Giulia Rachele Maggi

A Child in the Forties and Fifties in Northern Italy

All the moms I knew stayed at home, and daddies worked very long hours. While Dad went on to pursue a successful career in banking, Mom left her job a few months before I was born, to become a full time housewife, as it was almost compulsory at that time. She was a secretary, in the same bank where my father worked, and that is where they met. They married in 1941, but I was born only six years later: I suppose they didn’t want to have a child in the war years, which in Northern Italy were hard enough, especially in 1943-1945, with German occupation, Civil war and Allied bombings.

She was a perfectionist, and translated her notable organisational skills into her new career in housekeeping and child raising. She was a wonderful cook, successfully fought daily battles against that old enemy, dirt, was very good in every kind of housework, from ironing to the art of buying cheaply the best available food. She was no less active and ambitious in her role of mother. She had wanted to keep her family small so her offspring could achieve the highest possible standards. Her aims were high, and her parenting tools were certainly adequate to the task. Of course, she drew on her own experience as a child, not only as a daughter, but also as the eldest of three siblings, to whom important duties were conferred by her mother. She had read several books about parenting, including Montessori’s, but most of all she gave a lot of thought to mothering strategies and tactics, training on the job. In this new role, she acquired, step by step, new skills and put together a complete toolbox. Mom sang children’s songs, cooked nutritious child food, planned interesting destinations for the family outings, and helped us with homework. She was an affectionate mother but would not express freely her emotions. She was also a strict disciplinarian, like most parents in that time, but more about this later.

A maid helped Mom in her daily duties: when the family was still small. The maid would come for a few hours every morning, but after my sister’s birth and for seven or eight years, her helper would live with us, day and night. By that time, we had a bigger apartment, and my father earned more money than before. But we were not rich: most middle class families had a living-in helper, as salaries were pretty low. The girls were very young, 16 to 20 years of age. A few were sacked by my mother after a few days or weeks, but most stayed, but not for long, one or two years being the average length of their stay. The reasons for leaving were different: one went to work in a textile factory, the one who stayed for the longest time and who I liked best, Dora, emigrated to Canada with her brothers, another rejoined her peasant family after her youngest sister, whom she was very attached to, died of diphtheria. I still remember the chilling moment when she answered a phone call from home (peasants didn’t have phones and would not spend money just to say hello to a sister or daughter living away), speaking in her dialect, which I fairly understood as it was not too different from the one still spoken by most old people in Milan. She didn’t understand immediately what had been going on, she cried, then seemed to be relieved as she wrongly assumed that her beloved sister had just broken her leg, then finally the awful truth was revealed: she had just died. I felt so sorry, and still I feel very sad remembering this event.

My memories of myself as a baby and toddler are almost non-existent, except from a few glimpses, and one never knows if they are original and personal, or just a reflection of other people’s memories being told and retold many times in later years. But having a sister five years younger, born in 1952, allows me to recollect with some precision how it was to be a small child in my family. I don’t assume that our experience is typical of every middle class child in the early fifties in Northern Italy, not at all: there were, and certainly still are, so many differences in parenting styles, even between families of the same background and environment.

I wasn’t breastfed at all, as my mother “didn’t have enough milk”, while my sister was, albeit only for a few months. Mom’s approach to breastfeeding was very “modern”, “scientific” and expert-oriented. I clearly remember Mom weighing the baby, breastfeeding her, and then weighing her again, as medical science in the fifties was deeply suspicious of such equivocal evidence as could be gathered by a mom as a proof that the baby had eaten the “right” amount of milk. Scientific measurement should step in, and this was even more important in the phase (after two or three months) when mom’s milk “had to” be supplemented by formula milk, so starting the transition towards full weaning, which happened at around 4 or 5 months. These theories and practices were the most advanced of the time, at least for middle class parents of the 50s in the city of Milan, and my mother followed them thoroughly.

There were no disposable diapers at the time, so my sister (and I, a few years before) were cloth diapered. My mother was a hygienist, so she would tend to change diapers every time we would wet or soiled them. This certainly put a tremendous burden on her housewife life, more so as over our diapers we wore some sort of short pants or drawers, which also had to be changed and washed and dried and ironed. As a consequence, early potty training was the norm and babies who were not trained yet were kept at least part of the day diaperless . A potty would be always at hand, for elimination sessions, but we also had a nice highchair which could also be used as a potty.  I've found ours, still in good condition, in my mother attic, after she died two years ago.  It has to be a 1952 model year, as it certainly was new when my sister used it.   It was clearly a "de luxe" model, with lot of chrome, well finished upholstery, and... a nice hole in the middle of the seat.  The potty would be attached under the seat, and when not intended to be used, the hole would be covered with a perfectly fitting rounded piece to form an even seating surface. Contrary to myth, no punitive methods were used in training both with the "normal" potty and with the potty under the highchair.  Apparently, parents, and children too, were patient enough to wait for the desired "product", with no excessive pressure being applied. This meant that children stayed with their bum naked many hours a day! Of course, this attitude disappeared a few years later, as soon as disposables took over.  I don’t remember exactly, but I presume that at 18 months or even before we were perfectly trained, at least during the day. Training was a drawn out affair, starting as soon as the baby could keep herself seated, approximately at 6 months.

