Loving Monsters

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Here you are, Jayjay, domiciled in Italy over half a century later. A somewhat compromised Englishman, but an Englishman for all that. We’ve heard a good deal about the boy from Eltham, but is there anything of the patriot left in you?

  – Oh … What an awkward question. You sound just like a journalist. How can I put it? I would be patriotic at the drop of a hat if I thought for a moment the loyalty would be reciprocated. –

  The exile’s cry. Once again, I don’t think Captain W. E. Johns would have approved. Or John F. Kennedy, for that matter. Ask not what your country, etcetera.

  – Exactly. Primitive rhetoric. And within a year or two of Kennedy’s speech thousands of young Americans were asking how it was helping their country to give their lives in an immoral war halfway around the globe. Let’s not go into that. All I can say is that when the news reached Alexandria that England was at war with Germany I was a very long way from experiencing a simple patriotic urge to join up and start killing the enemy.

  – The first thing that happened was that the Egyptian Prime Minister, Ali Maher, declared martial law. Under this the terms of the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty were implemented and the country’s ports, roads, airfields and railways placed at Britain’s disposal. The few Germans in Egypt were rounded up. Those who were members of the Nazi Party were sent up to Alexandria and interned in Adelio’s school, which meant that he and the other students had to be farmed out elsewhere around town. We still didn’t know which way the Italians were going to jump, but from the British point of view a glance at the map of Africa gave one a pretty good idea of what was likely. To the west there were about a quarter of a million Italian troops in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, and to the south the Duke of Aosta had much the same number stationed in Italian Somaliland and Ethiopia. It would surely have made sense to Mussolini to take Egypt and the Sudan, thereby joining up his territories into one massive African empire. By now General Wavell, our Commander-in-Chief Middle East, had arrived, and he looked at the map and made the same calculation. It didn’t look good. The Italians outnumbered us five to one. You could hear teachers from Adelio’s school, Fascists to a man, calling cheerfully to each other across Saad Zaghlul ‘L’Egitto sarà a noi!’ Mirella herself was becoming a little infected by the enthusiasm of her colleagues at the Italian legation but she still gave me luncheon three times a week and encouraged me to take Adelio off for the afternoon. Indeed, she was impressed by the progress he was making in English and wanted our arrangement to continue.

  – It was a very odd period. For an unattached, self-employed Briton like myself there was very little pressure to be warlike. A good few Britons of military age had already left Egypt on roundabout routes to return to England and join up. But the complete uncertainty of what was going to happen to Egypt made for a kind of hiatus for the rest of us. Basically, we just went on enjoying ourselves even as more and more men in khaki flooded in from places like Australia and New Zealand and India to reinforce Wavell’s scant division or two. This was excellent from the point of view of my business, of course, since selling troops pornography is about as challenging as selling rat poison in Hamelin. Then the disquieting news reached me that August had been interned in Khartoum as an enemy alien, poor fellow. Still, I had enough of his negatives to be able to supply the market for the indefinite future and I was not about to enlist in the army unless forced to. It was here that all my party-going in Cairo began to pay off. I had some excellent British contacts who knew I spoke Arabic and had Egyptian student friends. These party contacts had just been chaps a few years older than myself whom I’d last seen dancing with girls from the fishing fleet. Now suddenly these same fellows were popping up in uniform with quite impressive ranks, or else in civvies but attached to mysterious intelligence units that looked most unlikely ever to have to fire a Lee-Enfield rifle. For the moment I skulked and considered my options while the Italian Fascists in the streets went on assuring everybody that Egypt would shortly be theirs. As I said, a very odd time.

