... to the ridiculous?

In October 1989, having left the RAF in 1987, worked as a furniture packer and carrier for a removals firm in West Berlin until December 1988, moved back to C'Martin in Devon, had my first and only son and married a completely mad Irish girl (his mother), I arrived in Crewe. South Cheshire. Cheshire Life? Not really. In fact, not at all.

I'd got a job as a civil servant - in London - in September 1989 and we moved up to Crewe in October. It was an economic imperative that had forced me further north than I'd ever been before. Starting from scratch again, we couldn't afford to stay in the south. So I lived in the north and worked in the south ... and eventually got a transfer up to Liverpool after about 18 months.

Throughout this period the promise had been put very much on the back burner, as it were. There had been too much else to worry about. By '92 or '93 though, things were starting to settle down. I'd got my feet under the desk at work, we were starting to get the house (an 1883 mid-terrace) in some sort of shape and I'd managed to get a computer and I had time to 'play' with it.

Whenever I had to go to meetings in London (which was quite frequently), I'd arrange the meeting for the morning and then take the afternoon off and spend it in the Family Record Centre in Islington. Slowly, I started to pick up the pace and then - probably about '95 or '96 (it may have been earlier than that but I really can't remember) - the best thing since sliced bread happened. I got the internet - with Compuserve. You remember them? Your email address was a series of numbers and I could never remember what my series of numbers was.

It was access to the internet that allowed me to make an enormous leap towards fulfilment of the promise. One day I did a search on an email directory for anyone living in Amalfi. I found a whole list of them and I picked out a few names at random. I made up a descendants report from Family Tree Maker, attached it to my emails, explained what I was doing and fired them off to their unsuspecting recipients.

Only a week or so later I got a response from one of them - a Signor Cantalupo (I wish I could remember his first name) - who said that he was delighted to 'meet' someone who was interested in researching his Italian roots and he promised to do what he could to help.

A couple of weeks later I got an email from him and when I read the attachment I was gobsmacked. He'd traced my family forwards (not backwards) from my great-great-great-grandfather Luigi Criscuolo who was born at the beginning of the 19th century to my dad's second cousins and my third cousins.

When I'd written my exploratory email, I hadn't specified, as far as I can remember, whether I wanted to go back in time or come forward but, looking back, I think I was probably hoping to go further back in time. Signor Cantalupo had done what I only realized I'd always wanted to do when I read his email. He had given me the key to put me in touch with living relatives.

For the moment, of course, they were only names on a computer programme but every name on that newly expanded family tree held the potential to lead me by the hand to the fulfilment of the promise. All I had to do was want it and not be afraid of it.

The end of a beautiful relationship

When I got back from Piovene, I started preparing for my expedition into the 2nd year of my studies. I was back and I'd got a full grant for this year. I'd managed to pass the 1st year. Surely that would be the boost that I would need to get me through the rest of the course - 2nd year in London, third year abroad and final year to finish theses (or dissertations) and take the final exams. Easy.

I got dead excited when we had to make arrangements for the two places (one in Italy and one in Germany) where we would spend our year abroad and I finally settled on six months in Siena (Toscana) and six months in Konstanz (Baden-Württemberg). I had decided that I was going to do my Italian thesis on the history of the Mafia and had given no thought to what I would be the subject of my German thesis.

I have to admit that that was a reasonable reflection of my attitude to the whole thing. Idle. Lazy. I can do this without breaking sweat. I hadn't learned a damned thing.

When I turned up to pick up the results of my 2nd year results they were awful. I retired to the bar on the ground floor of the School of Languages behind Euston Tower and got absolutely blind drunk. Polluted. Twisted.

I went back to Deb'n for the summer having promised one of the lady lecturers to give serious thought to repeating the year. "You can do this, Marco, and well", she said, "if you'll only put in the work."

When it came to it, I bottled out. I couldn't face another year without a grant, stealing from people's doorsteps and all that rubbish. I never went back.

Instead I started writing speculative letters to everyone who might conceivably have a job for a lazy git who could speak a few languages (French, German, Italian, Latin and Spanish at that point to varying degrees of fluency).

Life on the dole. Not pretty. It was looking as if my idleness had brought the quest to a grinding halt. What was the promise worth now?

Requiescat in pace Alfredus Criscuolo

It was a gorgeous day as I recall, the 16th of October 1976. I was out in our very small back garden and it was early afternoon. We didn't have a phone in them days so, funnily enough, we didn't get any calls.

Out of the blue though, one of the kids from next door came running round like a bat out of hell. "your nan's just phoned. You've got to go up to hers. Your grampa's poorly."

