My Mother's Childhood

“Sa cosa pius difficile est a connoscher a isse e totu.”
(The hardest thing is to know yourself.)
(Sardinian proverb)

Clotilde Porcedda with an unknown child. Sini, Sardinia, around 1940.

 

I was born in October 1947, the third of seven children. Four sisters and three brothers.

Our names all start with the letter A because my father liked it that way.

Agnese, my name, Adriana, Aldina, Angela, Antero, Anchise and Alessio.

 

My parents got married when my mother was 21 and my father 24.

My mother Clotilde was born in Genuri, in the province of Cagliari, in 1920.

Unlike many Sardinian families of the time, they were only two sisters and a brother, because their mother Grazia died when Clotilde was only 9 years old.

While my father, Giovanni Battista, had two brothers and four sisters.

He was born in 1916, in Sini, in the province of Oristano, where we were all born.

 

Giovanni Battista Casu. Sardinia, around 1930

I have always loved my father very much. He was always smiling, smart, and made me feel like I was his favorite.

Mom was more severe.

She failed to finish elementary school; she only reached the third grade. She, pity mom, barely knew how to read and write, but she was needed to work in the countryside and on the family lands.

My father was also a farmer, but he managed to finish elementary school.

 

I remember the story of my mother and father.

It's said that my mother's eldest sister had a child before marriage, causing a great scandal in the village, who then died as soon as he was born, pity creature – he was on the bed, seemed to be sleeping, but he was no longer breathing. My aunt was forced by her father to marry the baby's father anyway. He, my grandfather, was a very strict man, he had studied to become a priest.

He would never tolerate other scandals, so his daughters could never leave the house, until they reached the age of majority, at the time of 21 years old.

So my mother, she was always sitting outside the front door, embroidering, with the other sisters. During the village fairs my father came to Genuri, he had just finished his military service, and as soon as he could he went to chat with my mother sitting outside the house. Nothing more was allowed. It was absolutely forbidden to go out alone and meet in the village.

So it was that they soon got married; just turned 21. It was in 1941.

I remember my grandfather was really awful. Grandfather Cesare, not even an orange from the tree in the garden you could pick, only those that fell to the ground.

I never met my grandmothers; they were already dead before I was born. Just both grandparents.

 

My mother's paternal grandparents. Sardinia, around the end of 1800.

Giovanni Battista (standing last on the right) with friends from the military service. Sardinia, around 1936.

 

Farmers for generations, my mother and my father came to live in Sini, where they were direct farmers. They have always worked the land and livestock.

At the time Sini was a small village that did not have a thousand inhabitants.

We only had elementary school, high school was 30 kilometers away, in Ales, and it took the bus to go there, so we first-born only went to elementary school. The first high school opened in the village in 1962, so only my younger brothers and sisters went there.

I dropped out of school in 1958 at the age of ten and started working in the fields with my sister Aldina, who was three years younger than me – we were always together.

But already at 6 years old, after the lessons, we went to the pasture to look after my father's cows. I remember that each of us had our own cow, mine was called “Sannoredda”, which in dialect means “young lady” because she was very elegant, and Aldina's was called “Delicata”.

While my father followed the grazing cattle, we spent our time playing like at the market, with blades of grass and stones to interpret the one she sold and the one who bought. While Sannoredda and Delicata bellowed blissfully close to us.

Until we went to school we didn't even know how to speak Italian, only in dialect. At school, we drew letter shafts on squared notebooks and then ran out to play rope, hide and seek, or fetch water from the spring with the terracotta wineskins on our heads or sides.

Then, in 1954 came the first television.

The first family to have it was that of our teacher. She was so kind that she opened the front door to our entire class – we all went there to watch TV for an hour every day, sitting on the floor.

Then also the mayor and the two, three richest families in the village could boast of television.

We never had it, not even the fridge or the washing machine.

They were among the first gifts that we gave to mother with the salaries of our work outside Sardinia.

Not that we were poor, indeed, ours was a wealthy family, of excellent farmers. My father sold all the products he produced for village fairs.

We had a very large house, with nine rooms, two floors, two entrances in the surrounding wall, a vegetable garden with fruit trees, and the largest well in the country.

