In Love and War

Part Four

Recordings. St Mark’s English Church

FLORENCE, 1939–1941

(transcribed by Ada Liuzzi)

1. A-Side: Harold Goad and Friedrich Kriegbaum discuss the building and authorship of the Ponte Santa Trinità (29′ 23″)

B-Side: ‘This is not a diary. Douglas always said I should keep a diary, record everything. Everything is interesting, he used to say. Get it down. I don’t believe him. I want to forget.

Nor is this an attempt at auto-psycho-analysis, to file my despair with Anna and Philip’s letters and Fiamma’s snood which, in the days after her death, found its way into my bedroom, I’ve no idea how.

The only thing to do with unwieldy objects is burn them, the only thing to do with a memory is tug it around like a fusty dog until you’re forgiven for tying a brick around its neck and drowning it.

I realised something last night: the discs we record onto, that make up our archive — and what a grandiose word that is for these programmes, which, as I listen to them, strike me as half-baked twaddle. People listen to this because they are charmed by the idea of an outpost of Englishness in Italy, because they visited Florence on some ghastly tour they saw advertised at the back of the Daily Mail and they think we’re guardians of Anglo-Italian culture.

Where was I? Oh yes, the discs. We’ve only been recording on one side. So I’ve begun this little memorandum on the other. It’s comforting to think they’ll stay here in Florence, in a box in the British Institute, or packed into Ada’s attic. And maybe she will, on a whim, very late one night and rather tragic, dig me out, hear my voice and be filled with me. Who would have believed the curved cornet of our direct-to-disc-recorder could be a time-travelling device?

I’ll be long gone, in a rum shack by a beach somewhere, or teaching at a frowsty colonial university — Wollongong, perhaps. I’m going to make old bones, you’ll see, crawl out of Europe, the dark continent.

Perhaps she’ll be with me, Ada. Although there doesn’t seem much chance of that now. After practically heaving me over her shoulder after Anna’s death, the barricades went straight back up. Every move I make towards her, she bats away. So I’m here, in a funk, mixing metaphors, leading a circumscribed, spinsterish life, writing postcards into the void.

Three, four, five — that’s the bell of Santo Spirito you hear. I’m going to open the shutters a bit. There’s the faintest glimmer of dawn out in the square. We’re having an Indian summer. It’s been like ’14 — peace before the nightmare. Although it’s beginning to look like it might never start here. We expected Musso to jump straight into bed with Hitler, to invade France, or Greece, or Britain. But it’s all gone rather quiet — Il Duce is busying himself with Albania, thumbing his nose to Adolf and his war games to the north. Perhaps Italy and Spain really won’t join in, perhaps Stalin will realise Hitler is a bigger monster than the one that greets him in the mirror each morning. Good night, whoever you are. I’m shattered.’

2. A-Side: Esmond Lowndes and Bernard Berenson discuss symbolism in Primavera by Botticelli (27′ 33″)

B-Side: ‘I’ve been trying to isolate the part of my mind where Anna, Philip and Fiamma dwell and close it down, like an aeroplane with an engine on fire. The pilot shuts it off, hoping to glide home safely on the one that remains. Still, my eyes are drawn to the flames on the wing.

I had another letter from my father. The folly of me staying on here, how I’ve shirked my duty, the essential uselessness of what I’m doing given that the British Union is all but wound up. Circumstances have overtaken them. Pa says he’s already spoken to his pal Major-General Fuller about getting me into the Guards. He’s tried to sign up himself, but there’s not much call for a one-armed fifty-four-year-old. Yet. I haven’t answered his letter.

It feels like when I was first in Florence. The warmth has given way to rain. There’s no one around. Bloody lonely. Having Ada here every day is too frightful. The way she looks at me as she stands at the door at the end of the evening, her brolly in one hand, already half in the rain. Every time, I dare myself to say Wait! but I never do. I think, secretly, I’m rather enjoying the part of tormented lover. It takes my mind off Philip, off Anna, off the more weathered scars left by Fiamma, and all that was lost in ’37. Love is a splendid distraction from despair.

I’m recording this on the other side of a discussion Bernard Berenson and I had today. Amazing that he’s still here — although he arrived in Florence before the 1919 cut-off, so he’s legit. Still, I’d be feeling a bit exposed if I were one of the most famous Jews in the country. I went up to I Tatti for dinner after we’d recorded the show. Strange set-up. I mean, with the wife and secretary and the very obvious tension, but the art makes up for it. Gloriousness on every wall — Pollaiolo, Lorenzetti, Sassetta. Ada came with me, she took my hand as we went through Poggio Gherardo, the city glowing below us. It was astonishing what the mere feel of her hand in mine did — little electrical explosions moving all the way up my arm, across my body. Douglas was right: Fascism is just a refuge from the powerlessness of love.

The talk at the Berensons’ was all of the war, of how Italy won’t be ready for combat for at least another three years. No automotive industry, an agricultural economy. They’ll have to sit it out with the tea and oranges, as pa would say, as the north falls apart. It looks to be a lengthy thing, none of that Panglossian “It’ll be over by Christmas” stuff this time.

There was a moment last night, as we came down from the hills into the first streets by lamplight, and a group of working men sat around a wireless on the viale Augusto Righi, when I was suddenly aware of the fact she was Jewish. It’s perhaps all this talk of what’s going on in Germany, in Poland, the camps holding people to whom — even though she says she doesn’t believe in God — she must feel some sort of link. Perhaps it was that we were arm-in-arm in public. I tried talking to her about it, but she’s got this way of turning a corner when the conversation is delicate. There’s a sad secret in her smile, but I’m buggered if I know what it is.

After I dropped Ada off at her apartment, I cooled my heels on the street and watched her lights go on. I imagined her sitting reading late, preparing material, stretched out on the divan in her father’s study. Her sadness reflects my own. I wish we could be sad together, but she doesn’t seem to have any need for contact, at least not mine. She’s the most island-like person I’ve ever met. I sat in the church and looked at the triptych tonight when I got back and I kept seeing her face in Mary Magdalene’s. Both of them hard, reedy, faraway. I’m so tired. Still a little drunk from dinner. I think I’ll go to bed. G’night, whoever-you-are. I may haunt you yet, so speak kindly of me.’

3. A-Side: Harold Goad and Alessandro Pavolini discuss the life and poetry of Gabriele d’Annunzio (27′ 54″)

B-Side: ‘Should I be dating these missives from the past? I rather think not. I like to picture you piecing the chronology together from my summation of the war elsewhere, a war which feels so daydreamish and unlikely when I climb up through the stairways, ladders, trap-doors and corridors and then out onto the palazzo’s flat roof. I look over the river, towards the dome of the cathedral, and the stories of submarine battles and massacred Poles and bombs dropped on Scottish harbours seem like the work of a very slender imagination indeed, somebody’s rejected novel.

