I remember that, as we sat outside eating, for no reason it started to rain. We retreat inside while a waiter rescues our food. The waiter is amusing; he apologizes for the rain and says even though some has settled on the food, there’ll be no extra charge.
Seated inside, Toni suddenly says to me, “You know, in two day you leave me.”
My mood changed, was it that soon? I was so impervious to days that each one came as a shock. Why wasn’t time timeless?
“Toni,” I said, “I’ll come back as soon as I can and I’ll write as much as I can.”
That’s followed by us just looking at each other in silence.
“I miss you very much, Terr-ee.”
She looks so small and helpless; I feel so small and helpless.
“I tell you what, we have some champagne, yes?”
She pauses reflectively. “OK,” she says.
The restaurant hasn’t any champagne. “Tedeschi hanno bevuto tulto,” says the waiter. Would we like Asti Spumante? Yes, when in Rome.
When midnight strikes in some campanile, we toast each other. We’d done it so often before, but this time it’s a little more meaningful – our sand is running out. In the taxi back, I sit with my arm around her, her head on my shoulder (sounds like a transplant). I hum her favourite tune, ‘La Valzer di Candele’…We tiptoe into the apartment and I instinctively wait for my mother’s voice, “Where have you been at this time of night.” No, it’s Signora Fontana asking is that Toni. Yes, so goodnight.
∗
The day is suit-fitting day. When we arrive at the tailor’s, a man is leaving wearing a terrible suit that appears to have been made by a blind man. No, no, no, says the little tailor, he didn’t make that. It’s only his father-in-law visiting to collect the alimony. My suit is all ready on a hanger. Will I step into the cubicle and change? The suit is a great success; I can’t wait to get outside for a photograph.
Oh, yes, this is a Robert Taylor suit. Quick! I must be seen walking about the town. What’s the best street? Ah, yes, driver, the Via Veneto and step on it. When we arrive it’s midday and the morning promenade is coming to an end. Nevertheless Toni and I and the suit walk up and down, then down and up. Toni and I and the suit sit at a restaurant and Toni and I and my suit have an ice-cream. All Rome must be talking about me. My suit is now smoking a cigarette. Toni is totally bemused: is this a man or a little boy she’s going out with, or is it a suit? If only they could see me in Brockley now, standing outside the Rialto Cinema waiting for Lily Dunford. My picture would be in the Kent Messenger.
By mid-afternoon I think Rome has seen enough of the suit, so we return to the apartment. Gioia opens the door to my suit, she doesn’t seem to notice it’AW She’ll have to be killed. I have a good reason to take my suit off: Gioia has to go out shopping. It’s the last chance of Toni and I being alone. I draw Miss Toni’s attention to this by making her take her clothes off and getting into bed, where we foreclose on the world. There if a Father Christmas. He was early this year. However, though it was divine making love to her, it lost a bit by Toni breathlessly telling me all the time to ‘hurry up’ as Gioia was due back. I did my best, finishing in under twenty-three minutes – beating Gioia by five and my own record by ten. With Gioia fiddling at the door with the keys, I rush madly back to my room, just slamming the door on my bare bum in time. Worn out by pressurized love-making, I have a siesta. It’s a warm afternoon but nice and cool in the room. I can hear Gioia clinking and clanking in the kitchen…
I awake in the evening to the sounds of Signora Fontana and Lily talking. As this is my last evening here, they want me to have dinner ‘a casa’. They know my love of pasta and have prepared spaghetti Neapolitan. Toni wants her mother to see ‘the suit’, so I put it on and do an ‘entrance’ into the sitting-room. Oh, yes, her mother thinks it’s very smart. But should the flies be undone? Oh, dear. Today is Signora Fontana’s wedding anniversary. She shows me a photo album: that’s her as a young woman on holiday with her mother and father in Savona. Did I know her mother was French? No? Well, I did now. I see grinning photos, from her mother-in-law grinning in Ravenna to her husband grinning outside his soap factory in Abyssinia in 1936. It was possibly one of the best records of grinning I had seen.
