by Norman Lewis
Once again the villagers must have suspected that something was about to be taken from them by the rich, and such was the public hubbub that whatever decisions had been taken by those in authority were promptly reversed, and the village was rescued from defacement. The concreted river, the artificial island and the captive ducks were out, but there was no doubt that predatory eyes were still on the site and that the farmer who owned the meadows would sooner or later receive a compulsory purchase order, and be told to remove his sheep.
I took counsel on this matter with neighbours, learning that the only way these meadows could be positively protected was to devise some commercial purpose to which they could be officially designated. Continued grazing by sheep would be rejected as being too casual as compared to a settled commercial operation upon which a bank loan could be raised. Tree-planting, it turned out, came under the umbrella, but it was required that they should be grown for a profit, which ruled out most of the kinds giving pleasure to the eye. The recommended ‘profit’ tree was a fast-growing poplar. Joining forces with a neighbour, I therefore bought the meadows from the farmer and planted them with uninteresting poplars, convertible after twenty years into several million matchsticks. This was perhaps half a victory, for even though the water-meadows were no more, there would at least be grass under the trees.
The great battle faced by any such village possessing features of scenic, architectural or historical interest is for the preservation of its identity and style. If it is within fifty miles or so of London commuters will be attracted, most of them well-off by local standards and the houses built for them will feature urban amenities but lack charm. A certain decadence is promoted by wealth, involving building complications of an unsuitable and frequently pompous kind. Red-brick walls replace hedges, stables are built, and in one local case what appears as a fairly accurate copy of a Norman barn has been added to a Tudor house.
The attraction of Finchingfield, which draws pilgrims from London to its centre for eight months of the year, is of all things a pond. Over the green and across the water there is a view of a hillside miscellany of houses of all sizes, shapes and colours, dating perhaps from the eighteenth century, but it is the pond, not the houses, which is the thing. As many cars as can be squeezed into the area form static lines each weekend. Some of those who are brought in them may get out and stray a hundred or two yards up into the village, but the pond always fetches them back, and many prefer not to leave their cars and appear not to take their eyes off the water.
To someone like myself who has spent long periods in the East, there is something about this scene and mood that is tremendously familiar. For the short length of their stay these people (many of whom return over and over again) appear to have fallen under an Asian influence. They sit in their cars, or stand to watch the water, all of them facing the same way like orientals in search of a mystic experience. In India pilgrims would have been drawn to this nondescript patch of water by legends concerned with a divine king or a god. Here there is nothing, no legends, no history, no creative essences in the water that cure sickness of body and mind. In India the pond would have been ringed by hucksters, half-naked holy men smeared with ashes, epileptics, sellers of fake jewels, amulets, charms, saucers of scalding food, cow’s excrement for the treatment of illness, and a god with an elephant’s trunk and multiple arms. The Indians would have been there for the water, too, but they would have waded into it, sluiced it over every part of their bodies, even drunk a little, their faces imprinted with huge joy. For them this would have been a holy place, where nevertheless you went to have a good time. Religion, at least in the East, was spiced with entertainment. In the village, the beneficiaries of the silent, almost biblical congregations are the ducks that assemble here, too, in the certain knowledge that they are about to be fed. They are all of them wild, as many as fifty glossy, energetic mallards at a time. These, combining inherited experience with the most delicate avian sensitivity, not only take their tribute of food without a trace of nervousness, but raise their enormous broods of ducklings in the village gardens, often preferring a site within feet of a door. Such sagacious animals have no objection to establishing a relationship with their tame counterparts. Mallard drakes come winging in to fall upon any farmyard duck they can take by surprise, such matings producing offspring which must cause the farmer surprise by eventually taking to flight. Many of them, like their Aylesbury mothers, are pure white, and there are few more splendid sights on a summer’s day than that of these brilliant albinos overhead, soaring sometimes to become no more than a powdery scintillation in the high sky.
The poplars were sprouting vigorously, but wildlife suspicious of change rejects plantations, and I never saw a bird’s nest in a poplar. Nevertheless, animals in retreat from the new farming procedures took refuge in the recently acquired glebe-land and began to spread from it into the garden, where much of the disorder they appreciated was made available. I welcomed, for example, the ordinary stinging nettle—a sensitive plant which responds to encouragement—and grew a half acre of it, upon which butterflies were invited to feed. At some point the Water Board washed its hands of looking after the river, enabling me to anchor in position tree-branches that had fallen into it, thus helping with the nesting problem of moorhens and providing a perch for the occasional kingfisher. Odd blackthorn seedlings were carefully looked after, and transplanted to a position where they would grow into a thicket.
Having tended my nettles and blackthorns and cat-proofed the boundaries, I was now lord of an acre of promising wilderness. In the second year of these reforms the garden resounded with birdsong in a countryside that had become largely mute; and I could sit back and enjoy the result.
