Goodbye Soldier (3 page)

“My love is like a red, red rose that blooms in early spring.”

She smiled with her eyes, “You write that?”

“Yes,” I said.

If you’re going to tell a lie, tell a big one. Slje holds her hand out and we are off up the steps to visit the apartment of Keats’s overlooking the Piazza di Spagna. A bored sixty-year-old guide points out items of interest – Keats’s bed, his writing table, his chair, his po, etc. etc. – then holds out his hands for the Keats fund. I tip him fifty lire. He is well pleased and I am not. I want change. He tells us that Keats’s grave can be seen in the Protestant cemetery. I say, thanks, we only visit Catholic stiffs. Time for us to part, she to home to see Mother and I to the Albergo. We will meet again at the theatre that evening.

The
Barbary Coast
show was a sell-out again. Some brass hats and their females were introduced to the cast, among them General Tuker from the 4
th
Indian Div. He was delighted when I spoke to him in Hindi – even more stunning, he knew my grandfather, Trumpet Sergeant Major H. Kettleband and his wife!! That night I went straight to bed and dreamed the whole day through again, nude.

FAREWELL OLD SHOES

28 June 1946

T
oni and I meet at the Café Minosko on the Via Veneto. Toni wants to get me to a shoe shop to buy a pair of decent shoes. I arrive first and order.

“Tea,” I say. “Tea à la russe con lemone.”

I am quick to learn. Suddenly, as I’m sipping the newfound concoction, she draws up beside me. She, too, has Russian Tea. Tea over, she holds out her hand; I take it and follow. We walk and talk. We could have run and talked, I suppose; or, rather, Toni could have run and talked while I stood and listened. God she had lovely legs. Those lovely legs stop outside a shoe shop. In she hikes me. A totally bald fat Italian salesman with a fixed grin attends us. Tony rattles off something in Italian, during which the salesman glances in horror at my sensible English shoes. He is gone and returns with a pair of black moccasins.

“Terr-ee,” she smiles. “You try theseeeee.”

I sit while the salesman unlaces my shoes. He braces himself like a man about to neutralize an unexploded bomb. With a low moan, he eases them off and drops them to the floor with a loud Thud!

My shoes lie on their sides looking like an accident. He slips on one moccasin, then the other. I feel light-headed. I feel naked. I look in the mirror – gone are the two Frankenstein lumps at the bottom of my legs. Now, all is trim and elegant. Toni has made her first move in civilizing me.

The salesman wants to know if I want the old shoes. Yes, I say, I want to take them to Lourdes to see if there’s a cure.

The change in shoes is unbelievable. I’m a stone lighter, I can cross my legs without having to lift my leg manually, dogs have stopped barking at or trying to mate with them. A small step for Spike Milligan, a giant step for mankind.

Toni wants me to meet her family. Why not? I’ve already met mine and it took to me. We sit in a café on the Via Veneto with Rome passing by. She tells me her father died at the beginning of the war, that he had owned various enterprises in Abyssinia but they had all collapsed and been impounded by the British whom he hated. The main one was a soap factory; when they closed that, he had a heart attack and died. I had been out with a girl whose father was a mechanic in Norwood, one who was a bookmaker in Crofton Park and one who was a thief in Brockley, but never a soap factory owner. Still, everything comes to he who waits. But before I meet her family, she must break the news to her ‘boyfriend’ Arturo who is an officer in the Alpine Brigade. She has already written to him saying it
wasjinito
.

“I only know him a leetle,” she said.

29 JUNE 1946

S
aturday morning and I take a taxi to 53 Via Appennini. Toni meets me, smiling, at the door. Why she smiled at doors, I don’t know.

“Ello Terr-ee.”

I had dressed in my battledress with all my medal ribbons on. I wanted her to present a heroic liberator-of-her-country image to her mother. So to Mother in the lounge, a homely chintzy loose covers affair. This was the first time I’d had a loose covers affair.

