Where Have All the Bullets Gone? (29 page)

As we disembark, Italian Dragomen and flies are waiting. “Do you like a donkey?” No thanks, I’m a vegetarian. We board the Funicolare — up up up. At the top we walk out into the most famous square in the world, Captain Reg O’List. How are we? — he’s just returning. Goodbye Reg, no — no need to sing ‘Begin the Beguine’, no, thank mother for the rabbit.

The main square is set up with cafes and outdoor tables, no piped music or transistors. We choose the Cafe Azzura because it’s nearest, and order two icecreams. What ice-creams!!! Wow, a foot high, multi-coloured, and covered in cream and flies. We are the only two soldiers in the Square.

My God! the impossible! “Ello lads.” It’s
her
! It’s our Gracie! I wished it was
theirs
. She insists we come and have a ‘nice cup of tea’. Down the lanes she takes us to her Villa Canzone del t’mare; the view is stunning but the house is rather like a very good class boarding-house in Scunthorpe. She’s wonderfully warm-hearted. We sit on the balcony admiring the view; please God, don’t let her sing. Is she going to say it? She does. “Ee Bai Gom, a bit different from Blackpool.” She
must
be working from a script. We escape without any singing. “Good luck lads, give my love t’folks back t’ome.” We’d escaped! Not even ‘Sally’!

I wanted to see San Michele. It’s closed, says a caretaker who looked like Frankenstein’s monster without the bolts. On to the site of the Villa of Tiberius, now carefully converted into cowsheds. Sloshing thru’ cow dung, a local shows where Tiberius threw his victims over the cliff.

“I don’t see what’s dangerous about that,” said Bornheim. “It’s perfectly safe until you hit the rocks.”

Lunch, midday and that warm torpor was implemented as we ate Spaghetti Marinara and drank Ruffino at a little restaurant, high over the sea.

Me after the meal, well fed and pissed. Observe geranium
.

As I write this nearly forty years later, I can still feel the warmth of that day; that one day can cast such a lasting spell speaks either for my appreciation of life, or that ancient Capri was indeed as charged with such beauty that it left itself tattooed on your mind, soul and spirit. I know I was quite a simple soldier, unsophisticated, but as I grew older, my mind took up the slack of that past time and computed it into a finely honed memory, leaving every colour, taste, sound and sight as crisp and as electric as though it happened yesterday; and to me as I write, it did.

I remember a potted geranium on the wall. I wonder if it remembers me. It’s scarlet luminescence, projected against a fibrillating azure sea, seemed to hypnotize me. Like all idiots with a camera, I had to photograph it, and like all dodos who think they can capture their emotions on a holiday snap, I took a colour picture, in black and white…

The world’s first colour photograph in black and white

I must be Irish. Well, I was that day.

“It’s the colour of the sea,” said Bornheim, equally pissed.

“What about the colour?” I’m asking.

“It looks as if it’s been painted,” he said, staring into its calling waters. “It has been,” I said.

“
Who was he?
” said Bornheim, stressing every word. That geranium, it was becoming fluorescent: I think it was doing to me what the chair did to Aldous Huxley in
The Doors of Perception
. I was understanding why Van Gough painted that simple chair in Aries — people say he created his own mescalin. What a saving! I sat on the wall and looked towards the Capri headland and envisaged the marble palace of Tiberius that once adorned it. That a man so innately evil should have lived in such beauty; poor Mallonia killing herself (“that filthy-mouthed, hairy stinking old man”) to avoid his advances. (He should have gone out with Maria -he’d have been dead in a day.) Now all that rage had passed, all was emptiness with the wheeling sea birds, the wash of the hissing seas.

We returned as the evening purple cascaded down on the Sorrentine peninsula.

The ferry is cloyed with chattering screaming Neapolitans and flies. At the stern a row breaks out. I can only see the pictures of a crowd of males hitting one unfortunate individual, some actually hanging over the boat railings to give better purchase for their assault. As in all mobs, anyone can join in the hitting, even though they don’t know the reason for it, and even I was tempted. It’s the last boat, crowded. We are the only two soldiers on board. I address a seaman: “Hello sailor,” I say. “Can you take our picture?” Si. The sailor smiles and points the ancient Kodak. Click! Bornheim and I are immortalized.

The cool evening air and the last warmth of the sun touched our skin. We stood at the rails watching Capri sink into the oncoming crepuscular night; in ancient times the Pharos on Capri would have been igniting its faggot fires to warn ships bearing grain from Africa of its rocky prominence. Bornheim and I were taking on glasses of grappa to light our own faggot fires, and warn those self-same ships against our own rocky prominences. Arriving back at the billets and settling back into the ways of soldiery was difficult. After lights out, we reminisced in our khaki cots. “It didn’t really happen, did it?” he said.

