Voyage By Dhow (20 page)

A moment later there was a sudden chill in the atmosphere and the smiles faded. A grim-faced, gesturing man had pushed himself to the front to demand payment of 50,000 lire—about £30. His story was that he was acting for the owner of the pictures; but it was to be supposed that he was an enforcer of one of the protection gangs said to levy a toll on most Neapolitan business enterprises. We decided to resist the extortion: there were four of us, and we were certain that we had the crowd on our side. The situation was saved when the old man had the courage to admit that he had never seen the presumed gangster before in his life. With this, the unwelcome stranger went off, and the emergency was at an end.

In 1943–44 I spent a year in Naples, arriving a day or so after its capture from the Germans in October 1943, when the city lay devastated by the hurricane of war. The scene was apocalyptic. Ruins were piled high in every street and in these people camped out like Bedouin in a wilderness of brick, on the verge of starvation and close to dying of thirst: there had been no water supply since the great Allied air-bombardment a month before. Families experimented with seawater to cook herbs and edible roots grubbed up in gardens and parks. Some squatted by the shore with weird contraptions with which they hoped to distil seawater to drink. At the same time an absurd and disastrous ban on fishing kept the boats from going out, and children by the hundred were to be seen scrambling about the rocks, prizing off limpets to sell at a few lire a pint, supplies of winkles and sea-snails having been long exhausted. All the rare and extraordinary fish from all parts of the world in the famous aquarium had been eaten by the populace, and a manatee, the aquarium’s most prized possession, preserved for a while only by its ugliness, had finally been slaughtered and disguised in the cooking to be served at a banquet in honour of General Mark Clark.

Men and women who had lost all their possessions in the bombardments went about dressed in sacking or in garments confected from curtains and bed-covers. But at the many funerals, professional mourners still tore at their clothes as well as their cheeks. A problem had risen over the shortage of funeral horses, many of which had gone into the stewpot; and the most extraordinary sight of all was of two old men harnessed up with a pair of enfeebled donkeys in the shafts of a hearse. It was at a time when Naples was threatened with outbreaks of smallpox and typhoid; armed deserters from the Allied forces were attacking and looting private houses; and Moorish troops committed atrocities against men, women and children on the outskirts of the city.

The printing of occupation money, plus the devaluation of the lira from 100:£1 to 400:£1, spelled instant ruin to those dependent upon fixed salaries. An American corporal then received about ten times the pay of an Italian major, and the
Questore
, the Chief of Police of Naples, the highest paid civil servant, with a salary of 5,496 lire a month, was earning the equivalent of £14. This man was incorruptible, and I was present in his office when he fainted from hunger.

Men of lesser calibre turned to the black market, organized and presided over by Vito Genovese—and nourished by one third of all the supplies shipped through the Port of Naples for the provisioning of the Allied forces in Italy.

Children orphaned or abandoned in the anarchy of the times, the notorious
scugnizzi
(numbering perhaps 20,000), lived like little foxes in their holes in the ruins. They were outstandingly good-humoured, intelligent and beautiful, but they could only survive by pimping and petty theft. Sometimes they were driven to risk a raid on Allied food-lorries that happened to be slowed in the traffic; but this came to an end when guards were concealed in the backs of the vehicles and a number of small boys lost their fingers, hacked off by a bayonet, in the moment of grabbing a tailboard.

In families deprived of their menfolk the women frequently supported themselves and their children by prostitution. A bulletin issued by the Bureau of Psychological Warfare gave a figure for women in Naples who had become regular or occasional prostitutes of no less than 42,000. That this could have happened when there were possibly 150,000 girls of marriageable age in Naples seems incredible: there is no more convincing illustration of the extremity of their agony.

It was Naples’ calvary of fire and destitution; the days of reproach through which it came at long last so astonishingly unmarred. The Neapolitans’ salvation was their fortitude; their incapacity for despair. Perhaps too, there was a kind of austerity in their make-up unsuspected in Southerners—a readiness to make do with little and a lack of affinity with the acquisitiveness already beginning to dominate Western European society.

