Children of The Sun Read online

  MORRIS LANGLO WEST was born in St Kilda, Melbourne, in 1916. At the age of fourteen, he entered the Christian Brothers seminary ‘as a kind of refuge’ from a difficult childhood. He attended the University of Melbourne and worked as a teacher. In 1941 he left the Christian Brothers without taking final vows. During World War II West worked as a code breaker, and for a time he was private secretary to former prime minister Billy Hughes.

  After the war, West became a successful writer and producer of radio serials. In 1955 he left Australia to build an international career as a writer and lived with his family in Austria, Italy, England and the USA. West also worked for a time as the Vatican correspondent for the British newspaper, the Daily Mail. He returned to Australia in 1982.

  Morris West wrote 30 books and many plays, and several of his novels were adapted for film. His books were published in 28 languages and sold more than 70 million copies worldwide. Each new book he wrote after he became an established writer sold more than one million copies.

  West received many awards and accolades over his long writing career, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the W.H. Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature for The Devil’s Advocate. In 1978 he was elected a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 1985, and was made an Officer of the Order (AO) in 1997.

  Morris West died at his desk in 1999.

  THE MORRIS WEST COLLECTION

  FICTION

  Moon in My Pocket (1945, as Julian Morris)

  Gallows on the Sand (1956)

  Kundu (1957)

  The Big Story (US title: The Crooked Road) (1957)

  The Concubine (US title: McCreary Moves In) (1958)

  The Second Victory (US title: Backlash) (1958)

  The Devil’s Advocate (1959)

  The Naked Country (1960)

  Daughter of Silence (1961)

  The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963)

  The Ambassador (1965)

  The Tower of Babel (1968)

  Summer of the Red Wolf (1971)

  The Salamander (1973)

  Harlequin (1974)

  The Navigator (1976)

  Proteus (1979)

  The Clowns of God (1981)

  The World is Made of Glass (1983)

  Cassidy (1986)

  Masterclass (1988)

  Lazarus (1990)

  The Ringmaster (1991)

  The Lovers (1993)

  Vanishing Point (1996)

  Eminence (1998)

  The Last Confession (2000, published posthumously)

  PLAYS

  The Illusionists (1955)

  The Devil’s Advocate (1961)

  Daughter of Silence (1962)

  The Heretic (1969)

  The World is Made of Glass (1982)

  NON-FICTION

  Children of the Sun (US title: Children of the Shadows) (1957)

  Scandal in the Assembly

  (1970, with Richard Frances)

  A View from the Ridge (1996, autobiography)

  Images and Inscriptions (1997, selected by Beryl Barraclough)

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin in 2017

  First published in Great Britain in 1957 by William Heinemann Ltd

  Published in the United States under the title Children of the Shadows

  Copyright © The Morris West Collection 1957

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone:

  (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email:

  [email protected]

  Web:

  www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 76029 755 8 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 1 76063 829 0 (ebook)

  Cover design: Julia Eim

  Cover image: iStock

  For

  Alison Dix

  Gargiulo

  Souls made of fire, children of the sun,

  With whom revenge is virtue.

  The Revenge, Act V., Sc. 2

  EDWARD YOUNG (1684–1765)

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE: ‘SEE NAPLES AND DIE’

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PART TWO: LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  PART THREE: COSA FARE?: WHAT’S TO DO ABOUT IT?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  ENVOI

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

  To name some, without naming all, would be an injustice. Many honest and enlightened men and women who helped me with this book have asked me to suppress their names for fear of economic reprisals against themselves and their families. I offer them, nameless, my thanks for their help and for the privilege of their friendship.

  M.L.W.

  PROLOGUE

  IN NAPLES the nightmares began. They began, as they always do, with a simple reality.

  There was a child whom I used to visit in the House of the Urchins. His name was Antonino. He was eight years old, but his body was so small and his face so pinched and pale that you would have taken him for five or six. When I came into the small and dusty courtyard where he played with the other boys, he would leave the game immediately and run to me, arms outstretched, calling my name, “Signor Mauro! Signor Mauro!”

  When I took him in my arms, he would cling to me a while, then he would beg me to sit down and tell him stories of my country—how far it was from Naples, and what sort of people lived there, and what language they spoke and what birds were there and what animals.

  While we were talking the others would gather around, and I would find myself the centre of a group of boys, open-mouthed, spellbound, as if they were watching Punchinello in his little golden house with the red curtains. Whenever a new one joined us, Antonino would introduce him to me and tell him with grave face and wide gestures that I was a “gran’ scrittore australiano” who came from a country bigger than Europe where no one, no one at all, was hungry.

