by Norman Lewis
When this order came through there happened to be four of us at HQ, and the order was to arm ourselves with Thompson sub-machine-guns and go out and do whatever was necessary. The sub-machine-guns turned up a few weeks back, after we’d gone through the active part of the campaign with our pistols and our original five rounds of ammunition apiece. No one has fired a single shot, either with the pistols or the sub-machine-guns, which were examined with a certain amount of respect when delivered, and then put away and forgotten about. Now the four of us who happened to be caught in this predicament were actually obliged to grab one of these imposing weapons apiece, see to it that it was properly loaded, try to remember how it worked, and then sally forth into the Riviera di Chiaia, trying to look like British Army versions of Al Capone, but ready to duck down the nearest side street and disappear from the scene at the first sign of trouble.
Fortunately for us there was no trouble. Approaching the danger spot with extreme caution and taking full advantage of the cover offered by tree-trunks, bushes and the occasional statue, all we found was as calm and pacific a scene as one could hope to find in any municipal gardens on a sunny afternoon. The storm had come and passed. The sellers of sweets and nuts had settled peacefully at their stalls. All the local black-market activities, involving the sale of American cigarettes, articles of military clothing and food, were being carried on with absolute normality. A nursemaid dressed in an amazing Victorian uniform with a lace cap and white gloves was playing ball with a little girl in ribbons and bows who looked like a kewpie doll, and a drunken American Negro slept in a flower-bed. We could go home.
The incident highlighted an unhappy and deteriorating situation produced by the encroachment of the Allied presence on the emotional and romantic life of the city. Naples, the world’s largest village, is divided into many smaller villages, the rioni, each one of which is in effect an enormous family. In each of these quite literally every member is known to every other member, and the circumstances and history of every family are a matter of public knowledge. Marriages, on the whole, tend to take place within the rione, and in the case of some – for example the fishermen’s quarter, the Pallonetta di Santa Lucia – the young person of either sex hardly ever marries an outsider. Each rione has its web of relationships, its traditions, its social structure, and betrothal and marriage are the concern of all.
Then the foreign soldiers came on the scene and were in immediate collision with the local boys, who had no work, no prestige, no money, absolutely nothing to offer the girls. A British private, wretchedly paid as he is, earns more than a foreman at the Navale Meccanica, while an American private – who can shower cigarettes, sweets, and even silk stockings in all directions – has a higher income than any Italian employee in Naples. The temptation is very great, and few seem able to resist. Thus the long, delicate, intricate business of the old Neapolitan courtship – as complex as the mating ritual of exotic birds – is replaced by a brutal, wordless approach, and a crude act of purchase. One wonders how long it will take the young of Naples, after we have gone, to recover from the bitterness of this experience.
Last week a young American soldier of Polish parentage called at our HQ to say that he had just been to a party in Marichiaro where he believed a man purporting to be a Polish officer was a spy, as he clearly had little knowledge of the part of Poland he claimed to come from. I drove him back to the party in the FSO’s car, and we went in and talked to the man. My conclusion was that he probably was a spy, but it was better to do nothing about it, because had I arrested him and it turned out that a mistake had been made, all the wrath of the Polish army would have been called down on my head, and my head alone.
We therefore set out on our way back. After we had driven a few yards the American said, ‘I feel like a woman. How about trying that house over there?’ He showed me his haversack containing several cans of meat, and asked to be put down outside an apartment building – one of a dozen in sight. I waited while he rang the bell, and put his proposition to whoever it was came to the door. Then he waved back to me to carry on, and went in.
October 10
In September in Naples it usually rains torrentially for a few days, after which benefit of water the fields in October put on strong new greens in replacement of the brown desolation of summer. The sunshine of this month charges the landscape with deep, solid colour, but the heat is gone. It is the habit of Neapolitans to go on family outings whenever they can at this time of the year. These excursions in the fine, fresh, lively days of autumn are called ottobrate. The woods are full of chestnuts, fungi spring up out of the damp earth, and edible plants of the order of dandelions and plantains, for use in salads, sprout among the new grass. People go out in their thousands – mainly at the weekends – in search of these wild delicacies. This is also the time when flocks of small migrant birds pass through, going southwards on their way to winter in Africa, and there is no bird insignificant enough to escape the interest of the sportsmen that lie in wait for them with guns and nets in the fields and the orchards all round the city.
By invitation of Ingeniere Crespi, with whom I have been on good terms since the episode of the leakage of information over Anzio, I took part yesterday, Sunday, in a family expedition to collect funghi and salad plants, and to try our luck with the migrant birds at the Lago di Patria, some ten miles along the coast to the west of Naples. We went in two cars, the Ingeniere, his eighteen-year-old son, Andrea, and myself in one, and Signora Crespi, a nephew and his wife in the second. As Crespi and his son proposed to shoot duck – or failing that, anything that flew – they were fantastically dressed in green knickerbockers and Alpine hats. Signora Crespi wore a costume in Scotch tartan of a fierce design from Milan. She and her party were after mushrooms and greenstuff, and to avoid confusion between edible fungi and others of extreme similarity of appearance which are deadly, they had brought with them an enormous rolled-up coloured poster to be used in carrying on comparisons in the field.
