Happy Ant-Heap

by Norman Lewis

  The fair held at Forty Hill was to outclass all previous entertainments of the kind. On the night before, the village had been full of the iron noises of tractor engines crashing through the potholes, and by mid-morning on the twenty-fourth a great, garish encampment, so alien in this rustic setting, covered the summit of the hill and spread aggressively through the grey-green monochrome of hedgerows and fields. It was peopled by gypsies with fierce, handsome faces, flashing eyes and shrieking voices from whom the locals drew nervously away. At the entrance each child was presented with a Union Jack, but after a few perfunctory waves, these were tossed into the bushes.

  Blocking access to swings, roundabouts, coconut shies, hoopla stalls, fortune-tellers and gypsy boxers who could defeat local challengers with ease was a large tent bearing over its entrance the sign PEOPLES OF THE EMPIRE. Into this the villagers were firmly directed and here they were faced by a row of dark-complexioned men lined up on a platform, all in colourful—sometimes astonishing—garments, most baring their teeth in efforts to smile. Placards at their feet denoted their place of origin. Some of them had feathers stuck to bare chests, others wore tasselled loincloths, turbans or coolie straw hats, and carried clubs and spears. (In fact they were Lascars recruited from Bombay and shipped over to work on the London Docks, where they had been tracked down by Sir Henry’s agent and fitted out by a theatrical costumier to play their part.) The children giggled nervously at the sight, and a few of the younger ones showed signs of alarm. We were told to clap and we did, and the ‘people of the Empire’ bowed gracefully or waved.

  Beyond this bottleneck the fair was in vigorous action, and those who finally escaped joined others who had bypassed imperialistic propaganda by better knowledge of the geography of the grounds. Life in Goat Lane was a matter of leaden repetition, and the whole village, apart from the bedridden and a sprinkling of misanthropists, was here for that tiny taste of excess that would encourage them to tackle survival with a new burst of energy.

  The fair organs ground out their music, and the steam engines blew their exultant whistles. Despite the blatant cheating that went on, some of the cleverer villagers, whooping their triumph, won on the games. At first, inexplicably, the latest in roundabouts brought specially from its place of manufacture was not in use, with access to its grinning, wide-eyed horses debarred by a rope. A dozen of the elderly estate workers wearing ceremonial collars and ties lingered in its vicinity, and shortly the lights came on, a preliminary gurgling started in the organ pipes, a woman’s face appeared in the window of the little ticket office, the rope was removed and it was clear that action was about to begin. Two men approached carrying an armchair, which they placed with its back to the roundabout, and with that Sir Henry came on the scene and took his seat in the chair. He was wearing his decorations and a grey bowler with a strong curve in its brim. By this time the old men had formed a line and now they moved forward one at a time to take Sir Henry’s right hand in a gentle squeeze and mutter a greeting suited to the moment. Sir Henry smiled and stuttered his thanks, then turned away to climb the steps of the roundabout, hoist himself up on a horse and begin his solitary ride. The crowd applauded, Sir Henry raised his hat, the roundabout began its rotation, while the organ wheezed into ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, still the anthem of moments such as this.

  Such entertainments had to be paid for, although prices, subsidised by Sir Henry, were low. No charge was made for teas, and there was a bun fight for the children, also free. This could have been the last survivor anywhere of a traditional revel providing for the young a joyful escape from plain food and much amusement for those who looked on.

  The bun fight at Forty Hill was held in the stable yard, where three trestle-tables had been lined up for children momentarily released from disciplines that would imprison them again at the end of the day. Bun fight was an accurate description of what was to happen. The buns brought up from the bakery in large wicker baskets were tipped out on the table tops, and the children scrambled and pretended to fight for them. Sir Henry and several landowning friends invited to be present found these scuffles picturesque and were ready with their cameras. I remembered a previous occasion when the then prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, who had been at Harrow with Sir Henry, had turned up to applaud the maintenance of a custom so deeply rooted in our history. This year the feeling among the organisers was that, due to the dispirited quality of the times, the thing was calming down. The children fought each other on the table tops as tradition demanded, and cheeks were scratched and hair pulled, but it was a tame affair, and no blood flowed.

