Children of The Sun

by Jonathan Green

  These men are afraid of what they are doing now. Why else do they try to move their funds out to America? Why do they try to prevent the organisation of the workers? Why have they formed the Fronte Padronale—the association of industrialists, landowners and merchants, which is pledged to arrest all movement for better wages and working conditions? Why have they split the unions into two groups—top management and lower employees? Why do they nurse the one and keep the other down to breadline subsistence? Because they are afraid.

  Here in the South they build high walls about their villas and fit them with electric gates and keep a wolf-hound chained in the garden, to keep out the beggars and the poor.

  You and I live in reasonable comfort with an open garden and a gate that any tradesman can vault over. We are not afraid, because by evolution and common effort and the spread of social principles we have achieved a reasonably balanced, democratic society.

  In the Mezzogiorno there are few who are willing to work for democratic progress, because there are many who don’t believe in it. They know how to achieve it, but they refuse the means at their disposal. More than this, they fight actively against it.

  They are intelligent men, yet they want to put the clock back. They may well succeed. The Fronte Padronale is the best way to get the Fronte Popolare back to Italy. The Communists don’t have to work in Italy. They can sit back and let the signori work for them. Using American dollars!

  CHAPTER NINE

  ONE FINE spring day I drove into Naples to visit a big industrial concern. I went at the personal’ invitation of the family which owns it. They had heard I was writing this book. They were aware of my strictures on the skin game of Italy. They did not challenge my findings. They did ask, however, that, in fairness to themselves and to others like them, I visit the Naples factory and see what had been done towards the application of modern social principles and what might be done by others with good will and good economic sense.

  The Cirio Company is one of the largest canning enterprises in Europe. Its products are exported all over the world. It has a big plant in Argentina. It operates factories in the South and in the North. It has farms at Salerno and Mondragone and elsewhere. Its headquarters are in Naples.

  One of the most interesting things about it for the purposes of this book is that the majority of the shares are all held by one family—the Signorini. All the decisions therefore have the seal of what is virtually a family council. In a country like this with a pool of two to three million unemployed, the company could function as a tight little autarchy without regard to social principles. Instead, its worker relationships, like its production-line techniques, bear comparison with the most evolved organisation in America, Great Britain and Australia.

  The Naples factory sprawls over a dozen blocks on both sides of the road in the notorious San Giovanni district. It is within a stone’s throw of the worst hovels on the Via Marittima. It is right in the centre of some of the poorest and oldest tenement houses in the city. Few areas of Naples can compare with this for poverty, unemployment and abject misery. The observer has, therefore, the benefit of natural contrast.

  Both factory areas are enclosed by high stone walls and the entrances are barred by heavily reinforced gates which are opened only to permit the passage of necessary traffic.

  My guide was the American wife of the senior brother of the family. As we drove in through the main gate, a guard saluted smartly and motioned us to a parking space in a wide asphalt courtyard. Another guard rushed to open the door and we were conducted with ceremony to the door of the administrative building. We were introduced to two of the brothers Signorini and to the son of our American friend.

  We were shown a ground plan of the organisation—its farms, its production centres, its distributing organisation. It was impressive and it looked efficient. A tour of the factory area confirmed the impression. The machinery was modern, the production methods were as good and in some cases better than those I had seen in other parts of the world. The workers wore clean uniforms and they seemed to work happily. All of which meant very little to my investigation. A food processing plant has to be clean. It has to be efficient if it wants to make money in a competitive market. Most production-line workers look intent on their jobs. In Naples they have to look that way because there are 200,000 waiting to take their place.

  What interested me most of all was what the company was doing for its staff.

  There are some 1500 permanent workers in the San Giovanni factory. This number is more than doubled in the picking season. Necessarily the majority of the workers on the processing lines are women. This again is common to food plants throughout the world. Many of the women are married because the company makes it a policy to give employment to married women in a city of so many workless men.

  You take it for granted in Naples that all married women have children. The children of the Cirio workers are the first thought of the company.

  After our inspection of the plant, we were taken in hand by the personnel manager, who drove us out of the plant into a small side street. Here the Signorini brothers had founded an elementary school for the children of their workers. Before I went in, I had prepared myself for yet another repetition of the dusty, shop-worn look of Italian schools. I didn’t get it. I found myself in a modern building with bright airy classrooms, freshly-painted walls; spotless floors and modern teaching equipment. The children’s faces shone with cleanliness and health. All were dressed in freshly laundered smocks with white collars and bows of different coloured ribbons to indicate their classes. The teachers were bright-eyed young women, each with an Elementary Teacher’s Diploma. The Directress was a senior officer of the Education Department. I looked carefully at the exercise books and the class projects. They were in immaculate order and of a uniformly high standard.

  The classrooms were ranged around a large central room, the school dining room. Here, each day, the children were given a hot midday meal in accordance with a dietary chart prepared by the food chemists of the company. At the mid-morning recess each child was given a glass of fresh pasteurised milk.

