Where have all the bullets gone_ - Spike Milligan [74]
Bornheim holding his eternal Union Jack newspaper — with a passing Maria
As we disembark, Italian Dragomen and flies are waiting. “Do you like a donkey?” No thanks, I’m a vegetarian. We board the Funicolare — up up up. At the top we walk out into the most famous square in the world, Captain Reg O’List. How are we? — he’s just returning. Goodbye Reg, no — no need to sing ‘Begin the Beguine’, no, thank mother for the rabbit.
The main square is set up with cafes and outdoor tables, no piped music or transistors. We choose the Cafe Azzura because it’s nearest, and order two icecreams. What ice-creams!!! Wow, a foot high, multi-coloured, and covered in cream and flies. We are the only two soldiers in the Square.
My God! the impossible! “Ello lads.” It’s her! It’s our Gracie! I wished it was theirs. She insists we come and have a ‘nice cup of tea’. Down the lanes she takes us to her Villa Canzone del t’mare; the view is stunning but the house is rather like a very good class boarding-house in Scunthorpe. She’s wonderfully warm-hearted. We sit on the balcony admiring the view; please God, don’t let her sing. Is she going to say it? She does. “Ee Bai Gom, a bit different from Blackpool.” She must be working from a script. We escape without any singing. “Good luck lads, give my love t’folks back t’ome.” We’d escaped! Not even ‘Sally’!
I wanted to see San Michele. It’s closed, says a caretaker who looked like Frankenstein’s monster without the bolts. On to the site of the Villa of Tiberius, now carefully converted into cowsheds. Sloshing thru’ cow dung, a local shows where Tiberius threw his victims over the cliff.
“I don’t see what’s dangerous about that,” said Bornheim. “It’s perfectly safe until you hit the rocks.”
Lunch, midday and that warm torpor was implemented as we ate Spaghetti Marinara and drank Ruffino at a little restaurant, high over the sea.
Me after the meal, well fed and pissed. Observe geranium.
As I write this nearly forty years later, I can still feel the warmth of that day; that one day can cast such a lasting spell speaks either for my appreciation of life, or that ancient Capri was indeed as charged with such beauty that it left itself tattooed on your mind, soul and spirit. I know I was quite a simple soldier, unsophisticated, but as I grew older, my mind took up the slack of that past time and computed it into a finely honed memory, leaving every colour, taste, sound and sight as crisp and as electric as though it happened yesterday; and to me as I write, it did.
I remember a potted geranium on the wall. I wonder if it remembers me. It’s scarlet luminescence, projected against a fibrillating azure sea, seemed to hypnotize me. Like all idiots with a camera, I had to photograph it, and like all dodos who think they can capture their emotions on a holiday snap, I took a colour picture, in black and white…
The world’s first colour photograph in black and white
I must be Irish. Well, I was that day.
“It’s the colour of the sea,” said Bornheim, equally pissed.
“What about the colour?” I’m asking.
“It looks as if it’s been painted,” he said, staring into its calling waters. “It has been,” I said.
“Who was he?” said Bornheim, stressing every word. That geranium, it was becoming fluorescent: I think it was doing to me what the chair did to Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception. I was understanding why Van Gough painted that simple chair in Aries — people say he created his own mescalin. What a saving! I sat on the wall and looked towards the Capri headland and envisaged the marble palace of Tiberius that once adorned it. That a man so innately evil should have lived in such beauty; poor Mallonia killing herself (“that filthy-mouthed, hairy stinking old man”) to avoid his advances.