Mr. Campion's Abdication

by Mike Ripley

  ‘Me!’ said Perdita perkily. ‘I mean, Mrs Simpson.’

  ‘Quite. The newspaper proprietors had agreed to keep a wall of silence around Edward and Mrs Simpson ever since the affair had started in 1934, thinking that once he became king he would do the decent thing and keep her as a mistress …’

  ‘Oliver, please!’ Lavinia was convincingly outraged. ‘Keeping a woman as a bit on the side is not doing the decent thing, even for a king!’

  ‘I’m sorry, my love, but that’s just the way they saw it back then; in fact, it was regarded as something of a historical tradition, just one you didn’t talk about.’

  ‘Was she such an awful person they had to pretend she didn’t exist?’

  ‘I don’t think she exactly endeared herself to the powers-that-be,’ Perdita offered. ‘I’ve read that she was described as the sort of woman who, when entering a room, expected to be curtsied to or at least not at all surprised if it happened.’

  ‘Haven’t you ever felt like that?’ suggested Lavinia, sensing an ally.

  ‘Often,’ whispered Perdita.

  ‘Anyway,’ Oliver resumed, ‘the result was that newspaper readers in America and Europe knew far more about Mrs Simpson than anyone here did and probably why there was never a photograph of the actual visit. Which was odd, because Sam Salt of the Courier followed the excavation right from the start. Apart from the parish magazines, it was just about the only publicity the boat burial got, though if they’d found anything it would have been a different story – or at least a story. There was nothing about the royal visit in the following week’s edition.’

  Rupert dared to ask the question everyone had avoided so far. ‘So are we sure there actually was a royal visit?’

  ‘Of course there was!’ Oliver was indignant at the suggestion. ‘The vicars of both Heronhoe and Sweethearting referred to it in sermons, which were reported in their parish magazines, though neither mentioned Mrs Simpson. Of course, it could well be that no one here knew who she was then. It was more than a year later that the affair became public knowledge and then everyone knew who she was and there were plenty of locals who saw them together on that visit. By all accounts, the prince didn’t stay long, just peered over the edge of the trench, made a few polite remarks and shook hands with the diggers. That’s all Daniela wants you to do, I think.’

  ‘She could have told us that instead of leaving us hanging around all afternoon,’ Perdita moaned.

  ‘Apparently she and her cameraman had some additional research to do in Sweethearting,’ Oliver said in Daniela’s defence, ‘and in any case, the trench isn’t yet as deep as it was back in 1935.’

  He pointed to the faded newsprint image of the diggers clearly standing in a depression shoulder-deep.

  ‘If that photograph was taken the day before the visit, why wasn’t one taken of the visit?’ Rupert asked suspiciously.

  ‘I told you, it was not in any way an official visit and Mrs Simpson was definitely off limits to the press. Wasn’t that why your father and the charming Mr Lugg’ – Rupert and Perdita exchanged wry looks – ‘came down a day early, to make sure the coast was clear?’

  ‘He wasn’t here when the prince was, but I was thinking that one of the locals might have taken a few snaps as souvenirs.’

  Oliver shook his head and smiled patronizingly. ‘These were rough and ready country folk and it was the middle of the Great Depression. Few people would have had access to a camera and film.’ He paused, then drummed his fingers on the scrapbook page just above the picture of the trench. ‘Come to think of it, it is odd that the paper ran this picture with a caption advertising a royal visit yet never reported that it had taken place. Even Samuel Salt, who had been following the dig from the start, stopped reporting on the Sweethearting boat burial. Mind you, the dig, as a dig, was pretty much over by then. In fact, they would have started backfilling had it not been for the visit.’

  ‘Did you say Samuel Salt, dear?’ Lavinia sounded bored, more interested in squeezing another cup of tea out of the pot on the tray in front of her.

  Oliver Bell reacted with pleasure that his wife had been taking interest in what she had previously dismissed as his ‘obsession’.

  ‘Yes, darling; Samuel Salt, the journalist who worked for the Courier.’