And many animals, really a lot.

The donkey that ground the grain, the hens for the eggs, pigs, rabbits, sheep, dogs and cats.

 

Clotilde at 20

Clotilde with her aunts, 1969

Aldina in a class photo, 1957

It was a happy childhood, even though all of us children started working from the early years of childhood.

But at the time it was like that, we were all born in the house, with only one midwife already old when she gave birth to me, who had given birth at home to all the children of the village. Dolla, we called her in dialect.

 

I had my best friend, Ignazia, who was the teacher's daughter. We were inseparable. But then she moved to Cagliari to take care of a granny's baby. I missed her a lot, so after school, I begged my father to let me go to work in Cagliari. I was 13.

He did not want; he said I was too young to work away from home. Cagliari is 80 kilometers from Sini, but at the time it seemed an immense distance.

But I wanted to go there at all costs, I missed Ignazia very much and I knew that she worked well and earned money: I wanted to buy myself a new dress, I was tired of always wearing the same clothes sewn by my mother, which all of us sisters used to go through.

Since I was my father's favorite he had to give in to my tears and agreed to take me to Cagliari. I know that he confabulated with the granny, in that house of hers: “I will leave my daughter here, so much so that you will see that in a few days she will beg to go home.”

In fact, every night I cried because I missed my family, but during the day I was always happy. Granny asked me every morning: “How are you? Are you homesick? Do you want to go back home?” Nothing, I repeated that I was absolutely happy to be there to work. I stayed there for a year. I was 14.

 

Agnese in Sardinia, 1963 \ 64

Agnese with little brother and sister in her arms, 1963

Then I began to negotiate on the price, with other ladies I met in the park.

“How much are they paying you, cute girl, to be a nanny?” “2,500 lire,” I replied. “If you come to me I will give you double: 5,000 lire!” Well, so I changed the family to work. But they had four children and I was always tired. So I accepted when another lady, still in the park where I took the children to play, suggested that I work for her for 10,000 lire.

I stayed in Cagliari until I was 15. I also had a boyfriend.

Then my sisters told me that in Rome they even paid 20,000 lire. So I moved to work there, where I met your father. 

It was 1964, I was 16. We got married in 1970.

 

But it wasn't always so happy.

Before leaving for Rome there was the greatest pain of my life.

I was still 13 when my beloved dad Giovanni Battista fell ill with bowel cancer. 

I was already working in Cagliari, when I knew that he was very ill.

Before leaving he had already sold all the cattle, he had only kept a flock of 200 sheep. Every day I went with him to the pasture, to check the sheep – and him.

I hated those stupid sheep; they all looked the same.

Then, day after day, I learned to know them. I understood that each of them had their own character. They were happy days.

When I was in Cagliari, they told me that my father went around all the hospitals in the area, but in the end, the doctors told him that there was nothing more to do. Two years of life, no more, they told him.

Then he dropped everything and he stayed at home. There he wanted to die.

He had time to conceive even his last-child, Antero.

 

Agnes (25 years old) with her younger sisters

Photo of the sisters from around 1963/68

I wanted to go home, but my mother didn't want me to see my father so sick – she knew how attached I was to him.

“He's fine,” she told me, “he's fine.”

I didn't believe it.

So one day I went home. Before entering I saw my sister through the keyhole: she was dressed all in black. She opened the door for me, and I also saw my mother dressed in black.

Then I ran up the stairs. I looked for him in the rooms.

Nothing.

He was already dead. September 1, 1962.

I was 15, and for two years I hated my mother and my sisters deeply, without speaking to them, because they had kept it secret to me. Without giving me the chance to say goodbye for the last time.

 

From that night, for every night, until today, every time I close my eyes before sleeping, I hope and pray that he will appear in my dream, to greet me. How it should have happened.

 

But until now, I've never dreamed of my father.

 

After getting married, I returned to Sini every year, until my mother came to live in Rome in 1972. She and Aldina always lived in the same house, together, until her death on August 17, 2007.

In 2015 we sold all the land in Sini.

 

This was my childhood.

 

Aldina with her photograph at thirteen. Rome – 29 January 2021

 

• Riding Time 
• An Old Green Letter 

 

Italian version