2

The Box Brownie

A Brownie Model C Camera. Patented in the USA, 1 February 1910.

The black metal box looks far lighter than it feels in the hand; its solid metal walls, covered in a crêpy, tooled leatherette, enclose a simple dark chamber, a compact body with six apertures, four of them round like eyes, the two others miniature rectilinear viewfinders; a small metal lever with a satisfying clunk still opens the shutter for just a split second, a wink you aren’t sure you saw; a metal winder on the side, like the bobbin case on Ilia’s Singer sewing machine, rolled up the exposed film on its spool inside. To carry the camera, there’s a neat, real leather handle stamped ‘BROWNIE’, a name that echoed the name of the camera’s designer, a certain Mr Brownell, but was soon intertwined with the brownies of the secret commonwealth and the trooping fairies: Eastman’s cheap novelty was originally aimed at the family market, and especially the new child photographer, and brownies were the good, clever helpers of folklore (unlike many of their cousins, elves, imps, borrowers, pucks and goblins, who were mischief-makers). Soon after the arrival of the camera, girls in the Boy Scouts complained: they didn’t want to be called ‘Rosebuds’, the name Baden Powell had given them. From 1914 they too were called Brownies instead.

The manufacturers called it the ‘Brownie Box’ but Esmond always said Box Brownie, and he had it with him in Italy and was still pointing it at us on family holidays in the 1960s, making memories of our being together, stork mother with her two fledglings side by side, images in which he, the photographer, is inevitably absent. The box is entirely bare and dark now, a theatre closed down for the duration. But back down the years, its fleeting winks caught many moments – new outfits, new places, new friends and old, Esmond’s garden in bloom, adventures – and farewells.

After Esmond died in 1982, Ilia kept his things in trunks in her garage, including this camera and, among some papers, in an old cigar box, I found a small aluminium film canister. Inside two rolls of negative film were coiled around one another: the outside one turned out to be the first snapshots Esmond took after he met Ilia in early 1944 (the other roll, taken in Cairo in 1952, would take us too far ahead in their story).

My mother is standing in front of a jeep in a street in Bari, and Esmond’s batman Prestridge (F.E. in the army records online, but I never heard his first name used) appears standing to attention, his bottom lip thrust up over his upper lip to push forward his chin determinedly; his cap is perched at an angle on his head. On my mother’s other side stands Esmond’s driver in his beret. The jeep is huge; the fender comes up to the elbow of the driver, and the bonnet reaches his shoulder. Many passers-by, all of them civilians, are caught in the wings of the picture: a young woman, very thin (wartime scarcity), is crossing the street with a smaller and rounder old lady, not so much plump as misshapen; both in black, both in clumsy shoes; the older woman is clutching some supplies to herself, supporting the bag almost tenderly. Another woman in black is striding past in the dappled shade under a line of mimosa trees which alternate with a row of the smaller, slenderer oleander trunks. Behind them the town is empty of all traffic, though from the shadows it must be around ten or eleven in the morning; or two or three in the afternoon. My mother – she too very thin – is holding a bunch of feathery white flowers – unidentifiable, but not orange or almond blossom, though judging from the long jacket she’s wearing over a blouse and skirt, it was still early spring. March 1944. She is smiling, openly, warmly, clearly very happy.

During the desert war, Major Esmond ‘Plum’ Warner, 1942.

In the next shot, my father is standing at ease, also smiling – perhaps my mother is taking this picture? A bicyclist is passing behind him, near a hand-lettered notice pinned up on the trunk of an oleander, announcing Holy Communion at St Augustine’s in Bari, next to Area HQ: sung Eucharist at ten, matins at noon and evensong at seven. 8th Army have settled in, and the Anglican padre – who helped when Esmond wanted to marry a local girl – has taken charge of services.

