A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary 1939–1940 is very different in content. Just as War in Val d’Orcia is the story of La Foce during the final epilogue (for Italy) of the world conflict, A Chill in the Air reflects the increasingly oppressive atmosphere of a country on the brink of a war for which it is entirely unprepared. Iris Origo’s account of those years makes compelling reading. She pores over the Italian newspapers and reflects poignantly on the changed attitude of her adopted country towards her beloved England, all the while holding our interest with an effortless flow of anecdotes, chilling wartime jokes and insider accounts of diplomatic negotiations doomed to failure. Her shrewd political analyses are backed and illustrated by a wealth of detail drawn from a great variety of social and political backgrounds. Conversations with major political figures, confidential information from friends in diplomatic and military circles and the despairing predictions of her anti-Fascist liberal and Catholic neighbours at La Foce are vividly recounted in these pages and Iris excels in bringing to life the prevailing atmosphere of uncertainty and unease. She records the puzzled, aggressive or cynical reactions in the towns and in the countryside as Italians from all walks of life – and she counts herself among them – struggle to understand the fate of their country. As a uniquely placed observer who can claim a profound knowledge of Italy and things Italian, Iris has access to many different voices. A Chill in the Air is set mostly in Tuscany and Rome where Iris Origo’s godfather, William Phillips, was the American Ambassador. Iris counted many diplomats, intellectuals and liberal politicians of different nationalities among her friends and acquaintances, and through her husband Antonio she met the leading members of the Roman aristocracy, many of whom frequented the King’s and Mussolini’s inner circles. Yet Iris also records the voices of shopkeepers and artisans, and especially those of the peasants and workmen at La Foce, who turn to the Origos for advice and a word of hope.
As always, Iris keeps her private life out of these pages – to the point that we learn that she is expecting a baby only when the American Ambassador voices a doubt whether Rome, where the first air raids have begun, is the ideal place for an accouchement. Iris is adept at concealing her personal emotions, though this in no way detracts from her capacity to suffer with the victims of war and injustice. A recurring note is her frustration that, as an Anglo-American, she is barred from any contribution to war work – she feels so useless that it even takes some of the joy out of her pregnancy, long-desired and unexpected (Iris was thirty-eight, old for child-bearing in those times). Her need was always to take action, to make a difference. Deep down, though she was herself a true intellectual, she believed that a life entirely dedicated to contemplation and intellectual pursuits was selfish and fruitless.
A Chill in the Air ends abruptly in July 1940, a few days before the birth of her daughter Benedetta. Shortly afterwards, Iris finally finds work with the Red Cross, which absorbs her so completely that she concludes her diary in a brief sentence – “and until the spring of 1943 I had no more time for writing”. The reader is left hanging as Iris embarks on the life of action she set such store by. Three years later, when she picks up the thread of the narrative again in War in Val d’Orcia, the tale she has to tell is very different.
Katia Lysy
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Copyright © The Estate of Iris Origo 2017
Introduction © Lucy Hughes-Hallett 2017
Afterword © Katia Lysy 2017
A Chill in the Air was first published in Great Britain by Pushkin Press in 2017
ISBN 978 1 78227 356 1
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