Siege at the Villa Lipp (11 page)

With her husband my credentials were of a different order. The school to which I went has never been considered as better than reasonably good; but he happened to have heard of it, and the idea of having an English public-schoolboy - even one who was Argentine - as a servant seemed to appeal to what I assumed to be the Fascist sense of humour. I think that his original intention may have been to discipline his wife, and at the same time strike a blow for Il Duce and the corporate state, by firing me after a few days, or as soon as I had sufficiently demonstrated my incompetence. If so, I disappointed him. Being a steward on a yacht is not all that different from being a junior boy in the kind of school I had just left. I may also have misjudged the nature of their personal relationship. Possibly it did not include the friendliness with which she treated me. Perhaps, in that marriage, she was the one who had the disciplinary whip hand.

I very much hope so, because, although I have during my life encountered a great many unpleasant men and women, I still after all these years remember him as being one of the nastier.

When the weather broke on the Riviera we cruised south, first to Ischia and Capri, and then on down to Tripoli. There, east of the town, the owner had land, on which he played at citrus-growing, and a tarted-up farmhouse. His wife explained that he owned the place not because he wanted to or because it was profitable, but for some mysterious political reason.

We spent several days doing nothing much while he had meetings with the Governor and other local administrators. Then we started off on a cruise that was supposed to take us to Benghazi. A north-west gale ended that, and within thirty-six hours we were back in Tripoli. There it was announced that the yacht would now be laid up for its annual refit, with just the captain retained to oversee the work. The rest of the crew would be off to their homes in Italy for the winter months. The owner and his wife moved into the house.

Nobody having told me where I stood, I counted my savings, wondered whether I could expect a tip from the lady, and eventually asked the captain if I was entitled to my fare back to Cannes. He mumbled something about my not having a labour permit, and then said he would enquire. Until the boat went into the yard to have its bottom cleaned, I could sleep on board. I was reminded of the end of one of those terms at school when there had been not enough holiday time in which to go home, and nothing much else to do but spend too much pocket-money.

To my surprise, the captain remembered to enquire about me without being reminded. Next day, I was sent for by the owner.

It was the first time I had been to the house. You took a bus to the nearby village and then walked along a dirt road between lemon groves.

His study was a hideous room with a tessellated floor and red, leather-covered walls. The writing table was a Second Empire monster with a matching chair of throne-like proportions. He had a mop of white hair and very black eyes. Sitting in that enormous chair, he looked like an illustration depicting the king greedy for gold in an art-nouveau edition of Grimm’s fairy tales.

‘I understand,’ he said, ‘that you wish to return to France. Why, young man? In order to gamble away all the wages I have been paying you these past weeks?’

His wife had told me of his stuffiness about gambling, but I had forgotten about it, along with the fiction that I was a gambler myself. So, instead of replying that what I did with the money I earned was my own affair, not his, I answered his silly question as if he had been entitled to ask it.

‘No, Sir. I merely wish to regularize my position. As the captain pointed out, I still have no labour permit for Italy or Italian possessions.’

It could have been more happily put. He gave me a long, smouldering stare.

Then he said deliberately: ‘For the work you are paid to do in Italian possessions, the only necessary permission is mine.’

I
was very innocent in those days. It took me a moment or two to grasp what he had said. When the penny dropped, though, several things seemed to happen at
once. For the only time in my life I felt myself blushing. I had an almost overwhelming desire to hit him and, along with it, an equally compelling determination to get out of the room before I did anything stupid. Good sense won. I turned quickly and walked to the door.

‘Come back here,’ he snapped.
‘
I
haven’t finished with you.’

I didn’t go back, but I stopped and faced him again. After all, I still had to know what the score was.

‘You had better understand me,’ he continued. ‘I have considerable influence with the authorities both here and in Rome. I could have you in prison within the hour if I chose. I could also have you deported. In
that case, you would certainly pay your own travel expenses. The only way that you can, as you put it, regularize your position is to do as you are told, not by that fool of a woman, but by
me.’

He let that sink in, a smile hovered. ‘You may even find it less inhibiting to do as you are told here, rather than on the far side of a yacht bulkhead.’

When he was sure from my expression that I had thoroughly understood him, he sat back and seemed to relax. ‘I leave for Rome tomorrow afternoon and shall be away for some weeks. You will place yourself at my wife’s disposal for as long as she continues to find you useful. When she has finished with you, then you may go.’ He paused, savouring the final insult before delivering it. ‘One other word of warning. There
are
some possessions of value to me in this house. Don’t try to steal them. My servants will know immediately if anything is missing. Now get out.’

I left without seeing her and walked to the bus stop in the village. When I got back to the yacht, however, there was a note from her waiting for me. It said that I must ignore her husband’s bad manners. They were the result of too much association with politicians. She would expect me for lunch on Friday. From then on I would be
her
guest, not his. In case I had not yet been able to make arrangements for cashing cheques with a local bank, she was enclosing five thousand lire to cover taxi fares and any other incidental expenses I might wish to incur.

At that time five thousand lire would have gone some way towards
buying
a taxi, the kind of taxi they had in Tripoli anyway. Two days later I moved into the farmhouse; but one thing I had to ask her about before finally deciding to stay. Had she known from the first that he had listened to us?

The question seemed to perplex her. ‘But he didn’t listen to us from the first,’ she said. ‘How could he have listened to us in your hotel?’

‘I mean on the boat.’

‘Oh, walls on boats are always so thin.’ She dismissed them with a shrug. ‘But what does it matter? Who cares what is heard? It is what one
feels
that counts.’

It did not seem worthwhile trying to challenge that statement.