Esmond, a staff officer in the Royal Fusiliers (London Branch), reached Bari before 3 December 1943, the day the harbour was bombed: a direct hit on ammunition ships caused a massive firestorm and great loss of life. The bombs also exploded a clandestine cargo of mustard gas – but this disaster, which caused terrible sickness in the town, was hushed up for years. ‘I was carried through the air,’ Esmond remembered. ‘The blast lifted me up and dropped me down again, my eyes streaming, nasal passages on fire. It was the second time it happened to me – I was lucky, what! So near to copping it, but unhurt in Tripoli that time the Germans came in and bombed the harbour there too. But in Bari, it was worse – they took us by surprise. A huge raid just as we were unloading and the harbour was all lit up. And this time in Bari I lost my glasses. But I found them again, believe it or not, a hundred yards from where I came down. They were cracked but at least I could see something.’

Soon after this, he was deployed north with the army as it advanced up the peninsula.

On the arrival of the Allied troops, all four of the Terzulli sisters immediately volunteered to help the Allies, who were disoriented, especially as all the street signs had been destroyed. For most of the locals, including my mother’s family, the Germans were an occupying power – until I was in my late teens, I never realised the Italians had at one time been on the enemy, Axis side. ‘We were bicycling along in the country one day near our grandparents’ farm,’ my mother remembered, ‘when some German troops came by in a truck and didn’t slow down or stop and so we were forced off the road and when we fell into the ditch they rushed on and we saw them in the back laughing their heads off.’

Ilia was the youngest of four sisters in the family, with their widowed mother, living on next to nothing and the charity of an uncle. After their father Luigi Terzulli’s premature death in 1931 at the age of 42, the younger daughters, Beatrice (Bice) and Ilia, my mother, stopped going to school. Ilia was 9 and Bice 11. Later, Ilia would explain this decision rather vaguely, ‘The Fascist ways of doing things confused Mamma. She didn’t like it, though I don’t know why.’ More importantly, she also remembered, ‘We were known as le Americane, and Mussolini banned anything foreign, especially American. We had to hide the discs that babbo’d brought back from Chicago.’ They still danced to them, clandestinely, learning from the lyrics: ‘By the light of the silv’ry moon / I like to spoon …’ and ‘Picture me upon your knee / Just tea for two and two for tea … Can’t you see how happy we will be?’

The three elder Terzulli girls had all been born in Chicago during the family’s attempt to settle in the US. But in 1921, the family ran from the violent anti-immigrant and especially anti-Italian feelings that spread through the US in the wake of the trial of the Italian anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti. My mother was born in Italy the following year, the only one in the family who did not have US citizenship.

Her next oldest sister, Bice, spoke the most English in the family, as of the four sisters she was the keenest learner and the most irrepressible. Annunziata and Purissima, the two older girls, remembered the language from their years in Chicago. On the arrival of the Allies, they reverted to their American names, Nancy and Pat, but they were less voluble and forthcoming by nature. And Nancy, the only one who was married, was recovering from losing the twins. Ilia knew the words of some songs, and she had a fat anthology of English and American literature, packed with writers from Chaucer to Kipling.

The family of women needed money, and the British were grateful for any translation and interpretation. So the sisters took in work for four, and Bice did it. In the evenings, the family used to invite soldiers round to the flat; the men would gather around the girls’ sparrow-boned, myopic mother who, like so many other widows in the town, wore the sad livery of her state, however bright the summer light or sultry the temperature.

At some point in the spring of 1944, Esmond was given his first leave, and returned to Bari; a friend suggested taking him to meet the charming and respectable Signora Terzulli and her daughters.

Several of the family’s visitors wrote over the years to my mother recalling those days and the hospitality and miraculous beauty of the four Terzulli girls; one or two of them have also written to me, after piecing together that my mother must be the Ilia they had known. ‘It was a haven … a home from home,’ one remembered in a letter. ‘We played records on the gramophone and your mother sang to the numbers; sometimes, we danced.’

A few days later, when Ilia was in their temporary offices, picking up some documents for translation, Esmond began introducing her to a fellow officer: ‘Here’s just the thing for you,’ he said, laughing.

But my mother turned away from this new arrival and said to Esmond instead, ‘But why not you?’

At least that is the family legend.

The odd thing is that I could imagine this, her looking at him, levelly because of their shared height, but with a slightly cocked head and mock raised eyebrows. ‘Why not you?’ And the possibility struck him to the heart, the words flying true from the bow of her lips.

