Alex Preston - In Love and War

As a figure in the public eye, I’d be very grateful if you would sign this petition. I have been let down by many of those I counted amongst my dearest companions, but we are lucky to live at times such as these when the bonds of friendship are put to the test and we may winnow out the lickspittles and toadies. Perhaps you’d pass it on to Father Bailey once you sign it, and ask him to send it the way of anyone else he thinks might help my cause.

I’m aware that you have been put under some pressure over Ada’s continued employment at Radio Firenze. I wanted to offer you my sincere thanks, and that of my wife. We love our daughter and know she loves working with you. See you for dinner on Wednesday as usual, I hope.

With my most cordial salutations,

Guido Liuzzi.

[Collection of invitations; visiting cards; concert, cinema and opera tickets; train tickets to Rome, Milan, Genoa and Venice; receipts for meals, hotels, taxi journeys.]

He has been on so many train journeys these past months he feels the rhythm of the shuddering carriages in the patterns of his thoughts. He suffers a kind of seasickness for the first half-hour in a new city, until he finds his land legs again. He does not see enough of Italy on these trips. Often he is taken straight from the station to some out-of-town office to meet the scions of wealthy manufacturing families, ambitious executives keen to toady to Il Duce , place a flag in the ground on Radio Firenze. Advertising money is pouring into the station, eclipsing the contributions made by the operations in Heligoland and Sark, and he and Ada open the discs each afternoon and listen to stoic men in clipped voices talk about the smooth action of their Beretta, the speed of their Romeo, the refined taste of their Martini. The next day, he is a travelling businessman — he feels modern, useful, as if he has stepped from a dream into real life.

He spends a night in a hotel in Venice overlooking the Piazza San Marco. The city is more ornate, more oriental than Florence, the squares wider and suffused with grey light. It seems to him a more naturally Fascist environment. His taxi driver points out the balcony from which Mussolini and Hitler addressed the crowds when they met there in ’34. He is appalled by the stench of the canals. He meets a girl at the foot of the Torre dell’Orologio and takes her back to his hotel. He is surprised when, in the morning, she wants paying.

He finds an England in the landscape. Looking out of the window of the train as he crosses the Po Valley, he sees a coppice of oak and elder that might have been a hillside in Ellesmere. He is reading War and Peace, falling in love with Andrei and Natasha in equal measure, but he thinks of England. And the streets of Milan and Turin are as dull as those of London, the people of those busy northern cities as lost in their own affairs, in their own hurried footsteps and urban anxieties.

Whenever he returns to Florence, making his way by foot down the via Tornabuoni and over the Ponte Santa Trinità to the gate of St Mark’s, it feels like home.

Roma Reial Hotel, Barcelona

4/11/38

Dearest Es –

Everything’s buggered. I’m in Barcelona, looking down over the Plaça Reial. Bloody rain gushing onto the cobblestones, turning lanes into mud, splashing up and soaking the few miserable creatures out there pushing half-empty carts up to the Ramblas markets. Above the noise of the rain on the roof I can hear the shells to the south of the city, guns in the hills. Place I’m in used to be a hotel, but there’s no bed, nothing in the room but dust, my few books, my revolver, a blanket. I’m hungry and we’re all bloody buggered.

That sod Chamberlain’s to blame. We all had so much hope. We were cheering Hitler on during the Sudeten Crisis, applauding every act of violence, every ultimatum ignored. We thought, you see, that it’d lead to an alliance against Fascism: the Russians, the Brits and the French. Even the Americans, perhaps. That as Hitler pushed things further and further, the democratic powers (well, and Stalin) would see Fascism for the evil it is (sorry, Es, but there you have it). They’d turn not only on Hitler, but on Franco, Mussolini, Horthy — the whole dark stain wiped from the map. And before you brace yourself for a wiping, take a good look in the mirror. You’re no more a Fascist than I am. Anyone who’s had his cock in my mouth automatically unsubscribes himself from the Fascist Cause. It’s one of life’s little rules.

Now all we have is this welching appeasement — ‘Peace in our time’. There was a real chance for a better world and we blew it. I’m in such a rage, Es, I feel like running up into the hills with my gun and having a go. It’s funny, now that we’re really fighting, now that we can see the Falangists with our field glasses from the look-out on the roof, I don’t feel the least bit windy. Heroism ain’t the word for it either, it’s just a kind of placid acceptance. I’m going to see this out and bugger the consequences.

Charlie’s dead, by the way. We were caught in an ambush on the way out of Valencia. Italian CTV troops. Nothing to be done. He died holding his cricket bat, which I think would’ve made him happy. I lay underneath him and Gonzalo (the boy we’d been travelling with) for an hour, listening to the Italians picking around in our stuff, feeling Charlie’s breathing getting shallower all the time. Gonzalo died immediately. They’d mined the road and the car was flung up and off into a ditch, everything rolling and tumbling and then a volley of machine-gun fire that tore through the car and through Gonzalo, whose body, I think, protected me. Charlie only took one bullet, but it was in the eye. Straight through and out the back. He looked like he was winking, which I felt rotten about as I thought it. They dragged him and Gonzalo out from under the rolled car. I hid beneath a tartan rug. They’d found our stash of whisky in the boot and seemed more interested in that than in us, the bodies.

I waited until darkness and then crept out into the cool air, a waning moon on the water, bats flapping etc. Took me three nights, only travelling by dark, sipping the half-bottle of whisky the Italians left to keep me warm. Finally Barcelona, where the Republicans have made their new capital and everyone is doggedly optimistic, even under this bloody rain.

There are a good number of English here, enough that I’ve organised a few games of cricket in the Plaça in Charlie’s memory. Pathetic sight, me in the rain with a group of five or six scrawny, battered Englishmen crouched around the crease, and me crying so much to think of playing with Charlie in the corridors in Vienna, in the squares in Valencia. I was never much of a cricketer anyway, but I’ll keep playing for his sake, I think. We were in love, you see.

Send me some money, Es. Anything will do. I need to get boiled, stinko, lit up like a church and slopped to the gills, but haven’t a peseta to my name.

Philip.

Welsh Frankton,

Shropshire.

26th November

Darling E –

I haven’t slept a wink since I heard you were coming back for Christmas. Simply too thrilling. Daddy’s the happiest he’s been in years — I swear it. I should imagine the train ride will be splendid — take some good books and fall into some frightfully exotic affair with a White Russian countess. If it were anyone but you having this glamorous time, turning daddy into a nervous schoolgirl and generally being the top of everyone’s toast, I might feel a Small Dash of Envy. As it is, I’m just too, too thrilled for you darling.

Mick Clarke (who has taken over the nutty side of the Party since William Joyce left for Germany) is in a high frenzy over Kristallnacht. His grin is so wide he risks flipping open like a hatbox. He and Mosley are down here for a pow-wow with daddy. They’re arguing over whether the Party should cosy up to Hitler now he’s shown his true colours: daddy is anti, Clarke pro, Mosley increasingly addled and prone to letting Clarke take control. The Times got it right on Germany, for once. It seems as if all the talk of the British Union as the party of peace has been for nothing. Because we should be fighting against the Germans, shouldn’t we? Kristallnacht etc.