My three big brothers, Steve, Nick and Howard (always known as Din, short for Howardino, i.e. little Howard, our father being the big Howard) were the ultimate heroes of my childhood and adolescence. Although they teased me mercilessly, and made me cry far too often, I would have done literally anything for them. They went away to boarding school in England, when I was about 5 years old, returning to spend holidays with us in Italy at the end of each term.
My heart sank like a stone each time they left again at the end of each holiday. I made myself a calendar, to mark off the days until they returned, drawing a thick, satisfying line through each carefully written number at bedtime.
When they were at home, whether at La Tambura or in Rome, it meant pure excitement: lots of girlfriends and their handsome friends from school; constant noise; plans for picnics and other thrilling outings that I always begged to include me. As a snotty little kid, I must have been incredibly irritating at times, but deep down I knew that they loved me just as much as I adored them.
I would spend hours planning menus for them, trying to include as many of their favourite things in every meal. I liked to make sure there was always a cake ready for them when they first arrived, and that their first meal back at home was always really special, adding flowers and name cards to the specially laid table.
When I was about ten years old, they took me to my first Rolling Stones concert at the Palasport in Rome’s EUR district. Mick Jagger gave an extraordinary rendition of Midnight Rambler, oozing sex appeal and confidence. In the middle of it all, I stood up and started screaming my head off. My brother thought I’d been bitten by a scorpion or something and was really concerned, but the truth is that the music and the performance had touched some chord in me, and I was just not in control of what I felt just at that instant, though I could never have put it into words. I have been a dedicated Stones fan ever since, and still feel the same, though nowadays I rarely scream in public.
Later on, when they were away at university and the whole family traditionally spent the whole long hot summer at La Tambura, our seaside house in Tuscany, I’d sometimes wake up in the morning, fling open the heavy green shutters and find that at least three small tents had appeared in the garden overnight. These were more friends of my brother’s - such glamorous (in my eyes at least) boys who had responded to a casual invitation to come and visit and had arrived long after I’d been sent off to bed. On those mornings, I’d give myself what my mother called ‘a lick and a promise’ in the bathroom with a cold wet flannel, pull on yesterday’s shorts and Tee shirt and rush downstairs to meet them, bubbling over with offers to help prepare breakfast and running off to the henhouse for warm, freshly laid eggs as fast as my legs would carry me.
Having all these extra young English people around the house, made every mealtime even more riveting than usual, and my efforts in the kitchen, as a willing assistant, increased in line with my heightened exhilaration. Happily, I would peel mountains of potatoes; joyfully top and tail hundreds of green beans and I painstakingly fed the chickens and rabbits with all sorts of extra goodies to fatten them up. I had a special treat for the chickens that involved rather gruesomely cooking grasshopper kebabs for the chickens over a little fire in the garden, explaining to any horrified person who caught me at it that this was my way of giving the hens a ‘nice hot meal!’
The kitchen was always busy, and food was prepared in huge quantities to satisfy the guests’ huge appetites. My gorgeous brothers held court at the table, telling us all about their latest adventures, most of which I did not understand as it was all about places and people I had never heard of, but that did not matter one bit. My parents would gaze at them with such love and pride in their eyes, and both of them obviously adored having all these new guests around them.
My brothers were handsome, strong and fearless. They sailed, swam, fished, hunted, roared around on motorbikes and drove fast cars. For me they were just incredible, and I adored them all, and we shared all sorts of things my parents never would or could tell me.
I was incredibly gullible as a little girl, and never caught on when they said things like “Why don’t you go and check if your bedroom is still there?” when they wanted me to leave them alone with a girlfriend. When I was old enough, it was my job to handle the hundreds of phone calls from hopeful, and often hopeless, girls who called for them. I had a whole list of names and instructions as to what to say to whom when they rang – it was a real insight!
I remember going sailing with my brother Nick, on a day when the red flags were flying and flapping on their poles and nobody else was taking their boat out.
But Nick was determined to show off his skills to his girlfriend and I was a willing, if slightly terrified, part of his plan. We paddled out of the marina, our trusty, solid, wooden catamaran Pelican bouncing around all over the place, and quickly set sail once we were clear of the pier. The wind was fierce, and we whipped along, my own face set in a grimace rather like the one the girlfriend was wearing. Nick meanwhile was gracefully trapezing, his feet hooked under straps on board, his entire perfect body stretched out over the water. The sea was grey and very choppy, not in the slightest bit inviting. Suddenly, at a secret signal from Nick, I hurled myself overboard, crying out and pretending to fall in, just so my brother could show off his rescue skills. I bobbed up and down in the grey waves in my orange lifejacket, trying not to swallow too much seawater, and watched terrified as they just kept sailing away from me. Finally, they did tack and returned to pick me up - not a moment too soon as far as I was concerned.
That particular night, Beppino, our caretaker and font of all things culinary as far as I was concerned, had organised a “Bisteccata” for all the young people. This involved him lighting and preparing a pine wood fire in the dome shaped barbecue he had built with his own hands, and marinating several thick T-bone steaks in his own special olive oil and rosemary marinade. The old ping-pong table was covered by a tablecloth and then set for dinner in the garden under a swinging light bulb hanging from a precarious wire strung up between two tall pine trees.
The steaks were then grilled over the glowing embers and served with mountains of fresh tomatoes from the garden, thinly sliced and dressed with olive oil and salt, and boiled potatoes dressed with more olive oil and handfuls of freshly chopped, fragrant parsley. The wine flowed, and I watched the party from behind a nearby bush, hidden from sight in the darkness but longing to be old enough to join in the laughter and fun. Eventually, my mother found me, and chased me upstairs to bed.
My brothers are still all amazing cooks, and I have a collection of wonderful memories of cooking with them, making their favourite dishes in their own very special way, using all kinds of ingredients I had never even seen or heard of back then for their curries, their pasta sauces and their own versions of risotto.
One of my fondest, and most hilarious cooking memories that I treasure is of my brother Nick is of making a velvety, sumptuously rich Lobster Bisque with him and his girlfriend, one rainy afternoon in the kitchen of La Tambura.
By the time we had finished bashing up the lobster’s shell with hammers, and subsequently setting the cognac alight, the floor was entirely littered with bits of lobster, Nick’s eyebrows were almost completely burnt off and we were all three in hysterics. But the Bisque was epic.
I can’t think about my brothers cooking without remembering Spaghetti Aglio Olio e Peperoncino, and how they would often make it at 3 a.m. with all their mates, trying very hard to be quiet, as a preventative measure against their hangovers the next day. My bedroom was right over the kitchen however, so I always heard them, and would come down in my nightshirt to “help” them and usually end up eating a bowlful of my own. Their theory was that the pasta will soak up the alcohol excess, the chilli and garlic will help to purify your blood, the olive oil will line your stomach to stop the nausea and then the stink from the garlic will keep everybody away from you the next day, as you recover from the almighty headache. I just liked watching them make it, and was thrilled to be a part of their magic circle in the middle of the night.
They seemed able to always achieve all their mad enterprises, like the time they drove all the way to Spain in a Fiat 500, or surfed for hours in wetsuits in the rough Tyrrhenian when nobody else had the courage to go in. This was so unusual in our part of the world that a local photographer took a picture of them that was turned into an actual postcard of the area for tourists to buy – I was so proud of that postcard and sent it off to literally everyone I knew!
When they left us, to return to school or university, it always felt like the end of the world and I would weep for hours, inconsolable, and then start to count the days once more as I carefully prepared my new calendar with sharpened pencils and a new ruler, until they were home again.
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