THE NAPLES BOAT was on time. The crossing – it was May – had not been too gruelling. Lightly one stepped ashore and into the funicular, and, after a brief, slow ascent, emerged into Piazza still warm under a late afternoon sun.
I was elated. To be back, to be back anywhere in those days – the year was 1948 – felt a miracle. One responded with a delirious sense of freedom, rediscovery, renewal: the Europe for so long known to be held down in agony and chaos, so long believed lost to us, possibly forever, was beginning to be regained. I had spent – immense privilege – the winter in Italy, Venice first, then Florence, and was now living, somewhat precariously, in a backstreet hotel in Rome. I had stayed up late the night before – all hours were precious – then left at dawn, driving south chanting poetry to myself in the car I had been entrusted to deliver. By full morning, when the near-empty road (not much legitimate petrol around then) glared before me, I had to fight drowsiness till at one point there was a great jolt and I came to with the front wheel already off the road and was just able to wrench the car back on course. Jolted hard myself, I stopped – I had missed the ditch, a milestone, a tree. Out of nowhere women arose from a field crying, ‘Mamma mia.’ I braced myself to inspect the damage, but no – no dent, no buckled mudguard, no burst tyre; the poor old Morris looked unscathed. I was not quite so sure about the steering as I drove on, slowly now, with circumspection, and contrite, appalled by my irresponsibility.This was not my car. Another hundred and forty kilometres to go, out of some two hundred and fifty. The prospect seemed long … The dawn jaunt had turned into a slow, hot, anxious drive.
In the end I got there. I left the car as arranged, in a garage considered – as far as is possible in Naples – one of the less blatantly dishonest ones, and instructed them to check and, if necessary, repair the steering (the bill to go to me). After that, lunching with a friend, the young British Vice Consul, I got my second wind. Constantine Fitz-Gibbon was with us, and Theodora – we were all high with the same postwar joy of being where we were, and I only just caught the boat to Capri.
On boarding, Constantine left me with a pill he said he’d got off a German officer he’d taken prisoner during the Italian campaign. It was a largish capsule, a bit tacky by now, issued reputedly to keep a man efficient and alert for forty-eight hours or more without sleep. Constantine seemed to think I might need it before the day was out (I had told him whom I’d have to face). Recklessness had returned: I accepted the pill, wrapped it in a scrap of tissue, and put it in my pocket.
And now there was Capri. The island looked itself. One point about the war was that where it had not destroyed, it had conserved. Craters and ruins, yes, but no new excrescences (yet): for five and a half years the developers had been kept at bay. And in Piazza there was the usual crowd, native and tourist, assembled to wait and watch the boat arrive and passengers appear. To my surprise and pleasure I saw Martha Gellhorn. I had not expected her to meet me, but she had.
‘I say,’ she said, ‘this is a glorious place.’ She had taken a room for me at the pensione where she was staying, a hundred feet up from Piazza. Clean and cheap. ‘That,’ I said, ‘would be delightful.’ But before we took one step further I had to tell her something. (Straight candour – with Martha anything else was unthinkable.) ‘I have done something very bad,’ I said. Then told her what had happened.
She and I had met only just over a week before at the studio flat of a man who to her was a fellow journalist and an ex-combatant (he had been parachuted into German-held Italy after Anzio and spent some intensely perilous months underground before the liberation of Rome) and to me a connection, a cousin in fact, of my stepfather, and a childhood chum. Meeting Martha Gellhorn, being addressed, being taken noti