  When I got up to leave, he would hold my hand and trot beside me on his rickety little legs and beg to carry my coat or my camera, so that he could be with me a few minutes longer. When I walked down the narrow street, between the fish stalls and the piles of refuse and the drab lines of laundry, I would look back and wave, and he would wave too, and my heart would be wrenched with pity and with tenderness and with deep, deep shame.

  For Antonino was a scugnizzo, a homeless, loveless child of the back alleys of Naples.

  He didn’t belong to Naples; he came from Rome. He had made the journey alone, on foot, sleeping in ditches, scavenging like an animal for food, his feet bare, his clothes a mess of filthy rags. When he reached the outskirts of the city, he had made a frightening journey through the mazes of the underground railway, and
had come finally to rest on an iron grating in the Street of the Two Lepers. He had joined a gang of other waifs who lived by scavenging and pilfering and pimping for the girls in the casino.

  Each night he slept on a grating where the warm air drifted up from the baker’s oven, or between the wheels of a vendor’s cart or on the stone steps of an ancient church. Until one night he was picked up and brought to the House of the Urchins.

  He was safe there and warm and loved, more than he had ever been loved in his life. His frail body began to strengthen and his tormented little mind began to calm itself. But he would never be a child again, and when he became a man he would always be different from other men, because the scar of the streets was on him and the fear of the sunless days and the terror of the loveless nights.

  In the House of the Urchins they would try to make him forget. But he would never forget, because, one day, he must grow up and go out again into the old and pitiless city.

  So, I began to dream about him…

  Always the dream was the same. It was night, a moonlit night, chill and dreary. There was a railroad track—a long perspective of steel rails between tall poplars, naked and skeletal as they are in winter. At the end of the track, where the lines converged, there was a tunnel, a black archway in a grey cliff.

  There was a child walking along the rails, a ragged, spindly, limping child. Sometimes he would stumble and fall, then pick himself up and limp forward again. My heart went out to him with love and pity, but, when I called to him, he began to run.

  I followed him, calling all the time, begging him to stop, warning him of the dangers that lurked in the dark tunnel. Still he went on. The dark archway swallowed him up. I followed. There were lights in the tunnel, rare, yellow lights and against them I saw his tiny distorted body, hopping like a wounded animal from sleeper to sleeper.

  I heard the sound of a locomotive. I shouted to warn him, but he would not stop. He was running to his death but he did not seem to care. Then I saw the headlamp of the locomotive, and, in its light, the face of the child—not Antonino’s face, but the face of my own son!

  Always at this same moment I would wake, sweating and terrified and calling the name of my child who was sleeping quietly in his bed, smiling at his own untroubled dreams.

  Then I knew that I must write this book, to purge myself of the nightmare. I must make my voice the voice of the children, the hungry, the homeless, the dispossessed, the damned innocents of Naples. I must batter on hearts for them, scavenging as they scavenge, not for bread, but for pity and for human kindness and above all for hope.

  PART ONE

  ‘SEE NAPLES AND DIE’

  CHAPTER ONE

  THERE IS a street in Naples called the Street of the Two Lepers.

  To find it you must plunge into the labyrinth of lanes and alleys on the north side of the Via Roma. You must thread your way through steep, narrow ravines of houses, with lines of washing hung between them like the banners of a tatterdemalion triumph. You push through the crowds round the fruit stalls and the fish barrows with their mountains of mussels and trays of polypi and their tubs of slimy water crawling with snails. You brush by the hawkers with their piles of cheap cottons and second-hand jackets and patched trousers and their photographs of film stars in cheap gilt frames. You duck under the cheeses and sausages hanging from the windows of the salumeria; you stumble over the grubby tattered children rooting in the rubbish piles for rinds and fruit scraps and trodden cigarette butts. You pass a dozen shrines with dusty statues or pictures of gaudy saints behind smeared and spotted glass. The lamps glow dully and the little votive tapers flutter faintly in the chill stirring of the wind. You peer into tiny rooms where women with pinched faces bend over knitting or embroidery, or where families of ten and twelve chatter and gesticulate over bowls of steaming pasta.

  Finally, you come to the Street of the Two Lepers.

  There is no commerce here. It is a dark and narrow lane, whose walls are damp and slimy and whose doors are blind arches, cold and cheerless. Yet, as you pass, you see that they are astir with life. Shapeless figures sit huddled over tin dishes filled with warm charcoal ash. A bundle of rags groans and stretches out a hand in supplication. In a gloomy courtyard, where a dull lamp burns in a tiny niche, a troop of filthy children link hands and dance in a pitiful mockery of joy. The cold bites into you and you thrust your hands deeper into your pockets, duck your head under the arch of a Spanish buttress and plunge onward towards the light at the far end of the Street of the Two Lepers.

