Noisy at the Wrong Times

by Michael Volpe

  One of my fondest childhood memories (although when I say memory, I mean it to be more visceral than that) is the sound of Italian women shrieking from balconies at their friends, their children or their husbands. Although a cacophony, it still retained a mellifluousness that was full and compelling, a street opera without accompaniment. The complexity of the Neapolitan dialect and the speed with which it is usually delivered gives the language a genuinely animal quality, and as I sat on benches and at café tables with my cousins, I would be gripped by its expression. My spoken Italian is drenched with a strong southern accent; not for me the formal eloquence of the Milanese or Florentine when the inventions and bastardisations of Nnapulitan are there to be washed around the mouth before bursting through the lips with the force of a punch. In the sphere of profanity, the dialect is extravagant, and as you might expect, I took to this with gusto. Swearing in Neapolitan is a cruel art form that spares nobody, where nothing is sacred. It is employed liberally, even in conversations of levity and friendship; a woman would think nothing of telling her brother to go fuck his mother. Neapolitans have words to describe complex realities too: “The rain is like fine hair”, which would properly be something like La pioggia è come capelli fini, is the much more brief and evocative “Shul’agaia”. I write the word phonetically because I have absolutely no idea how you might spell it. I am aware that much of this sounds dreadful and common and peasant-like, but that’s because it is. Southerners are frowned upon for such things, but to me it was wonderful and I could cuss, undetected, like no other child at Addison Gardens Primary School. In real song, too, the language is bewitching and Canzone Nnapulitan are, in the right hands, accompanied by guitar alone, a breathless balm for the soul.

  Suffice to say, I absorbed every second of my time in Italy and laid it all out for everyone to see whenever it was time to return to Addison Gardens school. As an inveterate show-off, I would come back with stories of a lifestyle lived, as opposed to a fortnight in a hotel, although very few if any of my friends could afford that. I could boast of meeting the big man who pushed a dustcart through the slender streets for the municipal authority and to whom everybody would mystifyingly doff their cap. On investigation, I was told that when not tipping the remains of everybody’s dinner into his wagon, he would be tipping those of the last person he’d whacked on behalf of the local Camorra into a ditch. Mafia hit men were as outlandish a concept as Luke Skywalker. And like him, you only ever saw them in the movies.

  But I digress.

  So it was that Mum struggled through life, playing her cards in order to merely stay in the hand. Sometimes, though, if you wait long enough, a better stack will land in front of you, and so it would transpire. When I was nine years old, my brother Serge, the third born of us four boys, was sent off to a school in the countryside and the talk was that I would join him there in due course. Being ‘sent’ somewhere was a significant event in our environment since the word was usually accompanied by another: ‘down’. We even knew the names of the beaks at Horseferry Road Magistrates Court who, with their picayune intellects and mammoth prejudices were most likely to give custodial sentences for the most piffling of crimes. The trick was not to get caught, or at the very most, to do only that for which a warning from the local bobby would be the limit. If policemen hate filling forms now, back in the seventies we were still waiting for the paperless office which, when it arrived, only succeeded in increasing paper a hundredfold. The only form a copper was interested in was that of the kid they had struggling in their grip, so better to deliver him to his front door with a telling off. It was still the age when trying to knock off a policeman’s helmet with a football represented the pinnacle of daring, and the idea of stabbing him couldn’t have been further from our minds. Still, Matteo, a recidivist who could hit a copper’s lid from forty yards, as well as have the watch off his wrist from the same distance, was recurrently dragged off to the local approved school or borstal. Even tolerant policemen have to take action eventually.