We dine to a mixed conversation about the world: things aren’t getting any better. I agree, I know my thing isn’t getting any better. Shoes are very expensive, “Troppo caro,” says Signora Fontana. Has she thought of bare feet? They must be economical. The Communist leader Togliatti is a very dangerous man. “He want revolution in Italy,” says Toni. So a ragbag of conversation. Gradually, I’m left out of it altogether as they all jabber heatedly in Italian. As the conversation swung from Toni at one end and her mother at the other, I must have looked like a spectator at a tennis match. I call out the score: “Fifteen, love…thirty, fifteen…” They ignore me, but it’s fun.
Dinner over, they listen to the news in Italian on the radio as I sip a glass of white wine. After the news comes Italy’s premier dance band led by Angelini. Lily wants to know if I can ‘jitter bugger’. Try me. We move back the chairs a little and Lily and I ‘cut a rug’. She’s very good, I am not. Toni and Mother watch on with amusement. Gioia looks on in amazement. The phone rings, Lily hurls herself at it: it’s him! She is running her finger up and down the wall. The evening ends with us playing snap. How delightfully simple it was, the simplest of all was me…
∗
Comes the morning of my final departure. I put on my CSE uniform for the journey, then comes amnesia, folks. I remember that I made the return journey by military lorry, a three-tonner returning empty to a depot in Salerno – but as to why and how I managed to get a lift on it, I can’t remember. I’ve racked my brains, I’ve even racked my body and legs, but to no avail. Anyhow. There I was, saying goodbye to the Fontanas: they all cry, even Gioia, the maid. So with one suitcase and a much-reduced bankroll, I depart.
I depart to amnesia because where I picked up the lorry is lost for ever. However, I remember the journey back. The driver was a north-countryman, he hardly said a bloody word all through the journey. I sat there in silence with Rome falling farther and farther behind. It was a hot, dusty day and I dozed frequently in the cab. When we reach the Garigliano plain, I can see Colle Dimiano where I was wounded. It all seemed so unreal now, but I think I left part of myself up there for ever; after the incident, I was never the same.
Suddenly, as we near Naples, the creep driver seems to speak. “Do you know what time is?”
“Yes,” I say. Period. I’d make the bugger suffer.
He pauses and repeats, “Do you know what time is?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, what is it then?”
Finally, I tell him. He nods his head in acknowledgement, his vocabulary expended. He drops me at the bottom of the Via Roma. I delighted in saying goodbye. “Tatar, you little bundle of fun,” I said.
I’m in the welter of the Neapolitan rush hour and garlic. I manage to get a taxi back to the hotel. The old fragile porter grabs my bag; he’ll take it to my room. He strains and staggers to the lift. I have to wait for him, I have to help him into the lift where he stands gasping for breath. He must be training for a coronary. On my floor, he staggers behind me. I offer to carry it. “Mo, no signore, tutto a posto,” he’ll just have a little rest in the corridor. I go ahead and wait in my room – poor old bugger, he’s doing it in anticipation of a tip or death, whichever comes first. I give him two hundred lire – it’s a good tip. “Mille grats, signor,” he says in Neapolitan dialect and shuffles out the room. I put through a phone call to Toni. After a delay it comes through.
“Hello, Toni.”
“Terr-ee,” she gasps, “my Terr-ee, you go all right Napoli?”
“Yes, I go all right in Napoli.”
“Ow lovlee ‘ear your voice, mio tesoro. I miss you much already. Why you go away?”
“What are you doing?”
“Just now we have dinner.
Tell me you love me.”
“I love you.”
A little more of that type of chat and we finish. Yes, I promise I’ll phone tomorrow. No, I won’t go out getting drunk with Mulgrew. No, I won’t go near other girls. Now, where is that man Hall. I buzz his room.
“Oos that?”
“Me, Spike. Are there any gigs going? I’m at a loose end till the boat sails.”
No, no gigs tonight. There’s one tomorrow. Do I mind playing in a sergeants’ mess? Well as long as it isn’t too big a mess.
“Wot you doing tonight?”
“I’m not doing anything tonight.”
“Well, good luck with it,” he says.