I stayed there over three months, and by then my Italian, although never altogether free of Spanish intonations, was fluent. By then, too, I had come to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to be needing it for very much longer. Hitler had invaded what the French and British governments had left of Czechoslovakia. A few weeks later, and to show that he could be just as bold and bloody if he put his mind to it, Mussolini had ordered the invasion of Albania. From Rome, too, came word that the yacht would that summer be cruising only on the west coast of metropolitan Italy. Her husband added, as if as an afterthought, that an Italian steward had been hired and would report for duty when he himself joined the boat at Naples. The captain would be advising her of his sailing orders.

It was time for me to go. I left, by a ship bound for Marseilles, on my nineteenth birthday, though I didn’t tell her of the coincidence. I don’t think she was all that sorry to see me go - she was one of those who like change - but a birthday would have added unnecessarily to the emotional content of the parting. Perhaps, now I think again about it, she taught me quite a lot.

From Marseilles I went to Paris and lived, within my means this time, at a small hotel in the rue de l’Isly. In spite of the fact that my year of ‘travelling in Europe’ was almost over I
was not unduly troubled by the thought that I might soon have to return home. That was probably because it was almost impossible to live that summer in Paris without knowing that there was going to be a major war; and because, as a result, I did not really believe that anything was going to turn out as planned for very much longer. Still, as a precautionary delaying tactic, I wrote to my father suggesting that it might not be a bad idea if I went home by freighter via New York, so that I could visit the World’s Fair and see what our foreign business competitors were doing in the world market. I could, I assured him smugly, easily afford it.

I need not have bothered. Mail travelled slowly in those days, and, by the time my letter reached him, the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact had already been signed. During the last week in August 1939, I cabled him saying that, subject to his blessing, I proposed going to England in order to join either the Royal Navy or, failing that, the RAF.

His blessing I duly received, but soon had to cable for supplementary assistance: more money and some introductions in the right quarters. Of course, at the beginning of the war, none of the British services was prepared to cope with floods of raw recruits, least of all the Navy and the RAF. The best he could do in the way of introductions not only landed me in the Army but also in one of the most boring parts of it - a searchlight battery stationed in East Anglia.

All I remember now about the winter that followed was how cold it was, and that in March we moved to a site farther south which seemed even colder. In May we were moved again, suddenly, to Wales; not because we were needed there, but in order to leave the hutted camp we had occupied free to receive troops evacuated from Dunkirk. In Wales we were told that the artillery regiment to which our battery belonged was to be converted from the searchlight role to that of mobile Ack-Ack with Bofors guns. Older’ officers and men were to be weeded out and transferred to static units. The qualifications of all personnel were re-examined and reassessed. The process happened to coincide with Italy’s entry into the war and the issue of an Army Council Instruction requiring returns from all units listing the names of NCO's and men who could speak Italian. My name was one of three sent in, the other two being those of British-born Italian waiters. In due course, we were summoned to a barracks near Durham where we were interviewed and tested by an officer who spoke phrase-book Italian with a Scottish accent. He said, in the importantly secretive way which was then fashionable, that we were probably needed for guard duty at the new Italian internment camp on the Isle of Man.

I never knew what happened to the waiters, but two months later I was sent to an infantry battalion bound by troopship for Egypt and the Western Desert.

After we arrived, the battalion delivered me to the Intelligence Corps. Theoretically, I was there as an interpreter. In practice, I was used from the start to interrogate the Italian prisoners-of-war who were then pouring in by the thousands. An officer, with an NCO escort, was supposed to deal with each POW separately, but there were just too many of them for that sort of nonsense. So the work was split up. To give me a semblance of authority, I was made an acting-corporal and told to behave like a stage sergeant-major. It was all a great waste of time. During the months before Rommel’s first big counter-attack, I
interrogated many hundreds of POWs and wrote an equivalent number of reports on them. Never, during the entire time, did I learn anything of military value that I had not already learned from the intelligence briefings we were given. The only higher-ups who took any real interest in our findings, were the political warfare people. Once or twice I was able to quote in my reports things said by a more-than-usually demoralized prisoner - generally one with wife trouble - or gripes, spotted in the letters from home some of them carried, that could be used in propaganda.

I was confirmed as corporal and there was talk of my being commissioned, but nothing came of it. Instead, I
was transferred to Field Security Police and posted to Italian Somaliland as an acting-sergeant. After more than enough of that - why anyone should ever have wanted the place passes all understanding - I was posted to Eighth Army in time for the invasion of Sicily.

To see how it was that I came to arrest Carlo, you have to know what the Field Security Police in Italy were supposed to do. Some who were there at the time may need no reminding, but it may help others to recall that our opposite numbers in the American sector of the front bore a rather more dashing title - Counter-intelligence Corps.

The CIC and ourselves both had the same job and we did it in more or less the same way. While the ordinary military police were concerned briefly with military matters such as convoy traffic control, drunks, deserters, POW cages, stockades and so on, we dealt with the problems arising from the presence all around our forces - and, in the towns and villages,
among
them - of large numbers of civilians who, until recently, had been actively or passively on the side of our enemies. Some of them, a few but some, still were. Our main task was to see that, in the forward areas where such things mattered, those who were against us and in a position to do something about it were either removed or neutralized.

Of course things were rarely as simple as that.

If a farmer stole a pair of army boots because his own had gone to hell and he had to start ploughing his land again, was that petty theft or sabotage? Was an old whore wounding a soldier by hitting him in an eye with the heel of a shoe merely defending her democratic right to the rate for the job, or was she giving aid and comfort to the Waffen SS division dug in across the river north of us? And then there were the black marketeers who flogged bottles of a turpentine-like liquid they called peach brandy to the troops in exchange for cartons of army rations. How did you cope with that sort of traffic? By telling the troops that they were ruining their lives?