Revisiting Naples I saw it as a city that has achieved its own kind of emotional stability, is content to drift with no eye to the future, has rejected change and is unchangeable. In this way, as Scarfoglio had observed, it is Oriental rather than European. Economically it has stagnated, where the industrial North with its separate identity and ideals has pushed further and further ahead. Nearly half the Neapolitan workforce is unemployed or under-employed, but Neapolitans help each other. The income per capita is only a third of that in Milan; but, for me, Naples will always be the better place to live in.

In Naples there is a human solidarity hard to find elsewhere. If one lives there long enough one has the sensation almost of belonging to the world’s most enormous family. The labour statistics may reveal situations reminiscent of Dickensian England, but there was little in the England of Charles Dickens of the laughter of Naples.

The sensation of continuity—that here in Naples one was recapturing the vanished past—was reinforced by a visit to a famous shore-side restaurant, unaltered in any way in its furnishings and atmosphere from the days in 1944 when it had been full of Allied officers and the barons of the black market. The house troubadours, facsimiles of their fathers, attended the guests as ever to strum the everlasting
Torn’ a Sorrento
on their mandolins. The same algae-spotted showcase with its display of octopus and crabs was there still and so, too, was the old man hunched behind the antique cash register with its bell chiming like the Cathedral’s angelus.

All the rituals had been preserved. Fish were still presented with hooks hanging from their mouths to suggest that they had been cut in that very instant from the line; and what used to be known as the ‘show-fish’, a majestic bass or
merou
, passed on a lordly salver from table to table to cries of admiration from diners who should have known that, whatever they ordered, it would not be this that they would eat. At the proper moment the visitors’ book was produced—but here, at least, there had been changes. All the great, blustering Fascist names had been weeded out thirty-five years before, but now the pages dealing with the years 1944–45 had gone too, and with them Mark Clark, and the rest of the Allied generals. Enduring fame now belonged only to such as Axel Munthe and Sophia Loren, the local girl (surely well on her way to popular canonization) from Pozzuoli, just round the corner of the bay. Neapolitans had thrust the politicians and the soldiers out of memory.

Close to us a number of tables had been pushed together to accommodate a family later identified as a man of fifty, his wife, two teenaged children, a son in his twenties and the daughter-in-law, their three children, the host’s elder brother, his widowed sister, and the grandfather, who was placed out of respect at the top of the table and to whom the show-fish was first presented for his nod of approval. In Naples there are no babysitters: the family takes its pleasures and suffers its tribulations as a unit, and the aged are excluded from none of its experiences.

With the exception of the eldest son, in his
moda inglese
pin-striped suit, and his stylish wife, the general impression the group gave was one of less than affluence; yet it was clear that a small fortune was being spent on this meal. By the time coffee came I found myself chatting to the head of the house. He had just been released from hospital—hence the celebration. The family went out on the town two or three times a year, he said, ‘whenever an excuse can be found’. So the money went.

It was the kind of household based on a three-roomed flat—the young couple and their children would live separately—with nothing on hire-purchase, the minimum of furniture and a kitchen of the old-fashioned kind with nothing electrical in it apart from the toaster. The accommodation and home comforts of such a family might seem spartan to English people who could afford an occasional meal in an expensive restaurant.

The father went on to say that he had been employed as a mechanic in the Alfasud factory, then laid off. He added with a twinkle and a rippling gesture of the fingers that while drawing what benefits he could, he had managed to get his hands on a list of Alfasud buyers in the area and, by servicing their cars at cut price, had been able ‘to keep the soup flowing’. His daughter went to school, but took time off before Christmas to make figurines for Nativity cribs, which at that season were in great demand. If necessary his wife could always turn her hand to sewing umbrellas for sale in the London stores. Should a financial emergency arise, the eldest son, who ‘worked on the boats’—he nodded in the direction of the piratical launches in the harbour—could be counted on to pitch in. ‘
Si arrangia
,’ he said: ‘We get by somehow.’ It has always been the true motto of Naples.

