My Italian Adventures

by Lucy de Burgh

  On another afternoon Cicely and I visited the Castel Sant’ Angelo, the great round tower on the edge of the Tiber, between the Vatican and the Palazzo di Giustizia. This colossal and massive edifice was originally early Roman, but was improved and enlarged upon by various governments up to the Renaissance period at least. There is a covered way, like an aqueduct to look at, connecting it with the interior of Vatican City, and it was along here that Pope Clement VII escaped to safety during the sack of the city by the French in 1527.

  We crossed over a drawbridge just inside the main gate, and then visited a terrifying collection of dungeons and cells and saw some manholes where, our guide cheerfully explained, people used to disappear for good. He seemed to take particular pleasure in emphasising the gruesome parts of the castle, probably to give us an extra thrill and to see us shudder with horror. We saw the parapet over which La Tosca hurled herself to her death, we saw ancient cannon balls 2ft in diameter, we saw the famous statue of the mounted angel, so prominent in the view of Rome from the Pincio, and we saw the little tiled bath of the Popes, decorated in Pompeian style, but of the fifteenth century.

  Yet most magnificent was the view from the top, the grey-green Tiber winding sluggishly below us, bordered with trees; to the west the Janiculum Hill, and in the immediate foreground St Peter’s at its most magnificent. The people crossing the square in front of it and going up its steps looked no more than ants from the height of the castle, and to our left and all around, the city lay spread out before us, as on a pocket handkerchief. To the south we looked towards Castel Gandolfo. Everything was so beautifully framed in the rarefied blue, which seems to accentuate every outline, whether of buildings, hills or foliage, and which throws each object into sharp relief, so that not a thing appears out of place, and the whole presents a picture that one tries to memorise for life. I am sure that anyone who has not been in Italy can believe that the sky is as blue and the colours as vivid as they appear in the great masterpieces, for example, of Titian and Leonardo. Yet when you actually see and experience the Italian country and climate, then you realise that the Old Masters in no way exaggerated – for them beauty and truth were indeed synonymous.

  Note

  5 The title of a children’s play, popular at this time.

  13

  Live and Learn

  A s the weeks passed by, new officers and men joined us – we heard that the stupendous move of AFHQ had been completed and the great headquarters was now housed in the vast palace of Caserta, and in the surrounding maze of Army huts and other outbuildings and a forest of tents, American and British. It was said that a great many files had been lost in transit from Algiers, but one never knew the truth – rumours were rampant. Meanwhile our unit was growing apace, with additions from North Africa, the permanent attachment of an RAF Section, and others posted in from the Middle East and Greece, as well as a few additions from the United Kingdom. Mail from home was extremely erratic, and took a fortnight at least by airmail; parcels took anything from one to four months. We had a wireless, a requisitioned one, I think, and used to tune in to the news at home, but even that was made difficult by the efficient German jamming system. And so, more or less cut off from home, and still set apart from Italian civilisation sufficiently to make fraternisation fairly rare, units in CMF naturally created their own amusements. So it was that the Army welfare organisation expanded rapidly, providing facilities for the ever-increasing numbers of men and women with free time on their hands and long empty evenings in which there was at first nothing much to do, and resources, when letters had been written and a stroll in the neighbourhood taken, were extremely limited.

  The first thing to be organised in our particular show, within a few days of our arrival, was a canteen for men, where they could sit in the evenings, buy their NAAFI goods, including cigarettes and sweets, and obtain something alcoholic, mainly vermouth. There was practically no beer to be had, except some American canned stuff. Later on, a brewery on the outskirts of Rome was repaired and reopened, and produced a rather thin light brew, which I gathered was not up to British standards.

