Ordinary people with extraordinary stories

Oh yes. Many times... and ongoing!

When we did Italy we stayed in a hotel just outside the Cinque Terra before walking it. The owner was a delightful old lady with perfect english and a plum in the mouth British accent. She segued seamlessly into Italian while talking. Being Australians placing the accent was driving us mad, so we asked her where she was from.

Born and bred Italian, but...

Her father was an Italian soldier who left to fight in North Africa when she was tiny (her mother was just 19). He was captured at Tobruk and interned by the British in Kenya, and later transferred to India. As the only soldier in his group with any English the British officers used him as a conduit to communicate with the other prisoners, thus he picked up the plummy accent. He caught a nasty disease in India, but survived.

She dreamed about her father.

The war ended. The repatriation of prisoners was interminable but he was eventually sent home in 1947 to the wife and child he hadn't seen for five years. Deleriously happy to see them but not very healthy.

She says she learnt to speak english from her father, and mostly because he sang in English while he shaved - so she picked up the accent he'd picked up in POW camps.

He died young, and she still clearly loved him deeply, and still dreamt of him.

There was a most interesting lady that lived in the same apartment complex I did in Boston. She was retired from Filene's Basement store in Boston. She worked there for 50 years.

However, as a young girl she lived in Pearl Harbor. Her father was a vice admiral in the Navy. The day that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, she was in church (at Pearl). She came out of the church, removed her shoes, stockings and jacket and waded into the water and pulled dead bodies back to the shore. Hell of a memory huh.