The Wedding Officer

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Most of the events and incidents in this book actually took place and are taken from contemporary accounts, although I have aimed for authenticity rather than accuracy in my use of them. In particular, I have drawn on Norman Lewis’s wonderful Naples ’44, a journal of his time as an NCO in the Field Security Service. To take just the most significant example, his entry for April 5 reads: “Twenty-eight investigations of prospective brides for Servicemen completed to date, of which twenty-two proved to be prostitutes…. One would like to be able to do something for these applicants to marry our soldiers. Of the twenty-two failed candidates most seemed kindly, cheerful, and hard-working at their household tasks, and their standards of good looks was very high.”

Amongst other things, Lewis witnessed the 1944 eruption of Vesuvius, which many observers believed would have been far more devastating had it not been for the relief operation carried out by American and British soldiers under the leadership of Lt. Col. James Kincaid. As it was, the eruption claimed most of the towns of San Sebastiano and Massa and destroyed almost an entire wing of B-25 bombers at the Terzigno airfield. Today, over a million people live on or around the volcano; seismologists say another eruption is probably overdue.

Lewis also describes “a typically hare-brained A-force idea” to round up syphilitic prostitutes in Naples and send them to the relatively disease-free German territory in the north. This scheme, which had already been used with some success in France, was abandoned in Italy after a few attempts because of a lack of cooperation from the women involved.

Many thanks to the staff of the Imperial War Museum, London, who made it possible for me to study several unpublished accounts of life in occupied Naples, and who even provided me with a map, once issued to servicemen on leave, of the city as it stood after the bombing. Zi’Teresa’s still exists, incidentally—I recently ate there a very good baby octopus simmered in squid ink and tomatoes.

The man who identified Beethoven as Belgian originally did so in the hearing of E. M. Forster, as recounted in his 1958 essay A View without a Room.

The quotations on pages 156–60 are from the twelfth edition of Married Love by Dr. Marie Stopes. By 1940, it has been estimated, this guide to lovemaking had sold more than a million copies.

I am also indebted to Sophia Loren, In Her Own Words, which describes a childhood in wartime Naples and Pozzuoli; Dear Francesca by Mary Contini, which contains many recipes and recollections of her grandparents’ upbringing in Campania; and the wartime memoirs The Gallery by John Horne Burns, From Cloak to Dagger by Charles Macintosh and Rome ’44: The Battle for the Eternal City by Raleigh Trevelyan. My sources about Neapolitan cooking include Sophia Loren’s Recipes and Memories and Antonio and Priscilla Carluccio’s Complete Italian Food. A big thank-you to Jamie for the tip about using a filing cabinet as an oven.

The suggestion that the CIC (later to become better known as the CIA) covertly tried to hinder the communist partisans has become known as the “Operation Gladio” theory. I’m very grateful to Blaze Douglas for bringing it to my attention.

Several friends read the manuscript and made comments, including Bobby Sebire and Peter Begg. Particular thanks to Tim Riley for responding so unstintingly to my request for a really tough critique, and to Anna Actis, a reader from Italy, for corrections to my Italian.

My agent, Caradoc King, encouraged me over a very good Italian lunch to start writing this story, and over another, eighteen months later, encouraged me to finish it. I doubt if either would have happened without his help. I also owe a huge debt to my publisher at Time Warner, Ursula Mackenzie, who told me to write whatever I wanted to, and my editor Jo Dickinson, who had to put up with the—sometimes unsteady—results as The Wedding Officer slowly took shape.

This book is dedicated to my father, one of that extraordinary generation of young men and women who decided in 1939 that democracy, decency and kindness were worth giving their lives for. For as long as mankind continues to tell stories, their story will be told and retold as an inspiration to us all.