Children of The Sun

by Jonathan Green

  The folk of the Marina Grande are not Italians at all. They are descendants of the Barbary Corsairs, who pillaged this coast in the old days. Their dialect is tinged with Arabic and, until the last two decades, they lived completely apart from the townfolk of the peninsula, who called them i barbari—the barbarians.

  They did not marry outside their own beachhead and centuries of in-breeding have produced some quaint biological phenomena. Now, however, there is new blood among them—Italian, German, British, American. You see tow-heads and apple-cheeks sprouting among the dark, narrow-faced Berber families.

  They are a gentle, primitive folk with weathered faces and ready smiles for the visitor who cares to spend a little patience and politeness on them. They are slow-moving and slow of speech like all fishermen, and for all their bare feet and their patched clothes and the sparse simplicity of their lives they have a great natural dignity.

  You see them rarely in the town. The commerce of their lives is carried on between the house fronts and the sea, among the beached boats and the trailing nets and along the great stone ramp that leads up to the hilltop.

  In winter their life is hard and frugal; but, when the summer comes and the fish are back with the warm currents and the tourists come to hire their boats, they do better. At night you see their clustered lights over the fishing grounds and in the morning you see the women squatting on the beach or on the sea-wall, patching the fine, brown nets.

  Their houses are old and crumbling, piled one on top of another like children’s blocks, and in the dim rooms on the ground level the meticulous craftsmen build the long double-ended boats to the pattern of their Moorish ancestors.

  Their children are brown-faced, bare-footed and shy as young horses; but they have bright eyes and wide, winning smiles. In the morning they go to school in the Sisters’ convent, and in the afternoon they do the housework or the shopping or romp noisily among the boats drawn up on the stony beach.

  We picked out way over the pebbles, greeting this one and that, hailing a child or two, and enquiring after the health of an aged grandmother huddled under her shawls in the late, cool sunlight. Finally, we climbed a flight of stone steps to a first-floor room in one of the water-front houses.

  To my surprise, it was full of children—thirty-six I counted, but they told me some were absent. Although it was late in the afternoon, long past school time, they were all busy over their books. Some were working out problems in elementary arithmetic, some were reading geography books, others were drawing or making paper cutouts.

  There was no teacher; but three girls and two young men, seventeen to twenty years of age, moved among them helping them with their work. They were well dressed. Their faces were handsome and intelligent. Their approach to the children was affectionate and interested.

  After we had watched a while they called the youngsters to the centre of the floor and led them through a series of songs and folk dances.

  There was something strangely touching about the drab, dusty room with the ragged infants and their spruce young instructors. The kids were so obviously interested, their monitors were so patently proud of the work they were doing. As they bustled back to their desks, Giuliana Benzoni explained to me.

  The young instructors were students, one of engineering, another of architecture, a third of economics. They belonged to a club which met every evening after lectures and whose members took it in turns to come down to the Marina Grande and give after-school lessons to the fisher children. They took no pay and asked no thanks, and each year they paid their own expenses to the Summer School of the Assistenti Sociali in Rome, to learn more about the education of under-privileged children.

  I looked at them with new interest. This was the sort of thing I had been looking for in the South, and of which I had found so little—the spontaneous, unselfish movement of youth towards social reform, outside the party framework of political sponsorship. The girls were young, attractive and vital. Most Neapolitan girls who can afford it spend the years between puberty and marriage in sacred meditation on boys, bed, clothes, local gossip. They tend to develop the vacant comfortable look of pneumatic cushions. Not so these. They had intelligent eyes and intelligent conversation. They wanted to go places, they needed only someone to show them the way.

  They had found that someone in Giuliana Benzoni. She had founded the club and introduced its members to the idea of social service. She supplied them with books and kept them in contact with visiting celebrities.

  The following afternoon I sat with them in the big basement room of her villa, watching Ruth Draper giving one of her memorable performances.

  The youngsters had taken eagerly to the idea of unselfish service and the need in Italy for a beginning, however small. They were hungry for knowledge and for contact with the outside world. When I talked to them in their club room, their eyes shone with interest and their questions on economics, politics and social organisations went straight to the core of the matter.

  When I enquired into their backgrounds, I found that they all came from small middle-class families—the 90,000 lire a month bracket of teachers, bank clerks and accountants. None of them belonged to the signorial families or to the new class of post-war merchants. This, too, was significant. Democracy, as we know it, is founded on a strong, prosperous middle-class. Here in Italy, the middle-class is ill-paid, insecure and caught between the upper and nether millstones of irresponsible capital and unemployed labour.

  What these boys and girls were doing was all the more important and all the more unselfish. It stood as a stinging reproach to the critics and the politicos who talked so much and did damn-all.

  * * *

  The next one is a golf story. It has nothing to do with my handicap or how my professional told me to handle the dog-leg on the fifteenth. So you may read it with comparative safety.