Before my sister was born, till I was five, I slept in a child bed in the same room as my parents. It was customary at the time; most children I knew, especially if they were the only child in the house, had similar sleeping arrangements. When we moved in a new and bigger apartment, I had a room for myself, but this lasted for a couple if years or so, as my sister then came to occupy the second bed opposite mine. It was a very large room, but also very full, as we had a big cupboard and many shelves for dolls and toys. Of these, I had many. A work-aholic like my father compensated for his all too rare presence at home with buying lots of presents. At Christmas, the amount of gifts I was going to find under the tree could be immense. Here I would find everything I had asked weeks before in fastidious details in long letters to Child Jesus, and also many things more, usually bought on Christmas Eve by my father, who had left office early (at 6 p.m.!) and had go shopping in the most expensive shop in town (Mastro Geppetto).

We were not rich at all: the house where we lived was rented, we had a single cheap motor car, but conspicuous consumption was at the order of the day for my family. As Dad spent a lot of money for Christmas presents, Mom would buy expensive clothing, for us children, too, not thinking that in a matter of months we would outgrow the elegant dresses or the leather shoes she had bought. We were constantly amongst the best-dressed children in town, often in white, as this was considered by far the prettiest “colour”. It was also the one which made more evident any dirt and soiling, compelling us to be “good girls”. Looking back, it was a blessing that during the summer months we could escape from this strict limitations: in the country, away from the middle class values my Mom felt obliged to adhere to when in town, when back in the same environment of her childhood and youth, we were left free to roam about barefoot, with ragged and dirty clothes! It could be judged as a schizophrenic experience, but I never felt ill at ease with it as a child. The city and the country were still two worlds apart, in the Fifties, and so we were unfazed by the almost opposite rules which seem to be enacted here and there.

The city was big, and developing fast, with immigrants coming from all over Italy to participate in the “economic miracle”, as this period of furious growth was starting to be called. Air pollution was terrible, but we nobody did care much. In winter smog was our daily fare; in a matter of hours after being washed cars would get covered by a coat of black coal powder, and I vividly remember asking Mom where did the Sun go in the winter months, as we didn’t even have a glimpse of it from November to March. Grey cloudy skies alternated with grey foggy skies, and of course black skies during the nights. What was sadly lacking, were blue skies. But this was something Milanese were almost proud about: the black smoke coming from chimneys meant that they were working hard and Milan was like a powerful locomotive, strongly pulling ahead with its labour the whole country, even half dormant Central Italy and the lazy South could not escape the Steamroller Modernity!

My parents, and especially my father, was nostalgic about the close relations he had enjoyed with his cousins during his childhood and adolescence, not seeing any of sign of this closeness in the new generation of post war years. Long gone were the years when children could play in quiet streets where a motor car would pass by every hour or so, and when even adults fathers and sons, sisters and brothers, would live in the same block.

In fact, we met our relatives only at Christmas and at a few other times during the year, in fairly formal occasions, as at the lavish dinner my mother would invite them to (with almost no hope of reciprocation…). Moreover, our close relatives who lived in Milan (my father’s brother and one of my mother’s sister) had respectively no children or only an adult one.

As our family was small, with only two siblings and without cousins living in town, in my first years I grew up in comparative isolation from other children. We lived in downtown Milan, in an apartment on a busy street, where going out unsupervised was completely out of question, with no young relatives and no Kindergarten (there were several of them, but only working class children frequented them). Things changed somewhat a few months before my sister was born, as we moved to a new and bigger apartment, in a compound where a L shaped lane was closed at both side by gates, with each of the three big houses which made up the compound guarded by concierges (after a few years, two of them were substituted by a cheaper vigilante). So my mom finally allowed me, I was six at the time, to go out alone. This was very important for me, as we lived a long way from school, and contact with school mates was restricted to classes .

Nevertheless, the time of the year when I could really socialise with my age group and learn about the wide world, was summer, when we stayed in the country, with lots of children and enjoying enormous freedom. This of course made life all the more exciting and so different to the daily routine. But read about this in the other text I’ve written.

