THAT magnetic actor/producer Tom Conti is visiting the Isle of Man this week.
His father, Alfonso, was one of the many Italian so-called enemy aliens detained behind barbed wire in Douglas seafront boarding houses and hotels in the Second World War.
Mr Conti is making a BBC Radio 4 documentary about this aspect of what might be called his Manx ancestry.
Welcome to the Isle of Man, Mr Conti. I have a story for you.
In 1943 or 1944 I was a junior pupil at Douglas High School. My father was in the RAF. We lived at Studley House on Queen’s Promenade, now down under a block of apartments.
Other people like us had been turned out of their houses with two weeks’ notice by the UK Government to make room for the thousands of internees coming.
We were lucky. We didn’t have to move out.
Our place was taken over as billets for the camp guards. In time the guards went elsewhere and Ma was able to go back to taking visitors, although not as many as there used to be during the summer.
Once our only guest was an Italian lady. She had told my mother her husband was an internee and she had come to visit him at his internment camp.
She was upstairs one evening when Ma had a neighbour, Mrs Gahan, round for a fireside chat in our living room and I was doing my homework.
We weren’t expecting other callers so it was a surprise to hear the outside front door being opened and somebody walking up the hall quietly past our closed living room door and going upstairs to the bedrooms.
Ma and Mrs Gahan and me sat there in wide-eyed silence.
Ma decided I should go to bed while she dealt with the matter. She wanted me out of harm’s way. She didn’t take into account that it could be the Mad Axeman waiting for me upstairs.
Ma told me what happened later.
She rang the police. They turned up with Army officers from the guardhouse at the internee camp just up the prom from us.
They had come because an Italian detainee had escaped that very evening.
The Army and the police went upstairs and took the Italian couple away and that was the end of it for us.
But looking back on it, as I grew up I came to harbour the fervent hope that they waited a decent interval before going up and knocking on the Italian couple’s bedroom door.
We never heard anything more about them so I don’t know if our visitor was called Alfonso.
• THE Examiner had a report of a meeting of Castletown Commissioners at which there was a discussion relating to a body called the Southern Local Authorities Group (SLAG).
When was it founded? Is it an old slag?
• THE international news supplied to Manx Radio by Sky included the following: There’s a warning Britain’s energy reserves are on a downward rollercoaster.’
I’m glad I’m not on it as well.
• RICHARD Hetherington sends in the following Manx clue from a Daily Telegraph crossword book: Local dignitary plants tree on island (8) – ALDERMAN.
• THIS week’s new media collective noun: A Shorthand of Journalists.
