The Last Pier (30 page)

IN THAT THEATRE
of war, with all the world’s stage in such chaos, the Lead Man played many parts and inevitably caused havoc.

‘The war made fools of everyone,’ Carlo told Cecily. ‘Everything frightened the adults, they suspected everyone.’

It was hardly surprising the children had picked up on this fear.

The Leading Man, drinking claret and smoking strong cigars, delivered rousing speeches. He commissioned a splendid set of posters that would live in the hearts of the British people forever.

It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t get everything entirely right. It wasn’t his fault if some people died unnecessarily. This was a war, dammit. People died in wars. Only the insane believed otherwise.

When the Leading Man said, ‘Collar the lot!’ he had meant it. In a manner of speaking.

The Stage Managers took their instructions from him and called for all hands on deck. The file (it was a new file that drew material from the old Black List files) had a new name. It was titled W.A.R. (Warning. Alien. Risk.)

A man was put in charge of Operation W.A.R. A man with several names.

Some called him Robert Wilson. Others Sweet William. Still others (now dead) had called him Captain Pinky.

He had an official code name, seldom heard until now: FINCH.

And a birth name that no one ever found out. Although afterwards he was called Dr Calvino, in memory of the work he had done to stamp out the fifth column, and in memory of a man who wrote Italian fairy tales.

It was considered an honour.

But during the conflict Finch had two important jobs. To find out about the fifth column and identify the man code-named ‘Wotan’. In order to do this he had gone to Suffolk where there were groups of Italians clustered together near the Hokey-Pokey Ice-Cream Parlour. It wasn’t Finch’s fault that he should fall in love with Wotan’s lovely daughter. That had not been part of any plan.

After the war Finch was ordered to leave the British Isles for a time. When he returned as ‘Dr Calvino’ he hunted out Agnes. Hunting was his speciality but he found, on this occasion, that in her presence all he had loved and lost came back to smite him. He reeled as from a physical blow, his face turning pale, his heart breaking all over again. He smiled a smile of infinite sadness.

‘I loved her, you know,’ he told Agnes, simply. ‘She had my love then, she has it still.’

Agnes had nothing to say. Objects danced through the doors of her mind. She saw shoelaces of liquorice and jelly babies beside copies of
Schoolgirl’s Own.
What did that mean? Dr Calvino let her ramble on. Better for the evening sun to fall full on her face as it sank for the last time. He understood how the rhythm of life for those who waited at home had been destroyed and he saw himself as a symbol of sorts. The cause of a million displaced people.

‘I did not know then, how in only a few hours, she would be dead,’ he told Agnes, following his own train of thought. ‘I just knew that her face and the scent of the tobacco flowers nearby brought out all my feelings for her, in that last dusk.’

Dr Calvino looked at Agnes for her reaction but there was none. He felt he was speaking to an empty room.

‘I shall never forget her,’ he said, very softly, a prisoner of remorse. ‘She is my life.’

And then he left.

Dr Calvino was put out to grass. Always after that, it was Rose’s face he saw in his dreams. It was her unresolved look, the light draining away like a tide, that haunted him so terribly. These fluctuations of emotion drove him mad.

Some things, it seemed, flourished in a time of war. In his diary he wrote,

You win some, you lose some.

He wasn’t an original man.

After the war, information, hard to come by during it, emerged from behind the bombed-out buildings. Like revellers after a drunken party, on unsteady feet, Information came sheepishly out of hiding. It was too late to change anything.

By now, the Molinello family, what was left of them, had flown to Italy. The story of Lucio and Mario, Giorgio and Luigi and Beppe and all the other prisoners travelled across the Atlantic Ocean on small rafts of rumour.

This was what Carlo found out.

The Molinello men had been taken to a camp.

Rumour suggested it was in Bury.

They were close enough to be visited, but Anna and Franca and Carlo hadn’t known this at the time.

In the camp, living like rats, they sent home letters.

