Noisy at the Wrong Times

by Michael Volpe

  The job at the nursery was a major step forward because it was secure, offered a regular income and carried with it a pension. She would remain in the job for over 30 years until her retirement. But the slum in which we lived made sure life was never simple, even as things began to improve. A one-bedroom basement flat with no bathroom or toilet was home for the first five years of my life. Lino on the floor, baths in the kitchen sink and mice in the cupboards are enduring memories.

  Woodstock Grove, now inevitably gentrified, its large houses re-joined from top to bottom, was a community one rarely sees today. It was a dead end street (literally and socially), with a BBC complex at the closed end, and cars never travelled its length. Predictably, it had a pub on the corner at the open end, and women had only to step outside their front door to scream the name of their menfolk, who would wobble from the pub obediently. All doorsteps were painted in that dark burgundy stone paint. It was a place of poor, working class solidity and industriousness, where we could buy fresh eggs from Old Man Lacey, a home farmer with chickens in his back yard and only one arm with which to harvest their crop. Another family bred rabbits in the cupboard under the stairs that were either sold as pets to those with room for a hutch or sent to the pot for sustenance. No doubt those bought as pets would inevitably end up in a casserole too.

  The children of Woodstock Grove played in the street together in gangs that seemed to number dozens, all dressed shabbily in hand-me-down nylon and sockless in their tatty shoes. The games featured all of the street’s children, of every age. Standing with arms and legs spread in a star shape against a stolen sheet of plywood so that friends could hurl darts like a circus knife thrower was a popular entertainment. One boy lost an eye, and my eldest brother felt the sting of a dart sinking itself into his clavicle. For weeks, wood and flammable scrap would be collected as the kids built massive bonfires in the road on Guy Fawkes Night. Fireworks were a constant thrill and, unlike today, only seemed to go on sale a week or so before November 5th, so there was a real sense of occasion as we pilfered pennies and pooled pocket money for Bangers. Ten in a box, these small cigarette-sized exploding tubes with a blue fuse were lobbed at cats, at each other or dropped into letterboxes. On the building sites, we could chuck old milk bottles stuffed with a lighted banger into the air, timing it so it exploded mid-flight, but Matt, my second eldest brother, for some inexplicable reason, lit a Jumping Jack (a special banger that does what it says) and put it in his pocket. Burns and injuries were a constant menace, some of them serious. But above all else, the bonfires stirred our souls. One was never enough; each section of the street had to have its own pyre so at least three would singe and buckle the tarmac, radiating a brutal heat that flaked everything in its path. Given that there was so much nylon in its path, it is a curiosity that more children didn’t spontaneously combust as they were pinned against the houses of the street by the ferocious glow. Every year the fire brigade – most of west London’s – had to be summoned. Our other playground was the electrified tube line that ran past the end of the garden, which also contained the outside loo. Holding onto tube trains waiting at red and seeing who could stay on longest as they accelerated away filled hours of time. Incredibly, nobody died.

  One summer we all caught ringworm from the neighbour’s dog, but Mum refused to let our curly hair be shaved off even though it offered the best chance of a cure. This refusal was completely at odds with the way in which she maintained our much-valued locks, for which she used one of those ferocious combs with an embedded razor, taking regularly to our heads with abandon, turning our hair into feathered mats with a coiled fringe. With mounds of hair at her feet, she would then smother what was left on our heads with Vitapoint, a nourishing cream that smelled like cat’s piss and had the effect of turning the mat into a greasy brown mesh. Pictures of me as a youngster are an exhibition of wonderfully quirky hairdos and I half-expect to see a small rodent poking out from behind my ear.

  Even as small boys, our pride suffered from having to attend school looking like scarecrows, but Matteo was always at the hospital with real injuries requiring stitches. In fact, we all risked life and limb playing in the local building sites, but Matt would remove all risk of grievance by willingly replacing it with certainty. He once turned his feet and ankles into beef jerky by leaping onto a carefully stacked pile of plate glass. My early recollections of Matt include watching him gently pick the stitches from his latest laceration – because he was always getting wounded, early signs of the fearless abandon that would have found better expression had he developed an interest in high finance rather than shoplifting.

