Peace Work (4 page)

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.

Oh, those kisses, there must be a word somewhere that explains the feeling. Spazonkled! That’s it, it was like being Spazonkled, Spazonklified!! I lay in bed smoking a cigarette and steaming with love. Where will it all end?

RICCIONE DAY 2

I
slept late, missed breakfast, couldn’t find Toni anywhere. She’d gone with the girls for a swim. I find an Italian café and order
caffelatte
and a brioche which I wolf down. Bornheim appears at the door:

“Missed breakfast,” he said.

“Oh, you little Sherlock Holmes,” I said.

“Not with Toni?” he went on.

“No, not with Toni. Very good, very observant.”

He settles down to a coffee. “Seen the theatre?”

No, I hadn’t.

“Very nice, small but very nice. Called La Galleria. Been for a swim yet?”

“Yes, last night with Toni.”

“Ohhhhhh, you dirty devil! Midnight swims, eh???”

Bornheim doesn’t understand the purity of this romance.

“When you going to give it to her,” he says, and I shudder.

I’m above all this. I’m no longer lecherous Gunner Mil-ligan but nice Terri Milligan.

Bill Hall thinks we need to practise and think of some new ideas. So we retire to my room for two hours, play those jazz standards I still love, ‘Georgia Brown’, ‘Poor Butterfly’, ‘What’s New’, ‘Sophisticated Lady’. We get carried away and the practice becomes a swing session, lovely.

The show that night as per usual, with glances between Toni and me whenever we passed as we rushed to change for the next scene. It’s a very warm night and the smell of frangipani is wafting through the window of our dressing-room – all very nice. Taiola Silenzi, a name to conjure with: she is our monumental Italian soprano. She and her smaller husband Fulvio Pazzaglia sing excerpts from opera and popular ballads – “Violetta’, etc. Taiola is in her early forties and must have been very pretty in her day. Alas, I wasn’t in town that day. She is overweight but insists on wearing skintight clothes. Layers of fat poke all over the place as though she is wearing a series of bicycle inner tubes. She is not far off looking like a Michelin man. She’s billed as Frisco Lil and with that name launches into ‘One Fine Day’. Tonight, as she and Fulvio are going for one of those last high screaming notes, her dress rips across her abdomen with resultant raw soldier laughter from the audience. She is furious and storms off into her dressing-room where we can hear her yelling at her innocent little husband. She was so loud in her protestations that during the Bill Hall Trio act we could hear her ranting on, to which Bill Hall yells ‘
Silencio!
” Which got more laughter.

Show over, we all clean up and pile in the Charabong. Toni is already in and pats the place next to her. Every time I sit next to her, there’s a sort of howl from the males in the coach. Through twenty minutes of streets to our hotel, it’s a moonlit night. From the hotel, we can see the waves breaking on the beach. A swim? A crowd of us ran up and don our costumes, then a race to the beach and splash bang into the warm waters of the Adriatic. Lots of whooping and high jinks. I swim out about a thousand yards and look back at the shore, the winking lights, the shouts of the swimmers – I swim back.

“Where you been, Terr-ee?” says a little wet thing. “It ees dangerous to swim long way.”

Ah, she’s mothering me! We dry off. I smoke a cigarette holding up a towel for Toni to change behind, seeing as much of her as I can. Contrary to the legend Bornheim has spread, I now know that Italian girls have pubic hairs like all the others.

It’s minestrone soup and scampi for dinner and a carafe of white wine. How different from my mother’s boiled hake, boiled potatoes, boiled meat and two boiled veg, and spotted dick. I was living in another world. That night, I wrote home to my parents telling them about Toni. I concluded, “How would you like an Italian as a daughter-in-law?” My mother writes, “Be careful, son. I’ve heard these Italian girls are diseased.” Never mind, she’ll be all right when she’s boiled. But then my mother would have only been satisfied if I had married a nun or the Virgin Mary. She is now ninety, I am sixty-seven and she’s still warning me: “They only want your money or your body.” If she only knew how run down both were.

∗

Our two days at Riccione over, we lump it all on the Charabong and with groans of “Oh not again” and “
Che stufa
” we set off for ancient Padua. Bill Hall is missing.

