Where Have All the Bullets Gone? (8 page)

“Right, Sunday morning 0800. Bathing costume and towel.”

The day. Colonel Startling Grope, Captain Clarke, Len and myself pile on the jeep.

9.10
we arrive at the specially bombed car park on the water front at Naughty Naples. We go on board an awaiting RAF Rescue launch. “Welcome aboard,” says a silly sea captain, all beard and binoculars. “Cast offforrard, cast off aft,” whoosh, turbines throb and we head out into the mist-haunted sea. Our two officers are taken below for drinkypoos; we stay on deck and talk to the crew. “Hello sailor,” I say.

The bay is calm, looking like skimmed oil. We bounce on the surface and the morning mist starts to lift. In twenty minutes looms’ the soaring purple head of Mount Epomeo. We draw near to the south shore, skilfully entering a little fishing mole amid red and blue fishing boats with the warding-off evil eye on the prows. We heave to as our two officers surface flushed and smiling. We jump ashore. The Colonel misses and plunges his leg up to the groin in the waters. “Oh bother,” he says, meaning “Oh fuck.”

With seven dry legs and one wet one, we follow the Colonel up a small path inland that leads us to a bleached white Italo-Moorish villa on the sea. A brief pull on the doorbell; the red mahogany door opens to a small smiling, white-coated, thirty-year-old, blood group Rhesus negative inside leg forty-two, valet. He ushers us in, all the while looking suspiciously at the Colonel’s one damp leg. This is the Villa San Angelo, owned by an Italian Colonello with two dry legs. He is at the moment ‘away on business in Naples’. Possibly at this moment, he and two pimps are changing lire into sawdust on the Via Roma.

The Moors have left their mark here: many arches, turquoise tiled floors, latticed screens, Fazan carpets. It is a treasure house of antiques — Majolica Ceramics, Venetian Glass, Inlaid Moorish Muskets, Tapestried Walls. “Homely isn’t it, Terence,” says the Colonel. After a cold buffet of avocado and prawns and wine of the island, our officers retire to sleep. Len and I are directed to the private beach down a few rocky steps. The day is sunny, the sea is like champagne. We plunge into crystal clear waters that in forty years time will be floating with tourist crap and overpopulation. Lording over the island is Mount Epomeo, hung with a mantle of vineyards and bougainvillaea. Legend has it that the giant Typhoeus lies transfixed beneath it. A punishment for screwing one of the Naiads. I suppose one way of keeping it down is to put a mountain on it.

On this very island Michelangelo used to visit the lady Vittoria Collona — mysterious, as he was gay.

VITTORIA:

‘ows the cealin goin, Mike?

MICHEL A:

I bin using the long brush but it’s doin’ me back in.

VITTORIA:

Why don’t you arst the Pope fer scaffoldin’?

MICHEL A:

Oh ta, I knew these visits ‘ere wouldn’t be wasted.

Hours. We lie on the beach sunning and smoking, and like true smokers throw our dog ends and matches in the sea.

“Hello, down there.” The Colonel’s red face is at the grilled Moorish window, his face looking equally grilled. We must come up, tea is being served. A long refectory table laden with salads and a magnificent bronze samovar. Our every whim is waited on slavishly by the little Italian. “They’re a dying breed,” says Startling Grope. (He was right. The Iti died the day after we left.) The officers are slopping down one Alexander after another and we all repair to the beach again; Captain Clarke in a one-piece suit that was out of date when Captain Webb swam the channel, and the Colonel in a pair of bathing drawers of ‘the briefest gist’. He plunges in, comes out, and goes up to bed. Captain Clarke strikes out to sea so far that the current gradually carries him out of sight round the headland. He is not shouting ‘help’ but just in case we shout “Goodbye, sir.” He disappears. Should we inform the life-guards? No, there’s plenty more like him. Hours later he returned overland via the Villa Fondalillo some three miles away. When the Italian flunkey opened the door, a shagged-out Captain Clarke fell into the house, but at least he had two wet legs and a body to match.

Eventide and we are returning; the RAF boat waits at the mole. The Colonel has organized it perfectly, except for falling in the sea again. “Homeward bound, eh?” says the Captain, and leads our officers away for drinkypoos. We of the lower order stay on deck with buggerallpoos. Ischia fades into the crepuscular evening and Naples looms. We dock.

“You drive, Terence,” says Colonel S. Singing all the while, we are back at Maddaloni in just over the hour and under the weather. It was a memorable day. Even as I type this, I can see that splendid sunlight on that warm azure sea in a time capsule that will never come again.

Len and I are bedding down for the night. “He must have drunk ten bottles of wine, two of Strega and two of brandy,”

Len said. “You’ll see, when he goes it will be his liver or his bladder.” He was wrong: in 1970 Stanley died of heart failure during an operation for piles. But for piles, Stanley would be alive today, doing ten years for interfering with little boys.

