Peace Work (30 page)

Mangiare mezzogiorno
has been laid on. Fussing like a mother hen, Signora Fontana shows us our seat placings. “Terr-ee,
qui
,” she gestures.

“How did the show go in Naples?” asks sister Lily, who will have to be killed.

“Oh, the show in Naples? Very well. Oh, yes, my word, the show in Naples, ha ha, it was splendid.”

Signora Fontana tells us there has been a one-day strike of tram drivers. Oh, really? How interesting. Does Signora Fontana know that the price of butter has gone up in Poland, and there are no dry-cleaners in Peru, and a Negro vicar has crossed Scotland on one leg, medicine is now free in England and so is illness? Soon I’m left out of the conversation as they all talk in Italian at a speed too fast for me by far. I just sit and when they all laugh I join in like an idiot. When the meal ends, Toni remembers me again. “My mother have bought ticket for opera tomorrow night. You like see?” Yes, I’d like see. The meal ends with zabaglione. “Gioia make for you, she know you like,” says Toni. Delicious! Now it’s announced that all the ladies are going to afternoon mass. Do I want to come, too? No, I’ve got this bad leg.

I spent a relaxing afternoon listening to the Allied Forces Network which played unending programmes of big band music. This afternoon, I remember, it was Artie Shaw. I didn’t know at the time that the days of the big band were numbered (I think this was number six). Swing music was the ‘in’ thing and I was part of the scene, man. When the ladies returned from mass, they found me stretched out on the sofa, asleep, with the radio on. It had been a boring service with an old priest who couldn’t enunciate well and dribbled. Now some tea: Gioia disappears into the kitchen. The Signora wants to give me a present, a book,
Italia Paese dell’Arte
– was this Artie Shaw?

Dedication by Toni’s mother in the book.

We sit round drinking tea and drumming up conversation. What will I be doing when I get back to England? As I step off the boat, I will immediately become famous – that’s what. The Bill Hall Trio will be up there in lights, London will be at our feet, shins and groins! Toni tells her mother how successful we are. Oh yes, her mother knows, had she not seen us triumph at the Argentine Theatre, even if she herself was a bit baffled by the act? I remember her mother had no idea ofjazz and couldn’t understand why we all wore rags, and
why
were people laughing at us? It wasn’t fair. How is my mother? My mother is very well. And my father? He’s well, too. What about my brother? Would you believe he’s well as well. The phone goes, Lily rushes to it. It’s her beau. Immediately her body turns to jelly and she speaks
sotto voce
, blushing and giggling, running her finger up and down the wall. Toni smiles, “This new boyfriend.” Lily is now rocking backwards and forwards and her finger is going up and down the wall faster. What
is
he saying to her?

Toni unwraps the presents she bought on Capri. They are all delighted. Gioia is delighted with her pincushion and hugs it to her; Signora Fontana tries on her headscarf. Lily is weaving from side to side and trying to drill a hole in the table with her index finger. She is nodding her head – how can he hear that on the phone? She seems to be going into a trance. Who is she speaking to, Svengali? I have another cup of tea. They want to know have I any plans for the evening?

Yes, but I left them in my other jacket pocket – I remember, though. I thought Toni and I might go to the pictures. “Oh, yes,” says Toni enthusiastically. Splendid, her mother is expecting an old schoolfriend and will no doubt spend the evening going over the old school exams. “Do you remember 2X2 = 4?”

“As if it were yesterday.”

The drag of going to an ENS A cinema is that I have to wear my CSE uniform to be allowed in free. When we arrive, we see they are showing
Fantasia
. I’v seen it before but it’s good enough to see again, if only for the hippo and crocodile ballerinas in the ‘Dance of the Hours’. In the dark, we sit holding hands and sucking boiled sweets. It’s a very enjoyable, relaxing evening until three soldiers sit in front of us. The one in front of me has a head the size of a Dickens’s Christmas pudding with ears that look like another two heads looking over his shoulders. He totally obscures the screen and Italy. I have to watch with my head inclined at sixty degrees.