  Meanwhile, Hitler’s military machine was doing impressively well in Europe and the Egyptian Government was becoming increasingly pro-German. Most of my nationalist friends as well as the Wafd Party were arguing that Britain’s being involved in a European war and stretched throughout her global empire was a golden opportunity for the cause of Egyptian independence. They, too, began openly supporting the Germans. Then in June 1940 Mussolini finally made up his mind whose side he was on and Italy was suddenly at war with the Allies as an Axis power. By late September the so-called Italian Army of Liberation had crossed the Libya-Egypt border and had occupied Sollum and Sidi Barrani, sixty miles inside Egyptian territory. The following month the Italian Air Force bombed Maadi, a suburb of Cairo. The majority of British women and children in Egypt had already been evacuated to South Africa, and you can imagine that the atmosphere was pretty panicky. We were all expecting to be overrun by Marshal Graziani’s 10th army at any moment. The real thing was happening at last and we were about to become prisoners of war. Alexandria, which was where they would arrive first, was very tense but subdued, except for the Italian Fascists going around loudly counting the days until they could throw garlands around the necks of their victorious compatriots. But there were quite a few Italians in Alexandria who were not at all sure they wanted to be conquered by Fascism. It was obvious Mirella herself had her doubts. She told me it would give her no pleasure to see the city reduced to a military garrison like an overgrown Tripoli. What then of cosmopolitan lotos-eating? But suddenly the British launched a counter-offensive and Wavell’s commander of the Western Desert Force, O’Connor, re-took Sidi Barrani, carried straight on westwards and by Christmas had taken well over twenty thousand Italian prisoners.

  – This was a great boost for British morale, of course, but it hotted up the problems between the British Embassy in Cairo and King Faroukh. It was widely believed that Faroukh, already well known as an Italianophile, had a secret radio transmitter in one of his palaces and was in constant touch with the Italian High Command in Rome, presumably passing on the gist of Sir Miles Lampson’s conversations with him as well as any information he could glean of British military intentions. Lampson put the King under a lot of pressure to ‘get rid of his Italians’, meaning all those Palace electricians and cronies and including poor old Renzo. Faroukh’s brilliant answer was ‘Just as soon as you get rid of yours,’ referring to Lampson’s second wife who was half Italian. It was a famous riposte and gave a pretty good idea of how strained relations between the Embassy and Abdin Palace were. Meanwhile the Egyptian press was saying that the British could never have done so well against Graziani without the help Egypt was giving them under the terms of the 1936 Treaty, and this alone ought to have earned Egypt its complete independence. The British replied that the Egyptians ought to be damned grateful to them for having saved their country from an Italian conquest.

  – It all helped to make up my mind. Eighteen months into the war I had reached the point where I couldn’t go on skulking, especially not with fellow Brits in tattered uniforms limping around Cairo on crutches. My private feelings were still quite clear that I wanted nothing to do with this war, but it’s easy to be shamed into doing things against your better judgement. Do you remember all those studies about bravery some years ago? They found that in nine cases out of ten, acts of heroic wartime bravery are committed not out of hatred of the enemy but out of fear of being thought cowardly by one’s own comrades. It’s all about not looking bad in front of one’s friends, and that was pretty much exactly what drove me to enlist. Maybe if I had been back in Eltham I might have tried to fail the call-up medical with the old gas-and-milk dodge, but there again I’m not sure. To this day I have no idea whether I’m a coward or not. I’m not even certain what it means. The fact is I was brought up to fight. We all were, of that generation. It was in the air. Most men over forty that one met had served. The First World War had been over a scant twenty years and ever since then there had been constant
rumours of another war to come. In every Briton’s unconscious was the knowledge that we had a huge Empire to defend. I don’t think any of us seriously believed we would live our lives out without at some point having to fight. Anyway, brave or not, shamed or not, I enlisted.

