Naples '44 (14 page)

Apart from negative definitions by GHQ (FS personnel will in no circumstances be used as interpreters), nobody seems quite to know what we are and what we do. As a result any job that no other branch of the forces wants to tackle is automatically thrown in our direction. It is now announced that we will investigate and report on all applications by Italian females in the Naples area to marry British soldiers. This will entail collecting information from the competitive and mutually hostile Pubblica Sicurezza Police, and the Carabinieri, questioning the applicant herself, and appraising the circumstances and the environment in which she lives.

This is a chore nobody in the section seems anxious to take on, so it falls to my lot.

Miracles galore in the past few days. At the weekend crowds flocked out to the Campi Flegrei to watch the performance of a twelve-year-old local Bernadette to whom the Virgin has appeared several times with comforting messages for the population. A band was in attendance, and in the absence of any more suitable form of transport, the Sindaco of Marano arrived in a motor-hearse.

At Pomigliano we have a flying monk
*
who also demonstrates the stigmata. The monk claims that on an occasion last year when an aerial dog-fight was in progress, he soared up to the sky to catch in his arms the pilot of a stricken Italian plane, and bring him safely to earth. Most of the Neapolitans I know – some of them educated men – are convinced of the truth of this story.

An excursion with Frazer, the Signora Lola and friend in the naval launch carrying supplies to Capri. Frazer as stylish-looking and emaciated as ever in his well-cut battle blouse and Desert Rat polka-dotted scarf; Lola beautifully bloated through the return of
pasta
to the menus of Naples. Her friend, Susanna, was a frisky redhead of about twenty-five, the possessor of a mime so expressive that within minutes, and hardly a word passing between them, she was able to give Frazer a brief outline of her life history. Both ladies were absurdly dressed for the occasion in fox furs, with small straw hats decorated with glass fruit on top of their piled-up tresses.

It was one of those golden mornings of Naples. Within minutes of chugging out of the harbour, the town behind us was afloat in layers of mist, and all its strong colours, its reds and its corals, faded to a pacific grey. After that a headland with pines showing like a pencil drawing, the tops of towers, the Castel Sant' Elmo in suspension over the town, then utter dazzlement. Frazer produced a loaf and cut it up to cries of girlish
delight. This party was as much about bread as it was about Capri – an excuse for the ladies to eat limitless white bread under picnic conditions. They munched the bread and laughed uproariously, and threw mangled crusts to the escorting seagulls. An unlicensed fishing-boat veered nervously away trailing a little mandolin music, and ahead Capri penetrated a quilt of mist like the tip of a volcano.

Capri, like hashish, is supposed to bring out the demon, whatever its nature, lurking at the bottom of the human personality, and people go ashore at the Marina Grande hypnotised in advance by its reputation. Frazer disposed of his supplies and we went up to the village and sat in a café in the Piazza Municipio. This was a different world from Naples; escapist, full of make-believe, and almost hysterically concerned to show its lack of interest in the war. Civilians find it difficult to get passes for the island, but all the old Capri-hands were there; the men dressed to go shooting and the women in sandals and streaming veils like Isadora Duncan just about to go off on the last fatal trip in the Bugatti.

We ordered the inevitable marsala – the alternative being a local gin that smelt of turps – and the girls took the bread they had saved from their beaded handbags, and began to chew. The waiter counted in German, and went off, saying
Danke
for the tip, and we settled into our roles in the pageant of Capri. An American major at the next table sat with his arms round the waists of a couple of courtesans singing a blustering version of ‘
Torna a Sorrento
', and when the municipal loudspeakers began to blast out a tarantella one of them was persuaded to hop about in what was supposed to be a dance on the table-top. A hanger-on I knew vaguely from Naples attached himself to point out Madame Four-Dollars, a foreign expatriate so-called from her fixed price paid to fisherman for sexual services, and to invite us to visit the Villa Tiberius, whose ancient scandals were part of the island's stock-intrade. The haunted face of Curzio Malaparte whom I believed to be in the internment camp of Padula but from which he had clearly been released, appeared briefly, and among his courtiers I observed a British officer who, under the spell of his environment, grimaced and gesticulated in all directions.