Yes, it was very touching, she said, that he was looking to make a match for this penniless and fatherless waif and didn’t think of himself as a candidate. But when she proposed herself, he could suddenly see himself in the role.

On his third or fourth visit to the family’s apartment, they became engaged. He filled an airgraph letter to his parents, reported that on 27 February he had been promoted to lieutenant colonel and went on without a break to announce:

6 March ’44

from Bari

I have much bigger news for you than any promotion though. I am engaged to be married to an Italian girl Elia Terzulli – she is only 21 – she works as a typist for our ‘welfare’. She is tall and slim (5ft 8 and a half), dark-haired, enormous brown eyes (her Italian friends call her ‘the Stars Look Down’ after the Cronin novel) and she is as good as she is beautiful. She has been very strictly brought up, is the youngest of four very good-looking sisters (one, Nancy, like Marlene Dietrich!) and the pet of her family. She has a very bright intelligence and a very keen sense of humour. You would all love her, and her voice is a dream. The sad thing of my leaving 2 Dist[rict] is that I shall be (temporarily) separated from her.

Along the margin:

Save up some jewellery for Elia. She wd ‘set off’ good things wonderfully.

Elia is also a very good cook!

After they’d become officially engaged he could now stay close to her, at home with the family. But they had still never been alone together (and he didn’t yet know how she spelt her name).

Writing from Naples where he had been assigned a new job, Esmond told his parents:

16 March ’44 (Naples)

I am many miles from Elia whom I miss very much though I have only been alone with her 2 minutes in my life (that strata of Italian life is about 1885 I shd say for customs!)

If only the war will end soon and I can bring her home for you she will add at least another 5 years to your lives, her combination of spirit, vitality, and what a pleasure to look at, like a 2-yr-old filly now, ‘rangy’ NOT quite filled out! She has Lrd Birkenhead’s qualifications of true breeding, apart from all else, beautiful hands, small feet and ankles, tall 5.8 and a half and a long slim neck! Black eyelashes are half an inch long and curl upwards in a sweep. In character she has much in common with ‘Ju-Ju’ aged 3, including that almost fierce possessiveness. (We have to be very patient as I consider marriage before the war over impossible.)

Ju-Ju was a pet, much loved, but a dog. And a filly, well, is a young pony, before growing into a mare, a mother horse. From fille, girl, daughter. Fillette, little girl, little woman, ‘darling little woman’, as I was always called by Esmond after I appeared.

Ilia would mind terribly, later, that Esmond took to calling her ‘old thing’ and ‘Mummy’ to her face, not only when referring to her in our company as was natural in presence of a woman’s children.

Yet, all in all, ‘filly’ was preferable to Mummy.

But filly was something sporting, too, and he reported in another letter home that his suit had been egged on by a fellow officer and Master of Foxhounds of the Cottesmore Hunt, a good chum:

26 March ’44

To Daddy

I may tell you when I was only courting Elia, Chatty Hilton-Green encouraged me a lot as he wanted us to be able to bring her to stay with him at Melton, where he guaranteed her a ‘furore’ (and I fear he’s as good a judge of a ‘filly’ as of a hound or a horse!) Elia is the most thoroughbred-looking girl I ever saw and a lovely open character, although very possessive and jealous!!

The letter then runs on without a break (using up every bit of the airgraph) to describe climbing Vesuvius:

I have a charming adjutant here, Angus Collier lately of Seaforths, and he is very good to me. We went up the observatory on Vesuvius near the crater at the height of the eruption. The eruption has been amazing and serious. Much lava flow nearby, one town destroyed, ash thrown hundreds of miles, one part one foot deep in heavy clinker, my car completely bogged in it. I have had rained over me a heavy clinker like grey gravel up to soft balls bits, but much dust (read, our garden 2” deep). The clinker has covered parts up to one foot. Accompanied by a gale and a snowstorm. Tremendous rumbles, the crater belching fire, smoke black and oily, thousands of feet high, now an impenetrable fog. Words cannot describe the conditions – It has given us quite a lot to do too. All the above is an UNDERSTATEMENT! An unique experience.

Along the margin Esmond adds:

Do ask at Buck’s for Chatty Hilton-Green – he is a great chap and friend.