  The women of the Primrose League who had inspired such antipathy among the housewives of Goat Lane were present. They made neat piles of the remnants of demolished buns before clearing them away and smilingly righted mugs that had been knocked over, refilling them with lemonade made from crystals of citric acid.

  Jesus said of the poor ‘they are always with you’. In Forty Hill it was the rich who were rarely out of sight.

  1996

  A Mess of a Battle

  THE SIGNING OF THE armistice that put Italy out of the war was announced from the Municipality of Naples at 6.30 p.m. on 8 September 1943 to a large but remarkably inert crowd assembled in expectation of the news. The ringing of hand-bells on occasions of public rejoicing had been ordered by the fascist state. This was left to a minor functionary, who did so in a lackadaisical fashion, and an attempt at spontaneous dancing in a nearby side-street soon petered out. Maresciallo de Lucca of the carabinieri listened to the announcement and to the dispirited murmurings of the crowd and recorded their reactions in his notes in shorthand of a kind used by the police, which in this case took the form of four letters: PVDP, translatable as ‘No acclamation. Cries of give us bread.’ He returned to his office in the Piazza Dante, and in a matter of minutes a telephone call from the carabinieri colonel commanding the area came through. He ordered de Lucca to leave immediately for the area south of Salerno, remove the files from a list of police stations and return with them to Naples. In addition he was to visit the shrine of San Gennaro at Santa Maria della Fossa, take possession of the sacred relics comprising several finger bones of the martyr and arrange for them to be placed in safe keeping in Naples.

  De Lucca found the order baffling; nevertheless, he dashed off in his car, emptied the police stations listed of all records of their transactions, then sped on to Santa Maria, where he arrived on the scene too late, for the caretaker had deserted his post and thieves had already decamped with the precious relics. Turning back for Naples, he heard a warning come through on his car radio of a total curfew on all forms of travel. Remembering old friends who were staying in their holiday cottage on the beach at Paestum, he went there to ask for a bed, and spent the last hours of the day in pleasant company, playing cards and discussing theories of perpetual motion, in which all were interested. They were late to bed, and at dawn de Lucca got up, left the others asleep and went down to the beach a few hundred yards away, in the hope of being able to collect shellfish among the half-submerged rocks. Despite the brilliance of the morning, his eye was caught by what seemed a low sash of mist extending from one end of the horizon to the other. For the time of year the mist was exceptionally dense, giving an impression almost of solidity, and studying it more intently it seemed that indistinct objects were forming in it. Within minutes these vague shapes took on edge and solidity, until they become identifiable as ships.

  A month later, while on an official visit to the carabinieri headquarters in Naples, I met de Lucca, an engaging man who described this experience, which he had never quite recovered from, in person. ‘I stopped trying to count all the ships,’ he said. ‘They were spread out for miles. I thought: what can they be doing? There’s nothing for them here.’ Presently lights twinkled among this grey confusion. This de Lucca interpreted as naval gunfire, and turning his attention as if by instinct to the profile of mountains over the beach, he saw a house plucked from a distant village like
a tooth from an old jaw.

  He went back and awakened his friends. ‘I think we’re being invaded,’ he told them.