  – Well, I say ‘enlisted’, but this contact I had in the SOE Cairo office told me I wouldn’t be doing England any favours by becoming cannon-fodder in the Western Desert. I would be much more use otherwise deployed since by now I spoke excellent street Arabic, quite passable Italian, and knew my way around Cairo and Alexandria. I also had some potentially valuable Egyptian contacts. SOE, of course, was Special Operations Executive whose chief remit (apart from denying its own existence) was to build up and co-ordinate the underground resistance to the Axis in Europe. It had offices in various neutral cities like Bern and Istanbul and Cairo. Each office had two sections, one of which handled special operations and the other propaganda. I was assigned to propaganda, which pleased me since I had always fancied myself as anyone’s advocate. But the first job I was given was to stay in Alexandria and help look after a warehouse of SOE equipment that was being stockpiled in secret for eventual use in the Balkans. It was a large garage at the back of Sidi Gaber station and funnily enough it had once belonged to the Italian legation until being commandeered quite early on. I liked to think my old Fiat had once been housed there, but I don’t suppose it had. There were a lot of submachine guns in crates, also stacks of walkie-talkie radio sets with those great chunky batteries that looked as though they’d been dipped in butterscotch: some kind of greased paper they were wrapped in. I took it in turns with a fellow named Sid Dix to keep an eye on all this equipment. The windows of the garage had already been whitewashed and barred and special locks put on the doors, so guarding it wasn’t too difficult. In fact we didn’t have much to do for several months. I had less spare time now but was still taking Adelio to the beach whenever I could. It was also one of my duties to report what I could about the Italian community in Alexandria, its morale and so forth. Effectively, I was expected to spy on close friends like the Boschettis. Needless to say I passed on nothing about them, but neither did I mention to them that I was now officially employed in their legation’s former garage. Funny how easily an impostor slips into game-playing … Am I boring you? –

  Absolutely not, Jayjay.

  *

  Liar! Hypocrite! But how to explain? How can I tell him that these days his biographer is prey to a sound like that of surf on a far-distant shore. It has made him impatient with narratives where nothing seems to weigh much more than anything else, all scurrying along with the sole purpose of getting a tale told, of moving someone from Eltham to Suez to Cairo to Alexandria to (eventually, if I have the patience) aged eighty at the foot of a hill in Tuscany. It is true: I lack the patience to hear out the full ‘And then …’ of his life, its long-ago busyness and its rehearsal of scenes whose exact sequence no longer matters. My own life shoulders it aside (and what greater failing could a biographer admit to?) It is a part of having passed an arbitrary age – maybe forty-five, maybe fifty – that no matter how languorously the sun sprawls on to a Tuscan hillside, no matter how glitteringly the bees burst from their hives to swerve into immediate invisibility, there lies behind it all that familiar mortal shore in far-off Asia. Here in Italy it is sheer chance that I happen never to have followed a friend’s coffin to Montecchio cemetery. For all the winters endured here, for all the memories of mud and snow and gales, this place has managed to retain something about it of a perpetual summer holiday, certainly with shafts of melancholy but miraculously preserved from the grind of a normal reduced existence. The two kilometres of forest that separate my house from its nearest neighbour represent more than mere distance; in some way they form a cordon sanitaire. But none of it is proof against the sound I can always hear at the back of my mind as if borne on the wind from far over the planet’s haunch: that Asian beach of coral chips being washed by the constant sea, the unresting chafe of pebbles. There, I have indeed walked behind a coffin. I have helped whitewash graves for All Souls’ Day, tearing mats of greenery off inscriptions in the cement, watching how the wiry roots pull away clots of mortar rotted by the sea wind. Year by year the names blur and fade even as memories of their once living owners remain sharp, as though photographed in the intense glare of tropic light, walking and laughing in my own past, forever handing me a glass, hauling in a fish or laying a hand on my arm, brown on white.

  However, for a biographer to tell his subject that his life story is becoming a bore is not easy. Apart from the likelihood of giving offence it leaves the writer still more isolated in his peculiar fastidiousness, apparently unsatisfied by ingredients that the majority would find interesting, even gripping. I mean to say, here is Jayjay being swallowed up by the Second World War in a theatre full of misfits and weird political cross-currents. The divided loyalties, the remoteness from Europe and Hitler’s blitz, the unwarlike aspect of Cairo and Alexandria with their well-stocked shops and frenetic night-life: surely all these would constitute a raconteur’s dream of endless episodes and reminiscence? (That time the Brigadier was left standing in only his underwear to greet King Peter of Yugoslavia … The consignment of London Rubber Industries’ condoms, Other Ranks, For the Use Of, that was inadvertently dispatched to SOE’s typing pool as carbons …) Plus, of course, the flashlit derring-do of Stuka attacks and desert warfare. The biographer acknowledges the appeal of all this, adding only that he seems to have seen or read it all before somewhere. It is only feasible to repeat it if we know something about the narrator that damages his account, or undercuts it, or sets it at one remove from the filmic. Otherwise we run the risk of writing the sort of book that wins literary prizes and later gets given the middlebrow Hollywood treatment. With some temerity I put this to Jayjay, not bluntly but more as a suggestion that might bear thinking about before he embarks on the next episode of his saga. He is less offended than surprised. Like most people he thinks unconstrued events are enough in themselves. He has never encountered anyone so hard to please. Surely his job is to relate the facts and mine to give them a writerly gloss, the literary depth and so on? I reply that out of a silk purse one could no doubt cobble together a silken sow, but I am not in the stuffed toy business. Real depth requires real information.

