Happy Ant-Heap Read Free Page B

and no blood flowed.
    The women of the Primrose League who had inspired such antipathy among the housewives of Goat Lane were present. They made neat piles of the remnants of demolished buns before clearing them away and smilingly righted mugs that had been knocked over, refilling them with lemonade made from crystals of citric acid.
    Jesus said of the poor ‘they are always with you’. In Forty Hill it was the rich who were rarely out of sight.
    1996

A Mess of a Battle
    T HE SIGNING OF THE armistice that put Italy out of the war was announced from the Municipality of Naples at 6.30 p.m. on 8 September 1943 to a large but remarkably inert crowd assembled in expectation of the news. The ringing of hand-bells on occasions of public rejoicing had been ordered by the fascist state. This was left to a minor functionary, who did so in a lackadaisical fashion, and an attempt at spontaneous dancing in a nearby side-street soon petered out. Maresciallo de Lucca of the carabinieri listened to the announcement and to the dispirited murmurings of the crowd and recorded their reactions in his notes in shorthand of a kind used by the police, which in this case took the form of four letters: PVDP, translatable as ‘No acclamation. Cries of give us bread.’ He returned to his office in the Piazza Dante, and in a matter of minutes a telephone call from the carabinieri colonel commanding the area came through. He ordered de Lucca to leave immediately for the area south of Salerno, remove the files from a list of police stations and return with them to Naples. In addition he was to visit the shrine of San Gennaro at Santa Maria della Fossa, take possession of the sacred relics comprising several finger bones of the martyr and arrange for them to be placed in safe keeping in Naples.
    De Lucca found the order baffling; nevertheless, he dashed off in his car, emptied the police stations listed of all records of their transactions, then sped on to Santa Maria, where he arrived on the scene too late, for the caretaker had deserted his post and thieves had already decamped with the precious relics. Turning back for Naples, he heard a warning come through on his car radio of a total curfew on all forms of travel. Remembering old friends who were staying in their holiday cottage on the beach at Paestum, he went there to ask for a bed, and spent the last hours of the day in pleasant company, playing cards and discussing theories of perpetual motion, in which all were interested. They were late to bed, and at dawn de Lucca got up, left the others asleep and went down to the beach a few hundred yards away, in the hope of being able to collect shellfish among the half-submerged rocks. Despite the brilliance of the morning, his eye was caught by what seemed a low sash of mist extending from one end of the horizon to the other. For the time of year the mist was exceptionally dense, giving an impression almost of solidity, and studying it more intently it seemed that indistinct objects were forming in it. Within minutes these vague shapes took on edge and solidity, until they become identifiable as ships.
    A month later, while on an official visit to the carabinieri headquarters in Naples, I met de Lucca, an engaging man who described this experience, which he had never quite recovered from, in person. ‘I stopped trying to count all the ships,’ he said. ‘They were spread out for miles. I thought: what can they be doing? There’s nothing for them here.’ Presently lights twinkled among this grey confusion. This de Lucca interpreted as naval gunfire, and turning his attention as if by instinct to the profile of mountains over the beach, he saw a house plucked from a distant village like a tooth from an old jaw.
    He went back and awakened his friends. ‘I think we’re being invaded,’ he told them.
    At 5.30 a.m. on the day when de Lucca had watched the ships take shape in the mist, ten British Intelligence Corps members, including myself, were