One of them could have been me. I speak with experience.

. You see that evening on our return from Ischia, I drove Stanley back to his billet and he put his hand up my shorts. I thought, this could mean promotion for me, but no, I said “Look here, sir, fuck off…sir.” He is sorry. It will never happen again.

Len falls about laughing. “Cor, fancy, there’s men up the line dying and down here the Colonels are trying to grab yer goolies.” I reminded him it was better than dying. “Let’s face it, would you rather be fucked or killed?”

Ars Gratia Artist

I
have entered an Art Contest, and I win!

Nude winner of art contest

The prize is given me by a new man, Major Rodes of the Highland Light Infantry. He too is gay, and has just returned from some daring deed behind the enemy lines, like squeezing partisans’ balls under fire. Now he is out of the line as he has developed a hernia (did he use a dark room?) and he is billeted with us awaiting an operation. This has been delayed by Brigadier Henry Woods who is a ‘rupture expert’ and wants to get the Major the right hospital and the right surgeon. So, I receive my prize from a ruptured major who was a professional artist in Civvy Street! Did he chalk the pavements? He laughs not. My drawing is very good, had I done any artistic training? I told him I’d done a bit in Goldsmith’s College. He said never mind her, would I like to do murals? Had I ever done any murals? Yes, I did ‘All Coppers are Bastards’ outside the Lady Flo’ Institute, Deptford, 1936. He shows me a drawing of Hyde Park Corner in high Victorian days. He wants to do an enlargement on the wall of the Officers’ Mess. “There’ll be something in it for you,” he says. OK, I’ll do it. Murals; mean swines, anything to save buying wallpaper. Evenings I don my denims and start work.

I square off the wall and then draw the enlargements.

Officers’ Mess Maddaloni on a Bad Day, 1944

Military supplies showing liver cripplers, Maddaloni, 1944

To my delight it comes very easily. It means working late after the Officers’ Mess closes, but in lieu I’m given time off in the mornings. I am praised. “My word, you are talented, Terence,” says Stanley, Sir. “You play the trumpet and guitar and you can paint. Is there anything you can’t do?” Yes, sir, Sheila Frances.

The Colonel is to do a tour of the front lines. Would I like to come too? The front line? Does he think I’m mad? He does. No sir, my days of sitting in an OP trench full of water with 88s air bursting over your head and your bottle bursting underneath are over. “Goodbye, good luck, God be with you, but not me.”

O2E is womanless, save for tall lovely ATS Captain Thelma Oxnevad, six foot with sparkling blue eyes and certain things…We like each other, but alas, she is an officer and a gentleman and I am a gunner, the stuff that gutters are made of.

“No Spike, I can’t walk out with you.”

I don’t want her to walk out, I want her to walk into my bedroom. No, if Brigadier Henry Woods heard this, she’d be cashiered and I’d be shot. I tell her that’s OK with me. I tell her that when we take our clothes off she wouldn’t be able to tell the gunner from the Captain! Nay nay nay. When I dance with her, she is three inches taller. I explain that lying down we will both be the same height. Even as I dance with her, I can feel the eyes of other officers on me, jealous with rage. Like Major Rodes, he wants to dance with me. Thelma gives me hope.

“Your lust will soon be allayed Spike, a consignment of Virgin ATS are to be posted here.”

Meantime I still try to home in on Sheila Frances. She jives in! Yes, she
will
meet me. She’ll never regret it! With toe in my Prime and all parts in Grand Prix order. Ah yes, She’ll love my Grand Prix. 8 o’clock outside the 604 ATS Company HQ Caserta.

I am there, beautiful, radiating Brasso, Blanco, Brylcreem and Brio, with all my things revolving at high speed. I am there dead on 8 o’clock, I am also there dead on at half-past eight, I am also dead on there at nine, and I am there dead on again at nine-thirty, and I went on to be dead on at ten o’clock. Where was she, my little darling dirty rotten little tart, letting me and it down! Today I wonder, was I at the right address? Somewhere in the street of Caserta is a grey-haired old lady in a ragged ATS uniform still waiting for it.

I withdraw to the Forces Canteen in the High Street and am found drinking tea, eating a sandwich and finding consolation watching the wobbling bum of the manageress. Next Hay Major Rodes and his rupture hear of my adventure. “So your little soldier tart didn’t show, eh?” He hands me a drawing.

Band Biz

W
e want to expand the band. We would like a string section. There is a fine fiddler, one Corporal Spaldo. At concerts he plays Montés’ Czardas. Would he like to play in our band? He shudders. No, not for him the nigger rhythm music. There is a postscript to this tale.