  ‘That’s the one the inspector rang about.’

  ‘Inspector? What inspector?’

  ‘A policeman. Inspector Chamley, I think he said his name was. He rang earlier and left a message for Mr Campion. Said he’d made a few enquiries, as asked, and it seems that Samuel Salt left the Courier in July, 1935. In fact, he just didn’t turn up for work one Friday, which was unusual because it was the day the reporters claimed their expenses. It was only the following week that someone checked his digs in Hadleigh, found him gone but his belongings still there and thought to tell the police. He was over twenty-one, unmarried and with no debts and no relatives to report him as a missing person, so the police probably didn’t look very hard.’

  ‘And Pop had asked this policeman chap to investigate Samuel Salt?’ asked a puzzled Rupert.

  ‘I guess so. He told me to expect a call from Inspector Chamley and take a message before he and Mr Lugg shot off to Frinton.’ Lavinia sipped delicately from her cup. ‘I’ve no idea what it means, but the gist of the message seems to be that Samuel Salt disappeared around the time of the prince’s visit and hasn’t been seen since.’

  Mr Campion and Lugg were clear of the bright lights of Frinton and negotiating the country backroads between the Bentleys (Little and Great) and the Bromleys (Great and Little) before either of them vocalized what they had both been thinking.

  Campion took a deep breath and said simply, ‘Bolzano. You remember?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lugg grimly, ‘Little Italy.’

  TEN

  Little Italy

  The ancient central London parish of Clerkenwell, named, one presumes, for a well patronized by clerks taking a break from their literary duties, had been a proud component of the borough of Finsbury until a municipal takeover in 1965 by the less-fashionable borough of Islington.

  It is unlikely that either the existing residents, or the ghosts of previous ones, objected to this snippet of local government reform, if indeed they noticed it, for Clerkenwell was an area which had long looked after itself socially and politically and had never been afraid to encourage the dissenter, the protestor or indeed the law-breaker. From the network of brothels housed there in Elizabethan times, to political street demonstrations by Lollards and, later, Chartists, to offering a domestic sanctuary away from Westminster to Oliver Cromwell and editorial offices for Vladimir Lenin for his newspaper Iskra in 1903, Clerkenwell had seen its fair share of colourful residents. It was a local legend that Lenin had gone drinking with a young Stalin on a youthful visit to London, in the Crown and Anchor, later renamed The Crown, on Clerkenwell Green.

  Yet it was beyond dispute that the most colourful inhabitants of Clerkenwell were the Italian immigrants who migrated there in the early part of the nineteenth century.

  London had always attracted its fair share of huddled masses seeking a better life, and though some of those early Italian settlers might have been tired and poor, many were skilled tradesmen and technicians attracted by the opportunities of the industrial revolution. The overwhelming majority of that first wave of invaders came from the Tuscan walled town of Lucca, where Julius Caesar, Crassus and Pompey had once met to split Roman political power three-ways. They brought with them an expertise in the making and repair of watches, telescopes, lenses and thermometers, and they prospered to the extent that they could import those Italian necessities they missed and which soon became part of the fabric of Victorian Clerkenwell: Catholic churches, restaurants, wine and ice cream, whose sellers with their cries of ‘Ecco un poco’ to tempt customers into trying ‘a little taste’ became known in the parlance of the indigenous Londoner as ‘the Okey-Pokey Men’.

  London embraced ‘Little Ita
ly’ as it would a comforting hot chocolate on a frosty morning, although the residents referred to it is simply as ‘The Hill’ after the climb up the Farringdon Road from Farringdon and High Holborn station. Until 1940, that is, when Winston Churchill issued his infamous ‘collar the lot’ order to round up and intern enemy aliens.

  In the Fifties, normal service was resumed to Little Italy with an influx of fresh blood for the returning diaspora, mostly from the region of Emilia-Romagna this time, though it became a staging post providing early orientation for new arrivals from all over Italy, including the generation of chefs who were to make Soho the hub of the trattoria revolution.