On 17 March 1944, Esmond wrote to give the news to Aunt Dot and Uncle Basil Lubbock, addressing an envelope lined with brown tissue and stamped ‘Federazione Provinciale Fascista Siracusa / Il Segretario Federale’, with inside, thick cream, watermarked writing paper headed ‘Marchese Romeo delle Torrazze Senatore del Regno’; this luxury has been annotated in my father’s hand, ‘captured in Sicily early on (Very special this paper!)’. He repeats some of the description in his letter to his parents, but adds that Ilia:

speaks English (only too devastatingly …) She is the nearest thing to a Persian ‘odalisque’ I ever saw in reality. It is a quite incredible piece of luck I sh’d find in wartorn Italy what I always sought.

I don’t fully grasp this rapid sequence of events, but I can now see that my mother’s initiative played more of a part in their union than I had thought: in a diary entry many decades later, in 1989, seven years after my father had died, she writes, in Italian: ‘Io sono sempre stata la parte attiva nell’atto sessuale’ (‘I have always been the active partner in the sexual act’).

Was this really possible? At first reading I was disbelieving – shocked. It is difficult to think of one’s mother in this way, of course.

But then, on reflection, the vivacity and charm she was so celebrated for, her refusal to allow tedium to take hold of a room or a gathering, her capacity to kindle the ashy embers of a dinner-table companion’s moribund spirit into licking tongues of flame, all those ways of hers which were so life-enhancing and vivid, which I used to marvel at and, at the same time, revolt against as geisha-like ministrations to male authority, itself unearned, rotten and undeserving of her efforts, were interwoven with this active desire on which she acted – not only later when she knew she was unhappy and that Esmond and she were so profoundly unsuited to each other, but from the start, when she took the initiative as she said was her wont and proposed he should consider himself a candidate for her love. No, not only her love, for her desire. One of the most pejorative words in her vocabulary, alongside ‘frump’, was ‘prude’. Ilia never could bear a prude.

The wedding, which took place in Bari on 25 June 1944, followed soon after the entry of Americans into Rome on 5 June and the liberation of the south, and Esmond was able to take Ilia on their honeymoon to some of the towns and cities on the cliffs above the Mediterranean on that western coast which she had never seen before.

Ilia, on her honeymoon, Villa Cimbrone, Ravello, June 1944.

They went to Ravello: the photographs show Ilia smiling as she peels an orange on the balcony of the Palumbo hotel, giving her new husband a candid, utterly convincing smile of happiness; shots of views – from the balcony of the ridged vineyards rising up to rocky scarps, crested with parasol pines; another snapshot later in the gardens of the Villa Cimbrone, Ilia gently caressing the ear of a gazelle, with behind her, rooftops covered in frills of terracotta tiles, windows inset with barley sugar columns, and pergolas on flat roofs. Confectionery, pasta cutting and architecture developed in Italy in a continuum, the shapes of sweets and cakes cut out in clay or flour to build churches and public buildings, houses and gardens.

Esmond had travelled the world ever since he was a babe in arms, he told her; before this beastly war, he’d toured Italy and seen more of her own country than she had; he would show her Venice too, one day, when peace returned. He’d travelled on to the Balkans and Albania in 1924, and before then, the family had been on long sea voyages, all the way to Australia with his father on a cricket tour in 1911. She listened intently; she asked him to repeat words; she committed them to memory.

‘One morning but not yet first light I heard a noise that I couldn’t understand, though mind you I was a tiddlywink then who hadn’t seen much. The noise brought me up on deck and we were drawing up to dock – it must have been Port Said, and everything but everything was black. Do you know why, piccola?’

Ilia shook her head.

‘Because the ship was taking on coal, it was being filled up from the bilges to the gunwales with tons of it, bloody tons of it, to get us to … where do you think? Colombo!’

Colombo was where Esmond would get stuck in 1945, waiting for another boat to bring him home.

