... 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.

I tre amici

In the summer of 1985 I went back to Piovene for what turned out to be the last time. I'm not really sure why it turned out that way and have always been sorry that it did but arguably not sorry enough to do anything about it. Idleness? Quite probably.

Anyway. In the summer of 1985 I returned to Piovene with two comrades-in-arms - Mark Townsend and Malcolm Drummond Ashleigh Cooke (I'm sure the Ashleigh was spelt that way but ...). Of the three of us, Mal was the only one who could drive and therefore the only one with a car. He had a lovely bright red XR3i and that was to be our chariot for the journey from Gatow in West Berlin to Piovene Rochette in Italy - 987 km. Actually, that's 987 km now that Germany has been reunited. At the time we had to go down the central corridor from West Berlin to Helmstedt and only then cut south to Italy and that took the journey up to 1,147 km.

It was a cracking holiday. We stayed in a bed & breakfast in Piovene and Paola and Fulvio took us around to all sorts of places ... and to Venice of course.

One day Mal decided that we were going to go to Lido di Iesolo. I wasn't that keen simply 'cos I don't like tourist traps but I went along under protest. We booked rooms in a hotel for two people because we didn't have enough cash on us for three and then went out. Mal and Mark ended up chatting up a couple of German housewives on a girls' holiday while I sat, uninterested, disinterested and bored, watching the pidgin interaction between them. Eventually, they decided that it was time to go back to the hotel. By this time it was lashing down with rain and ... guess what. Nobody could remember where the hotel was. We traipsed the streets of Lido for hours in the pouring rain and finally found it.

I slept on the floor of the room and tried to sneak out early in the morning. I was caught sneaking out but managed to persuade the receptionist that I'd only come in to the hotel to wake the lads up. I'm certain that the fella didn't believe me but after a while he stopped arguing with me.

Tired, wet and hungry, we headed back to Piovene. We came back to a very narked Paola. Narked that we'd disappeared without saying anything. I'd anticipated this and it was one of the reasons I hadn't wanted to simply disappear. Anyway, over dinner that evening all was forgiven as I recounted the daring adventures Mal, Mark and Marco in Lido to uncontrollable fits of laughter of a room full of Italians. The two lads were sat in the middle of it all, not understanding a word that was said and knowing that it was their adventures that had everyone in fits.

I enjoyed that couple of weeks but it had been frustrating. All I had wanted to do was chill with Paola and Fulvio. The lads wanted to get out on the pull and drink. We ended up heading back to Berlin early because they'd got bored. I could have stayed there for months. Nobody's fault of course. Des gouts et des couleurs. That's all.

I never heard from Paola and Fulvio again. I wrote a few times but they never wrote back. Another door shut behind me. Maybe they'd outgrown me. In the seven years since we'd first met, she'd matured; grown up. I very much suspect that I hadn't. Life in the armed forces was never particularly conducive to the maturation of young men. Maybe I still haven't.

L'Amore Mio

It didn't take long for me to find somewhere where I could get a regular fix of Italian. It was an Italian restaurant on a lay-by on the Gatower Straße and it was called L'Amore Mio. It was a nice little place and the food was good.

My name and my Italian was enough to persuade the two fellas who owned the place that I was a friend. Every time I walked into the place they made a fuss of me in the way that Italian restaurateurs do and I was flattered. Delighted with my apparently elevated status in the establishment.

I don't remember the names of the two lads although I must have known them at the time. They told me that if I ever wanted a job all I had to do was ask. So I asked one day in 1987 after I'd left the RAF and moved in with civvy friends in Reinickendorf in the North of West Berlin.

The plan had been that I was going to be a link between the restaurant and their guests from RAF Gatow. They had said that they wanted me behind the bar where I was visible and where I could talk to their British customers. They put me in the kitchen. Washing up. To add insult to injury they paid me DM5 an hour. Not even £2. I picked up my pay - such as it was - and left after a few days.

I did go back once or twice afterwards but the relationship didn't survive the job offer. Lesson? Business always comes before pleasure.

The Queen's shilling

It must have been coming towards the end of summer when I got a letter from the Royal Air Force careers office in Exeter asking me to come down to see them. They thought they probably had a job for me.

I got the train from Barnstaple to Exeter St Davids and made my way to the careers office where I was seen by a very jovial, pleasant sergeant. He took my personal details, qualifications and all that and then we got on to the job that I was being offered. I asked him what the job was and, laughing, he said he had absolutely no idea. It was called Radio Operator -Voice. That was all he knew. That and the fact that they wanted people with foreign language qualifications.

The next thing I knew I was off somewhere else - I can't for the life of me remember where it was. I was there to do the Modern Languages Aptitude Test (MLAT) for which we had to do a number of language learning tests in Kurdish - vocabulary memory, translation into and out of English, formation of basic sentences, etc. I was later to discover that my result in that test was among the top half-dozen ever.

Early in 1982 I was in - Aircraftsman Criscuolo. By early 1983 the treatment that I'd been handed by some of those with whom I was training made me understand why uncle Tony abandoned the name in the early 1940s and by the time I left for West Berlin at the end of my training in April 1983 I was Junior Technician Crisp. The troubles had reached a peak when I was the only one supporting Italy against Brazil in the 1982 World Cup Finals ... when Italy won 3-2. What a game! Blinding.

Those who had earlier found me somehow objectionable suddenly found me perfectly acceptable and I felt the guilt that grampa must have felt when he 'played the game'. The daft thing is that everyone still called me Marco. I was only ever Marco. The Criscuolo revival has lasted all of six years. I had let him down badly. Very badly. Was the 'problem' just a perceived one? Probably. At the time though I believed it was real.

Incidentally, the job that I couldn't be told about and that I couldn't talk about without afterwards killing anyone whom I told is now described in the Royal Air Force careers brochure in the following terms:

"Intelligence Analyst (Voice) - The RAF will train you to a high standard in at least one foreign language so that you can monitor, collect and analyse radio signals from overseas. You'll use this information to produce reports on actual or potential enemies and their movements."