It is the 23rd of October. It is a Monday night. A Tuesday morning. The 24th of October. I’ve grown rather sleepy. Not now, I don’t mean, even though it’s two and I’m unable to lie still let alone drop off. I’m in the studio in bare feet, recording this in my pyjamas. I’ve just fallen into a state of lethargy — the more everyone tells me to go, even Bailey now, and Goad, the more my father showers me with letters containing, some of them, ripe old nicknames — the more I feel happy here. I’ve begun to think a healthy and successful life depends on a kind of accomplished ignorance of good advice. I don’t want to be heroic; I want to stay in Florence, look after Ada, read books. I consider the balance between hope and memory that shifts and tilts over the course of a life, giving different reasons for carrying on. At the moment, it feels like I don’t have enough of either.

The palazzo is more complex than I’d imagined. I keep finding new passageways, hidden doors, empty rooms that feel just-left — perhaps the ghost of Machiavelli. Stairways cut through the building like rock strata; some end in brick walls, but usually they lead out onto the roof, where I like to sit and watch the tiles of the city crest and fall like a terracotta wave, collecting the last sun before winter. Occasionally, at night, I hear things: mumbling voices, a child crying. The voices of the Florentine dead? It doesn’t sound so ridiculous, or at least no more ridiculous than anything else. If God is an artist, we might accept that we are preliminary sketches. Good night.’

4. A-Side: Harold Goad and Esmond Lowndes discuss T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (25′ 41″)

B-Side: ‘Rudyard has signed up! I can hardly believe he’s old enough, but we’ve all been ageing recently. I’m twenty-two now, which means Rudyard’s eighteen. That seems impossible, but not unlikely. He took the bus into Shrewsbury on his birthday and signed up then and there. He’s a common foot soldier in the 7th Battalion, Cheshire Regiment. Father’s awfully proud. I imagine he’ll make rather a fine squaddie. He can handle a gun, has the kind of pluck that comes from never being wholly of this world. I always got the impression he lived without an internal narrative, or at least no more than What a jolly hunt! and I love shooting! and Dogs are faithful friends. I realised that all the images that come to my mind when I say the name Rudyard are outside, distant, bloody. He was always the one on horseback, wheeling a fox’s severed brush around his head, galloping off to mete out death to some small, innocent thing. Excluded from the love that Anna and I wrapped around each other, he was thrown together with my father, and into that world of hunting, heroism and intransitive rage. He’ll enjoy the war.

Father’s letters have gone from angry to ominous. Of course it doesn’t help that he’s alone now in that mournful house, only Cook for company. His last one said he was thinking of commandeering a Wellington from RAF Shawbury and flying over himself to collect me. He still seems to think it’s practicalities that are holding me up. Or he thinks I feel some misplaced loyalty to the Party that I need to keep up Radio Firenze for the sake of the cause. Alas it’s just that I’m in love, and a coward. I’ve stopped answering his letters, although I keep collecting cash from the advertisers, wiring it over when I remember.

Ada’s father has been attempting to persuade her to come and join him in Turin, up there where he’s near enough to the Swiss border to get out if need be. When I try to talk more generally with her about what was happening to the Jews, how she feels about it, she just casts off again. That distance she has, nothing can get behind it. It’s an emotional Maginot Line. She’d make a virtuoso torturer — I wake up exhausted and ashamed, empty of my secrets, and happy. I don’t know what I’d do if she left. Throw myself from the Ponte Santa Trinità, I expect.

Bailey has been back to the UK again. Spying, no doubt. In his kitchen, he has a map of the world spread out on the table with different-coloured toy soldiers for the Germans and French and Brits. It has become an evening’s fun for us to read the newspapers together and arrange the troops. My Italian’s fairly decent now — still a frightful accent, but posso farmi comprendere, posso leggere i giornale. I miss Bailey when he’s away. Hey! There — did you hear that? More noises in the roof. If it’s not ghosts, then it’s rats. I should set out traps, or poison. There’s certainly something peculiar about this place.

I found a glove on one of the stairs, a lady’s glove. It’s not Ada’s — hers are red, scuffed. This is small and black and exquisite. I can’t imagine Bailey had invited in a lady-friend. Uncanny. G’night.’

5. A-Side: ‘Filippo and Filippino Lippi — A Son in His Father’s Shadow’, a talk by Esmond Lowndes (27′ 30″)

B-Side: ‘Happy Christmas. It’s snowing outside the window. There’s no heating in the palazzo, but I’ve lit a fire and I’m wrapped up like a Sherpa: scarf, hat, tweed jacket, two pairs of socks. I’m actually quite warm. It’s been a bugger of a Christmas Day.

We lunched at Goad’s. We all squeezed into the sad little flat they’ve let him keep on the ground floor of the Palazzo Arcimboldi, now the Institute is no more. He greeted us at the door of his burrow, and he seemed so genuinely happy to see us, and so small and tired it was all I could do not to drown him with tears. Gerald is over for a week. He’s losing his hair. A bald patch the size of a quail’s egg in the centre of his scalp. He looks terribly serious and business-like. He’s working at Lloyds Bank. Just like Eliot. After a few drinks, though, he shrugged off the mien of the busy capitalist and was something like his old self. There was still just a shadowiness around him, though. He seems disappointed, shifty somehow.

Ada and Bailey and Reggie Temple joined us for lunch. It was almost merry, to start off with. A rag-tag family pulling Smith’s crackers that Gerald brought over. Goose roasted in Goad’s little kitchen. A pudding that wouldn’t light no matter what we poured on it. I think I drank too much grappa. Became a tad maudlin at the end, raising my glass to the dead ones, singing “Auld Lang Syne”, sending Ada long, doleful glances.

We played charades all afternoon until Reggie fell asleep in a chair and Goad and Bailey started arguing about the war. So Gerald and Ada and I went out to walk about the city in our galoshes, looking at the ice floes in the Arno, the bright windows of the shops on the via de’ Corsi, snow settling on the cathedral: heavily around the lantern and then thinning out to a dusting as the roof slopes. I have a picture in my mind of the three of us, standing in the empty square looking up at the spiralling snow, the scab-coloured roof glowing beneath it. It felt like being with Fiamma, but now we look older and wounded.

Ada went home and Gerald and I found the bar of the Excelsior open, and we sat on the high stools and drank. The longer we sat there, the easier it was to see Gerald as he had been a year and a half earlier: dashing, rather dangerous. Sexful, as they used to say. We came out of the hotel drunk and it was dark, our footsteps squeaking on the snow. An icy corridor of wind swept down the Lungarno and we burrowed into our overcoats. It reminded me of Philip and the rain storm in Grantchester, and I suppose for that reason I kissed Gerald below the statue of Justice at the end of the via delle Terme. His breath was sour, and there was something too ardent and grateful in the way he kissed me back. I broke off quickly and said goodbye. I stood on the Ponte Santa Trinità until I was frozen sober, thoroughly depressed.