1980

I
N OCTOBER 1944, INSTALLED
at the Intelligence Corps headquarters on the first floor of the Satriano Palace, I was as ever astonished at the magnificence of the Bay of Naples as seen through the garden statuary, when the order to leave immediately for Taranto arrived. Here I was to take charge of 3,000 Russian prisoners at that moment ‘in transit’. Enigmatic as this first appeared, no further information was to be obtained, so I took the first train south and after many delays arrived in Taranto in the evening of the next day.

A major in temporary command of the Russians explained their presence. They had been captured in the north of Italy while fighting in the German army and were to be repatriated by sea. I would go with them. The major exploded with wrath. ‘These men are shits,’ he said. ‘If any man so much as attempts to escape, you will shoot him.’ I warned him that such an order could not be accepted. He suddenly appeared to calm, and there was a change in his tone. ‘Do they have foxes up in Naples or wherever it is you come from?’ he asked. I told him that I had no idea. ‘Pity,’ he said. ‘They do in Rome. That may surprise you. In the woods. Get one with your pistol if you’re lucky.’

The Russians had been transferred to the veteran troopship
Reinadel Pacifico
, and going aboard I found them in their rumpled German uniforms filling the holds and crammed into every inch of deck space. To my surprise I was to learn that all these weary, sick and demoralized men had actually turned on their German captors and gone over to the British in the first battle in which they were involved. In recognition of this they had been promised that their German uniforms would be replaced with British ones. This had not happened and a total collapse of morale had followed along with a number of suicides. Almost all the nominally Russians in sight were Asiatics, in particular from Uzbekistan, and at this moment they had begun an almost tuneless chanting described by an interpreter, who had just arrived on the scene, as a tribal funeral dirge.

A Tadjik, who was the first of these Asiatics that I could make understand me, described his experiences when captured by the Germans advancing into Russia. He and his comrades had been herded into a camp where they were held for three days without food or water before they were made to understand that they were prisoners of war. An interpreter had explained their quandary. ‘There are more of you than expected,’ he told them. ‘There is food for a thousand, but ten thousand of you are here, so you must draw your own conclusions.’

The pick of the prisoners were enlisted in the Asiatic division sent to northern Italy and the rest eventually eliminated by starvation or outright murder, and, since regular German army soldiers were reluctant to kill prisoners, methods were contrived by which they were killed by their own comrades.

Between 4,000 and 5,000 Asiatic Russian prisoners died, largely of starvation, in such death camps. Now, squatting among the survivors in the fetid twilight below deck of the
Reina del Pacifico
, I listened to the survivors’ descriptions of the horrors that had overwhelmed them. Death’s finality, these survivors admitted, was frequently confirmed by a knock on the head, after which the corpse would be smuggled away to a quiet place to be eaten. Cannibalism, at first dismissed as no more than the most impossible rumour, became a hideous commonplace to be accepted. If a man died his edible parts were eaten. Even a prisoner unconscious through sickness was liable to be attacked. One of the men I talked to displayed the cavity in the back of his leg where half the calf had been gnawed away while he was in a coma. Eventually I was convinced that all the ex-prisoners carried on this ship had eaten human flesh. The majority admitted to this without hesitation—as if the confession provided psychological release.

Authority among these survivors was divided between two men, an Uzbek mullah of the Muslim faith, and one of the handful of Christians, Ivan Golik, a Muscovite with the rank of senior lieutenant in the Red Army, whose philosophies of life were diametrically opposed. Golik’s determination was at all costs to restore the fighting spirit of these cowed victims. The mullah, by the name of Haj el Haq (‘the Pilgrim of Truth’), advocated death for his followers, in this case mass suicide by drowning, to be followed by life everlasting in the Muslim paradise. It was a remedy evaded by even the most fanatical of the mullah’s followers by the ship’s arrival at Port Said, where the promised British uniforms awaited us.

Bound to the wheels of a military machine which once set in motion could not be stopped, ordnance spewed forth: not only the promised uniforms but a range of such army equipment as camouflage netting, gas capes, signalling flags, and above all innumerable razors and shaving brushes, the uses of which bewildered these men with hair that grew only on their heads.