Naples '44 (3 page)

Five minutes later we were on our way again. The tins collected by my fellow travellers were thrown to passers-by who scrambled wildly after them. None of the soldiers travelling on my truck had felt inclined to join actively in the fun.

The city of Naples smells of charred wood, with ruins everywhere, sometimes completely blocking the streets, bomb craters and abandoned trams. The main problem is water. Two tremendous air-raids on August 4 and September 6 smashed up all the services, and there has been no proper water supply since the first of these. To complete the Allies' work of destruction, German demolition squads have gone round blowing up anything of value to the city that still worked. Such has been the great public thirst of the past few days that we are told that people have experimented with sea-water in their cooking, and families have been seen squatting along the seashore round weird contraptions with which they hope to distil sea-water for drinking purposes.

The Section has fallen on its feet. I arrived to find that we had been installed in the Palace of the Princes of Satriano at the end of Naples's impressive seafront, the Riviera di Chiaia, in the Piazza Vittoria. The four-storey building is in the Neapolitan version of Spanish baroque, and we occupy its principal floor at the head of a sweep of marble staircase, with high ceilings, decorated with mouldings, glittering chandeliers, enormous wall-mirrors, and opulent gilded furniture in vaguely French-Empire style. There are eight majestic rooms, but no bathroom, and the lavatory is in a cupboard in the kitchen. The view across the square is of clustered palms, much statuary, and the Bay of Naples. The FSO has done very well by us.

At first sight Naples, with the kind of work it is likely to involve, seemed unglamorous compared with North Africa. Gone for ever were the days of forays into the mountains of Kabylie for meetings with the scheming Caïds and the holy men who controlled the tribes, and the
secret discussions in the rose arbour in the Palace Gardens of Tunis. Life here, by comparison, promised to be hard-working, sometimes prosaic, and fraught with routines. There were military units by the dozen all round Naples who wished to employ Italian civilians and all of these had to be vetted by us as security risks. Nothing could have been easier than this operation. The Fascist police state kept close tabs on the activities of all its citizens, and we inherited their extensive archives on the top floor of the Questura – the central police office. Ninety-nine per cent of the information recorded there was numbingly unimportant, and revealed as a whole that most Italians lead political lives of utter neutrality, although prone to sexual adventures. In all, the unending chronicles of empty lives. A little more thought and effort would have to be devoted to the investigation of those few hundreds of persons remaining in the city who had been energetic Fascists, and whom – largely depending on our reports – it might be thought necessary to intern.

A suspects file had to be started, and this was a job that fell to me. Section members had already cleared out the German Consulate in Naples, removing from it a carload of documents, all of which had to be studied. The work was increased as a deluge of denunciations began to flood in. They were delivered in person by people nourishing every kind of grudge, or even shoved into the hands of the sentry at the gate. Some of them were eccentric, including one relating to a priest who was claimed to have arranged shows of blue movies for the commander of the German garrison. Everything – from the grubbiest scrap of paper on which a name had been scrawled, and the single word ‘murderer' scribbled beneath, to a scrupulously typed document bearing the seal and signatures of the Comitato di Liberazione – had to be studied and recorded. The labour involved was immense, and exceedingly tedious, and was much complicated by the prevalence in Naples of certain family names – Espositos and Gennaros turn up by the hundred – and by the fact that material supplied by our own authorities for inclusion in the official Black Book was often vague. Quite frequently suspects were not even identified by name, but by such descriptions as ‘of medium height', ‘age between thirty and forty', ‘strikingly ugly', or in one case, ‘known to
possess an obsessive fear of cats'. However, the work went on; the filing system expanded, and the Black Book with its vagueness and its sometimes almost poetic idiocies, began to put on bulk.

Within days of settling in, three section members were sent out on detachment to Sorrento and the coastal towns, and Eric Williams, our best Italian speaker, became a solitary exile in the important town of Nola. Three more people, apart from the FSO, were tied down to administrative duties at HQ, leaving only four of us, Parkinson, Evans, Durham and myself, to confront the security problems of that anthill of humanity, the city of Naples itself.

