'Memoirs and Recollections of An Officer of the Indian Political Service' [‎32r] (63/156)

- 32 -
the channel ^>orts. We chose the southern route through Greece, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia
to Venice. There we left the Orient Express, and went south to Rome and Naples to
meet some of my Italian relations (I had forgotten to mention that my mother was
/
Italian - nee Sofia Raffaela Ricciardi-Arlotta, and that her five children, myself
included, but not my younger brother Peter, were all born in Naples to which my
mother regularly returned from India whenever a birth was imminent).
We spent Easter Monday in Rome joining a crowd outside St. Peter's for the Blessing
by the Pope. From Naples we visited Capri and Pompei. Although, by now, it was the
end of April there was still snow on the summit of Vesuvius. Our stay preceded by only
a few days the official visit to the city by Hitler, accompanied by Mussolini. The
Fascisti in their Black Shirts were everywhere, and in the port Black Shirt Militia
were boarding the transports to take them to Spain to fight for Franco in the Civil War.
From the date we left Bahrain until we returned to India in February 1938, I was on
leave in the United Kingdom of one sort or another. We visited Ireland on several
occasions, where I met my wife's parents and her eight brothers and sisters for the
first time. Their home was at Stradbally in County Waterford, close to the sea.
During one of these visits (in September, I think) we were in Killarney for the Races
at a time when tension was running high in Europe. Chamberlain and the French Prime
Minister were in Berchtesgarden struggling to negotiate with Hitler and Mussolini
to avert war in Europe, which was threatened by the imminent Nazi invasion of the
Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. It was in a pub in Killarney that we heard the news
that Neville Chamberlain had returned from Berchtesgarden flourishing a piece of paper
which he described as 'peace with honour'. I must confess that, though later Chamberlain's
agreement came to be condemned as a gross betrayal of Czechoslovakia by the British, most
people at the time welcomed the agreement, only too relieved that the possibility that
Great Britain would be involved in war with Germany on behalf of Czechoslovakia had been
averted. We packed a great deal of travelling into my eight months leave. Motoring
in the British Isles on those days was not the purgatory it has since become. The
cost of living was low and stable, and although my salary was hardly munificent, it was
sufficient to allow us to have a really good time.