Chapter 1

When I was young, I was the butt of jokes in the family. My parents often threw up their hands and declared. “Marcie, you really have no idea!” My name is Marcello Gambino, son of Italian immigrants who had come to England to get away from the stifling weight of family history in the old country.

I had been born in England, in the Royal Berkshire Maternity Unit in Reading. My parents had done well for themselves, and we lived in a very nice house on All Hallows Road, Caversham. I went to the primary at Micklands and secondary at Highdown. The first was all right, the second was a terrible time for me.

My family wasn’t different from the other Italian families in the area, just the latest of a long line of immigrants. My great-grandparents had come to the area in the late forties, to get away from post-war Campodorato. Now a good olive oil area, then it was blasted and bare. They had brought their youngest children with them, leaving my grand-parents behind, having already started their own family. My father was the youngest of six and got out of there as soon as he could afford it. My parents and my oldest sister, Angelica, arrived in Reading in the late nineties. The next daughter, Sophia, came along in twenty-o-five, with me arriving in twenty-o-nine.

What this meant was that I had family still in Italy, and an established family of aunts, uncles, and cousins here in England. Nearly every generation of boys had a Marcello in it, so, by the time I came along, every variation of the name was in use, so that when the family talked about the offspring, there was Mart, Marty, March, Cello, Chill, and me – Marcie. I don’t think anyone considered the peril that put me in at a school with a lot of Anglos, to whom Marcie was a girl’s name.

The earliest time I can remember being told that I had no idea was when I was about four. My sister, being in primary not long after I was born, used the baby me as a live doll. When I was old enough, my mother would take me to a local playground, where I played with boys my age. One day, my sister was in her room with some of her friends from the primary school, and they decided that the pictures of me as a doll were so wonderful, they would recreate the look. I had forgotten the earlier times, and they had a rude awakening when they tried to strip me and put me into a dress. I did not co-operate as expected and got a “You have no idea of how to play, Marcie,” when I pushed my sister over. Of course, that got a slap on the leg from my mother.

The next time that looms large in my memory was in my second year at primary school. We had done all the messy things in the first year and was expected to do normal things as we aged. We were given some paper and crayons and told to draw and colour a nice picture. I had seen a TV program about Picasso that my parents had watched before I went to bed, and it struck me as a great way to see the world. My abstract did not do down well alongside the houses, fields, trees, and cute animals that the others had tried to draw. The fact that my picture was good, in my eyes, held no water. It was “Marcie, you have no idea about art!”

As I got older, the list of things that I had no idea about grew longer. I had no idea about mathematics, sneaking a calculator into class before I got caught. I had no idea about spelling; that was one I did agree with. I had no idea about playing soccer, hitting back when I was tackled and putting the ball into our own goal because I could. I had no idea about table manners, dealing with relatives, looking out for my sister, holding my baby niece for a photo. (She was heavy! No wonder I dropped her.)

It was when I got into secondary school that my life became almost too much to bear. The school did not have a reputation as one full of bullies for fun. My name, as such, wasn’t unusual, as about five other Marcello Gambino’s had attended. I was the first one with the nickname of Marcie, and that sealed my fate for five long years, only tapering off as I got older than the rest of the school. The best thing was that my sister and her friends were at Queen Anne’s School, so I didn’t have to put up with them at all.

The worst thing was that I was a short, weedy, kid called Marcie. I was always picking up my schoolbooks that had been ‘dropped’; going to the lost and found to retrieve my clothes after soccer, and seeing the nurse about various cuts and bruises I had received from running into a whole list of things.

I truly had no idea about a lot of things. Many of which got me detention. I caused a small fire in the chemistry laboratory, destroyed the geography teacher’s globe when I pointed out a location with my dividers. How did I not realise that it was an inflatable one? I got lost on a cross-country run and it took the police several hours to find me, about five miles off-course.

My parents, bless them, took me to the doctor to see what was wrong with me. He heard what they told him and sent me to a clinic for testing and evaluation. The result was that a highly paid specialist with a bow tie and a stethoscope around his neck told them that I was suffering from neurodiversity. They didn’t know what he meant, so took it seriously. At that time, I was about fifteen, and I looked it up on my computer. I decided that it was the latest catch-all phrase that doctors used when they didn’t know what was wrong with you and were too lazy to try and find out.