I met him in the dining-hall for dinner. Has he seen Mulgrew or Bornheim lately? Yes, he’s done a couple of gigs with them. What about the Dominion Monarch and the sailing date? That’s all fixed, I have to collect my ticket from Major Ridgeway. So the end is in sight: it’s goodbye Italy and hello Deptford.
∗
The remaining days were very very boring. So I won’t bore the reader. I do a couple of band gigs on guitar with Hall, Bornheim and Mulgrew at military establishments. I collect my boat ticket and passport and I buy a few trinkets for my mother and father. Most days I spend in my room reading books from the hotel library. The very last one was the story of San Michele by Axel Munthe, a most moving story about Capri.
The night before I sail, Jimmy Molloy checks into the hotel. He’s booked on the same ship as me. He wants to have a night out; he knows a good officers’ nightclub on the seafront. OK, I’ll come with him and wear the suit. It’s the Club Marina, ‘Officers Only’. We show our CSE passes. Down a corridor to a large room with a central dance floor, where a good Italian band are playing the music of our time. There are hostesses at the bar: no, Jimmy, I’m not interested. Well, he is. He goes over and chats to one and brings her back to our table. Ah, good, wait till she sees my suit. She is pretty stunning, small, petite, saturnine-dark with a pair of giant olive eyes.
“This is Francesca,” says Molloy.
“Piacera,” I say.
She throws me a dazzling white-toothed smile. More than that, as the evening progresses I realize that she fancies me and my suit. “I fink I’ve picked a loser here,” chuckled Molloy. Do I want to take her over? No no no, Jimmy, I am promised to another. He gives me a disbelieving look. “Come on, a bit on the side won’t hurt.” I told him I had no bits on my side, all my bits were at the front, so I’d be the wrong fit for her. However it’s nice flirting with her.
The lights go down: a spotlight on the stage illuminates an Italian MC in a white jacket. “Laddies and Gintilmin, nower oura starer of thee cabareter, Gina Escoldi.” He points left, the band strikes up and a ballerina on points pirouettes on the the floor and sings ‘a hubba hubba hubba’ with red-hot accompaniment. She has a coarse croaky voice, loaded with sex – all the while standing on points. It was a head-on collision between jazz and ballet, but very successful. She goes down big with what is in the majority, an American officer audience.
At the end of the evening Molloy says, “You takin’ this bird or not.” I decline, cursing the fact that I have a conscience. “One day,” he laughs, “you’ll regret this decision!” What did he mean ‘one day’, I was regretting it now. While he offs with her, I off to the hotel and bed. While I lay there, my mind was going through the long years away from home. Had I really been in action in North Africa? Had I really taken part in the Tunis Victory Parade? Did I land at Salerno? It all seemed unreal, like a distant dream ending up in the most distant dream of all – Toni and me on Capri. Would the sun ever shine like that again?
∗
On departure morning I awake and, first thing, put in a call to Toni. We say our final goodbyes – tears on the phone from Rome. At breakfast, I meet Jimmy Molloy. “That bird last night, what a con. When we get to ‘er place, she just kisses me goodnight then pisses off. I think it was all your bloody fault, Milligan.” Smugly, I say, yes, it undoubtedly was.
Our ship sails at midday. We have to start boarding at 10.30. We take a taxi to the quay where the Dominion Monarch awaits. We both have first-class passages – I’m nominated a cabin on the port side. A young English steward carries my bag and calls me sir. It’s a fine, single-berth cabin with a porthole for looking out – or, if you hang on the outside, for looking in. “If there’s anything you want, sir, just ring the service button.” I locate the Purser’s Office where a grim-faced staff change my lire into sterling, which looks much less. Up on the promenade deck I find Molloy and I get him to take my photo.
The ship is alive with bustle, with sailors shouting yo ho ho and pouring hot tar down the hatches. At midday the gangplank is removed, the ship gives a long mournful blast on the hooter and a tug starts to manoeuvre us out to sea. Molloy and I stand at the rail. Slowly, the great ship puts on speed, the Italian mainland recedes into the distance, finally lost in a haze. It’s over: it’s goodbye Italy, goodbye Toni and goodbye soldier.
On board SS Dominion Monarch from Naples to the UK.
EOF
Memoirs 06 - Peace Work Page 22