It took two months for the first letter from Mario, destination censored, to arrive. Reading it, horror-struck, Anna and Franca packed a parcel and sent it to the PO Box address.

The next letter to arrive came a month later.

Despairingly they packed another parcel.

Christmas came and went.

No one remembered it afterwards.

For Anna and Franca and Carlo, grief was the club foot they dragged around wherever they went. They had no idea where their menfolk were.

Joe came home and quietly married Franca in Our Lady of The Rosary. A week later he was gone, and some time after they heard he was missing in action. Franca had no more letters from him after that. Agnes, of course, was incapable of passing on information but many years later Carlo heard that letters from the forces to any foreign nationals in Britain were destroyed. Enquiries came to nothing, all their loved ones had vanished in a bunch; flowers cut in their prime.

In the New Year a few Italian women began contacting each other from different parts of the country. Very soon Anna heard talk of Italian men being rounded up and sent to prisoner-of-war camps around Britain.

The ice-cream parlour closed its doors and in order to make a little money Anna took in sewing when she could. Overnight the town put up a barricade of hostility towards them. It was as if they had never lived in England for all these years. Then in the spring of 1942, Cook and Partridge came to visit. They asked if Carlo might help with the enormous amount of work to be done at Palmyra Farm before the harvest.

Anna hadn’t wanted him to go. Franca couldn’t bear the name of the place mentioned. Carlo hadn’t wanted to either but they needed the money and Partridge and Cook had a look of such sadness that he went.

They never spoke of what had happened. No one was mentioned but Cook made Carlo small sugarless apple turnovers to take home and Partridge gave him rabbit and vegetables whenever he could.

Once, just before the war ended, Cook kissed him and told him he was very brave. Just like Cecily. There had been tears in her eyes. Once too, Carlo saw Partridge mend the bicycle Cecily used to ride. He took it apart, oiled it and then he painted it a brilliant blue. Like the blue robin on the packet of starch Cook once used to wash the child’s clothes.

When the war had been over for three months the Molinellos finally heard the rest of the story. They had moved to the village of Grondola, in Tuscany. Further down the valley the little town of Pontremoli was almost unrecognisable. The Germans while in retreat had attempted to blow up all that was beautiful. A medieval church, a Romanesque building that had withstood centuries of earthquakes. Other towns had been flattened too, as had the harbour area of La Spezia.

Only the sea, indestructible and salt blue, remained.

‘You lived from one day to the next, Cecci,’ Carlo said.

Cecily knew.

Weeks passed, months; years. Suddenly, two years had passed. The war remained in the near distance but you were still in it. It was there, decaying in your head.

The rest of the story came via a stranger passing through Grondola. The man brought Anna a basket of bright yellow
zucchini
flowers, picked and ready for frying. He remembered the ice-cream parlour in Bly. It was he who confirmed they had been in the camp in Bury.

There had been barbed wire,

broken windows,

filth everywhere.

The internees slept on bare boards.

The lavatories were disgusting.

The only water they had came from eighteen cold water taps.

There were 500 men. Each with their own prison number.

‘Your husband Mario was there,’ the man said. ‘And your sons.’

And in amongst the medieval army of lice and dirt was Lucio. Almost unrecognisable.

‘I was shocked,’ the man said, speaking into an equally shocked silence. ‘What were we doing in a place like this? There were Germans there with us!’

This had confused them further.

‘What had we done except keep shops?’

The camp’s commanding officer finally told them the real reason behind what was happening.

‘You are a Fascist threat to the British people,’ he had said, waving aside all protest, trampling on their hopes as if they were ants. At that Lucio became incandescent with rage.

‘I told you all not to go near Mussolini’s social club,’ he’d screamed. ‘Did you listen? I told you the administration was toxic.’

Laughter had escaped from Lucio like poison gas.

‘I told you,’ he’d screamed again. ‘We are all on a black list of some sort.’

In the camp there was a Jewish refugee. He had been working for the BBC World Service but somehow he too had been rounded up.