  At 5.30 a.m. on the day when de Lucca had watched the ships take shape in the mist, ten British Intelligence Corps members, including myself, were studying the details of the distant Italian coast from one of them. We had sailed from Algeria in the Duchess of Bedford, carrying the entire HQ staff of the American Fifth Army, and had dropped anchor some ten minutes by landing craft from Paestum beach. Our ignorance of what awaited us there matched de Lucca’s as to the reason for our coming. We had been told of the armistice, but otherwise all was hazard and conjecture. Supposedly the Italians were out of the war, but where were the Germans? Were they still present in southern Italy—and if so, in what strength? A lecture delivered by the fleet’s Chief Intelligence Officer the previous evening had ended with the startling admission, ‘We know virtually nothing.’ This confession did nothing to inspire confidence in the outcome of what awaited us. In addition it was known that the Fifth Army was composed largely of troops who had not seen action and was led by generals whose first taste of battle this was to be. The majority of the officers had taken comfort in a belief that the landing would be carried out without opposition, but this illusion was hastily jettisoned when the first landing craft to approach the shore came under heavy fire. For those of us still on the ship, waiting to climb into a boat, Paestum lit by the first rays of the rising sun appeared as a scene from antiquity: three Greek temples sparkled distantly among pinewoods backed by a low crenellation of mountains. Over these a slender column of smoke arose from a village that had attracted speculative fire from the ships.

  Twelve hours passed before we were finally put ashore among American soldiers by the thousand, wandering without direction in aimless, bewildered groups. There was an unnatural silence about these men drifting through the shadows, broken rarely by the low murmur of voices. An MP jeep on the lookout for wanderers or men who had lost themselves crawled softly by, its tyres crunching on the sand. A single shot spread sharp echoes and startled movement. It was a scene imprinted with fear.

  For us it was an occasion not wholly free from risk. We had been warned on the ship that our British uniforms might seem strange and even alarming to young soldiers exposed to foreign surroundings for the first time, and we had been advised to have ourselves kitted out by the quartermaster as soon as we were ashore. There was the matter of the password, too. Here and there sentries had been posted and one suddenly sprang out of a bush, rifle aimed, to demand a password, of which we knew nothing. It came close to being a lucky escape, and at this point the essential problem seemed to be to eliminate the hazards of our first night on Italian soil. We therefore chose a dense wood in the vicinity, burrowed deep into the underbrush and almost instantly fell asleep. Some time later I was awakened by movements through the bushes. Listening, I picked up a low mutter of voices, among which I could clearly distinguish German words, forming the opinion in a drowsily relaxed fashion that these could only belong to the enemy, on the lookout, as we had been, for a place to pass an undisturbed night. Soon the voices died away, and I slept again.

  Early next morning we reported for duty at what was pointed out to us as the Fifty Army HQ’s staff tent. We were carrying papers addressed to the Staff Officer (Intelligence) describing the urgency and importance of our mission, but we discovered that neither this officer nor any other senior member of the HQ staff was present, and after diplomatic questions put to the captain who saw us, we learned that the whole staff from General Mark Clark down were still aboard the Ancona, ‘where there was more space’. According to our briefing in Oran, we were to instruct senior officers, who in many cases would be seeing action for the first time, in the relevance and importance of security. Our suggestion was that we might be taken out to the Ancona to contact the Intelligence Officer there without delay. The captain’s reception of this request reflected both harassment and boredom. ‘We’re under pressure here, as you can see,’ he said. ‘You want to be of use right now, maybe you should give a hand unloading supplies.’

  We looked down upon the long, thin trail of humanity wandering like ants through the sand dunes down to the water to pick up their burdens and return. Sergeant-Major Dashwood explained the urgency with which 312 Field Security Section had been brought up, at the insistence of General Clark himself, from the depths of Algeria to provide safeguards essential to the opening of the Italian campaign, but listening to him the captain’s expression changed to hardly concealed hostility. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘you are free to come and go as you please, and to occupy yourselves as you think fit.’ It was the last we saw of him, and we accepted the fact that we were now on our own. Nevertheless, perhaps out of habit we were unable to stifle an interest in what was going on. The Fifth Army HQ troops fixed up field kitchens, knocked together rudimentary sleeping quarters for officers and other ranks, dug latrines and unloaded boats. A mammoth pile of typewriters and filing cabinets began to accumulate, but no weaponry, artillery, ack-ack guns, mortars or even rolls of barbed wire were reaching us from a marine horizon glutted with uncountable ships. But above all—and far more alarmingly—where were the tanks?