Bombardier Milligan, a moment before looking the other way

Me telling Bornheim where my hand has gone
.

Last shot of Capri before we head for home

Nearly!

T
hese were the days when we should have been lotus-eating but the NAAFI didn’t stock them. Life was a series of paid gigs. The Bill Hall Trio, with Bornheim on piano and George Puttock on Drums, plays for dances in, around, and sometimes under Naples. Every band in those days had to have an MC. Ours won his at El Alamein. He was Sergeant Bob Hope, yes,
Bob Hope
. What a letdown when he showed up.

“You’re not Bob Hope?”

“Oh yes I am.”

“You don’t look like Bob Hope.” . “Well, I bloody well am Bob Hope.”

“Not the Bob Hope.”

“No —
a
Bob Hope.”

We finally got him to use ‘Dick’ Hope. Dick or Bob, he nearly did for us.

We are in a van returning from a successful gig at the Royal Palace at Caserta, a dead straight road that leads to Naples. There are no lights. Bill Hall is counting and recounting his money, hoping to make it more. He’s turning it over for the tenth time.

“You keeping it aired,” says Mulgrew who’s got his in a sealed Scottish death grip in his right hand.

Bornheim’s lighter illuminates his face; he tries to set fire to Hall’s money.

“Wot you bloody doin?” says Hall, beating out the flames.

I’m looking through the windscreen from my bench seat; ahead are two lone sets of car lights; I can tell by their excessive brightness they’re American. They are approaching at speed. I have a nasty feeling. The lights are swaying. In no time the car is on us. It veers across to our side. The idiot Dick Hope is rooted to the wheel. I lunge over his shoulder and wrench the steering wheel to the left. As I do so, the uncoming vehicle hits us, there’s a screech of metal, it rips the whole of our undercarriage out, our four wheels are hulled from under us and our bodywork crashes to the road. We skid along on the chassis, the road coming up through the floor. We grind to a halt.

“Everyone alright?” shouts Bornheim.

“99, 100,” says Hall, counting his money.

We kick open the rear door and scramble out. The first thing is the unending blare of a motor horn coming from the other vehicle, a banshee sound. It’s an American Pontiac staff car, nose deep in a ten-foot ditch. In the dark we slither down. The driver is impaled on the steering column shorting the horn. His eyes have been jettisoned on his cheeks. Dead. We unstick him. In the rear are a colonel and wife/lady/screw. She was unconscious and saying “O! O! O!” A lot of help — didn’t she know any other letters? I drag her out; she’s mumbling “Are you OK, honey?” I said yes, I was honey. Her top half is naked, her dress hanging down from the waist. The colonel is unconscious, his trousers are around his ankles. What I wouldn’t have given for a hot line to the
News of the World
! I drag her up the bank. The other three pull the colonel out.

“I think the driver’s dead,” says Bill Hall — it must be a second opinion. On the road I help the bird get her boobs back into her dress, give them a squeeze and ask would she like a quickie. The colonel is gaining consciousness and saying ‘Darling, you were wonderful’ to Bill Hall, who agrees with him. An American Police Patrol jeep screeches to a halt. They leave one policeman and the other speeds off for help — he will ‘alert the British Military Police’. In no time the whole mess is cleaned up, the ambulance whisks off the colonel, the lady and the dead driver. A giant crane lifts the wreck away and whoosh! all gone. All that’s left are the six British idiots, alone in the dark with the top half of a van. “Let’s play look for the wheels,” says George Puttock.

We are waiting for the ‘Alert British Police’ — one hour, two hours, three hours — shall we start walking? No, we
should
have started walking hours ago. It’s gone four o’clock. Queen Victoria, Abraham Lincoln, Prince Albert had also gone, everyone had gone but us. As morning in a bowl of light was putting the stars to flight, a fifteen-cwt truck with two Military Police arrives, followed by an ambulance. My first words were: “Where the fuck have you been?” A tall red cap cautions me. “Now, now Corporal,” he warned, “that kind of language won’t get us anywhere.” Oh, would he like it in fucking French then? He was not endeared to me.

“Where are the injured?” he said.

We
are
the fucking injured, I said, but we’re all better now.

“We were told that your driver was dead.”

Oh? We didn’t know that, otherwise we would never have let him drive.

Enough is enough. We get into the fifteen-cwt and as the sun was rising, drive down the Royal road to Naples.