First impressions of my colleagues under working conditions are favourable. They are hampered in several cases by their lack of Italian, but they are an industrious lot, and set to work with enthusiasm to learn the language. Like all sections, this has developed its own personality. It is less informal than most, and a little bureaucratic. I cannot imagine any member of 312 FSS being able to manoeuvre himself into a position where he could turn up at an airfield, wave his pass about, and bamboozle some Airforce officer, British or American, into arranging a quick unofficial flight back to England – an achievement of the kind which has been possible in certain other sections. All my new friends have been issued with special officer's-type identity documents replacing the normal AB 64, but Captain Cartwright has clearly not wished to have these endorsed as in the case of those issued to 91 FSS – one of which I still carry – with the authorisation to be in any place, at any time, and in any dress. Nor, so far, do section members wear civilian clothes. Army Books No. 466 (no erasures, no pages to be detached) are scrupulously carried, and daily entries condensed in the form of a log, handed in to the FSO first thing each morning, and discussed at a parade at nine, at which certain regimental formalities are carefully preserved. These things are quite new in my experience.

Contact with the military units brought its inevitable consequences. The phone started ringing first thing in the morning and rarely stopped. An excited officer was usually on the line to report the presence in his area of an enemy agent, or a secret transmitter, or a suspected cache of abandoned German loot. All this information came from local civilians who poured into the nearest army HQ, anxious to unburden themselves of secrets of all kinds, but as not even phrase books had been issued to help with the language problem, mistakes were frequent. Today, being the only section member left in the office, I was sent hurriedly on the motor bike, in response to the most urgent request, to Afragola, where an infantry major was convinced from local reports that a village woman was a spy. In this case evidence had been transmitted mostly by gestures which the Major had failed to interpret. It turned out that what the villagers had been trying to explain was that the woman was a witch, and that if allowed to cast her malefic gaze on the unit's water supply, she would make it undrinkable.

On my way to resolve this misunderstanding I saw a remarkable spectacle. Hundreds, possibly thousands of Italians, most of them women and children, were in the fields all along the roadside driven by their hunger to search for edible plants. I stopped to speak to a group of them, and they told me that they had left their homes in Naples at daybreak, and had had to walk for between two and three hours to reach the spot where I found them – seven or eight miles out of town. Here a fair number of plants could still be found, although nearer the city the fields had been stripped of everything that could be eaten. There were about fifteen different kinds of plants which were worth collecting, most of them bitter in flavour. All I recognised among their collections were dandelions. I saw other parties netting birds, and these had managed to catch a few sparrows and some tiny warblers which they said were common at this time of the year, attracted by the fruit in the orchards. They told me they had to face the hostility of the local people, on whose lands they were trespassing, and who accused them of raids on their vineyards and vegetable patches.

This afternoon, another trip along the seafront at Santa Lucia provided a similar spectacle of the desperate hunt for food. Rocks were piled up here against the sea wall and innumerable children were at work among them. I learned that they were prising limpets off the rocks, all the winkles and sea-snails having been long since exhausted. A pint of limpets sold at the roadside fetched about two lire, and if boiled long enough could be expected to add some faint, fishy flavour to a broth produced from any edible odds and ends. Inexplicably, no boats were allowed out yet to fish. Nothing, absolutely nothing that can be tackled by the human digestive system is wasted in Naples. The butchers' shops that have opened here and there sell nothing we would consider acceptable as meat, but their displays of scraps of offal are set out with art, and handled with reverence: chickens' heads – from which the beak has been neatly trimmed – cost five lire; a little grey pile of chickens' intestines in a brightly polished saucer, five lire; a gizzard, three lire; calves' trotters two lire apiece; a large piece of windpipe, seven lire. Little queues wait to be served with these delicacies. There is a persistent rumour of a decline in the cat population of the city.