I came back to the church and tried to work on the novel, but it all seemed predictable and tiresome. So now I’m here, earlier than usual, speaking to you. Happy Christmas, whoever-you-are. I’m off to sleep with my hangover.’

6. A-Side: ‘Dante Today — the Enduring Legacy of the Divine Comedy’, a lecture by Alessandro Pavolini (31′ 51″)

B-Side: ‘Bailey’s obsessed by the Finnish campaign. More by the pluck of the Finns than anything. The way they simply won’t give up, even with the aerial bombardments, the tanks, the Russians’ vastly superior numbers. We’re all cheering them on, but I can’t think they’ll be able to hold out much longer. I have an image of them: mostly blond, snow-dusted men with blue eyes and unpronounceable names skiing in white fatigues through the endless Arctic night. Rudyard is in France, digging in around the Maginot Line. He wrote me a card — thoroughly censored, of course. He sounds like a man, even in those few words. I wish I’d known him better when we were young. It made me think how alliances form in families, how Anna and I were so close we pushed the others away. I still miss her almost every day. It seems absurd that she should be dead and not there, in her room, waiting for me. That someone so abounding with kindness should act so pitilessly as to die.

Pavolini came to see Goad and me today, ostensibly to record his thoughts on Dante’s legacy in contemporary European poetry — actually rather interesting — but in fact to issue instructions about our broadcasts. He’s seen the success William Joyce is having in Germany — Lord Haw-Haw of Zeesen they call him there — and he wants us to mirror it. To become a propaganda mouthpiece for Musso. The way he put it to us was that Il Duce is certain to get into the war at some point; he’s like a hunter waiting for the optimum moment to shoot; and that we need to make up our minds now which side we’re on when Italy squares up to Britain. Goad and I sat on for a long time after he left. One of Pavolini’s requirements was that we give over a half-hour every day to PNF propaganda that he will script for us. Justifications of the war in Abyssinia, praise for the Italian military machine, hagiographies of Il Duce. I’ve heard the Joyce broadcasts and there’s not a chance we’d do something like that, but Pavolini is an intelligent man. Certainly no one who knows Dante like he does, who writes so delicately about poetry and music, can be all bad.

We’ve agreed we’ll see how it goes — there’s no gain in shutting things down before we see quite how invasive he’ll be. After Goad left, I stood in the studio looking out at the piazza getting rained on. My father wrote me one last letter, cutting me off. As far as he’s concerned I’m no longer his son. If I won’t be a warrior, I no longer deserve the name Lowndes. It draws a line under things, I suppose.

If only it wasn’t so very clear what’ll happen to me if I go back. A hair-raising voyage aboard some submarine-stalked ship, a few days at home with the ghost of Anna in every room, then to London with my pa, fitted out at Gieves’, on the train at Victoria and pow! a bullet in the brain a week or — worse — a year later. I went down to the church after dinner. I turned on the altar lights and sat looking at the triptych for an hour or so. I feel crumpled, hollowed out, like those three figures in the painting. It’s as if Florence has seen me go from a boy who could feel sensuous about Primavera and The Birth of Venus to a man who can only relate to withered creatures. Don’t think I’m not ashamed of my fear: I am. I feel like a bloody hole. But shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary feeling. Perhaps it will push me into action.

I saw crocuses growing in the Cascine today. Spring is on its way. Good night.’

7. A-Side: Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: a consideration by Harold Goad (28′ 28″)

B-Side: ‘The war is utterly confounding. Even Bailey seems to have given up moving his figures around the kitchen table. There’s mushroom sauce across Scandinavia, a blob of passata in the waters of the Indian Ocean. I’ve been learning how to cook — we’d grown bored with eggs on toast. All we had as far as cookbooks were concerned was Douglas’s collection of aphrodisiacal recipes, but I’m now able to fashion a passable pastasciutta, an encouraging gnocchi al ragù, a frankly hopeful cinghiale salsa agrodolce. I’ve converted Bailey to wine. He was teetotal when I turned up and now we get through a bottle of Chianti most evenings. I’ve started broadcasting Pavolini’s propaganda. Generally fairly tame stuff, but today there was something on the Manifesto of Racial Scientists. It wasn’t too evil, just the usual guff linking the Jews to the Reds who are disrupting the factories, how there will now be stricter curfews. They wanted us to get Guido Landra, their pet eugenicist on, but Goad drew the line.

All the time I was reading it, I was watching Ada’s face. That cold angularity, the way her eyes leave and she follows. I shiver to look at her when she gets like that. It became harder and harder to read the words. I realised how much power there is in those bureaucratic phrases, in the canted, abstract language of the State. I felt, with the suddenness of instinct, that the words I was reading meant something concrete, that translated into actions by Blackshirt thugs on the streets of Turin or Naples, into education or medication denied to Jewish children, into the concentration camp they’re building in Campagna. That speech carried a dreadful weight, a weight that would finally fall on Ada’s shoulders. I felt my throat closing up, choking off the words as I read them. I barely got through it. When I reached the end, silence like a fog came over us, and I felt as if I’d just carried out some atrocity, some appalling crime as I read. Ada got up from the sound desk and practically ran. I went after her, heard Goad following me. Her footsteps echoed down the stairwell, then the clatter of the wicket gate.

I finally caught up with her at the midpoint of the Ponte Santa Trinità. She was running very quickly. It must have been six — people were walking home from their jobs, standing around in the spring sunlight, watching the fishermen on the Arno. To stop her, I put my arms around her, and she was heaving with sobs, tears streaming down her freckled blue cheeks, onto the soft linen of her shirt where I could see her collarbones pushing through, see her small breasts, and then I was kissing her and I pulled her tightly to me, and the river flowing under us, the rumorous hum of the city, the milky sky overhead, all of them seemed to stop for a moment — we were the still point and the world was rising to a blister on our lips, at the intersection of our bodies as they pressed hopelessly together. I drew back for a moment and stared at her, feeling as if another sun had risen. Then we started kissing again, urgently, both of us. When we pulled back for a second time, I saw Goad at the foot of the bridge, watching. I tore myself away from her, and that was what it felt like: as if our bodies had fused for a moment and now we tore flesh as we parted.

Goad gave me a talking to. About how ill-advised it was for a Brit to be consorting with a Jew. We are under significant scrutiny, and this is just the sort of performance that might tilt it all against us. He apparently assumes it’s been going on for some time. He gets terrible itching on his hands when he talks about this kind of thing; he sits there and I can feel the pressure to scratch building up inside him until it’s unbearable. Then he gives a rub, runs the back of one hand down the tweed of his thigh. Poor fellow. I can’t remember what I said to him. Mumbled apologies, told him it wasn’t anything serious, that it was in response to the moment, to her tears.