  I recall feeling especially concerned that I shouldn’t ever be committed to the supervision of ‘screws’ at Stamford House in the Goldhawk Road, with its high fences surrounding the playground and its heavy locks. I’d seen it frequently enough, smelled the tobacco-bleach mustiness of its corridors and experienced the chilling, lip-curled rigidity of its staff as I visited my brother. Being invited through a gate that needs unlocking, to see a sibling whose presence at home has become noticeably rare, demonstrates to even the youngest child that the place is out of the ordinary. His captors barked and marched around the rooms and environs like casually attired policemen, and they looked upon me, I was certain, as a future resident. They called Stamford House a remand home or a reform school or some such misnomer; what it really represented was short-stay prison for young teenagers, and character transformation was seldom the outcome. Its gates, grey close-meshed grills and contemptuous care were an option any of us might so easily have taken up. Stamford House or St Vincent’s (another such place) had space for any of us should we so desire it. Correction was the intention, but Matteo learned well the art of transgression behind those fences.

  FIGHT

  Woolverstone was different.

  Quite how different was made lavishly clear to me one afternoon as I returned to our Fulham estate and was met by the sight of a small crowd gathered in the space between the brick flowerbeds and bike sheds that dissected the blocks in which we all lived. Years later, in an act of vandalism, the council removed the flowerbeds but when we had first arrived in Fulham Court they were full of large rose bushes and shrubbery. Fulham was on the cusp of an affluent flowering that continues unabated to this day. Fulham Court was properly built on the site of an old brewery in the thirties, with old flettons and panelled sash windows, and there was no high rise – three floors at most. Among council housing, it was the pinnacle and not far off being elegant, but most of those it cosseted in faux opulence were far from that.

  It was a place where people had a sense of pride in their surroundings but had no idea how to make them, or themselves, much better. Throwing a bucket of disinfectant down the stairwell was keeping it clean for the old sofa that would soon follow it, teenage barbarism was still a marginal and rare concept and villains talked of respect and honour when they weren’t balancing half-pints of beer on their penises, as one celebrity criminal was wont to do in the local pubs. The estate was a genuine community at a period in time when such micro-societies did not hate and abuse themselves. Avarice was there, but it had not yet become rapacious, cold-blooded or murderous. Material aspiration included the kind of bike you could afford to buy your child; the zenith was the “Chopper”. We could never afford one (Mum scraped together enough to buy us a small-wheeled bike that we shared), but we could always borrow one for a few hours until the rightful owner, tearful and desperate, discovered who’d taken it and we would give it back. Depending on who it was, we might even convince him that we were doing him a favour by returning it, which meant we could always legitimately borrow it for a few more hours in the future. It was a great system. We had become quickly absorbed into this varied community, drifting, as boys do, towards others of like mind and outlook. We were at home among these people, it seemed.

  Half this population were there in the crowd on the day in question. Mobs, when engaged by exciting events, have about them a character all their own. They don’t keep their distance; they swarm in around the incident, seeking to get close to the drama; they hunch their shoulders and implore the subjects of their attention to greater outrages. The crowd that confronted me that day were in their element as they noisily encircled a commotion. I could tell by their intensity and unusual placement in between two blocks that there was a fight going on.

  Nothing could surpass a good scrap on the estate, violence prompted by love, trousers-down guilt or plain old machismo. They could be terribly visceral and frequently drew in a selection of secondary or tertiary combatants such as wives, sons, mist
resses. By the end of the drama, several people could be bashing the granny out of one another, screaming and screeching. They were physical soap operas that might run for ages, shifting around the estate, up and down stairwells into the play park or football yard, and those involved might retire to their flats, only to emerge again with weapons, dogs and reinforcements. The police would rarely be called. But if there was anything more spellbinding than a brawl among residents standing up for honour or pride, it was one that involved your mother doing the same. For at the heart of this tumult, in what my memory recalls as a cloud of dust, perms and expletives was indeed my mother, clawing, scratching and slapping furiously at another woman.