  DISCOVERING WHERE IT BEGAN ...

  No doubt the local council was taking notes, recognising the dangers that four young children with a single mother were in, but more likely they realised the peril our neighbours faced as we grew. Social services were probably less sensitive than they are today, and in the late sixties and early seventies I suppose many of the social workers would have been war children, when deprivation was genuinely life-threatening. With a world war fresh in the memory, most social workers probably needed the delinquent behaviour of children to mimic the invasion of Poland, or at the very least, the worst excesses of a Panzer division before alarm bells began to ring. They had the power, these social workers, to confer real privilege upon us. Warsaw felt no threat from us, but Woodstock Grove probably did; and when I was five years old, we were offered the unimaginable luxury of a flat in Fulham Court, a flat I should add, that had an inside bathroom.

  We all decamped to our new duplex three-bedroom flat in June of 1970. Central heating wouldn’t be installed for another twenty years, but there was always paraffin. Fulham Court was on the Fulham Road, closer to the fashionable enclave of Chelsea, and Matt no doubt had his own Blitzkrieg in mind; but I was so unspeakably excited by the concept of a bath that I insisted on sitting in it when we all went to view the flat before moving in.

  If this leap in social status was significant to us, it was like winning the pools for Mum. Two bedrooms to share between us children was officially palatial, but in reality, Mum had even seen Woodstock Grove as a vast improvement over what she had lived in before coming to England. Her hometown was the mountain top village of Montecorvino Pugliano in Campania, southern Italy. Poverty there in the thirties and forties had a smell and danger all its own, with malaria and cholera haunting the narrow, steep streets of her village. Her younger brother contracted meningitis as a baby and was essentially condemned to death by his doctor, but an old woman, having heard the wails and moans of the family, came to the door with a jar of leeches, offering the last and only hope to my mother’s parents. Placing several of the creatures around his head, the old woman’s intervention was absurd and illogical, but it was a hope of cure where sophisticated antibiotics never existed, and, miraculously, the child survived the illness. Mum’s home was a lethal environment that sent its inhabitants into the arms of such quackery, but if Il Dio ignored your prayers, he’d always send a surrogate with an old wives’ tale instead.

  If it wasn’t bacteria that threatened to wipe out the population, it was earthquakes. In 1980, one terremoto had a good go, shaking the region to smithereens: thousands of people perished. In her early teens, war and the presence of the Nazis became the biggest threat once Mussolini had been kicked out. The formerly chummy Germans were an instant occupier when Benito, hanging by his feet, met his gruesome end at an Esso station in Milan. By then the Nazis were undoubtedly on their last legs in Italy, but the continuing resistance action provoked terrible reprisals. Eventually, liberation came, but even that almost cost Mum her life. She, my brothers and I have cause to be thankful for the failures of British munitions workers as a stray Allied shell failed to explode after it crashed through the roof of the bread shop Mum was in, killing the baker as he handed her a loaf. Actually, I don’t know the nationality of the shell, but the British were engaged in all sorts of activity in the area as the Allies pushed northwards. The fighti
ng in the region was substantial, and in Mum’s municipality, a legend was born when a small platoon of Germans held out for two weeks in a church, fighting the surrounding Allied forces to a standstill. Why they didn’t just flatten the church I don’t know – perhaps even then there was sensitivity towards religion. Maybe they did try to flatten the church but the shells kept failing to go off. That munitions factory probably became British Leyland.

  I myself once had cause to experience the indelible mark that the war had left on Mum. Returning late one evening to the home of an uncle in the poor district of Montecorvino (for there were less poor areas than others), we had just passed a small block of flats under construction when a mighty, deafening explosion blew us forwards. The blast wave rushed past us, and, before I’d had time even to think, my mother, despite being half my size, had grabbed my hand and begun sprinting up the hill with me in helpless tow. It turned out to be a device planted by the local mafia to remind the builder of his obligations and if it had exploded when we were passing the building thirty seconds earlier, we would have been turned to mincemeat. But the event had instantly pitched Mum backwards to the days of war, and I had never before even given it a thought.

