There was little traffic. The Neapolitans had been starved of petrol along with everything else, and the trucks passed only some bony mules pulling carts and a couple of very decrepit old cars with patches riveted on to the tyres.
There was a lot to take in at once, but one detail which didn’t escape anyone’s notice was that across the entrance to each side street off the main road was strung a wire bearing a bold army sign: ‘
OFF LIMITS – OUT OF BOUNDS. VD AREA
’.
‘That inspires no end of confidence, doesn’t it?’ someone said.
Most of the comments were adverse.
‘Of course, they don’t live, in places like this,’ a voice said close to Rose. ‘They merely exist.’
Rose turned and saw a fair, milky-skinned face, freckled and healthy-looking. She shouted over the noise of the truck, ‘What part are you from then?’
‘Me? Oh – Buckinghamshire,’ the young woman shrilled.
‘And you know all about being poor, obviously,’ Rose bawled back at her. Even under those conditions the sarcasm communicated itself quite clearly.
The young woman looked very taken aback. Rose felt Gwen nudge her hard with her elbow. ‘D’you have to be so damn prickly all the time?’ she yelled in Rose’s ear.
Her touchiness was part of a more complicated emotion. Almost from the moment she had caught sight of the Italian coastline, and with increasing force since they had docked, she had felt drawn to the place. As she looked out at the old, splendid buildings of central Naples and saw at the same time the plight of its people, a powerful sense of kinship came over her. These hungry, downcast Neapolitans seemed, astonishingly, part of her. She didn’t even know yet whether she liked the place. All she could be sure of, instinctively, was that she was meant to be here.
As they reached the northern edge of the city Rose caught sight of a huge cemetery which overlooked the Bay of Naples, containing some graves the size of small stone houses. Then they were away on the road north to Caserta. They passed small villages with crumbling tile roofs, fields showing a down of tiny green growth surrounded by fig trees and vines which had fingered across and clung on to the trunks.
It was slow going. There had been rain in recent days and the road suface was covered with a slippery layer of mud. The journey took over an hour and a half, and on the way they saw several Jeeps overturned in the ditches by the side of the road.
‘Goodness, someone needs driving lessons!’ Gwen shouted when they’d passed the third Jeep.
‘They’re all American ones!’ Rose called back with a grin. Now out of the city, she was exhilarated by the new countryside, which even in winter looked so much lusher than England, with the dark shape of Vesuvius behind them pushing steam clouds into the sky.
Caserta was a small town of faded red roofs and cream and yellow paint peeling from the fronts of old buildings. Rose took in the wooden shutters on the windows, the tiny wrought-iron balconies, the slim square tower of a church. But the town itself seemed completely dwarfed in size and significance when they caught sight of the palace. There were gasps of astonishment from those who could see out.
‘Is that where we’re going to live?’ Rose asked.
‘I don’t think so,’ Gwen said. ‘That’s the headquarters, I think, where we’ll work. We’re going to our billets now.’
It was during their first viewing of the inside of the eighteenth-century palace the next day that they were to discover the full extent of its majesty. The vast central block of rooms was the royal apartments. It was possible to walk through those for a long time without finding a room that looked in the least commonplace. Every floor and doorway was a work of art in different colours and textures of Carrara marble; the ceilings soared above, resplendent with gold and rich-coloured oil paintings and intricate designs of paintwork and stucco. Each room was different, and each magnificently designed. At first the sight was impressive and awe-inspiring. But after walking round for any length of time it cloyed and overwhelmed.
‘It’s like hogging a whole plate of cream cakes all at once, isn’t it?’ Gwen commented wearily. ‘Rather indecent really.’
‘Out the back’s the best bit,’ Rose agreed. ‘Now that is beautiful.’
From the back entrance to the palace an enormous landscaped garden extended as far as the eye could make out any detail. A narrow road ran straight through it, thinning to a pencil width as it climbed the tree-covered mountain in the far distance.
The real glory of the garden lay in the fact that from a far point up the mountain water rushed in cascades over the rocks. The water was channelled into a long line of stone tanks, from where it fell splashing into a green pool. Watching over this stood a semicircle of stone statues. As a recreation ground for the huge number of forces people who were to be living in the area it could not have looked better.