It’s time to turn in. I’ve found it hard to get Ada out of my head. I tried to telephone her earlier, but there was no answer. Something makes my chest suddenly too small for my heart when I think of her. She’s been the anchor tying me to Florence. It’s a better excuse than ennui, anyway. I’m reading Benedetto Croce. “Historical judgement is not a variety of knowledge, it is knowledge itself; it is the form which completely fills and exhausts the field of knowing, leaving no room for anything else.” Not easy. Buonanotte.’

8. A-Side: Esmond Lowndes: Milton in Italy, 1638–39 (30′ 21″)

B-Side: ‘Hell. Bugger, as Gerald would say. I’d meant to record these things more often, but so much has been happening, and every night Bailey and I sit up planning and plotting, trying to sort our way through the mess that’s unfolding across Florence and Europe. So what has happened in the six weeks since my last direct-to-disc? I’ll start with the pathetically personal and broaden to the faintly historic. You’ll want to know, whoever-you-are, what is going on between me and the admirable-stroke-terrifying Ada Liuzzi.

I join you in your curiosity and only wish I could help. She came in the next day, the day after our kiss on the bridge, and every broadcasting day since, maintaining an air of chilly professionalism, resisting offers of after-work drinks and dinners and dances at the Maggio Musicale and, indeed, that far-off look has barely left her face. Only once, when we ran into each other on the via Porta Rossa, I coming back from dinner with Friedrich Kriegbaum, she from a concert in the Cascine, did I sense a crack in the froideur. A heavy rain squall came down over the city, as if the Arno were flowing upwards. Everyone was hurrying with their jackets tented over their heads, and I ran straight into Ada. Her eyes lit up for a moment when she saw me, and I could tell she was a little drunk, very wet. I took her hands and she didn’t snatch them away immediately. I kissed her cheek but close enough to the corner of her mouth that she could have turned it into something more had she wanted to. She almost did. I’m stricken, really. It is pathetic, to have fallen for someone like this, and to betray myself in so many trite, adolescent ways. I try to manoeuvre opportunities for us to work together, just the two of us; I’ve been waking from elaborate rescue dreams in the small hours, whisking her out of Europe on the back of a white charger.

I call her when I’m drunk, but she never answers.

My mother’s a gaolbird! Mosley was arrested first, then most of the rest of the active British Union. There was even talk of father doing clink, but sense seems to have prevailed there. At least mother’s back in Britain. Seems the realities of war broke up the hiking party in Berchtesgaden. It was decided that the squawking posse of English matrons surrounding the Führer were an unnecessary distraction. Hess drove mother and Diana Mosley to the aerodrome himself. They were picked up as soon as they set foot on British soil. They’re in Holloway Prison with Mosley, all three of them in a cosy little cabin of their own. Extraordinary that five years ago there was talk of these people running the country.

Mussolini, the hunter in the field, has finally pulled the trigger. Italy is at war with Britain and France. What does this mean? A final exodus of Brits from Florence. A host of women called Gladys have left, although my favourite of them, the indomitable Gladys Hutton, has said she’ll stay no matter what. Bailey and I have been frantic, sorting passports for ancient coves living in isolated splendour above Monte Oliveto, persuading Gladyses they can’t take their entire wardrobes with them on the train, then hauling suitcases around the station like porters, ordered about by women in pince-nez who colonise their railway carriages like their uncles colonised Poonah.

Goad has moved into the church apartments, a room on the ground floor. He’s not well — I suppose you’d call it nerves. He’s convinced that, if he’d had more support from his superiors, if he’d been allowed to continue at the Institute for a little longer, he’d have been able to prevent Musso from getting into the war. He writes thick letters to Lloyd George and Churchill and Duff Cooper, but you can’t think they’ll ever be opened, let alone read. He comes up and joins us some evenings, sits ghostly at the table worrying his food while we plan the latest evacuation. He’s been hearing noises in the night, too. A baby crying, rustling footsteps, coughing. He thinks it’s part of his illness. Perhaps it is.

As for the Italians declaring war, that’s simple — pure opportunism. Mussolini saw which way the tide was turning and jumped. They’ll be eating strudel and raising steins on Piccadilly before the end of the year, unless the Americans help us out. Finland, Belgium, Norway have fallen; France has all but gone — there are Germans on the Champs-Elysées, the Brits ferried back from Calais in fishing sloops. If it’s all over this year, or early in ’41, the Italians will need to show they deserve a seat at the table alongside the Russians and the Germans. That’s why they’re fighting.

Pavolini called me up last night. With Goad ill, I’ve been making the broadcasts myself. Apart from the prescribed guff, I’ve been trying to stay away from matters political, rehashing my notes from F. R. Leavis’s lectures, speaking about Shelley and Yeats. Pavolini was awfully pally, described me as a key asset. But he pointed out that the raison d’être for Radio Firenze was now something of a nonsense. Rapprochement between the Brits and the Italians being, for the moment, off the table. He’s given me a plan for the next six weeks of programming. Italian poets, German composers, even more propaganda. Two days devoted to Balbo, the great Italian air hero shot down by his own troops in one of these absurdly antiquated Fiat biplanes that make up the Italian air force.

I imagine I’ll eventually find myself heading back to a Britain changed beyond recognition with — who knows — Mosley as Commander of the British Reich or some such. In the meantime, I’ll keep my head down and concentrate on those few small things I can do to help push back that frightful prospect. Good night, whoever-you-are.’

9. A-Side: Esmond Lowndes and Friedrich Kriegbaum discuss Bach’s Goldberg Variations (33′ 33″)

B-Side: The Battle of France is over; I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. That was my Churchill voice. He’s bloody good, actually. Much better than Chamberlain, hoisted by the petard of history. Churchill’s a bit more like it — feels as if he’s up for a fight. I’m no good at accents, really. Just listen to my Italian. I know the words all right, but can’t get myself to sound like a local. It’s partly why I’ve become something of a recluse, hiding from the Blackshirt gangs who’ve grown in number and aggression since war was declared. Mostly bitter older men, veterans from the last war looking for a reason to pull on a uniform and biff people up. Sound familiar?

Some good news, finally. I mean not only that, so far, the British pilots have managed to fight off the Hun. And wasn’t this how we always dreamed the wars of the future would be fought, high up in the clouds, sharks of the air ripping chunks off each other? But even better, Goad discovered that Carità has left Florence, joined up and gone to fight in Albania. The town can breathe.

