The Bonus of Laughter by Alan Pryce-Jones

Author:Alan Pryce-Jones [Alan Pryce-Jones]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571297818
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

XIII

ONE DAY, EARLY in 1945, there appeared at Bletchley Harry Hitchens, a schoolmaster turned Brigadier and a splendidly sardonic observer of humanity. He was assembling a small staff to meet a situation which in fact never occurred, for at that time it was believed that Hitler might form a redoubt in the Austrian Alps, and Hitchens’s function was to prepare the Intelligence pattern to this.

And so I escaped from Buckinghamshire to Italy, first to the Trentino and later to the Palace of Caserta, where were the headquarters of the Allied Forces. A new world surrounded me, one which, as I had not, had experienced the stresses of North Africa. I found friends old and new: Hamish St Clair Erskine, who had had an admirable war with the Brigade of Guards, even though it had started strangely for him when he went overseas, taking only such luggage as Lord Rosslyn’s silver-gilt picnic-case, on the grounds that you can always find essentials, but not luxuries; John Willett, the translator of Brecht; Archie Colquhoun, translator of Manzoni, who, as a dedicated Marxist, had an inconvenient vision flying over Lourdes and ended his days in a monastery.

The war was virtually over, and though I was a mere Lieutenant-Colonel – a basic rank by 1945 for those who had been in the army more than five years – I had access to delights such as visiting Duino, briefly a corps headquarters, borrowing the Commander-in-Chief’s suite at the Grand Hotel in Venice and using on any reasonable excuse an aircraft or a captured Mercedes, or a German army horse, the discomfort of whose saddle is with me still.

Years before, Jack Squire remarked that every officer in a good British regiment carried a manuscript in his knapsack, very probably a sonnet sequence. And certainly at Duino there were copies everywhere of Rilke’s Elegien, discussed in the mess from behind a clipped moustache. It was not quite the same, I later found, at Caserta. One evening, in that most splendid of palaces, an unknown major began to discourse on the building, its size, its marbles, its cascading staircase. ‘If you’re so interested,’ I ventured, ‘you must have read Sacheverell Sitwell’s Southern Baroque Art.’ ‘Art?’ he snapped, ‘Art? I became interested because I took the palace drains as a special subject for my promotion exam. I’m a sapper, you see.’

The highlight of our months in North Italy came when the Russians finally allowed an inter-allied mission into Vienna, to negotiate boundaries between the different zones, and similar matters. We were kept hanging about for weeks until the prospect of a starving city became so actual that the Russians decided to bring in ourselves, France and the United States, so as to spread disaster thinner.

But first we had celebrated VE-Day, in my case in Rome, in the company of Peter Acton, a very dear friend not long after killed together with his wife in an air-crash: an example of Providential forethought, for neither could easily have survived the other. On

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