Noisy at the Wrong Times (3 page)

I myself once had cause to experience the indelible mark that the war had left on Mum. Returning late one evening to the home of an uncle in the poor district of Montecorvino (for there were less poor areas than others), we had just passed a small block of flats under construction when a mighty, deafening explosion blew us forwards. The blast wave rushed past us, and, before I’d had time even to think, my mother, despite being half my size, had grabbed my hand and begun sprinting up the hill with me in helpless tow. It turned out to be a device planted by the local mafia to remind the builder of his obligations and if it had exploded when we were passing the building thirty seconds earlier, we would have been turned to mincemeat. But the event had instantly pitched Mum backwards to the days of war, and I had never before even given it a thought.

She was the oldest girl of a large family with an alcoholic father, and it fell to such young women to run the family home. Washing clothes in streams and specially built stone fountains fed by springs is hard graft in the furnace of a southern Italian summer, but working in tobacco fields as she did in her late teens and early twenties before leaving for the UK surpassed
anything for brutal physical drudgery. Her father had been a committed fascist and believed Mussolini to be the great saviour. He had taken up arms abroad and, even more dangerously, at home, alongside the struggling Germans against the Americans and British. With the Resistance so active and the community split, his continuing dedication to the cause had to be guarded and cunning to keep his neighbours in the dark. Money was virtually non-existent, so the richly fertile land and climate was something of a redeemer, but it was an arduous, perilous existence. Mum’s life in London, in Fulham Court with its running water, bathroom and inside toilet was therefore something she could proudly view as the Everest of social improvement. Her regular employment as a cook had indeed rendered her wealthier than most of her kin back home. Despite the economic miracle of post-war Italy, when only Japan and Germany (is there something about losing wars?) surpassed its growth, the south of the country remained in the relative dark ages for some time. Mum never felt the need to return.

Dad was from the larger town that sat only halfway up the mountain, Montecorvino Rovella. I think this is what led to the elopement: Dad’s lot were urban sophisticates compared to Mum’s hillbillies and they didn’t approve of his dalliance with her. Class divisions go beyond just rich and poor, something I don’t think has ever been properly understood by those who try to alleviate deprivation. All parts of society are sub-divided into almost countless sections, and if you sliced through it, it would have as many layers as a lasagne. My father’s dynasty, led by the patriarch Luigi, my grandfather, considered their family to be respected and of high status. Triumphant proclamations by my uncle years later revealed that this elevated self-image was on account of
Nonno’s
position as a local government officer and a distant cousin who had become an architect. But such things mattered in Montecorvino.

In fairness, there
was
something a little feral about Mum’s clan. Their homes were ramshackle, in centuries-old narrow back streets that still had pigs in sties beneath them. One of her brothers had a miscellany of tiles on the stairs leading up to his house, fruits of the family’s gentle thievery. After several years, they had pocketed enough tiles from loose walls or surreptitiously placed majolica slabs from building site entrances into handbags to finish the stairs completely. But they were warm people, and we loved our uncles, especially Rolando, who had once run off with the circus to become a famous trapeze artist. He was enormously athletic and strong and could hang all four of us from his biceps. Another of my uncles, Isidoro, used Rolando’s strength to help him organise the annual
fiera
because, he said, it was “come avere quattro uomini”. And when Rolando wasn’t carrying half-ton loads on his back for his older brother, he was striking out across the mountains at dawn to collect a cornucopia of wild
funghi
to sell in the market. As far as I could tell, only he had the skills and knowledge to find such delicacies. Knowing which were safe to eat was the golden ticket of
funghi-
collecting talent so Rolando’s arduously harvested produce was valuable indeed. It is impossible to imagine the extraordinary variety of these mushrooms, which Zia Anna, Rolando’s wife, frequently served me. Some were like large steaks, slabs of perfumed fungus drenched in olive oil and dusted with Parmesan, rosemary and thyme; other’s were better fired in the oven with gorgonzola and honey, or wrapped in pasta to make perfect ravioli. It was the southern Italian meadow’s meat. Rolando epitomised the simple peasant, wandering the hills with his old, floppy straw hat to protect him from the fierce heat, smoking cigars that hung permanently from his lip. He played the village idiot to some degree, I feel, but with his film-star looks (once captured in an old photograph of him in circus costume), enormous
physicality and a big heart, he was a bit of a hero to me. This is a man who had run off with the circus against his parent’s wishes at the age of fifteen. He was a
trapeze artist
who also did a solo stint on the high swing, possibly the most glamorous act under the big top, for goodness sake! And I had so loved the film with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis; Rolando was
my
Burt Lancaster. Can you imagine how I luxuriated in this story when in the playground? Nobody in the whole of London will have had an uncle who was a circus star.

