The Painted Altar

Chapter Twenty-Nine

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.