Plot reminder: Assuming the identity of Ettore Lo Bianco, Vincenzo has been taken in by Hilda, the owner of a dairy farm near Cambridge.

~~~~~

And so I learnt about cows.

I learnt how to place my hands around their teats, the correct level of delicacy required in the squeezing and pulling. I learnt how to influence their movements with differing facial expressions, ensure an orderly procession through the sorting gate at milking time. I learnt that even these most docile of God's creatures were prone to a wide spectrum of emotions, and that the intensity of these emotions are as indiviual to each cow as they are to each of we human beings.

And in learning all this, I in turn learnt much about myself, whoever the hell I was. Ettore Lo Bianco, formerly Vincenzo D'Ambra. Some strange hybrid in between.

I was adaptable. Quick to understand new concepts, develop new skills. Life-hardened enough to know that nothing ever lasts forever, yet still enough of a dreamer to hope it anyway might. Above all else, I was a man who could sense an opportunity like a dog an approaching storm. Though I wasn't yet quite sure of what lay ahead, I knew it wouldn't be what I'd left behind. For now at least, this seemed enough.

And thus when Hilda casually enquired as to my background that second or third day at the farm as we worked teats side by side in the stalls, I told her I was from the inland town of Lecce deep in the Italian heel. That I was an only child, the son of a civil servant. That my birthday was the one stamped onto my ID tags, not the one stamped equally as indelibly onto the memory of friends and family. Not the 15th of May but the 23rd of April. I had suddenly become three weeks older.

The way I liken it is to the bronze statue of Juliet which has stood in the courtyard of the Capulet house in Verona since the 1970s. Tradition has it that by rubbing her right breast those visitors who are unlucky in love will magically become more fortunate. Needless to say, in that particular area of the girl's body the original bronze tan has worn away, a shinier brass tone been revealed beneath.

The details I shared with Hilda that morning were the same which would be repeated countless times to other people over the course of the following decades.

That's the thing about a lie. As Juliet's right breast, in time it begins to take on a different colour. A truth-like shine.

*

Due to its nature and location, the place was known somewhat unimaginatively as 'Woodside Dairy Farm'. Looking back now, it often occurs to me that the years I spent there were the happiest of my life.

It's a trick of the memory, I think, that we recall different chapters of our personal stories by way of snapshots rather than the jerky roll of moving film, and that the tone and angle and light quality of the snapshots reflect our emotional connection to those periods. Thus it is I picture my time at the farm in a series of low-angled stills on one of those endless English June evenings, the sun half sunk behind the woods or the chimney of the farmhouse. Shots brimful of long, dreamy shadows, the silhouetted forms of the cattle, a hundred dappled shades of green.

It's almost as if my mind has erased the short, dark days of winter. The cow-burying snowdrifts, the constant squelch of mud beneath my boots.

The toil though; no, I haven't forgotten those endless hours of toil. I can still feel them there in my very bones, a weary lingering ache. Hilda had me work harder than any camp commander could have done. Any senior officer, any general. I didn't mind though. For Hilda Frecklington I'd have moved mountains if I'd had to.

She was a widow, her husband John having been lost somewhere in the icy depths of the Norwegian fjords during the opening salvoes of the Allied war. At 40, he'd been a year too young to avoid the start of the current conflict just as at 18 he'd been a year too old to avoid the end of the last. His experiences in the Great War had taught him one thing: better anything than a foot soldier. Hence his ill-fated decision to reinvent himself as a naval man.

The various photographs scattered around walls and on top of mantelpiece showed a handsome, well-groomed man with the type of eyes which seemed out of sync with the rest of his facial expression, the sort which smiled even when lips were set straight.

It was a kindness of gaze shared by the couple's son, Ronnie. His 18th birthday and thus the arrival of his conscription papers had been less than a month after they'd received the tragic news of his father's death. 'I fear that at the vital moment he won't be lucid enough,' Hilda once confided in me. 'That he's treating it all as a sort of personal revenge.' The squeaking approach of Bob the postman's bicycle along the lane each morning was a moment of grave, unbearable tension. The fear seemed almost to paralyse her. Freeze her like a hooked lamb awaiting the slaughterman's knife. "Just another letter from Iranian front," she'd breathe, examining the handed over missive. And in her own deep exhale of relief I too would feel that some dark looming weight had once more been side-stepped.

It was in Ronnie's room that I slept, his childhood enshrined by the wooden sailing boat and tin racing car which sat atop a shelf, his adolescence by the magazine photographs of Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo pinned around the walls. It was, I recall, the most comfortable bed I had ever slept in, one I would collapse into gratefully, find the truce of slumber the exact same instant my head squashed into pillow.

If any caller or busybody in the nearby village asked, they were simply informed that I was an Italian POW who, post-armistice, had been billeted at Woodside Dairy until further notice. Nobody seemed to bat an eyelid, concured only that, yes, what with her husband's passing and son away at war, Hilda could use an extra pair of hands around the place. Within a couple of months I'd been accepted as part of the local community, my name anglicised as Hector.