As far as I was concerned, I was quite normal, but he had decided I wasn’t. I wasn’t autistic, I didn’t have ADHD, I didn’t have PTSD (difficult to have when you’re fifteen and have never been in a war zone – other than school, that is.) I could be classed as having difficulties in maths, reading, writing and co-ordination, but none of that had stopped me getting good marks, as well as that fitting about half of the other kids in the school. In the end, it was money well spent, as I now had a label.

At the end of school, I had no idea about what I wanted to do with my life. I had a laptop computer full of my drawings, all abstracts of differing garishness. I had never thought that I could use them as a stepping-stone to any future job. Not in Reading.

I ended up helping my father in his pizza shop. If there’s one thing that we Italians can do, is make pizza. Naturally, I was considered to have no idea when I started making square ones. I thought that they fitted the oven and the boxes better. What I did have, though, was a sense of design and the ability to paint, if only walls. I helped my father redesign the pizza shop to cater more for the various courier gigs, renamed the shop as Game On Pizza, catering for the thousands of kids now stuck in their bedrooms playing online games.

After that, my father got me another job as a general hand, helping a friend of his with a removal business. At least, I didn’t have to think too hard with that one. When I got the job, I left home and found a flat. Then, with my savings, I bought the motorcycle that my parents would never allow me to have. I had joined a large club, online, and had gone to a couple of their social events, all without my mother finding out. When it came to getting a bike, I asked those who lived near me and one of them took me to a shop where I ended up with a rough Yamaha 650, with a home-made sidecar attached.

The other guy had ridden sidecars and taught me how to make it do what you wanted it to do, by steering it with the throttle. I was able to go along to my job now, without worrying about the bus. They had been told about my apparent clumsiness, and never let me lift anything breakable. Usually, they sent me into cluttered rooms to move the bits and pieces out into the corridor so that they could be moved or thrown out. It was steady work, and I was starting to be considered as actually having an idea, after all. We did removals but were also the go-to crew when it came to filling containers.

It was a house near Twyford that changed my future. The family had only started renting the house around ten years before and were now emigrating to Australia. We had put all the main things into a container and had filled the empty spaces with all their cutlery and crockery, wrapped in blankets. There were cases of clothing, boxes of personal items, and everything that you can’t carry on an aeroplane.

There were a lot of things that they were leaving. All the beds and wardrobes, for a start, as well as the refrigerator. They had taken their near-new lounge suite and dining suite, along with a lot of chairs and tables from around the house. The house was quite large, but very run down. I had gone to the top of the house and was in a small boxroom when I heard a shout for me to come down. The previous renter of the house paid the boss and was getting into the taxi when he turned to me.

“We have everything that we want to take, the rest is rubbish. If there’s anything you want, it’s yours.”

I was told that the job was over and to drop the house keys with the real estate agents on my way home. I had my motorcycle and sidecar and had done the same tidying up before. I realised that there was a lot of bits and bobs still to be looked at in the boxroom. I took my time to sort through, finding some nice ceramics that I would get a few pounds for at a dealer that I knew in London. I wrapped them in remnants of linens that I had discovered in a forgotten linen cupboard and put them in the sidecar.

I double-checked the boxroom, but the remaining stuff needed a tip run. Except for a step ladder leaning against the wall. It wouldn’t fit on the sidecar, but I had a look to see how good it was. It was covered in dust, obviously not used in many years. It was good enough to come back with a van. The more I looked at it, the more a voice in my head told me that it was out of place, here at the top of the house.

I went out of the room and walked the upper corridor while looking at the ceiling. Near the top of the stairs, I saw the outline of a trapdoor. Nobody had said anything about this house having an attic. By the dirt on the rungs, it had been many years since someone had been up there. Intrigued, I went all the way downstairs to where we had left some rags for me to put in the bin. Taking a handful, I went back up and carefully wiped the rungs of the ladder and then carried it out to position it under the trapdoor.

When I got up, I pushed it up and it swung open on hinges. The edge of the hole had been reinforced and I was able to go up a few more steps and pull myself into the attic. The first thing I noticed was the dirt, the webs, and the dark. This meant a climb back down and a trip to my bike to get the LED light that I had in case of breakdowns at night. Back up in the attic I set the light so I could inspect the space.