Also, Ada loves me. I waited until we’d worked late recording a show on The Decameron. We were still in the studio at nine in the evening. I kept slipping up on the passages in Italian, clanking mistakes in my translation, partly because it was reminding me of first being in Florence and reading the book in the loggia of the Palazzo Arcimboldi with Fiamma. Finally we were done and Ada pulled her scarf around her head, started buttoning her jacket. I asked her to join me for a drink and was surprised when she said yes. I found a three-quarters-full bottle of Chianti in the kitchen and led her up to the roof of the church.

We’ve been so busy, too busy even to come up and admire the sunsets, and the rooftop has grown over. Weeds spew out between tiles, the little garden where they must once have planted raspberries or tomatoes is now dense with wild fennel, yellow flowers shooting up through chicken-wire. We sat on the roof and drank our wine, and Ada said something about how Florence reflects her hills, how the undulations of the rooftops mirror the rise and fall of the land. It struck me as beautiful and true, and I thought back, again, to sitting on another rooftop with Fiamma and seeing the purple darkness reaching up to cold heights. I told Ada all about Fiamma, or almost all. She listened very carefully and was quiet afterwards. I leant over and kissed her, and she didn’t resist, though nor was she anything more than politely encouraging. We spoke for a while longer and then she invited me for dinner the next evening.

I’d imagined a lonely existence for Ada away from the studio. Whenever I telephoned her, after drinking too much and feeling maudlin, I pictured her with some serious book in her lap, reaching out a hand to the telephone and then drawing it back. In fact, her house is something of a salon. It wasn’t just me for dinner. I’d made an enormous effort with my clothes, I bathed and perfumed and pomaded. I’d selected a copy of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, edited by Yeats, to give to her. It was a present from Anna, Christmas before last, and it felt like a good sacrifice, to make it Ada’s.

I arrived at the via dei Forbici. I could hear conversation echoing in the stairwell as I made my way up. The door to the Liuzzi apartment was open and there were six or seven young people with Ada in the kitchen, more grouped around an older man with thick spectacles and thinning hair who sat on the divan in the drawing room. I’d brought a bouquet of flowers — lilies from the stall in front of the Villa Ventaglio. I stood, holding them stupidly, until Ada swept out of the kitchen and kissed me and took the flowers and cooed over the book, and seemed friendlier and more relaxed than she’d ever been with me before. It wasn’t the tête-à-tête I’d been hoping for, but, rather despite myself, I had a smashing time. The party was to celebrate the release of one of Ada’s friends — a thin-faced, quiet, good-looking man called Bruno Fanciullacci — from gaol. I saw Ada’s eyes slide to him repeatedly, monitoring his position in the room. He carried a matchstick in the corner of his mouth which bobbed gently as he spoke. He was the son of one of the leaders of the local Communist Party and had been arrested on a series of trumped-up charges, given seven years and released after two.

The older man was Piero Calamadrei, a Professor of Law at the university who’d led the legal challenge to Bruno’s imprisonment. Whenever he spoke, the rest of the room fell quiet, although his words came in jagged, impressionistic bursts that were hard to follow. We sat on the floor with our bowls in our laps — Ada had made lasagne — and the young people talked as they ate, shouting across each other and filling beakers with wine from unlabelled bottles, looking up reverently at the Professor whenever he held forth on politics, or literature, or law. Ada made sure that I was included in conversations, translated words she thought might be difficult for me, trailed her fingers through my hair as she passed. She introduced me to her friends with a kind of protective warmth I found very touching. It made me realise how, after three and a half years in Florence, I know very few Italians. Shameful, really. This was a strange bunch, though.

The Professor seemed to take against me at first, referring to me as Ada’s “pet Fascist” and saying, with a little wrinkle of his nose, that he’d listened to my programme on d’Annunzio. No praise, or comment, just the nose.

In one corner sat a famous cyclist, Gino Bartali, who was a friend of Ada’s father and was cheerfully and palpably in love with his new wife, Adrianna. They spoke only to each other, smiling around the room every so often as if allowing us collusion in their bliss. A group of serious young men surrounded Bruno, huddled on one side of the room, watching him move the matchstick around his mouth. They all looked rather tired and ill-fed and trim-moustached. Three young women in Agnes Ayers turbans, smoking Sobranies, stood in the doorway, looking over at the men and letting out little flustered laughs. Finally, sitting with Ada and me, a lady called Maria Luigia Guaita, a plump, friendly sort from the Monte dei Paschi bank where my account is held. I hadn’t quite worked out at this point what should perhaps have been rather obvious — that this rag-tag bunch at Ada’s house were the Florentine chapter of Giustizia e Libertà, that the Professor was their leader, that Ada was testing me somehow by bringing me along.

After dinner, with the French doors open to the square below, the Professor began to talk about books. I lost a little of the subtlety, even with Ada whispering occasional translations in my ear, but he was speaking about the role of literature in politics, the temptation for writers to retreat into symbol and allegory, rather than recording the stony facts of the world. He said it was the writer’s duty to speak for those who couldn’t speak, who were trapped or overlooked or oppressed. He said, in times like these, novels should be written with broken fingers, and all poets’ eyes should be black. He fixed me then and asked me if I wrote at all, and everyone was silent.

I didn’t see what else I could do; I told him about In Love and War, about Hulme and how writing about him was a way of writing about my father. Their friendship, I thought, had driven my father to Fascism. That staying true to Fascism, Mosley and violence, was all a fidelity to his dead friend. I’d always felt, I told them, that I was out of place, and that my attempt to make Hulme a hero was an attempt to forge someone from my father’s world, someone with fierce, Fascist ideas, into a laudable figure. I could show Hulme, a copy of Sorel from the London Library in one hand, a gun in the other, living the philosophy he preached: heroism, duty, standing up for those values that made life worth living. But I’d buggered it up. The novel didn’t work. I was writing it with an ugly hand over my eyes. By the end I was exhausted. You must remember I did all of this in Italian, which gave it a kind of clumsy honesty.

Ada raised her glass to me. The Professor swallowed the contents of his own, seemed satisfied, and began to ask me questions about Auden and Spender. He thought Pound a great poet, he said with a sorry smile. Yeats, too. Now that my ladder’s gone, he quoted in English, I must lie down where all the ladders start. In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. Bloody good. Then everyone began to talk and argue, and a group of university students turned up, and with them a young, pretty girl with white-blonde sparkle, Tosca. Everyone calls her La Toschina. Her boyfriend, a tough-looking fellow named Antonio Ignesti, seemed to take a shine to me — heavy Sicilian accent he had, barely caught a word. He kept urging me to drink from his bottle of grappa and soon it was two in the morning and people were walking out into the night. Finally I was left with Ada on the balcony, looking over the darkened square.

