Naples '44

by Norman Lewis

  A suspects file had to be started, and this was a job that fell to me. Section members had already cleared out the German Consulate in Naples, removing from it a carload of documents, all of which had to be studied. The work was increased as a deluge of denunciations began to flood in. They were delivered in person by people nourishing every kind of grudge, or even shoved into the hands of the sentry at the gate. Some of them were eccentric, including one relating to a priest who was claimed to have arranged shows of blue movies for the commander of the German garrison. Everything – from the grubbiest scrap of paper on which a name had been scrawled, and the single word ‘murderer’ scribbled beneath, to a scrupulously typed document bearing the seal and signatures of the Comitato di Liberazione – had to be studied and recorded. The labour involved was immense, and exceedingly tedious, and was much complicated by the prevalence in Naples of certain family names – Espositos and Gennaros turn up by the hundred – and by the fact that material supplied by our own authorities for inclusion in the official Black Book was often vague. Quite frequently suspects were not even identified by name, but by such descriptions as ‘of medium height’, ‘age between thirty and forty’, ‘strikingly ugly’, or in one case, ‘known to possess an obsessive fear of cats’. However, the work went on; the filing system expanded, and the Black Book with its vagueness and its sometimes almost poetic idiocies, began to put on bulk.

  Within days of settling in, three section members were sent out on detachment to Sorrento and the coastal towns, and Eric Williams, our best Italian speaker, became a solitary exile in the important town of Nola. Three more people, apart from the FSO, were tied down to administrative duties at HQ, leaving only four of us, Parkinson, Evans, Durham and myself, to confront the security problems of that anthill of humanity, the city of Naples itself.

  First impressions of my colleagues under working conditions are favourable. They are hampered in several cases by their lack of Italian, but they are an industrious lot, and set to work with enthusiasm to learn the language. Like all sections, this has developed its own personality. It is less informal than most, and a little bureaucratic. I cannot imagine any member of 312 FSS being able to manoeuvre himself into a position where he could turn up at an airfield, wave his pass about, and bamboozle some Airforce officer, British or American, into arranging a quick unofficial flight back to England – an achievement of the kind which has been possible in certain other sections. All my new friends have been issued with special officer’s-type identity documents replacing the normal AB 64, but Captain Cartwright has clearly not wished to have these endorsed as in the case of those issued to 91 FSS – one of which I still carry – with the authorisation to be in any place, at any time, and in any dress. Nor, so far, do section members wear civilian clothes. Army Books No. 466 (no erasures, no pages to be detached) are scrupulously carried, and daily entries condensed in the form of a log, handed in to the FSO first thing each morning, and discussed at a parade at nine, at which certain regimental formalities are carefully preserved. These things are quite new in my experience.

  October 8

  Contact with the military units brought its inevitable consequences. The phone started ringing first thing in the morning and rarely stopped. An excited officer was usually on the line to report the presence in his area of an enemy agent, or a secret transmitter, or a suspected cache of abandoned German loot. All this information came from local civilians who poured into the nearest army HQ, anxious to unburden themselves of secrets of all kinds, but as not even phrase books had been issued to help with the language problem, mistakes were frequent. Today, being the only section member left in the office, I was sent hurriedly on the motor bike, in response to the most urgent request, to Afragola, where an infantry major was convinced from local reports that a village woman was a spy. In this case evidence had been transmitted mostly by gestures which the Major had failed to interpret. It turned out that what the villagers had been trying to explain was that the woman was a witch, and that if allowed to cast her malefic gaze on the unit’s water supply, she would make it undrinkable.

  On my way to resolve this misunderstanding I saw a remarkable spectacle. Hundreds, possibly thousands of Italians, most of them women and children, were in the fields all along the roadside driven by their hunger to search for edible plants. I stopped to speak to a group of them, and they told me that they had left their homes in Naples at daybreak, and had had to walk for between two and three hours to reach the spot where I found them – seven or eight miles out of town. Here a fair number of plants could still be found, although nearer the city the fields had been stripped of everything that could be eaten. There were about fifteen different kinds of plants which were worth collecting, most of them bitter in flavour. All I recognised among their collections were dandelions. I saw other parties netting birds, and these had managed to catch a few sparrows and some tiny warblers which they said were common at this time of the year, attracted by the fruit in the orchards. They told me they had to face the hostility of the local people, on whose lands they were trespassing, and who accused them of raids on their vineyards and vegetable patches.

