Return To Sorrento

(N.A.A.F.I. = universal store, found on every British military base) On some bleak airfield on some Cambridge fen (that awful winter - 'forty-seven, I think) my mother, novice servicewoman then, crossed parade-ground like a skating rink to see the Christmas concert on the camp. Inside, the quonset hut was black as ink till airmen lit a feeble spirit lamp. The snow was driving against one outer wall: she calls to mind a smell of tents and damp and stinging fingers, fresh from thrown snowballs, and gouts of steam, blown out in cloudy spurts as people laughed. Then lights dimmed in the hall. She now recalls a curious stab of hurt to see the Italian janitor of the base revealed onstage in P.O.W. shirt when curtains opened. What had been a place of uproar, now - faced by this threadbare clown - had undergone some dreadful loss of face. In dubbin make-up, N.A.A.F.I. dressing-gown, as solemn as a high priest at the altar, this patched-up Pagliacci, ear-flaps down, sang ludicrously well. The keyboard faltered, and stopped. The singer, weeping now, kept on, quite heedless, as his clown's nose dripped tear-water. There's something sacred in the humblest song (with wretchedness wrought into lasting good through alchemy of art) and, all along, the watchers, to their horror, understood. He sang so gorgeously of going home because he knew full well he never would.