That was last night. No great passion. We kissed, slept in the same bed, but not much more than that. We talked a great deal. She’s part of the Resistance, which strikes me as frightfully brave. It’s why she stayed in Florence when her parents left, to keep up her work here. Radio Firenze provides her with just enough of a cover story. I was stroking her hair as she told me this, her head in my lap. She’s involved in counterfeiting documents. She and the plump cashier, Maria Luigia, create the passports at night with the bank’s franking machine, official paper stolen by someone at the Ministry in Rome. Then Gino Bartali, with the alibi of his gruelling training, cycles out to safe houses. Hiding there are deserters from the Italian Army, Communists threatened with internment, Jews looking to forge authentic Italian identities for themselves before Il Duce carries out his threat to round them all up and deliver them to Hitler.

Just before I left, a few hours ago, as the first light broke over the city, she spoke to me in her glowing voice. She said this was why she’d been hesitant about us, why she’d backed off instead of doing what everything in her heart told her to do — to take me in her arms and kiss me. Because I was the enemy. And she needed to know that I was with her, that the decency she sensed in me wasn’t just a fabrication of love. I felt like Desdemona, you know: She loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them. Ada’s bravery undoes me a little.

It’s coming up for six. I need a few hours’ sleep. Rustling, movement, happy familial sounds from the empty rooms tonight. Not uncanny now — comforting. Good night.’

10. A-Side: Gerhard Wolf and Alessandro Pavolini discuss opera from Wagner to Puccini (33′ 54″)

B-Side: ‘The picture we receive of the war, through Radio Londra, through the Empire Service, through the distorted lens of La Nazione, is muddled.

It is easy to think that propaganda only works in one direction, but, as Dr Johnson said, among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth. We have no idea how things stand; all we can do is number the facts, the certainties, the casualties. Italy is at war with Greece, using Albania as a springboard into the Peloponnese. Germany and Britain continue to hack each other out of the skies above the Channel; those antediluvian Italian Fiats have joined the Messerschmitts in taking on the Hurricanes and Spitfires. Bombs rain down on the cities in squalls, exploding across Bristol, across Bonn, in strange symmetries which suggest fore-planning, complicity, consent. Liverpool’s getting it bad just at the moment. It was Hamburg last month. Under the dark waters of the Atlantic, the U-Boats prowl.

Ada and I spend several nights each week at the via dei Forbici. It feels provisional, unlikely: sometimes I catch sight of us in a shop window, or in the bathroom mirror at her apartment, and I think how odd we look as a couple. She’s twenty-six, three years older, but there’s something about her, perhaps also about me, that makes that distance seem much greater. She still gets the look occasionally, staring off as if I’m not there. It makes me feel as if any attempt to know her is doomed, but then she’ll smile, and never has a face changed so instantly, and she’ll place those sparrow-bone wrists around me and pull me in, and I have sudden, primordial charges. We’re happy together, or I am.

If it strikes you as strange, after Philip, after Gerald, that I should love Ada, it shouldn’t. It is not only that Fiamma, dear dead Fiamma, served as a copula, a springboard, a bridge. I have always loved beauty and the gender of those I love matters to me as little as their shoe size. It seems odd to me that so many humans limit themselves, slavishly. For now, it is Ada.

I realised that, since my last recording, since I spoke about Ada and her Resistance pals, I needed to be more careful with these discs. It didn’t strike me until a few days afterwards, walking through the Boboli Gardens on my way up to the Kaffeehaus to meet Ada. Unprompted by any sight or sound, I was gripped by a sudden certainty that someone was listening to the recordings I’d made. I raced back through the Oltrarno, scattering morning shoppers and their baskets, clattered upstairs and found the studio empty, naturally, the discs as I’d left them. But now I’ve eased up a floorboard, hidden them beneath it, scattered rugs.

One other revelation. I was in my room the other night. Ada won’t sleep at the church apartments, even though I’m certain Bailey wouldn’t mind, and is away so much anyway, and Goad is so absent-minded and frail he’d barely notice. But she won’t and so, two or three nights a week, I’m here alone. I was sitting up writing, going over passages of In Love and War, trying to dust some truth off the words. I scratched out whole pages in my notebook, wrote and rewrote, and it was as though I was unbricking a wall behind which bodies had been buried. Fascist blood was burning, burning in the veins of the novel and I would have no truck with it.

A sound brought me from the contemplative fug into which I’d fallen. It was past midnight — the bell of Santo Spirito had stopped and wouldn’t be back until five. I crept out into the corridor. It was cold and I had a thick woollen dressing gown wrapped around me, heavy slippers on my feet. Dim light coming up from the stairwell at the end. I felt my way along the passage, down the steps and round towards the entrance of the church. There, a flicker of light. I made my way into the church. Faint incense from Sunday’s service. In a pew at the front, looking up at the triptych, sat a young boy. He was humming quietly to himself. A candle in his hand. I walked down the aisle, looking at the soft black hair of his head. A creak of the floorboard and he turned round and there was horror on his face, and his eyes darted first one way, then another, searching for a way out. I got down on my knees, held up my hands, said something minor. He looked at me out of large, dark eyes. I asked him whether he liked the painting. We stared at it together. He didn’t answer, but his mouth dropped open a little.

I went to sit beside him. He must have been six, a scrawny scrap of a thing. He was wearing a jumper but his feet were bare. Sono Dino, he said, his eyes still fixed on the triptych. I asked him if he wasn’t cold. Un poco, he said, but he couldn’t find his socks in the darkness. I asked him where he lived and now he looked at me. Are you a Fascist? he asked. I shook my head. We’re upstairs, he said. I took his feet in my hands and rubbed them warm. We sat, his feet in my lap, for a while longer, staring up at the painting. It is bewitching, that triptych, something in it that shuts out the world. I felt suddenly sleepy, found myself nodding. When I woke, the boy was gone, the candles on the altar burnt down, the air around me still and grave.

Bailey was away on one of his trips and didn’t come back until late Saturday night, yesterday. He has lost weight: everyone is leaning on him at the moment — the Gladyses, Goad, certain other eccentric Brits who’ve decided to stay. He’s been enlisted by Cardinal Elia della Costa, the Archbishop of Florence, to advise a group of priests charged with interceding with the regime on behalf of political prisoners. The islands in the south, the blighted villages of exile, now busy with dissidents.

I always half-thought George Keppel’s description of Bailey as a spy was far-fetched, but the trips to Milan, to Switzerland, shuttling back and forth to Britain — it makes no sense for a priest. When he walked in that Saturday evening, I poured him a glass of wine and waited for him to sit at the table, where the map of the world has become a record of long dinners and twilit debate. The tanks and miniature soldiers with which he marked out the course of the war are all piled around North Africa, where he’d finally given up, overcome by military complexities, contradictory news. Military fronts, he said, sitting down heavily and unlacing his boots, were as wild and arbitrary as the weather from which they drew their name. I’d kept some pasta al ragù on the stove which I heated up and served to him. He ate in silence and I could tell he was waiting for me to speak. I told him about the boy.