Her mother is tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed and I was soon to know she was French by descent, like parachuting from the Eiffel Tower. She is very pleased to meet me as is her younger sister, Lily, who is the living image of Ingrid Bergman! The maid, Gioia, is introduced and she is a giggle of shyness. She curtsies to me.

I am to have a lunch of soup, then pasta and a fish course with a white wine – the latter must have been made from stewed guardsmen’s socks, mixed with vinegar. Apart from that, it was a delightful lunch with me acting up to Toni’s mother. I think as I was the first Allied soldier they’d met, they were all excited, including Gioia who giggled every time she served me. I tried to avoid an amorous glance to Toni so her mother didn’t worry about what was going to be a real love affair.

That night I stood in the wings and watched Toni pirouetting to Ponchielli’s ‘Dance of the Hours’. It was all so romantic. It had echoes of Hemingway’s
Farewell to Arms
, though I doubt if anyone would have judged the man with the clip-on moustache, long white nightshirt, holding a candle and singing ‘Close the Shutters, Willy’s Dead’, was the boyfriend of the stunning petite ballerina on the stage. Toni liked Johnny Mulgrew and Bill Hall but (a) didn’t like Bill’s scruffy appearance and (b) Mulgrew’s drinking habits. It was her fear that I, too, would become like them.

Bill Hall is still disappearing for twenty-three out of the twenty-four hours, only appearing – shagged out – minutes before the act is due on stage. Where does he go? Bornheim knows.

“He has to hop it sharp after the show. If daylight touches him, he turns into a werewolf and raids NAAFI dustbins.”

Mulgrew shakes with silent laughter.

“I tell yew if he did turn into a werewolf no one would notice the difference.”

Mulgrew has an evil sense of humour i.e. Hall rolls his cigarettes, so Mulgrew manages to mix magnesium powder with hall’s baccy. With blackened face and singed eyebrows, Hall walks the hotel corridors with a stick shouting “Orrite ‘oo fuckin’ dun it.” Worse to come, Mulgrew, who by damping brown paper had made a realistic ‘Richard’* places it in Gunner Hall’s bed with the note ‘The Phantom strikes again’.

≡ Richard. Richard the Third = turd.

Oh, dear! Maxie has overdone it, he thinks he has fractured his arm! I watched from the wings as it happened. Maxie, for a start, looked like Neanderthal man, his forehead was every bit of two inches and his arms reached below his knees. I think in his paybook it said ‘Place of birth: tree’.

He is telling the audience, “Laddies and Gintzleman, hai makada act zo, I tak dees hiron barrr and I mak bend bye hitting special muscle hin mie arm.”

Then he used to start this terrible Thwack Thwack Thwack on his forearm, mixed with grunts and occasional screams. This night, he staggers off clutching his arm and moaning Oh Fuck in Hungarian. He was off the show for weeks; I think he convalesced in a zoo.

After the show, I take Toni for a glass of wine at the trattoria next to the theatre. We sit at a table on the pavement and talk, what about?
Anything
, it’s just lovely being with her, looking into those eyes, at that waspish smile and listening to her small childlike voice. I am falling head over heels.

PADUA

SUNDAY, 30 JUNE 1946

A
ll packed up and on to the Charabong. This time, I sit next to Toni. Our destination, the ancient town of Padua. We are travelling on a Sunday morning and families are coming or going to church. The sound of church bells hangs on the morning air; we pass several religious processions.

“One fing about Caflicks,” says Gunner Hall. “They always play ter full ‘ouses.”

Bornheim agrees. “It’s all that communion wine they swig free, that gets ‘em in” – he who hasn’t been inside a church since his christening day.

I, too, had lost touch with my religion. I had stopped going to church the moment I joined the Regiment. No more could my mother nag me into God’s presence. However, Toni was a practising Catholic. Why are they always practising? When do they become good enough not to?

When I put that to Toni, she said, “I don’t understand you, what are you talking about.”

I said about twenty words a minute.