  On the opposite side of the road from our camp, and a little further out towards the mountains, was another requisitioned cinema studio, with all its various buildings. This had been taken over as a refugee camp – a temporary asylum for many hundreds, later thousands, of displaced persons of many nationalities, who seemed to be converging on Rome in a steady, if apparently inconsiderable, trickle. There were three British people running it, and how they coped with their heterogeneous collection of charges I could never understand. Apart from the language difficulties, there were all sorts of problems: people with missing relatives, those who were diseased or suffering from malnutrition, orphans, a shortage of clothes and a chronic lack of money. Some of the inmates had travelled surreptitiously for hundreds of miles across Occupied Europe, carrying only a small bag, and constantly on the run for fear of being caught by the ever-vigilant Gestapo. It was natural that members of our camp should before long become acquainted with their international neighbours, and soon various people were finding their way over the road to the dances run by the refugee authorities, or ‘fratting’ with the inmates.

  I only went to one such dance, and it was at the end of a dinner-party at the Pincio. We got back, six of us, at approximately 10.30 p.m., and heard that there was a dance on over the way. A Scotsman with a trailing and belligerent moustache announced that he was going over in his jeep and would give us a lift. Within two minutes the jeep, much overcrowded, was off and under way. We drove straight into the camp, but it was dark and we could not find the dance-hall or where to get into it, and we soon got lost in a maze of buildings and barbed-wire fences. At last we spotted lights and heard music, but could not get to it for a 7ft barbed wire erection stood in the way – goodness knows what it was doing there! Someone suggested scaling this obstacle, and the idea was hailed with enthusiasm. Two or three of the men started up, and before I was aware of what I was doing I found myself automatically following them and at the top of the fence, looking down on some startled Italians underneath, who were wringing their hands and crying, ‘Mamma mia, la Signorina, come si fa!’ Jonathan, however, was waiting with them, encouraging me and ready to catch me if I were to fall, so I descended a little gingerly, glad my skirt was of good strong drill, and that I was wearing respectable khaki underwear beneath it, and was soon on terra firma once more.

  We quickly made our way to the dance-hall, and found a strangely mixed party in progress, but everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. We at once espied our CO, who had looked in for a short time, and was dancing with a lady, of whom I had heard, known as the ‘Baroness’. I was introduced to her, and she told me, in German, her story, how she had left her husband in Berlin (I think he was the Baron), and had fled, in danger of persecution, finally ending up in Rome. The story was long and garbled, and I did not make it all out against the blare of the accordions and saxophones, but it sounded genuine enough. In any case, one could not help liking the Baroness with her bland smile and permanent cheerfulness. I found myself dancing with foreigners during a Paul Jones, and though I could not really say what nationality they were, one or two were definitely Italian, going by their rather jiggly style of dancing, which seems to be the custom among many Italians. It seemed very strange to be dancing with dark-haired civilians, in rubber-soled shoes and open-necked shirts, having been partnered by khaki for so long. I think the boys in mufti thought I was a bit of a ‘wow’, dressed up as an officer wearing a shirt.

  The evening, a Saturday, was rounded off with a party in the mess, but I retired halfway through, in accordance with tradition. It was not looked on with favour that lady members should see mess parties through to the bitter end. About eleven o’clock things usually became a little rowdy and songs became less polite. Generally speaking, I took the singing of a fairly decent version of ‘Alouette’ as the signal for my departure. Mess parties in this particular place very often
finished up with a performance known as the ‘Carabinieri Reali’ (literally, ‘Royal Carabinieri’, or ‘guards’). Now that Italy is a Republic the Carabineers are not ‘royal’ any longer, but just pure and simple Carabinieri, and act as policeman for the maintenance of law and order. The Carabinieri Reali consisted in sailing down one of the two flights of steps outside the anteroom doors to the ground floor and front entrance on a tea-tray. Who initiated this practice and christened it was a mystery to me. Sometimes after we had gone to bed we used to hear distant singing and racketing and crashing, which we knew meant that a party was in process, and the Carabinieri in full swing. On one momentous occasion, however, I was allowed to take part in the ritual and made the descent on a tray covered with a cushion and escorted by a captain, so that it was like riding on the back of a motorbike, or going down a toboggan run. I repeated it once, and then decided I had to be fit to sit at a typewriter the following day.