Film over, we usher forth. It’s now dark and Rome is at its best – people in their Sunday clothes, the streets thronged with those just out walking or sitting at street cafés. “Come,” says Toni, “I show you nice place.” Back home, at this time of night, I could have shown Toni Reg’s Café opposite Brockley Cemetery where you could get eggs, sausage and chips with bread and butter for half a crown. I daren’t tell, I didn’t want to make her jealous. Three streets up she shows me a little trattoria where we settle. Would she like dinner here? No, “Just glass wine.” She tells me, with a note of sadness in her voice, that when her father was alive he sometimes used to bring the family here for dinner. Did my father ever take me to dinner?

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“50 Riseldene Road, Brockley.”

“That is restaurant?”

“No, that’s my home.”

Toni laughs, a plus mark. We sip our wine watching life’s circus pass by.

“People in Rome very chic, Terr-ee, yes?”

Those who are perambulating do so at a pace that is not far short of standing still. The ladies throw their weight on to alternate feet to give their bottoms a slow rotating wobble. All Italian women have it. Rome must be a voyeur’s paradise. Toni and I point out people that interest. For instance, what is the old bald man with watery eyes doing with a sixteen-year-old temptress? What tablets is he on? Toni releases titbits of scandals.

“All men in Rome like young girl,” she says with a knowing look. “When I in Rome ballet, many old men come to stage door and give me flowers, many.”

We finish our wine and taxi back home. She shushes me as the rest of the family are in bed. She rustles us up some sandwiches. We sit and eat, listening to the AF Network turned low.

“I lak jizz but I no understand.”

“If you like it, that’s all that matters. It’s like wine – you like it or you don’t.”

In retrospect, I realize how simple our conversations were, almost mundane.

After a quick canoodle on the couch and a lot of lascivious whispers from me and a clothesline of no, no, noes from Toni, I go to my bedroom. I lie in bed, my mind wandering lonely as a cloud that drifts on high. I couldn’t wait to get to England and start the act on its road to fame…

∗

What a treat: I’m awakened by Toni, all bathed and perfumed, with my breakfast on a tray. Her mother has gone to work, sister Lily to college, only Gioia in the flat – she’ll have to be killed. “How you sleep?” she says. I tell her I slept on my left side with my knees drawn up under my chin. “Theeese bed OK for you?” Yes it’s OK for me, but too narrow to be OK for us. “You naughty.”

When I’ve bathed and dressed, she tells me we are going visiting to see Luciana Campila, her ballet friend from the tour. “
Via XXI di Aprile
,” she tells the taxi. Why is the street called 21 April? She doesn’t know. It might be after some special occasion, then again it might be named after 21 April.

You can never tell with a local council – in Brockley, we had a Fred Street and an Enid Terrace.

The Campilas are a bustling middle-class Italian family with two daughters. When we arrive, the middle-aged plump Signora Campila is in the kitchen massaging a huge lump of dough to make pasta, with the aid of her daughters. They all break into animated conversation but, after a brief introduction,
I
might as well be tied up in the garden. As they continue, I wish I was. There are bursts of conversations, then shrieks of laughter – every now and then one of them giving me a sympathetic look as though I
should
be tied up in the garden. Luciana has become engaged to Dennis Evans, a military pianist at CSE Naples. They are to be married and live in Cwmllynfell, which he can’t even spell. He’s a miner; they will live with his mother and father in one room and live happily ever after, until she flees back to Rome two months later, covered in coal dust and pregnant – but that’s all in the future. My future will start the moment this cabal of females breaks up. “Terr-ee, you lak cup of coffee?” says Toni.

How nice, she still remembers me! I sip my coffee like I’ve just come back from the dead. From what I can make out of the conversation, it’s all scandal. When they get excited, the Campilas attack the dough with greater ferocity. It looks like three women beating up a malleable midget.

After a couple of hours in Coventry, Toni says we are leaving. I’d left hours ago. We go back home where Gioia has prepared us a salad lunch.

“The opera this evening, tell me about it!”

“Ah, you lak very much – Aida in the Terme di Cara-calla.”

Did I hear right? We’re going to watch an opera being held in Caracalla’s bath?