‘And after Colombo, we’d steam on straight ahead – give or take a few bends – onward eventually to Sydney. Australia! Daddy was playing there, you see. His game, cricket. The game you don’t have in Italy – not yet, anyway. Almost everywhere else plays it, where we British have set foot. It’s not just a game, you see. It’s the embodiment of what it means to be British. And Daddy has been knighted for his services to the game, in 1936 – the King himself dubbed him.’ Esmond laughed, ‘Whack, whack, with a sword, first one shoulder then the other.’ He swished an imaginary blade through the air. ‘Rise Sir Pelham!’

She was listening, carefully. Her English officer was laughing that hooting laugh of his, which misted his specs so he had to take them off and wipe them and mop his tearing eyes.

He collected himself. ‘Where was I? Yes, going through the Canal. The deck, the lifeboats, the funnel, every fixture and fitting of the boat was covered in coal dust. And so was I within minutes. Panda eyes, my toes a mudlark’s, and my nice white cotton pyjamas begrimed and seamed in soot!

‘That sound I’d heard, that had woken up a sleeping boy in his hot cabin before dawn, was the roar of the coal pouring into the hold, and all around me lascars were mopping. They were swarming over the ship with buckets, dropping them down the other side of the boat from the wharf to fill them in the Canal and slosh the water over the decks.

‘I’m telling you, those fellows knew a thing or two about work – before you could say Jack Robinson, the widow’s shrouds that had wrapped the ship were gone. When Nanny found me, she was fit to explode ’cos there wasn’t a sign left of the soot anywhere except on me! It was an apparition, I’m telling you, and I never forgot it.

‘Then we set sail down the Canal and the ship seemed to float on the desert which stretched all a-shimmer around us and laid, shining, wide and flat, a silver path ahead like moonlight beaming on a calm sea. I ran the decks from stern to prow to look – the Suez Canal! It unfurls calmly level with the wide flat desert on both sides. This was it, and nobody’d thought to wake me to see it – I could have missed a bloody wonder of the world and who would have given a toss? Not Daddy, who cared only about wickets and scores. What a sight it was! What a triumph of raw human will! If I’d known the words then, I’d have howled out to that marvellous belt of silver that links us in Europe to Africa and to Asia “What a bloody piece of work is man!” We’d sliced through a continent to open the fast way east! To India, to China, and to Down Under, where Daddy and Mummy and I were headed. It was 1911 and the Canal wasn’t old hat, not at all.

‘The Canal has loomed pretty damn large in the desert campaign. Larger than the ship floating through the desert on either side of a small boy before that first World War. It was everywhere in our thinking. We fought to hold Cairo and Egypt because of it: it’s the empire’s coronary artery. The channel that keeps us in the style to which we’re accustomed, mia piccola. Without it – well I can’t imagine what life was like or what’d it be like, honest to God.’

Esmond went back and forth between duties in Naples and visits to Bari. Meanwhile, the parties at the Terzulli girls’ flat continued in his absence: in 1993, a thriller writer, Bruce Munslow, who had also been in the 8th Army, wrote to me from Devon how he had never forgotten them:

I was reading the interview with you … and I knew at once that your mother’s name was Ilya [sic] … a beautiful Italian girl I met long ago … I went a few times to parties at Ilya’s home – I think it was in the Via Calefati. Actually I think someone was on the lookout for a husband for young Beachi [sic] – for at least once I found myself along with her at night on the little balcony – and I remember her saying softly, ‘… but let us talk of loff, Bruce’. She pronounced my name ‘Broooch’.

I’m afraid I couldn’t talk to her about loff, because I was already half in love with Ilya, whose husband was further north with his regiment. Apart from her not being free, I had no desire for an outraged colonel to come looking for me. However, I must have been alone with Ilya at least twice (which was hard to achieve with any Italian girl at that time) because I gave her a love poem I had composed …

I remember another incident very clearly. There was to be a dance at the depot where I was stationed … Another chap asked if I was going … I thought I’d show him something and asked all three girls, Ilya, Nancy and Beachi to go with me, which they did. They were of a different class to the other girls at the dance and in their beautiful dresses looked absolutely stunning …

In August, Esmond was able to organise a ride for Ilia to join him, and they spent their first birthdays – they were born one day apart over a gap of fifteen years – in Ravello.