  And, through family connections and recommendations from the church, Clerkenwell was also the first port of call for many a young, female Italian visitor travelling alone to London.

  Seraphina was one of those.

  Before it became fashionable for city-dwelling middle-class couples with large houses and growing families to employ an au pair girl – more often than not as a status symbol rather than an indispensable domestic assistant – every ‘decent’ home in London with children aspired to have an ‘Italian girl’.

  Their duties were varied and normally non-technical. They were not, of course, expected to be able to drive a car, but they might be required to learn how to use the latest electric washing machine with built-in mangle and to appreciate whether the lady of the house preferred Persil or Tide as the bespoke soap powder. Similarly, tuition might have to be provided for the household’s beats-as-it-sweeps-as-it-cleans Hoover, for the poor dears would surely never have seen anything like one back in the slums of Naples or wherever it was they hailed from. The kitchen was an area of some importance for them as they would spend much of their time in there, not cooking (what did Italian girls know about food?) but doing the washing-up, drying and putting-away and cleaning down the recently installed wood-effect Formica work surfaces. Their busiest time would be early morning, getting children out of bed and breakfasted on Puffed or Shredded Wheat once the differences between these two essential cereals had been explained – the production of boiled eggs and toast soldiers only being entrusted to the most reliable girls, usually after a trial period in the house of at least a year. Having walked children to their nearby primary schools – though little instruction was ever provided in the strategic art of crossing a London road at rush hour, the theory being that if they had, as children, survived Anzio and Monte Cassino, they could cope with the Ladbroke Grove traffic – a girl’s morning routine would then revolve around whatever cleaning or laundry tasks the mistress of the house delegated to her and which she could complete before, after a solitary lunch, usually of cold cuts from the family dinner the night before, she could retire to her own room, invariably at the top of the house, as close to the attic as possible, for two hours of personal reflection or study. Then it was collecting children from school, getting their tea ready and assisting in the more menial tasks of the production of dinner for the man of the house returning from a hard day at the office. Contact with this rather austere and distant figure was deliberately restricted by an unspoken protocol dependent on the age and attractiveness of the girl, a protocol strictly enforced by the lady of the house. Only when all chores were completed would the Italian girl be invited to join the family as they gathered around that wonder of 1950s Britain, the television set, an activity seen as a tutorial aid to help the girl learn English rather than entertainment.

  With one day off a week, invariably Sundays so that Catholics could do whatever they had to, and a meagre allowance of ‘pocket money’, the opportunities for any sort of social life for the average Italian girl were limited. The suggestion, by many of them, that they supplemented their meagre incomes by offering to give Italian lessons to English gentlewomen or children was dismissed as fanciful.

  It was not therefore surprising that with whatever spare time an Italian girl was allowed she would gravitate to Little Italy in search of the companionship of her own language, culture and traditions. Unfortunately, those traditions were not always lawful. The heyday of the organized gangs involved in criminal extortion had been the pre-war years – when the protection rackets which blighted every race course in southern England were run from Clerkenwell – but in Little Italy, old habits die hard.

  Seraphina Vezzali was just seventeen when she arrived in London to be the Italian girl for the Knighton family and their grand Victorian terrace townhouse with six bedrooms over five floors on tree-lined Northumberland Place. Her hosts, or perhaps guardians or even mentors – certainly nothing as crude as ‘employers’ – were a well-to-do couple with four children aged between ten and three; Jonas Knighton worked long hours as a subeditor on a Fleet Street newspaper (sadly, not The Times) and his wife Alice had considered careers in the musical theatre and as an author of romantic fiction before settling on marriage and motherhood.

  Being liberal with a small ‘l’ in outlook, and Jonas having served briefly in Rome on a British army newspaper towards the end of the war, it seemed only logical to offer bed and board in exchange for light household duties to an Italian girl. Besides, in 1955, live-in servants were almost impossible to afford or even find and absolutely all Alice Knighton’s friends in her bridge and tennis clubs had one, even if they didn’t have four kids to deal with.