He put his fork down, swirled the wine in his glass and sipped at it, not taking his eyes from me. He asked me which side I was on. I thought I could see where this was heading, but feigned innocence. He began a long and rather worn speech about the course of world history, consequentialism, the necessary conditions for evil, et cetera.

I let the silence settle after he’d finished and then told him I was on board. That whatever he was up to, I was with him. It turns out Goad is in, too. Bailey went to call for him and we sat up till late. Goad even drank a glass of Chianti, or half, looking rather sparkier than I’d seen for a while. He’s out of love with Fascism, he says. The Corporate State was still the ideal, but not the violence. The Fascists weren’t poets — look at Pavolini. Once a thoroughly decent writer, now just another of Il Duce’s thugs. Now he smiled, and I realised it was the first smile I’d seen on that pinched, grey face since Fiamma, since Gerald, since everything turned to dust.

After dinner, Bailey led me back into his bedroom, Goad following with his glass of wine — a sight I found oddly funny. It was all so bizarre it was hard not to laugh. This vicar and his pale accomplice standing up to the might of Fascism. On the desk in Bailey’s room there was a shortwave W/T set. On the floor reams of paper fanned out from manila files; on the wall a map of Tuscany with numerous pins in and around Florence, some as far as Pisa and Lucca.

Bailey says he’s working with the Professor — Piero Calamandrei — to mould the rag-tag Resistance into a credible whole. Bailey and Goad are in charge of helping dissidents, refugees and deserters evade the tentacles of the State. The Resistance have a man in Rome, Filippo Caracciolo, who lets them know when new names are added to the list of official enemies. More information comes from local Blackshirts, who are bribed with a few jugs of wine at the Paszkowski Bar, a grappa or two. As soon as they know that a member of Giustizia e Libertà is in trouble, they ferry him or, just as often, her, to a safe-house. Bartali, the cyclist, pulls a wooden box behind him in which a man can crouch. When stopped, he claims the box is essential to his fitness for the Giro d’Italia. It is full of stones, he says, and opens the lid. The Blackshirts or carabinieri stand back and nod, the fugitive tucked snugly beneath a false bottom.

Recently they’ve been taking in Jews threatened with internment at the concentration camps in Campagna and Trieste, others who ducked out of sight during the eviction of July ’39. Florence’s bureaucrats and their henchmen have been more enthusiastic than most in circumscribing the lives of their Jewish residents, but their roll-calls and round-ups are nothing compared to those in the east. Over the past few weeks, Jews have been arriving from Fiume, Friuli, Trieste and all across the Julian March. Some are refugees from Austria and Germany; most fleeing the anti-Semitic officials of Balkan and Adriatic Italy. The boy I’d seen in the church a few nights earlier, Dino, was from a family of fishermen on the Isonzo River.

It was Ada who introduced Bailey to the Professor and his group of liberalsocialiste. He is now co-ordinating with Giustizia e Libertà cells in Milan and Turin to ferry the refugees under false papers to America, Palestine, Brazil. Sixty have been sent so far; fifty more housed in convents, abbeys, derelict church buildings in the city and Val di Pesa, Cardinal della Costa providing the keys and his blessings. Bailey and Goad told me all this as one bottle of wine, then another, was emptied, me sitting cross-legged on Bailey’s bed, Goad perched on the dressing table stool. Goad kept beaming at me, rubbing his hands and saying Just so and Very good. It grew late.

Bailey told me other things. The presence of the station provides cover for his shortwave communications with Turin and Milan, with the deserters who’d fled the city and were hiding in the wooded hills of Forlì-Cesena. The telephones were tapped — he knew this — and the security police had devices for monitoring radio signals, but the noise generated by the waves of Radio Firenze masked his messages. Was I, he asked, ready to take a more active role in his plans? Could I be relied upon not to give them all up?

I’m recording this early in the morning. I haven’t slept, haven’t been able to find my way back into In Love and War. I remember something my housemaster at Winchester said to me. I’d let down the house in some way — I think it was the time I was out in front in the school run, had stumbled and fallen and had to crawl to the finish. Twenty-fifth place, I recall. That evening, in his study, he’d steepled his fingers. We only know ourselves, he’d said, in crisis. Character is theoretical until we act. I think today, Esmond, you beheld yourself. Not quite the hero your father was, eh? He’d given me a narrow, nasty smile and dismissed me with a flick of his hand, gone back to pleasanter thoughts. Now I have a chance to do something Ada will admire, something for England, something that, if he ever knew about it, my father would be proud of, I think.

I still feel bloody windy, though. I keep thinking of that brave young man who broke a bottle over Carità’s head, grabbed his pudgy wrist in the entrance hall of the British Institute. Perhaps, in the end, those were my crises, my assessments. I didn’t do so badly.

Hitler’s arriving in Florence today. Musso is already here, encamped in the Palazzo Vecchio, banners fluttering over the ramparts, posters of his granite head on every wall. Blackshirts glower under the carved tabernacles on the street corners, polishing their revolvers. I’ve not been invited to meet the great men but Pavolini is in town and wants a chat. I intend to be sly, I think. Evasive. Play the part, spy-like. Now dawn is coming up like thunder, and I must go. Good morning, whoever-you-are, good morning.’

11. A-Side: Alessandro Pavolini on the March on Rome and the Glorious Patria (35′ 21″)

B-Side: ‘It’s February, and bitterly cold in the church apartments. There’s central heating at the via dei Forbici, and Ada and I have made a nest for ourselves there, piling rugs on the bed and looking out over the branches of the Villa Ventaglio, silhouetted with snow. The Professor comes to see us weekly, bringing other members of the Resistance with him. The persecution of the English, the crackdown on Communists and deserters, even the racial laws appear to have been forgotten as the Italians are buffeted with bad news from all sides: disaster in Greece; ignominy in North Africa; now British warships shell Genoa, RAF bombers hit Livorno. There are sandbags around the foot of Giotto’s Campanile, around Ammannati’s Neptune, which I, for one, wouldn’t mourn were it hit. They’ve constructed a wooden shelter under which David seems smaller, rather ashamed of his city’s nerves. The Brancacci Chapel, where Filippino learnt his craft, is cocooned in an asbestos bunker, closed up until peace breaks out.

Ada and I spend our time doing paperwork: small tasks which, when combined with the work of others who take far greater risks than we, will mean a family safely on an Aliyah Bet ship bound for Haifa, or a group of young men hidden with friends in the hills. We celebrated Hanukkah with Dino and his family. I gave him a catapult and a book of prints, Lippi’s St Jerome and Botticelli’s Venus among them. It’s not possible now to see the paintings in person: most of the galleries’ important works have been removed to storage. Underground vaults, or in villas in Fiesole, Pontassieve, Impruneta. Dino’s father is a quiet, intelligent man; he looks at the book carefully, nodding all the time, then passes it back to his son. His mother is chubby, sweetly smiling, and used her son’s catapult briefly to fire peanuts at Bailey and Goad. They have another son with the rebels in the Apennines.