  High up on the spine of the Sorrentine mountains, just past Saint Agatha of the Two Gulfs, is a long stretch of undulating land. It belongs to the Comune of Sorrento, and is, in fact, one of the few tracts of common land available in these parts. You reach it by a scenic motor road and when you get there the view is breath-taking. There is the Bay of Naples on one side and the Gulf of Salerno on the other. There is a majesty of cliffs and blue water, and a nestling of red-tiled towns, and a march of orchard trees through the valleys and up the steep hillsides.

  A Sorrentine friend, a nominee for the new committee of the Comune, drove me up to see it. After I’d admired the view, I mentioned casually that it would make a wonderful golf course. My friend chuckled happily—the Comune had the same idea. When we went back to town, he would show me the plans. They had been drawn by a well-known British expert. They included a nine-hole course, a small hotel and a chair lift up from the town of Sorrento.

  The project interested me. It had imagination and good prospects. It would attract a new type of tourist. It would develop the winter trade. It could make Sorrento a permanent sojourn spot, instead of a jumping-off place for Capri and Ischia. It would give the foreign visitors more to do than sit in the Piazza or wander round the shops in boredom and frustration. Its construction and maintenance would provide more employment for the locals. All in all, it was a sound progressive proposition.

  I was anxious to hear more of it.

  We drove back to town to look over the plans. The course looked interesting. The British expert had done a good job. The hotel layout was modern and comfortable. The chairlift would be a separate investment by the Circumvesuviana Railway. That left only the course and the hotel to be financed by the Comune.

  Ah, no! My friend smiled gently at my simplicity. Not by the Comune.

  By private enterprise then? A lease of the land to an Italian company?

  No, again! The Comune was trying, without much hope of success, to raise some capital in London from English investors!

  I was dumbfounded. I said so, bluntly. There was enough idle capital on the peninsula to finance the project ten times over. The la
nd itself, at present inflated values, was security enough for a substantial bank loan. There were thousands of unemployed on the peninsula. In the winter months there would be even more. Why go abroad for capital? Why not make it an Italian enterprise?

  My friend shrugged unhappily. The conversation had taken an unexpected turn. He pointed out, with obvious reluctance, that risk capital cost a lot less in England and that, in any case, Italian investors were a chary lot and difficult to handle. Italian banks were the most difficult of all. Besides, it was such a sound prospect, why shouldn’t the British be interested?

  Politeness forbade the obvious answer. Investment depends on fiducia—confidence. If the Italians had so little confidence in their own country, in the good sense of its financiers, in the honesty of its commercial and administrative system, how could they expect the British to have more?

  * * *

  I repeated this story the same afternoon to Professor Gaetano Salvemini, formerly of Harvard University and now living in retirement at Capo di Sorrento. Salvemini is an old man now, but he is one of the world’s great humanists and he is one of the incorruptibles in this corrupt and despairing country.

  He is over eighty years old, yet his eyes sparkle and his face shines with the eternal youth of the Mediterranean sun. His retreat at the wooded bluff above Sorrento is a meeting place for hope-hungry Italian students, and a goal of pilgrimage for those who studied under him in the New World.

  His verdict on my story was delivered in the calm, measured voice which still bears traces of its Calabrian peasant accent.

  “In this, my friend, you see the fate of a nation which loses faith in itself because it has lost faith in the truth. When men do not believe in liberty, they put themselves in the power of others to find an illusion of security. They are unwilling to take risks, because they are afraid of sacrifice. They have lost their dignity as men, so they are content to make themselves beggars. Their leaders are kings in a kingdom of beggars, profiting from the misery of their subjects but making no effort to lift them out of it. That is why we lean to the extreme Left and the reactionary Right, while the party which calls itself Christian and Democratic has tried to create a confessional state, neither Christian nor Democratic. We demand to be led, no matter where, because we lack the courage to walk a man’s road, even if it means walking alone.”

  I agreed with the old man. His thought was the thought on which is founded the best in our own way of life. But, I asked him, given the situation as it exists, given the state of mind as it exists, how do you make a start? Where is the fulcrum on which to rest the lever of reform ? I returned to the story of my journalist friends, to their fear of unemployment and of prison.

  The old scholar snorted angrily.

  “Then let them lose their jobs! Let them go to prison! That was one thing Mussolini and the Fascists taught us—how to go to prison, how to starve for the things we believed. There is your fulcrum. There is no other. It is one man’s courage and strong heart. The courage of many is what makes a good life for all.”

  This, too, was true, but I wanted more yet. I pointed out that he knew—none better—that the growth of truth and courage and their flowering to common effort was a slow process. I pointed out that he was an old man with a lifetime behind him, that his colleagues were working to disseminate the doctrine of the dignity of man and the need for co-operation and personal sacrifice, but that it might be decades before the fruit of their years was gathered.

  The scugnizzi of Naples were the core of this book. They were, in every sense, a product of the ills of Italy. Their need was a symbol of a million other needs. If a solution could be found for them, it, too, could be a symbol, a rallying point for reform.

