WE ARE placing bets on the first phrase to come out of the mouth of our newborn daughter, who has spent the first three months of her life on a building site in Italy. My husband, Pete, is currently 2-1 favourite with: “I’m a baby, get me out of here”. I’m pushing for: “How do you say ‘woodworm’ in Italian, again?”. Luigi, our builder, is prepared to put a pocketful of euros on a much-used (by him) local blasphemy which, impressively, likens the Virgin Mary to a common household pet in only two words. For the moment baby Mathilda is keeping mum.
A year ago we indulged our Escape to the Country fantasy and bought a barn near the Apuan Alps in northern Tuscany, then inhabited by two cows — the barn, not the mountains, which are positively teeming with them. My brother has had a house in the region for 20 years and I’ve been spending summer holidays there since I was 11. Last September some Italian friends of the family approached us about a small capanna that they wanted to sell and thought would make a great holiday home.
It was a pretty basic affair, unless you were a bullock, with one lovely old room where the original building had been and the rest, a ten-year-old breeze-block structure, built to earthquake standards but no obvious rule of aesthetics. The big selling points were its vines and orchards with figs, peaches, pears, apricots, apples and plums. As they always say on TV before they are fleeced by the plumber and the floor caves in, “we fell in love with it”. And, for the area, it was very cheap. Even our Tuscany-loving PM, known locally as “that British scrounger”, might have forked out for it.
A month after we’d bought it, I found I was pregnant with our first baby and we decided to spend the three summer months of my maternity leave from The Times there. Luigi, an Italian friend, said he and his brother would help with the building work while we were back in London. But, nine months later, as Mattie May was born and I was recovering from a nasty birth, the cows were still living downstairs. The house had electricity but no water supply.
There were no stairs linking the two floors and the whole place needed flooring, plastering and painting. It was scorching, apparently, and we had no fans or shutters. Luigi’s mother called us to say she had been down there and it really was not safe for a baby. But, ever optimistic and more than occasionally stupid, we had agreed to let our flat in London. So we crammed ourselves into a photo booth in Victoria Station and held Mattie up for her passport picture (say “formaggio”, baby) and as she turned three weeks old , we flew to Pisa feeling a tad scared and irresponsible.
You know it is self-harming, but you do read the baby books (Gina, Penelope, Miriam). Mostly, they tell you to turn your home into a lab where even grandmothers must be sterilised in a saucepan of boiling water for eight minutes before they are allowed through the front door. They also obsess about decorating the nursery, presuming that people still have them. By chapter two you think you need the entire contents of Peter Jones’s baby department.
By chapter three you realise that you need urgently that giant sit-on hedgehog with fully-incorporated baby CCTV. But we had spent all our money on a pile of bricks that I was sure Merchant Ivory would not be needing for a reshoot of A Room with a View and Ryanair’s luggage allowance is weeny. So, in the end, we flew out with only Mattie, a suitcase and a Moses basket.
We arrived to find that in the previous couple of weeks Luigi had stirred himself to action and the bedrooms were plastered and had floorboards. The bathroom had a bath — if only there had been enough water to use it. The first couple of nights we slept out under the stars and an industrial mozzie net, not in an attempt to recreate the spirit of Woodstock in our back garden but to avoid the varnish fumes. As they faded, we moved inside.
In the first few weeks we coped well. It was not a holiday but hard, hot work trying to make it habitable and keeping certain areas baby-safe. While the books were advising us to put up a mobile over the cherrywood cot and buy complicated electronic hardware that bleeped if she stopped breathing, we were taking it in turns to hold the baby while the other filled a large plastic tank with a hosepipe from a neighbour’s supply so that we had enough water for drinking, washing and scrubbing years of cow manure from the walls.
Our neighbours, horrified that we chose to leave our families to live at the end of a dusty track, have been fantastic, bringing us fresh vegetables and eggs, never mind cot sheets with teddies on and frilly baby outfits.
Having said that, we have realised that you need less than you think. Water was obviously crucial, but after a week or so a trip to the local board with Mattie, told to “look really thirsty”, soon got us our own supply and the trenches for the pipes took a day with Luigi’s mega-digger.
When they are newborn, and if they are as easy as ours is, you can carry them around like a tool box. It is when babies can crawl that you have to worry about them sucking nails and eating scorpions. Too much stuff just complicates things. And it’s liberating to remove yourself from that consumer baby bubble which feeds off new parents’ paranoia.
Still, there were two of us to swap chores and we didn’t take stupid risks, of course. We borrowed a cot with a mozzie net for a roof as she grew out of her Moses basket and created a clean corner in the kitchen that is always kept that way. Our few concessions to modern technology were electric fans and a bottle steriliser.
We have tried to keep one room dust-free at all times, so that she has somewhere to feed, sleep and practice her underarm spin with her toy puppy. We found a baby clinic in the nearest town where we can drop in and get her checked and entertained. “Tutte OK,” the doctor always says, tickling Mattie’s cheeks and waltzing her around the surgery. Meanwhile, rather than being deemed a second-class citizen in London, when we go out she is treated like Madonna at a Kabbalah fundraiser.
“Congratulations on your beautiful baby,” said an old lady whom we had never met before. We were trawling Lucca’s second-hand furniture market at the time. As Mathilda, who was sharing her pushchair with a bookshelf, a standard lamp and a rather cool Mussolini-era alarm clock, gurgled, the lady gave a shriek, wet her finger frantically and rubbed Mattie’s clothes, to no effect.“She’s got paint on her Babygro!” she exclaimed.
“Si, she’s finished the kitchen and is starting the bedroom tomorrow,” we told her.