Having a family in Italy was quite a bonus when it came to holidays because as long as Mum could scrape together the train fare (cheaper than flying in those days) we would get a good long break in the Med. Well, sort of. The train journey was a two-day adventure in choked carriages and stifling heat, but an overnight passage through the Alps is still among the most exciting things I ever got to do as a child. Serge and I, sharing a couchette bed, would peer through the windows into the night, where we could still make out the moonlit crests of the mountains, their villages revealed by twinkling, distant lights. Strikes by railway workers would mean sitting stationary for hours on the tracks, blocked by a handful of disgruntled train drivers who would break out a picnic of bread, salami and home made wine, sharing it with passengers who would climb down from the carriages. At stations that were loud and chaotic, my brothers would leap from the train to fill containers with drinking water, and amid the pandemonium I would always fret that the train would leave without them. Once, panic and hysteria did break out in our compartment when Matt had failed to return as the train began its onward journey. With Mum flailing her arms in grief and despair, me copying her, and the whole carriage wondering if the Red Brigade was mounting a terrorist attack, Matt nonchalantly wandered into the compartment, explaining that he had merely got on further along the platform.

Italy in the summer meant weeks of freedom in a potent and overwhelming landscape of heat, smells and wild untamed beauty. Even among the poorer members of the family there were lavish late lunches after days at the beach or mornings catching lizards in the first rays of the scorching sun. As a youngster I would ride the hot, dusty road between the two towns on a motor scooter, the air soaked with the pungent aroma of wild basil or the occasional open sewer. Halfway up the Pugliano road was a high stone bridge spanning a gorge, and I would stop there and imagine the days during wartime when, with suspicious, paranoid Germans patrolling, my grandfather would sneak beneath it on his way to deliver food to the inhabitants of his town. Inevitably, two soldiers caught him one night but were persuaded not to shoot him on the spot by the
Fascisti
party card he produced from his pocket. Nonno might have been a fascist, but he still wanted to feed his family. Mum also told me of young women who would be found dead at its base, apparent suicides but who more likely had been pitched from it by their ashamed fathers and families because of illicit love affairs or unplanned pregnancy. Even today, unwed mothers or forbidden trysts cause a real stir in that part of Italy, but the disgrace it caused in the thirties and forties burned through society like acid. I often think it would be a great subject for a one-act verismo opera;
Il ponticello della morte
or something equally melodramatic. These were stories of death and dishonour, but they were thrilling.

From the peak at Pugliano I could view, laid out before me, the hot, arid plain between the mountains and the ocean, the landscape filled with mile upon mile of tomato fields, from which my cousins would return every afternoon after picking box after box of
pomodori,
their backs blackened by a day in the brutal heat. The land would stretch out forever, and when the air was clear, you could see the waters of Spineta beach
shimmering in the far distance. There was nothing impoverished about the geography of the place, and I can only ever have been enriched by days such as those.

