Please do e-mail again if we can help further. Our website contains further information about the thriving Italian communities in the UK.
Yours sincerely,
G. P. Ronchetti
Vice President
National Association of Italian Ex-Servicemen
Dryden dipped back into the inbox for the second reply from the MoD.
Dear Ms Dryden,
I am glad the National Association was helpful. We have traced our records of Serafino Amatista and he is recorded as being captured in September 1942 by a British Army patrol which broke up a food riot in the outskirts of occupied Bari, southern Italy. He was one of a group of about 200 Italian servicemen who had sailed home from Parga, western Greece, shortly before the port fell to the Allies. A converted troop ship took all the prisoners to Southampton and Amatista arrived in Ely at the PoW camp in early October 1942.
I hope this helps.
Matthew Lumby
‘Right,’ said Dryden. ‘So Serafino Amatista escaped in 1944, but according to the official records he didn’t exist.’ Laura remained impassive, the COMPASS silent. Was the corpse in the tunnel Serafino Amatista? And why, if it was, had he tried to get back into the camp?
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ said Dryden, knowing he was being ungrateful for the work she’d done.
He poured more wine. ‘There’s something else. The stuff they found in the tunnel with the body looks like loot to me – pearls, and the candlestick. There was a robbery, and a murder, in ’44 at Osmington Hall – remember the place? We went there with Mum, years ago. It may have got into the papers at the time – although I doubt it. Some of the nationals may have it online, and there’s an archive in Cambridge of the local papers. If you e-mail this guy he’ll let you on.’
Dryden tapped a name on the end of document 15. The county archives were now stored in a fireproof facility at the central library following a blaze which had threatened to destroy two centuries’ worth of data. At the same time stored back-copies of newspapers were photographed and put online.
‘The Crow may have done something on it – and there may be some background. See what you can find.’
The COMPASS jumped into life: ‘I TRIED.’
‘Jesus,’ said Dryden, suddenly aware how ungrateful he had been. He tore off the tickertape paper and lay on the bed beside his wife, cradling her head against his chest. Turned away from the COMPASS she couldn’t talk, but he knew she enjoyed these enforced silences. He held her tight, and imagined that none of it had ever happened, not the crash, not the coma: life without the COMPASS.
When he finally got back to the cab Humph could tell by his eyes he’d been crying. He offered Dryden another bottle of single malt and fired the Capri into life.
‘Home?’ said Humph, regretting the word.
By the time they’d parked up at Barham’s Dock the boat, in battleship grey, was bathed in moonlight. Dryden listened as the Capri drove off towards the distant main road, its progress marked by the clatter of its loose exhaust. Then there was silence, pointed up by the trickling of the water along the river bank and the plash of the boat’s bilge pumps.
PK 129 was a former naval inshore patrol boat. Steel in construction, it had lumpy, industrial lines and the paraphernalia of a real working boat. Dryden had always despised the glossy white sleekness of the gin palaces which crowded the river in high summer. In the wheelhouse was a simple plaque which read ‘Dunkirk: 1940’, a romantic touch which had instantly sealed her purchase, financed by the sale of their London flat. He felt tethered here to reality, but with an avenue of escape always open along the river.
He opened up the cockpit tarpaulin and stepped in, pressing a button to fire the generator into life. The floodlight mounted on the deck blazed into the night, revealing 200 yards of riverside footpath. Dryden imagined the beam picking out the flailing arms of survivors in the water on that night in 1940 at Dunkirk, the sea calmed by the glistening oil spilt from the smoking wrecks of the rescue boats. Something caught his eye mid-river, but it was only a gliding black swan, its red beak catching the moonlight.
He fetched a glass, sloshed in an inch of Talisker and returned to the deck. Looking up at the moon he thought of its light falling through the green skylight onto the floor of the Italians’ makeshift theatre. In the shadows he placed Serafino Amatista, the face still unseen, the deserter’s eyes watching always, scared of discovery. Who had been his friends, and who his enemies? Who had lain in wait for him in the tunnel under the old camp? And what had made a coward of him in the summer heat of wartime Greece?
Even on the day of the reprisal Siegfried had never believed it would happen until he said the word itself. Then came the echo, amongst the cacophony of rifle shots, in the deep ravine beyond the village. He remembered so little of that day but so much of that moment: the pungent scent of the Greek oregano on his fingers, the tobacco on the breeze, and the shuffle of the firing squad’s boots in the silence.
There was only one image from before that moment, before the gunshots made the crows rise: the old man, his father’s age, being dragged from the house where they’d found the guns, and where the girl in the blue dress played on the step. The old man clutching a wooden puppet to his chest; taking it like a talisman to the site of the execution. Then, defiant, he’d smoked the cigarette Siegfried had given him.
In the end he’d shouted the order because he felt if he waited longer, allowed the minutes of the old man’s life to lengthen any further, he’d buckle and never finish the job. The man’s life was the length of a cigarette, smoked with a shaking hand.
He’d given him sixty seconds more, after the butt fell to the earth. The tension he knew was unbearable and unfair, but he’d promised, and he could see the old man’s lips moving in prayer, the puppet – a crudely made doll – still held. There was no rope, no post, no need. The old man stood.
With five seconds left he heard the running feet. If he stopped now he knew the man would live. And then what of Siegfried? How could he live with such shame? So he counted on, hearing the footsteps, and as he shouted ‘Fire!’ the flash of the blue dress fell into the old man’s arms. His men, petrified by killing, fired blindly.
The old man was no longer there, superseded by an image, like a clip of newsreeclass="underline" a bundle of obscenely flexible limbs, tumbling into the grave Siegfried’s men had already dug. But the girl lay in her dress, the blue swamped with red.
‘A single volley,’ he’d said, knowing the villagers would have heard. He scanned the rocks above, had he heard a stone fall? A goat, perhaps.
He had wished many times that it had not been him standing in that noonday sun, his shadow crowding in around his boots. He had killed often in that war, and while he pitied them all he remembered only the old man in the ravine with his puppet, and the girl who had run to him. They’d buried her later, on the high pass, and he’d marked the spot with a cairn, knowing he’d never return. After the war, he’d told his men, he’d lead the family to the grave. They’d marched on, never looking back.
He’d rehearsed then, as they crossed the snowline, the arguments he would use to salve his conscience: that they’d found the guns in the old man’s house; that they’d made him do it, the villagers of Agios Gallini, killing the guard he had selected for them from the occupying civilian authorities. Serafino, a gentle man, an Italian for God’s sake! But they’d killed Serafino, taken his body into the hills, leaving only his bloodied rifle. Siegfried had to respond, to impose the authority which it was his responsibility to hold. The young men had gone, into the mountains or the factories of the cities. Only the old man remained, with the women and the children. The old man with his puppet, and the guns hidden in the grain store. And then the running footsteps of the granddaughter, the accident which no one would believe.