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.
Poor Hilda, yes. In many ways those years were more a sacrifice on her part than mine. So distracted was I that I must have seemed like a child lost in some imaginary world. She would often awake to find me asleep at the kitchen table, books spread out before me, Sammy asleep in my lap having seized the opportunity of a warmer, softer bed than the floor tiles. Once, she even found me with pencil still clenched in hand; whilst taking notes on the English Civil War from a library book on British hisory, tiredness appeared to have landed its knockout punch mid-sentence.
Strangely, the only respite from the endless physical and mental drudgery were my twice-weekly sessions with Mr Habergham. This was due partly to the fact our lessons took place at a quiet corner table of The White Horse, with refreshments both alcoholic and copious of nature. More than this though, the man was the finest teacher I would ever have the fortune to learn under, able as he was to lucidly summarise the most complex of concepts, wring humour from the driest of topics. Whilst his initial charge had been five shillings and two pints of milk per week, after I successfully passed the Higher School Certicate exam in July 1948, this became two pints of milk only. In effect, his tutoring for the Cambridge admission test became an act of charity.
I think by this stage even he was starting to believe that I might actually pull the damn thing off. Make that leap from prisoner of war with conversational level of English only and an equally limited academic background all the way to Cambridge undergraduate. Hurl myself by brute force over that gaping cultural and educational chasm. As such, maybe he had felt guilty about siphoning those five weekly shillings from my meagre income. If I passed the exam, was ushered through the gilt-sparkled portals of Cambridge, I would be needing every penny I could lay my hands on.
Whilst I had never imagined tuition fees would be cheap, it came as a nasty shock in the months leading up to the exam to discover exactly how expensive. More than I earnt, in short. More than Hilda could possibly ever hope to pay me.
The funding of my academic ambitions had always been a bridge I intended to cross if and when I came to it. In May 1949, after the jubilation of my admission test success subsided, it was span I was now finally forced to confront. A rickety, teetering one, as long as the Straight of Messina.
*
As I said before, postwar Britain was a realm of contradiction. Of unexpected developments. The reversal of the old order.
Other than the ever more parsimonious nature of food rationing, there was also Britain's reduced status in the world. Rather than cement its role of imperial superpower, the country's heroic wartime contribution had come at a huge economic and political cost. Cajoled by a rebellious Canada, the Commonwealth nations began to seek ever greater levels of autonomy. Then in 1947, of course, Mahatma Gandhi led India to full independence. Even after all these decades, the almost complete dissolution of its empire was a development which Britain, particularly in the sense of its perception of itself, has never quite fully digested.
Perhaps the biggest shock of all during that immediate postwar period, however, had arrived within two months of V.E Day. Winston Churchill, who over the previous five years had achieved demi-god status in the eyes of the British public, and whose forthrightly delivered radio speeches had inspired even I, an Italian, was ruthlessly ousted to make way for the Labour government of Clement Atlee. It is a fact which speaks volumes both of the sound level-headedness of the British public and of the healthy pass-the-baton nature of its political system. For most Italians, I suspect, it is difficult to imagine government as anything other than a ferocious idealogical tug-of-war, the country dragged first to one extreme then a matter of months later to the other. It is no coincidence that Britain is one of the few European countries to have never suffered widescale political extremism, neither fascism nor communism. Its people, quite simply, would never have allowed it.
Just as Churchill's steely defiance was exactly what the nation needed during those dark years of war, so an ambitious socialist agenda was exactly what it required in the immediate aftermath. Reconstruction, job creation, expanded educational provision and, of course, the Atlee government's greatest and most-defining achievement: the creation of the National Health Service.
It was in this optimistic postwar climate of renewal and social egalitarianism that Cambridge University introduced bursaries for students of disadvantaged economic backgrounds.
There was a catch however, and for my own personal situation a not indifferent one: in order to be considered for a bursary, applicants had to be British or Commonwealth citizens.
My choices were thus the following. Either I began my undergraduate studies right then in the autumn of '49 and racked up an unimaginable mountain of debt. Or alternatively I waited a further two years for my due period of citizenship naturalisation to finish.
This latter option represented more of a sacrifice than might be imagined. For one thing, I would have to sit the admission exam again with absolutely no guarantee of a second success. Even more importantly, if I waited until the autumn of '51 I would by the end of my second undergraduate year have already turned thirty. As forty, fifty and sixty, such landmarks seem more ominous, potentially more life-changing, as they approach on the horizon than after they've been and gone. At the time, I was worried that by waiting those two extra years my enthusiasm might wane. My academic momentum decelerate. That somehow my chance of achieving something great with my life, my borrowed identity, would have slipped into the ether.
After all the effort and sacrifice, all those long hours of study, my impatience and frustration were difficult to mask. For a period, I suppose you might say I just wasn't quite myself.
It was a golden evening in early-June that Hilda invited me to take a stroll with her after milking. I think even as we stepped out of the gate with the two dogs cavorting at our heels I could sense there was something in the air. Something reckless. Something inspired.
"While I was up in the village this morning," Hilda began, the soles of our shoes stroking the overgrown grass of a neighbouring paddock, "made a few calls. Government offices mainly, asking information. Upshot is, I found out that if you were to get married they'd have to take two years off your naturalisation period. You'd get your bursary, be able to start your studies this autumn."
She paused her step, twisted to face me. There was something in her expression I'd never glimpsed before - a sense of mischief, of devil-may-care. Her face illuminated by the low burnished sunlight, she'd never before looked quite so beautiful. Quite so stripped of all those other defining labels: war widow, bereaved mother, dairy farmer. For those few brief moments she became a woman, pure and simple. Nothing more.
"I'm just a country girl at heart," she smirked. "Still old-fashioned in so many ways. I'm not the one who's going to be getting down on one knee. That's your job Hector."