Where Have All the Bullets Gone? (14 page)

The Printed Word in Maddaloni

O
ur Librarian, Corporal John Hewitt, tried to foster the written word. Till he arrived our library had no one in charge of our book. He put it to rights by procuring numerous volumes. “This,” he said, holding up a ragged book with covers hanging like limp wings, “this is the Bible of the masses.”
No Orchids for Miss Blandish
. He points to the drool stains. I’m above this, I have borrowed Darwin’s
Origin of the Species
, which my father had said was ‘Rubbish’.
He
was the origin of the species. Hewitt wants to know why I’ve had Dante’s
Divine Comedy
for two months. I daren’t tell him it’s a counter-weight on Lewis’s mosquito net. ‘Twas Hewitt, himself a poet (silly to be not yourself and a poet) who introduced poetry contests, which he lived to regret.

LONDON

Oh London, none sufficiently can praise

The courage fowering ‘mid your smoke maze

Of Limehouse alleys and suburban streets;

From every home unfailing humour beats

Each newer outrage with a newer jest
,

And death has never claimed but second best
.

This deathless spirit freed from shattered bones

Scarce sheds a tear above your broken stones

Scarce pauses far a moment longer than

It takes to snap the slender life of man
,

‘
Ere taking stand within another heart
,

Doubling the measure of its counter-smart

Until today your limitless reserve

Of courage, breaks the Nazis’ vaunted nerve
.

W.J. O’Leary, Pte.

“That was the winner,” he said sobbing on my shoulder. “You should have seen the bad ones,” he lamented.

Furlough

Y
es. “We’ve been furloughed,” said Steve, holding up Part Two Orders. Why had we been furloughed? In appreciation of our
Men in gitis
efforts. One whole week in the Capital again. We are away next morning, Sgt. Steve Lewis, Private Eddie Edwards and Gunner S. Milligan. It looked like an old joke. “There was this Englishman, this Irishman and this man of the Hebrew persuasion and they were all in the Army, and then one day, ha ha ha, they were all given leave to Rome, ha ha ha.” Once again it’s the 56 Area Rest Camp. Steve, being senior, signs us in. “You realize I’ve signed for you bastards. For God’s sake please avoid the following: rape, murder, arson, little boys, gefilte fish, Mlle Ding.” We queued for a dinner of Irish stew, sponge roll and custard.

Steve Lewis, Eddie Edwards and Spike Milligan There was an Englishman, an Irishman and a Jew…

Tired after a hard day’s travel, we ate it, then wrote off for compensation. The Yew, Lewis, has bagged the favoured upper bunk. “It’s the English class system,” he explains. “If a wild beast gets in it eats the lower class first, allowing the upper class to survive and re-let the bed for the next victim.” Next morning, early hot showers, singing, towel flicking on the bums etc., then breakfast of sausage, bacon, bread and jam, and we are like giants refreshed. We go on the town.

We are accosted outside a souvenir shop. “Hey Joe,” says an Iti tout. I tell him my name is not Joe, but Terence Alan Milligan and have a care. Do I want a picture? “Your-a-face-a-painted in five-a-minutes flat.” Do I want a flat face? OK-o. I must have had a face like a po — he has named me Jerry.

The Colosseum is to Rome what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris but less rusty. “That’s where they threw the Christians to the lions,” says Eddie. No Jews? “No, the lions weren’t kosher.” We eat gelati at a cafe; visit the Forum. “Not much of it left,” says Eddie. I tell him that the Forum was destroyed by Vandals. “I know, they did in our local phone box,” he said.

The Parthenon; two thousand years old and still intact! -the Barbara Cartland of Architecture. Within are the tombs of the Kings and Queens of Italy and there, immured in marble, is Michelangelo. Steve is very impressed. “What did he die of?” I tell him: “He fell off the scaffolding.” He is trying to translate the plaques.

“Pity they’re in Latin.”

“Why?”

“It’s a dead language.”

“Well they
are
all dead.”

I couldn’t believe it! Me from Brockley standing where Agrippa stood; it was as absurd as finding Agrippa queuing for fish in Catford. Steve is telling me he has cracked it. “Agrippa,” he says, laughing at the terrible pun. “Agrippa is…Latin for hair grips.” I thought I heard a groan from the tomb of Michelangelo.

Outside we turn into the Corso Umberto and witness the great cat colony. An old Italian lady is feeding them (as is the Roman custom). In answer to my query she says the cats have been here ‘Lontano fa’, so I tell my two chums, “They’ve been here since lontano fa.” Steve says, “That’s strange — they miaow in English.”

The Fontana de Trevi and its songs in water: it cascades, gushes, ripples, drips, laughs, squirts. It is magnificent.

I toss the traditional coin in. “What did you wish?” says Steve. I explain certain things about Candy and he is well pleased. Eddie throws his coin in; he won’t say what, but if it was to retire and live in Southampton and go grey, it’s been granted. Steve screws up his Jewish soul and throws in a low-denomination coin. What does he wish? He wishes he hadn’t thrown it in. We hold back as he starts to strip.

