A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (13 page)

If I had not had marginally OK friends who had not abandoned me when we moved to the
orfanotrofio
from the camp in which we had previously been imprisoned I, too, would have become a dweller in darkness, which I did not want to be. I wanted the opportunity to observe the OK people at close quarters and some inner voice told me, quite correctly for once, that this might be my last chance to do so for most of my life.

Before the war I had rarely spoken to OK people, let alone known any well enough to talk to. Even at Sandhurst in 1940 OK people had been rarities. They were accommodated in the hideous New Buildings, which were not really new at all but were newer than the old ones; or else they were members of something called The Royal Armoured Wing – I now forget where they lived – which had to do with armoured fighting vehicles and therefore with what was still called the Cavalry, which was nothing to do with the Royal Tank Regiment and still isn’t, all these years later.

When I was very young I sometimes used to see what I immediately recognised as midget versions of OK people in Children’s Hairdressing on the first floor at Harrods, to which my mother, who had been a model girl at the store and had a nostalgia for the place, used to take me from Barnes to get my hair cut. There they exercised themselves on the rocking horses while waiting to be given the treatment and never let me have a go. I used to see them, too, wearing hand-made overcoats with velvet collars and long gaiters with hundreds of buttons down the sides, the sort of outfit which would have caused any un-OK child to have a fit of apoplexy in the mild spring weather in which they were dressed like this, being pushed up Sloane Street in huge, glossy machines known as Victoria carriages, which were short-wheelbase prams with curled up fronts, like seashells. They travelled sitting more or less upright with their backs to whoever was pushing them and, usually, with a dark blue blanket clipped over the front with their initials, or their parents’ initials, embroidered on them, on their way to the Dell, a charming grassy depression on the far side of Rotten Row, in the Park. They were still being conveyed about in these carriages at an age when I had long forgotten what it was like to be in a push-chair.

The nurses who had the pushing of these little OK boys who sat, as it were, with their backs to the engines, were invariably bad-tempered looking and absolutely hideous. They wore pork-pie hats with badges on them, long, drab overcoats of putty-coloured gabardine or grey flannel, with lisle stockings to match, and clumpy great shoes; not like my very sexy suburban nanny who wore a uniform bought for her by my mother – who had not been a model girl for nothing – a blue denim dress in summertime with stiff white collar and cuffs and black silk stockings and high-heeled shoes, and whose head was swathed in some sort of dark blue veiling when she took me out for an airing. Often it was to have assignations with what looked to me like very old men but were probably quite young ones, in a graveyard, not in fashionable S.W.1 but in S.W.13, keeping me quiet while she did whatever she did with them by giving me handfuls of Carrara marble chippings from the tombs to play with. (She was fired when my mother found me still playing with them in the bath.) If this nanny, of whom photographs still exist in an album, which enables me to remember more clearly than I would otherwise have been able to do what she looked like, had taken me to the Dell, the other nannies would have ignored her, not only because she was far too good-looking to be a nanny, but because I was not an OK child.

Whatever else I may have envied them I certainly did not envy these little OK boys their nannies.

‘Why is the sky blue, Nanny?’ I heard one ask in the bell-like upperclass voice which I envied and always wished that I could emulate – mine sounded as if it emanated from my boots. To which he got the reply, ‘Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies, little Mr Inquisitive.’ And later when we were all a bit older, and I was on my way to or from the dentist, also in S.W.I, with my mother’s ‘Help’, I sometimes used to see a shambling crocodile of them, all wearing the strange-looking, tomato-coloured caps of a smart pre-prep school, which looked like the sort of caps that some Irish peasants still wear, being shepherded along the road by a number of brisk grown-ups, all wearing no-nonsense-from-you expressions.