She didn’t understand, but laughed and said, “I love you beautiful eyes.”

How strange! All those years in the Army and my sergeant never said I had beautiful eyes. “Beautifulll eyeeesss front!” No, it doesn’t sound right.

We are driving across Italy from west to east. We can’t make Padua in a day; it’s some six hundred kilometres away. We stay that night in a hotel on the sea at Riccione. It’s a large rambling hotel built in the thirties, a square building built by squares for squares. The rooms are comfortable – strange I’ve
never
found an uncomfortable Italian bed.

We all hike ourselves off the Charabong carrying our chattels. We’re here for three nights – we do two shows starting tomorrow night. It’s only seven o’clock, a velvet starlit night is slipping overhead. I tap at Toni’s door: would she like to go for a swim? Oh, yes, it’s a warm night. Dinner is at eight, so we have time. The beach is deserted and the water soft and warm. We frolic around for a bit – all that idiot ducking and diving between her legs, etc. We run back to the lee of a fishing boat and dry off.

“Before the war, these beach very many people,” she says, and it wouldn’t be long before there were twice as many people as there were then.

I went back in 1965 on a nostalgia trip: you couldn’t see the sea for people and when you did see it, there was no room in it. Signs should have read ‘Sorry, Adriatic Full Up Today’.

We hold hands and lean against the boat and I kiss her for the first time…There were love whispers in the all-embracing night. We return to dinner in a nice airy room opening on to a verandah. Toni asks about the family.

“Wot you fadder do?”

“As little as possible. He’s a soldier, a captain.”

“He fight in theese war?”

“No, no, not this one. He’s too old – ‘vecchio’. He fight in last war, this one is an encore.”

“And you mother? You look like her or you fadder?”

“I think I like my father.”

“Oh, he must be veree ‘ansome,” she laughed.

“Yes, he was. Not so much now.”

“You have sisters, brothers?”

“One brother.”

“Is he old or young?”

“He’s younger than me, eight years.”

“Wot he do?”

“He’s in the Army in Germany.”

“Before war?”

“Before he was studying to be an artist.”

“You family all artist…how you say
artistico
?”

“Yes, my mother was a trained singer and she played the piano. My father sing and dance.”

“What kind dance?”

“Tap dance.”

“Oh, like American, Fred Astairs?”

“Yes, Fred Astairs – a little more Bill Robinson.”

“Who Bill Robinson?”

“Oh dear.”

It was the sort of conversation that millions of people make when they first meet. Looking at it these forty years later, it looks boring. So, what made it worthwhile at the time? The sound of her voice? The movement of her lips? The look in her eyes and that peculiar tilt of her head when she spoke? Her hand gesturing to make a point? Yes, I suppose all those things and the unexplainable biological call of matching chemistry that takes charge of the entire you and dedicates it to another person. It’s all pretty miraculous stuff. It does wear off, but it will always haunt you – a sudden tune, a perfume, a flower, a word, and the ghost of all those yesterdays returns for a fleeting moment, like a wind’s caress. Ahhh, youth…

From the windows in the passage off our bedrooms, we can see the outdoor cinema which is showing Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald in something like ‘give me some men who are stout-hearted men’, etc. etc. etc. Toni and I stand at the window for the freebie. I have my arm round her waist; it’s like an electric shock. We watch as Jeanette and Nelson shriek at each other, face to face. “I am thineeeeeeee, for everrrrrrr.” It ends with them kissing on a balcony. So to bed. I kiss Toni goodnight only to be caught by Johnny Bornheim.

“Here, here, here,” he cautions. “No kissing ballerinas between six and midnight.” He pretends to produce a notebook and pencil. “Now then, how many kisses and what time?”

Toni giggles and disappears into her bedroom. “Goodnight Terr-ee.”

Bornheim tells me he has found a grand piano in a room. Would I like to hear it? I troop down with him and he plays Puccini, Ellington and more Ellington. By then it is midnight. I hie me to my bed, my head full of flowers and Toni.