The Vengeance of Rome

What Americans call ‘Jewish’ food is actually East European. Most of it is familiar to me. But the Jews had to pretend they had invented it, just as the Greeks cannot bear the idea that their entire cuisine is Turkish. They have a saying in Albania: How do you tell the difference between Turkish cuisine and Greek? Answer: One has pork.

Believe me, this is not a palatable notion, but it is the truth. Aggressive Moslemism (and it is by nature aggressive) is something I shall resist to my dying day. My quarrel with that fool across the street is not with his choice of religion. Anyone should have a right to follow his conscience; I have never said anything else. But I hate that grinning fool’s cynical wickedness as he passes off his kebabs and shleftikos as authentic. Not only does the public think he’s Greek, they think his hideous muck is typical. Maybe I should not blame him. After all, his customers are scarcely gourmets.

Rome in those days was also full of archaeologists. Il Duce had ordered a huge programme of public works designed to resurrect the best of the past and build new monuments which would be their equal. Everywhere you went you found some pit full of babbling foreigners chipping and dusting and studying for all they were worth. Myself, I had little time for them. Their unhealthy obsession with the past showed no respect for the future.

They are all the same, these people. They are suspiciously unwholesome. They grub around in antique filth as if this will give them some insight into the aspirations and inspiration of their ancestors. Is there some profit motive I do not understand? I saw this boy, he could not have been ten. He was selling a stained-glass window in the Blenheim Arms. Only I was outraged. Mrs Cornelius said it would look nice in her front room. Where would you keep it? I asked. What would you tell the vicar? He has no doubt robbed a church. Don’t be silly, she said, that’s out of one of them big villas up Talbot Road. Drink up and be happy, Ivan. She has a tolerance for thieves. Perhaps she is right. Most of her friends and relatives are rogues of some description. Until these middle-class novelists and TV producers started moving into the area everyone else in Notting Hill lived by and from crime. Fit company, I suppose. I am a fool to notice. Every shopkeeper in Portobello Road says I should ‘allow’ for some pilfering. They expect even their staff to rob them. It’s human nature, they say, pretend you don’t notice. I suppose it is cheaper than paying higher wages or having someone keep an eye on the stock every minute of the day. Live and let live? Where would we be today if Mussolini and Hitler had taken that attitude?

Once a week for many years I would meet my old friend Major Nye in the Lyons Corner House across from Victoria Station. He had retired from the army after the war. He ran a market garden somewhere near the Kent coast. He supplemented his pension, he said, by working as a bookkeeper for a firm of solicitors in Palace Street. But he kept in touch with his army chums. Sometimes I met them. They were rather pale, scrawny old men with white moustaches and neatly cut white hair. Embarrassed to be wearing civilian suits like ill-fitting uniforms, they were forever fingering their ties and asking after one another’s well-being. Colonels and majors and occasionally captains. All in Civvy Street during the 1950s. All spluttering at the speed with which, under Attlee’s Red hit squads, the empire was disintegrating. All their lives they had served an ideal. Now they no longer had a cause. Later, Major Nye worked in Lincoln’s Inn Fields at the Sir John Soane Museum. I spent much of my time there after I first came to London. Mrs Cornelius was not yet back from the Continent. Spain was finished. That was in 1939. Major Nye joined the museum in 1959 or 1960. He was growing a little frail. He had some tummy trouble. An ulcer, he said. I sometimes think stomach ulcers were the bane of that age. Everyone had them. Americans made entire films about those who suffered them. What was it making entire nations clutch their stomachs? I understand the feeling, all too well. In my case it was not an ulcer that caused my pain. Ulcers determined the history of the entire first half of the twentieth century. Drugs will determine the second half. Capital expands all possible markets.