A FAMILY REUNITED

Bedford Street, Crewe, Cheshire

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.

By 1998, I had decided that I was ready. I had all the information that I needed. It was time to try again. To try again to go back to Amalfi. It wasn't really a going back of course because I'd never been there but that's what it felt like.

I had no idea how to go about organizing it. No idea where to start. What to expect. What to do. It must have been early in 1999 when I went to my local Thompson (or is that Thomson? No. It's definitely Thompson) and booked a package deal ... for me, my wife and my 9-year-old son.

It suddenly occurred to me (or maybe it was to my wife that it occurred) that we had to take dad. We had to ask him at the very least whether he wanted to come along. The name 'Pontone' was as much a part of his identity as it was a part of mine. He said yes. There were going to be three generations of Criscuolo making the journey. It all seemed so right.

On a gorgeous day in October 1999 (I'm ashamed to say that I can't remember what date it was), we took off from Manchester airport bound for Naples. It was late morning when we landed at Capodichino airport and after having been churned through the mill through which arriving tourists are ground when they arrive at any airport anywhere in the world, we got on the coach that was to take us to Amalfi.

Out of the airport, onto the Autostrada del Sole and southwards until we cut west onto the Sorrento peninsula. Through Cava dei Tirreni, Vietri sul Mare, Cetara, Maiori and Minori - mountainscapes of outstanding beauty - with the sun beating down on our coach and my heart leaping out of my chest we wound our way until we reached the last headland - Capo del Orso - and turned the last bend.

Then I saw it. Just like on that old picture postcard. Was this home? Was this real? Had I finally made it? I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Our hotel was just off the main square - Piazza del Duomo - and we were very soon booked. Stood on the balcony I looked out over the marinas.  Fifty two years after Nicola's last trip home, we were 'back'.

We were staying in a little family-run hotel called Hotel Lidomare. It was set back from the main square (Piazza del Duomo) on a kind of small square of its own. The real beauty of the place though was that it was two minutes walk from the the Piazza del Duomo and about a minute more from the front.

Pogerola

Criscuolo is a local surname and it gave me immediate cred as someone who belonged there. If you're at all curious, you can go to http://gens.labo.net/, type 'Criscuolo' in the search field in the top left hand corner and hit the red arrow. It'll give you a lovely visual display of the distribution of the Criscuolos in Italy. It'll do the same, of course, for any surname.

On the first day there - it was a Saturday - I seem to recall that we walked up the stone mountain stairway (scalinata) to Pogerola. It was a stunning walk and breathtaking in every sense of the word. Some 800 steps to the top left all except dad pretty much knackered by the time we got to the top.

Much and all as I couldn't wait to go to Pontone, I was scared. Petrified of what I'd find. Scared stiff that I'd be disappointed. Afraid that I'd be rejected. What would I do, I asked myself, if someone I'd never met in my life turned up on my doorstep insisting that he (or she) was my long lost cousin? I didn't know the answer and I wasn't entirely sure that I wanted to know it.

While I was building up my courage, I started to get my bearings around the place. This was heaven. This was, without doubt, a place where I could happily live and die. Like I said, my surname gave me immediate credibility. Criscuolo. It was local. Combined with the fact that I spoke Italian, with a southern accent, and without any trace of an English accent, it was a real asset.

I started making friends. Friends who, many years later would turn out to be real, solid friends. The first of them was a gentleman - a real gentleman - called Alfonso Lucibello. A man of real dignity and serenity. A man of boundless generosity. Over the years he has become a friend for whom I would definitely walk five hundred miles.

Dad looked the part. After one day in the place he looked the part. He only had to walk out into the sun for his skin to suddenly take on that rich Mediterannean bronze colour. He has that rugged southern Italian face too ... and the schnoz. The only thing that picked him out from the locals was the fact that he couldn't speak a word of Italian.

I really enjoyed that first day. It was barmy. Laid back. Italian. I was still petrified about the adventure up to Pontone that I knew had to come but I was starting to feel easier about it. The reception that I was getting from the people to whom I wasn't related was starting to make me feel a little easier about the whole thing.

On the second day in Amalfi (it must have been a Sunday), I plucked up the courage, and we decided to walk up the scalinata to Pontone. It's a hell-of-a-walk. These stone stairways have been there for donkeys' years and they are still well used. They link the coast to the villages in the mountains. The hinterland.

We walked up the the mountain and I have to say that it was a stunning walk. Whether you looked back at where you'd come from (Amalfi) or forward to where you were going (Scala) it was breathtaking. It's one of those places that makes you feel totally insignificant and is all the better for that.

When you get to the top of the stairs, you have to cross a road and then, up a few more stairs, you enter the village square. It's a gorgeous little square. There's the church (of San Giovanni) and a bar. There are also a couple of drinking fountains. The square itself is built on the side of the mountain and protrudes from the mountainside. It's a sort of a terrace.