  October 9

  This afternoon, another trip along the seafront at Santa Lucia provided a similar spectacle of the desperate hunt for food. Rocks were piled up here against the sea wall and innumerable children were at work among them. I learned that they were prising limpets off the rocks, all the winkles and sea-snails having been long since exhausted. A pint of limpets sold at the roadside fetched about two lire, and if boiled long enough could be expected to add some faint, fishy flavour to a broth produced from any edible odds and ends. Inexplicably, no boats were allowed out yet to fish. Nothing, absolutely nothing that can be tackled by the human digestive system is wasted in Naples. The butchers’ shops that have opened here and there sell nothing we would consider acceptable as meat, but their displays of scraps of offal are set out with art, and handled with reverence: chickens’ heads – from which the beak has been neatly trimmed – cost five lire; a little grey pile of chickens’ intestines in a brightly polished saucer, five lire; a gizzard, three lire; calves’ trotters two lire apiece; a large piece of windpipe, seven lire. Little queues wait to be served with these delicacies. There is a persistent rumour of a decline in the cat population of the city.

  October 10

  How lucky for all concerned that the liberation of Naples happened when it did – when the fruit harvests were still to be gathered in – and the perfect weather of early autumn helped hardships of all kinds to be more endurable. Day followed day of unbroken sunshine, although the heat of summer had gone. From where I sat sifting wearily through the mountains of vilification and calumny, I could refresh myself by looking down into the narrow street running along one side of the palazzo. This is inhabited to bursting-point with working-class families, whose custom it is to live as much as they can of their lives out of doors, for which reason this street is as noisy as a tropical aviary.

  Quite early in the morning, a family living in the house opposite carried out a table and stood it in the street close to their doorway. This was briskly covered with a green cloth with tassels. Chairs were placed round it at an exact distance apart and on it were stood several framed photographs, a vase of artificial flowers, a small cage containing a goldfinch, and several ornate little glasses, which were polished from time to time as the day passed by to remove the dust. Round this table the family lived in what was in fact a room without walls; a mother, grandfather and grandmother, a girl in her late teens, and two dynamic boys, who constantly came and went. Here the mother attended to the girl’s hair, washed the boys’ faces, served something from a steaming pot at midday, sewed and did the family washing in the afternoon. There were a number of other such tables along the street, and constant social migrations took place as neighbours paid each other visits. The scene was a placid one. The green persianas hanging over all the upper windows and balconies breathed in and out gently in the mild
breeze from the sea. People called musically to each other over great distances. A beggar with tiny, twisted legs was carried out by his friends and propped up in a comfortable position against the wall, where he started to strum a mandolin. Two lean, hip-swinging American soldiers, sharing a bottle of wine, passed down the street, and the girl at the table looked up and followed them with her eyes until they turned the corner and disappeared from sight.

  There is no notice in the palazzo to say who we are and what we are doing here so it is hard to understand why people assume this to be the headquarters of the British Secret Police. However, they do and we are beginning to receive a stream of visitors, all of them offering their services as informers. No question ever arises of payment. Our visitors are prepared to work for us out of pure and unalloyed devotion to the Allied cause. In the main they are drawn from the professional classes, and hand over beautifully engraved cards describing them as Avvocato, Dottore, Ingeniere or Professore. They are all most dignified, some impressive, and they talk in low, conspiratorial voices. We received a visit, too, from a priest with a pocketful of denunciations who asked for a permit to be allowed to carry a pistol. These are the often shabby and warped personalities on which we depend. Once they were called by their real names, now they are officially ‘informants’, and already there is a euphemistic tendency to turn them into ‘contacts’. They are a special breed, the life’s blood of Intelligence, and the world over they have an extraordinary thing in common: a strange and exclusive loyalty to one particular master. An informer is like a duckling newly freed from its shell and in need of fostering. He can be counted upon to attach himself permanently to the first person who is prepared to listen sympathetically to what he has to say, and prefers never to transfer his allegiance. In these first few days we all made half a dozen or so ‘contacts’.

  All names are checked as a matter of course with our rapidly expanding files, and we find to our amusement that several of these men who have come forward to assist us in every way they can, have been accused by their fellow citizens of being arch-collaborators. We have collected copies from the offices of the German Consulate of many servile and congratulatory letters written by Neapolitan worthies to Adolf Hitler himself. An outstanding example of these was from a Counsellor at the Naples Court of Appeal who had just called to offer his services. This assured the Führer of ‘my great admiration and sympathy for the soldiers of your country’, and concluded, ‘Con profonde devota osservanza’.

  What is remarkable to us is the German bureaucratic rectitude with which all these communications, many of them highly nonsensical, have been conscientiously acknowledged, translated, and actually forwarded to the Chancery of the Nazi Party in Berlin, and fulsomely replied to by that office – the reply being returned via the German Embassy in Rome. One’s imagination reels at the thought of the paperwork involved in dealing with thousands of such epistles from the toadies of occupied Europe.

  Complaints are coming in about looting by Allied troops. The officers in this war have shown themselves to be much abler at this kind of thing than the other ranks. The charge has been made that officers of the King’s Dragoon Guards, to whom fell the honour of being the first British unit to enter Naples, have cut the paintings from the frames in the Princess’s Palace, and made off with the collection of Capodimonte china. The OSS have cleaned out Achille Lauro’s sumptuous house. Some of the bulkier items of booty are stated to have been crated up for return to England with the connivance of the Navy.

