Loving Monsters (26 page)

– Bit by bit I understood that he was mainly being scorned for having a mother who drove about town with an extravagantly absurd foreigner and a father who was an absentee cuckold, although everyone at school wanted a go in the Delahaye which was one of the most glamorous vehicles in Alexandria. I find it hard to explain why I was so affected by Adelio’s being made to feel humiliated by his own mother’s behaviour, but I was. To a Briton of that period it was also sympathetic that an Italian kid should be so indifferent to the propaganda they were being fed daily at school: all that stuff about Africa being their natural empire. He knew the songs, of course, and the slogans. But he said he just associated it all with the military and his father. And that was yet a further reason for his unpopularity at school: he had no real interest in joining the armed forces and fighting for
Il
Duce.
His idea of being an Italian patriot was becoming a diplomat, as Mirella hoped he would. He liked making cases and was a good debater. But the notion of having to live in a barracks with more of the same sort of people he knew at school held no attraction for him. He certainly didn’t want to fight and possibly kill people, although he admitted he would cheerfully shoot his mother’s Hungarian Count given the opportunity. Now and then we would plot the Count’s assassination just for fun, idle flights of fancy while eating ice creams. We both knew it was a game and
Bathory-Sopron was neither here nor there. The Count’s demise wouldn’t change anything for the Boschetti family since there was a rich supply of varyingly glamorous or preposterous representatives of European aristocracy in Egypt. But although it was a game, it was one founded on knowledge we shared of how distressed he actually was by Mirella’s behaviour and how deeply he hated the Count. It was then I realised that if I ever did break my promise to him and contrive to bed his mother it would smash him up utterly because I had become the one adult in his life he trusted and could talk to.

– It might seem odd now that the most serious conversations I ever had about matters of personal loyalty and patriotism and fighting for one’s country should have been with a twelve-year-old Italian. Yet regardless of our difference in age it was a topic that was obviously going to have considerable significance for us both in the near future. If England went to war with Germany again, what was I planning to do? I didn’t feel the sort of patriotism that makes a warrior, but neither did quite a few Britons in Egypt who had no connection with the military. We just wanted to get on with living our lives, especially those of us who were enjoying ourselves. On the other hand we weren’t blind. We knew we were living in a country that had uneasy relations with its ruling foreign power and there was no plausible war scenario that wasn’t going to embroil Egypt in one way or another. Sooner or later I was going to have to take a decision and it probably wasn’t going to be easy, regardless of whether I came down on the side of duty, tactical disappearance, enlightened cowardice or whatever. Also, you have to remember that I had listened respectfully to Michael’s rhetoric at Eltham College about not fighting to save International Capitalism and Imperialism. I had found it easy to sympathise with the basic notions of Egyptian nationalism that were shared by all the young Egyptians I ever met. Why would I want to fight for my country when my country’s presence in Egypt was so transparently one of self-interest? Really, the sort of patriotism needed to fight a war is possible only if your country is
invaded or when you have a captive and biddable population that hasn’t travelled much. Once your citizens have globe-trotted and intermarried and formed friendships with all manner of foreigners their loyalties are no longer so clear, and the primitive rhetoric of politicians and the gutter press is ineffective at best and contemptible at worst. –

Here you are, Jayjay, domiciled in Italy over half a century later. A somewhat compromised Englishman, but an Englishman for all that. We’ve heard a good deal about the boy from Eltham, but is there anything of the patriot left in you?

– Oh … What an awkward question. You sound just like a journalist. How can I put it? I would be patriotic at the drop of a hat if I thought for a moment the loyalty would be reciprocated. –

The exile’s cry. Once again, I don’t think Captain W. E. Johns would have approved. Or John F. Kennedy, for that matter. Ask not what your country, etcetera.

– Exactly. Primitive rhetoric. And within a year or two of Kennedy’s speech thousands of young Americans were asking how it was helping their country to give their lives in an immoral war halfway around the globe. Let’s not go into that. All I can say is that when the news reached Alexandria that England was at war with Germany I was a very long way from experiencing a simple patriotic urge to join up and start killing the enemy.

