Writing non-fiction was not really what I had set out to do, but one night …
I was sitting in my office in Naples one very stormy evening in the late autumn of 2001, supposedly finishing off my duty rostrum but in reality idly leafing through a book about Operation Avalanche.
It was not just a cold dark wet winter evening; it was a positively filthy night, compounded by ill-fitting French windows which rattled with every gust of wind, and the rumble of the trams outside.
Just as I was gathering up my things to go home, the late-night duty guard appeared at the door to tell me I had a customer, who wanted some information about exam registration.
My visitor was ushered in and, speaking fluent English, told me her name was Lydia and asked if I was also English. By return I asked her where she was from and how I could help. She told me she was from Angri – a small town south of Naples on the Salerno road. I immediately warmed to the conversation, since Angri was a town I had been intending to cover for my out-of-office hours research and I told her as much. I was slightly interested in how an English woman could have ended up in a place like Angri.
She began explaining – it was a long story about her father who had been there during the war. I could hardly believe it. But my excitement turned to disbelief when she spotted on my desk the front cover of the book I had been reading and told me in a rather matter-of-fact way – as if I had been waiting for her to show up all evening – “Ah yes there’s a photograph of my dad in that book!”
It transpired that her father, now an old man, was very sick with cancer but was living, or dying, at her home in Angri. I immediately arranged to take the next morning off work and raced down to Angri in my battered Toyota.
The old man was indeed very sick indeed. I hesitated before speaking to him, before switching on the tape-recorder. But it was clear that he was eager to speak, and to set down his personal story.
So here it is.
***
Sergeant John Bates was born in in Marylebone, London in 1916.
He played football at Wembley for the London Schoolboys against the Glasgow Schoolboys.
After he left school, he became a pathologist’s assistant; on one occasion he remembers cycling over to a hospital with a large biscuit tin to pick up a brain. When he tired of this, he went to work for Ford motor company.
When war broke out, he could have stayed to work in the motor industry but decided to join up.
He served in India and Iraq, North Africa and then landed in Pontecagnano near Salerno with the 56th Division, 64th Field Artillery Regiment, with a crew manning a 25-pounder field gun.
He remembers landing about 4.30 am in semi-daylight near the River Tusciano in the Spineta area and that the landing craft next to his, carrying troops from the 8th London Fusiliers, got hit.
The Germans were on the beach. He remembers trying to dig a hole in the sand with his helmet but then got told to move forward. The first obstacle was a machine-gun nest. They lobbed a grenade and one German was killed, another badly wounded (“calling for his mother”, a customary invocation whilst on the point of death apparently) while they dragged his comrade away. This was the famous photograph in the book that lay on my table. A very dramatic photo, and now I had the background. The actual taking of the photograph had been quite spontaneous, nothing staged. An officer-looking type just walked up to them and took it.
John says of that moment in his life: “In that first hour you can live a lifetime.”
They crossed the “little” railway line but got shot at by an 88mm German gun which was in the Spineta stronghold, which they had actually got behind, so the 88 was firing backwards towards them. It got taken out by a destroyer.
They then moved on to the Tobacco factory (very large) – it must have been the SAIM tobacco warehouse at the Santa Lucia crossroads. I know it well. The whole area had suddenly come to life. The factory was shelled by corvettes.
***
John’s memories are random, they will need sorting out later. He says about the Salerno landings: “Everybody was doing their own thing.” He remembers most of the fighting was there and around Montecorvino airport. Then he remembers that in a farmhouse Capt. Mayne (the son of a General) got his head shot off, while he saw the body of another captain, again the son of a general (Capt. Maxwell) up near Castelluccia above Battipaglia. But Battipaglia was taken and lost three times. He can’t remember on which occasion he saw Maxwell.
He moved from Battipaglia to Fratte, about twenty miles up towards Naples, where there was a blown bridge. Then back to Salerno and then Baronissi, Nola, Maddaloni, Marcianise, S. Maria C.V, Capua across the bailey bridge, Sparanise, Teano, Roccamonfina (where he nearly got captured) and Monte Camino (with 201st Guards Brigade).
At Roccamonfina he remembers three little girls, sisters: Rosa, Lidia and Immacolata, who was about 4 or 5. Their father had just been deported by the Germans. This family had a a house next to their gun position, overlooking Monte Camino, not far from the battery where Spike Milligan, future, writer and TV personality and early colleague of Peter Sellers, was lance bombardier.
His story of Roccamonfina touched me: was it because I had been there with my then wife-to-be, in the days when we were happy, before we married? Was it because I wanted to join up the memories of this old dying man, with a real person from is long distant past?
***
So, after John died at the age of 85, about two weeks after I had visited him on 19th December, I couldn’t wait to visit Roccamonfina – a small village set on the slopes of a chestnut covered extinct volcano crater about 50 kilometres north of Naples – in order to find the three sisters. My family sat and waited for me in a restaurant while followed one of the proprietors who thought she had identified the only family that had three elderly women in it.
Rosa and Immacolata had by then passed away, but Lidia, now owner of a small dress-making shop just off the main square, remembered the presence of Inglesi soldiers outside her house, although it was the hunger and the cold of that winter that is still uppermost in her memory. A bit of an anti-climax, comparatively, yes. There have been times in this research project that I have reduced old people to tears when confronted with photos or memories that depict them. They thank me, as if I had reconnected lost fragments of their life.
***
But John Bates’ story did not finish when the war ended. One place he was billeted was in the cotton mill in a small village called Angi, not far from where had actually landed on the beach. (The mill chimney is still there.) In the morning the townswomen would come down to do their washing. This was comparative luxury to Monte Camino where they slept rough, in the middle of the winter, since it was too dangerous to sleep in houses. Once he went into a cave in a river bed and found loads of Italians from San Clemente.
After the war was over, however, he returned to the South of Italy for a holiday in 1948 with his friend Frank. When re-visiting Angri one day they saw a pretty girl walking along the street, and they followed her until she disappeared into her house. One of the girl’s sisters came down into the street to find out what they wanted and Frankie, who was a bit bolder than John, asked her if John could write to her sister. This was funny, I thought, because it reminded me of the generation, of which I think I am also part, where there was a certain “proper way” of conducting early courtship.
She agreed and after a lot of corresponding John asked her to marry him, by letter of course. Her parents were initially very much opposed to the idea, but she liked John and eventually, after her parents had procured the services of a religious order in England to verify his marital status, they relented and invited him over to Italy for a two-week holiday. Because John was Anglican, and the catholic Bishop in Angri would not consent to marrying them in his diocese, they had to go to England, where, unlike many war-marriages, they raised a family and lived together until his wife died in the early ’nineties. Only then did John moved back to Italy to be with his daughter Lydia, who had chosen to move back to Italy earlier.
***
Oh, yes, I nearly forgot: John’s daughter’s name was Lydia, after one of children next to whose house John’s artillery battery had been stationed in Roccamonfina. But Lydia had not known the origin of her Christian name.
Simon Pocock – Blog 
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