  Jean was a great worry to me around this time. She was suffering from severe migraines, and to counter this Doc was giving her pills, some of which contained opium. She was taking more than she ought, or so I thought, and sometimes in the morning she lay absolutely doggo and I would take a sponge to wake her up. This of course infuriated her, but I obstinately insisted on rousing her, and completely ignored her angry protests. I just lifted up the mosquito net and applied a cold sponge to her face. I was very anxious about her, as she was unhappy and depressed. She had been in Cairo, and had really done too much time overseas for one of her temperament. She got a transfer some months after we had been in Italy, and I think the change at least helped her. The trouble was that if you did get down there was not much outside relief, at least at that time, to counter your depression and take your mind off it. When I got at all melancholic, I usually tried to get to an OR’s dance or some such function, finding the best antidote was to mix with other people, and perhaps share their troubles. Jean had other worries too – she had an unhappy love affair – who didn’t if it came to that – but it gave her a sort of melancholia. Here again, I think the transfer helped her; she got away from the scene of it, at least.

  Round about this time Cicely took me one day to visit some friends of hers in Rome. They had a lovely flat in a beautiful old palazzo behind the Piazza Venezia. The husband was a partisan, although I did not know it until over two years later, and as he had two or three small children he must have taken great risks, for there was always the danger of reprisals being taken against the family if a partisan was caught or blacklisted. His wife was English, and for the first time in an Italian house I ate a more or less English tea, with thin bread and butter and a jug of hot water for replenishing the teapot. A lot of Italian was spoken, but I did not understand a great deal. It seemed strange and faintly nostalgic to be in an English home once more, for the atmosphere was indefinably and yet unmistakably English.

  Meeting the ingeniere and his wife and now meeting this family, friends of Cicely’s since long before the war, brought home to me very clearly that I must do something about improving and enlarging my knowledge of Italian. As it was, my scope for practice was limited – just Signora Pinto, asking a civilian the way in Rome, the cloakroom girls at the officers’ clubs, and my hairdresser. My hairdresser was a young man called Nino, short, dark and alert. His manners did not seem quite the same as those of a British hairdresser – he was much more gallant, and rather too caressing, it seemed to me. Then one day he enquired what I did on my days off, and asked me whether I would meet him. Then we would go for a walk together, he said. I protested that I hardly ever had a day off, and that in any case I would be very busy when I did. He would not take no for an answer, and insisted on my taking his telephone number, and besought me to ring him up and make an assignation at the first possible moment. If he were out, then his sister would be delighted to speak to me and arrange matters, he said. I had my doubts about this, but in order to pacify him I took the card with his name and telephone number on it. Nino did my hair well, and the shop where he worked was in a convenient place, but there was nothing for it but to change my parrucchiere and so I got Iris to recommend me to her hairdresser, the one she had known before the war. I went there, in the Via Sicilia, but the assistants were always very booked up, and finally passed me on to their sister shop. It was in a part of Rome I did not know very well, and rather inaccessible, but a young man called Pietro took me on there. This shop was not so élite as the other two had been, especially Nino’s, and when one’s hair was being dried, one got ejected from the cubicle and sat down among assorted chairs in the entrance hall, where other customers were perched under driers, husbands were waiting and children were running round playing ‘catch me if you can’ in and out of the chairs. The telephone at the desk near the door rang continually, the assistants shouted at each other across the room over the hum of the driers, the shrill voices of the toddlers and the angry commands of exasperated mamas, overheated under their machines – altogether there was a general pandemonium, but tempered with friendliness and good humour.

  I often chatted with other customers, while waiting for Pietro to begin on me, for I discovered that Italian hairdressers were not always ready to do one’s coiffeur on time, although they were much more punctual than one would suppose from the reputation Latins generally have in time-conscious Britain.

  It was a pity one had to put such a dreadful ATS hat on the top of one’s coiffure, and all the hairdressers bewailed it, for it spoilt their work of which they were conscious and justly proud. When we were allowed to wear berets it was better. How much more comfortable the berets were, and what a pity that they are not the universal headgear of the women’s services!