  The kindergarten room contained a small but elaborate stage and from the window of this room I could see a wide open playground with monkey-bars and roundabouts of tubular steel. By any standard, the school for the Cirio children was first-class.

  The children are taken into the kindergarten at the age of three and are given the full elementary course of five grades. All the expenses of the school—textbooks, uniforms, daily meals, regular medical attention, the salaries of the teachers and the stipend of a permanent chaplain—are paid by the company. Only the Directress is a salaried employee of the Comune.

  When I looked at the bright rooms and the bright faces, when I recalled that many of these children lived in the overcrowded tenements of San Giovanni, I could not help comparing them with the other children I had seen—the scrabbling mites on the rubbish heaps, the babes eaten by flies in the baracche, the child-workers in the back streets off the Via Roma.

  I thought of the 50,000 others who had no schools at all. I wondered why the other big companies of Naples hadn’t taken up the idea. It seemed to me a much more profitable investment than the hush-money paid to Communist funds to call off a railway strike.

  I remembered, too, the problem of Don Borrelli: what to do with his boys after they had finished their sketchy elementary education. I put this one to the personnel manager.

  “We are one company,” he said. “What we do must be for our own people first. It is our idea that when these children are educated, we send the bright ones to technical school and later absorb them into our own employment. We cannot do more. Already this project is a heavy charge on the company’s revenue. We need not do it. With so many unemployed, we could fill our staff ten times over, but the Signorini family have a social conscience. They are good Italians. They are good Neapolitans.”

  After what I had seen, I was prepared to believe that. But there was more t
o come.

  The personnel manager piled us in the car again and drove us back to the main factory. We went up a flight of stairs and found ourselves in a large and airy room which looked like the nursery of a large maternity hospital. The walls were pastel-tinted; the new venetian blinds made a pleasing colour contrast. There were about thirty cribs in the room, each furnished with fresh linen and bright baby blankets, each with its own active little occupant. They squalled or slept or chewed their fists as healthily as any children in the more fortunate countries of the world.

  There were three maternity sisters in attendance, each fully trained in obstetrics and infant welfare. There was a row of spotless porcelain baths and a shining modern kitchenette with a steriliser and cooking equipment.

  When a factory mother returned to work after her confinement, the babes were taken in charge by the nursery and the mothers came at fixed times to breast-feed them.

  The nursing mothers go straight to a feeding room where they wash and change into clean white smocks provided by the company. The children are brought to them from the nursery and a nurse superintends the feeding, in case supplementary diet is required. At no time are the mothers allowed to enter the nursery itself.

  Apart from its value to mother and child, this system provides the best piece of education in cleanliness and baby welfare that I have yet seen in Naples. Both mothers and babies return at night to the crowded tenements of the bassi, and their good fortune is the envy of those who have neither work nor education nor opportunity to offer to their children.

  Across the street from the factory is a club provided by the company for Cirio workers, with radio, television and reading material. Further away is a large sports arena and the living and training quarters of the professional soccer team maintained by the company.

  All in all it adds up to a solid social achievement comparable to what Olivetti has done in his own field. But it does not end here. The company maintains its own farms for the improvement of orchard and dairy products. Workers on these farms are provided with model houses fully furnished at a rental scaled to their earning capacity in the company. There are pension schemes and generous cover for incapacity arising out of sickness or accident.

  In the red belt of San Giovanni, the work of this company is a shining example of what free enterprise can do to lift the living standards of the depressed South. It is also a bleak reproach to the many others who might do the same but so far have done nothing.

  My final note is made with no hint of malice. The gates of this workers’ paradise are guarded by men with loaded pistols: an unavoidable necessity since the store rooms and the freezing chambers of the Cirio Company are stacked with food products, while half a mile away are the grim hovels where people sleep fifteen in a room and women sell themselves to buy food for their children.

  * * *

  By the time I came to set my notes in order for this chapter, I was tired and irritable. I wanted to make a constructive book, to point to the good things as well as the bad. To show where reforms had begun in the South and the help they needed to stimulate their growth. Too many writers—too many Italian writers—had made profitable theatre out of the miseries of Naples. I wanted to do something more.

  The Cirio factory was one hopeful sign. Borrelli, himself, was a dramatic exemplar of reform. I was looking for others like them, but outside the clergy and in other fields of service and social development.

  I had been bitterly disappointed. I had begun many lines of inquiry, but all of them had led me inevitably to the Neapolitan skin markets.

  Housing, for instance. I had come back to Naples after five years’ absence. The first thing that impressed me was the growth of new apartment blocks southward from Naples, along the coastal strip and right through to Torre del Greco and Castellamare. Some of them were being erected as private projects, others as part of a Government housing scheme financed by the Cassa del Mezzogiorno.

