European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

“It might start raining”, he would say, and then he would go pick up some rope, while we all went to help the farmer.

Battle-name; first activities as a dispatch-rider

As for myself, I was a dispatch-carrier.

I would always move around, from Reggio to Secchio.

My parents often asked me to go to the mountains, so some boys eventually told me:

“If you go to the mountains, you could take us there with you”.

Every now and then I would take some of them first to one place, then to another, until they would join a partisan unit.

I would often go to Don Carlo, who was also a partisan, and would leave these boys with him.

Then there were the Davoli brothers. Kiss was the commander of the dispatch-carriers.

He was from Reggio, and he was the landlord of the house where my mother was born.

Then one day he told my mother he had to go to the mountains.

He told her he would come to our house and then from there he would head uphill, so my mother replied that I could take him.

He came from a family with money, lots of it.

We went to the mountains together and then he reached the Central Headquarters.

There he met Gordon and some other “special” boys, so Don Carlo suggested they could join the English unit.

At that time paratroopers were starting to be dropped in the area,

and they had set up the English command with radio transmitters in Secchio.

They asked the Central Headquarters to provide them with around 25 skilled partisans,

who had been there for a while and were well trained.

You have to realise that at the beginning there were all sorts of people in the mountains,