Goodbye Soldier (15 page)

ROME AGAIN

ROME AGAIN

I
am awakened by the waitress and her morning tea trolley. “Ah gratzia, signorina,” I say, as she pours the steaming liquid into my cup.

“
Piacere
,” she coos. She and her Chivers jelly bottom exit.

I sit up, sipping my tea. It’s another bright day. Blast! My great gold obscene watch has stopped. I phone the porter. “
Scusi, che ora sono?
” It’s otto o’clock, one hour to departure. A quick wash and shave with a very blunt razor that gives me a very blunt face – the beard isn’t cut, it’s pulled out hair by hair. My skin is a series of sore blotches.

I meet Toni at breakfast. Yes, she slept well. That’s that out of the way. I eat my brioche and that’s that out of the way. Lieutenant Priest leans over our table, how are we, did we sleep well? Yes, we both slept well. He also slept well – God, this is exciting news! Does he know anybody else who has slept well? We’d like to congratulate them.

The Charabong awaits. We board the bus, saying Buon Giorno to Luigi. Faithful Luigi has been to early Mass at St Anthony’s and prayed for the success of the journey, and I wonder – as he didn’t invent them – does God know about charabongs? That’s the best part of the Catholic religion: you can pray for anything, your overdraft, the death of your mother-in-law, money. My prayers to be leader of a bit band had never materialized. I’d say God was deaf.

We have only travelled a kilometre outside Padua when there is a hold-up. Ahead, there has been an accident: two lorries have collided – one is a lorry containing chickens and now lies on its side, blocking the road. The two drivers are shouting at each other and gesticulating. Add to this a hundred chickens clucking. Some of their cages have broken open and chickens are running around, pecking by the road side or perching on the side of the lorry. A black mongrel dog has joined in and is chasing the chickens into the middle distance. It was chaos as a police patrol arrived and joined in the shouting.

Luigi backs up, turns round and finds another route.

“Why do Eyeties shout so bloody loud?” says Bill Hall.

“It’s because they’ve slept well,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about twenty words a minute, which is the going rate.”

“The nearer the equator you are, the more hot-blooded,” says Professor Bornheim. “In fact, people living
on
the equator actually explode.”

At the front of the coach, Tiola Silenzi and her husband Fulvio have been coaxed into singing a duet. They give us ‘La Paloma’. Lovely, pure
bel canto
singing. They are warmly applauded for their efforts and nobody exploded.

Toni and I sit holding hands. Every now and then, we look at each other and grin. This is called looking without exposing the teeth.

Time for a British response to the Italians. “Come on, Ricky,” says Lieutenant Priest, “lead the singing or get off.”

Soon we are all singing ‘You Are My Sunshine’, ‘We’ll Meet Again’, ‘Blue Birds Over the White Cliffs of Dover’. This is followed by a short concert of jazz by Milligan and Hall. The Italians are mad about La Jazz. So pass the morning hours.

We stage on the sea at Riccione. We sit on the beach and eat our sandwiches, but are plagued by horseflies. Bornheim takes a delight in killing them with a rolled-up copy of the
Union Jack
. “That’s five of the buggers so far,” he boasts. Our costumes are all in our luggage, so no swim; but trousers-rolled-up paddling is being indulged in by a few of the more daring spirits. The sun is gloriously warm as I lie back on the sand with my eyes closed. A pleasant breeze is blowing from the Adriatic, a horsefly gets me on the ear. I lash out, miss him but nearly render myself unconscious. Why bite me? I’m not a horse.

“Number eight,” says Bornheim, gleefully flicking a corpse off his hand.

Mulgrew is up to his shins in the sea, occasionally throwing a flat pebble which skims the shining surface. What is it about the sea? It calls us all. Is it a prehistoric instinct? Were we once creatures from the sea? If you put a baby on the beach, it will instinctively crawl towards the water. Strange, eh?

On, on to Rome. We heave ourselves free of the beach and board the now very dusty Charabong. As we drive, Hall, Mulgrew and Bornheim play a game. Each one in turn has to sleep with the next living thing they see on the road. Hall gets a pretty village girl, Mulgrew gets an old toothless dear and Bornheim gets a horse. They soon tire of this and Hall produces his violin and plays Italian melodies. The Italians join in. I know this all may sound repetitive, but that’s how it was. We were
all
very repetitive.