  I had just finished building a house in my own country, so my head was stuffed full of facts and figures and I had a painful and personal acquaintance with the problems of the investor and the builder. I began by tramping through the unfinished shells, watching the working methods, studying the layout.

  The first thing that impressed me was wasteful design. The architects had thrown away hundreds of square feet of living space in every block. In a block of ten apartments, there was living space for fifteen, but most of it was wasted on wide foyers and triple-width staircases—living space that had no built-in cupboards, so that it would be halved when the heavy Neapolitan furniture was moved in. The architects of the South seemed never to have opened an overseas manual on low-cost housing. Their laundry facilities were limited to the primitive cement washtub without hot water and there was no communal drying space for clothes. So, naturally, they were still hung on the balconies, as they were in the bassi.

  This, for all its seriousness, was only wasteful planning. When I looked at the cost sheets, I was staggered. With a labour cost one tenth of that prevailing in Australia, the cost of building was twenty-five per cent higher! Why? Materials, they told me: cement and stone and ceramic tiles. But these same materials were produced with the same cheap labour? Certainly, but the suppliers put on big profit margins. To justify some of the prices I saw, the profit margin must have been nearly 500 per cent. Of course, with a bankrate up to seventeen per cent, everything else goes haywire.

  But there was more yet. There is a shortage of skilled artisans and a famine dearth of cost accountants and quantity surveyors. So the job supervisor is able to make a handsome rakeoff from the agencies handling business materials. Bills are falsified and the difference split both ways. One builder to whom I spoke had just succeeded, after twelve months’ investigation, in tracing 500,000 lire a month lost in gerrymandered costs!

  Because there is no effective control, and because most of the South is held in feudal right by old families, land costs are hoisted out of all proportion to real value.

  So the skin game goes on—unreal land values, loaded building costs, wasteful construction—and no hope at all for ownership or reasonable rental.

  I asked about child welfare and mothercraft centres. They told me there were some in Naples. I believed that. But in all the days and nights of tramping the streets swarming with ragged children, I didn’t see any. I did see a rash of doctors’ placards—Doctor X, Specialista, Veneree e Malattia di Pelle!

  District nursing? House visitation by social workers? Group welfare? The Sisters of Charity did some of that, they told me. They went into the houses of the distressed poor, they scrubbed floors and washed the sick and prepared meals and changed the babies. But social work apart from the Church, paid or unpaid? Very little. Welfare work, in spite of the existence of a Department of Public Welfare, was practically non-existent. Why? A shrug and a significant gesture—the Church controls all that!

  You will probably have gathered long before this that I hold no brief for the defence of the Church in the South. I am able to view with a certain sympathy the anti-clericalism of Italy. I am able to understand the historic and social reasons for it. But the fact remains that no Italian, however anti-clerical, has been able to point to any comparable work done by secular organisations.

  When I challenged them with this argument, they would launch into long explanations of the secular intrusion of the Church, its political accommodation, the compromises of the hierarchy. But not one of them ever gave me a satisfactory answer as to why none of the critics had ever rolled up his sleeves and done what Borrelli had done, or Don Gnocchi in the North. They admitted that these men were not part of the hierarchy or the bureaucracy of the Church. They admitted that what they had done was achieved with courage and personal effort. Why couldn’t the critics do the same? The answer was always a deprecating shrug. I was a foreigner. I could not be expected to understand.

  I was prepared to understand. I wanted facts, and I was prepared to accept them from the Devil himself, but I wante
d to be shown chapter and verse. Nobody has yet offered me a page-reference.

  You should understand that I was looking for the answer to a specific problem: how best to create for the boys in the House of the Urchins an opportunity, a hopeful future. Ideally, the future should be in their own country, even if it were created by initial help from well-wishers overseas.

  A work of this kind has a double value. It benefits those for whom it is created. It ennobles those who take part in it and it spreads, as ripples spread in a pond, touching many others, setting off new currents of movement and action. Transfer the work to another country and you yield to the counsel of despair. You say, “There is no hope here. Let us start somewhere else!”

  I have stopped half way to this conclusion. There is hope for Italy and specifically for the South. The existence of a work like Borrelli’s affirms that. But it will be decades before the hope is realised and in any year of those decades the hope can be wrecked.

  For the boys, themselves, there is no hope. Borrelli has taken them as far as he can in the conditions that exist today. Their only chance is to get out and begin a new life overseas.

  * * *

  Let me tell you two simple stories. The first contains the germ of future hope. The second illustrates the despair of the present.

  One fine April day, after a gruelling week in Naples, I took time off from my notebooks and went down to visit the Marina Grande, the small circular cove at the north end of the town of Sorrento.

  My guide was Giuliana Benzoni, a crackling, vital woman, a violent opponent of the old régime, whose record as an underground courier during the war makes a hair-raising story. She walked me down a flight of worn stairs under a Greek archway and down to the small cobbled beach, where the fisherfolk live and the boat-builders who make the skiffs for all the villages from Massa to Capri.