Franca and Carlo had sat open-mouthed, holding their mother’s hands. None of the internees had heard from their families since the day they had been captured. They were crazy with worry.

‘Lucio talked about a woman all the time,’ the man told Anna. ‘He was crying a lot. And your husband… he was in a very bad way, too.’

And then, summer came at last. There were all kinds of rumours. At the end of June 1940 they were told they were going via Liverpool to the Isle of Man. The government wanted most of them deported in twenty-four hours.

From Liverpool this random harvest of men was taken to the city dock escorted by armed soldiers. All the Molinellos were in this first batch. Since they thought they were going to the Isle of Man by boat they had become more cheerful.

After three hours they were finally lined up and taken outside. But in front of them, instead of a little boat, was a 16,000-ton grey passenger liner called the
Arandora Star.
It was obvious to the prisoners they were being shipped somewhere far away.

Ahead of them and beyond the breakwater lay the sea, the mines, the U-boats, the torpedoes and the planes dropping bombs. The men were panicking badly. Who would tell their wives, their daughters, their sweethearts? When would they see them again?

Shortly before the internees boarded, barbed wire barricades were placed on the promenade deck and around all the exits. The Captain began complaining that evacuation in the event of an emergency would be difficult. But the wire remained.

Lucio was going crazy. He wanted to get a message to a woman called Agnes. He was making so much noise that towards midnight he was moved to another part of the ship.

Finally on July 1st 1940, the
Arandora Star
set sail from Liverpool. It was heading for St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada.

The day was calm, the sea grey and grim. Huge seagulls glided in the wind as they left, their hearts crying out.

Leaving, a word so like grieving to them.

On their left was the coast of Ireland. On the right was Scotland. Some of the lifeboats had holes in them and worst of all, what none of them had known, was that the ship had left Liverpool unescorted, with no Red Cross flag and with its antiaircraft guns visible from a distance. But all any of them could think of were their families left behind.

By now many of the men were crying uncontrollably as the ship zig-zagged its way across the water in an attempt to avoid enemy submarines. They did not know that the German officer who had sunk the
Royal Oak
in October was on his way back through these same waters to Germany. Or that his U-boat had one last torpedo left.

It was fired at 6.58 am and the ship was instantly plunged into darkness. Water poured into the gigantic hole in its side.

The ship was doomed, men were screaming and jumping overboard. The man recounting the story told the Molinellos that he saw Mario leap into the sea. He saw a large board being
thrown immediately after him from above. It hit Mario on the head. It was the last the man saw of any of them before he too jumped ship.

‘The sea was full of floating heads,’ he said.

All waves behave like monsters, when they are out of sight of land. Forty minutes later the
Arandora Star
sank beneath the waters, forever.

‘I will never forget how the sea looked immediately afterwards,’ the man said. ‘Deadly calm, silent; unreal.’

It was six hours before an RAF Sunderland flying boat picked up the SOS and rescued the few survivors.

In the silent room at Palmyra House so many decades later Carlo drained his tea.

‘My father, my uncle and my brothers, enemies of the British people? Fascists, us?’

Twenty-eight years had passed away without a burial.

‘Their bodies were never found,’ Carlo spoke so softly Cecily had to lean forward to hear him.

‘My sister had a dream one night,’ he said. ‘I remember waking up and my mother making us some warm milk.’

They had gone to their little shrine facing the sea and prayed until the dawn.

‘
Guarda
!
’ Anna had said. ‘Look, your father is in the sea. I feel it.’

Two days later a small notice appeared in
The Telegraph.

Arandora Star sunk by U-boat. 1,500 Italians and Nazi internees in panic.

After that Home was the name of a place where he had not been born, Carlo told Cecily. It became a place of mountain streams and filial love.

It was a language learnt in his mother’s arms.

A song sung in his father’s voice.

A place where he might feel closer to his uncle and his brothers.

His brothers and Rose were all mixed up in his mind. Franca had been too traumatised to cope. She stopped speaking. Both Italian and English. Only their mother carried on, teaching her daughter how to have the will to live.