‘Well-born they may be, Master Eric,’ the ‘Help’ said stoutly, when they had shuffled past, ‘but most of them look half-barmy to me.’ And when the war came and I was on embarkation leave I saw them again in Harrods, in various splendid uniforms with their mothers and sisters and girl friends who all wore miniature replicas of their regimental badges picked out in diamonds, and again listened with awe to their loud, self-confident voices, usually as we were ascending or descending together in one of the lifts, slightly cracked versions of the bell-like tones I had listened to with envy on the way to the Dell sixteen years before. But this was the first opportunity I had had to consort with them and study them at leisure and
en masse
.

In the camp the members of the coteries moved easily in a mysterious, almost Edwardian world and when they addressed one another they used nicknames, just as the Edwardians had been so fond of doing, which were completely unintelligible to anyone else, and they knew who was who so far down the scale of the aristocracy to a point at which one would have thought that any blue blood corpuscles would have been non-existent. They alone knew that ‘Bolo’ Bastonby was the nephew of the Earl of Crake, that ‘Jamie’ Stuart Ogilvie-Keir-Gordon was the youngest brother of the Master of Dunreeking and that ‘Feathers’ Farthingdale was the third son of the Marquis of Stale by his second wife. No one outside these coteries had even heard of the holders of the titles, let alone ‘Bolo’ Bastonby, ‘Jamie’ Stuart Ogilvie-Keir-Gordon or ‘Feathers’ Farthingdale.

The
orfanotrofio
was more like a public school than any other prison camp I was ever in. If anybody can be said to have suffered in this place it was those people who had never been subjected to the hell of English preparatory and public school life; because although there was no bullying in the physical sense – canes had been taken away for the duration, and the twisting of arms was forbidden by the Geneva Convention – there was still plenty of scope for mental torment; and although the senior officer thought he ran the camp it was really run by people elected by the coteries, just like Pop at Eton, where so many of them had been.

When one of the prisoners was found to be stealing food, a most awful crime in a prison camp where everyone started off with exactly the same amount however much more they managed to acquire by exchanging tobacco and cigarettes for it, and the problem arose of punishing him without the added and unthinkable indignity of handing him over to the Italians to keep in their cells, the
colonello
offered our colonel a small Italian infantry bivouac tent and a piece of parched ground in what was normally a zone that was out of bounds to us on which the sun shone all day, so that the offender could expiate his crime in solitary confinement and on a diet of bread and water provided by the British, from their rations, not by the Italians.

Some of the prisoners were very old prisoners indeed, not in age or seniority but because of the number of years they had been locked up. Most of the ‘old’ prisoners had wonderful clothes which no one who had been captured later in the war could possibly emulate, things that had been sent to them before the Italians had instituted rigid sumptuary laws for prisoners of war in order to prevent anyone having anything which vaguely resembled civilian clothes. By some technicality those who already had these clothes were allowed to keep them, providing that the larger items bore the large red patches which were sewn on to everything we wore. They had pig’s-whisker pullovers, scarves and stocks from the Burlington Arcade secured with gold pins, made-to-measure Viyella shirts, and corduroy trousers, and one who was a member of a cavalry regiment called the Cherry-Pickers, wore cherry-red trousers. Some of this gear had reached them by way of the Red Cross and neutral embassies, but not all of it. One officer had an elegant hacking coat which had been made for him while he was a prisoner, out of a horse blanket which he had rescued from his armoured car when it went up in flames near Solium, and which he paid the Italian tailor for with cigarettes.

The one thing which united the prisoners in the
orfanotrofio
and which gave them, as it were, a ‘team spirit’, was their attitude towards the ‘Itis’. ‘Itis’ in the abstract, because it was difficult for any but the most hidebound to actively dislike our ‘Itis’, apart from one or two horrors who would have been horrors whatever their nationality, and we all loved the ‘Iti’ girls – soldiers always make an exception for the women of the enemy, for otherwise they would feel themselves completely alone.

