Apart from founding the language school, Captain Meldrum’s legacy was this villa built on land bombed during the war and snapped up by his father when Toni was born in 1960. Built in the typical Veneto style, the villa was situated a few kilometres from the city of Treviso in the hills to the north and at an altitude of 300 metres, from which they had an excellent view of the Dolomites in general and Monte Grappa in particular. For Toni, these winter snow clad peaks dominated his childhood memory and he saw them as signposts that pointed back to memories of the pure and memorable kind – his father, for example, working in the garden shed, a typical English structure, for hours at a time and emerging with a piece of Italianate garden furniture or furnishing. Then, there were the garden parties on the terrace in which his mother would get local help to make local cakes – tiramisu for example or fregolotta – and advice on choosing the right white wine to embellish her own English fish-paste and cucumber sandwiches.
For Toni, the house was full of sunshine and light but his favourite place both as a child and as an adult was the garden around the house. The garden boasted oak trees – possibly to remind his father of England – linden trees, cypresses standing sentinel and a terrace full of Mediterranean plants. And within sight of the terrace and on a clear day Toni was able to see the Monte Grappa massif where so many soldiers had lost their lives in WW1 and where so many partisans had lost theirs in WW2 and, even now, if he gave himself over to the past, he heard the wind, and felt the memory of death on his face.
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