  Salvemini looked at me, quizzically.

  “And what is your solution, my friend?”

  I gave it to him, tersely.

  “Get them out! Found farm schools and trade schools for them in Australia, in America, in Canada, in Rhodesia. Ship them out as students, like the Barnardo and the Fair-bridge boys from England. Then, when they are grown, they are already useful citizens of a new country. They create no problem of integration. They are no charge on the state. On the contrary, they are productive members.”

  “And where would the money come from?”

  I told him I believed it could be raised from private charities, from Italians who had settled in these countries and made a good life, from Church organisations and citizen groups. He had seen himself how such things were done.

  He nodded, soberly, and asked me another question.

  “And how do you ask these people, these organisations, to do what Italians refuse to do for themselves?”

  “By stating the simple truth—that these are children, and a child has claims on the hearts of all the world.”

  As I said it to Gaetano Salvemini, I say it now to all those who may read this book.

  * * *

  It is not enough, of course, to say what should be done. Unless a writer can offer a practical solution to the problems he poses, he had better not write about them. To do so otherwise is to make a theatre piece out of the misery of his fellows.

  When I was a very green young man, I served a brief apprenticeship with William Morris Hughes, Prime Minister of Australia, and an inveterate enemy of Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson. Clemenceau, the Frenchman, admired him and Orlando, the Italian, disliked him, probably because he was as canny a rabble-rouser as ever stalked the boards. He taught me one lesson I have always remembered.

  “Rhetoric,” he would say, “makes good politics and bad practice.”

  Billy was a black Welshman and his Celtic counsel has been much in my mind during the writing of this book.

  Italy is the home of rhetoric and Naples is the fountain of sentiment. Roman oratory has seduced more than one diplomat and Southern charm has seduced a thousand visitors into love affairs with a very tawdry mistress.

  So now I turn pragmatist and say in plain terms how folk in other countries can help the urchins of Naples.

  On April 13th this year I wrote in identical terms to the United States Ambassador and to the Australian Minister in Rome. I chose these two countries, not because they are the only ones to which emigration is possible, but because I am the citizen of one, and because the other is so deeply involved in the affairs of Italy.

  These were the terms of my letter:

  . . . This work (the House of the Urchins) has now reached a critical phase. Don Borrelli takes these boys from the streets, educates them until the age of seventeen or eighteen years and then must send them out into the insecure and often sporadic employment of Naples where there is a constant pool of nearly 200,000 unemployed.

  The best hope for these boys—and for the work itself—would be emigration to a specially organised farm-cum-technical school in Australia, America and Canada. Would Your Excellency be good enough to inform me—for publication in the closing chapters of the book—on the following points:

  (1) If such a reception school were set up and maintained by private charities in Australia/America, would the present provisions of Australian/American immigration laws permit the entrance of a limited number of boys each year?

  (2) If any impediments exist to such immigration, what are they and what action would be required to remove them?

  On April 23rd, I received the following reply from the Australian Minister, Paul Maguire:

  There is nothing in the Immigration Act to prevent the admission of a limited number of boys each year in the circumstances described. The boys would, of course, have to satisfy the conditions of the Immigration Act and any criteria applied by the Australian Government under the Act… Migration policy, in general, favours young migrants, but you will understand that specific projects for migration and individual migrants are treated on their own merits, as to suitability, health, etc.

  In essence the reply is favourable. Stripped of its cautionary phrases and official options, it indicates that the way is open for
private charity to provide a future in Australia for Borrelli’s boys. The way is open, specifically, for those Italians who have found a good life to share the fruits of it with the lost children of their own country. How to do it?

  There are a dozen blueprints available, but I suggest this one as the most practical and profitable to the country and to the boys themselves. Let them provide land, building and maintenance funds to set up a farm-cum-technical school in a good mixed farming area, where each year thirty or forty boys can be sent from the House of the Urchins to be trained as agriculturalists or specialist tradesmen.

  If the capital outlay and the maintenance costs of such an enterprise seem too great, let them found the same number of resident scholarships in established institutions and charge themselves with the passage money, the clothing and the home life of the boys during the training period.

  In point of fact, the second scheme could be used as a preparation for the first and the initial batches of boys could assist those who came later, under a system analogous to that of the British Big Brother Movement.

  One could write volumes on the organisation and administration of existing schemes, but all the volumes can be boiled down to one paragraph:

  The need is evident. The way is open under the law. Let men of goodwill do something about it.

  The following is the text of the reply from the American Consulate General in Naples. The date is May 22nd, 1956:

  Your letter of April 13th, 1956, to the Ambassador, requesting certain information regarding the emigration to the United States of Italian boys, about 17 or 18 years of age, for possible training in a technical or agricultural school, has been referred to me for reply.

  Italian citizens, if qualified for immigrant visas, can obtain such visas subject to the quota limitations established by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. The quota for Italy is 5,645 per annum.