  She was the oldest girl of a large family with an alcoholic father, and it fell to such young women to run the family home. Washing clothes in streams and specially built stone fountains fed by springs is hard graft in the furnace of a southern Italian summer, but working in tobacco fields as she did in her late teens and early twenties before leaving for the UK surpassed anything for brutal physical drudgery. Her father had been a committed fascist and believed Mussolini to be the great saviour. He had taken up arms abroad and, even more dangerously, at home, alongside the struggling Germans against the Americans and British. With the Resistance so active and the community split, his continuing dedication to the cause had to be guarded and cunning to keep his neighbours in the dark. Money was virtually non-existent, so the richly fertile land and climate was something of a redeemer, but it was an arduous, perilous existence. Mum’s life in London, in Fulham Court with its running water, bathroom and inside toilet was therefore something she could proudly view as the Everest of social improvement. Her regular employment as a cook had indeed rendered her wealthier than most of her kin back home. Despite the economic miracle of post-war Italy, when only Japan and Germany (is there something about losing wars?) surpassed its growth, the south of the country remained in the relative dark ages for some time. Mum never felt the need to return.

  Dad was from the larger town that sat only halfway up the mountain, Montecorvino Rovella. I think this is what led to the elopement: Dad’s lot were urban sophisticates compared to Mum’s hillbillies and they didn’t approve of his dalliance with her. Class divisions go beyond just rich and poor, something I don’t think has ever been properly understood by those who try to alleviate deprivation. All parts of society are sub-divided into almost countless sections, and if you sliced through it, it would have as many layers as a lasagne. My father’s dynasty, led by the patriarch Luigi, my grandfather, considered their family to be respected and of high status. Triumphant proclamations by my uncle years later revealed that this elevated self-image was on account of Nonno’s position as a local government officer and a distant cousin who had become an architect. But such things mattered in Montecorvino.

  In fairness, there was something a little feral about Mum’s clan. Their homes were ramshackle, in centuries-old narrow back streets that still had pigs in sties beneath them. One of her brothers had a miscellany of tiles on the stairs leading up to his house, fruits of the family’s gentle thievery. After several years, they had pocketed enough tiles from loose walls or surreptitiously placed majolica slabs from building site entrances into handbags to finish the stairs completely. But they were warm people, and we loved our uncles, especially Rolando, who had once run off with the circus to become a famous trapeze artist. He was enormously athletic and strong and could hang all four of us from his biceps. Another of my uncles, Isidoro, used Rolando’s strength to help him organise the annual fiera because, he said, it was “come avere quattro uomini”. And when Rolando wasn’t carrying half-ton loads on his back for his older brother, he was striking out across the mountains at dawn to collect a cornucopia of wild funghi to sell in the market. As far as I could tell, only he had the skills and knowledge to find such delicacies. Knowing which were safe to eat was the golden ticket of funghi-collecting talent so Rolando’s arduously harvested produce was valuable indeed. It is impossible to imagine the extraordinary variety of these mushrooms, which Zia Anna, Rolando’s wife, frequently served me. Some were like large steaks, slabs of perfumed fungus drenched in olive oil and dusted with Parmesan, rosemary and thyme; other’s were better fired in the oven with gorgonzola and honey, or wrapped in pasta to make perfect ravioli. It was the southern Italian meadow’s meat. Rolando epitomised the simple peasant, wandering the hills with his old, floppy straw hat to protect him from the fierce heat, smoking cigars that hung permanently from his lip. He played the village idiot to some degree, I feel, but with his film-star looks (once captured in an old photograph of him in circus costume), enormous physicality and a big heart, he was a bit of a hero to me. This is a man who had run off with the circus against his parent’s wishes at the age of fifteen. He was a trapeze artist who also did a solo stint on the high swing, possibly the most glamorous act under the big top, for goodness sake! And I had so loved the film with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis; Rolando was my Burt Lancaster. Can you imagine how I luxuriated in this story when in the playground? Nobody in the whole of London will have had an uncle who was a circus star.