It was about a mile from our place to nan and grampa's and though I ran like I'd never run before in my life, it seemed to take ages. To get to the house, I had to run up a long flight of concrete stairs to a terrace of four houses that sat on the side of the valley. Their house was the third.

I banged on the door and nan let me in. "He's at the bottom of the garden", she said pointing urgently. I don't know what I expected to see or do but I ran to the far end of the garden. There was a flight of concrete stairs at the bottom of the garden that went up to the garage. Grampa had been working on the car.

The doctor had signed him off sick because of his heart and told him to take it easy. Of course he didn't. He was lugging the car battery around - recharging it.

When I got to the top of the stairs, he was lying on the gravel with the car battery on its side beside him. I knelt down beside him and took his hand. He was still alive - I'm certain of that. He looked at me and then he died. I could almost see the life leave him ... as if it were something visible, tangible.

I wasn't allowed to go to the funeral. I wasn't old enough; something like that. He was buried in a cemetry in London together with his parents - Nicola and Raffaella. It was as close to home as he was going to get.

When I say I was gutted I mean it. That ripped the guts out of me. He hadn't lived to see me keep my promise. I felt I'd failed. I knew he was watching though and I knew that there was no way I was going to let him down.

Me Italian too

I must have been about fifteen or sixteen when I met my first honest-to-God Italians. They were three young ladies in their late teens or early twenties. They were in Devon with a throng of other kids from all over Europe to study English in summer school.

They stopped me asked me how to get to somewhere or other. I don't remember where it was they wanted to get to although I remember that it involved walking with them about a mile through the village to the front. I was too taken with their stunning good looks and, more importantly, the fact that they were Italian.

I took a deep breath ... and asked very formally "Loro sono italiane?" They nodded. I don't remember actually getting much out of them by way of conversation. "Mio nonno è italiano." (my grampa is Italian) I said, proud as punch. Proud that my grampa was Italian and proud that I was actually speaking Italian to real Italians. Their reaction was disappointing to say the least. My revelation didn't even provoke an "Oh, really." They were completely underwhelmed.

I walked with them down to the front (Combe Martin bay), showed them where it was they were going and they skipped off chattering and giggling between themselves.

I can't say whether I sounded like an Englishman speaking Italian or an Italian speaking Italian because I got no feedback at all ... although the extent to which my charges were underwhelmed may have been feedback enough. I was gutted.

I've always put it down to the assumption that they were Tuscan. Strange people the Tuscans. In my travels around Italy, they have appeared to be the least talkative. Of course, I can't say for certain that they were Toscane.

Strange people though the Tuscans. Anyone who says 'Hoha-Hola' for Coca-Cola has to be viewed with suspicion.

Strangers in a strange land

We arrived in North Devon at around Easter 1969. We stayed in a little village called Lee in a bloody awful place called Chapel Cottage that would have had the Ghostbusters working overtime. We finally ended up in a village called C'martin on the North Devon coast in a house where, for the first time, we had not only one indoor toilet but two and a bedroom each; at least in the winter.

Grampa and Nan followed us down a couple of years later and bought a little terraced house just up the road.

Grampa played the sax and the clarinet in whatever local 'big band' he could get to. I adored both him and his music. I used to sit listening to him practice for ages at a time. I'm told that he wanted at least one of us to get into music and that was me. I'd started the violin when I was eight years old and, while my mother screamed at me to practice, grampa coaxed me and egged me on.

He was my idol. A gentle man. A man with an eye for the girls who didn't mind showing it, even when nan was around. He loved the Sunday western on BBC2 and I used to sit between his knees in front of his armchair and watch the western with him. Poor bugger would often fall asleep half way through - a post-prandial stupour after nan's mountainesque Sunday lunch.

Me, dad, grampa and my nearest brother would be in the living room while mum, nan and my sister were in the kitchen. Apartheid? Of a sort. I seem to recall that grampa would sent me into the kitchen to ask nan to make him a cup of tea. Those were the days ... when men were men and women were glad of it.

As I got older, he branched out in the musical instrument stakes. He taught himself the cello so that he could join a very amateur string ensemble with me. It seems to me with hindsight that he did all he could for me and I would have done anything for him.

As the muses would have it, he died in October 1976 when I was 16. I was gutted. I wasn't even allowed to pay my last respects. Whilst I concede that my interest in women and beer were starting to wax at about that time, his death ensured the end of my violin career, if career it could ever have been. I gave it up and turned to hedonism ... if in a rather naive and harmless form.