Every day the Resistance grows. We hear of sabotage attacks on railway convoys, bombs planted at factories, ammunition dumps ransacked or destroyed. With so many Italian troops abroad, the security forces are making do with veterans, cripples, recently released prisoners. Carità and his squadristi are away in Greece, so the deserters and Communists, the assorted anti-Fascists have the run of the city, putting to use the bomb-making and sabotage skills they learnt during the war in Spain. The Professor is optimistic: he sends Antonio Ignesti, Giuseppe Martini, Giuliano Gattai — names already taking on a lustre of heroism — on daring missions to collect refugees heading over the mountains, to procure boats in Ligurian harbours. They confab with their northern friends, the union leaders in the Fiat and Piaggio factories in the Piedmont. And all the time Bartali pedals that cycle of his, covering hundreds of kilometres each week, passing where others may not pass, returning to the doe-eyed Adrianna with his cheeks flushed, his brow stiff with ice.

I had a letter from my mother, mainly asking what had happened to the advertising revenue. She’s beginning to sound like Mosley’s puppet. Rudyard, she wrote, has been sent to North Africa, now they’re talking about Greece. He’s already been promoted, leads a band of sharpshooters, a hero in the making. I haven’t answered her. The truth is I’ve allowed Maria Luigia to use her place at the bank to siphon funds from the broadcasts. It’s not much, not enough, but it’s a start. I’ve been on a new round of visits to the major advertisers. I’ve been trying to persuade them to keep up their contributions despite the pressure of the war. How important it is for them to let the world know it’s business as usual in Italy. No luck so far.

Bailey’s got a dog — Tatters. Energetic Jack Russell-y little thing with a snowy beard. Turned up at the church one morning in January, half-starved, tail chewed by rats. I chose the name — from Ulysses, the whole dog-God thing. I believe in one dog.

The noises in the building have lost their spook since I found out about Dino and the rest. I like wandering through the warren of small rooms and passageways and staircases in the palazzo now. Often I run into Dino chasing mice with his catapult, or come upon his father reading in an empty room, armchair to the window, winter light on a serious-looking novel. There are others, passing through on their way to safe-houses in the hills, stopping for nights between Rome and Turin, or between the coast and the mountains. Young men with devil-may-care moustaches, sallow skin. They sit in close huddles looking at water-stained papers and smoking. I rather want to join in, but they barely seem to notice me. It’s almost time to start recording today’s programme. I must cut this disc and bury it. Cheerio.’

12. A-Side: ‘An Address to the People of England’ by Benito Mussolini (35′ 42″)

B-Side: ‘As you can see, as you may have heard, we broadcast a message from Il Duce himself this morning. I’ll save you the trouble of listening. The Italians, he says, with their German allies, will drive the Brits out of Africa, batter us for daring to intervene in Greece, and altogether warm our heels to Battersea Bridge. His English isn’t terribly good, so it was actually Pavolini reading, doing his best Mussolini-speaking-quite-good-English impression. It’s funny, madness in any other job is weeded out and treated. In politics it’s classed as fortitude.

Something dreadful happened last week. I was out at a concert of the Maggio Musicale. It was hosted by Gerhard Wolf, the new German Consul. Bailey appeared at the door of Orsanmichele asking someone to come and fish me out. Gently, holding the newspapers but not allowing me to read them, he told me about articles in the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Herald linking me to William Joyce, calling me a traitor and accusing me of waging “a one-man propaganda war on behalf of Fascism”. You can imagine — I was undone. Denounced at home. Furtive abroad. I felt like P. G. Wodehouse. Bailey saw the positive side immediately — how this strengthened my cover, how it would be well received in Rome. He tried to cheer me up. Tatters in my lap all evening — he could tell I was sad, good fellow.

The war follows its coarse, careless path. It feels as if, slowly, the Germans are gaining the upper hand. Rudyard, according to my gaolbird mother, has been evacuated from Greece, pushing out from Piraeus in a fishing boat with a bunch of his wounded comrades. They made it to Crete and there’s talk of him getting a King’s Commendation at the very least.

Dino and his family have gone to America. I was sad to see it. They made me promise to look out for their son and write when the war’s over. Ada and I are now experts at forging passports, visas, emigration forms. Maria Luigia brings photos, paper and card, and for a chilling tale of extradition or escape we can have you a thick wad of documents within the hour, no questions asked. Bailey has been visiting a man named Moses Ricci, Mayor of Casoli, site of the largest concentration camp in the country. He thinks that, with the correct emoluments, Ricci will agree to transfer a number of the foreign Jews in his care to a ship at Pescara. Ada and I may travel down to help arrange it. Life is full and dangerous. I am continuing to make my broadcasts, to act the good Fascist. Just now, I am preparing to have the German Consul speak about Beethoven. He’s a kind, clever man, but his delivery is a little dry. I am sipping a glass of Chianti in preparation. Bis bald, Zukunft.’

13. A-Side: ‘Italy in 1950 — A Speculation’ by Niccolò Arcimboldi (37′ 50″)

B-Side: ‘I must be quick. I think this’ll be the last of these. In fact I’ve no idea what’s going to happen. There was a raid on the church this morning. I have an appointment with the Quaestor — the chief of police — at eleven. He’ll grill me about how much I knew of Bailey’s clandestine operations. I’d been at Ada’s the night before; when I turned up at the church, the security police were already there, Carità with them. He’s back from Greece with a new ugliness about him. He’s gained weight, his bare knees are now invisible beneath folds of skin. His hair is longer, the white tuft curling into a question mark above his head. He’s a centurione now, still in shorts, but with medals on his chest, polished silver eagles on his epaulettes. Tatters wouldn’t stop barking — Carità landed a kick at him, but still he yipped and snapped until I shut him in the studio. Bailey was very cool about the whole thing. The police had arrived during the morning mass — only Gladys Hutton in the congregation. Goad was serving, holding a chasuble in the shadows, and managed to sneak out, up and into the apartments. He warned the four young Sicilians living on the fourth floor: they escaped over the rooftops.

Then he went to Bailey’s room, picked up the map of Florence, as many papers as he could carry and threw them in the kitchen fire. The W/T radio he brought back down and hid in the sacristy. Bailey forced the thugs to wait in the entrance hall as he filled in the details of the congregation in the service register, and then, underneath it, wrote Chaplain Rev. F. J. Bailey arrested — sent to concentration camp. Goad is coming with me to the Quaestor. I don’t know what’ll happen now. I must bury this disc, find Ada, make sure she’s safe. I’m scared, whoever-you-are — pray for me.’