10 Sept 1944

Elia came over to stay at Ravello on 21st August and stayed till 29th – I was able to get away most nights and 3 days of her visit. She had with her also on leave from Bari my good friend ‘Uncle’ Harry Marley, who is kindness itself, brought her over in his car and took her back, and looked after her when I was at work. It was a great success, and we both loved our second honeymoon.

We had the same lovely room at our beloved ‘Palumbo’ – what a little Paradise Ravello is. Two or three others were over on leave from 2 Dist[rict] also, and for our birthday dinner party we sat down 10, and had a very gay evening, with an Italian band and singer going on very late for our special benefit – the Italian popular songs, especially the Neapolitan are very catchy and a good many of the boys know some of them well already. And we had of course the inevitable Lili Marleen with its nostalgia of desert days.

I had to go up to Rome for a conference on the 28th and was ‘doing business with’ as usual and stayed with my good friends of General Alex’s HQ. Their mess in Rome was Musso’s late villa, Torlonia, rather lovely, but pretty shabby now. They had a dance the night I was there – I wondered who else had danced in that salon in late years.

Two days later, they found themselves in Amalfi on the feast day of the town’s patron saint, St Andrew the Apostle. The photos he took show the procession, with a huge silver effigy of the saint, pouring down the long steep flight of steps that leads up to the west door of the harlequin-patterned cathedral, with dozens of boys in white surplices carrying small vessels – probably censers, but too small to see exactly – and very, very tall candles. A whole peacock tail of robed prelates sweeps on behind them – the photograph is fuzzy (light has got into the camera) but I can count twelve of them, no less, in mitres very wide and shiny and tall, and they are stepping down two by two to accompany the saint who is enthroned and raised high on the shoulders of a cohort of spallieri; some of these bearers are also holding up, to shelter the statue, a fringed canopy on four poles pinnacled with complicated tasselled crowns: this whole machine is being manoeuvred down the steep flight. The thronging clerics in their finery are themselves flanked by officials in sashes and capes and ingenious hats (the Italians are endlessly inventive when it comes to millinery, as well as pasta and confectionery).You can just see the large knot of men heaving to under the relic, all of them in white robes with dark tabards – the vestments of a local confraternity, most likely, the one to which the God-fearing borghesi of the town all belong where they can do business in full trust of one another. These spallieri are as tightly packed together as a rugby scrum and it is indeed miraculous that even such concerted manpower could lift the colossal reliquary and carry it down the precipitous steps that descend for over fifty metres to the Piazza del Duomo. It’s a feat, an ordeal, putting its citizens in danger in order to attain a collective high – at the bottom of the steps, the festa is beginning.

In the last of three photographs, the reliquary bust of the saint has almost completed the descent successfully, and the crowd is already relaxing in the piazza, the confraternals and priests hobnobbing, and the saint himself has come into closer view, and towers over the gathering like a colossal Buddha, like an enthroned Mughal emperor.

Ilia always went to Mass and prayed with fervour, and Esmond attended the services by her side during those few marvellous weeks they spent together. He watched her pray and was enchanted by her absorption. Every now and then, she’d give a small, parched cough – she had had TB when she was a child and the illness had shrunk her lungs, or at least her mother and her sisters thought it had and telling her so over and over gave her a sense of precariousness when she breathed, so that all unconsciously, she often gave this little dry sputter of a cough to open her lungs a little to expel the old air trapped in her tight passages and bring new oxygen to aerate her. The closeness of the deity and his mother, of the angels and saints in the church, made her feel this need, as Esmond realised, tenderly and protectively, when the incense misted the distance between them and the priest, who was turning around now to face them with the chalice held up theatrically in front of him, a host pinched between finger and thumb, offering Communion.

‘Aren’t you going to take Communion?’ he whispered into the side of her face, which was still slightly curved downwards, absorbed in her missal, her lace veil the tint of mulberry juice against the deeper blackness of her loose curling hair. She turned, eyes wide and laughter in them: ‘How could I, when you have given me so much chocolate for breakfast?’ She did not express it quite in those words because her English came out in bits and pieces during those first weeks they spent together.

But she had said, as she laughed, something about chocolate.