We are now in Tuscany: on our left the sea, on the right numerous vineyards, all looking uniform, neat and tidy, all heavy with grapes awaiting the gathering. I was reminded of Omar Khayyam’s ‘I wonder what the vintner buys, with stufFhalf as precious as that which they sell’. In another life, I would like to have been a vintner.

We are climbing into hilly country. It is getting overcast and so are we. Soon it starts to rain. “This will do the garden good,” said Bornheim. I borrow his
Union Jack
newspaper. What was happening in the world apart from this tour?

Herbert Morrison promises full employment for many years ahead

Spanish Frontier Sealed

RUSSIA ASKS AMERICA FOR BIG LOAN

Nuremberg Defence Opening Delayed

Ah, here is the best one;

HITLER’S EX-SECRETARY ARRESTED

—the copy reads. She is said to have lost none of her fanaticism for the Nazi cause and prays nightly beneath a picture of Hitler who, like God, appears to be deaf. Ah, a funny one: a blood donor in Australia had so much alcohol in his blood that the recipient got pissed. So, all that is going on in the world! What a jolly place it is.

The rain leaves off. Through the afternoon, we are getting travel-numb and I might say traveller’s bum – there’s a limit to how long a bum can be sat on. After three hours, there are cries of distress – people want to relieve themselves. Luigi pulls over by a wooded verge. The ladies disappear into the trees to the left and the men to the right, and never the twain shall meet. “I think that I shall never see,” says Born-heim, “A poem lovely as a tree.” So saying, he lets go against one. The floodgates are opened and we all return with satisfied smirks. (Are your smirks satisfied, dear reader?)

At Farno, we leave the sea and travel inland – two hundred miles to go. “It’s too bloody long,” complains Hall. “We should have stayed at Riccione for the night.” For once we all agree with Hall. What a strange man he was: he looked permanently unshaven, he was six foot tall and even thinner than me. If anyone has seen an illustration of Paganini, then this man had the same deep-set burning eyes. I think he also had burning arms and legs. He was the epitome of the English eccentric. Why, why wouldn’t he ever send his underpants and socks to the laundry? He would never say.

“I’ll tell you why,” said Mulgrew. “If he sent ‘em to a laundry, they’d send them to a solicitor.”

“Anyone like a sweet?” says Lieutenant Priest, handing around a bag of bull’s-eyes. Ah! My childhood favourite, black with thin white stripes. I used to wonder how they made the stripes. To this day, I don’t know.

Ah! Luigi is slowing down, he’s stopping for petrol! God, how exciting! We needed this to keep our morale up. Some of us get off. The petrol station sells bits and pieces. I buy a packet of nuts of unknown origin. I give some to Toni. They taste like almond-flavoured cardboard. “
Che bruto
,” she says, spitting them out. So did anybody want to buy a packet of carboard nuts? Only eaten once, must sell, owner going abroad. Toni wants to sleep. I put my arm around her and she drops off. I stick it until my arm goes numb. Wake up, Toni, it’s arm back time. My circulation is worse than
Blackwood’s Magazine
.

We are travelling through great vistas of farming land. They are still ploughing with great white oxen like the cattle we see on Roman statuary. It seems a timeless land – at places there are no signs of the twentieth century except our Charabong. It’s like a journey through a time capsule. I light up cigarette number upteen.

“Ah, ah,” says Mulgrew, “don’t put them back.” He takes one with a sweet, forced smile.

“You’re not out of them
again
, ”’ I say.

“Tis better to give than receive,” he says, making the sign of an invisible cross.

Poor Johnny, one day this appalling habit would kill him.

John Angove, seated at the front, wobbles to the back of the coach. “Anything exciting happening this end?” he said.

“No,” says Bornheim. “Try the middle.”

Angove shrugs his shoulders, “I’m bored to death.”

“It’s no good you coming up here and moaning about being bored to death,” I said. “If you must know, at this end we’ve been bored to death and then bored back to life again.”

Putting on a Groucho Marx demeanour, I added, “So think youself lucky my man. When I was your age, I was seven, and, another thing, goodbye.”

Toni had never heard of Groucho Marx, but then she’s never heard of Brockley SE 26! I have to explain what the Marx Brothers are like. It wasn’t easy, it was like trying to convince Quasimodo that he ought to enter for the pole vault. I explain that Groucho always walks with his knees bent. “Why?” says Toni. Why? For no reason at all,
that
’s why! I’ll say this, she
tried
to understand.