My time in Italy and the extended family I had there, as well as those who had come to the UK, would always influence the way in which I saw myself. I feel Italian to this day and, as a child, I felt it lent me an exoticism my contemporaries just did not possess. Paradoxically, we were curiosities in Italy too, where most of the town knew who the
Inglese
were. On the warm, humid evenings when the whole town would walk up and down the main street, parading themselves and gossiping about each other, I was always acutely aware of the looks we would get. The only place on earth that I can tolerate crowds is on the ‘passagiata’. In Italy, the throng of chattering, shouting people who stand in groups small and large to argue and gesticulate vehemently is one of the great entertainments known to man. For hours, I would listen to the undulating lyricism of the Neapolitan dialect, which manipulates the Italian language – already a beautiful thing – into an intricate, acrobatic linguistic feat. It’s pure music.

One of my fondest childhood memories (although when I say memory, I mean it to be more visceral than that) is the sound of Italian women shrieking from balconies at their friends, their children or their husbands. Although a cacophony, it still retained a mellifluousness that was full and compelling, a street opera without accompaniment. The complexity of the Neapolitan dialect and the speed with which it is usually delivered gives the language a genuinely animal quality, and as I sat on benches and at café tables with my cousins, I would be gripped by its expression. My spoken Italian is drenched with a strong southern accent; not for me the formal eloquence of the Milanese or Florentine when the inventions and bastardisations of
Nnapulitan
are there to be washed around the mouth before
bursting through the lips with the force of a punch. In the sphere of profanity, the dialect is extravagant, and as you might expect, I took to this with gusto. Swearing in Neapolitan is a cruel art form that spares nobody, where nothing is sacred. It is employed liberally, even in conversations of levity and friendship; a woman would think nothing of telling her brother to go fuck his mother. Neapolitans have words to describe complex realities too: “The rain is like fine hair”, which would properly be something like
La pioggia è come capelli fini
, is the much more brief and evocative “Shul’agaia”. I write the word phonetically because I have absolutely no idea how you might spell it. I am aware that much of this sounds dreadful and common and peasant-like, but that’s because it is. Southerners are frowned upon for such things, but to me it was wonderful and I could cuss, undetected, like no other child at Addison Gardens Primary School. In real song, too, the language is bewitching and
Canzone Nnapulitan
are, in the right hands, accompanied by guitar alone, a breathless balm for the soul.

Suffice to say, I absorbed every second of my time in Italy and laid it all out for everyone to see whenever it was time to return to Addison Gardens school. As an inveterate show-off, I would come back with stories of a lifestyle lived, as opposed to a fortnight in a hotel, although very few if any of my friends could afford that. I could boast of meeting the big man who pushed a dustcart through the slender streets for the municipal authority and to whom everybody would mystifyingly doff their cap. On investigation, I was told that when not tipping the remains of everybody’s dinner into his wagon, he would be tipping those of the last person he’d whacked on behalf of the local Camorra into a ditch. Mafia hit men were as outlandish a concept as Luke Skywalker. And like him, you only ever saw them in the movies.

But I digress.

So it was that Mum struggled through life, playing her cards in order to merely stay in the hand. Sometimes, though, if you wait long enough, a better stack will land in front of you, and so it would transpire. When I was nine years old, my brother Serge, the third born of us four boys, was sent off to a school in the countryside and the talk was that I would join him there in due course. Being ‘sent’ somewhere was a significant event in our environment since the word was usually accompanied by another: ‘down’. We even knew the names of the beaks at Horseferry Road Magistrates Court who, with their picayune intellects and mammoth prejudices were most likely to give custodial sentences for the most piffling of crimes. The trick was not to get caught, or at the very most, to do only that for which a warning from the local bobby would be the limit. If policemen hate filling forms now, back in the seventies we were still waiting for the paperless office which, when it arrived, only succeeded in increasing paper a hundredfold. The only form a copper was interested in was that of the kid they had struggling in their grip, so better to deliver him to his front door with a telling off. It was still the age when trying to knock off a policeman’s helmet with a football represented the pinnacle of daring, and the idea of stabbing him couldn’t have been further from our minds. Still, Matteo, a recidivist who could hit a copper’s lid from forty yards, as well as have the watch off his wrist from the same distance, was recurrently dragged off to the local approved school or borstal. Even tolerant policemen have to take action eventually.