The four of us chose a table in the square and I went into the bar and ordered the drinks. Ice Cold in Alex for me and the lady. Dad had something non-alcoholic and my son almost certainly joined us in a beer ... or did he have a Coke. I really should have kept a contemporaneous record of all this.

Rossino, Andrea, Gianfranco & Marco Criscuolo
poring over the family tree

I finally plucked up the courage to appraoch the barman - a gentleman called Gianfranco Criscuolo. I asked him where the local cemetery was - I wanted to see if I could find any of my fathers' graves. It's in Scala, on the top of another mountain and the quickest way there is back into Amalfi to get a bus up to Scala.

So. I got my scroll out. My descendants tree showing all the descendants of Luigi Criscuolo and his wife Brigida - who must have been born in the early decades of the 19th century. I spread it out on the top of a wall and we were quickly joined by an another gentleman called Andrea Criscuolo. I have to say that neither were directly related to me. Poring over the family tree, Gianfranco and Andrea pointed to one name after another - she lives down the road and No. 13. He's her brother and lives with her. He lives in Minuta across the mountain there. He lives down there in Amalfi.

I decided to take the details - such as they were - of the lady who lived at No. 13. We went to the house and rang the bell. No answer. We went back to the bar, had another beer and went back and rang the bell again. Still no answer.

Between visits to No. 13, I talked to Andrea (known locally as 'O Maresciallo because his father was a Marshall of the Police Force). At one point he looked at me, fag in hand, and said "I know your double". I must have looked at him quizzically because he nodded vigorously and repeated his assertion. "Honest. I know your double". That double turned out to be one of my dad's second cousins (Matteo Criscuolo) and there is a definite likeness - bearing in mind that he is twenty years my senior.

Eventually, having written a note, explaining who I was, what I was doing and where I was staying (with address and telephone number - I didn't have a moby at this stage) and left it in the gate at No. 13, we walked back down the stairs to Amalfi.

That evening as we were leaving the hotel to find somewhere to eat, an elderly couple crossed the square towards us. They took one look at dad and said "Siete Criscuolo?" Dad looked at me and I looked at them and nodded. "Si. Siamo Criscuolo." They kissed us - the way that friends and relatives do in civilized societies - and introduced themselves. Maria and Luigi Criscuolo. Brother and sister.

I explained that we were looking for a restaurant to have something to eat and invited them to join us. Not a chance. You don't need to eat in no restaurant. They took us to a house up the road and introduced us to other cousins (dad's second cousins and my third) and we talked and talked and talked about people and times and places.

They had accepted me ... us ... as family. No questions asked. They had known Nicola Criscuolo - zio Nicola - and remembered him coming over to see them. What's more, Maria was incredibly like auntie Marie. The way she looked, moved, talked, fussed. Everything. Dad cried for the family he'd lost and I wasn't far from doing the same if I'm honest.

We were home. No question. We had family there and that was enough to ensure that we belonged there.

The next day we got the bus up to Pontone to Maria's for lunch ... and dinner. I think we must have got the quarter past 10 and arrived about twenty or so minutes later. The bus can't actually get into the village so it stops at a point as far up the mountain as it can feasibly get. There's a sort of lay-by built into the side of the mountain that allows the bus to turn round and head on toward Scala and Ravello. From there we walked into Pontone, across the bijou little square and up to Maria's place.

Lunch was a feast - pasta followed by meat followed by vegetables followed by salad followed by fruit followed by cheese, olives, salami, chestnuts and Lord knows what else - and all washed down with vino paesano.

I love vino paesano (peasant wine). It's one of those things that should go on everybody's 'bucket list'. It's your honest-to-God basic wine made the way God intended. They crush the grapes, let the juice do its own thing for a few months and then drink it. It doesn't taste like anything that we would recognize as wine. It tastes of grapes. Now there's a thing. Maria's wine was never particularly strong (although I have drunk stuff that was much stronger) so we would happily get through two or three bottles in a sitting.

We were persuaded to stay for dinner. I have to concede that we didn't take a lot of persuading. You can keep all your fancy chefs with their fancy restaurants and their Michelin stars. I can safely say, without fear of contradiction, that I have never tasted food as good as the stuff that comes out of Maria's kitchen (is that cliché No. 2?).

Dinner was another half-a-dozen courses of ambrosia washed down with more vino paesano and all topped off with a couple of glasses of home made limoncello straight out of the freezer.

What more could any man ask for? To be sat on a roof terrace that looks out over Amalfi, the sea and the mountains eating five or six courses of heaven, drinking vino paesano and finishing with the sublime taste of home-made limoncello.

Pontone

Perfection? Not quite. Neither Maria nor Luigi (both in their 60s) spoke Italian. Pure dialect. Pure Neapolitan (Neapolitan being the generic term for the dialect that is spoken in Campania, Puglia and Calabria. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and all that good stuff). The result was that they could understood every word I uttered but I understood only maybe half of what they said.

Most of the rest of that holiday was spent going to and fro' from Amalfi to Pontone with trip out to Pompei, Paestum and 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.