Keep Smiling Through Read Free

his
famiglia
before he have to leave for guarding the factories?’
    To give Papa Tino his due, he never tired of matchmaking, for he seemed convinced – against all their protests – that she and Roberto were meant for one another.
La passeggiata
was a slow amble through the streets in the company of your betrothed and his family or, if unpromised, with a
mamma
who had a sharp eye open for a suitable husband. In Antonino’s Naples it was an age-old custom carried out during the soft, warm and scented evenings, but in Cliffehaven where the wind tore in from the Channel and the gulls squabbled overhead, it would lose any of the romance of the moment and simply get tongues wagging amongst the small Italian community.
    Rita chuckled and shook her head. ‘No
passeggiata
tonight, or any other, Papa. I’ll see you in half an hour.’
    ‘You are sure?’ He looked crestfallen, the very embodiment of a man devastated by crushed hope.
    Rita had seen this act before and wasn’t fooled. She grinned. ‘Positive. Now, let me close these doors and get on, or Louise’s pasta will be ruined.’ She watched him shrug before he turned away and knew he was already plotting something else so she and Roberto could be alone.
    She was still chuckling as she drew the heavy doors to, snapped the padlock over the thick chain and headed to the back of the garage and the door that led to a flight of stairs. Running up the bare boards, she entered the main room at the front. Even her own father seemed anxious to see her and Roberto together, and although she adored Roberto, he was more like a brother than someone to fall in love with, and she refused to play along with their scheming. The war had meant life was opening up to her with endless exciting possibilities and new challenges. She wasn’t about to do something so radical just to please the people she loved. If she and Roberto were meant for one another, then it would happen. Meanwhile, she had a war to get through.
    The front room served as kitchen and living space, with a small range in the chimney breast, a narrow table, two chairs and a sagging couch. A photograph of her mother had pride of place on the mantel next to the new one of her father in his uniform, and a wireless stood in one corner, the mahogany casing gleaming dully through the layer of dust that had settled since this morning. It wasn’t a big room, but it was the heart of their home, and as Rita eyed her father’s empty chair, she felt his absence even more keenly.
    The sadness threatened to overwhelm her again, so she drew the blackout curtains and lit the gas lamps – the electricity supply had recently come to this end of town, but not every house had been fully adapted. She eased off her sturdy boots, then stripped off the heavy leather trousers and moth-eaten flying jacket and slung them over the back of the couch where she’d left the dungarees she wore to work. Wriggling her toes, she pulled off the thick socks and, dressed only in her camiknickers and vest, padded across the faded linoleum into her bedroom.
    It was a small, rather untidy room – there never seemed to be enough time for housework these days, which suited her just fine – with a single iron bedstead, chest of drawers, wardrobe, and a view out of the window over the tiny backyards of the houses in the next terrace to the shunting yards beyond the high brick wall. There was no bathroom, and it would take too long to fill the big metal tub which hung on a hook in the outside lav, so she would have to make do with a quick wash in the kitchen sink.
    Now the sun had gone down it was chilly, so she pulled a warm knitted dress and cardigan from the wardrobe and returned to the front room. Standing well back to avoid getting her eyebrows and lashes singed, she lit the ancient boiler and washed as well as she could in the tepid water.
    Her stomach rumbled as she finished dressing, reminding her she hadn’t eaten since the paste sandwiches she’d