Rob is still a close friend and we share holidays together from time to time. He remains deeply empathetic as an individual and we are as close to brothers as non-genetically related people can be. He runs a beautiful estate in Somerset for the designer David Mlinaric and has a son, Marshall, who loves to hear stories of our escapades.
We are all middle-aged men now and we understand more of what we are and have become, but we all know that Woolverstone shaped and moulded us, that we all still fall back on the experience when things get rough. I doubt that a more tremendous tribute could be paid to a school.
As for the school itself, after it closed in 1990 it was acquired by Ipswich School for Girls. Halls and Johnston’s house have been demolished and a beautiful brick sports block has been built in their place. The irony of it being full of girls always gives me cause for a chuckle, but there is something satisfying in knowing it wasn’t turned into a health spa or hotel. Many old boys make frequent pilgrimage to the school to see their old stomping grounds, usually with children, wide-eyed in wonder that their fathers ever attended such a place.
AFTERWORD
In the introduction to this book (which began as an essay for an old boys’ website and burgeoned into this stream of consciousness), I suggested that I had no idea where it would take me nor what conclusions I might draw from the process. I still don’t, really, but it does seem appropriate that I should try to bring you up to date with my story. I also alluded to the fate of my parents and siblings, and in the course of the past eighteen months both of my parents, as well as my brother Matteo, have passed away.
Lou now lives with his wife Tracey on the edge of a loch in Oban, Scotland, where they built a large eco-house. Sergio resides with his wife Kristin and their two young children in California. My own children, Leanora and Gianluca are beginning their life journeys with a proud mother and father looking on. My second wife, Sally, and I live in London with our daughter Fiora, who like Gianluca, has already performed on the Holland Park stage.
Matteo’s death I have reported elsewhere in these pages, but its effect on me has only really now formed into a whole, cogent concept, followed closely as it was by the deaths of my father and mother. Matteo was really the heart and dominant feature of Mum’s life; if anybody epitomised the threats and risks our family was vulnerable to, it was he. His birth was tinged with disappointment, his early years were framed by dad’s first wanderings; and if Mum’s struggles could be defined in any real way, it would be to the course of Matt’s life that we would point. His death was withheld from Mum who at that stage, ravaged by dementia, was scarcely aware of herself, but I was not prepared to take the risk that in there, somewhere, was cognisance. If fate had been less unutterably cruel, her grief would have known few boundaries, and so nothing was to be gained by inviting the prospect that she might feel the loss, but be unable to express it or even understand it.
My father’s death came ten month’s after Matt’s, and its consequences are still unravelling in my mind – and literally. I received a call from Corrado (his son by the other woman), my brother and a man to whom I had never in my life spoken. We all knew about Corrado, even spied him from a distance sometimes when as a teenager he helped Dad on the ice-cream van. He was our brother, but our loyalty to Mum ensured we would never seek him out or have relationships with him. When Fiora was born, it suddenly became clear to me that her attachment to her siblings was no less powerful because she had a different mother, and so my guilt about our neglect towards Corrado began to grow.
Soon after our father had died, I had a conversation with Corrado which revealed that he never knew, until the age of fifteen or sixteen, that he had four brothers, all living close by. He did not even know that he was older than me. Dad’s passing closed a few chapters, opened some new ones and Corrado attended Mum’s funeral, something that was previously unimaginable. His many questions signified so much about our father that was unpalatable, but Dad’s death resonated powerfully, not least because I was the only one of his three surviving sons by Mum to attend his funeral. With Matt’s death I felt an indefinable loss, a visceral experience that still shakes me, but at Dad’s funeral there was only sadness and regret that his life should end so unrewarded by family unity or even the slightest relationship with his grandchildren. It withered as a life and was scarcely celebrated, but the absence of extensive mourning contributed to a picture of my family that regenerated the tragedy of Matt in my mind.
Mum’s passing, just two weeks before I am writing this, has resolved the picture I have been trying to identify during the past eighteen months. Dad, Matt and Mum, on the surface, represented the tragic dysfunction of our clan and, somehow, their collective deaths within a short space of time is perhaps fate’s way of ending our misery quickly. Their lives were intertwined as stories of lost opportunity and struggle, and it was not until Mum’s death that the tragedy finally resolved. At Matt’s funeral, attended by a great many people, I tried to celebrate and value his life. At Mum’s, I attempted to talk to her in a way I had wished I’d done when she was alive and sentient, I elevated her life, made it noble. And it had been.
Throughout this book I have told you how selfish I was, how we had all driven Mum to despair and anguish countless times, and, when she died, after she had suffered several years of horrific mental decline, I became desperate that she should have known what an honourable life she had led. I wanted her to know that everything she had done was worthwhile and had produced wonderful results. Perhaps, more than anything else, this book is about Mum.
I cannot bring myself to go back to incorporate more of their lives into this book and so, as testimony, maybe even as conclusion, I reproduce their eulogies, delivered by me through many tears.