– The first thing that happened was that the Egyptian Prime Minister, Ali Maher, declared martial law. Under this the terms of the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty were implemented and the country’s ports, roads, airfields and railways placed at Britain’s disposal. The few Germans in Egypt were rounded up. Those who were members of the Nazi Party were sent up to Alexandria and interned in Adelio’s school, which meant that he and the other students had to be farmed out elsewhere around town. We still didn’t know which way the Italians were going to jump, but from the British point of view a glance at the map of Africa gave one a pretty good idea of what was likely. To the west there were about a quarter of a million Italian troops in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica,
and to the south the Duke of Aosta had much the same number stationed in Italian Somaliland and Ethiopia. It would surely have made sense to Mussolini to take Egypt and the Sudan, thereby joining up his territories into one massive African empire. By now General Wavell, our Commander-in-Chief Middle East, had arrived, and he looked at the map and made the same calculation. It didn’t look good. The Italians outnumbered us five to one. You could hear teachers from Adelio’s school, Fascists to a man, calling cheerfully to each other across Saad Zaghlul ‘L’Egitto sarà a noi!’ Mirella herself was becoming a little infected by the enthusiasm of her colleagues at the Italian legation but she still gave me luncheon three times a week and encouraged me to take Adelio off for the afternoon. Indeed, she was impressed by the progress he was making in English and wanted our arrangement to continue.

– It was a very odd period. For an unattached, self-employed Briton like myself there was very little pressure to be warlike. A good few Britons of military age had already left Egypt on roundabout routes to return to England and join up. But the complete uncertainty of what was going to happen to Egypt made for a kind of hiatus for the rest of us. Basically, we just went on enjoying ourselves even as more and more men in khaki flooded in from places like Australia and New Zealand and India to reinforce Wavell’s scant division or two. This was excellent from the point of view of my business, of course, since selling troops pornography is about as challenging as selling rat poison in Hamelin. Then the disquieting news reached me that August had been interned in Khartoum as an enemy alien, poor fellow. Still, I had enough of his negatives to be able to supply the market for the indefinite future and I was not about to enlist in the army unless forced to. It was here that all my party-going in Cairo began to pay off. I had some excellent British contacts who knew I spoke Arabic and had Egyptian student friends. These party contacts had just been chaps a few years older than myself whom I’d last seen dancing with girls from the fishing fleet. Now suddenly these same fellows
were popping up in uniform with quite impressive ranks, or else in civvies but attached to mysterious intelligence units that looked most unlikely ever to have to fire a Lee-Enfield rifle. For the moment I skulked and considered my options while the Italian Fascists in the streets went on assuring everybody that Egypt would shortly be theirs. As I said, a very odd time.

Meanwhile, Hitler’s military machine was doing impressively well in Europe and the Egyptian Government was becoming increasingly pro-German. Most of my nationalist friends as well as the Wafd Party were arguing that Britain’s being involved in a European war and stretched throughout her global empire was a golden opportunity for the cause of Egyptian independence. They, too, began openly supporting the Germans. Then in June 1940 Mussolini finally made up his mind whose side he was on and Italy was suddenly at war with the Allies as an Axis power. By late September the so-called Italian Army of Liberation had crossed the Libya-Egypt border and had occupied Sollum and Sidi Barrani, sixty miles inside Egyptian territory. The following month the Italian Air Force bombed Maadi, a suburb of Cairo. The majority of British women and children in Egypt had already been evacuated to South Africa, and you can imagine that the atmosphere was pretty panicky. We were all expecting to be overrun by Marshal Graziani’s 10th army at any moment. The real thing was happening at last and we were about to become prisoners of war. Alexandria, which was where they would arrive first, was very tense but subdued, except for the Italian Fascists going around loudly counting the days until they could throw garlands around the necks of their victorious compatriots. But there were quite a few Italians in Alexandria who were not at all sure they wanted to be conquered by Fascism. It was obvious Mirella herself had her doubts. She told me it would give her no pleasure to see the city reduced to a military garrison like an overgrown Tripoli. What then of cosmopolitan lotos-eating? But suddenly the British launched a counter-offensive and Wavell’s commander of the Western Desert Force, O’Connor, re-took Sidi Barrani, carried
straight on westwards and by Christmas had taken well over twenty thousand Italian prisoners.