How lucky for all concerned that the liberation of Naples happened when it did – when the fruit harvests were still to be gathered in – and the perfect weather of early autumn helped hardships of all kinds to be more endurable. Day followed day of unbroken sunshine, although the heat of summer had gone. From where I sat sifting wearily through the mountains of vilification and calumny, I could refresh myself by looking down into the narrow street running along one side of the palazzo. This is inhabited to bursting-point with working-class families, whose custom it is to live as much as they can of their lives out of doors, for which reason this street is as noisy as a tropical aviary.

Quite early in the morning, a family living in the house opposite carried out a table and stood it in the street close to their doorway. This was briskly covered with a green cloth with tassels. Chairs were placed
round it at an exact distance apart and on it were stood several framed photographs, a vase of artificial flowers, a small cage containing a goldfinch, and several ornate little glasses, which were polished from time to time as the day passed by to remove the dust. Round this table the family lived in what was in fact a room without walls; a mother, grandfather and grandmother, a girl in her late teens, and two dynamic boys, who constantly came and went. Here the mother attended to the girl's hair, washed the boys' faces, served something from a steaming pot at midday, sewed and did the family washing in the afternoon. There were a number of other such tables along the street, and constant social migrations took place as neighbours paid each other visits. The scene was a placid one. The green
persianas
hanging over all the upper windows and balconies breathed in and out gently in the mild breeze from the sea. People called musically to each other over great distances. A beggar with tiny, twisted legs was carried out by his friends and propped up in a comfortable position against the wall, where he started to strum a mandolin. Two lean, hip-swinging American soldiers, sharing a bottle of wine, passed down the street, and the girl at the table looked up and followed them with her eyes until they turned the corner and disappeared from sight.

There is no notice in the palazzo to say who we are and what we are doing here so it is hard to understand why people assume this to be the headquarters of the British Secret Police. However, they do and we are beginning to receive a stream of visitors, all of them offering their services as informers. No question ever arises of payment. Our visitors are prepared to work for us out of pure and unalloyed devotion to the Allied cause. In the main they are drawn from the professional classes, and hand over beautifully engraved cards describing them as
Avvocato, Dottore, Ingeniere
or
Professore
. They are all most dignified, some impressive, and they talk in low, conspiratorial voices. We received a visit, too, from a priest with a pocketful of denunciations who asked for a permit to be allowed to carry a pistol. These are the often shabby and warped personalities on which we depend. Once they were called by their real names, now they are officially ‘informants', and already there is a
euphemistic tendency to turn them into ‘contacts'. They are a special breed, the life's blood of Intelligence, and the world over they have an extraordinary thing in common: a strange and exclusive loyalty to one particular master. An informer is like a duckling newly freed from its shell and in need of fostering. He can be counted upon to attach himself permanently to the first person who is prepared to listen sympathetically to what he has to say, and prefers never to transfer his allegiance. In these first few days we all made half a dozen or so ‘contacts'.

All names are checked as a matter of course with our rapidly expanding files, and we find to our amusement that several of these men who have come forward to assist us in every way they can, have been accused by their fellow citizens of being arch-collaborators. We have collected copies from the offices of the German Consulate of many servile and congratulatory letters written by Neapolitan worthies to Adolf Hitler himself. An outstanding example of these was from a Counsellor at the Naples Court of Appeal who had just called to offer his services. This assured the Führer of ‘my great admiration and sympathy for the soldiers of your country', and concluded, ‘
Con profonde devota osservanza
'.

What is remarkable to us is the German bureaucratic rectitude with which all these communications, many of them highly nonsensical, have been conscientiously acknowledged, translated, and actually forwarded to the Chancery of the Nazi Party in Berlin, and fulsomely replied to by that office – the reply being returned via the German Embassy in Rome. One's imagination reels at the thought of the paperwork involved in dealing with thousands of such epistles from the toadies of occupied Europe.