Free Dead and Alive by Hammond Innes Page A

plateau of black rock like metal, all smoking, and in the middle of it was a great slag heap like a devil’s dunghill. Every thirty seconds or so there’d be a noise like a thousand tons of bombs dropped on your feet, and the whole earthwould quiver. I went up to the top of the slag. It was hot and every time the mountain blew off it quivered like a ruddy jelly. Through gaps in the smoke I could see great red gobs of molten rock leaping out of the flames, and solidified rocks splattered the other side of the crater. I reckon she must have been throwing ’em up to near on a thousand feet. But the funnel of the crater sloped away from us otherwise we’d have ’ad it.”
    “Were you there when the eruption occurred?” I asked.
    “Was I there! Cor, stone the crows! There—I was evacuating the women and kids from one end of Monte di Somma whilst the lava stream was swallowing it up from the other. I won’t ever forget that Tuesday. There was a hell of a hailstorm at about four in the afternoon—six inches of hail in ten minutes. And half-an-hour later there was a noise like ten thousand expresses going through a tunnel and a great column of black vapour steamed up to about twenty thousand feet. It was full of ash, that vapour. It rose like a—like a huge great rolling cauliflower of muck.
    “It wasn’t so bad when the eruption was just a great mass of black clinkers that glowed red at night—except for the blokes whose homes were in the way of it—but when the crater started blowing off in real earnest, then I began thinking of what had happened to Pompeii.
    “After that the Sangro River seemed quite tame, though I got wounded there and was downgraded. That’s when I was drafted to the Water Company.” He lit a cigarette. “Two months in Naples taught me a fing or two aba’t huming-nature. Gor blimy, wot a place. I seen men die in the streets for lack of food. The Ityes didn’t wony. The girls’d sell themselves for a tin of bully and there was gangs of hooligans on the loot. The only people wot was well fed was the boys in the Black Market. They did all right. A lot of the dock boys were in the racket one way and another. They say about a quarter of a million pounds of stuff was disappearing from the docks each month. An’ I wouldn’t doubt it cosI seen drivers wiv my own eyes bring out a roll of thousand lire notes—and army pay didn’t allow you saving that much, the price of vino being wot it was. An’ I bet it ain’t changed much.”
    And he was right there. Naples was the same bomb-raddled mean-streeted tart that I had known over a year ago. We berthed at the mole which the Navy had used. There was little sign of any reconstruction work. They were still using the improvised quays that we had built over sunken ships at the time of Anzio. They had cleared a few more of the shattered buildings and some wooden sheds had been erected for storage. But the port area looked just what it was—a place that had been blasted to hell from the air.
    It had an air of tired lethargy about it. But then, of course, the last time I had seen it the Navy had been in charge, and despite the destruction of so much of its wharfage it had been handling a bigger volume of traffic than ever before in its history.
    It was just after midday when Stuart and I went ashore. After arranging for the refuelling and watering of the ship we walked to the Banco di Napoli in the Via Roma and opened an account there. Then we went to the Zita Teresa for lunch. The long glass windows were open to the little harbour of Santa Lucia under the looming bulk of the Castello dell’Ovo. They were unloading wine casks from Ischia and the sour smell of vino was mingled with the smell of dead fish and tar. The Capri ferry was in and there was an old M.A.S. boat aground under the castle walls. They were playing O Sole Mio as we entered, and the man with the fiddle was the one who had played to Allied troops before the restaurant had been turned