  My mother was small and Italian. Further description is probably superfluous. Her impossibly tiny waist, seen in old photos, had devolved responsibility for catching the eye to her bosom, which still managed to overshadow her midriff. Mum had succumbed to the seemingly inevitable physical fate that befalls most voluptuously beautiful Italian women. Yet, whilst svelte elegance may have deserted her from her first pregnancy onwards, even at a late age she still possessed the highest cheekbones and a face twenty years behind her number of birthdays. She had diminutive, compact hands of solid granite, honed by years of manual work, forever liberated from manicured elegance or delicacy, and her forearms were striped with the scars of burns acquired from sticking her hands in and out of too many ovens. Her fingers were robust and short; if she ever did decorate them, the digits looked like red-haired Russian dolls. Being slapped by her was akin to being shot. So as I watched the cat-fight I felt some sympathy with the woman now being clubbed by a furious Neapolitan. I also judged that Mum’s opponent should count herself lucky, for if there was a coffee table or a vacuum cleaner to hand, my mother would have beaten her with that.

  I don’t wish to over-amplify Mum’s propensity to violence since she wasn’t commonly found battering her neighbours, but her children presented a challenge similar to that of a lioness keeping her cubs from rushing off in all sorts of dangerous directions, and she was ever prepared to roar. Physically keeping children in check was rarely considered inappropriate in the seventies, either by society at large or the children being kept in check. Hers was a kind of behavioural editing, and we were the errant prose. The desperate necessities of life and the half-panicked need to feed and clothe us produced a fear for the safety and wellbeing of her offspring that she was frantic for us to understand. If she had to, she’d thrash it into us. Italian mothers are like that: acute worriers whose obsessive attachment to their children is matched only by the grim zeal with which they will protect them, even from themselves. Mum was a worrier from the moment of the conception of her first child, when, as the first cells divided, she grew an extra adrenal gland. The level of corporeal admonishment Italian mothers dish out is directly proportionate to the dedication they have towards their children; the more besotted by them they are, the more frantic they become when their behaviour is in danger of doing them harm.

  There were four of us brothers in the fatherless family home, and all were swift to invite punishment, but even swifter to seek to avoid it so Mum needed strategies and she had to be fast. If she couldn’t get herself across the room quickly enough to deliver a manual pounding, she was not averse to broadcasting in our direction whatever was within her reach. Her throwing arm was lethally accurate, and she would launch fusillades of shoes, chairs or ornaments across the room as we crashed through furniture and doors in a frenetic bid to escape the artillery that was exploding off the walls around us. Shoes in the seventies were dangerously synthetic, with thick platform soles of dimpled plastic that could travel through the air at speed. Orthopaedic sandals had wooden soles that could either be used to smack or, better still, cast across the room like pine nunchucks. The heavy glass ashtray on the coffee table was often used, but so was the coffee table itself, which meant you had to dodge both the lump of glass with blue bubbles in it as well as the table. I was forever grateful that we couldn’t afford a television with a remote control and the television itself was rented, so she dare not throw that, although she could have if she so desired. The New York Yankees would have taken options on Mum were they to spot her potential. She could curve any object a yard left or right, which meant half-open doors offered little protection; Mum would still hit you with a Mr Sheen tin even when pitched from the unseen corner of the lounge. A curious shortfall in her skill meant she found it harder to score a direct hit the closer she was to you because she threw things too hard. But then, if she was within a yard or so, she had other means at her disposal.

  Hands.

  I think the expression “heavy handed” was first coined for Mum. The strike of her hand didn’t as much sting as stun. Flesh wasn’t flushed with redness from a slap; it was in spasm from blunt force injury. From time to time, when her hands were sore from the latest burn or from hand-washing a full load of boys’ clothes, she might corner you as you sat on the sofa, plastic shoe in her grip, in which case the best defensive position was lying on your back with a foot in the air as the first point of defence, very much as a goalkeeper narrows the angle for an attacker. As she flailed away at you with a four-inch platform shoe, you were able to wave the foot about, forcing her to change her slant. After a while, she worked out a new and viciously rudimentary strategy: hit hard on the sole of the foot being proffered so willingly into her firing line. If there was anything more painful than wearing one of those plastic shoes, it was being hit on the foot by one of them, and even as a child, stung into a fit of wailing tears, that particular irony was never lost on me.

