Plot reminder: In order to gain a bursary for Cambridge University, Hilda has suggested to Vincenzo (Ettore) that they get married.

~~~~~

I married Hilda Frecklington on Saturday 16th of July, 1949, and thereby committed the crime of bigamy.

It was the simplest of civil ceremonies, the whole occasion even more muted and austere than my first wedding. Hilda wore a lilac dress she'd found in a sale somewhere for twelve shillings; I, a suit I'd borrowed from Mr Habergham's brother-in-law and which hung off me as unflatteringly as the items I'd slipped from that back garden clothes line in September '43. There were no flowers. No swirl of organ chords. Other than ourselves and the presiding public official, attendance was completed by the legal minimum of two witnesses: Mr Habergham and his good lady wife Iris. When the official asked if any of the assembled knew of any reason why Hilda and I should not be united in wedlock, the only sound was the deafening squeal of my own conscience.

Afterwards, I bought a round of drinks in a nearby pub. As was his wont, Mr Habergham then bought a second. And a third, along with a bag of pork scratchings.

After that, we all went home. There was the afternoon milking to attend to.

*

Though as Hilda's husband I would of course continue to live on the farm, my imminent undergraduate studies would necessitate my absence for large chunks of the daytime hours. At no little financial sacrifice, the decision was therefore made to take on a full-time hand.

His surname I can no longer recall; something long and unpronouncable and typically Polish. Jozef was his first name, this usually shortened to Joe. A nice chap, if a little serious in that way Slavic people often are; it took at least half at a bottle of vodka before you'd see him crack a smile. A former airman, he'd fled his Nazi-occupied homeland to pilot Spitfires in the Battle of Britain. With me he never spoke of his war experiences however, nor I of mine with him. This is something I've noted on various occasions throughout the decades, that none are more mute than two war veterans together. The heat of battles fought, the images and sensations therin, hang like a bees' nest between. Best not prodded or stirred.

Based at the nearby RAF Wittering throughout the war, he'd afterwards found work at a paper plant in Cambridge, this where he'd met his fiancee Rita. Having grown up on a grain farm in the wide Polish plains south of Gdansk, he'd found it difficult to adapt to the more claustrophobic environment of the factory and had been eager to return to the land. Passing through the village one day he'd made enquiries at The White Horse, the locals pointing him in the direction of Woodside Dairy.

We paid him forty shillings a week and granted him Sundays off to visit Rita. The rest of the week he was accommodated in the pantry which we'd purposely gutted out and which had been just big enough to fit a bunk, bedside cabinet and small chest of drawers. Though a stoical and uncomplaining type, the makeshift nature of his lodgings in a two-bedroomed farmhouse had at first confused him.

"If you and Hilda are married," he asked me as we scrubbed out the stalls one afternoon soon after his arrival, "why don't you sleep together as God intends a man and his wife?"

To Hilda and I, the situation was so ridiculously simple, so perfectly natural, it mystified us that hardly anyone other than ourselves seemed to understand. To say ours was a union of irresistible passion would be wrong, yes, but neither was it some cold, soulless marriage of convenience. Despite the twenty-two years between us there had always been a certain level of physical attraction, right from the very first day. That we had never acted on it was to not put at risk the more overridng facet of our bond - that of our friendship, our mutual respect and affection. Rather than tear apart this unspoken contract, our marriage served to strengthen it.

I would share Hilda's bed just once, on the night of our marriage. As my knee-bent proposal that golden June evening had acted out the theatrics of tradition, so too we played our expected roles on our wedding night.

I remember in the breathless aftermath of our consummation the way her eyes had fixed mine, seemed to peer inside my very soul, try to ascertain its colour and shape and texture.

"Who are you Ettore Lo Bianco?" she'd whispered. "Who are you really?"

*

It was a bright Tuesday morning the following October that I began my undergraduate studies. To mark the occasion, Hilda and Joe both pedalled down to the village railway station with me as if in honourary escort. As a churning white billow of steam further down the track heralded the approach of the Cambridge-bound train, Hilda had handed me a small parcel tied with a bow. A stainless steel fountain pen, I would discover as the train pulled away a few moments later - an object of great beauty and, I can only imagine, of no little cost. One I've carried with me throughout the decades, and which glints its nostalgic wink at me every time I open the stationary drawer of my bureau.

"Stay with us," Hilda had whispered as she'd pressed the gift into my hands. "Among us normal folk, with your feet on the ground."