The
colonello
was generally conceded to be ‘all right’, a ‘good chap’ in spite of being an ‘Iti’; and most people liked one of the Italian officers, a
capitano
, because he smoked a pipe and was more English than many of the English. For most of the others and the wretched soldiery who guarded us, the privates and the NCOs, with their miserable uniforms, ersatz boots, unmilitary behaviour and stupid bugle calls, we felt nothing but derision. What boobs they were, we thought. We used to talk about how we could have turned them into decent soldiers if only we were given the opportunity.

How arrogant we were. Most of us were in the
orfanotrofio
because we were military failures who had chosen not to hold out to the last round and the last man, or, at the last gasp, had been thankful to grasp the hand of a Sicilian fisherman and be hauled from the sea, as I had been. We were arrogant because this was the only way we could vent our spleen at being captured and, at the same time, keep up our spirits which were really very low. Deep down in all of us, prisoners isolated from the outside world and Italian
soldati
, far from home, subjected to a twentieth-century Temptation of St Anthony and without the money to gratify it, firing volleys at us in fury because we laughed at them in front of girls who by rights should have been their girls, tormenting us all, reminding us constantly of something for which we felt that we would give up everything we had for one more chance to experience, something we ourselves talked about all the time, was the passionate desire to be free; but what did we mean by freedom? I thought I knew, and so did everyone else; but it meant so many different things to so many of us.

We were, in fact, as near to being really free as anyone can be. We were relieved of almost every sort of mundane pre-occupation that had afflicted us in the outside world. We had no money and were relieved of the necessity of making any. We had no decisions to make about anything, even about what we ate. We were certainly much more free than many of us would ever be again, either during the war or after it. And as prisoners we did not even suffer the disapprobation of society as we would have done if we had been locked up in our own country. To our own people we appeared as objects worthy of sympathy.

On the evening of the 8th September news of an armistice came through. The following morning we left the camp
en masse
to avoid being sent to Germany. It was a close thing; the Germans arrived shortly afterwards. Because of my damaged ankle I left the camp on a horse. That night I was given shelter in the hayloft of a neighbouring farm.

The next morning, the ioth September, after a slow start, things began to happen with increased rapidity. It was as if a piece of an old film in which the actors emerge from vehicles, zoom into buildings with incredible speed, and miraculously appear at a window sixteen storeys up within seconds, had been interpolated in a modern one in which the characters move at a normal rate.

Around eleven o’clock an Italian doctor arrived in a Fiat 500. He was an enormous, shambling man with grizzled hair, like a bear and one of the ugliest men I had seen for a long time.

He examined my ankle, which was rather painful after the strains to which it had been subjected, raised his shoulders, made a noise which sounded like
urgh
and went off to have a conference with the
capitano
, who had joined the prisoners when they broke out of the camp.

‘The doctor says you must go to hospital,’ the
capitano
said, when they emerged from their conclave.

‘But that means I shall be captured again,’ I said.

‘You’ll be taken anyway if you don’t. Apparently things are not going too well at Salerno and we’re six hundred kilometres north of it. Everything’s going to break up here, anyway. Unless you can walk you won’t stand a chance. The doctor can get you into a hospital in Fontanellato. No one will think of looking for you there.’

While he was speaking, the forerunners of an army of women, girls and small boys began to arrive at the farm on foot and on bicycles; the same girls, or the same sort of girls I had seen on the road outside the camp, except that now they were wearing their working clothes. I felt more timid now that we were at close quarters and there was no wire between us, and so did they, and all we managed were some nervous smiles.

They all carried baskets and panniers filled with civilian clothing, wine, bread, cheese, fruit, eggs and tinned food and cigarettes which they had saved from the
orjanotrofio
after the Germans had left. All at once the farm became a depot for the prisoners who had taken refuge from the Germans behind an embankment.

I found myself a mechanic’s jacket and a pair of dark blue cotton trousers and a shirt, filled my pack with the food and cigarettes that were being pressed upon me from every side, and climbed the ladder to the loft where I changed into them, chucking my uniform down from the window into the yard from which it was instantly taken away.