In England, Frank Pakenham, Esmond’s old school friend, for whom Esmond had fagged at Eton and who, on the death of his older brother in the war, was to become the famous campaigner Lord Longford, heard the news and wrote from his home in Oxford to congratulate him on marrying a Catholic and expressing his hopes that he would soon have a very large family:

1st July 1944

My dear Esmond … though you say you are sticking staunchly to your old Anglican heresy, just you wait and see! I don’t want to crow too soon, which might have a ‘putting-off’ effect, but I have no fears now about your ultimate salvation.

Summing up ‘News of old friends’, he passed on that

Evelyn [Waugh] broke a bone in his leg learning to become a parachutist, and is now, I believe, preparing to escort or actually escorting journalists round the Second Front. He has also written the best part of a long novel. If any of his virulence against the ‘brass hats’ finds expression in print and makes its way past the Censor, I should expect this to prove his most entertaining satire since ‘Decline and Fall’.

At one moment he was posted to a Divisional Headquarters and served as ADC [aide-de-camp] to the general. Freddy [Birkenhead] saw him off from White’s fairly well oiled. He had a few drinks on the way, arrived thoroughly ‘canned’ and spilled the wine all over the general’s trousers at dinner. Next morning the general dismissed him. ‘No offence I hope Waugh, but can’t have an ADC of mine getting “foxed” at dinner.’ Evelyn, disliking the word ‘foxed’ almost as much as he disliked the general, ‘You can hardly expect me, sir, to change the habits of a lifetime to suit your peculiarities.’ Exit.

I could drivel on like this, Esmond, for a long time because it seems to bring us closer together, but I must stop in a moment …

Yrs affectionately,

Frank

PS Telephoning your mother to confirm your address … I learnt that you are now married. Marvellous [underlined seven times] Still more congratulations to you both. Now for a family.

That family would eventually consist of my younger sister Laura and myself, and Esmond would laugh heartily when I, terrified he would burn in hell, begged him to convert.

Esmond loved Frank and went on loving him through many vicissitudes and the marked difference in their interests and status. There is no other word for the intense attention my father paid to Frank’s every word and deed; he was proud he was his friend; he admired him, marvelled at him, mocked him: Frank had ‘gone over to Rome, and taken Elizabeth with him’. Elizabeth Harman was the only ‘undergraduette’ anyone at Oxford knew. Frank’s faith, discovered and kindled by the living saint Father Darcy, responsible for Evelyn Waugh’s conversion as well as Graham Greene’s, was always a source of utter perplexity and entertainment to Esmond, who liked his friend chiefly for his worldly ambitions – and successes. But Frank’s new-found religion puzzled him less than Frank’s earlier defection from every tradition and allegiance of his class (Anglo-Irish plantocracy), when he became a fervent socialist, serving in Attlee’s government. Esmond was not going to follow him down either of these crazy paths. Instead, he snorted with laughter at his friend’s idealistic zeal.

In Amalfi on the day of the patrono’s feast, the priest sounded like a caricature to Esmond because the Latin Esmond first learned at his prep school was pronounced altogether differently. In Bari, the celebrant on the high altar, sweeping from side to side in his gleaming embroideries with a small boy following, censer and vials at the ready, pronounced the words as if they were in Italian – not the solid masonry edifice of Cicero and Tacitus that he’d declaimed at school. Ilia echoed the words of the Mass, and this too filled Esmond with a swelling tide of tenderness towards her – Roman Catholics certainly knew about the feminine virtues! In London, he’d had girlfriends who were for the most part the sisters of his old school chums, and later of his university friends, men he’d been at Oxford with and later in the Guards. There were sisters in the story, there always were. Sisters appeared when you went away for the weekend during term to stay with a friend at his family’s, they carried golf clubs and ciggies, drove quickly and tossed their gear – tennis rackets in severe presses with wing nuts and screws at the corners, long cartons stamped with dressmakers’ crests in azure and gold, in which the ballgown and the stole and the cocktail dress were lying between sheets of tissue waiting to leap out and enfold their mistress with encrusted ruffles, slippery rustling stuff, while the little strong box for Mummy’s tiara which she was lending for the night, so sweet of her, was thrown on to the back seat as well. Then off, off down the lanes to the country house.

