The Painted Altar

Chapter Thirty-One

Plot reminder: Following the end of the war, Vincenzo (now Ettore) has decided to remain in Britain and has ambitions of studying at Cambridge University.

~~~~~

Those immediate post-war years were strange ones. A period of contradictions, of things working out the exact opposite to how you might have imagined.

Take rationing, for example. Rather than restrictions gradually lifting, they became ever more austere. First the permitted quantity of bacon and cooking fat was cut. Then even the staples of bread and potatoes took a hit. It got so bad that the farmer-to-farmer produce exchanges in which Hilda partook no longer sufficed. By the spring '46, my illecit status had become a problem. I needed to get myself legit. Needed to get myself a ration book.

The long postponed moment of offering myself to the grinding cogs of British bureaucracy had finally arrived, and I could only hope I wouldn't be ground into dust.  Hilda looked nervous as we took the train down to Cambridge together that grey April morning. Pensive, reflective. My own stomach was meanwhile tied into multiple reef knots. Things had the potential to go terribly, tragically wrong for both of us.

Questions - oh yes, there were questions. Awkward ones. Insidious ones. Where were my camp release papers? My billet papers? Beyond my military tags, did I have any official documentation at all?

I'd made the mistake of leaving my papers on the kitchen table one day, I told the succession of grey-faced civil servants towards whose desks I found myself ushered. Via a chair which hadn't been correctly pushed back under, Sammy the Yorkshire terrier had  managed to climb on up, gorge his little stomach. He wasn't the sort of dog to much worry about what he put in his mouth was actually edible or not.

Any foreigner forced to cover up a wrongdoing before British authorites is strongly encouraged to invent a similarly cute canine story. As long as some tongue-dangling, floppy-eared dog is involved in whatever excuse you make up, you're likely to get away it.

The British love of animals wasn't the only thing which worked to my advantage that day in Cambridge Town Hall however. So many of the population had been lost beneath the rubble of war - not just servicemen but civilians too - that the labour force was still critically low. It simply wasn't in the national interest to place excessive bureaucratic obstacles before those many thousands of former prisoners of war, both Italian and German, who wished to remain. Then there was the sheer weight of numbers, the huge quantity of documentation to process. Human history had never before known such levels of mass migration, not just Europe but the whole of the world a dizzying criss-cross of returning soldiers, repatriated prisoners, displaced persons in search of new starts. One Italian POW missing a few documents was hardly cause to put everything else on hold whilst the matter was thoroughly investigated.

And thus within a few days of our outing to Cambridge, Bob the postman arrived at the front gate with two government missives. The first was my Indefinite Leave to Remain certificate; the second, my very own ration book.

Seeing the name Ettore Lo Bianco starkly printed there in black and white seemed a confirmation. My new identity  had been validated. Rubber-stamped.

Vincenzo D'Ambra had become a phantom. A mere ghost who'd briefly shimmered across the Earth.

*

The period 1945 to 1949 was a blur. I shuffled through those years like a somnambulist treading across the landing floorboards. My mind and body became disjointed; like estranged spouses, took up residency in different hemispheres. Whilst I squeezed cattle teats, the wars of the ancient world raged through my head, each neatly labelled with respective dates, the names of victorious emperors, pharoahs, generals. As I mixed feed in the store, a faint internal voice would recite Hamlet's soliloquies, Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn', the opening paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities. Over dinner, whatever questions or observations Hilda may have voiced were drowned by my much louder cerebral ruminations on Archimedes' Buoyancy Principle, on Kepler's Law, on Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.