Even the briefest account of a childhood in the Forties and Fifties may not ignore the topic of discipline. In this respect, my experience has been that of an average child in a perfectly normal family. We kept hearing about children who were harshly punished (luckily, there were only very few) and also about those who were NEVER punished, or only in a desultory way. The parents of the former as well as the latter were the subject of very unfavourable comments in our family, and I was proud and happy to occupy the middle ground with the overwhelming majority of the kids I related to, in school, in the neighbourhood, in the extended family. Much as I disliked to be spanked, as this was the way most children were disciplined at the time, I was relieved that I wasn’t judged to be a spoiled little girl, “una bambina viziata”, as the little girl next door, of the same age, who really was a spoiled disgusting brat, really difficult to relate with, a liar, who would whine or throw tantrums until she would get her way… I knew other children who would not share, and knew nothing about turn-taking, but this particular little girl developed these “skills” to new heights. Mom and I would exchange views on this girl, and I have been told that as young as six having just assisted to a confrontation between mother and child, successful for the young brat, I publicly uttered this unfavourable comment about her mother,: “Wow Mom, she sure doesn’t know anything about discipline, does she? Who’s gonna tell her? ” I couldn’t but agree with my parents when they pointed out how unlucky was that child, who could only become an inept adult and a hopeless wretch !

As in almost all the families we were acquainted with, daily discipline was a mom thing, and Dad stepped in only in extreme cases. First, daddies worked very long hours, even on the weekend, and they couldn’t be expected to spend the few hours they were with their kids disciplining them. Second, Dad had not an authoritarian personality and would not want his daughters to experience a sentiment of fear towards him. I think that Dad spanked me only 2 or 3 times in my life, and only a few times more my sister.

Mom had not the same restraint! From an early age, she would give us short sudden slaps, as attention getters, but of course what I best remember are her “formal” corrections, when she took time to give us a proper over-the-knee spanking, on our bums, with her hand or with a short, thin, flat wooden spoon, the kind that we thought would be best used to mash potatoes. I don’t have a photographic memory, but I have in my mind the clear picture of a little girl (my sister or even me, which is obviously impossible), face down across our mother's lap, her skirts over her head, her drawers let down at the ankles, while a small wooden spatula was vigorously applied to her bottom. After the spanking, we had to stand in a corner for a time which always seemed too long, but probably amounted to very few minutes. Once or twice, I made the mistake to run away, and so I was sent to spend the rest of my time out in a dark closet! Looking back, I’d say this kind of punishment was given with some dignity, and did not provoke anger in us. This goes a long way to show how we trusted Mom’s judgement: Mom was a credible parent and a well-respected adult.

What were the serious offences which required punishment? Going out of the gate which protected our “private” lane was considered a serious misdemeanour, of course, as it was a sassy mouth. Once I was as ill advised as to (unusually) display this behaviour while on a car trip, with my father at the wheel. I was going on and on, when out of a sudden Dad just stopped the car in a picnic area parking, made me swiftly climb out of the car (no safety belts then) and spanked me on the spot while sitting on a bench with other people near by! I also remember a typical childish silly act: I threw several fistfuls of earth, taken from vases on our second floor balcony, on the roof of a car parked just in front of us. It was a dare and a competition, as I was taking turns in throwing earth with a boy my age who lived in an apartment just in front of us. I still remember how this seemed a very good idea, and the pleasure of watching the brown earth lumps smashing over the gleaming white roof of the car! My father of course had to pay for the damage done. The grief caused by the well- earned spanking which duly followed was somewhat alleviated by the satisfaction gained from having clearly won the throw context (and against a BOY!).

This sort of accidents could happen in the country, too. Here, when my Mom wasn’t there, Aunt Lisa was in power. She was the Nordic type, blonde, with piercing blue eyes, as one sometimes find in Lombardy (the people which gave their name to our land, the Lombards, were German), and I judged her on a par with Marilyn Monroe and Doris Day, to form a trio of blonde goddesses I so much admired – and envied. With her permission, once we children took a different footpath out of the village. We were walking, running, stopping here and there, having a whale of a time as the mountain path winded between woods and meadows. We had walked for what appeared to me a very long time, and were looking around for a nice place where to have a rest, and then go back home. Sis and a couple of kids of her age (she was six or seven and I 11 or 12) were walking ahead not much more than 20 yards, when as I was turning round a bend, having lost sight of her for a few seconds only, I heard a SCREAM, a blood chilling scream ! I ran as fast as I could, and here was the two other kids, in tears, and no sign of Sara, as she had just fallen over the edge of the path ! It was a frightening moment, as I couldn’t possibly know where she was. It soon appeared that she was lying 10 feet or so down the edge, which was bad enough, but what was worst, was that she was lying in a bed of…. stinging nettles !!! We had her out of that mess in a fairly short time, but by now she was starting to feel the sting. As usual, her legs and feet were bare, and the short sleeveless dress, her only clothing, hadn’t protected her at all, so she was really in pain. We hurried back home and Aunt Lisa scrubbed her skin and then applied wet moss on the area for cooling and soothing relief . Sara was out of her bed next day, and she was OK. You may ask: how she fell in the ravine in the first place! Auntie asked her too, and she hadn’t a clear answer, and how could she! She was probably just dreaming, or looking at the butterflies, or concentrating on her steps, without looking ahead, being a child, simply… Of course, Auntie didn’t correct her, as she had been punished enough through natural consequences, while her uncaring big sister couldn’t avoid a good old fashioned spanking, the last of my life!