– This was a great boost for British morale, of course, but it hotted up the problems between the British Embassy in Cairo and King Faroukh. It was widely believed that Faroukh, already well known as an Italianophile, had a secret radio transmitter in one of his palaces and was in constant touch with the Italian High Command in Rome, presumably passing on the gist of Sir Miles Lampson’s conversations with him as well as any information he could glean of British military intentions. Lampson put the King under a lot of pressure to ‘get rid of his Italians’, meaning all those Palace electricians and cronies and including poor old Renzo. Faroukh’s brilliant answer was ‘Just as soon as you get rid of yours,’ referring to Lampson’s second wife who was half Italian. It was a famous riposte and gave a pretty good idea of how strained relations between the Embassy and Abdin Palace were. Meanwhile the Egyptian press was saying that the British could never have done so well against Graziani without the help Egypt was giving them under the terms of the 1936 Treaty, and this alone ought to have earned Egypt its complete independence. The British replied that the Egyptians ought to be damned grateful to them for having saved their country from an Italian conquest.

– It all helped to make up my mind. Eighteen months into the war I had reached the point where I couldn’t go on skulking, especially not with fellow Brits in tattered uniforms limping around Cairo on crutches. My private feelings were still quite clear that I wanted nothing to do with this war, but it’s easy to be shamed into doing things against your better judgement. Do you remember all those studies about bravery some years ago? They found that in nine cases out of ten, acts of heroic wartime bravery are committed not out of hatred of the enemy but out of fear of being thought cowardly by one’s own comrades. It’s all about not looking bad in front of one’s friends, and that was pretty much exactly what drove me to enlist. Maybe if I had been back in Eltham I
might have tried to fail the call-up medical with the old gas-and-milk dodge, but there again I’m not sure. To this day I have no idea whether I’m a coward or not. I’m not even certain what it means. The fact is I was brought up to fight. We all were, of that generation. It was in the air. Most men over forty that one met had served. The First World War had been over a scant twenty years and ever since then there had been constant rumours of another war to come. In every Briton’s unconscious was the knowledge that we had a huge Empire to defend. I don’t think any of us seriously believed we would live our lives out without at some point having to fight. Anyway, brave or not, shamed or not, I enlisted.

– Well, I say ‘enlisted’, but this contact I had in the SOE Cairo office told me I wouldn’t be doing England any favours by becoming cannon-fodder in the Western Desert. I would be much more use otherwise deployed since by now I spoke excellent street Arabic, quite passable Italian, and knew my way around Cairo and Alexandria. I also had some potentially valuable Egyptian contacts. SOE, of course, was Special Operations Executive whose chief remit (apart from denying its own existence) was to build up and co-ordinate the underground resistance to the Axis in Europe. It had offices in various neutral cities like Bern and Istanbul and Cairo. Each office had two sections, one of which handled special operations and the other propaganda. I was assigned to propaganda, which pleased me since I had always fancied myself as anyone’s advocate. But the first job I was given was to stay in Alexandria and help look after a warehouse of SOE equipment that was being stockpiled in secret for eventual use in the Balkans. It was a large garage at the back of Sidi Gaber station and funnily enough it had once belonged to the Italian legation until being commandeered quite early on. I liked to think my old Fiat had once been housed there, but I don’t suppose it had. There were a lot of submachine guns in crates, also stacks of walkie-talkie radio sets with those great chunky batteries that looked as though they’d been dipped in butterscotch: some kind of greased paper they
were wrapped in. I took it in turns with a fellow named Sid Dix to keep an eye on all this equipment. The windows of the garage had already been whitewashed and barred and special locks put on the doors, so guarding it wasn’t too difficult. In fact we didn’t have much to do for several months. I had less spare time now but was still taking Adelio to the beach whenever I could. It was also one of my duties to report what I could about the Italian community in Alexandria, its morale and so forth. Effectively, I was expected to spy on close friends like the Boschettis. Needless to say I passed on nothing about them, but neither did I mention to them that I was now officially employed in their legation’s former garage. Funny how easily an impostor slips into game-playing … Am I boring you? –