10. Two seventy-five year old mysteries finally resolved. I spent the five-happiest years of my eighty-three plus year-old life at SACK, St. Agnes’ Convent Kalaw. I was there from 1934 to 1939 from the ages of four to nine. In April 1939, five months before World War 2 started in Europe on Monday,1st September 1939, my parents took me out from SACK, and enrolled me in one of the schools in Rangoon. This would enable them to quickly collect me from school in case of war. On Sunday, 7th of December 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, WW2 broke out in the Far East. I was home safe and sound by the evening of the the very next day. Actual hostilities in Burma really started on Tuesday, 23rd December 1941, at about 9.00 am. That started with the first ever bombing of Yangon by the Japanese Air Force with twenty-five bombers. I remember this because I actually counted the planes myself from the compound of the Insein Railway Hospital. I left S A C K with two apparently unrelated but inexplicable puzzles on my mind. They would persist till March 2011, and be resolved only seventy five years later, when missing pieces of the puzzles fell into place, all of them in a short space of time. These two puzzles were:- 1. From 1937 onwards, I noticed that the Italian Nuns had stopped using the traditional British National Anthem ‘God save the King’, which by mandate, had to be sung at the end of every school function in all British Colonies then. In its stead, the Nuns began to use the Catholic Hymn ‘God bless Our Pope’. 2. At about the same time, the Nuns also started teaching us an Italian song. The surprising thing was that they did not explain to us what the song was about, nor did they give us the meaning of the song. We were taught in groups of four to five during recreation in our playing grounds; not in class rooms nor in bigger groups. They were however very adamant that we got our pronunciations pat. (I give below my verbally transcribed version of that song we learnt orally by heart from the Nuns. Jovinettsa, Jovinettsa, Prima vera dibalettsa, Della vita letta sprettsa, Ilto cantos e liv a. These were the actual words of the song, that we, (as 7-year old kids) had learnt verbatim from the Nuns. I have tried as best I can, choosing and matching correct alphabets to the phonetic words we actually perceived of the song by our youthful ears. Not knowing a single word of Italian, my spellings understandably may be atrociously wrong. Time passed; days, weeks, months, years and decades. Seventy five years in fact. Now notice how the pieces of my two puzzles all fall into place in a short space of time. In March of 2011, at the age of eighty one, I:- (1) was diagnosed as suffering from Ca rectum; (2) had to go to Singapore for treatment; (3) suddenly recognized the song that was being sung on a TV program on the Singapore TV. (4) It was the song taught us by the Nuns at S A C K. It was being sung by a group of Italian soldiers in WW2: their caps in their left hands; their clenched right fists over their hearts; standing at full attention and singing this song with fervor; that could only mean that they were singing, their National Anthem; (5) I just had to have the song verified as the Italian National Anthem, because only then would a lot of things become clear:- Why the Nuns had taught us the song on the sly, so to speak?. Why they had not told us the nature and meaning of the song?. Why we just had to get our pronunciations pat?. Verification started in the first week of April 2011, after my return to Burma. I looked up Google on my Ipad, searching for; (6) the name of the Italian Anthem. Google replied that the name of the current Italian Anthem was Il Canto degli Italiano. Since that meant nothing to me, I really felt stumped. Realizing that the first two words of the song were identical, I thought perhaps that might help me identity the song. The fact that the Nuns insisted we got our pronunciations pat, really helped now. Trans-scribing the two words as best as I could to the closest sounding English alphabets, these two words came out; (7) Jovinettsa Jovinettsa. I entered them into the Google search. The first search resulted in the response no match found. Though disappointed again, I suspected my spellings might be wrong. So another attempt was made using the same words but spelt differently thus:- (8) Giovinettsa. This time bingo I hit pay dirt. Google identified it as the Italian National Anthem from 1933 to 1945, (chosen by the Italian dictator Mussolini) and spelt Giovinezza. Now, the covert answers to my above two puzzles became suddenly very clear. The Nuns were un-obtrusively teaching students the Italian National Anthem from the year 1937 in Burma, when international tension had already risen; and they were doing this in Burma, a prized British colony even before World War 2 had started!. This was really treason on the part of the Nuns. But what made the Nuns act so?. To really understand the reason why, I must first describe the general political situation that was then prevailing in Asia and Europe. Mussolini, Head of State of Italy had aligned Italy with the Axis Powers, namely Germany and Japan. From 1937 onwards, knowing they would soon be on opposite sides in the coming war, the British began to denigrate and downplay everything Italian. This must have led to resentment on the part of the Nuns, who powerless to do anything overt in return, resorted to acts subtle and defiant: subtle, in their covert teaching of the Italian Anthem; and defiant, in their overt substitution of the Catholic Hymn God Bless our Pope for the British Anthem God save The King. I think I have now found the reason why the Nuns had acted so. These were desperate acts on the part of the Italian Nuns, trying to express their sense of Nationalism and Patriotism every which way they could, without obviously drawing upon themselves the unwanted attention and ire of the, the then, all powerful British Raj. In March of 2013, a ninety-year old English lady named Victoria Gaudoin, seven years my senior, and a then-contemporary at SACK came to visit Burma for old times sake. After reading this article, she told me she could say for certain, that the Nuns did not teach the Boarder girls this Italian song, Giovinezza. If that be so, then this effort by the Nuns was not a concerted action of all the Nuns, but only by a few ultra patriotic Nuns who were minding the Boarder-boys. How they managed to stop using the mandatory British Anthem from 1937 onwards, while still residing in Burma, is beyond my ability to explain?. I know for a fact that the Nuns had stopped singing it from 1937 onwards, because I myself was still there at that time. I do not know if the Nuns re-used the British Anthem, after WW2, when the British returned to Burma from May 1945 to January 1948, the time before Burmas Independence. Perhaps post war students of SACK in that time frame will be able to answer this question. Memory and Google have provided me with two versions of the actual lyrics of that Italian Anthem. Comparing the two verses side by side (given below), I feel pretty proud that, from the delicate pickings skimmed-off the memory of a young boy, who was just a 7-year old child then (75 long years ago), this rendition tallies closely to the actual words of the original song. My version from memory. Actual version from Google. Jovinettsa Jovinettsa, Giovenezza, Giovenezza, Primavera di belettsa Primavera di bellezza, Della vita letta sprettsa, Per la vita, nell aspezza, Ilto cantos e liv a. Il tuo canto squill e va. It is my fervent hope that my version will not sound as utter gibberish to Italians. For, by inference, it would mean that my faintly-remembered and laboriously re-constructed rendition is not intelligible-enough to be understandable to Italians. Our beloved Italian Nuns were Mother Superior (Josephine), Sister Ermenia, Sister Seraphina, Sister Casurina, Sister Anetta and Sister Ave Maria. My hats off to them for having had the gumption and subtleness in successfully bucking the system imposed by the Almighty British Raj and getting away with both these acts. Anyone wishing to outsource this article may do so freely. ZAW WIN.
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 08:40:04 +0000