SPOON FOR SALE
Pompeo Pico’s jeweller’s shop is a pleasant place to spend an idle hour, and comedy and tragedy can be seen enacted there. Knowing the family is useful. Not only is it pleasant to spend an evening with them, playing with six-year-old “Little Tito,” who will dance national Yugoslav dances for you and sing partisan battle songs, but being a friend of the family means that you are not allowed to buy unwisely in the shop. It should be explained that the family are Yugoslav refugees, in partnership with an Italian jeweller.
The stock is always changing and only good things are sold there. In the room at the back two serious-minded goldsmiths work at the little forge and tiny lathes. The shop itself has much to offer – old jewellery, cameos and coral necklaces and brooches, compacts and crucifixes, and jewels taken from their gold rings in the past when the Fascist Government called for the sacrifice of rings and jewellery by all loyal women, and to be disloyal was tactless.
Allied soldiers are the day-time customers, looking at this and that with the inevitable hunted look of the man shopping for his wife. Cameos are the most popular purchase, easy to send home and very Italian. Cameos must be in the mode at home, as they were when our grandmothers wore them on their bosoms.
The comedy at Pompeo Pico’s arises from the shopping soldier. He is charmingly obvious. He does not want to be done. He may have been told that his wife’s neighbour has a cameo or a coral necklace, and family pride is roused. Advice from someone else is gratefully accepted, and he is distrustful of his own taste. If the wives and sweethearts knew what honest sweat went to the purchase of their presents from Italy they would treasure them indeed. Sometimes it is something very rare. I remember a little silver box, two hundred years old and enchantingly lovely. It was oval and engraved with a miniature in enamel on the lid. A husky Commando lance corporal bought it for ten pounds, and he fingered it timidly and with awe.
The full significance of Pompeo’s shop is seen after hours, when those who know can go in through a little side door. I went to get a locket for a certain small lock of very young hair. Pompeo promised to house the somewhat sentimental symbol of a son yet to be met, and I stayed half an hour, ferreting in a tin box of odd jewels and stones.
Three people came in, through the side door, in that half-hour, and they provided a clear illustration of the cost of defeat in war. The first was an Italian soldier. He came to sell a silver cigarette case. He was wearing a British battle-dress dyed green and good quality socks. You could see his socks because he had not yet been issued with the new boots which he would get before he was re-equipped for this second phase of the war. His boots were all that remained of his own equipment; they were worn as sandals, and poor sandals they made. In the, strange contrast between his very efficient new battle-dress and the tramp-like boots you could read his story. The first, soldiering with Fascist slogans and pomp and poor-quality boots; the interval of defeat and disorganisation, the selling of his cigarette-case for money; and in the new battle-dress the new soldiering which was coming. He was not bombastic, indeed, he was very respectful.
The second came to buy a little camera, for which he paid a ridiculously high price. He was the type who makes a harvest from the chaos of defeat. A smartly dressed young civilian, unpleasantly ingratiating, pert of manner, and slick in bearing. He would sell the camera confidentially in some side street to a gullible soldier, at a heavy profit. He was the parasite of chaos.
The third visitor showed the real tragedy. She was a well-dressed widow with an orderly little boy. Her black clothes and her veil, her good hands and her shyness told her story. She turned her back to me and produced from her handbag one silver spoon. It was a beautiful spoon, heavy silver and engraved. Pompeo was very courteous and he weighed it carefully. He-was infected by his customer’s embarrassment. I did not see what he paid her for it, but the quality of the spoon itself, the dignity of the widow; and the bearing of her little boy all bespoke the tragedy of losing a war, that she should be pawning her silver, spoon by spoon, to buy food.
Doubtless there are sharper tragedies, when home and child and all are gone; yet sometimes the subtle sign tells more than the obvious. I wonder what was the story behind the silver box the Commando lance corporal bought. The transference of that little box to the dressing table of an English wife in a suburban house is a symbol of war, as are all the treasures that pass from Italians to Allied soldiers through Pompeo Pico’s shop.
DAVID SCOTT DANIELL
The Manchester Guardian; Dec 30 1944