The Vengeance of Rome

FIFTY-SEVEN

‘I’ve never known a luckier bastard than you, Ivan.’

I am not sure Mrs Cornelius knows what she is saying. How is it luck to be brought down out of the skies not once but four times?

She indicates her empty Guinness glass. ‘Not only did yer meet up wiv your Aye-taye mate in Barcelona, but when his boat started sinkin’ ya got picked up not by a bloody Russian or Frenchman, but by an Aye-taye submarine with another mate o’ yours on board!’

‘Major Pujol, the liaison officer, was scarcely a mate,’ I point out, ‘and let’s face it, our boat was rotten. Frau had been cheated. It was already sinking when the Italian RS-14 started strafing it. Frau was killed. Zoyea herself was nearly drowned.’

‘Put it this way,’ she hands me the glass, ‘ther boat would’ve sunk and th’ lot of ya’d ‘ave gorn ter th’ bottom. This way ther sub started lookin’ fer survivors an’ at least picked th’ two of yer up. An’ yer’d never ‘ave found Major Nye an’ me, would ya?’

Sometimes I cannot always follow her reasoning.

She thinks the traffic fumes have gone to my brain. I could accuse her of a similar condition. Or perhaps we are inhaling the new orange paint in the pub? It contains lead, after all. Our accounts of events are not always the same, to say the least. How can a man recollect anything in tranquillity when he lives in such miserable times? Things were not this bad when I first got to England, even though the War was soon to begin.

When I arrived here North Kensington was a decent place to live. In Notting Hill and Notting Dale you knew who your neighbours were, and they knew you. Nobody talked to the police or the NHS. Nobody told debt collectors where you lived. Admittedly there was a certain amount of tension after closing time, but at least you had a good idea who was who, and by staying on good terms with the O’Days, Connors and other important local families, you rarely had any difficulties. You made sure your nose was clean, as Mrs Cornelius said, and, when the occasion demanded, your head stayed down.

That was the same lesson I had learned in Kiev and Odessa’s Moldavanka. You kept trouble within boundaries. Local family rivalries were between each other or with the police. The police knew not to start trouble. If the press people called us ‘denizens’ rather than ‘inhabitants’ and thought it too dangerous to come down to Blenheim Crescent, we didn’t care. Other Londoners had the idea we were criminals and prostitutes. You could not get a taxi to take you all the way home. Cabbies had a line they drew. If you lived below the junction of Westbourne Grove and Portobello Road, they would drop you off at the corner of Ladbroke Grove on top of the hill, making you walk the rest. During the so-called race riots they would only take you as far as the top of Kensington Park Road. And what were those riots? Reading the Manchester Guardian you had the impression of hordes of blacks and whites with knives and razors. Go outside your own door and you saw a couple of Teddy boys jeering at a West Indian or three Jamaicans going nose to nose with three cockneys.

Needless to say, most people living in the Gate or the Grove were honest, decent and hard-working, as respectable as any in London. Mrs Cornelius knew everyone. She was related to most of them on both sides of her family. We weren’t space aliens. We all talked English, even if the accents differed. TV violence had not yet taken over from Dick Barton and ITMA on the wireless and the whole family listened to Variety Bandbox, Family Favourites and Workers’ Playtime. The same as everyone, we ate our Marmite on crumpets and our jam on bread and butter. We drank Typhoo tea or Brooke Bond Dividend Tips. On Sundays those who could afford it cooked some sort of joint. The men went to the pub and read the News of the World until it was ready. I soon learned to enjoy these customs. Those were my happiest days.

I loved the films, the Ealing comedies, the American musicals, the Westerns. We shared the same radio and cinema stars, read the same daily papers; once a week the men bought Tit-Bits and Reveille and the women bought Woman’s Weekly or Red Letter, boys had Dandy, Beano, Hotspur, Adventure and Knockout, girls had Schoolgirl’s Own and Girl’s Crystal. If you were more demanding in your fiction you ordered, as I did, the Sexton Blake Library, which published four books a month. By the 1940s the stories had become pure fiction and not up to the old standard, but I still found them entertaining. On the wireless we heard the same music. Every week I looked forward to Big Bill Campbell’s Rocky Mountain Round-Up, a show reminding me of our happiest times in the USA during the 1920s. For more intellectual stimulus we tuned in In Town Tonight. All popular programmes with millions of listeners. We talked about them in the pub. The BBC brought us together. Only later, after the death of Lord Reith and the debacle of the Festival of Britain, did things change, taken over by Buggers Broadcasting Communism, as we used to say. Even then not everyone at the BBC was a bugger or a communist.