We arrived at the lake in less than an hour, having passed other families already busy in the fields, cutting dandelions and stuffing them in paper bags. The report was that as there had been no duck-shooting last autumn in this area – which had been fought over as the Germans withdrew to the line of the Volturno – the sporting expectations were bright. Signora Crespi and party were left at the edge of a small pinewood where the nephew had already spotted glistening yellow toadstools, towards which they ran carrying their poster, and uttering cries of delight. The rest of us carried on a mile or so to the shores of the lake.
Here the prospects seemed dismal. We stood, the Crespis holding their splendid guns, looking out over a surface of water that was as clean as a newly polished mirror. Another party of sportsmen mooched into sight on the far side of the lake, then disappeared again. A peasant came up and offered to show Crespi where edible frogs could be taken, but his offer was declined. The lake was bordered by sedge which Andrea was determined to investigate. He went off, returning in about an hour slimed to the knees in mud, and carrying a handful of feathers trailing green legs, which had once been a moorhen. This was success. Father and son hugged each other with delight. A moorhen wasn’t a duck, but it was the next best thing.
Andrea cleaned up as best he could and we drove back to where we’d left the rest of the family, who’d done reasonably well with the fungi, with a fair collection scraped from tree-trunks or discovered – revealed by their startling colours – among the black rotting pine needles. There was a joyful outcry at the sight of the moorhen, and kisses and more hugs for Andrea from the womenfolk. After that the fungus-gatherers were deserted once again and we drove off over a sunken road to a particularly good position Crespi knew of. There were areas, he said – and this was one of them – where migrant birds seemed inclined to pause and to hover, as if to get their bearings. He spoke of people who sometimes brought small trees with them, covered them with birdlime, and stuck them into the ground here – sure of a good catch, althoug
h he personally saw not much fun or skill in the practice. His own favoured device was a piece of Heath-Robinson equipment carried in sections in the boot of the car. This, when assembled, looked like a model oil-derrick, with a rotating top encrusted with pieces of mirror set at different angles, which, when in motion flashed into the sky, attracted the curiosity of passing birds, and brought them within range.
This contraption was set up near an isolated bush, where it would be convenient for tired and inquisitive birds to alight. Strings attached to the rotating head were stretched back to where we crouched in the deep road in hiding behind the car, and were wound by Andrea over a bobbin to set the thing in motion. We were in the middle of a vast field with flowering spikes of asphodel thrusting up from the grass all round, and in the middle distance the blackened debris of a German half-track. Our first success was with a lark, drawn out of the sky as if by a magnet, and destroyed by Crespi’s impeccable shot. There followed buntings, more larks, wheatears, chats, blackcaps and five or six neat grey-green half-ounces of warbler, hardly any of them spoiled to the eye by the tiny, specially prepared shot with which Crespi had filled his cartridges in preparation for this delicate slaughter. Although these birds must have hailed from the north, they all appeared slightly different from our English version of similar species. Only a local goldfinch, alighting on the bush with a burst of brief twittering song before extermination, was totally familiar.
The final bag was eighteen small corpses having a total weight perhaps of a pound. Crespi regarded this as a success, and an excellent return for the expenditure in ammunition and effort. The passion for hunting, he said, could come even before the pursuit of love, and be equally remote from the balance sheets of gain or loss. Ferdinand of Naples had spent the equivalent of several million pounds on building his palace at Capodimonte just because this hill was on the route of migrating beccafiche – warblers of all kinds – and having finished the palace, a road to Naples had to be built at the cost of another million or two. It was estimated, said Crespi, that every warbler eaten by the royal sportsmen cost the nation a thousand ducats.
We joined up with the rest of the family by the edge of the wood, picnicked off salami, mortadella and mozzarella cheese, the latter warranted to have been produced from the authentic milk of the buffaloes raised in the swamps of the Volturno, and which in appearance and vascular rubbery texture attempts to imitate the testicles of these beasts. After that, it was back to Naples, dizzy with success. It had been, as all agreed, an excellent day’s sport. I delicately extricated myself from the invitation to dinner that evening.
October 16
A number of weeks of hard work on the part of Robert Parkinson culminated today in an operation mounted at the Pace Hospital for women.
Parkinson’s most valuable contact in Naples has been Professore Placella, the gynaecologist specialising in the restoration of lost virginity for all who can afford it, who is also a consultant at the hospital. Goodness knows what Parkinson has been able to do for Placella, who is as subject to the laws of Omertà as is any other Neapolitan in a case affecting his own colleagues. Whatever it is, it has induced the Professore to supply the hint or the clue to the reason for our failure to cope with the epidemic of VD.