Penelope had been Esmond’s most frequent companion. She was more eager to tuck her hair into a riding helmet than under a tiara, and she didn’t have a car, but her brother Roger had, a Model T Ford which he willingly let Esmond borrow to squire his sister round. The Chetwodes, though connected to everyone, were short of the readies, like Esmond, but they had land, lots of it, thin shale somewhere with endless rain and midges; as chauffeur Esmond could make himself indispensable, and drove Penelope and her pony in its neat box to point-to-points where she grew flushed and glowing as she competed – never minding a fall, or a broken collarbone or crushed rib every now and then.

There was never a breath of romance; he’d wait outside the St John’s Ambulance tent while they set her fracture, and he’d smoke anxiously until she reappeared, a bit wan, but grinning at her luck. What an adventure, oh what fun.

When my mother prayed, she was always intent; when I used to go with her to Mass, I followed her in many different churches during my childhood, from the Nissen hut at RAF Oakington to the Dominicans in Cambridge where she liked Father Robert Pollock’s sermons, and, last of all, Brompton Oratory in London, she was fully possessed by the service and its unfolding drama. Sometimes her lips moved; sometimes her eyes were closed; sometimes she gave that short dry cough that afflicted her all her life, but it didn’t interrupt her absorption.

By then, my father never went with her, and in spite of his devotion to Frank, he never even flirted with conversion.

On their honeymoon, accompanying her, he took in the earnestness of his young wife with similar amusement:

to MR and Betts

… I went with Ilia to Mass in Ravello Cathedral where an old bishop (over 80) (and held up!) celebrated a solemn charade full of conjuring tricks, and looked like Uncle Auchie!

Meanwhile in London, Mother Rat, herself from Northern Irish Protestant stock, and his father ‘Plum’, whose father the Attorney General of Trinidad has gone down in the history books for the truly hostile environment for Catholics he created, were a little anxious about the Italian girl’s allegiances.

21 March ’44

To Daddy

Thank you very much for your charming letter ref. Elia – your reactions are what I wd. expect, and I fear MR’s are too. I thought true Christians like MR believed in the ‘indivisible Christian brotherhood of men’ so her remarks about foreigners amuse me, if it was NOT rather sad. Elia is of course a RC – we only once discussed religion – I was rather delighted to find that she barely knew there were any other Christians except RCs!! But I have left her in no doubt that I stand by the principles of the glorious revolution of 1688 and the Protestant Succession and ‘down with the Pope’! Poor darling that she should be considered against a theological and dynastic background. I fear that we who here have made the long trek from Alamein have little time for this sort of thing, as Churchill has said ‘good citizens are all nations and creeds’. The fact is however that MR will, of all of you, be especially mad about Elia (for Betts’ information, accent on the E) as she has a very Irish character, full of light and shade. I will tell you more of her family …

She is very worried you will think her ‘NOT good enough for me’ when the facts are very much the other way, and I say that most objectively.

This is where he goes on to write those words about her future as his wife:

they [Ilia’s family] have nice friends of ‘the professional classes’ type. Elia however (you know she is only 21) belongs to the new world, and her life will be mine, NOT her circle’s.

Esmond was to leave the following Saturday for South East Asia Command and another war front in Burma; in 1945, with Esmond still in the Far East, my mother left Bari, carrying a hatbox and a suitcase for London to meet her parents-in-law and enter that new life.

It is disorienting hearing your father’s voice from long ago, sounding in the chamber of memory, and seeing your mother then, before everything that was to happen. I can’t help flinching at the way he wrote about her – was it naiveté? Yet he was raised to worldliness, far more than she. The world he had lived in as an adult for nearly two decades – he turned 38 in 1945 – was a narrow anchorage of cards and cricket, the school yard, the officers’ mess, the house party, the supper club. She was stepping into it:

Elia is a greyhound … [she] has the lightest step I ever met.

Bruce Munslow, in the letter written so many decades after the events he recalled, wondered ‘how Ilya would fare in England. She was rather like a delicate flower, not suitable I thought for this climate.’