The Painted Altar

Chapter Fourteen

Plot reminder: Lucio has worked out that Mary is not a journalist and that Vincenzo D'Ambra was in fact her father. He has taken her to the town library, his former place of work. The plan is to see if they can trace online any of the fellow prisoners D'Ambra named in the letters he sent home during the war.

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The letters totalled forty or so, each of the time-yellowed envelopes featuring inspection label and camp of origin stamp. The first was dated February 24th 1942; the last, the 1st of  September 1943. That the earliest couple of dozen had been sent from a camp numbered 565 rather than  106a provided the focus of our first Google search, the site resulting as a stately home somewhere in Bedfordshire. Another element to the story was thus added, my father's wartime itinery now complete: first the provincial barracks of Lecce, onto Brindisi, then Alessandria and Tobruk, from there all the way south to Kenya before being hauled back into the northern hemisphere - first Bedfordshire, then Lincolnshire. And here the trail came to an abrupt halt, almost like that jagged wall of rocks at the end of Punto San Giacomo beach. At some point during the first weekend of September 1943, my father had disappeared into the ether. Got swallowed somewhere, like a southward-gliding bird into the sky.

The first of the letters from camp 106a was dated the 18th of April; it was here that our search for names of fellow prisoners would begin. I carefully extracted the single sheet from envelope, unfolded it onto the desk between us. Cara famiglia it began: 'Dear family'. My eyes skimmed over the three brief paragraphs beneath, the stream of exquisite-sounding Italian words. Unable as I was to decipher many of them, my analysis focused instead on my father's handwriting. Though by no means any kind expert, a forty-year career in primary education had equipped me with a certain level of insight with regards to graphology. As a young teacher whose enthusiasm had yet to be blunted by decades of diminishing standards and government interference, it had been a source of enormous satisfaction to watch my charges' evolution from the clumsy repetition of individual letters at five years old to the cursive free-flowing individuality of pre-pubescence. I had observed, for example, that it was usually the shyest and most introspective children who, like my father, maintained a low, tight letter size. The high dots of his 'i's meanwhile suggested a heightened  imagination. Of particular interest were the disproportionately wide gaps between his words, a trait which hinted at a desire for freedom and space - unsurprisingly perhaps given those cramped darkened streets which had encaged him as a child.

That initial letter contained no names, but confirmed what John Simmonds had told me about the prisoners' first night in Lincolnshire having been spent under canvas, the men themselves tasked with the construction of the site. The next letter was also deviod of names, but interestingly referred to the fact that there were Land Girls working in the men's midst. 'The English have created an agricultural army of young women who bend their backs in the fields next to us,' Lucio translated. 'This has caused quite a stir amongst the men, as you might imagine, but the guards work hard to make sure our contact with them is kept to a minimum.' The wording seemed deliberately ambiguous: too bland to attract the attention of a censor, yet at the same time darkly communicative to the family members who would read it at home. The guards'  'hard work' which my father referred to, had this included actions which infringed the Geneva Convention? Which ruptured the confines of decency and humanity? Rather than verbal warnings that the men keep themselves at a certain distance from the Land Girls, had there instead been punishments which were entirely disproportionate of nature for any prisoner who dared so much as to brush a female arm with his own. The name Sergeant Reynolds once more tore like a spike through the fabric of my mind. Had he been the one to set some manner of low, violent tone, the other British officers a herd of dismal unthinking sheep following along behind? A downward spiral which would eventually spin out of all control, result in that blackest of all crimes?