This afternoon British and American MPs descended on a dozen clubs, dance-halls and bars – even on the cafés in the Galleria – arrested every woman in sight, and carried them off to the Pace for examination. This has happened before on a smaller and less vigorous scale. The procedure is that vaginal smears are taken in each case, and those found to be clear of infection are released forthwith, while VD sufferers are forcibly detained for hospital treatment, as long as may be necessary.
With Placella’s help a trap had been set, but owing to the importance of the case Parkinson felt that this was an occasion when it might be useful to have a witness present, and I was invited to go along. We went to the hospital, were quietly admitted by a back entrance, put on surgeons’ coats over our uniforms, and were then introduced to the smiling and bowing Assistant Director of the hospital as British Army Medical staff who were paying a routine visit to observe the method employed in carrying out examinations of cases of suspected venereal disease.
The inspections were to take place in an enormous room furnished with a row of gynaecological chairs. As soon as we arrived and joined the group of Italian doctors there, the detained women began to stream in like sheep about to be hustled through a dip. In most cases they were dressed with a respectable formality that seemed to intensify the indignity to which they were to be subjected. The operation moved at the pace of a bullfight. The first six women, some of them sobbing and protesting, were led forward, ordered to remove their knickers, pull up their skirts, and settle themselves in the chairs in which their legs, held in stirrups, were grotesquely raised and separated. At the door a constantly increasing group kept up a frantic argument. Among them were a few bejewelled courtesans and some obvious bar-girls, but the majority looked like young housewives, some with their shopping-bags on their arms, and there were some very young girls who were certain to be virgins. A suspicion grew that over-enthusiastic MPs had not been above snatching girls at random off the street.
The doctors went to work with their speculums and swabs while the great, bare, grimy sala resounded with the noise of weeping. Parkinson, Placella and I walked dutifully past the exposed pudenda, nodding our satisfaction at the work, waited while another row of victims, knickers in hand, faces streaming with tears, took their places, then returned. Occasionally Placella would stop with a cry of pretended astonishment to point out to us some collector’s item of a chancre. An ugly and most depressing experience.
Success of the scheme depended on the vindication of Parkinson’s theory that two prostitutes known to be infected with syphilis, who had been carefully included in this roundup, would be able to bribe their way out, and this they did. They were immediately arrested and freely admitted that they, as well as other infected women, had been approached by a hospital underling known in the half-world of Naples as sciacquapalle (balls-rinser). This man arranged for the supply of a certificate of good health on the payment, through him, of 10,000 lire to the hospital’s Assistant Director.
Professore Placella estimated that in this way about three infected prostitutes a day had been released from the Pace, and that each one could be responsible for as many as five thousand new cases of VD annually. Thanks to Parkinson’s efforts, this particular hole in the dyke will be stopped. The forms are being typed out for the Assistant Director’s arrest tomorrow. The Germans would shoot him, and they would be right to do so. As it is, he has been able to buy friendship and support in AMG – now almost totally corrupt – so in due course he will come to trial and almost certainly get off.
October 20
I am concerned at the increasing number of applications by officers or other ranks to marry Italian civilians. COs must realise that everything possible will be done to discourage such marriages, few of which turn out happily or even survive more than a short period. Statistics of last war marriages with foreigners prove that only five per cent turned out successful. There is no reason to hope that present war international marriages will prove any more satisfactory. The reverse is more likely, owing to the even more bitter feeling to which it has given rise. After the last war there were many cases of men who could not stand the unhappiness of their wives and children any longer, and went to live in the wife’s country, usually to their unending regret. In all cases the wife forced them to do so. It is the duty of all officers to protect our troops from matrimonial shipwreck. It should be pointed out that the soldier has no future security to offer his wife. He is at present a temporary government employee, and the future is dependent upon obtaining a suitable permanent job in civilian life. No one can marry with impunity upon such a basis. There are many other differences which, although small in themselves, such as different tastes as regards cooking, do militate strongly against happiness.
This circular issued by the GOC, No. 3 District, dated 5 September 1944, is probably the real reason behind the sudden coming to an end of my investigation into the suitability of marriages proposed between the British soldiery and Italian girls in the Naples area. In the first three months forty-three such vettings have been carried out, and in twelve cases the report has been favourable. Recently, however much the General may complain of the increased rate of application, few have come my way. I suspect that pressure has been put upon soldiers to change their minds, and that in some cases the men have been quietly posted out of the area. However this may be, I am out of it for good, having been relieved by the FSO of this particular duty in so subtle a fashion that I’m bound to suspect that after a year of close contact with the seamy side of life in Naples he’s been unable to avoid infection by the deviousness of the environment.
Three days ago I was sent to vet Liana Pagano, living at Via Aniello Falcone, aged thirty-two; a widow, aged twenty-two, mother dead, father mechanic working at Navale Meccanico (never inscribed in Fascist Party), one sister married into the family of a priest, one still at school, was born and has always lived in Naples, has one child, speaks English slightly, is not pregnant. In other words an apparently respectable girl, from a respectable lower-class background – the fact that a sister is married into a priest’s family being an important factor in the family’s standing and its morale.