UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
A Venetian Chore
I eyes piercing mine, " a job that will call for special qualities of body and brain. You're a good sailor ? Right. I've chosen you to do this because I feel sure you'll do your best at it. Don't let me down. Goodbye and good luck." He wrung my hand in a confidential manner, and as I saluted and left the room I felt his gaze following me inexorably through the door.
So it was that I was detailed from my regiment to help run the motor-boats at Venice, one of the more unusual, I suppose, of the chores undertaken by the British Army at the end of the late war. Next day I found myself installed, alone with a brother cavalryman, in a vast and magnificent Venetian villa on the island of Giudecca. It was a house that had belonged to a distinguished French politician, and was still hung with huge and colourful portraits of his ancestors ; with banners of obscure colonial regiments, one of which, I regret to say, now adorns my own rather humbler shelter, but will be returned upon the application of the distinguished French politician ; and with a notable collection of Oriental relics, inexplicably mixed up with the horns of mountain goats, the hoofs of bison and other bits of animals, the whole effect being that of a rather indigestible hors-d'oeuvre.
We were, as I say, alone in this mansion—quite alone, for all around us was the flat solitude of the lagoon, and the water in our boat-house lapped against the walls in a most disconcerting way, so that we were for ever imagining ghostly visitors, half Chinese, half goat, creeping up the great staircase to commune with the relics on the walls. Behind us was a violently Red quarter of the city ; in front our view included a mental home, a hospital for incurables and a highly sinister monastery. Perhaps I should say here, in all fairness, that while we were never quite reconciled to the view before us, we became firm friends with many of the Communists in our rear.
For we who ran the motor-boats of Venice were nothing if not democratic. We treated everyone, princes, industrial magnates, mayors, policemen and labourers, alike, with the same studied and unanswerable rudeness. In return we gained (or so older hands at .the game assured me) the confidence and respect of our Italian co-belligerents. Certainly our methods ensured that evzry single motor-boat in Venice came to our notice, and almost every one under our direct control. There must have been simply hundreds of them at our moorings, from enormous luxury launches with cabins like drawing-rooms and ivory fittings to blatant speed-boats and modest motor-dinghies.
There was a boat reputed to belong to the Duke of Windsor and another said to be the property of Miss Barbara Hutton ; there were boats that had belonged to eminent Fascists and boats that had conveyed German commanders ; there were boats of old English families, embellished with miniature cre-13, like the doors of Rolls-Roycei; there was a boat believed to have come from the Italian liner ' Rex,' lying upside-down off Capodistria ; and there was a boat whose driver claimed for it, in his misty English and overpowering Italian, some vague affinity, I am not quite sure what, with Lord Byron. There was an old steamer like the vaporetti that are Venice's buses, which was used to provide a private service for the Allied forces, And which ran to a complicated time-table up and down, up and down, the Grand Canal, besieged at every stopping-place by Venetian citizens who thought it was coming for them. There were grand, flag-frying boats to meet visiting generals and take them to the Danieli Hotel ; there were discreet, swift, soft-running boats for my superior officers ; and there was a small, shabby, noisy old boat which could, if it was not required else- where, occasionally be used by me.
The veil of time has hidden from me details of the system under which wt: operated-these craft ; but I remember well that it was quite the most difficult thing I have ever had to master. There
were multitudinous tasks to be done before a single boat of our great fleet could leave the landing-stage. Tickets an, forms had to be exchanged, signed, filed, duplicated and cancelled. Small circular objects had to be handed over counters. Drivers had to sign declarations. Petrol-vouchers had to be checked. Boat- numbers had to be verified. Logs had to be filled up. And at all times the office where these strange formalities were completed was filled with the clamour of a dozen or so suitors, most of them boat- owners clamorously beseeching us to give them back their boats.
Of course, we never did. Indeed, we were constantly on the search for boats hidden away in concealed boat-yards or in the hulls of laid-up fishing-vessels. One man was so anxious to Veep his launch that he took it to the mainland, put it on a lorry and drove it to Lake Como ; but it was not long before he had to put it on another lorry and bring it back to us.
You may suppose that, as all these boats were at the disposal of the British, it would be easy enough for a British officer to use one. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our whole organisation was designed to ensure that the boats were used as little as they possibly could be, and the longer a craft was left idling at the landing-stage, the more officers there were wanting to use it, the louder they chafed and swore and pleaded and argued, the more urgent their appointments in the centre of the city and the longer there was before the next steamer, the better satisfied we were. Nothing would induce us to help a fellow- officer out of a difficulty by lending him one of the score or so boats that were always at our headquarters ; and even if, by some miracle, he had obtained authority to use one from one higher in the military hierarchy, even then he had to spend hours on the draughty wharf while the necessary formalities were _concluded. Nothing could speed up the process, not even if there were fifty idle boats and fifty idle drivers and only one applicant for a voyage. Because of this most of our boats were generally immobile, and some of them, I suspect, never put out at all.
But this was the system ; and, as a result of our curious abstinence in the use of the craft we went to such pains to procure, they were kept in quite astonishingly good condition for their real owners. Indeed, most of our time was spent not in causing them to move about the canals, but in ensuring that they would move about if ever such an exigency arose. We had two boat-yards of our own; one of them in the shadow of San Giovanni, on an island which was the old arsenal of the Venetian Republic. In addition we took our boats for incessant repairs, overhauls, cleanings and inspections to scores of little boat-yards tucked away in the back canals of the city, guarded by great, cracked wooden doors which hid from the outside world all signs of the activity within. Often they were the ground floors of down-at-heel palaces—for such is the all-pervading damp of Venice that social life begins on the first floor up. Some- times they were in such close, almost sacrilegious, proximity to churches that I always had the impression that we were working in a vestry, and that somewhere or other around the boat-yard there ought to be a row of cassock-hooks, surmounted by pieces of sticky paper bearing the names of choir-boys.
Such is the fascination of Venice—the extraordinary way in which against all odds the old overcomes the new, and amid the motor-boats and the radios and the dance bands the old palace doors still creak and the lanterns swing in the shadows.
" Welcome home," my colonel said when I went back to my regiment. " You've done a difficult job well. It was a job that needed patience and tact, that required skill as well as discipline, a job that called for special qualities of body and brain. Well done! " And as he dismissed me I couldn't help wondering what would have happened if he had come to me a week before and asked for a motor-boat.
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