  The fact is I can’t wait for him to get serious, to spill some beans, any beans. I am now more than ever certain that at some time during his war there was an episode that took him by the scruff and gave him the sort of shaking from which there is never a complete recovery. His airily putting himself down as an impostor is surely a legacy of this. Did he not just say he was brought up to fight? And did he not immediately add some reflections on cowardice? Perhaps like me he failed in some awful fashion. I do hope so. I yearn for him to get into uniform, to hurry through these preliminaries for battle. However, it is unfortunately not a biographer’s task to hustle him but to pounce the moment I think he is becoming slippery. So after delivering a stern reminder that his narrative stands in urgent need of complication I shut up.

  On that note we part for a while, quite amicably and with no suggestion of finality, though with the feeling of an impasse that somehow needs to be overcome. There is too much eggy youth about his tale so far, and the sound of that distant coral-chip strand too insistent in my own ears. I find myself thinking about curling tongs. Often these days I walk out of the house in the early morning to stand as on the rim of a vast bowl of landscape at whose bottom lie dark pools of mist. I watch as the overtaking light leans around the mountain’s shoulder to spill across the forest tops below. Sometimes a sense of quite unearned fortune grows in pace with this light that has rolled all the way from Japan to pour into a Tuscan valley. At the end of a rotten sad century there is the apprehension of having unjustly escaped. Surely such fortune must be paid for? Maybe a bitter band is even now making its way silently up the track towards the house, intent on its bitterness. Shortly I shall find mys
elf incredulously digging a shallow pit as the men lounge around smoking. Without warning the first roncola blade will thud into my back and a gout of blood hit the spade handle. The methodical thudding will go on, accompanied by grunts of effort. Then my eyes are put out with a pocket-knife still greasy from cutting salami for yesterday’s lunch. Sudden darkness will turn on its head and become still blacker, heavier, suffocating as they refill the pit and stamp down the soil. The same sun will go rolling blithely onward to the Americas and beyond to greet Japan again. This fantasy comes less from guilt than from incomprehension. So many hundreds of millions have made far grimmer ends this century, why not I? In the banal lottery of earthly existence atrocity is visited on some and fortune on others, irrespective of virtue or deserts. Both are reprisals for having drawn breath.

  I stand on the particular grass beneath which I shall probably never lie (or else may soon be lying as the billhooks are wiped, the knife folded, an eyeball kicked with disgust into the irises that fringe the terrace edge). At this moment it so happens there are no bodies between my footsoles and the tilted slab of rock that underlies the shallow soil like muscle. There is probably nothing of flesh and blood beyond the odd mole. But there so easily could be: more nourishment for this landscape whose bucolic tenderness, now revealed by a risen sun, is testament to millennia of spilt blood. On certain days it is all too plain that Tuscany’s rich patina was achieved by force, by whips and priests and landowners. It is merely the casual irony of a later age that we itinerant leisured folk can praise the scenery from our terraces and feel that in some way we can possess it or consume it, and all without reflecting that today it is our own elbows at which Death stands. We need only turn our heads a little to glimpse him; so we go on staring rigidly ahead, busily admiring ourselves for being able to admire the painterly effects of olive and cypress and the lavender light that slants across these aromatic hills.