In truth, dairy production wasn't a top priority for authorities when assigning labourforce billetings. Milk simply did not feature amongst frontline rations; given the distant equatorial nature of most of the British military engagements during the middle years of the war, even cheese was problematic. With milk thus considered a commodity of almost exclusively domestic use, it was unlikely that Hilda would ever be assigned officially sanctioned help, be it Land Girl or prisoner of war. The exact details of my provenance, therefore, was something Hilda was happy to overlook. Unauthorised, off-the-books: yes, it suited her just fine.

The only drawback to this arrangement was of course my lack of officially provided rations. Though the war effort was a concept held sacrosanct by the British, human nature is a blight to even the most noble of minds. Thus it was that not every last gallon of milk was loaded onto the government collection van each morning, and that some of that gallon was set aside for immediate personal use, another couple of pints would be pinched with salt and left to curdle into butter, and what was left might be swapped with a nearby farmer who likewise had kept aside a few extra cabbages or carrots or potatoes. Whilst our table was far from an abundant one, Hilda and I got by better than most.

After a childhood spent in the cramped environment of a fisherman's hovel struggling to hear my own thoughts above the exuberant din of four siblings, then an early adulthood in the even more cacophonous surroundings of military cofraternity - of the most devasting conflict in human history - the peace and quiet of Woodside Dairy was more than just refreshing but a bonafide revelation. For the first time in my life I could feel the soft contented breathing of my soul. Could hear the whir of cerebral cogs turning, ideas beginning to form.

*

It was during my seventh month there, April 1944, that I spied the figure trudging along the lane as I called the cattle through the gate for afternoon milking. Slender, uniformed, kitbag slung over shoulder. The side-parted hair was auburn like his mother's, bleached a shade lighter by the Iranian sun.

"Hilda!" I called.

But she'd spotted him too from where she stood scattering corn for the hens in the backyard. She froze as still as a statue for some moments, the feed bowl slipping from her grasp, cascading its contents across the dirt. A blur of motion then, running towards him, arms opened in waiting embrace. He in turn skipped dutifully into it, a smile dawning wide and bright across his face. Even the cows seemed to turn in their direction, tails swishing as if in some primitive communication of shared joy.

And thus it was for the next month I found myself relegated to the sofa in the living room. I didn't begrudge Ronnie of course; indeed, the two of us quickly forged a brotherly bond. We were the same age, after all, had fought for our countries in the desert heat. In addition, we both had the best interests of Hilda Frecklington at heart.

Those few short weeks he was home on leave, her step seemed lighter, her brow straighter, less crinkled by worry and doubts and whatever dark imaginings were playing through her mind. She became younger, in short, but not in that superficial way of a change of hairstyle or a new dress. It wasn't a simple matter of a few years being shaved off, more that she regressed back into adolescence, became a girl once more and everything that being a girl entailed. Lips pursed in whistle, a carefree sway to her hips, a head full of dreams.

The second or third Saturday night of his leave, Ronnie dragged me with him to the The White Horse over in the village and we got as drunk as Lords. Together with a few of the locals, he even taught me the words to 'Roll Out the Barrel'. I remember it was a little before this point in proceedings - the fourth or fifth pint perhaps - that he confided in me that his mother had often mentioned me in her letters. As I'd stepped out from the woods that day, she'd written, it had seemed that I was a gift from God. "I think it was all starting to get on top of her," he'd continued. "You know, the solitude. The hard toil." He'd clinked his beer mug into mine, fixed me with his smiling eyes. "Thanks for being here for her Hector."

He was to report for duty at a barracks somewhere in Sussex, he'd said. The south coast was inundated with servicemen, apparently. Lots of Americans and Canadians too. Rumour had it that the powers-that-be were planning something big. Something breathtaking. A rapid mass movement of men across the Channel to try and gain a foothold in France.

"Anything happens to me," he whispered into my ear as we said our goodbyes on the day of his departure. "Look after her will you?"

He had my solemn promise, I assured him.

Solemn, yes... This was the adjective which best described Hilda's demeanour in the days and weeks which followed. That girlish lightness had gone, the weight of the adult world once more pressing down on her. It was with an increased neck-bent intensity that she listened to the BBC news reports on the wireless each evening. Her silences were longer, her gaze more distant.

It was the 12th of June, six days after the Normandy landings, that the telltale squeak of his bicycle announced Bob the postman's approach down the lane. There was something more doleful to the noise that day however. Something somehow sinister. Ominous.

Scrubbing out the milking stall next to me, I think Hilda sensed it too, the glance she flicked across at me before rushing out to the lane one of pure, untrammeled terror.

By the time I caught up with her the missive had already been snatched from Bob's hands. Ripped open. Its contents tossed to the ground as if in vain refusal to register the words there written.

I somehow managed to guide her inside, collapse her down on the settee. After that, I just remember holding her. Holding her for hours. Holding her until the sobs finally subsided, until a profound and welcome sleep placed its veil over the blackness of her conscious world.

And as I held her, I thought about Irene Brennan, her binding roots similarly severed. About Ada and my mother and Ettore Lo Bianco's mother, nine whole months now without word. About all those countless other mothers and sisters and grandmothers and wives and sweethears the world over waiting so vainly, so uselessly, back at home.

Wars may be fought by men, but is our women who suffer them.