Among the historical sources for The Wedding Officer is a wartime journal published under the title Naples ’44, by the novelist and travel writer Norman Lewis; a pre-war sex education treatise entitled Married Love by Dr Marie Stopes, and the memoirs of Sophia Loren.

Norman Lewis

Norman Lewis was born in 1908 to an eccentric family of Welsh spiritualists. In 1939 he raced a Bugatti at Brooklands racetrack, nearly killing himself in the process.

His first wife, Ernestina, was the daughter of a Sicilian mafioso who had escaped from Italy in a coffin disguised as a corpse. Norman and his bride were both believers in the Free Love doctrines of Bertrand Russell, and decided to have a marriage “without sanctions or ties,” as he put it in his autobiography. By the time the Second World War broke out he already spoke four languages, including Arabic and Italian, and became a Sergeant in the Field Security Service. "I am ashamed to say it, but I enjoyed every minute of the war,” he said later. “It was endless variety and excitement."

In 1943 he was posted to Naples, then the headquarters of AMGOT, the Allied Military Government of the Occupied Territory. During the first part of the war Naples had been under the rule of Mussolini’s fascists. After the Italians changed sides it was occupied by the Germans, who transported all the young male Neapolitans off to the Russian front or to work in German factories. The city was bombed on a regular basis by British and American planes, and food was very scarce. When the Allies invaded Sicily the Germans themselves dynamited Naples as they retreated. It was then occupied by the Allies. The bombs now falling during the air raids were of German manufacture rather than British, but the effect was the same: more hardship for the Neapolitans. Lewis recorded in his journal that of the 100,000 women in Naples around half were supporting themselves through prostitution.

One of Lewis’s many duties was to interview Italian women who had become engaged to marry British soldiers. The purpose of this was to make it harder for such marriages to happen – they were considered bad for morale and unlikely to turn out successfully. However, Lewis found that his sympathies were increasingly with the Italians, and his natural inclination was to write favourable reports which allowed the weddings to go ahead. This was eventually stopped when a suspicious commanding officer ordered a second report from one of Lewis’s colleagues, which bore little resemblance to his, and Lewis was hastily sent away.

Lewis does not mention his own love life anywhere in the pages of his journal, but during his time in Naples he contracted malaria and met a nurse called Hester, who was later to become his second wife, Ernestina having spent the war in South America living with another man.

Lewis started writing fiction before the war, but it was as a travel writer that he made his name. It was not until 1978, over thirty years after the war, that he published his Naples journal.

On one level, Naples ’44 is a record of events. But the nature of those events - by turns comic and grotesque, mundane and momentous - and the author’s commentary on them, detached, ironic but always civilised, turn the book into a fascinating evocation of an extraordinary time and place.

Sophia Loren

Sophia Loren grew up in Pozzuoli, now part of Naples but in those days a separate town. She was seven when war broke out, a time she describes in her books Sophia Loren: Living and Loving and Sophia Loren's Recipes and Memories:

"Waves of fighter planes and bombers, and almost daily explosions and crashes, greeted us just a stone's throw from my grandmother Luisa's kitchen… I'd clutch Nonna Luisa's skirts while we made the sign of the cross and waited for the din to subside and leave us unharmed. It wasn't that I was particularly foolhardy or courageous, but even in the midst of bombings I would be anticipating, with all the strength my stomach could muster, the pleasure that eating would bring…. nothing in the world would have made me miss the delicacies that she cooked up. I say 'delicacies' as a manner of speaking, because what we had was meagre and humble. Our larder was impoverished, but with a few sprigs of fresh herbs Nonna Luisa could transform even our plain stale bread into an elegant dish.
When the war was over, flour from America began to flow into our kitchen…. But the war years had imprinted on my soul and on my sensibilities certain indelible flavours that are with me still."

From Recipes and Memories

Torta di Asparagi
Asparagus pie
For 8 antipasto or 4 lunch servings:

Tender tops from 2 pounds asparagus
8 (1/2 inch thick slices country-style or strurdy white bread
¾ pound cooked ham
Olive oil
¾ pound soft cheese, preferably Italian Fontina, diced

Preheat the oven to 375 F

Steam or boil the asparagus for 2 to 3 minutes, until just al dente (take care not to overcook them) and refresh them under cold water. Place the asparagus on towles to drain.

Toast the bread. Mince the cooked ham almost to a paste and spread it on the bread. Lightly oil a baking dish large enough to hold the bread slices in one layer; arrange the bread in the dish; then place the asparagus, one beside the other, over the ham. Top with the cheese and bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until the cheese is bubbly and lightly browned. Serve immediately.

Marie Stopes – Married Love

Marie Stopes was born in Edinburgh to an archaeologist father and suffragette mother. As a paleobotanist she became the first female member of the science faculty at the University of Manchester. Owing to sexual ignorance her first marriage was unconsummated and then annulled in 1916. She began to research female sexuality, and in 1918 – the same year that she remarried - she published a small book entitled Married Love, a guide to sexual pleasure. Nothing like this had ever been published before, and certainly no woman writer had ever broached the subject of female pleasure during sex. Amongst other topics, Marie Stopes described foreplay, the female orgasm, and the location and function of the clitoris. However, she discouraged the notion of sex outside marriage. Despite not being widely available, the book had sold over a million copies by 1945.

You can read Married Love online here.