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Spike feeding the pigeons in a piazza in Bologna. Photograph of no particular merit other than that the photographer would one day arise and find Sir in front of his name.

Christmas in Italy

Our last show in Bologna was on Christmas Day. It was all very strange. On Christmas Eve, after a show to a very inebriated audience, I wanted to be alone. I went to my bedroom and wished I could be back at 50 Riseldine Road with my mum and dad and brother. I wanted that little Christmas tree in the front room, the coal fire especially lit to ‘air the room’ for Christmas Day. The simple presents, a scarf, a pair of socks, a presentation box of 25 Player’s cigarettes, my brother’s box of Brittans soldiers, a drawing book with a set of pencils. Very modest fare by modern standards, but to me then, still simple and unsophisticated, it was a warming and magic day. The lunch, and chicken, that was something! In 1939, chicken was a luxury. And the tin of Danish ham! The huge trifle with custard and real CREAM. My father’s pride in opening the Port, pretending he was a savant, smelling the cork. “Ahhhh yes,” he would say, and pour it with the gesture of a sommelier at the Lord Mayor’s banquet.

Here I was in a room in Bologna. I couldn’t get it together. Outside there is roistering. Not me. I knew tomorrow there would be no stocking at the end of my bed. Father Christmas was a casualty of World War Two.

FLORENCE

Florence

City of Medicis, Savonarola, and chattering raspberrying Secombe, now freezing without his leather ‘love gift’ jerkin. This is the city of the artist, the artisan, the connoisseur. Our Hotel Dante is just round the corner from the Piazza del Signoria. I would be able to see places that I had only read about. The hotel is one built for those rich Victorians doing the Grand Tour. Sumptuous rooms, a wonderful double bed with duck eider, like sleeping in froth. Putting my egg-stained battledress in the bevelled glass and walnut cupboard was like wearing a flat hat in the Ritz. Secombe flies past chattering and farting up the Carrara marble stairs with its flanking Venetian balustrades topped with cherubim holding bronze lanterns. He looks totally out of place, he belongs at the pit head.

I am standing on the spot, explaining that this is where Savonarola was burned. “Oo was Savonarola?” says Gunner Hall. I tell him ‘oo he is’. “They burnt him?” Yes. “Why. Were they short of coal?” I explain that he was at odds with the Medici and the state of Florence. “Fancy,” says Hall. “Why didn’t ‘e call the fire brigade?” The same indifference applies to see Cellini’s Perseus. With the head of Medusa, Hall wants to know why statues are erected to people being burnt or having their heads chopped off. “Why not someone normal like Tommy Handley?” Yes, of course: “Here is Cellini’s statue of Tommy Handley from ITMA.” That would look really nice in the Piazza.

The Pitti Palace leaves me stunned; masterpiece after masterpiece, there’s no end to it. From Titian to Seguantini. You come out feeling useless and ugly. On the Ponte Vecchio Secombe and I ask Hall to take a photo of us. It comes out with the wall behind us in perfect focus, two blurred faces in the foreground. He was well pleased.

Now a divertimento. An English lady living in Florence has invited us to tea. She is Madame Penelope Morris, a ‘relative’ of William Morris, “the man who invented wallpaper’. She was sixty-nine, tall, thin, a white translucent skin with the veins visible; her neck looked like a map of the Dutch canal system. She wore swathes of bead necklaces — to the value of two shillings. Two pale blue eyes, very close together, sat atop a long bulbous nose. She had no waist, no bottom or bosom; she went straight up and down like a ; phone box. A small crimped rouged mouth like a chicken’s bum. She spoke with an upper-class adenoidal voice that put her next in line to the throne. She ushered us into a cloying room that’ smelt of stale unemptied sherry glasses and tomcat piss.