  Having a family in Italy was quite a bonus when it came to holidays because as long as Mum could scrape together the train fare (cheaper than flying in those days) we would get a good long break in the Med. Well, sort of. The train journey was a two-day adventure in choked carriages and stifling heat, but an overnight passage through the Alps is still among the most exciting things I ever got to do as a child. Serge and I, sharing a couchette bed, would peer through the windows into the night, where we could still make out the moonlit crests of the mountains, their villages revealed by twinkling, distant lights. Strikes by railway workers would mean sitting stationary for hours on the tracks, blocked by a handful of disgruntled train drivers who would break out a picnic of bread, salami and home made wine, sharing it with passengers who would climb down from the carriages. At stations that were loud and chaotic, my brothers would leap from the train to fill containers with drinking water, and amid the pandemonium I would always fret that the train would leave without them. Once, panic and hysteria did break out in our compartment when Matt had failed to return as the train began its onward journey. With Mum flailing her arms in grief and despair, me copying her, and the whole carriage wondering if the Red Brigade was mounting a terrorist attack, Matt nonchalantly wandered into the compartment, explaining that he had merely got on further along the platform.

  Italy in the summer meant weeks of freedom in a potent and overwhelming landscape of heat, smells and wild untamed beauty. Even among the poorer members of the family there were lavish late lunches after days at the beach or mornings catching lizards in the first rays of the scorching sun. As a youngster I would ride the hot, dusty road between the two towns on a motor scooter, the air soaked with the pungent aroma of wild basil or the occasional open sewer. Halfway up the Pugliano road was a high stone bridge spanning a gorge, and I would stop there and imagine the days during wartime when, with suspicious, paranoid Germans patrolling, my grandfather would sneak beneath it on his way to deliver food to the inhabitants of his town. Inevitably, two soldiers caught him one night but were persuaded not to shoot him on the spot by the Fascisti party card he produced from his pocket. Nonno might have been a fascist, but he still wanted to feed his family. Mum also told me of young women who would be found dead at its base, apparent suicides but who more likely had been pitched from it by their ashamed fathers
and families because of illicit love affairs or unplanned pregnancy. Even today, unwed mothers or forbidden trysts cause a real stir in that part of Italy, but the disgrace it caused in the thirties and forties burned through society like acid. I often think it would be a great subject for a one-act verismo opera; Il ponticello della morte or something equally melodramatic. These were stories of death and dishonour, but they were thrilling.

  From the peak at Pugliano I could view, laid out before me, the hot, arid plain between the mountains and the ocean, the landscape filled with mile upon mile of tomato fields, from which my cousins would return every afternoon after picking box after box of pomodori, their backs blackened by a day in the brutal heat. The land would stretch out forever, and when the air was clear, you could see the waters of Spineta beach shimmering in the far distance. There was nothing impoverished about the geography of the place, and I can only ever have been enriched by days such as those.

  My time in Italy and the extended family I had there, as well as those who had come to the UK, would always influence the way in which I saw myself. I feel Italian to this day and, as a child, I felt it lent me an exoticism my contemporaries just did not possess. Paradoxically, we were curiosities in Italy too, where most of the town knew who the Inglese were. On the warm, humid evenings when the whole town would walk up and down the main street, parading themselves and gossiping about each other, I was always acutely aware of the looks we would get. The only place on earth that I can tolerate crowds is on the ‘passagiata’. In Italy, the throng of chattering, shouting people who stand in groups small and large to argue and gesticulate vehemently is one of the great entertainments known to man. For hours, I would listen to the undulating lyricism of the Neapolitan dialect, which manipulates the Italian language – already a beautiful thing – into an intricate, acrobatic linguistic feat. It’s pure music.