I gave her my oath, and even amidst the exalted company with which I would mix, the intellectual cream of Britain and its Commonwealth, it was one I like to think I kept.

That I was different to the vast majority of my fellow students was an unavoidable and self evident fact. Different not just because of my nationality or age or even economic background, but because of that much more unbreachable barrier of life experience. They the sons and daughters of physicians, lawyers, captains of industry. Fresh-faced kids for the first time set free from the cloistered micro-realms of their public or grammar schools, eager to learn about life just as much as they were the history of art. And then on the other side me, a former soldier, prisoner of war and still a part-time dairy farmer. So no, although I was open and friendly, and would often accept invitations of a quick post-lecture pint, it was difficult to forge a profound or lasting bond with anyone. Whilst they I could only imagine spent many of their evenings in the pursuit of inebriation and flirtation and general all-round hedonism, I would be back at the farm helping Hilda and Joe with whatever needed doing, then after that I'd hit the books at the same wobbly-legged bedroom desk where a decade or more earlier Ronnie Frecklington had occupied himself with his school homework. My marks were as good as anyone's, my awe just as profound at the development of human artistic endeavour from cave paintings through to the intricate creations of the ancient world and on then to the aesthetic explosion of the rennaissance and beyond.

Though by this time a master in the art, I hadn't decided to study at Cambridge University to feign at being someone I wasn't. I was there to learn and to know and to strive. To feel my soul animated in wonder.

*

New Year's Eve 1949 in The White Horse was a raucous, beer-swilling affair. What was arguably the darkest decade in human history was finally drawing to a close, and the sense of relief was almost tangible. So too the general air of optimism about what the following years might bring. An end to rationing. The rubble of war finally cleared, the wounds beginning to heal. As a landmark, it was an evening which was in many ways even more significant than V.E Day.

On a personal level it seemed clear even at the time that the 40s would forever remain the defining decade of my life. In 1940 my name had been Vincenzo D'Ambra and I was unsure of who I was. As the drunken refrains of Auld Lang Syne heralded the arrival of 1950, my identity had never been more certain.

The celebratory mood, I'd noticed, wasn't one which Hilda had wholeheartedly entered into. She seemed distant that night somehow. Troubled.

I'd put it down to the stares of some of the locals - one or two of the women, particularly. Flicked glares as sharp as barbs communicating their small-minded disapproval of her marriage to a man the same age as her son would have been. To boot, a sly wop who'd fought alongside the Nazis.

And yes, I'm sure she had registered these stares. But as I would find out over New Year's Day lunch, this hadn't been the reason for her distraction.

"Hector, I've got something to tell you," she began as I scraped the final spoonful of rice pudding and jam from dessert bowl. Her tone solemn, ominously so, my spoon paused midway in its journey to my mouth. "Something I've been wanting to tell you for months," she continued. Her eyes seemed unable to meet mine, flitted down to lace tablecloth. "There was your admission test and I didn't want to distract you. Then I didn't tell you before we wed because I didn't want you to marry me out of pity. Then you started your studies and I again didn't want to distract you. Then it was Christmas and I didn't want to ruin-"

"Whatever it is Hilda," I interrupted, "please just tell me." My spoon had clanked back into bowl, my hand now reaching across the table for hers.

She finally looked up at me, eyes welled with tears. "I've got a..." There was a deep intake of breath, the remainder of the sentence riding the sad, stuttering exhale. "A brain tumour."

I remember slumping back in my chair, eyes angled at the ceiling, the hairline crack which ran across its width. Half listening to the bleak details of it all - her covert visits to Addenbrooke's hospital as I was about my studies, the two different x-rays which had been taken. Half reflecting on how I should have read the signs - her general drowsiness and lack of energy; the more or less constant winces as if suffering from the most terrible of headaches; the two or three occasions I'd heard her vomiting in the bathroom and which she'd told me was just some stomach thing. Just something she'd eaten. Cursing myself for my own self obsession, the way I'd been so wrapped up in my own problems to consider that my wife, my best friend, might have her own much, much graver battles to fight.

"They say it's as big as the stone of plum," she continued. "Say I'm probably not going to make it to next Christmas."

In my status as war survivor and now Cambridge undergraduate I'd fooled myself into believing I understood something of the world. On that black New Year's Day of 1950, however, I realised I understood nothing at all.