FRIENDS AND ROMANS
On the run in Wartime Italy

JOHN MILLER

FOURTH ESTATE
1987

First Edition.
I let the train gather speed for as long as I dared. Then, facing the engine, I kicked myself through the narrow slit...'

With that leap from a train in September 1943 Capt. John Miller, British prisoner of war in Italy for over a year, jumped into freedom — and into a profound personal experience which he has never forgotten.

He had jumped out of the war of soldiers, and into the war as lived by Italian civilians. At first he was harboured in a remote mountain village in the Abruzzi, and then by a family in Rome who shared unstintingly their desperately meagre rations. For eight months he evaded the vigilance of German patrols and the Italian secret police by masquerading as a deaf-mute and member of the Fascist Youth. He had no contact at all with fellow soldiers.

The Allied liberation of Rome brought for Miller a strange mixture of pain and pleasure. He found it disturbingly hard to accept the GIs who flooded the streets, or the other British escapees who emerged from hide-outs with affluent anti-Fascist families.

This is an unusually subtle and disconcerting war-memoir, in which the strongest impressions are not those of fear and aggression, but of an intimate bond with people from another culture, and oft he ironies of national conflict.

24 x 15 cm. 184 pp + b/w photo plates.

Very good condition, corners of boards lightly bumped, page edges slightly age toned and foxed.