Chapter Ten
WAY BACK IN THE days of Gordon Street, immediately before the outbreak of war, Ernesto would occasionally receive visits from his countrymen straight from Sicily, who sometimes appeared to have given him no notice of their intended arrival. It would thus happen that he was sometimes away. According to the social protocol of the Mediterranean island, it was incorrect for the wife to entertain them, so there were instances when I was hastily summoned by my mother-in-law to do the necessary honours. The Sicilian visitor would be seated in the drawing-room, one of Ernesto’s ornate chairs placed at his side ready to receive his hat. Next, according to the schooling she had received, Maria would rush off to lay a tray with coffee and wine, after which she would follow me into the room. These encounters were ritualistic in the extreme. I would enter, bow and announce myself, give my name and, speaking Italian, define my relationship with Ernesto, concluding by begging the guest to make himself at home. With that the man would smile his gratitude and only then pick up the hat, previously held on his knees, and place it on the chair.
The conversation that followed could have been taken from a pre-Hugo phrase book but was brief and to the point. I was happy that it should be so, for although my Italian was going fairly well, I had not yet come to grips with certain recent changes ordered by Mussolini. The old Roman form of address, voi, in which the second person plural was employed, was to replace use of the third person singular, lei, which he found effeminate. Nevertheless all Italian expatriates stuck to lei, and I was forced to do the same. There was a further complication here, for whatever the dictator said, most Sicilians had continued to use voi.
Having thanked the visitor for his kindness in making the call, I explained my father-in-law’s absence, and then asked after his health.
Nodding gratefully, he would place his hand on his heart and say, ‘I can’t complain.’
‘And the family?’ In Sicily as in most of the Orient, you do not ask after a man’s wife even if she is well known to you.
‘We arrange ourselves—living in hope of better times.’
‘You are from Palermo, Signor Volpe. How are things there now?’
‘In Palermo, Signor Luigi, there is good and bad. Nothing changes.’
‘And that,’ I would say, ‘Si
gnor Volpe, is roughly the same here.’
I suspected that almost unconsciously I was beginning to adapt myself to a Sicilian environment, for such a meeting no longer struck me as unusual. In this case what was a little different was that in his youth Ernesto had been banished from Italy, although I was never informed why. There was something about these men whose hats were treated with such reverence that made me suspect that they were emissaries from the old country, carrying information about which natural curiosity made me eager to know more. But hardly a hundred words had passed between us on this occasion before the visitor got up, recovered his hat and, excusing himself, slipped away.
Ernesto was very much a private man, who preferred to watch life from the background, and to avoid ostentation and display. After we had lived under the same roof for a year or two he persuaded me to accompany him to a tailor in Conduit Street who fitted me out with a dark grey suit of good cut that would attract no notice. His only criticism of me following this small interference was that my voice was too loud. All the Corvajas conversed in soft voices that were unlikely to be overheard. ‘Before you speak, think,’ he used to say, ‘then if necessary remain silent.’
The house was a quiet one. All the doors shut with a soft but decisive squelch on rubber insulation through which no sound could be heard. Despite Ernesto’s distaste for public display it was richly furnished with gilt furniture, painted ceilings, and no dark corners existed in it anywhere under batteries of lamps and their thousands of candlepower of light
Against this background, with its echoes of a mysterious South, it was inevitable that a kind of obsession with the enigma of the Mafia grew upon me. Two decades had passed since the great bomb had just missed the house at Gordon Street with its silent doors, its vociferous gramophone playing nothing but Puccini, its ceiling after Michelangelo, its staring owl and its rickety chickens kept as pets, and much had returned to dust. And now, dressed in a Marks and Spencer off-the-peg grey suit, I set out for Palermo where I hoped to complete the material I was gathering to write a book about perhaps the most powerful secret society of all times.
I had an address through which I hoped to be able to contact one of the small Sicilians who had visited Gordon Street. Also, my friend James McNeish had been in Sicily recording its rapidly disappearing folk-music for the BBC, and had recommended me to see Mauro EM Mauro, editor of the prestigious left-wing newspaper L’Ora. I arrived on the scene too late, for a week or so before, Di Mauro had popped out of his office to buy a packet of cigarettes at a nearby kiosk, and was never seen again. Instead I saw his assistant, Marcello Cimino, who took me under his wing to the extent of giving me access to the archives of the newspaper and the many grim secrets they contained. We then travelled round the island together, talked to numerous people living in the shadow of the Mafia terror, and spent a short time in Partenico with Danilo Dolci, a Sicilian teacher who led the non-violent peasant resistance to the Mafia. Of this stay a representative incident was the experience of a woman volunteer in this organisation who had arrived from England that day. For some reason her taxi had dropped her a hundred yards from the town centre, and she had been instantly obliged to step aside in the narrow lane to avoid a body deposited there. My journey with Marcello was followed by several successive visits to the island which served to cement a friendship only terminated by his death in 1992.
