Excerpt
A Certain Tremor
Before
sunrise, Ash Wednesday, 23 February 1887
Hôtel-Pension Anglo-Américaine, San Remo, Italy
February 1887 had been unseasonably capricious
on the Italian Riviera. A wintry dawn had not yet lit the modest
pensione room where Lucy’s canvases, paints, palettes and drawing
materials were stacked in a corner and a copy of William’s just
published edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Collected Works
lay open on the bureau. Without warning, an ominous subterranean
engine rumbled deep beneath the earth’s crust and wrenched Lucy
and William from sleep. All at once their bed ‘heaved up and
down under us’ like ‘the rolling of a ship from side to side.’
Jars and jugs, ewer and washbasin crashed together in the bedroom.
Eerily not a single drop of water spilt. In spite of the chronic
state of her lungs, Lucy immediately jumped out of bed, galvanized
by passionate maternal instincts, and rushed into the next room
to wake eleven-year-old Olivia, while William roused Arthur
who was nearly ten.
Although the earthquake tipped one man right out
of bed, incredibly no one was injured at the Hôtel-Pension Anglo-Américaine.
William and Lucy both felt an aftershock and many hotel guests
reported a series of minor successive quakes. Everyone came
down to breakfast as usual to compare experiences of the early
hours and confer with Signor Milano, the hotel proprietor. At
first the building appeared to be stable but nevertheless the
owner advised immediate evacuation. So all the guests including
Lucy, William, Olive and Arty decamped to the garden. Many of
the foreigners were delicate, suffering like Lucy from a range
of asthmatic, bronchial and unspoken tubercular conditions.
San Remo in February seemed an exotic, flowery hothouse, a safe
haven to northern Europeans. It seemed so from a distance. When
Christina Rossetti - who had never visited San Remo - wrote
to her brother and sister-in-law from smoky London, she imagined
it as an ‘earthly-paradise’.
But even in dazzling sunshine the wind could cut
through shrinking flesh. William Michael Rossetti had arrived
in late January to join Lucy who, on the insistent advice of
Dr. Wilson Fox, had been staying on the Ligurian Riviera since
16 November with their two eldest children. ‘The weather was
at first most brilliant, and, so long as the sun was above the
horizon, scarcely to be distinguished from an English June or
July’, he enthused, although he noticed an ominous and ‘substantial
sub-stratum of cold, and also of wind. These three days past
the weather is spoiled - raining, dull, and once snowy: but
I suppose it may mend again. The earlier the better.’
Then suddenly, the morning after the terremoto
dawned tranquil, lucent and unnaturally still. Witnesses noticed
extremely high atmospheric pressure, the sun veiled in light
mist and a quiescent sea subsiding by up to 30 centimetres.
‘Nature seemed to have lulled herself into a dreamless sleep
after the one spasmodic effort, and there was scarcely a breath
of air stirring.’ The hotel garden became a Victorian extra-mural
drawing room with ladies sitting out, reading or knitting, men
strolling among them smoking and chatting. The English invalids
had brought both their manners and their phlegm to the Italian
resort, only a little less fashionable than Cannes and Nice.
‘If an earthquake were to engulf England tomorrow’, commented
one social observer dryly, ‘the English would manage to meet
and dine somewhere among the rubbish, just to celebrate the
event’.
As further damage to property was feared that
evening, everyone slept outside in spherical white tents, so
that gardens and public spaces looked like medieval jousting
yards lit up by fires for light and warmth. This experience
thoroughly unnerved Lucy who, because of her consumptive tendency,
was terrified of night air. She usually only ventured out of
doors for an hour or so either side of noon. On this post-earthquake
night she fretted additionally about young Arty who had caught
a feverish cold. Most of the population of San Remo also camped
out, crowding onto the promenade and the beach. By chance, no
one in the town died or was injured in the earthquake. Much
property was pronounced unsafe, though hardly dangerous enough,
in William’s opinion, to justify the later opportunist re-building
programme that vulgarized the authentic, medieval charm of the
old town.
However, a few miles away in the hills behind
San Remo, the village of Baiardo was completely devastated.
‘In the earliest morning of that Ash Wednesday the villagers
had thronged the church to receive the ashes’ when ‘the church
crashed down upon them’, killing about two hundred people.