  To Seraphina, who had arrived with one pair of shoes and two threadbare summer dresses, the grey, smoky cold of an austere London was a colourful, light-filled box of delights when set against memories – and persistent nightmares – of her own hungry and dangerous childhood in bomb-scarred Naples. For the first time in her life, she felt secure and was guaranteed warmth and food in exchange for the tasks set her by Mrs Knighton, and she was happy with her lot. She was also clever enough never to admit to the Knightons that, whatever duties she was asked to perform for them, they were light work indeed compared to the responsibilities for looking after the five brothers, a widowed and wheelchair-bound mother (both thanks to Allied bombing) and the two ageing grandmothers which she had left behind in Italy.

  Yet Seraphina had no desire to become English or abandon her heritage, and almost by osmosis found her way to Little Italy. On her days off, when the Knightons assumed, if they assumed anything, that Seraphina was sightseeing or at church, she would take the underground from Notting Hill Gate to Chancery Lane and Gray’s Inn and then walk ‘up the hill’ and over the Clerkenwell Road.

  She never told the Knightons about the friends she made among the Italian community there, or the hours she worked as a waitress in a restaurant called La Pergoletta, for she needed the extra money and was not afraid of hard work.

  Seraphina was good at keeping secrets, up to and including her death.

  Alice Knighton valued her membership of the Holland Park Lawn Tennis Club almost, her husband would complain to his Fleet Street chums, as highly as the annual fees. It was, Alice maintained with some force, her only luxury in life, at which point Jonas would sigh and reach for his chequebook.

  It was not that Alice was a good or even enthusiastic tennis player, or that she lusted secretly after any of the tennis coaches, but she did enjoy what she regarded as a certain social exclusivity by being a member, especially when it gave her the chance to play a set against or take tea with the likes of fellow members such as Lady Amanda Campion.

  She could not claim to be close friends with Lady Amanda, as Amanda’s visits to the club were irregular and she was not the sort of woman who encouraged social mountaineers. Alice’s coterie of tennis friends tended to be women of her own age with young children (although Amanda, at forty-one, could easily have passed as one of the youngest of that group) with whom she could exchange gossip and advice on the trials and tribulations of family life in West London. A constant topic of concern for Alice’s circle was how to entertain children at weekends and during school holidays, a problem Alice had solved by having an Italian girl, making her the envy of the other mothers. It seemed only polite for Alice to sh
are her good fortune with her dear friends and offer the services of Seraphina as an occasional babysitter and child-minder when her duties at Northumberland Place allowed. Financial remuneration was, of course, unnecessary as Seraphina would be grateful to meet new people and improve her English, which really was quite good, but occasionally a dress or a coat might be an appropriate reward as the poor dear had little money and her wardrobe was positively bare.

  It was towards the end of the heatwave summer of 1955 that Alice Knighton began to have concerns about Seraphina, though it was coincidental that when she finally voiced those concerns aloud it was in the presence of Amanda Campion, and even then only prompted by the fact that she had been eavesdropping.

  Alice had called in at the tennis club for afternoon tea and a sociable chat with any of her friends who happened to be present, expecting the range of gossip exchanged to be no more sensational than the ongoing drought in the north of England and the imminent first broadcast of independent television in the London area.

  Not recognizing any of her usual circle of friends, Alice ordered the club’s ‘Short Tea’ – a pot for one, bread, butter and jam – and, while she sat at a table waiting to be waited on, buried herself in the latest Good Housekeeping. She became aware that the table next to hers in the club bar was being occupied, but she had the good manners typical of a certain class of the English – something other nationalities referred to as aloofness – not to look up from her magazine.

  Out of the corner of an eye, she was aware that two people wearing white tennis kit had sat down and could not avoid hearing a male voice loudly order two glasses of ‘your finest lemon squash’ with instructions ‘not to stint on the ice cubes’ which were ‘as rare as hens’ wisdom teeth’ that summer. It was only when she heard a soft female voice say, ‘Oh, Albert, do behave!’ that she realized she was in the proximity of Lady Amanda Campion and, more interestingly, her husband.