Their billet, a mile from the palace, had previously been a hospital. It was a stark white building, housing groups of sixteen of them in blocks which each extended off a long central corridor. Rose and Gwen made sure they took beds in the same block, along with the young freckled blonde Rose’d had words with in the truck.
She latched on to them straight away. ‘My name’s Wilhelmina,’ she announced.
Rose grimaced and said, ‘Oh my God,’ flinging her kit-bag on the bed.
‘Is she always so rude?’ Wilhelmina asked Gwen.
Rose grinned repentantly. ‘Only when there’s an R in the month. But for heaven’s sake, we can’t carry on calling you Wilhel— whatever it is. What in God’s name did they call you that for?’
‘Most people call me Willy,’ the girl said apologetically.
‘And what’s your name?’ Gwen asked the solidly built young woman who had taken the bed on the other side of her. She had dark brown, rather greasy hair, cut in an abrupt bob round the bottom of her ears.
‘I’m Madge,’ she said gruffly. ‘And before you ask, I’m a driver, and I come from Leeds.’
‘Rose is a driver.’ Gwen pointed her out.
Madge put her hands on her broad waistline and stared at Rose. ‘Where you from, then?’
When Rose told her, she said, ‘You look all right. At least you’re not from down south – well, not quite, anyway.’
‘Glad I qualify for the human race,’ Rose quipped. She took to Madge straight away with her straight talking. Eyeing her up and down she asked, ‘Do they use you to jack up the trucks when a wheel needs changing? You could do it with one hand I should think!’
Gwen and Willy looked anxiously at Madge to see how she’d take this. She gave a great snort of laughter. ‘They just call me in when the blokes can’t get their nuts undone!’
Everyone else joined in the shrieks of laughter.
After they had returned to their unpacking there was a sudden squeak from Willy. ‘This is blood here – look!’
They went over to where she was kneeling by the bed, peering anxiously at some reddish brown stains on the wall. ‘Doesn’t that look like blood to you?’
‘It does rather,’ Gwen said. ‘Goodness, what a thought!’
‘Well, what do you expect in a hospital?’ Madge said. ‘That’s why the beds still feel warm.’ She gave her great bellow of laughter again. ‘Don’t worry. I think some American WACs have stayed here already. You won’t catch anything!’
Life soon began to settle into a routine. Rose was assigned a three-ton truck and was soon occupied in taking people from their billets to the palace for work and back, bringing in the loads of rations from the Divisional Headquarters and transporting the laundry and all the other requirements of the huge community they lived in. It was often her job to carry the German prisoners from the POW camp near by to the compound where they worked. And there were nurses to transport to the hospital, lifts to be given to officers in pick-up trucks, and messages to be relayed. All day she was in and out of some vehicle or other, refuelling them, sometimes repairing them, but, more often than not, on the move.
She wouldn’t have changed her job with anyone in the service. At the beginning of the day she climbed up on to the hard bench seat of her truck to handle the big steering wheel, with a load of passengers in the canvas-covered area behind. The seats in the trucks were high, but she still needed to add a firm cushion to give her a good view out. Even though most of the journeys were fairly short, she was exhilarated seeing this new place, the villages around Caserta strung together by muddy tracks, the ragged
contadini
working the fields, mules pulling carts and hens bustling in consternation across the road in front of the truck.
Though it was winter the weather was better by far than it would be at home. The cool, often sunny days were more like an English spring, so there was not the struggle to wield a spanner with hands she could barely move for the cold. She felt no envy at all of Gwen, who spent her shifts on duty receiving the coded messages from her wireless set deep in the cavernous basement area of the palace.
‘It’s odd, isn’t it,’ Willy said to Rose and Madge one day, ‘how whenever we go out anywhere for fun we have to be chaperoned to the hilt, yet you two go driving off all over the place on your own.’
‘Typical army logic I’d say,’ Gwen commented.
At Christmas they did the best they could to brighten up their sleeping block. They hung home-made coloured paper streamers across the bare white walls and brought in cuttings of greenery from outside to decorate the corners and windows. Some of the German POWs had also made little wooden Christmas trees which they put on the windowsills. The place still looked pretty bleak, but the decorations did something to soften the hard angles of the room.
