Part IV

The past appears as a vast plain surging with movement dimly seen, with here and there a flicker of light as a scene briefly emerges -- a scene perhaps of little consequence but still bright in the memory.

Rome for instance, where photographs variously dated April, May and early summer 1945 tell me I spent two separate leaves. In a rare burst of magnanimity on both sides of the conflict, Rome had been left to survive virtually unscathed. A friend and I were booked for a week in the official rest camp in the city, and looked forward with delight to exploring an erstwhile Babylon.

But from someone -- I can't recall who -- we had learned of a first-class pensione where we would be welcome on the basis of this recommendation. Civilian digs being of course wholly forbidden to Allied troops, we duly booked into the rest camp, left a token display pf luggage in our quarters to pacify any prying eye, and departed for the pensione, not returning till the end of our leave to sign out in what we hoped was a correct soldierly manner.

Our landlady was a Swiss lady of around forty with a Nordic beauty that was quite startling in contrast to her surroundings. She spoke fluent English, Italian, German, French -- and maybe Swahili for all I knew.

No meals could be supplied of course; like most civilians in war zones, the Italians were having a hard time keeping themselves alive. But after revelling in the luxury of a beautifully-furnished bedroom all to myself, with gleaming linen and a wonderful view, to wake with a glorious smell of coffee in the air and a uniformed maidservant, who would not have looked out of place in the stateliest English home, hovering nearby, silver tray poised, was bliss.

So we ate at the NAAFI club, which could be regarded as the pinnacle of the numerous shops and canteens run by British voluntary bodies for the benefit of the troops which surfaced in the wake of the fighting, from a couple of elderly English ladies we stumbled upon dispensing tea and buns under the auspices of the Salvation Army in a back street of a small Italian town to more elaborate institutes.

I don't know what function this building fulfilled in civilian life, but it was the most impressive NAAFI club I ever came across. Excellent meals were served by day and night without regard to mealtimes, enhanced by the setting of a splendid dining room, and, to me especially, by the presence of a full orchestra, which was playing certainly every time we visited, but I suppose must have had breaks occasionally...

The singers were mainly from the world of opera, the emphasis being on classical music, but there were popular pieces, neapolitan songs and suchlike, and here I first heard 'Return to Sorrento' and 'Mama', the former to become so all-pervasive.

One evening our landlady gave 'a little party' to introduce us to 'a few of her friends.' We entered the room to find it bulging at the seams. The Romans had been unable to resist the opportunity to view a new strain of species which had infested the area for two or three centuries and was thought until recently to be extinct -- Englishmen on the grand tour...

The guest proved to be a motley throng of journalists, and lawyers, with a heavy contingent of academia, and after we had regained our balance and with the aid of copious applications of wine it turned out a very pleasant party indeed.

It was while pursuing the remains of antiquity that we encountered one of the wonders of the modern world -- a mythical being from the silver screen. A Hollywood film star in the flesh. Walking past a building displaying the Stars and Stripes, we glanced casually in at an open window, and, glimpsing a couple of uniformed figures, registered the scene vaguely as an orderly room and carried on.

My companion came to an abrupt halt.

"That was Bruce Cabot!"

"Gettaway!"

We gazed at each other. I recalled what a keen film buff he was.

"Only one way to find out."

We returned to the window. In a corner of the room a man stared studiously through his spectacles at the papers on his desk. Nearby a sergeant hovered, glancing at us. We beckoned and he approached us with a little smile that suggested awareness of what was coming. "It is indeed," he said in response to our question, and we asked if he would be kind enough to get us an autograph. He went to the desk, murmured something, and Cabot came over, shook hands briefly, smiled and quietly returned to his papers. He seemed slighter in build and not so tall as I'd expected and some distance removed from the hero of the 1933 original version of "King Kong." But after all he was the man who rescued Fay Wray from Kong, so we were thrilled anyway... I still have the old lire note with Lieutenant Bruce Cabot's signature.

In passing perhaps I should mention here that on April 29 the German armies in Italy surrendered, together with whatever was left of the Italian forces that had remained with them. So for us the adventure was over. But not by any means our service.

By August we were in Legnano, a town near Milan, in a huge transit camp from which servicemen were repatriated. 'Camp' gives a false impression since it applied to an agglomeration of permanent buildings, some very large. And the term 'transit' did not refer to our unit specifically since it was the oldest servicemen who were dealt with first, and consequently we were a long way down the list. In fact we soon learned that we were not officially in transit at all, but had metamorphosed by some curious process into becoming part of the staff! The war being over, our radar capabilities were no longer required, at least not in Italy. As a result of an intelligence unknown making some vague connection between radar and the use of headsets, I found myself in charge of the camp's small telephone exchange.

But it was a hollow crown, since there were only three of us with a twenty-four-hour day to deal with, and decency insisted I share the hours equally.

Supposedly restricted to official calls within Italy and the surrounding area, matters rapidly assumed a more heterogeneous nature. We did our tolerant best, but had to be ready with the off-switch for the over-voluble and over-pompous. I have to conclude that if the telephone exchange had not existed, the loss from a military point of view would hardly have been noticed.

In the camp theatre a more or less constant series of shows were put on by ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association), and anybody who felt inclined and had some talent and enthusiasm -- in some cases only enthusiasm -- to display.

A few of us, myself included, were coaxed in to help with stage management and the general welfare of professional artistes from England; one such I remember particularly was the visit by Florence Desmond, a star of the West End in what was then termed musical comedy.

But there were also visits of quite another sort, notably one by the best-selling novelist Naomi Jacob, one of whose books I'd discovered among a row of hardbacks in a glass cabinet at home at the time I'd started to read boys' weeklies, and which included such novels as Silas K. Hocking's "The Silent Man," "Sorrell and Son" by Warwick Deeping, and one the contents of which I've completely forgotten called "The Wide Wide World." I read them all, hoping for an occasional Martian or spaceship to show up, puzzling over many of the words but persevering as long as there was some kind of narrative to cling to.

I was unhappy at my failure to drum up much of an audience for Miss Jacob, but she didn't seem put out by a group of half-a-dozen or so, and I for one enjoyed her talk. She was the first writer I'd met in the flesh apart from a member of our original radar unit who was a Crime Club novelist, I'd corresponded with L. A. G. Strong, novelist, short story writer, and broadcaster, before and even during the war, but never met him.

Of these flickers of memory, one of the more sombre ones is a visit to the square in Milan where the bullet-riddled body of Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were hung on display by the Italian partisans in an outburst of barbarity hard to believe in a civilized nation. One can understand the hatred for a tyrant, but -- for the mistress? One muses... Suppose she found she'd made a mistake in her choice of partner? How does a mistress walk away from a dictator? I wasn't sorry that the bodies had been removed some time before we visited the square.

That apart, in appearance, and with the names of the shops changed, much of Milan could have been taken for any large city in England. We explored, we learned to skate in the Palazzo del Ghiaccio, we were booked for a leave in a skiing resort in northern Italy, with free instruction, courtesy of the R. A. F. The only dubious part of the equation was the inevitable one in military affairs of having to wait your turn in alphabetical order. Just before the 'w's came up, the blow fell. My time had arrived for repatriation.

So -- a train journey via Domodossola through the snow-clad enchantment of Switzerland, though with a sad undercurrent of lost opportunity, to end in a dirty, rain-soaked, unwelcoming Calais.

End of Part 4