Image: an Italian soldier during World War Two

Plot reminder: Mary has traced her father, a man who has lived not under his real name of Vincenzo D'Ambra but that of his former best friend, Ettore Lo Bianco. He is now poised to recount to Mary and Lucio his story.

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Who was the prettiest girl in Punto San Giacomo?

It was a subject of no little debate amongst we boys of the village, at times even heated. Though other girls may occasionally have received a passing mention, a brief word of merit, the truth was that this was one of those sorts of races in which there were only ever two horses: Carmela Russo or Ada Pucci.

I was very much in the former camp. Whilst true that Ada Pucci was blessed by the more womanly physique, for the overall picture comprising grace, elegance and blessed alignment of facial contours, you would have been hard pushed to find a finer example of blossoming womanhood than Carmela Russo in the whole of the Province of Lecce, let alone Punto San Giacomo.

The spell cast by even the most ephemeral of glances in my direction was so powerful that I made and posted her a St Valentine's card. Though as tradition dictates the message was left unsigned, the fact that inside the card I had folded a lovingly crafted sketch of her own wondrous visage rather gave things away. I was the only boy in the village who drew.

By the time February had thawed into March, and without having received the merest hint of acknowledgement of my gesture, let alone a single word of gratitude for it, it was fair to say that for the first time in my life I had a deep and personal understanding of the concept of unrequited love.

It was a Sunday afternoon of the following April that my story truly begins. I was perched on the wall above the harbour, pencil seeking to capture the gentle bob of the trawlers there beneath, when Ada Pucci swayed suddenly across my line of vision. Would I care to do a sketch of her? The smile which accompanied the request was a strange and mischievous one, the sort which can provoke a disorientating fizz of fireworks inside both mind and stomach of a seventeen-year-old boy.

There was little I could do but oblige. And so there she sat,  face tilted towards the spring sunshine, the Adriatic a sparkling crystalline frame behind her. "Magnificent," was her verdict after I showed her the fruits of my labour. "You're such a talented young man you know Vincenzo D'Ambra." That smile again. Oh, by now there was no mistaking it: I was being flirted with. "You should go to one of those fancy art schools up there in Rome or Milan," she continued. This one of those idle references to some grand but unachievable ambition which people in Punto San Giacomo often came out with. For us,  the provincial capital of Lecce represented a vast and exotic metropolis. I'd never even been as far as the regional capital of Bari, and in truth had no great desire to, believing as I did that its sheer urban sprawl would be too dizzying, that I would only go and get myself lost, wind up in some dark alley of the kind it was advisable not to. As for Rome and Milan, these were cities of an entirely different planet. The idea of fisherman's son from Punto San Giacomo attending a fancy art school, meanwhile, belonged to some utopian parallel universe. My future was there right behind her shoulders - the languid swell of the Adriatic. On an afternoon such as that one, it seemed so benign, as harmless as an inland lake. At three a.m on a tempestuous November night, the darkness slapping  diagonal jets of rain at your face, each incoming wave as looming as an alpine mountain top, it wasn't nearly as inviting. I'd served as junior hand on my father's trawler since finishing middle school at the age of fourteen. The following year, 1941, would see my eighteenth birthday and thus the start of my requisite two years of military service. I planned to save as much of my stipend as I could, upon my return see about making a down payment on my own trawler. This was my plan, the only one available to me.

Ada had meanwhile carefully folded the sketch in half, slipped it into her handbag. "How can I thank you?" she asked, her body language that of someone open to all suggestions.

"Would you like to go to the cinema with me Saturday night?" I was surprised to hear myself enquiring.

And in such instants fates are decided, lifetimes shaped. In 1940, a teenage boy inviting a girl to go to the cinema with him was tantamount to a full-blown sexual advance. Neither party were interested in what film might be playing, whether it was Pilotto or Giachetti in the leading male role, Ninchi or Miranda as female star. In that pre-war age where only the rich and privileged owned motor vehicles, the cinema represented a magical opportunity for a teenage couple to enjoy dimmed lighting and comfortable seats. Strictly private it was of course not, but when everybody else in the back two or three rows were engaged in what might euphemistically be deemed 'heavy petting', it seemed somehow remiss not to do the same.