England began to go wrong after the old King died. I remember how hopeful everyone was at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. Mrs Cornelius bought a television to watch it. She didn’t pay cash. She got it on the ‘never-never’ when you could buy whatever you wanted on credit. You did not have to be a Bertrand Russell to see the result. Almost instantly we witnessed a falling away of morals, people’s failure to accept responsibility for their own actions. You stopped saving and started speculating. This phenomenon was reflected in the large issues as well as the domestic. Even as the English let the old empire slip into the hands of godless black dictators, they anticipated a forthcoming New Elizabethan Age. Presumably we were going to buy that on hire-purchase instalments, too. We were entering an era of prosperity and choice, they said. We had more technicolour films, certainly, and they ended rationing so that you could buy more sweets or cardigans, but they cultivated, in my opinion, a false hope. Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to a Greek was significant to those of us attending the Bayswater Orthodox Church, but then Philip was inducted into the Anglican faith and nothing came of that. Once the Greeks had counted on the British to save Christendom. Now the British looked aside and could not fill their own churches.

I sometimes wish I had not witnessed this decline, that I had arrived later, when the worst was over. But by that reasoning, I suppose, I would have been in a camp again somewhere in Europe. English social coherence lasted untouched to 1950 but was disappearing by 1958 when national service ended. Then came commercial television, the Egg Marketing Board, immigration and the notion of individual rights over the common good.

‘Of course,’ I tell Mrs Cornelius, ‘I blame Adolf Hitler.’ She does not disagree. To fight Hitler, the British Empire had to bankrupt herself. Britain mortgaged her heritage to the United States who pretended to help her fight the War but actually squeezed her dry. She had to sacrifice her workforce and watch her cities, already weakened by Hitler’s bombs and rockets, collapse into rubble. Thereafter she was in permanent debt to the American banks. The Jews decided her foreign policy. When the War was over, the best of Britain’s young people who survived went to Australia, Canada and South Africa, leaving only the riff-raff, the spivs, the Teddy boys and skiffle-kids. Instead of exporting ships, we exported pop music. Many German and Italian POWs chose to stay here, but Britain could not ask her former Allies for manpower because their own numbers were also depleted. So to replace the men she had lost, she called on the very people she had defended herself against, her ‘lesser half-breeds without law or order’, as Mr Kipling called them. Darkies and Orientals flooded into the vacuum Hitler had created of Notting Hill, Notting Dale and Brixton.

By 1955 our entire neighbourhood was a festering slum occupied by drug dealers, calypso singers and pimps. Ask poor Perek Rachman! He was destroyed by them and their degenerate allies, the Negrophilic decadent Cliveden set, Jewish aristocrats like John Profumo and whores like Christine Keeler. Her lovers made up half the House of Lords on one side, and an entire steel band on the other. Sports people and film stars like Freddy Fowler and Diana Dors enjoyed nothing better than being seen with Soho gang bosses and their powerful police friends from West End Central.

I knew all this at first hand from Mrs Cornelius. She was still doing film and TV work in 1950, though her roles became smaller due to American movies attracting a larger public. These, too, contributed to the rot. Richard Widemark and Robert Mitcham had a great deal to answer for. I told Mr Widemark this to his face on the bombsite where they were filming Knights of the City, in which Mrs Cornelius played a barmaid.

‘Mr Widemark, do you know that you are held up as a model for our young people?’ I asked him. We stood together in the ruins beside the Thames. Six o’clock in the morning. Widemark seemed unmoved. He asked me politely if I knew where you could buy American cigarettes. I was able to get him a couple of cartons of Pall Malls from contacts I had in the USAF PX.