It was quite large, and there were boxes, some suitcases, and old dressmakers dummy next to an ancient sewing machine, and what looked like two bedside chest of drawers. The space had a proper floor, so there was no chance of me finding myself in the room below, so I started to look more closely to the contents. The dummy had rotted, and the sewing machine was not old enough to be worth anything. The drawers in the two chests contained women’s underwear and stuff. Two boxes has shoes, one had hats. The suitcases had a lot of women’s clothes. Behind the boxes, there was an old chest, with the hasp held secure with what looked like a very old combination lock.

I had a similar one on my pushbike when I was younger and had been told how easy it was to break the code. All you had to do was exert a little pressure on the shaft and work the dial that was the hardest to turn, until there is a slight movement of the shaft. Then you repeat with however many sets of numbers there are until it opens. I carefully applied my learning, and it took just five minutes before I could open the chest.

When I shone my light into it, I could see crockery with tissue between the plates. When I lifted the tissue off the top plate I almost fainted. There, in all its glory, was one of the Picasso plates. It was one with a simple sketch of a man playing a horn to a goat. After my primary school attempt at copying the master, I had read a lot about him and his history, knowing that he had started making ceramics around the same time that my great-grandparents had arrived in England, and worked with ceramics for a good twenty years.

I took it out and turned it over. There, as it should be, was the stamp of Madoura and the mark that it was original Picasso. The true collectors’ items, the limited editions, were signed on the front. Even the one I was holding was worth some thousands of pounds. The plate underneath was a face. Alongside that pile was a pile of oblong plates, with the top one showing the unmistakable talent of the master. I sat back, wondering what I was going to do now.

I put both plates back where I found them and ran my fingers down the piles, counting. I was sitting there with fifteen round, and fifteen rectangular plates. If all of them were Picasso, then I was looking at close to fifty thousand pounds worth. And the man had told me it was all mine as he left. There were other items in the chest, looking like vases. I was too amazed to look at them here. I closed the chest and had another look at the drawers. This time, I lifted the various items to look underneath. In one, I found certificates, one was a birth, in the name of Geraldine Angelica Ramie, the other was for the death in the name of Geraldine Angelica Hubert. She was born in nineteen thirty-five, and died in nineteen eighty-four, of a heart attack. Under fifty is way too early to die. My own family all lived into their nineties, despite the harsh conditions in Italy.

I made up my mind. Leaving it all in place, I went back down the stepladder, closing the hatch as I went. I carried the ladder into the box room and locked the house as I went. I rode to where the boss kept his trucks and asked if I could borrow a van in the morning. I told him that there was a good stepladder in an upper room and that I would bring it back for him.

At home, I unloaded what I had saved and put it in a pile in the front room. I didn’t have that much in there as I mainly lived in the kitchen. I had a laptop and looked up Geraldine Hubert on the web. I verified the death in England. I did find a marriage to Francois Hubert, in London, in nineteen sixty-five. Her maiden name was Ramie, and her birthplace matched the certificate I had seen as Vallauris. She must have been a cousin to Jacqueline Roque, born in nineteen twenty-seven, so had known Pablo Picasso between nineteen fifty-two and her coming to England, some time before nineteen sixty-five. The Ramie’s had the Madoura Pottery.

This meant that the contents of the chest has an impeccable provenance. Jacqueline had worked for the pottery in sales. What I wanted to do, the next day, was to remove all the ceramics from the attic to a safe place in the house, where I could lay them out and catalogue them, before packing them to bring home with me. I would have to have a very good look to find any paperwork that established the ownership and to find if there was any mention of them in any wills. It would take a while, and I needed to be very quiet about what I was doing.

Tonight, though, I was going out for a meal at a pub near the house, to see if I could talk to anyone who had known the Huberts. The house was south of the railway station and only a walk from it, so good for commuters. The closest pub was the Golden Cross, just north of the station. I had a shower and dressed neatly, then rode the Yamaha there.

When I got there, I was disappointed, as it was not one where you could dine. I had a half of Timothy Taylor, looked at the young clientele and left. I got back on the bike and went a little further away from the house, finding the Duke Of Wellington, an old-fashioned pub in a timbered building and with a large number of older drinkers. I looked around and saw the oldest looking man with a large Guinness in front of him. I went over to him.

