Naples '44 by Norman Lewis

Author:Norman Lewis [Norman Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780600147
Publisher: Eland Publishing
Published: 2011-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

March 26

The streets of Naples are full of people hawking personal possessions of all kinds: pieces of jewellery, old books, pictures, clothing, etc. Many of them are members of the middle class, and the approach is made in a shamefaced and surreptitious way. One and all, they are in a state of desperate need.

Today at the top of the Via Roma near the Piazza Dante I was stopped by a pleasant-faced old lady, who had nothing for sale but who implored me to go with her to her house in a side-street nearby. She had something to show me, and was so insistent that I followed her to the typical basso in a side-street, where she lived. The single, windowless room was lit by a minute electric bulb over the usual shrine, and I saw a thin girl standing in a corner. The reason for the appeal now became clear. This, said the woman, was her child, aged thirteen, and she wished to prostitute her. Many soldiers, it seems, will pay for sexual activity less than full intercourse, and she had a revolting scale of fees for these services. For example, the girl would strip and display her pubescent organs for twenty lire.

I told the woman that I would report her to the police, and she pretended to weep, but it was an empty threat, and she knew it. Nothing can be done. There are no police to deal with the thousands of squalid little crimes like this committed every day in the city.

On my way back I was stopped and drawn into a corner by a priest, white-lipped and smiling. He opened a bag full of umbrella handles, candlesticks and small ornaments of all kinds carved out of the bones of the saints, i.e. from bones filched from one of the catacombs. He, too, had to live.

Apart from negative definitions by GHQ (FS personnel will in no circumstances be used as interpreters), nobody seems quite to know what we are and what we do. As a result any job that no other branch of the forces wants to tackle is automatically thrown in our direction. It is now announced that we will investigate and report on all applications by Italian females in the Naples area to marry British soldiers. This will entail collecting information from the competitive and mutually hostile Pubblica Sicurezza Police, and the Carabinieri, questioning the applicant herself, and appraising the circumstances and the environment in which she lives.

This is a chore nobody in the section seems anxious to take on, so it falls to my lot.

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