January 2020

In my last post I wrote – probably somewhat unexpectedly – about Norman Lewis’s diary of his time working for British Army Intelligence in southern Italy during the Second World War, the which was published at the end of the 70s under the title – “Napoli ’44“. I did not explain in that post how I came to the topic, promising that fascinating titbit instead for this follow-up missive.

As it happens the book was brought to my attention – as is so often the case with such things – courtesy of the BBC. At the very start of December last year they screened a documentary film entitled “Naples ’44: A Wartime Diary“, the which was – as one might imagine – based upon the book.

The film was in fact made in 2016 by Italian director – Francesco Patierno, himself a Neapolitan – and is a very strange beast in its own right. Patierno was clearly very taken with Lewis’s perceptive and humane memoir of the war years as they affected his birthplace and his screenplay includes extensive selections from the book’s text, narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch.

Patierno assembled an impressive quantity of footage shot in Naples at the end of the war, to which he added dramatised recreations of wartime life and scenes of an actor representing Lewis – who himself died in 2003 – walking through the streets of modern Naples. He also – somewhat controversially – included rather incongruous clips from films such as “The Four Days of Naples“, “Il Re di Poggioreale” and – of all things – “Catch-22“.

To many critics – professional and amateur alike – this somewhat contrived attempt at summoning an atmosphere and creating a mood by means of a collage of no more than tenuously related images and scenes misses the mark dramatically (in all senses!). For me – however – the work had an unexpected resonance – the which I could not at first place. Many of the black and white images in the film reminded me of photos that I had seen as a child in pictorial histories of different elements of the Second World War that my parents had owned.

Then the penny dropped! My father and I had never talked very much about his war-time experiences. I was aware that he had had a ‘good’ war (if such a thing there could possibly be). I believe that he had done his basic training; that they had allowed him to fire a gun once, before rapidly taking it away again (Father’s eyesight and hand/eye co-ordination had been left poor by measles when a child) and that – with his studiousness and banking background – he rapidly found himself working in the military administration, well enough out of harm’s way. He loved languages (and in particular classical ones) and had been eager to travel, so spending much of the later years of the war in southern Italy suited him very well. (He would certainly have loved to have revisited the country subsequently, but never did. My mother did not care to travel and he would not go without her).

So – Father must have been in the region of Naples during the time that Norman Lewis was there and writing his diary. No surprise then that the words and images in Patierno’s odd film struck such a chord.

Now – of course – I must read the book and it is, accordingly, on order from an online bookseller…

I started this post way back before Christmas but found myself sidetracked by other things… one of which was, of course, Christmas itself. I found myself a little reluctant, however, to just let it go – for reasons that will become apparent later. It has thus sat here in very embryonic draft form for nearly two months.

I think that it is time that I put it to bed.

Back at the tail end of the 70s the slim volume illustrated at the top of this piece – “Napoli ’44” – was published by William Collins (and later – in 1983 – as a paperback by Eland Books). It was written by the British travel writer and novelist – Norman Lewis.

Lewis had been a sergeant in the Field Security Service of the British Army Intelligence Core during the Second World War and had kept a diary – the which forms the basis of this book – from September 1943 to October 1944, on his posting to southern Italy following the allied landings there. For much of this period he was based in Naples – hence the title of the book.

As though being part of the British/American administration in the chaotic wake of the invasion and observing the Neapolitans struggling to make their lives work again in the ruins of the heavily bombed and water-less city were not a sufficiently apocalyptic experience already, on the 19th March 1944 Vesuvius erupted in spectacular fashion, shadowing all other concerns with clouds of ash and streams of molten lava. Lewis was sent out by his masters to check on military installations under threat from the lava flows. On arrival (under volcanic bombardment) in San Sebastiano he found that a lava wave was forcing its way relentlessly down the main street, consuming buildings large and small as it went and with the cupola of the church riding on its crest.

I find it difficult enough to imagine what living through such a traumatic and disorientating period must have been like without the volcano, but the point at which Mother Nature ran out her cannons and added her own destructive power to the show must truly have convinced some that the end of days was at hand.

Lewis’s account has been much praised over the years and is all the more remarkable for not having been written for nearly three and a half decades after the events that it memorialises.

Now – I must admit at this point that I have not actually read the book (nor indeed have I found a copy – shame on me!) – and the gentle reader may thus at this point be chafing at the bit somewhat. Patience – patience – and I will explain just how and why I come to be writing about it.

That needs must, however, await the second part of this post…