Matteo Volpe
Matteo Volpe, son of Lidia and Francesco, husband to Nikki, brother to Lou, Serge and Michael, uncle to Matthew, Leanora, Marcella, Gianluca, Fiora and Jack, friend to and much loved by countless others. And it has to be acknowledged, sometime frequent guest of Her Majesty.
Matteo emerged from the womb ready to rumble. His life was never going to be simple, never straightforward, forever dynamic in one way or another. As the second born of four boys, Matt grew up a quarter of Mum’s responsibility but at least half of her worry. That was Matt.
As a child, my earliest memory of Matt was of him pulling stitches from his latest injury. What we often call curiosity in children was called cheeky lunacy in Matt; why else would he light a banger and put it in his own pocket? Why else would he jump onto a pile of plate glass, cutting his feet to ribbons? He was, until his final day, a complex jumble of contradictions, a man who was difficult to predict, who could often surprise, who didn’t ask for much but for whom life itself was often not enough.
As children, Matt was the boldest of us, the bravest at times, the biggest risk taker. Like all of us, he had demons and he danced with each and every one of them until the last. I believe he grew to feel safer with them rather than cast them out when he had a chance. Perhaps these demons were somehow his friends too?
I always remember Matt’s teenage years, the parade of girls knocking at our door, upset because he hadn’t asked for a second date or phoned them. I remember his friends and their partying at our house. I looked up to him, wanted to be like him. Whatever Matt could at times be, I will always remember the Matt I grew up proud to call my brother to people in Fulham Court; good looking, good at football, good at pulling a fast one. Pretty good at just pulling too. Matt was cool. The challenges he would eventually present his family with were still to come, but even those times, through the struggles, the danger, they were part of what made Matt what he was. He worried about his Mum all the time he was driving her mad, he worried about me, his little brother. He lectured me after I had been suspended from my boarding school, unhappy, angry, disappointed. I was amazed that he should be lecturing me and I told him so, pointing out that HE had only just got out of prison. “We sent you to that school because we d
on’t want you turning out like me,” he said. So whatever path Matt was on, he knew what it was and couldn’t change it, but there was awareness enough to ensure I didn’t follow him.
Even with all the hard times with Matt, the memories that return to me are good ones. I remember our holidays in Italy, I remember his desire to get as brown as it is possible to get in the sun, oiling himself up with local olive oil. I remember him trying to persuade his girlfriends to let me, his young brother, cop a feel because I had to learn, after all. I remember him betting us he could knock the local copper’s helmet off from forty yards with a football and then actually doing it, and all of us having to run away fast. I remember him whacking a bloke who had scared a woman in North End Road market so much that she nearly went under a bus. Matt took off his wooden clog and walloped him with it. I remember Matt leaping off the boiling hot train at crazily busy stations to get water as we travelled to Italy and not being back as the train began to leave the station. I remember Mum wailing hysterically, me copying her and then Matt strolling back into the compartment without a care in the world. He had just got back on further along the platform. I was very young, maybe ten years old, and I recall the feeling, the awful panic that we had lost him forever.
And now, as we gather here, we all feel as if we have now really lost him forever. But as I speak, have you all been remembering similar things? Do you smile to yourself as you recall one event or other? A good time that you shared with Matt? If you do, then we haven’t lost him forever. He lives on in our memories, and what constitutes our lives is really just that bundle of memories in any case.
They say that people like Matt, who sailed close to the wind, walked the line and left us young, represent a tragic waste. I used to agree. But what do we mean by waste? That their lives were not what WE would expect them to be? That they somehow threw away what could have been but wasn’t? Matt didn’t waste his life. Matt lived his life the way he wanted, maybe even the way his demons said he must. But Matt made a mark on those who knew him. We knew that whatever he may do, Matt was, to his core and in his troubled heart, good and caring. This full church tells us that whatever Matt’s life was, we were all touched by it. And that cannot be a waste, can it?
So now we move on. We always have to move on.
Nikki, who loved and cared for Matt for so long, will begin a new phase of her life, and we must encourage her and wish that she has the best because she has earned it for what she gave to Matt. His brothers will remember Matt for the dramatic soul he was. From time to time, we will wish that that things had turned out differently, that being a brother to Matt hadn’t sometimes been so challenging, that one day we could all sit round a table with our grandchildren and laugh about that copper’s helmet. But perhaps we always knew that was not to be. We all loved Matt; sometimes it was tough love.
Fly free Matt. Those demons can’t touch you any more.
Lidia Volpe
I want to speak to you today, Mum. I haven’t really been able to for so long and I want everybody here to listen to what I have to say because there are things that we maybe should have said to you before, but didn’t.
Lidia Volpe, nee Perillo, you were mother to Lou, Matteo, Sergio and me. You were grandmother to Matthew, Leanora, Marcella, Gianluca, Fiora, Jack and Lily. You were aunty to countless others and a surrogate mother to many, many more. Here with us today are the children of your dear friend Giovanna Volino who you will have no doubt begun an argument with already.