So far the trip had been a huge success. This was Life as far as both girls were concerned, and Frazer, from the cautious nonconformist background of Peebles, had to admit that he'd never imagined that such a place as Capri could exist. Then suddenly there were agitated whisperings, confusion broke out at our table, and both girls got up, flustered away into the café and disappeared. Frazer, who went after them, came back perplexed. They had both left the café by the back entrance, and disappeared. While we were discussing the strange behaviour we noticed a small grey-haired Italian sitting at a table across the street, who was staring malevolently at us, and I felt that his presence must have had something to do with the girls' panic-stricken departure.

We wandered about the village which is too small to be a
hidingplace,
and in the end we found the fugitives and listened with what polite pretence of belief we could to the story concocted by Lola to explain what had happened. The venomous-looking little Italian had been an old family friend who had conceived a passion for her, and continued to pursue her hopelessly, to follow her, to make her life miserable by turning up like this out of the blue, despite the fact that she had told him a hundred times she never wanted to see him again. The relationship, she assured Frazer, tears welling in her enormous innocent eyes, had never been anything other than platonic. It was my task to translate all these protestations followed by the crossfire of accusation and denial.

Later, when the girls had been shipped back to Naples and delivered to their homes, Frazer wanted to know how much of Lola's story I believed, and it seemed to me a disservice not to tell him what I knew. The angry little man was a director of the Banco di Napoli, I told him, and had been a high official of the Fascist government, although not quite high enough for him to qualify for internment. ‘Do you think he's still her lover?' he wanted to know.

‘How does she live? How does she eat? Where did the fox furs come from? You don't keep her. Why live in a fool's paradise?'

‘I've never met a beautiful woman like Lola before,' Frazer said. ‘I thought she loved me.'

‘She does,' I said. ‘But one day, sooner or later, you'll be posted away,
and she'll have to go on living here. What do you expect her to do, starve? Work in a factory? Love's all very well but she has to live.'

‘I suppose she does, but I don't think I ought to see her again.'

‘That's for you to decide,' I told him.

Frazer came round to HQ today, obviously distraught, and we went to the Vittoria for a drink. He seemed to have come to terms with the knowledge that he had been sharing Lola's sexual favours with the ex-Federale, and would continue to share them while the relationship persisted, but was very worried about an attack made upon her by the other man, which in his opinion amounted to attempted murder.

His story was that, subsequent to our trip to Capri, Lola refused to see him for three days, and when in the end she finally appeared, her neck was terribly bruised.

I reassured him. This was what is known locally as a
strozzamento di amanti
– a lovers' semi-throttling. It was a form – a convention almost – in such relationships, and was tolerated and even appreciated as a proof of passion by Neapolitan girls, whereas a
schiaffeggiamento
, or beating up, was not. Had the bank director beaten her up, the chances were that she might have left him there and then, which meant that she would have had to turn to him, Frazer, for her support. ‘Ask yourself,' I said. ‘Do you think you could take on the exclusive rights on a basis of £10 a week?'

‘No,' he said. ‘I don't. I think I'll have to give her up.'

Twenty-eight investigations of prospective brides for Servicemen completed to date, of which twenty-two proved to be prostitutes. Of these, seven were officially described as such in the dossiers of the Pubblica Sicurezza or the Carabinieri. The rest were obviously living on immoral earnings because – in surroundings of total poverty and hunger – they and their houses were clean and well-kept, their children, if they had any, were shod, and there was food in the larder.

Always the same question. ‘Where does the money come from?' To
this there is an almost standard reply. ‘My uncle sends me some.' I ask for the uncle's address, explaining that I am bound to check up, and this produces a sad smile, and a shrug of the shoulders. The game is up. There is no such uncle.

