The village where it is always ten to twelve, by Clara Hewitt
An original contemporary travel writing (online feature).
The bus from the valley goes up to Roccavera twice a day, and the driver does not hurry. For forty minutes it grinds round hairpin bends between olive terraces and walls of yellow rock, until the road simply runs out in a small square with a dry fountain, a church and a clock that has said ten to twelve, I am told, since 1980.
Nobody has fixed it, and nobody seems to mind. In Roccavera, time is not something you keep. It is something you sit in.
The village clings to the top of a limestone ridge like a cluster of barnacles, its houses stacked so closely that from the square you can see only slices of sky between them. There are no cars beyond the fountain; the lanes are too narrow and too steep, and many are not lanes at all but staircases, worn into shallow bowls by four centuries of feet. Laundry hangs across them from window to window. Cats sleep on every third step.
In the 1950s, more than 2,000 people lived here. Today there are 140, most of them over sixty-five. Hundreds of houses stand empty, their doors locked by families who left for Turin, Germany or New York and never quite decided to sell. Walking the upper lanes, I passed a kitchen with plates still stacked on the dresser and a calendar open at a month long gone.
Yet Roccavera is not a ghost. It is simply slow. At eleven each morning the bread arrives from the valley in the back of a three-wheeled van, and half the village comes out to meet it. In the bar on the square, which is also the post office and the only place to buy stamps, cheese or batteries, old men play cards with a deck so soft it bends like cloth. Signora Pellegrino, who is ninety-one, has made the same almond biscuits for the village feast every August since she was nine. ‘Why would I change them?’ she asked me, genuinely puzzled. ‘They were right the first time.’
The young are not entirely absent. Two couples from Milan have bought houses and work from them online, which has caused great excitement, mostly about the internet. A schoolteacher, Luca Ferri, runs a small guesthouse and leads walks to a ruined castle at sunset. He admits the village’s future is uncertain. ‘We are either the past,’ he says, ‘or we are what people will want next. Maybe both.’
On my last evening I sat by the dry fountain as the light turned the rock gold and swallows screamed round the bell tower. A woman called her son in for dinner from four streets away, and he answered. Below, the valley was full of headlights. Up here, the clock still said ten to twelve, and for once that seemed exactly the right time.
The village of Roccavera is described as a place where time seems to stand still. How does the writer try to show this?
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1 Section A (30%) - Reading, covering 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.