‘I think it’s going to be a good Christmas,’ Gwen said the day before Christmas Eve as they were all getting ready for bed. She sat down on her bed beside Rose’s. ‘In fact, I have to admit I much prefer Christmas in the army to being at home.’
‘It’s not the same without the kids around,’ Rose said sadly. ‘That’s what I really miss. But they’re not even at home any more.’
Gwen reached over and took Rose’s hand. ‘Come on – let’s try and be cheerful,’ she said. ‘I know it’s not the New Year yet, but let’s talk about resolutions. What great things are you going to do in 1944?’
Rose, her chin set in her determined way, and just waiting for Willy’s look of bewilderment, said, ‘I’m going to learn to speak Italian.’
By the beginning of January 1944 the Germans had established a defensive line across the shin of Italy known as the Gustav Line. At its central point was the Benedictine monastery set in craggy isolation on the peak of a high mountain called Monte Cassino. The Allied troops, made up of British, American and many other nationalities, found themselves unable to progress further north. They were enduring a gruelling winter camped out among the sharp ridges and muddy gullies of the Abruzzi Mountains.
In the middle of the month the Allies, convinced that the Germans had taken possession of the monastery as an observation post, began to bombard Monte Cassino. It was the beginning of a long, mainly futile and mutually destructive battle. And on 22 January, Allied forces landed on the coast at Anzio, a point north of the Gustav Line, as a way of trying to break the stalemate. However, instead of moving immediately north from there, they delayed, became trapped by German forces, and were once again unable to make progress. The destruction of Monte Cassino continued.
In Caserta, in the Allied-occupied south, things remained relatively peaceful. It was possible to work each day at the royal palace and almost forget that there was a war going on.
One morning in late January, a REME engineer, Tony Schaffer, was walking across the open area at the front of the palace, enjoying the feel of the sun through his cotton shirt. He noticed a three-ton army truck pull up in front of the building. The small figure of Rose Lucas jumped from the cab. Tony smiled and headed over to her. She flexed her legs, stiff after sitting for several hours, and reached up into the cab for her canvas bag.
‘Hello Rose,’ Tony said. ‘Buzzing about as usual?’
She turned to look at him and a smile transformed her thoughtful face. ‘Hello Tony. Yes, I’ve been trying to keep the army fed again.’
Since she had been in Caserta she had a number of times run into this young man with whom she’d had her first sight of Naples on the
Donata Castle
.
‘I’m just off for a cuppa,’ she said. ‘You got time for one?’
The more Rose saw of Tony, the more she liked him. Her automatic caution in relating to men had been allayed by his own obvious shyness. He wasn’t one of those cocky sods, she thought. He didn’t put any pressure on you. He wasn’t like some of the other blokes who wanted to kiss you the minute they’d said hello, if not before. He seemed to want friendship, and he was interesting to talk to.
They strolled down the curving path to the palace which ran along the front of one of the stable buildings. Rose was telling Tony about where she’d been. He liked the directness of her conversation, the spontaneity which had not been curbed by too much education, but which made her seem to him somehow vulnerable. He felt very protective towards Rose, unlike a number of other chaps around who were put off by the sharpness of her tongue.
‘You really enjoy your job, don’t you?’ he said. ‘It’s good to hear someone who’s not constantly full of complaints. That’s the trouble with institutional life – the way it leads to this constant carping about everything.’
‘I do like it,’ Rose agreed, thinking suddenly what a solid person Tony was. He reminded her with a pang of Sam, though he was less stodgy. ‘I never thought I’d do something like this,’ she went on. ‘I mean what other job gives you the chance to—?’
She stopped talking abruptly, with a gasp that made Tony look round, concerned that she was in pain.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. She didn’t answer.
In front of them, a tall figure had turned out of one of the stable doorways close to the palace and was walking towards them. He was dark-haired, with wide, muscular shoulders which looked constrained by the khaki tunic top. Rose noticed he was walking with a slight limp as he came forward whistling ‘Run Rabbit Run’ with extra flourishes and patting his breast pocket as if in search of cigarettes. Despite the limp, she would have recognized the jaunty, slightly bow-legged gait anywhere.