Valediction to a lovely man

The last time I saw him Luigi Matteo Antonio Criscuolo didn't look very well but I couldn't be sure that he was ill. He'd always been very thin. He worked in the forests in the Lattari Mountains that are the spine of the Sorrento Peninsula.

I was thoroughly amused, when I first met him, by this Italian who had an archetypal Englishman's tan - the white T-shirt tan.

He really was a lovely man. Generous to a fault. Didn't say much. Only spoke when it was necessary to do so. When he had something to say or to ask.

He'd married when he was a young man - I don't know how young - but it seems that the marriage never worked out and he shared a house in Amalfi with his wife for no more than a few months before moving back to the family house in Pontone and spending the rest of his life sharing the house with his sister who never married.

He'd spent a few months - probably not much more - in Hastings in the '60s working in his brother's restaurant - Il Saraceno. Now and again he'd remind us with a single word of English spoken with a heavy southern Italian accent and a massive smile.

From him I learned loads of those little things that you normally learn from your nan and grampa but these came from a different world to the ones I learned from mine - always let the spring water run over your hand and wash the sweat off your hand before you use it to scoop the water into your mouth (not the sort of thing you learn in Buckinghamshire ... or Crewe). Don't drink while you're eating; Only drink between courses. He taught me how to make real lemonade with lemons the size of grapefruits. He showed me how to make vino paesano, how to set a pizza oven going, how to carry a crate of grapes without doing myself a mischief and how to get the lemon trees ready for the winter.

My son adored him. He wanted a hat like Luigi; he wanted this, that and the other like Luigi.

He smoked and drank but not in any way that we'd recognize. Half a bottle of Peroni or Moretti with dinner and one fag afterwards.

In the middle of May 2007 - I don't remember the date exactly - I got an email from a friend in Bari to say that Luigi was very ill. I phoned the mother of a cousin in Amalfi. He had liver cancer. That's why he'd looked so ill when we'd seen him the previous summer. I phoned my cousin and asked her to tell me the moment she got any news - good or bad. A few days later, on the 27th of May, she texted me - Stamattina Luigi è volato nel cielo (this morning Luigi flew to heaven). He was 71.

He was buried next day. I didn't even get to fly over to pay my last respects. I was gutted. Gutted almost sounds trivial or flippant but it's the right word. I felt like my guts had been ripped out.

He and his sister accepted me as family, no questions asked on that day in October 1999 when we first met them. They took me into their house, no strings attached and made me one of them. Generosity of spirit like that is rare.

Luigi was one of those people whose whole face lit up when he smiled and he smiled a lot.

Like a rubber ball ...

Most of the rest of that holiday was spent going to and fro' from Amalfi to Pontone with one trip out to Capri. You can see why Tiberius Claudius Nero, Maxim Gorkiy and Gracie Fields fell in love with the place. It is stunning. Totally overrun by tourists though; and for someone who has an innate allergy to tourists, the only escape was to walk up to one of Tiberius' villas - Villa Iovis (the Villa of Jupiter). Because the only way to get there was to walk ... half way up a mountain, it was gratifyingly quiet.

There was a terrace that overlooked the sea. In fact, it overhung the sea and it is said that it is the point from which he used to have those thrown who had displeased him. It was looking over the edge of the wall that, for the first time in my life, I experienced an overwhelming fear of falling. Nearly wretched my guts up. I spent the rest of the day staying as far away from the edge (any edge) as it was possible to get.

We spent days, or parts of days, out in Positano, Maiori, Minori, Sorrento and, as always, I did my best to blend in; not to be a tourist. It's not easy when your wife's got bright red hair and freckled white skin and you're the only one who speaks Italian.

When I got back to Crewe, I felt a certain sense of satisfaction and achievement. I felt that I'd sort of completed the circle that was broken when Nicola died in 1947. That was never part of the promise although I think it became part of the mission as I got older. Of course, the promise will never have been properly fulfilled until they put me in a hole in the ground; I had promised, after all, never to forget that I am Italian. I'd gone further though ... I think. I'd taken the first step toward putting the family back together again and that felt alright.

We went back in October 2000 only without dad this time. We spent a good deal more time with Maria and Luigi. Maria introduced us to other relatives - dad's second cousins, my third and my son's fourth. Hey. A cousin's a cousin, right? We were introduced to Marisa (and her husband Gennaro), Rosita (her husband Domenico and their kids Mara and Gianluca), Orazio and one hundred and one others.

This time, for the first time, something else happened; on a number of occasions. People would stop me and ask me whether I was from round 'yer. I'd explain that I wasn't but that I had family here. "Who's your family?" I'd reel off a list of names and their relationship to me, dad and grampa and they'd say something like, "ah yes. I know who you are." They didn't of course. Not in the sense we would understand the statement. But they knew where I fit into their world and their community.

I was chuffed to nuts. There was clearly something about my appearance that made them ask the question in the first place which meant that I must look like I belong there. My face fit. Without wanting to get all schmaltzy, I don't think I ever felt that at any other time, with the possible exception of those three years at the polytechnic.

... 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.