“We can’t wait for the bugger,” says despairing Lieutenant Priest and away we go.

Another bright, sunny but hot day. We open the windows for air, but that lets in the dust of passing cars. So it’s the alternative – shouting “Look out, here comes a bloody lorry,” slamming the windows then opening them again. Such interesting work. What if Hall
doesn’t
show up, inquires Mul-grew. I say he always does. But Mulgrew says, “You see, one time he
won’t
show. Then what?”

Then I say we become the Bill Hall Duo.

Padua is some 120 miles up the coast; the coach averages forty miles an hour; inside the coach, we seem to manage sixty miles an hour. The journey passes with some singing, smoking and me mooning over Toni. We stop every hour for leg stretches and easing of springs, etc. We drive through wonderful Rimini but don’t stop, and so much to see! A town crawling with history and us shooting right through it.

We stop at Ferrara for lunch at a large NAAFI canteen. It’s full of soldiers and when the girls enter, they get the treatment. Agggggghhhhhhhh COLD COLLATION!!!! It’s following me around Italy. In desperation I wolf it down.

“You don’t like thesse dinner,” says Toni.

“No, I don’t like it.”

“Why you no like?”

“Because it is without imagination and it’s cold –
senza immaginazione anche Jreddo
. Another thing, it’s not boiled.”

She smiles because I’m so serious. Why, why, why do females always laugh at males in distress????? Whenever my father struck his head on a beam in the cellar my mother, her sister and my grandmother burst into hysterical laughter and locked themselves in the sewing-room so my father wouldn’t hear. Is it the ultimate triumph of woman over man? Did Eve laugh when she first saw Adam’s willy?

No, I loathed Cold Collation mainly because it’s the English’s answer to shutting the kitchen early so the chef can get to the boozer before eleven. The number of nights I had been trapped in boarding houses with just me alone with Cold Collation in an empty seaside dining-room. The horror still lingers. How could Toni ever understand? There was only one thing worse than Cold Collation and that was the ‘Warsaw Concerto’. When the meal was over, several of the cast came and congratulated me on eating it. On, then, to Padua and away from the reek of Cold Collations!!!!

Ohhh never go to Ferrara

The curse of the nation

It’s known to weary travellers

For serving Cold Collation

Do not then you wonder

At travellers’ faces stricken

A lettuce leaf, tomato half

A lump of long-dead chicken.

Toni is telling me about how she always wanted to be a ballerina. She had started at eleven when she must have been two inches high. She was trained by Madame Cold Collation. No, no, no, I’m sorry, dear reader. It’s that terrible meal twisting my mind. No, not Madame Collation but Madame Esteve. Under her strict supervision, it was considered impolite to smile without placing a kerchief over your mouth; laughing out loud was forbidden. It was all the discipline of the ballet with Victorianism. And this training showed – Toni never raucous, always polite and, wonders for an Italian, never angry. Her gestures were always controlled. At first, she had difficulty in understanding me. I talked lunatic things all day so much that even people who spoke English didn’t understand.

MILLIGAN:

Bornheim, it’s the spludles again.

BORNHEIM:

The what?

MILLIGAN:

The spludles, they’re activating again.

BORNHEIM: (
warming to it
)

Ah, yes, and where are they this day?

MILLIGAN:

They are aggropilating just below the swonnicles.

BORNHEIM:

The usual place.

MILLIGAN:

The danger is they might swarm.

BORNHEIM:

Yes.

MILLIGAN:

Read all about it – man found dead in matchbox.

∗

It’s very hot inside the coach.

“Ask the driver if he knows a cooler route,” says Hall.

“Like Iceland,” I call out. “Anyone for iced swonnicles?”

We are crossing numerous Bailey bridges built on those destroyed in the fighting. The odd sign still says ‘You are crossing this river by courtesy of 202 Royal Engineers’. I reflect on how much blood was spilt in building them. Toni is fanning herself with a piece of card.

“
Che stufa
,” she says.

Indeed, it is very
stufa
. Through the village of Polecella, the towns of Rovigo and Stranghella – the names roll by on city limits signs – past old Mussolini slogans fading on the walls, murals of the deceased dictator with his jutting jaw, now vandalized, flashes of red which are tomatoes ripening on walls.