After 1946 there was not a Hollywood sofa unsoaked with blood or a lake which did not contain a dozen corpses wearing concrete overshoes. For every Singin’ in the Rain there were fifty Pickups on South Street. Meanwhile, the US scriptwriters rewrote our history to make Americans the heroes of every wartime encounter. Errol Flynn (admittedly Tasmanian originally) and John Wayne (who had had a secret sex change operation) personally saved Burma and China from the Japanese. Robert Ryan single-handedly defeated the Germans on D-Day. Those of us who suffered through the dark years of the War, who saw the British flyers going up day and night against the superior might of the Luftwaffe, still felt America might have stepped in a little earlier and, instead of supporting Hitler and Mussolini and Franco, before Hitler declared war on her in 1941, saved us all the trouble of the War and its consequences. No wonder the British public, who suffered so much, became confused by this imported American communist culture. For a while I was quite bitter about it. I watched Hollywood rewriting my history before my eyes.

‘You’ve lost th’ knack of enjoyin’ life as it comes, Ivan.’ Mrs Cornelius cannot help loving pleasure. Like my Esmé, she is an Erdgeist. She will never lose her joy in existence. She cheers me up in my most gloomy moments. She will not accept thanks. She still denies she got me transferred to the Institute and from there to freedom, even though she met me in Majorca, after I had been saved by Major Pujol. A coincidence? Extremely unlikely!

When the submarine picked us up I was able to hang on to my pistols, but my papers were lost, as was the last of my near useless ‘snow’. I told Major Pujol how I had succeeded in escaping Red Barcelona in the boat, only to be attacked by the Fiat floatplane. He and the Italians were full of apologies, especially once they realised that my dead friend had been an Italian. Zoyea was not so forgiving of them, however, and refused to have anything to do with them or any of the other Italians in Palma even after we reached the city. I was the only one who could comfort her, but she became increasingly melancholic. We remained in Palma for the summer. One afternoon I borrowed Major Pujol’s car and motored down the winding roads until we arrived at the pretty port of Andratx. The fishing village had lost none of its charm. We stopped for lunch at the Restaurant Fleming, and there by the big window I saw Mrs Cornelius. She had just finished singing and stood by the big, dark Broadwood piano looking out to sea. She was a Vermeer. I spoke her name and she turned.

‘Ivan!’ She came over to our table, chortling and winking at me about my delightful little ‘catch’, for Zoyea had now become a very pretty young lady.

Leaving Germany, originally she thought for a holiday, Mrs Cornelius had first arrived in the village with Desmond Reid who owned a flat here. Reid, too, found it politic to leave the rather oppressive atmosphere of Hitler’s Berlin. Did I know Major Nye was in Palma? I did not, of course.

‘I’m orlways ‘ere of an evenin’.’ Before we left, Mrs Cornelius gave me Nye’s card. She was planning to go back to England, she said. ‘Dezzie’ had long since been persuaded to rejoin UfA and continue to act in German films, but that didn’t suit her. ‘Too many of me pals keep disappearin’.’ Her new passport had finally come through.

I no longer had a passport, as I explained to Major Nye when I finally saw him. He asked if I had any objection to going to England. They needed someone with my skills and brains over there. He could not procure for me a British passport, but he had taken charge of a group of English prisoners who had been fighting Franco and had survived being machine-gunned on the beach as they came ashore near Palma after the fall of Barcelona. If I didn’t mind mucking in with them, he thought he could get me to London and see about sorting out papers for me once there.

That was how I was reunited with Major Johnny Banks who vouched for me as a member of the International Brigade. I was ‘repatriated’ to England in the autumn of 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the Hitler war. Zoyea, I heard, worked in Palma and married after the War. But we were never again to be lovers.

‘I have so much to thank you for,’ I tell Mrs Cornelius. ‘I might have died in Dachau.’

‘Y’ve got yer mate ter fank fer that,’ she insists. ‘The bloke who joined the Gestapo and then was in the SS. Wot’s his name? Prince Nicky Wotsit, wot got yer inter trouble in France. Killed at Stalingrad.’ Irrationally she still believes Kolya framed me for the Paris Airship fraud rather than saved me from the worst of the consequences. But I no longer argue. I am not even sure he died as she thinks. I will mourn him only when I have certain news. As usual my reply is logical.

