The Painted Altar

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Thus it was as dusk fell I reset my bearings, kept the north star now behind my left shoulder. Found myself heading south-west, towards Cambridge. In doing so, even on some subconscious level, I took my first uncertain steps towards the world of culture and learning. Towards that lofty, longed-for realm of fine art.

*

The next day I found slumber amongst the soft bed of woodland ferns. It was late afternoon that I was brusquely awoken by the inquistive, sniff-quivering snout of a dog.

"Winston!" called a boy's voice from the path.

"Vai," I urged the dog, pushing its snout away. Go. But it kept sniffing - exuberant, frisky, obviously still young.

"Winston! Here boy!"

The voice was closer now, the child trapsing through the ferns in search. Raising my eyes as high as I dared, I glimpsed a scruffy, grubby-faced urchin of around ten years old. Spotting Winston's frantic tail above the ferns, his stride lengthened into an excited run.

"What have you found boy? A badger? A stoat?"

I considered for a moment breaking into a run - armistice or no armistice, the fact remained that I was an escapee from a British prisoner of war camp.  But no, I thought. For one thing, Winston would prove difficult to outpace. Much more importantly, I would only render myself more sinister, increase the likelihood of the boy sprinting straight home, his parents calling out for the local police from one of those strange blue boxes which at the time littered the English countryside.

Instead, I rose slowly to my feet, wrestled playfully with the dog as it lunged at me on its hind legs. "Good boy Winston. Good dog."

The boy stopped dead in his tracks. Tentative, unsure of what to make of my sudden appearance. Unshaven, uncombed, my by-now-filthy clothes hanging off me like a breeze-swirled flag around a pole - I must have made for quite a sight.

"One of my uncles had a dog when I was your age," I told him.  "White and black, like Winston." I smiled in reminiscence. "Vito was his name."

A frown furrowed the boy's brow. "Foreign, int ya?"

I raised my hands, pleading my guilt. "I'm Italian," I admitted.

The frown lingered, as if trying to recall the significance of this. The shifting ebb and flow of the war -  the battles won and lost, the changing allegiances - was difficult enough for an adult to keep pace with, let alone a ten-year-old. The boy was clearly bright though, well-informed.

"Changed sides now, ant ya?"

I gave a solemn nod. "Yes, we're on the right side now," I assured. "On the side of good."

He half-squinted his eyes at me for several moments, as if making his mind up about something. Winston had by this point made his way back to him, was sitting at his side, canine gaze similarly directed at me. Weighing things up, reflecting.

"Don't worry mister," the boy announced finally. "I won't tell nobody you was here."

There was a twitch of a smile, then gone, Winston charging off ahead in search of the source of some other irresistable smell.

The episode served as a first-hand confirmation that the tide of public opinion had now shifted in regards to we Italians. Had I been German the boy would not have been nearly so gregarious. In all likelihood, I'd have been rounded up by dusk.

Though the armistice was certainly a positive development in my own personal story - and in those of all other Italians in allied hands - there was however a much bleaker side to the new political situation. That night as the previous and for all future nights until the fall of Berlin, I found my thoughts turning inexorably to home. What manner of pitiless teutonic vengeance was being rained down on my motherland, I wondered? I imagined right at that very moment a fleet of German bombers strafing the Adriatic coast of Puglia - Bari, Brindisi, Otranto, the smaller ports and fishing towns in between. Punto San Giacomo. Yes, even that tiniest and most insignificant dot on the map which was my hometown.

I thought of my father out at sea, eyes turned landwards, the periodic white flashing booms illuminating the coast. Thought of my mother and brother and three sisters at home in the faint glow of candlelight. Thought of Ada - dear, sweet Ada - lost in the darkness of our marital home. Of Carmela Russo. Of the boys I'd gone to school with, scuffed empty tins around in the dirt with, wrestled with, swapped jibes with, watched the pretty girls walk by with. Of those countless familiar faces which had populated my childhood and adolesence. Told me off for running too fast or shouting too loud, the whole community tasked with the role of parenting, of keeping an eye out, of forcefully indicating what was wrong and what was right.

I could only raise my gaze to the stars and pray to whichever celestial ear may have been listening that all of them, every last one, would see the light of dawn.

My fears were indeed well-founded. In one of the single bloodiest wartime tragedies to afflict the Italian mainland, the port of Bari would less than three months later be subject to an intense and sustained aerial attack with the resulting loss of 2000 lives.

All of a sudden, that faint, distant drone of the Luftwaffe I could hear in the skies overhead each night had become ever more sinister.

~~~~~