‘Can you do anything for me?' the girl usually wants to know. ‘I didn't ask to live like this. Give me the chance to get away from it and I'll be as good a wife as anybody else.'

The Bureau of Psychological Warfare has just stated in its bulletin that there are forty two thousand women in Naples engaged either on a regular or occasional basis in prostitution. This out of a nubile female population of perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand. It seems incredible. Three out of four of these girls I have interviewed will probably cease to be prostitutes as soon as they can hope to keep alive by any other means. One would like to be able to do something for these applicants to marry our soldiers. Of the twenty-two failed candidates most seemed kindly, cheerful, and hard-working at their household tasks, and their standard of good looks was very high. Nine out of ten Italian girls have lost their menfolk, who have either disappeared in battles, into prisoner-of-war camps, or been cut off in the North. The whole population is out of work. Nobody produces anything. How are they to live? Some Neapolitans have not tasted meat for two years. The marvel is that these girls can actually find a male once in a way – apart from soldiers – able to pay the very small sums they are ready to accept for their services.

To Nola to interview five British privates waiting to be re-posted to their units at the GRTD there, who escaped from a German prison camp near Terni and came in safely a few days ago.

All these had picked up enough basic Italian to be able to persuade the Italians working in the camp to bring in odds and ends of civilian clothing, which they stashed away until each man could dress himself up as an Italian civilian. The Italians did this out of the goodness of their hearts. Not only did they give away garments which they would probably have been glad to keep for themselves, but they exposed themselves to a
terrific risk in doing what they did. Workers were put through some sort of perfunctory search both when arriving at the camp and leaving, and parcels were opened, so the spare items of clothing had to be worn. A man would come in wearing two pairs of trousers or two shirts, or he would stick a pair of canvas-soled shoes into his jacket pocket, leave his boots behind with the British prisoner, and wear these to go out. When all was ready the escapees quietly mixed in with the Italian workers and walked out through the gates. One of them described a tense moment when a guard didn't seem to recognise his face, and stopped him, but was quite happy to let him go on being assured in broken Italian, ‘
Noi lavorare per voi
.'

Thereafter the five calmly set out on their one-hundred-and-
fifty-mile
walk back to our lines. The journey was undertaken in the most leisurely and relaxed fashion and there was nothing furtive about it. When they saw Germans ahead they kept up their stolid march, ready to wave, smile and shout encouragements in their broken Italian. Before their capture they'd listened to a standard S-Force lecture on how to handle a situation like this, and had noted the recommendation never to go to the big house in any village for help or food, but to rely on the poor, ‘because they have nothing to lose'. In fact they had their lives to lose – because the Germans gave short shrift to shelterers of escaped prisoners – but none of the Italians who helped our five friends to get back gave any thought to that. Progress was much slowed down because one of the party had a poisoned foot, and could only make a small number of miles a day, so the journey took over two weeks. When the men were hungry they would decide on a small house they liked the look of in a village street, knock on the door, explain who they were, and ask for food. In no case was this ever denied them. After they had eaten they were often offered beds for the night, and for this purpose were shared out among the neighbours. Sometimes they were urged to stay as long as they liked – in one case to settle down and become members of the local community. Money was pressed on them. The old people in Italian villages treated them as sons, and the young ones as brothers.

It turned out that there were several more soldiers in the depot at
Nola who had had experiences of this kind, and I spent some hours talking to them. To date I have not heard of a single instance of escaping British soldiers being betrayed to the Germans. This adds to the general impression of the civilisation and impressive humanity of our Italian
exenemies.
For this reason, since humanity is above partisanship, the Italians are no doubt equally kind to Germans who come to them for help in similar circumstances, and I find it deplorable that we should show anger and vindictiveness when cases of Italians showing even ordinary compassion to their one-time allies come to our notice.