From there, things began to snowball. Given Carmela Russo's cold-shouldered indifference to my advances only a couple of months earlier, I greedily lapped Ada Pucci up, viewed as a more than accetable booby prize her sheer tantalising buxomness, the envious glances of those self same village boys who had always argued that it was she the more sparkling of Punto San Giacomo's twin female jewels.

Ada and I were lucky - or perhaps in hindsight desperately unlucky - to come together when we did. Summer was soon upon us, a seemingly endless succession of Saturday nights warm enough to deem the cost and pretence and sexual limitations of the village cinema unnecessary. The theatre of our weekly trysts now became the beach, this a kind of deluxe version of the cinema in that the lighting was similarly dimmed, the soft yield of the sand was not only velvety to sit upon but also to lay against, and rather than just centimetres away in neighbouring seats the nearest teenage couple engaged in similar ungodly acts were two, three, five hundred metres further along the shore. As my back shimmied deeper into the sand, the moonlight delineating the writhing womanliness above me, I may even have fooled myself into believing that I was in love.

It was mid-September, just days before Italy joined the war, that Ada tearfully informed me she'd missed not just one menstruation but now two. I would the next day duly escort her on a covert visit to Doctor Rinaldi. I still remember that regretful shake of the head he directed across the waiting room at me as he accompanied her back out of the surgery door. It seemed a confirmation not just of the biological fact of it all but also that my adolescence had now terminated. That in the blink of an eye I  found myself  crashlanded into the manure heap of adulthood.

Abortion was not an option. Perhaps for Ada at least - a much more devout Catholic than I ever was - it would have been in any case morally untenable. The bottom line however was that such a procedure was illegal, and in Italy would remain so for, remarkably, another 40 years. Both patient and facilitator of the operation could face up to five years imprisonment.

No, in 1940s Italy an unwanted teenage pregnancy could only lead to one thing: an unwanted teenage wedding. This happened one cold shivering morning a couple of weeks before Christmas, an understandably low key affair devoid of the usual exaggeration and sense of fairytale drama we southern Italians like to imbue such occasions with. Ada wore her mother's wedding dress, this after twenty years inevitably a little yellowed. Not being nearly so  well-endowed as her daughter, it was also a little stretched and ill-fitting. Not just around the chest area either; Ada was by this point five months into her pregnancy and was already beginning to show. That bump, it was a constant visual reminder that all this was real. A zepellin slowly filling with helium. Expanding, rising. Like the Hindenburg, set to explode.

With the limited financial help our respective families were able to offer, the best we could manage was a cold water affair in the harbourside. Twenty square metres, if that. Ada kept it tidy though, brightened it up a little with scattered bunches of wild flowers. While I was out at sea, she spent her time honing those skills requisite of a fisherman's wife: net repairs, mangle maintenance, maximising the nutritional value of whatever scraps were available in the bare cupboards. She was taking the whole thing seriously, was determined to be the best wife and mother she could.

We smiled at each other often; bravely, just a little affectedly. One Sunday about a month before the baby was due I painted some cartoon rabbits onto the wall above where we would put the cot. If it was a boy we were going to call him Umberto after Ada's father, if a girl Marcella after my mother. We both feigned to one another that this was the life we wanted, the baby simply the next step on the long and contented journey we would share. Really though, we were just poor frightened kids. Playing, that's all we were doing. Pretending to be grown ups.

The facade would shatter as quickly and irrepairably as a dropped pane of glass. That March dawn was a grey, inauspicious one as I trudged back home from the harbour. It wasn't Ada who awaited me, but instead her father - his face puffed and bloated, eyes red-rimmed, dripping the deepest form of sadness. There'd been a complication, an ambulance called out in the middle of the night. Ada was OK, but the baby... The baby had... Dear Lord, even after all these years it still pains me so to say it out loud.

Once she returned home there were no courageous twitches of the lips any more. No pretty bunches of recently picked flowers hanging from the window frames. No ingeniously concocted pans of stew waiting for me on the stove. Just that oppressive butter-thick silence of two people who'd twisted the tiller to the wrong angle. Been blown so far off course there was no hope of ever finding their way back again.

My call up papers arrived the following June. Even though during wartime there was no longer any maximum limit to my service period and the chances of me ever making it back home again were fifty-fifty at best, and even though it shames my heart to admit it, as I stepped through the gates of the provincial barracks that afternoon it felt much more like a liberation than a curse.

~~~~~