You came to this country from poverty, and it was in poverty’s grasp you would remain for some time. You trusted your life to the father of your children, but it wasn’t to be. And so your life was hard and it threatened to crush you at every turn, but you fought and fought. You worked up to three jobs at a time. You faced your challenges, you protected us and you stood fiercely in the path of threat, sometimes literally. I remember you beating the woman who said that Serge was in a borstal when actually he was at a fantastic boarding school. You were so proud that he had gotten into that school, and that I would also join him, and nobody was going to sully that fact. Matteo was in the borstal, not Sergio, but that mattered. It mattered a great deal because you had, in your mind, saved us, achieved something with your guts and your fight for life. That is all you ever asked for; not favours, or hand-outs, charity or pity. You only wanted a chance, for yourself and for us.
You became the cook at Brook Green Day nursery and so thousands of children in west London grew up on lasagne, gnocchi and so many other delights unimaginable today. People of my age will still remember you, will know the smell of pasta al forno. But one job was not enough, you needed to provide us with more, be more certain that food would be on the table and that clothes were on our backs, and so you gave loyalty and dedication to others who had unimaginably more than you ever did but who never looked down on you. You would never allow that. And they loved and cherished you for your care and service.
We children grew up without the luxuries of life but we knew we were loved. You could overdo the love sometimes, Mum, I have to be honest, and it made you worry a bit more than you needed to. But we are all parents now, so maybe we understand that better than we did then. My childhood memories are full of people who passed through our lives because you chose to help them, even when they were not worthy of it. You just did that sort of thing. All my friends remember the food at our house, how you would almost force them to eat an enormous breakfast or dinner. My friend, who was named Easter, will remember how you smiled when you first met her and said “Allo, mya name is Christamas!” I am sorry Mum, it used to really annoy you when we imitated your accent. I might do it again before I am finished. A thousand other people will remember you, because you were different, made of something so few of us are made of. You always kept your dignity and of all the things I may have ever learned from you, it was this: to keep your dignity, no matter what becomes of you. You were forgiving, generous, allowed people their failings and their mistakes. When all around you said it was a lost cause, you always gave one more chance.
And so it came to your later years, as the great joy of grandchildren arrived, when you should have been enjoying the burgeoning of new life, life that wouldn’t face the privations that your own children suffered. You went out with the kids and Lou one day, to Greenwich, Tower Bridge, the London Eye. At the end of the day you said to Lou that you had never realised London was so beautiful – that was fifty years in this city living your life looking after others, with no time for yourself. In that fifty years, even though your English was excellent, you still struggled at times with the London vernacular. When Serge once told you that he had been to see a man about a dog, you looked sternly at him and said, “I tella you Sergio, I’ma NOT having a dog in dissa house!”
But even your great spirit was overcome by your illness and we watched your very being ebb away. I remember when I realised how this great unconquerable image of you that we all had, this indestructibility, was under threat. The day was Mother’s Day, but you didn’t know it. Your body was there but we didn’t know if your spirit was or where your mind had gone to. We found it hard to visit you, because you looked but didn’t appear to see us, you listened but we never knew if you could hear us. Your grandchildren kissed you but did you feel it? If only you knew how excited Fiora was to shout “Hello nonna!” but she was four and she didn’t mind that you never answered her because she knew you were Daddy’s Mummy and had never known you any differently. The older grandchildren preferred to remember Sundays at your house, with forbidden treats secretly placed in their pockets, pasta fagioli and all of that food. You only ever wanted your family around you, but later, when we were, did you even know we were there?
You didn’t deserve what happened to you; after all those years of hard work and sacrifice. Perhaps you finally had the tranquility that life saw fit to so frequently rob you of, that you could not feel the anxiety and worry any longer, but I wonder if maybe you would have liked nothing more than to feel i
t again?
You left us some time ago, Mum. We never said goodbye then because we stood at your bedside and waited for you to take your body with you. Now that you have finally gone, we can search again for those memories of the indomitable, incomparable woman you were, who would fight like a lion for us, even when we didn’t show you how grateful we were for it. We can banish the recent past and give new life to the happy memories of you that it is your absolute right that we should have above all others.
There was one blessing, Mum, when you were suffering. It was that we never had to tell you that your son Matteo had gone before you, that the boy you had shed so many tears for, suffered so much pain for, hadn’t made it, hadn’t outlived you. You would have felt that to be a failure, I know you would. But you didn’t fail, Mum, we want you to know that. If only you could have seen what we have all achieved, what your grandchildren have attained and what they have become. They will never know the hardships you knew, because you suffered them for us, and for them, and should they ever fall upon difficult times they can remember you and take from you the example of stoicism and sacrifice that you represent.
You see, Mum, I want to tell you that it was all worth it. I want to tell you that your fight was a good fight and that you won. That you had a fulfilling, worthwhile life, as noble, as distinguished and as glorious as any other. That your struggle was not in vain.
You did it Mum. You made it.
Your granddaughter Lea wrote a poem about you. Its final words I want to read to these people here because it reminds us how we should remember you. She composed it to remind your sons of what you did for us. In it, she tells us, this child of mine, what we should know, she stands up for you and your memory, and I can hear the force in her voice as she says;
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