“Excuse me, sir, but I’m writing a story on the Huberts, who lived near here, for my literature course. Did you know them?”

“It’s Huberre, lad. They was both French. Get me another of these and I’ll tell you about them.”

“I was thinking of getting a meal, is there anything you’d like?”

“Couldn’t go past a plate of bangers and chips, lad.”

I went and ordered two serves of the sausages and chips, a Guinness for him to come out with the meal and a pint of IPA for me to take with me. When the barmaid gave me change, she gave me a wink.

“Old Albert’s the man if you’re looking for gossip. Mind you, his memory for facts can be hazy.”

I thanked her and went back to sit opposite Albert.

“My name is Marcello Gambino, and I am looking into the local history of Geraldine Hubert”, now pronouncing it in the proper way.

“Lovely lady, she was. I did their garden for a few years. Always brought out some tea and told me to rest. She did a bit with the church. Don’t know what her background was, except that she would tell me stories about life in the French Embassy after the war. Him! He was a jumped-up little bastard. Always strutting about like he owned the place. He was at the bank, and in the local lodge, along with his good friend, the Doctor. They used to play golf together.”

He paused to take a swig of his drink, while I took a sip of mine. A lass came to the table with cutlery and, when she left, I took the plunge.

“The writings, from the day, said that she had a massive heart attack?”

“That lady was as strong as an ox, until the cancer got to her. It started simple, but they didn’t get it all when the operated. They say that there are some cancers that don’t show until they’ve been opened to the air. Two years after the operation she was bed bound. I think that he did her in, with the Doctor signing off on it. It would have been a release for her, but not really legal. I kept my thoughts to myself, but I’ve always wondered.”

Our meals came out, along with his drink, and we busied ourselves with the food. Except for some more anecdotes about the family, he didn’t add much to his story. That, though, was a lot more than I had known. When I rode home, I had a full stomach and the background that helped. Her things may have been put into the attic to get them away from her husbands’ sight. Nothing up there was too big to go through the opening. My worry, now, was how to get it all down. In order to be able to discuss the provenance, I needed to know as much as I could.

The next morning, before I went to collect the van, I went to the estate agent. Going in, I saw the manager.

“Excuse me, sir. I was at the house at Twyford yesterday, helping pack a container. Do you have someone waiting to go in?”

“Not at the moment. When I did the final inspection, I realised that it needed a lot of work to be able to be rented out. Why do you ask?”

“I thought the same thing. I wondered if you would allow me to live there while I did the repairs and redecoration, with you supplying the paints, of course.”

“Why would you do that for me?”

“I live in a small flat in Reading, and I want to start painting pictures. I have done a lot on my computer, but don’t have the room to keep an easel set up. I expect that it could take three to four months to work through the house. I was in a box room yesterday that looked like no-one had been there in over ten years. I do have some experience with redecoration as I redesigned the family pizza shop and painted it.”

“I know that shop, you did a grand job there. I’ll tell you what we’ll do. I’ll come to the house tomorrow and well inspect it together. If we agree on the decoration, I’m prepared to let you stay there for up to six months. If it works out, that house will sell at a premium in the first couple of weeks.”

I kept the keys and rode the bike to pick up the van. On the way to the house, I picked up an extending ladder and a number of plastic crates that I would be able to lower down by the rope I also bought. I added a pair of rechargeable floodlights on tripods that would light up the attic and allowed me to see easily.

At the house, I opened up and opened some windows. I took all my goodies up to the top landing and set them near the trapdoor. Then I got the stepladder and went up to open the trapdoor, before taking the stepladder away and putting the extending one up so that it protruded into the upper space. I could now climb right into the attic. I took the stepladder down and put it in the van, locked up and took the van back.

When I got back with the sidecar, I had some biscuits and a box of teabags. I had seen a kettle in the kitchen and the gas worked. I found the main power and switched it all on. In the kitchen, the fridge started to work. Upstairs, I took the lights, one by one, and set them up in the attic, with the space now as light as day. Then I took the plastic boxes up along with the rope. When I was ready, I went towards the chest and opened it again. As I gazed on the contents, a female voice spoke to me.

“You’re back!”

Marianne Gregory © 2024