In the whole province of Porto Maurizio (now Imperia)
over 600 people died and hundreds were injured. Only a few hours
after Bacchanalian sounds of revelry and carnevale had faded
away, the town of Diano Marina was devastated at the epicentre
of an area affected from Genoa to Nice. The first violent seismic
shifts, accompanied by rumbling thunder, registered Grade 9
or ‘Disastrosa’ on the Italian ‘Mercalli’ earthquake scale.
Bells tolled, people tumbled to the ground, houses collapsed
as the jolts and tremors continued. ‘Sand bounced on the sea
shore as if on a vibrating metal sheet.’ Cries and moans were
heard from the debris. ‘Some had found immediate burial in their
own beds, others fled or rushed from their dwellings’ only to
be crushed by falling walls in the narrow, ancient streets.
At least three further tremors occurred up till 9.00 a.m. and
no one could predict whether or when worse might follow.
Fears and statistics like these immediately panicked
Lucy into abandoning San Remo, although the town had escaped
relatively lightly from the earthquake and had done her so much
good over the past few months. The Ligurian sunlight had stirred
Lucy’s creativity which over the past decade she had re-directed
into fierce maternity of her five children. Painting again,
she sent her pictures for critical comment to her father Ford
Madox Brown, together with boxes of citrus and blooms from the
south. ‘Your flowers & your oranges & your pictures seemed quite
startling’, he wrote from wintry Manchester, ‘with your blue
skies contrasted with our grey shadows here. That of the young
Italian lady [Signorina Carsini, the children’s Italian teacher]
is nice in sentiment & quality. If you worked regularly I think
you would regain your old colour & skill, but the landskapes
[sic] are rather cruder colour than pleasant’, although he accepted
she was responding to Italy’s vibrant tones and shades.
William tried to dissuade her from leaving San
Remo but at the earliest opportunity they set off for Dijon
where they had to separate. He returned to his desk at the Board
of Inland Revenue in London. Lucy remained with Olive and Arty
at the Hôtel de la Cloche, favoured by many other refugees driven
inland by the earthquake that had been felt all along the Riviera.
She breathlessly justified her decision to decamp. ‘A General
who had lived in a country where there were 40 shocks a year
said it was nothing to this earthquake’. ‘A great many English
have come for a day or two from the scene of the Earthquake
unable to remain after all, today some people came from Cannes
where they said it was really felt very slightly and yet it
had such an effect upon their nerves that it was impossible
to stay longer than this.’
After an anxious exchange of telegrams with William,
his sister Christina Rossetti voiced her own fears, which echoed
Lucy’s. ‘What an awful awestriking experience an earthquake
must be […] I cannot help wishing that you and yours may already
be on the homeward road. Of course, no more shocks may ensue’,
she conceded, ‘but who can feel even ordinarily secure at San
Remo after what has happened?’ Always paradoxically closer from
a distance, Christina empathised with Lucy and underlined the
bonds of sisterhood. ‘My dear Lucy, So I was in your kind thoughts
at such a moment! I hope never to forget it with sisterly love
and gratitude. I fully agree with you that it is impossible
to pass through so awful an experience without deep impressions:
the suspense […] sent me to prayer […] What alarming prognostics
till the end of this year are published about earthquakes on
the Riviera.’ In spite of her terrors, the earthquake had not
sent Lucy to prayer, as she told her father. ‘One singular thing
which struck William & myself was that no one in our hotel ventured
to pray or speak of God’. Lucy observed that people only began
to refer to God’s protection four days later when the threat
of further earth movements had subsided.
Eventually, the Hôtel-Pension Anglo-Américaine,
a short walk from San Remo’s original nineteenth-century railway
station, was demolished and never rebuilt. No trace of it now
remains on a street once called the Corso Ponente. William reported
press comment at the time, which circulated the theory that
earthquake survivors can never entirely forget their experiences:
‘A certain tremor continues lurking in the nerves’. Five years
later when staying at the more sedate spa town of Malvern Wells
which registered a smaller quake, Lucy noticed to her horror
the windows shuddering without a breath of wind. She stayed
awake all night, waiting for earthquakes.
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