Food. A small restaurant, ‘La Bolla’ in the Via Flamania, a four-star place — you can see them through a hole in the roof. Here we are in the land of pasta, and I order
stew
. The photograph shows the evidence. I even had a
cup of tea
AND bread and butter. They didn’t have Daddy’s sauce.

Flashback! Steve had somehow (he can’t remember) gained ingression to a Roman widow’s flat. She was sixty with a daughter and son. He had arranged for two of us to stay there the last three days of the leave. And so it came to pass. We left Eddie standing in his shirt — Angora, for the wearing of- standing by his bottom bunk saying, “It’s not fair, I’m not going to play with you any more.” Yes, we gave poor Eddie the elbow, and if he wasn’t careful he’d get the shins and the knee bones as well.

Steve’s suitcase has labels. Albergo Vittorio Emanuel, Albergo Grande Viale, Albergo Re de Italia, Albergo Savoia. It gives a touch of class to his 2/6 Marks and Spencer reinforced cardboard box with the knotted string handle.

It’s in a faceless modern Mussolini-built block. We take the lift. “What’s this Primo Piano, Secondo Piano, Terzo Piano?” I told him that they had one piano on the first floor, two on the second and three on the third. Apartment 234. We are met at the door by the smiling grey-haired Roman widow. She’s yours, I tell Steve. We are shown into the bedroom, and having dumped our kit, she gives us tea. Her husband had died just before the war in a car accident; she has a twelve-year-old son Raymondo and a twenty-one-year-old daughter Anna, who will be mine!

It was mid-afternoon and we went to the PICTURES! George O’Brien in
The Kid Rides West
. I had already seen him ride East, North and South, and the film was exactly the same except he did it in a different direction. It was full of ‘Aw Shucks’, “You’re looking real purty today Miss Lucy’, and ‘Are you a-callin’ me a liar?” To the Alexander Club where my Hebrew friend did partake of Eggs and Chips. The REME band were playing. They were terrible. Someone shouted, “Mend a lorry.” The band meant well, but then so did Hitler.

Anna Morto

L
ittle did we know of the tragedy that was impending. On our return we were let into the flat by daughter Anna. “Aye Steve,” she said, and kissed him. “This is my friend, Spike.” Anna was tall, blue-eyed and blonde. She could have been a model. Her brother is back from school, a dark lad with numerous questions: “Were we in the fighting, how was it, had we won any battles?” It could have been any boy anywhere.

Anna works of an evening. Blast! Chance one gone! She works in the American Officers’ Club, the Nirvanetta. She is bemoaning Rome’s loss of elegance. She tells us that during Mussolini’s regime a woman was safe to walk anywhere after dark, even during the German occupation, but now, she threw her hands up in despair, now it was terrible, she couldn’t take the drunkenness and the lechery. Chance number two gone. She wasn’t joking, as we were to find out.

We were tired and after a shower I donned my terrible ‘Made-out-of-cheap-sheet-then-dyed-with-a-dye-that-comes-off-in-bed’ pyjamas. I was reading old English newspapers and magazines from home. I must have dozed off and I was awakened by Anna coming into my room. She put her finger to her lips for silence, then whispered: “Can I borrow this chair?” Yes. Did she want to borrow me? I had two legs less, but I was willing to be sat on. No. I was the last one to see her alive.

At seven next morning, Raymondo burst into my room: “Anna Morto,” he shouted. I leapt from my bed and followed him to the kitchen. Anna was in the chair, a gas pipe leading from the stove to her mouth. Hurriedly I picked her up. It was horrible; rigor mortis had set in, and she stayed in the shape of a person seated. Steve put the mirror to her mouth.

The mother is distraught, and that poor boy, that little innocent face as yet unused to a world without a father, now his sister…The mother says she has sent for the police. It would be best if we weren’t found here. We leave in embarrassing haste with our pyjamas under our battledress. I often wonder if having two Allied soldiers in her home was the last straw for Anna. Please God, I hope not. I will never know. How insensitive we were. We never even went back or wrote or said thank you. What kind of a person was I…?

It put a terrible damper on the rest of the holiday and soon we were in the lorry rumbling back to our Alma Mater, Maddaloni. Trouble with lorries is you can only see out of the back. “You see where you’ve been and you already know that,” says the Yew.

Sometimes — on a dark night — I still see Anna’s face.

April 17

MY DIARY:

MY BIRTHDAY. I’M 27. HAD EXTRA CUP OF TEA.

The news tells us that the Germans in Italy are on their last legs.

Führer Bunker

HITLER IS IN THE KARZI GIVING HIMSELF ONE OF DOCTOR MORRELL’S ENEMAS.

ADOLPH:

Allez oops! Ahhh! Dat is better.

GOEBBELS: