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Antoinette Moat |
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Antoinette was born in Farnham, Surrey, two years before the outbreak of the
Second World War. After a brief posting in Liverpool, where her father was over
seeing the air-defences for the city, the docks and Birkenhead, the family
returned to be near Farnham and its open heath-land, and to be close to
relations during this difficult time. Arturo Galletti, Antoinette’s father, was
killed in 1943.
Always
attached to her father’s background, the family spent much time in Italy and at
the Galletti family home near Gubbio in Umbria.
On leaving
school Antoinette trained at RADA and went briefly into the theatre, her first
love. In 1965 she married novelist and poet John Moat. They have lived ever
since in a remote, magical valley on the North coast of Devon, where they
brought up their two children, Elsbeth and Ben. For many years their life
included a small-holding: vegetables, sheep, and Antoinette’s special concern:
bees, chickens, ducks and a cow, producing milk, Devonshire cream, cheese and
butter.
With John and
the poet John Fairfax, Antoinette set up the Arvon Foundation, furnishing its
first two creative writing centres, in Devon and in Yorkshire. She helped found
and then over many years, sustain the Yarner Trust Centre in Welcombe, North
Devon, which runs practical courses in sustainable living. She is both a
qualified teacher of the Alexander Technique, and a Psychosynthesis counsellor.
In 1998 she
began research and set up a Drug Day Care Centre in Bideford, North Devon,
devoting four years to the venture. This required that she acquire computer
skills which she subsequently employed in the large-scale undertaking of
transcribing the family letters of 30 years that form the basis of ‘On Two
Fronts’. She also turns her hand to writing poems and ‘the odd bit of prose’.
Travels have
included a seven month trek with the children when they were small, across the
States and into Mexico, where the family made home for three months in a
mountain village. Twenty years ago she and her husband set off around the world
for four months as back-packers.
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On Two Fronts
Antoinette Moat
ISBN 1590482646
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It is a
mystery how a man can be born, rush through life, get killed in battle and
be virtually forgotten, only to have his story rescued from oblivion thanks
to the miracle of the written word. Arthur Galletti’s life-story,
inextricably woven with that of his wife and family, ripples unexpectedly
from the collection of letters, unfolds to a music of love, danger, war and
death from a time not so long ago.
Arthur
Galletti was a man in many respects representative of his time, and so it is
more remarkable that the book is ablaze with travel, romance and danger.
Born in India in 1907, raised in Italy and educated in England, Galletti had
by 1927 become a British Army officer whose dashing good looks would have
allowed him to star alongside Cary Grant in a Gunga Din movie.
Instead Galletti risked his life for real on the murderous North West
Frontier of India, exploring remote corners of the Raj.
Arthur’s
literary life began to unfold when from age five, he, Roberto four, Beatrice
three and a baby were left for ten months in the care of nuns in the hills
of India, and together with the mother superior of the convent, began a
correspondence with their own mother living below in the heat of India. From
then on his story unfolds. When he met Rachel in Peshawar his soldier’s
story took an unexpected literary turn. In those days of slow communication,
the letter enjoyed an importance few today can relate to. Galletti wrote and
received hundreds of detailed, wonderfully expressed letters. Those near to
him, those who loved him, ordered him, later fought beside him, all
contributed to a network of correspondence which, as if by a prescient
miracle, became a deeply moving, unified, and complete biography.
Arthur
Galletti was killed in action in 1943. Still deeply in love, he left behind
an anguished wife, a son, and a small daughter who was unable to comprehend
how her father died fighting in North Africa.
For 60
years the story lay largely ignored, until that same daughter decided to
investigate that treasure trove of letters. There were two trunks full,
lovingly preserved in the family home in Italy. When Antoinette Moat began
reading the letters she not only came to know her father for the first time,
but encountered in these carefully scripted pages all the great themes of
life: love, hope, loss, grief. And not just one man’s life awash with
adventure, passion, the ways of fidelity, but also in detail the life of
Rachel in whom is celebrated the often unspoken heroism and contribution of
the woman embattled on the home front.
On Two
Fronts
is two
people’s heart-breaking story – but it is also a detailed commentary on the
times and events they lived through. The book is illuminated with many
timeless photos, the intimacy and pathos of which will haunt you for years
to come.
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