After Sorrento I found myself once more in what I described to my sister as ‘the full gaiety of the Naples winter season’. When I had reported back this time to the transit camp to learn what arrangements would be made to get me back to the battalion they told me that they had no papers about me and would be able to do nothing with me until they had. This seemed to have something to do with the uncertainty about my being classified as either London Irish Rifles or Rifle Brigade, or neither. This situation, of course, I felt suited me very well — not just now, in Naples, but in my feeling that I was by nature an outsider — not tied to any group. So I was encouraged by the authorities again to go off on my own, with this time no indication about when I should come back. It was too cold and wet to go to Ischia or Capri, so I set about looking for a room in the old part of Naples, by the harbour, where from tall buildings washing like flags was hung across narrow streets. This was the haunt of touts who would offer soldiers their ‘virgin’ sisters in return for cigarettes. I soon found a man who said he could find me a splendid apartment in return for very little money. So I was taken to a high unprepossessing building and up bleak flights of stairs to the home of an elderly and kind couple who showed me two beautifully furnished rooms, which they said I could rent. I moved in with my meagre kitbag, and sat on an antique sofa beneath an ornate gilded mirror, and I thought — This is the first place truly of my own that I have ever had; it gives rise to a form of ecstasy.
I took up again my correspondence with my father that seemed to represent a sanity-seeking journey in contrast to that of war –
Have just read the most enthralling little book called The Mysterious Universe by James Jeans. It appears that the physicists have indeed done away with the old theories of matter and energy, and have arrived by scientific means at much the same conclusions that Berkeley and Co hazarded in the 18th century. The point I find fascinating is the scientific conclusion that the universe as we know it cannot be composed of ultimate matter and energy, but only the reflections of ultimate reality in some Universal Mind. And we are only able to see these reflections as reflections again in our own mind. Now this is a very acceptable conclusion when it is come by scientifically, for although the Universal Mind seems to be the mind of a Pure Mathematician, and thus for ever somewhat beyond our comprehension, it does at least suggest that the Universal Mind has some affinity with our own feeble minds, thus giving us enormous significance in the universe when before it seemed as if we were of no account at all.
And later –
Before I came into contact with the physicists I had embarked on a rather dangerous heresy reasoning as follows: although we admit the hypothetical existence of God and Ultimate Reality, it appears that both are so irrevocably incomprehensible to us that there is no way by which man can approach them: Ultimate Reality is eternally indiscernible, and there is no reason to suppose that the will, intelligence or purpose of God is anywhere manifested upon earth, either in mankind or ‘nature’. Why do we suppose that we have in us that which is also in God?
Reasoning thus, without the evidence of the physicists, I evolved a ‘man for man’s sake’ religion, the only ethics of which were those imposed by the conscience of the individual — a religion close to that of the terrible Frederick [Nietzsche]! Without the physicists’ evidence I think that was a reasonable view; but after my introduction to Jeans, I saw that there were very good grounds for the belief that ‘we have in us that which is also in God’; also that the natural world is in some way a reflection of eternal reality. However, in either philosophy our attitude to life can be much the same — the aim being always the perfecting of man and a possible creation of a higher type of man. Whether this is the end in itself — as it was with N — or merely the means whereby we may ultimately come in contact with Reality or Godhead, does not greatly matter. We shall doubtless know when the time comes. In the meantime to the sane man there can be only one attitude to life — to find a harmony between his consciousness and his instinct by a study of the world about him and the world that has gone before him, and an honest appreciation of the evidence thereby attained — and then to live in accordance with this harmony, always with the further purpose of increasing its range and imparting it to others. If ever a fairly universal harmony is obtained, a higher type of man will emerge. So long as the ignorant and prejudiced are in the vast majority, the harmonious man has to devote most of his energy to shielding himself from the insane clamour of the multitude; but if ever sanity is able to extend itself from the individual to society, then indeed I think there will be hope of higher creation.
This particular would-be harmonious man continued on his way through a Naples winter. My old friend Anthony, back in Italy after having been treated for his wound in England, sought me out in the convalescent home and later came to stay with me in my flat. We went to the opera — Carmen, La Bohème, Faust, Turandot, La Traviata. Gigli and Maria Caniglia were said to be expected from Rome. We visited Herculaneum and Pompeii; we climbed Vesuvius. In the Officers’ Club we got drunk and belted out Neapolitan songs to the accompaniment of a rousing band, or swayed to sentimental yearnings about Santa Lucia or a return to Sorrento. Occasionally there were a few nurses at the club, and I remember going with one for a moonlit walk by the sea. But as I had found in Cairo, sex did not seem to have much point in war — unless, that is, one had something of the nature of a rapist.
My friend from Ranby days, Raleigh Trevelyan, who had been badly wounded at Anzio, was now working for the Military Mission to the Italian Army in Rome, where the social life was more glamorous, and he suggested I should join him. He wrote, ‘I exchange pleasantries with Marchesas and dance on polished floors to the gramophone with Ambassadors’ daughters; every Friday I partake of tea and scones with the Princess Doria … the Vestal Virgins are preparing a bullock, snow white, to sacrifice in your honour; the priests of Dionysus are already weaving garlands to adorn the pillars of the temple.’ This was the old Ranby style of which I had been so fond and which I had got out of the way of with the London Irish Rifles. Later Raleigh wrote — ‘How unfashionable you are supporting Gigli! You’ll be a social failure in Rome.’
I still had nostalgia for the Rifle Brigade style, although I had not wanted to go back to it. When Mervyn had been convalescing in Sorrento earlier in the year and I was still laid up in Florence, he had bumped into Anthony and they had got on so well together that they had hatched a plot for Anthony to join the LIR. So when Mervyn got back to the battalion at the end of January 1945 — just as I arrived in Naples — he had spoken of this plan to our commanding officer, who had welcomed the idea, and had had a word with so-and-so who had had a word … and so on — and everything seemed to be in train for Anthony to join us until the Rifle Brigade got fed up and scotched the idea. In the meantime, however, Mervyn seemed to have become imbued with something of the old Ranby style and we wrote to each other about forming, with or without Anthony, a society of like-minded refugees from the earnest gung-ho spirit of war, to be known as the SDA or the Society of Decadent Anarchists. My two or three great friends and I already saw ourselves as forming what we referred to as a clique which felt itself aloof from conventional society; which made jokes about our current predicaments, and talked seriously about the meaning of life and God.