As a writer, I need to exercise my ideas, words, turns of phrase. Sit yourself down on your bottom and write. A dentist won’t tell you he or she has dentist’s block. When you have a contract, you must write.
I didn’t know what I was doing and when I used a vanity publisher and the book was published eight years ago, it was full of errors and badly needed editing. More stories of those early days living in flat Fenland, adapting to a different culture, struggling to learn English and our strange ways, strange cooking where potatoes took the place of pasta. Reader, she married him and came to live in England. Out poured more stories of romance under the Italian stars, forbidden dances – out of bounds for her handsome captain – and for her as well. In 1944, at eighteen, she fell in love for the first time. She told me she was so terrified that she stuck her head in a haystack, the rest of her body sticking out. ‘If I bring down a British plane, then I get ten days’ leave,’ he told her, pushing her out of the way and continuing to fire. ‘Don’t do that,’ she screeched at the blond young man. Giuseppina talked to me of how she and her mother went into the countryside to hunt for food from the farms how one day an allied plane flew overhead, how a young German tried to shoot it down.
Her courageous father, registrar at the town hall, who changed details of all the Jews living in Urbino to save their lives. My wonderful Italian mother-in-law, Giuseppina, had enthralled me with true wartime stories: her experiences as a teenager in occupied Urbino, the partisans that her father harboured in their apartment opposite German HQ. Pouring out higgledy-piggledy until there were over 100,000.
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