So we rumble on. By eight that night, we enter the northern suburbs of Rome down the Via Flamania. We all give a groan of relief, the Italians bravely strike up a song and Luigi pulls up outside the Albergo Universo. It’s not over yet. There’s the unloading of the baggage by two little porters and we all register at reception. And there is the lesbian manageress. “Ahh, Terr-ee,” she says and seemed genuinely pleased to see me.

“Before we all break up,” announces Priest, “the show is tomorrow at 7.30 a.m. Coach leaves here at 6 a.m. prompt – Bill Hall, please note.”

I’m in a room with Mulgrew again. He dumps his kit on the bed and hurries out for a drink in the vino bar next door. Would I like to join him, as he hasn’t much money? Swine. OK, I’ll be down when I’ve settled in. I lay out my clean pyjamas (laundered in Vienna) on the bed, then a quick wash, then to the vino bar to meet Mulgrew who is ahead by a couple of glasses. “You’re just in time,” he says, “I’ve run out of money.” Wine is cheap, a few lire a glass, so Mulgrew and I down about four each and we go back for dinner. Toni and Marisa are at a table when we join them. Toni doesn’t like me drinking.

She waves a finger at Mulgrew, “You teach Terr-ee drink like you, you
callivo
Johnny,” she says like a schoolmarm.

Mulgrew is totally bemused. “Just hark at her,” he says.

I’m hungry and looking forward to my dinner and backwards to the trip (Eh?): minestrone, then lasagne washed down with Chianti. Great, that’s better. I feel strong enough to go to sleep on my own. Tomorrow, Toni wants to take me to have lunch at her mother’s flat. Fine, OK. I take Toni up to her room. Curses, she’s sharing with Luciana, so it’s a kiss goodnight and back to bed. Mulgrew has gone back to the vino bar having borrowed money off me. Still, he always pays me back. You have to take him by the throat, but he always pays back. So, I can enjoy the luxury of clean pyjamas. I take a quick bath and then don them. I love the smell of freshly laundered clothes. I read my Bronte book for a while and then drop off to sleep. At some time I distantly hear Mulgrew come in and racket around the room. He is humming a tune broken only by a smoker’s cough. There’s very little difference between the two.

Morning comes bright and sunny. Mulgrew and I lie in bed smoking.

“What you doing today?” he says. I tell him I think I’m having lunch with Toni and her mother. “Getting your feet under the table, eh?”

“It’s not like that. I have been genuinely accepted into the family, I am a
persona grata
.”

At this, he guffaws. There’s no winning with him.

I must look my best for the lunch. I put aside my khaki travelling clothes and lay out my blue ensemble. I borrow a fresh razor blade from Mulgrew. It’s strange, in those days people lent freely – soap, cigarettes, money. What happened, then? I shave very carefully, avoiding any nicks or cuts, have a shower, first testing the shower rose. I dress as far as shirt, trousers and tie, then Brylcreem my hair, all the while watched by the bemused Mulgrew. “You’re looking loverly, darling,” he says. And, though I say it, I was looking lovely. God, I’ve only got fifteen minutes to have breakfast. I dash downstairs to the dining-room. No Toni. I order toast and jam and tea. Still no Toni. I ask John Angove where she is. She had breakfast earlier; also, Lieutenant Priest has some mail for me. Lovely!

I find Lieutenant Priest in the foyer. He is phoning Naples HQ. Still engaged on the phone he hands me two letters and a small parcel. I can tell by the overcautious wrapping and endless knotted string that it is from my mother. As to the contents, it’s marked socks. In the bedroom, I eagerly unwrap it. It contains chocolate, cigarettes and pile suppositories. Ah, how sweet, something for each orifice. The letters are from my mother and ex-girlfriend, Lily Dunford of 45 Revlon Road, Brockley SE26. Mother harps on about not forgetting to go to church. She thanks me for the photo of Toni that I sent her, but feels she would rather have had a medical report. Don’t forget to put paper on the toilet seat. If I can’t, do it standing up, etc. Lily Dunford’s letter is really just a progress report on her life. The man she had ditched me for had left her. But for Toni, I might have made it back with her again. Too late, ‘the bird has flown and has but a little way to fly’ (Omar Khayyam).