Back in London I met the American humourist S. J. Perelman, who travelled whenever he could in the Far East and felt obliged in consequence to read my books about Indo-China and Burma. Having much in common, we saw a great deal of each other and I showed him a chapter or two of the book I was writing, to be entitled The Honoured Society—this being the mafiosi’s description of the secret organisation they served. Sid Perelman thought that William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker, would be interested to see this and he took the first instalment back with him to the United States. Shawn had a reputation for personal exclusiveness that could be equalled only by a Byzantine emperor. He enjoyed the privilege of a guardian secretary who was herself accessible only to writers of established reputation. Sid’s entrée into this magic circle was due only to having known the great man back in the days when Shawn had been a jazz pianist in the Village. But even he took care never to address Shawn by his first name. Shawn read my piece and must have shown excitement for Sid telephoned me to come to New York as soon as I could. I arrived three days later and Sid was there to take me to one New Yorker office where I found Shawn—a rubicund, smiling, almost excessively polite little man—at a desk as big as Mussolini’s in a huge silent cavern of an office. To me it was astonishing that so much power should have come to rest on the shoulders of a man who was outwardly so meek. The interview took five minutes and Shawn asked me to go back to Sicily and finish the book for the New Yorker, mentioning what seemed an unbelievable fee for its publication in the magazine.
In the summer of 1963 I returned to New York where I delivered the completed manuscript to Shawn’s secretary, whose surroundings of isolation and grandeur almost matched those of her employer. Early next morning Shawn telephoned me at the Algonquin Hotel, where all New Yorker contributors were supposed to stay. He invited me to lunch, served at the famous round table, and I was subjected to a somewhat awe-inspiring phenomenon. After a short outburst of generous praise for the book, Shawn had nothing more to say. He seemed uncomfortable and after a while I became aware of the beads of perspiration rolling down his cheeks. I found that I was sweating too. After an agonised effort I managed to break the silence, and things slowly became easier for both of us. Later Sid Perelman said of this alarming episode, ‘I should have warned you. It happens to everybody. All you have to do is to pitch in and keep talking.’ On our third meeting I managed this with total success.
The Honoured Society was serialised virtually in its entirety in six issues of the New Yorker. Shawn had stipulated that no mention should be made of the Mafia’s extremely powerful American ramifications. Nevertheless the magazine was in trouble with the Sicilians, who claimed they had been libelled, and I found myself under attack as soon as copies reached Sicily. Gavin Maxwell had written an exciting book called God Protect Me from My Friends, dealing with the life and death of Salvatore Giuliano, the most intelligent and resourceful bandit of all times, who with a couple of hundred outlaws had run rings round army detachments sent to Sicily to get rid of him. Now Gavin rang to warn me, ‘You have succeeded in libelling Prince Alliata in exactly the same way as I did. I fought the case and lost it and have been caught for massive damages. If it comes up you’d do better to settle out of court.’
Both of us had quoted the same newspaper report that claimed Alliata had offered the bandits sanctuary on his estate in Brazil. To quote this in an Italian publication was not libellous in Italy, but in England, strangely enough, it was. In a matter of days the feared writ dropped from the sky and I fell back, just as Maxwell had done, on the legal firm of Rubinstein, celebrated for their expertise in this particular field. I was seen by Michael, Rubinstein who had handled the case for Gavin Maxwell. He looked me over doubtfully and told me that the man I should have to face in court was a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, a man of impressive presence and of international standing, fluent in English and persuasive in any language. ‘The judge was knocked sideways,’ Rubinstein said. ‘Gavin Maxwell comes from a notable Highland family, but Alliata made mincemeat of him.’ Rubinstein studied me again, in my imagination shaking his head. ‘Do you think you could do better?’ he asked. I told him I thought that was unlikely. ‘I don’t think this should go to court. This man seems potentially generous. If you offer to pay his hotel bill in London he’ll probably let you off.’ And this is what happened.
In addition to the New Yorker serialisation. The Honoured Society was translated into fourteen foreign languages, with the notable abstention of Russian, and I was told by Professor Evashova of Moscow University that this was because in the Soviet Union non-fiction works were not regarded as literature
.
Four years after the book’s publication, an internationally publicised Mafia trial in Palermo took place. This set a precedent in that not only were Sicilian mafiosi in the dock but visitors from the States alleged to have entered Sicily with the object of strengthening the collaboration between the two countries in matters of organised crime. Three of the accused had American and Italian dual nationality, but six of the visiting Americans had managed to escape.
All previous Mafia trials had followed a simple pattern of failure, collapsing because witnesses either refused to give evidence or retracted statements made to the police as soon as they were put in the witness box. It had been announced that this would not happen in this case, and that reluctant witnesses could expect to be hauled off to prison for contempt of court. On 14 March 1968 the trial finally began. It was a gala occasion, Southern-style, in celebration of the impending triumph of justice. There were street cordons of granite-faced armed police, stampeding pressmen and entranced crowds waiting for the arrival of the cortège from the prison as if for a religious procession, and carrying banners and images.
The Sunday Times sent me to record these extraordinary happenings, and I arrived at the courthouse to find that I was awaited by a photographer organised by some unspecified Sicilian contact. He was a small, gleeful, impish individual—the only person I have ever met to describe himself as ‘a man of respect’. I could only conclude that this he really was, for despite the notices forbidding photography, Lo Buono wandered openly round the courtroom photographing the men in the dock, witnesses and finally the presiding judge himself, admonishing him sharply when he closed his eyes, ‘Look at me, your Honour.’