  My rare days off usually included a visit to Pietro and also to the officers’ shop, which was a large requisitioned store, not far from the Piazza Venezia and near another ruined Roman forum. Nearby, in front of one of the many baroque churches of Rome, were two or three flower-stalls. The flower-stalls of Rome are one of the greatest ornaments of the city. They are usually shielded by large faded parasols, for the sun is so strong that no dye will last long in it. Underneath one sees a multicoloured array of vivid, fresh and varied blooms, giving out a delicious fragrance, the nostalgic blend of exotic perfumes. On the Piazza di Spagna, at the foot of the Spanish Steps, previously mentioned, there are several flower-stalls, displaying gladioli, marguerites, lilies, roses, tulips, lilies of the valley, cornflowers, violets, forget-me-nots, narcissi and many more, according to the season, and usually there are just a few cactuses for sale as well. The flower-sellers are sturdy independent folk, and as keen as mustard to sell their wares. But flowers were an expensive luxury and could not often be indulged in, although in keeping with Italian custom one usually took a small bouquet to one’s hostess when invited out, or when calling.

  There were Italian women employed in the officers’ shop and mostly they spoke all the necessary English, although I had the impression that they had not known the language for long, and were in the throes of mastering it. There was at least one warrant officer in charge, and an officer supervising everything. In the early days of these shops, one could buy more or less what one wanted, but then rationing started, mainly, I think, on account of a suspected black market. Certainly it would have been very easy to dispose of one’s uniform if so desired, for eager buyers were to be found everywhere and sometimes followed one in the street. From that time on, khaki clothing amongst the civilian population became more and more general, and by the end of the ensuing winter of 1944–45, one hardly saw a child not wearing some portion of military attire – a balaclava helmet, scarf, gloves, wind-jacket, a beret or little shorts or trousers made from American blankets. Battledress on adults was quite frequent, not to speak of coats and even trousers made from American blankets. Thefts from stores must have totalled enormous sums, and in spite of rigid supervision it was impossible to stop them. It was positively fashionable for the civilian population to sport khaki, and certainly in some cases i
t must have represented a triumph over the Occupation forces. I heard that the Poles were particularly good black marketeers, and that Polish officers would come out of the shop with a pair of shoes under their arms and sell them round the corner to a waiting dealer, but I never saw this happen. In fact, I never saw anyone in uniform concluding a deal. I confess myself to once purchasing a pair of bedroom slippers with seventy ‘tenners’ – tipping with cigarettes was of course the rule. Cigarettes in particular and other NAAFI goods in general, constituted a valuable currency, worth more than paper lire, of which there were plenty, printed freshly by the Occupation authorities, and nice and clean compared with the ragged old notes of the Italian administration. The new notes, however, were easy to forge and every so often an order went round that all notes were to be carefully scrutinised and signed on the back when purchasing with 500 or 1,000 lira notes.

  All British uniforms and nationalities could be seen at the shop, and these included Sikhs and Gurkhas. Rome was beginning to develop into a busy centre for leave, hospitals, base-troops of all descriptions, and all in all it was becoming a sort of second Cairo.

  More members of the Women’s Forces were arriving, including a batch of South African sergeants, whom we called ‘wozzies’. There was an ATS company at Caserta, and rumours that there would soon be one in Rome. We heard that some of our own girls were to be shipped over from Cairo, but before that we had a visit from the acting chief of the ATS. It was no longer the Scottish CO, but a general’s daughter, and very smart and correct withal. The AT officers had a polite drink with her in the anteroom and then went up to lunch rather late, and sat at a table specially reserved for us on this auspicious occasion. The room was full of men and hushed expectantly as we all trooped into the mess. Glancing over my shoulder before sitting down, I caught one or two surreptitious winks. But the buzz of conversation was soon resumed, except at our table, where it was rather forced. It would have been very dreary if the colonel had not stimulated it with jovial and hearty quips, which raised a frequent laugh. It is a pity that a senior woman officer’s visit seems to leave one tongue-tied, like a Victorian miss at her first dance, except for a few bold and fearless spirits. Personally I was always one of the tongue-tied ones, and even later I never completely managed to untie my tongue, despite having had much more experience of senior ATs. As they are all, almost without exception, charming persons, it is to be deplored, but there it is.