‘But why should Kolya have arrested me and then freed me?’

‘Maybe ‘cause yer dumped ‘im in the desert that time? Tort yer a lesson, didn’t ‘e? Well, ‘e could see yer’d be useful in Spain, wot wiv talkin’ the language an’ that, so ‘e orlways knew ‘e could get yer art. Didn’t they make yer some sort o’ spy?’

‘I was supposed to gather intelligence. We were testing my ship. They mentioned your name. They said you were in Belsen. I’ve told you all this. Kolya was explicit. If I didn’t do what they wanted, you wouldn’t be freed. I didn’t know you had escaped until I got to Majorca.’

She laughs. ‘An’ found I’d been livin’ the life o’ fuckin’ Riley in th’ ol’ port at Dez Reid’s. Croonin’ in ther local dance band! I woz earnin’ a tidy littel livin’ for a few months, while the Aye-tayes an’ the soldiers woz still comin’. An’ everyfmk was so cheap, Ive. Bloody paradise. Still, ol’ Major Nye got yer ter England, eh, when they demobbed ther International Brigade. Better than going back ter Odessa like some o’ them poor buggers, or France, or Germany, yer gotta admit.’

She minimises her part in all that. Even in prison she was my guardian angel. Kolya was powerless to help me. He told me so. And if Kolya was able to get me released in 1937, why couldn’t he get me out earlier? Why, as Mrs C suggests, was it up to the SS? After all, the Spanish conflict began in 1936. By the time I arrived in Barcelona, the war was as good as won. Germany and Italy had thrown their weight behind Franco. True, Major Nye was the intelligence officer attached to the government authorities, but he could not have helped me if she hadn’t told me where to find him.

When it was clear Franco had overwhelmed the government forces, Major Nye sent me and a dozen others who had served under Johnny Banks on to Lisbon and from Lisbon home to London. By then the others knew I wasn’t American but believed me to be a German anti-Nazi and covered for me. I had actually seen Santucci and his Italians machine-gunning Republicans as they waded ashore in Majorca, thinking they had found at least some brief relief from their demoralising defeats. Whatever my sympathies, this massacre of defeated, tired soldiers disgusted and horrified me. At various times in Palma I had been threatened with hanging, both as a Spanish traitor and as a Russian spy, but I could easily prove the accusations false. Major Pujol had vouched for me all he could without getting court-martialled himself. He even colluded with Major Nye when the time came to get me to England. He took many risks and died, I learned recently, impoverished in Madrid, a minor civil servant.

I know nothing much worse than civil war, which is usually conducted with the worst ferocity. Yet for all the Spanish bloodshed and cruelty, I never witnessed anything as bad as the horrors of Ukraine, nor was Franco, in victory, as vengeful as Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin. Say what you will about the General, he remained a devout supporter of the Opus Dei all his life and was in turn thoroughly supported by that godly society, whose part in the Spanish revolution has never been properly acknowledged.

I hold no brief for Catholics or their leaders, but while Mussolini and Hitler sought rapprochement with the Pope to further their own political ends, Franco received genuine blessing for his efforts. America, too, remained a great friend to Spain throughout the War and long afterwards. The Generalissimo was permanently grateful for that. He believed it stupid to persecute Jews just for being Jews. He felt the same about Negroes. The last letter I ever received from Mr Mix, after he wrote from Washington many years later, made it clear how he owed his life to Franco’s pro-Americanism. Only when the Nationalists discovered Mix was an American, and not a Moroccan, did they spare his life. He, of course, continued to work in Europe until the early fifties, when he was recalled to the home bureau’ and became some kind of civil rights expert at CIA headquarters. I heard this from Major Nye. I never did understand why Mr Mix stopped writing to me. I am not, I hope, one to exploit a relationship, but that man owed me something. Americans have short attention spans. No doubt he forgot. US intelligence people are inclined to abstractions at the best of times. They are not people to remember favours.