  When you reach it, you find yourself in a small square with a pile of rubble in the centre and a small traffic of people, grey-faced and shabby, passing and repassing from the dark lanes into the yellow light of the square and the streets of the vendors.

  It was in this square that Peppino gave me my first lesson on Naples.

  For me, it was an important occasion. I had dressed for it with some care. I wore an old seaman’s jersey, frayed and darned in many places. My trousers were tattered and patched and I wore a pair of broken shoes with pointed toes that hurt my feet abominably. I had not shaved for three days and my nails were black and my hands were stained with grease and tobacco tar. In any other city I would have been moved on by the police, but here, in the bassi of Naples, I was dressed like a thousand others.

  Even so, it was difficult to escape attention. I am a big man, six feet tall with broad shoulders and big hands and big feet. My hair is brown and my eyes are light hazel, and when Peppino walked beside me we looked like David and Goliath.

  I needed Peppino. I needed him to vouch for me as a friend and a good fellow who knew how to keep his mouth shut. I needed his reassurance in the labyrinthine darkness of the Neapolitan ant-heap. I needed him to interpret for me the strange Neapolitan dialect—an esoteric tongue which only the initiate can understand. I speak fair Tuscan and am comfortable enough with polite people, but here, without Peppino, I might have been deaf and dumb.

  To tell you at this point the full story of Peppino himself would be not only to anticipate, but to make a mystery for you, a mystery you might be inclined to dismiss as an improbable lie. Let it suffice for now that Peppino is a Neapolitan, that he is twenty years of age, that he was once a scugnizzo, an urchin who lived in the streets as thousands of others live today, that he has been in a house of correction and that now, by a singular and miraculous mercy, he is a man who respects himself and is respected by others.

  He was recommended to me as one who could show me the life of Naples, teach me to understand it, and help me to explain it to the rest of the world, who live so remote from misery that they can neither understand nor succour it.

  * * *

  It was nine in the evening. We sat, Peppino and I, on the heap of rubble in the centre of the square, smoking cigarettes and watching the passage of the people.

  In front of us was a door. Unlike the other doorways in the square and in the lanes, this one was brightly lit with a neon tube and an illuminated number. A man stood leaning against the door jamb. He was short, stocky and well-dressed, with sleek black hair and a flashing smile and dead, dark eyes in a Levantine face.

  When a man or a group of youths came to the door, he would give them a quick appraising glance, then move aside to let them go in. When anyone came out, he would glance over his shoulder as if waiting for a sign of approval before letting them leave the premises. All the time, he never said a word.

  “That,” said Peppino, “is a casino—a closed house. The man is the keeper of the women.”

  I nodded. So much was evident. A brothel looks the same in all languages, and so do the men who run them.

  I was more interested in the steady stream of youths and men who came and went under the naked neon tube. One is apt to be deceived by the look of these small and undernourished people, but I was certain some of the lads were no more than sixteen years of age. I put the question to Peppino. He shrugged and spread his hand and cocked his head on one side in the peculiar
deprecating gesture of the Neapolitan.

  “What do you expect, Mauro? In the city of Naples there are two hundred thousand men without work. Many of the lucky ones earn like me only five hundred lire a day. We have no hope of marriage. Who can keep a wife and children on six English shillings a day? We cannot have the company of a good girl without making her our fidanzata. And what father will promise his daughter to a man who cannot support her? What is left to us? This…” he flicked his cigarette ash in the direction of the casino, “. . . or five minutes in a dark corner with one of the girls of the street. Capisce?”

  I shivered as though someone had walked over my grave.

  I understood. I understood very well. Continence in expectation of marriage is one thing—good morals and good social practice. But continence without hope of marriage is a bleak sanctity attainable by few, and certainly not by these warm-blooded people of midday Italy, who sleep ten in a bed because they can’t find more room to sleep in and couldn’t pay for it if they did.

  I understood something else, too—a thing that had puzzled me for a long time. As you walk the back streets of Naples you are conscious of the absence of women in the long lines of youths and men making the passeggiata, the evening walk, clustered round a shop window, lounging around the bars, singing, laughing, shouting, quarrelling amiably about the latest sporting results. When you ask for an explanation, they tell you, with pride, that the place for a good girl is in the house with her family, or with her fidanzato. If she goes out with a man she is a bad girl by presumption and generally in fact. The concept of friendship between the sexes is alien to these people.

  “Friendship goes quickly to the act,” as Peppino told me succinctly. “The only safety for a good girl is to stay at home and wait for a good husband.”

  “And if she can’t get a husband?”