CHAPTER 16

 

 

#85: AL MARTINO

"Here In My Heart"

from the 78 rpm disc "Here In My Heart"

Released: April 1952

 

 

My mother spent most of the Second World War being held prisoner, along with most of her family, by the Germans in their own home in Filigano, Italy, just over the hill from Monte Cassino. Specifically, they were kept in one room of their own home by the German army. Her family farmed, and their crops were burned and their cattle slaughtered. For fully four years, from 1941-45, they were more or less kept at gunpoint. That was my mother's youth. She saw far, far worse things than you or I are ever likely to see. Her family were finally liberated by, firstly, the Canadian army, then the U.S. Army. The soldiers in the frontline were largely Black, and were the kindest to my mother's family. Then came the British army. Still regarded as the enemy, the English were on the point of executing the entire family, but then the Scottish soldiers came through and prevailed; they offered the family food, drink and clothing, among other things.

 

This would in itself explain why, in the ruined post-war Italy, so many of its citizens would flee the counrry for Scotland, and to a lesser extent Wales, rather than England; the Scots were nicer to them, treated them as equals.

 

My mother came to Britain in February 1953, two months past her twentieth birthday. One of her uncles had gone ahead of her to Glasgow and sent for her. He gave her a job as an assistant in an Italian café situated near the Botanic Gardens, and therefore close to Glasgow University. In 1956 my father would walk into that café and start talking with her about things Italian.

 

Despite arriving in this country without knowing a word of English, my mother was very quick to pick up the language, albeit filtered via the Glaswegian dialect, and soon felt at home in a city which to a great extent was a Little Italy in itself. The decade she found fun and lively.

 

She loved cinema and especially music. She had brought over with her a few ten-inch Italian 78s of popular ballads, her favourite being Luciano Tajoli’s 1941 reading of “Mamma Son Tanto Felice" (the song would subsequently be anglicised to "Mama" and prove a huge hit for Connie Francis). There was little, really, in Glasgow other than a wind-up gramophone but that, at the time, was enough for my mother, and the first record she purchased in this country, once she had saved up some of her wages, was the 78 of "Here In My Heart" by Al Martino.

 

"Here In My Heart" was also number one in the first nine British singles charts, which the NME's Percy Dickins had initiated in the week ending 14 November 1952. In those early days the chart was compiled from a relatively limited number of retailers, perhaps fifty in total, mainly in London and the South of England with a few northerly outliers. The record was far bigger here than in the U.S.A., largely because in Britain it was issued on Capitol, as opposed to the small Philadelphia independent label BBS. Martino had recorded it after his fellow Philadelphian Mario Lanza had passed on it, or passed it onto Martino at the latter's pleading request, depending upon which account you read.

 

Had our charts begun earlier, there is little doubt that "Here In My Heart"'s run at the top would have gone into double figures. As it is, the record certainly sounds, from Monty Kelly's arrangement on downwards, as though it wanted something big to happen, and as an introductory fanfare it did its job with pointed efficacy. Martino sings as though for his life, boisterous and soft in all the right places, offering his self, not merely his love or his heart but his very essence, to the person he loves. Trust in me, he seems to say, and I will promise you the greatest and most wonderful of adventures. Such a welcoming building block. Moreover, he bends away from the unreachable (even by Lanza, who also had a familial connection with Filignano and visited the village on at least one occasion during the fifties) final high note simply to prove that he is human like the rest of us, willing to settle for the nearest thing to perfection rather than perfection itself. In that way "Here In My Heart" is comparable to the opening and final chords of Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.

 

As far as my mother was concerned, the song also served as a gate of welcome to a new world and a new life. Perhaps it explains my own primitive attachment to the pop charts, which were likewise brightly awaiting me in my extreme infancy. This is where so many stories started. Now I simply have to find a way to finish it.