  Being the recipient of such tough love never seemed to alter our behaviour, but it probably kept its scope to reasonable proportions. Of course, so much of what we did was never tied to us and I will forever be thankful for that. And if we spent a lot of time avoiding a smack from our mother, we exhausted even more dodging one from various characters on the estate. The tattooed loon who was forever doing up his custom car, sullying the tarmac with oil for a ten metre radius from his front door, never found out it was me who smashed the windscreen of his prized asset.

  To this day, I have a curious passion for the flight of objects, a primitive pleasure in the arc of a ball or the flat hover of a Frisbee. It is why I can never play ball games with my kids in the garden because I will just have to smack the ball into the garden three doors down, just to see it fly. On one hot afternoon, bored and looking for trouble, I sent a stone sky high with my old tennis racquet, childishly gratified by the gorgeous ‘ping’ of the strings as the stone hit the sweet spot and I watched, transfixed, as it looped high into the air. After it reached its zenith and began the journey back to earth, I watched it drop behind the block, and for a brief second I was annoyed that my view of the stone’s aesthetic voyage had been interrupted. Half a second later I heard the unmistakeable sound of a windscreen being hit by a piece of rock travelling at terminal velocity. Then the shrieks rang out.

  “Oi!! What farkin caarnt did that, the farkin caarnts?!”

  Nothing my mother could deliver would have matched the punishment he would have dished out and I was sufficiently terrified as to nearly empty myself right there and then. I was already hidden in the stairwell when he, his pals and his large Alsatian careened around the corner looking for the culprit. To be honest he was probably expecting a sniper, so shockingly abrupt was the explosion of glass around him as he fiddled with wiring in the footwell. Some while later, on one of the Residents’ Association coach trips to Margate, I heard him tell this story, and he clearly retained a desire for homicidal revenge within his heart. I tried not to look guilty as his cohorts chorused their disapproval. Apparently, my act had necessitated his pilfering of another windscreen from a similar car.

  I was more moronic than malicious in my vandalism but like Frank Spencer in Some Mothers do ‘ave ‘em I could cause pandemonium in a split second of brainless curiosity. Like the time I set the entire adventure playground in Bishops Park ablaze by
lighting a mini fire to keep warm under the main climbing frame. Within seconds, the little fire had erupted into a conflagration that began to race up the thick telegraph poles supporting the structure. Four fire engines raced past me to the inferno as I ran sobbing from the park, and I spent months avoiding all contact with the outside world, absolutely sure guilt was written all over my face. For days, soot and minor burns were written all over my face. It meant hundreds of kids from Fulham and Hammersmith had to find something else to do while they rebuilt the playground. Helping a local milkman on his round lasted only a brief time. He’d asked me to drive the float around a small roundabout on a housing estate so that it would face the other way. I overdid the corner, and woke the entire estate as the float, riding on two outer wheels at 45 degrees to the road, emptied most of its bottled load onto the tarmac.

  Back at the matriarchal prizefight, there was no hiding for my mother’s opponent, but it was, as I said, her lucky day. Of course, as her set perm flicked from side to side in time with the blows that were crashing into the side of her head, she would not have seen it that way, but I could honestly attest to it. As it was, my mother appeared to have only those lethal hands and a shopping bag at her disposal. The bag, I noticed, was emptied of milk, pasta and sundry items and was lying crumpled on the ground, evidence that it had already been deployed in battle. Had the woman – whose retaliation merely consisted of gripping with despairing, white-knuckled fear to my mother’s coat – managed to break free of the rain of blows, Mum would have retreated behind a flowerbed with the shopping and begun to chuck it. The outcome would have been just as messy for the victim.