“Yes, Terr-ee, in the, how you say,
rovina
.”

Ah the
ruins
of the Baths of Caracalla, how hygienic! Do we have to take soap and towel?

It was an evening I’d never forget. The first bonus was we had a giant full moon, a cool evening. We arrive to crowds already entering the seating area in front of the stage, which is built into a giant arch in the ruins. I even thought I heard nightingales. I’d never seen this opera before. It was such a spectacle! And a giant cast. I was pretty stunned when, in the Grand March, it seemed every film extra in Rome was on stage, including two elephants! There was a wonderful vibrant orchestra of about sixty. The principals were Maria Caniglla and Giuzzo Neri; it was
bel canto
singing, soaring in the Roman night with ecstatic applause after each favourite aria. I was completely entranced. This was better than Harry James, better than two eggs, sausage and chips at Reg’s Café. At the end I sat there stunned, what a production! Time and again I was moved to tears by the music, was it really written by a man called Joe Green? Amazing.

After the opera I had promised to take Toni and her family to dinner at an hotel they had recommended – Albergo Tenente, wow! As Secombe would say, “There’s posh for you.” It’s modern but wonderfully tasteful; everywhere, it’s white marble and gilt. The dining-rooms are on the sixth floor overlooking the Tiber, the ruined Roman Ponte Sublicio and the Tiberine Island. A fawning manager greets us and a fawning waiter attends our table, how I love it. The Fontanas aren’t a well-to-do family – the mother has to work – so this is a treat for them, I can tell it by the delighted expression on Signora Fontana’s face. Mind you, the expression on my face when I saw the bill was something else. I mean there’s a limit to everything, even 72,000 lire!

The head waiter renders us a list of this evening’s specialities; he delivers it all with flamboyant gestures, rather like an excerpt from Shakespeare. It’s all a waste of time, as none of us want any. He deflates visibly like an actor who’s been booed. He hands us to a second waiter who takes our order with a slightly crimped mouth that looks like a chicken’s bum under pressure. The ladies are all agog with the munificence of the surroundings.

“
Un bel posto
, Terr-ee,” says Signora Fontana, whose head is all but revolving.

“Did you know, Terr-ee, Mussolini come here to eat?” says Toni.

“So have I,” I said.

“Mussolini,” says Miss Fontana, “is not bad man, he stupid.”

He must have been to pay these prices.

We talk about the opera. I lament the fact we don’t have such a plethora of wonderful voices back home.

“But you hev Gracie Fields,” says Toni.

“Yes,” I say, “we have Gracie Fields,” and leave it at that.

The meal passes with me trying to interject into the conversation. I knew a few Italian words that would suffice: ‘
Avero
’ (is that true), ‘
la penna del mia zia e nel giardino
’ (the pen of my aunt is in the garden) or ‘
Mio cane ha mangato ilgatto
’ (my dog has eaten the cat) and ‘
nostra cameriere ha profumati ginnochi
’ (our waiter has perfumed knees) – all said much to the bafflement of Signora Fontana, but it has Toni laughing.

“My mother think you mad,” she says.

“I see, then I must tell you that
il papa non suona lafisarmonica bene
” (the Pope cannot play the accordion well).

At this Signora Fontana laughs out loud, then stops herself with a hand over her mouth.

The chicken’s-bum waiter brings the bill, face downwards on a silver tray (not him, the bill). I turn it over and fake a heart attack. “Call a doctor,” I say. “No no no, on second thoughts, call a financier.” After this clowning, I make big of paying the bill. How I loved those huge Italian bank notes. As they are carried away, I fake tears and sobbing.

We are all fairly merry with wine as we taxi back home. Lily, who has heard that I can croon, wants me to sing ‘
una canzone come la jizz
’. I’m well lubricated enough to go straight into ‘Boo boo boo the thrill is gone, the thrill is gone, I can see it in your eyes’. I couldn’t fail, I had three captive females and
I’d
paid for the dinner. Lily claps. “Bravo, Terr-ee,” she says. Good, a lone clap is better than a single herpe.