‘You knew them. The Italians?’ said Dryden, thinking that once an audience had sat where they now stood, listening on dark winter nights to songs of home as the bombers droned overhead for Germany. He had played here alone, preparing the plays he would later inflict on his parents, pacing the rickety rough-planked stage. A child then, he had accepted the wonder of the theatre with hardly a question about the people who had created it. But now he had the questions, and a reason to ask them.
Stutton was silent, lost in the memory too.
‘I forget. Did you ever see them perform?’ said Dryden.
‘The Italians? Course. And your mum. Not really plays as such; revues, I guess – songs and that. They was good, damn good.’
Dryden nodded. ‘The Italians. That’s all I ever knew.’
‘It’s about that PoW’yer – isn’t it?’ said Stutton, stepping up on to the stage and moving into the shadows by the paper-thin wings. ‘Always read your stuff, Philip.’
Dryden shook his head. ‘Yes. Sorry – I would have come anyway. But I just wanted to know more. When did they arrive at Buskeybay?’
Stutton stepped into the light, an actor whose lines had arrived. He took a tobacco pouch out of his heavy-duty overcoat and rolled a cigarette expertly with one hand. ‘That was ’44. Summertime. Most of ’em were conscripts and they’d had a coupla years in the desert. Scared, I don’t blame ’em. Not much interested in getting back at all. Once the news come through they’d surrendered back home I guess they was officially non-combatants. So they moved ’em out, billeted them on farms. Couldn’t send ’em home, I guess – Germans were still fighting. Monte Cassino, places like that.’
‘How old were you?’ asked Dryden, straining across the years to hear the songs they’d sung.
‘Five when the war ended but your mum was older by the year. Used to play with ’em, both of us. Dad put ’em in the barn here to sleep and that, worked ’em in the fields. Not always our fields, mind, they bussed them out to where they were short of labour. They did this of an evening,’ he said, laying a hand on a painted cherub. ‘We had about two dozen here, but others came in when they put on a show. But most Saturday nights they went into town, mind, all slicked up. The Ritz had seats – for the newsreel and that. They was no trouble at all. Good workers as well, better’n the lot we had after.’
‘They moved them all out of the camp, out of California?’
‘Just about. A couple had jobs there after the Germans were put in. Orderlies, that kinda thing. The Germans were a different type – officers mostly, captured after the landings – D-Day. We kept well away from the wire then.’
‘You mean you didn’t keep well away when the Italians were inside?’
‘Nah. Even then they was popular. Sundays they had a choir and they sang by the wire and we chucked pennies through. Honest,’ he shook his head, unable to believe his own story. ‘And there were some girls that were keen. Even before ’43 they let the boys out in the day to work. The woods up by California was a courting spot. In fact they used to say only reason there was a wire was to keep the girls out.’
They both laughed and Dryden looked up, trying to pick out the details painted into the high arch.
‘Did any of the Germans get out?’
‘Doubt it. They really clamped down on ’em. They had camps up-country as well – Peterborough, I think. They lost a couple there – reckoned they slipped out through the docks at Lynn. And one got away from Norwich I’m sure, a pilot, he bashed some poor sod’s brains out at the aerodrome there and took a trainer to Ireland. Big stink about that. Scared us kids, that did.’
‘But the Italians were no trouble?’
‘Didn’t say that. Most just wanted a quiet life.’
‘Most? But not all?’
Stutton lit up again, his face theatrically illuminated by the match and then lost in a plume of white smoke. ‘There was something – that was after the Germans had arrived, must have been late in ’44. The police rounded up the Italians for questions. Came here one day with an open truck and took the lot. They woz back in twenty-four hours, nothing said.’
‘But there was gossip?’
‘Yeah. Oh yeah. Always in the war. They never told you anything so it was all there was. A burglary is what was said. A big house on the Fen edge, something classy. That’s why they came here – the police – coz our boys had been working out there. Anyway, it was artwork they got away with. You hear people now, you’d think there was no crime in the war, but there was plenty, what with all the men away and the police all over the shop expecting invasions and finding spies everywhere. A burglary, like I said, and they got most of it back that time, but they never got anyone for it. I think they found most of the stuff over at Friday Bridge – a turnip store or something. There was a big clampdown on the Italians, though – checks and stuff, ID rings, a proper curfew. No more Saturday nights in town. A lot got moved to internment camps. All ours were gone within a month.’