  October 13

  A week in which our activities have been hampered, and even frustrated, by false alarms and scares of every conceivable kind. Anyone whose activities depart in any way from the standards of normality set by the city is regarded as a spy, and we have been involved in endless wild-goose chases. None of these forays out into the night produced results. The suspected spies were always harmless eccentrics. The mysterious stranger in the next flat tinkering with a powerful radio was not an enemy agent operating a transmitter, but a man trying to get the BBC. In houses said to contain caches of arms we found nothing more lethal than unemptied babies’ chamberpots; while flashing lights in the night were always people on their way to the cesspit at the bottom of the garden.

  Now that the mail is operating normally again, a horde of censors are busily slitting open letters to probe for hidden meaning among the trivia of family and business correspondence, and when in doubt they fall back on us. Unhappily many telephone conversations are being monitored, too, and the typed out ‘intercepts’ sent to us contain their fair share of absurdity. The prize example received so far was one solemnly headed ‘Illegal use of telescope’. This referred to a passage in an overheard conversation between two lovers in which the girl had said, ‘I can’t see you today because my husband will be here, but I’ll admire you, as ever, through love’s telescope.’ No. 3 District adds to these burdens by bombarding us with addenda for the Black Book, which serves as the rag-bag for everybody’s paranoia. In one case we had to make an entry for a suspect about which nothing is known but his possession of three teats on the left breast, while another was described as ‘having the face of a hypocrite’.

  All these things encourage the growth of disbelief, so that when a few days ago reports began to come in about mysterious knocking sounds coming from the depths of the earth, we were unimpressed. But when yesterday the Italian Pubblica Sicurezza Police – sceptics like ourselves – were on the phone to talk about the knockings, adding that they had even been heard by a senior policeman, notice had to be taken. The knockings had been reported from a number of widely separated areas in the northern part of the city. It was the police’s theory, supported by much rumour and some credible evidence, that a picked squad of German SS had volunteered to remain behind after the German retreat from Naples, and that they had hidden in the catacombs, from which they might at any time make a surprise sortie. There was also a likelihood, if this were the case, that their plans had gone wrong, and that they had lost themselves in the darkness of a vast and only partially charted labyrinth, in which case the knocking could be explained as their attempt to draw attention to their predicament.

  Only a small part of the catacombs – the most extensive in Italy, and possibly the world – is accessible to visitors and the police had had some difficulty in finding an old map showing their full extent. There was no way of knowing how accurate this map remained after the damage of the earth tremors of the past and the subsidences they were certain to have caused. However, the map was studied in its relation to the location of the places where knocking sounds had been heard and, the general opinion being that the Germans were down there somewhere, a force numbering about fifty men was assembled, to include the Italian Police, the American Counter-Intelligence Corps and ourselves, to enter and explore the catacombs.

  Of the two networks of catacombs under Naples, the principal one, which concerned us, is entered from the back of the church of San Gennaro. These catacombs are believed to date from the first century, and consist of four galleries, excavated one below the other, each gallery having numerous ramifications and lateral passages. The two nethermost galleries having partially fallen in, they have not been accessible in modern times.

  It was decided to enter the catacombs shortly after dawn, and we arrived at the church in a dozen jeeps, lavishly equipped with gear of the kind used in cave-exploration, as well as all the usual weaponry. The monks in charge were already up and about, and showed us extreme hostility. One monk who planted himself, arms outstretched, at the entrance to the catacombs had to be removed by force, and then, when we went in, followed us, keeping up a resounding denunciation of our desecration of a holy place.

  The Americans had equipped themselves with lamps like miniature searchlights; these shone on the walls of the anterooms through which we passed to reach the galleries, showing them to be so closely covered with frescoes – mostly in excellent condition after sixteen centuries – as to give the impression of colossal
ikons. We were instantly confronted with the purpose for which the catacombs had been designed. Rows of niches forming burial chambers had been cut one above the other in the walls, and all these were crammed with skeletons, many said to have been plague victims of the sixteenth century. When somebody picked up a skull to examine it the angry monk trudging at our heels roared at him to put it back. Questioned about the possibility of Germans being in the catacombs, this man had answered in an evasive and suspicious way.

  It soon became clear that we were looking for a needle in a haystack. We were in narrow, bone-choked streets, with innumerable side turnings to be explored, each with its many dark chambers in any one of which our quarry could have hidden, or from which they could have suddenly sprung out to ambush us, if they were still alive. These men, had they gone into the catacombs – and we were all still convinced they had – must have been in the darkness for nearly a fortnight since their torch batteries had finally given out. After which, groping their way, or crawling about among the bones, they would have encountered terrible hazards. Even in the second gallery we came suddenly to a black chasm. In the depths of this, where the whole roadway from wall to wall had caved in, the lights showed us a pile of dust from which protruded a few ancient rib-bones. We dangled a microphone into this pit and listened while the monk muttered at our backs, but the silence below was absolute.