  Despite the limitless chaos, D-Day at Paestum had gone as well as expected, but two miles or so to the south on what was called Blue Beach the situation was less promising. A landing in the face of machine-gun and mortar fire had produced a number of casualties and a master-sergeant to whom I chatted was taking a number of corpses back to one of the ships. They had been laid out in the bottom of a boat, their faces covered with clean napkins, arms fully extended and thumbs along trouser creases, as if in preparation for an inspection by Death. This boat, like all the others in the vicinity, had come in laden with office equipment, which now formed high piles all along the waterfront. Once again, the boat had brought with it no weapons.

  The German presence in the area was now guaranteed, although there was still no precise information as to where they would be dug in, awaiting the Fifth Army’s advertised attack. As there was nothing better to occupy me, I took one of the section’s motorcycles and rode some three miles along the beach in a northerly direction, through fine coastal scenery, past tamarisks growing under ancient Mediterranean oaks, with a single glimpse of a water-buffalo of the race imported by the Greeks, knee-deep in a swamp.

  I stopped briefly to inspect the empty seaside house which, from my subsequent conversation with de Lucca, was clearly the one occupied by his friends on the night of our invasion, and then again at the point where the Sele River runs into the sea. Shortly before my arrival a squad of engineers had blown up a bridge a hundred yards away carrying both the north-south road and railway line over the river; at the moment I drew up they were finishing off boxes of K-rations and taking snapshots of each other. I asked the engineers why they had blown up the bridge and was told that it was to hold up any kraut advance. My friend the master-sergeant had given me a rough map of the bridgehead which included this area. ‘But it’s the British sector,’ I said. ‘What would the krauts be doing here?’

  ‘Search me,’ was the reply.

  I showed one of the engineers the master-sergeant’s map. ‘Going north as far as you can see is British,’ I said. ‘All the way to Salerno.’

  ‘I wasn’t told that. I guess the guy who gave me the order didn’t know, either. So maybe there’s no one here. Maybe it’s empty. I guess the British were waiting for us to do something about it and we were waiting for them.’

  ‘Let’s hope the enemy hasn’t heard anything about this,’ I said.

  On the second day, in the hope of making our stay more comfortable, we moved into one of the small farmhouses abandoned in the vicinity. The symbols of panic seemed more poignant in these humble surroundings. The first huge crashing salvoes from the fleet had demolished the carefully calculated order of this shrine of domesticity. A single window had been blown out, a child snatched from its cot had dropped a doll, and
a pair of crushed spectacles lay on the floor. Country people with lives organised to defend this low level of prosperity were known in these parts as famiglie di una vacca—one-cow families—and in this case, sure enough, the sole cow had been sacrificed to the invaders’ hunger for fresh meat, and it lay within sight of the back door, a haunch hacked away.

  We returned to camp in time for the first alarm call to reluctant battle as a German plane broke like a shining white splinter from behind the cliff and curved, in a manoeuvre appearing calm, leisurely and even beautiful, to drop a single bomb among the ships. Through our master-sergeant friend we learned that a landing strip had already been cut to enable our fighters to fly in from Sicily and take on the intruders. Unfortunately the first of these, a Spitfire, fell victim to friendly fire while attempting to land later that day.

  With the vision of the German FW 190 skimming over the cliff-top above us, all illusions entertained about this battle were at an end. Wild talk of Naples in four days and Rome by the beginning of the month was silenced and in its place defeatism began to spread. Two or three old soldiers, who had seen action in North Africa and found themselves among these raw beginners from Kansas and Wisconsin, realised that any Allied attack when launched would meet with the resistance of one of the best-armed, most sophisticated and tenacious forces in the West. There were even pessimists ready to suggest that far from the predicted military walkover, the Fifth Army might find itself involved in a defensive battle. These doubts strengthened later in the day when attacks by a single plane were replaced by those carried out by a five-plane squadron arriving overhead punctually at intervals of one and a half hours.