by Felice Arena
‘Yes,’ the man says. ‘I’ve just come from there. The boy’s aunt, Signora Cicero, told me what happened but they haven’t heard from him since. Do you know where he is now?’
‘He was here for a short time, about a month ago, but I haven’t seen him since,’ she says sadly. ‘Signor Piccolo said he has seen him around the beachfront, and another friend of mine saw him in the piazza about a week ago. I think he just lives in the streets, like the wild child he is. Who knows where he hides and sleeps at night?’
But the man smiles.
Signora Lari notices his expression. ‘What is it?’
‘I think I know where he spends his time,’ he says. ‘Thank you, Signora.’
The man begins to walk away.
‘God bless the boy,’ Signora Lari calls after him.
He hops into a jeep and drives through the small town towards the bay. When he reaches the beach, he convinces an American soldier to take him out on a small boat to reach the next cove.
‘Over there,’ the man calls out, directing the soldier to steer the boat towards a sea cave, a little grotto carved into a steep cliff-face. When the boat reaches the grotto, the man steps onto the rocky ledge and wades into the cave.
For a moment he allows his eyes to adjust to the darkness of the grotto and then he sees a lonely figure curled up in a blanket.
‘Antonio?’ he says.
The boy jumps to his feet, startled.
‘Get out!’ he cries. ‘This is my place!’
‘Antonio, it’s me.’
‘Chris?’ the boy says, stepping forward until he can see the man’s face. ‘Why are you here? How are you here?’
Chris takes a silver pendant out of his pocket – on it is an image of a saint and on the saint’s shoulder is the baby Jesus.
‘Well, your Saint Christopher medal got me safely back home, but there was something missing. Apparently there was still one more traveller he had to help,’ he says, handing the pendant to Antonio.
Tears begin to run down Antonio’s cheeks.
‘I talked to my wife about a boy I met on the other side of the world. He needed a place where he could be part of a family, a place that he could call home, and I hadn’t been able to help him. But I thought maybe we could help him now,’ the spy adds. ‘When an assignment came in for me to return to Italy, I made some calls and discovered that things hadn’t worked out with your aunt . . . What do you think? Do you want to come and live with my family in America?’
Antonio rushes forward – and hugs Chris tightly.
Chris hugs him back. ‘I’ll take that as a yes, then?’ he asks.
Antonio nods.
‘So, andiamo!’ the spy says to the boy. ‘Let’s go home.’
FROM THE AUTHOR
The setting and characters in this story are especially close to my heart. My name means ‘happy’ in Italian and my mother was born in Sicily two years after World War II ended. My father, who is a few years older than my mum, grew up in a seaside town in the nearby southern Italian region of Calabria.
Life had become very difficult in Italy during and after the war and many Italians from these regions made the huge decision to leave. They emigrated to places like Canada, the US and Australia to seek better conditions for themselves and their families.
I’ve always wanted to write a novel about my parents’ experience, but every time I started to write it I’d struggle. I even took my parents on a trip back to their hometowns hoping that a story would present itself. But it didn’t. So I decided to let it go.
A couple of years ago, though, over dinner with my parents, the subject of ‘rotas’ came up. I hadn’t heard the term before and I was fascinated. It comes from the term ‘ruota delgi esposti’, meaning ‘the wheel of the exposed children’. Rota is an alternative spelling and I decided to go with that as I thought it would be easier for readers to pronounce.
My mum and dad were telling me about the stigma attached to being a ‘rota child’ back in ‘the old country’. Suddenly I could hear Antonio’s voice, loud and clear: ‘Write my story!’ he said. ‘I don’t want to be invisible any more!’
I had just finished the Andy Roid books – a series about high-tech secret agent missions – and I’ve always loved spy books and movies, so before I knew it, I was madly writing the story of Antonio’s adventures in a world of wartime espionage.
This story is fiction, of course, but I wanted to recreate the mood of that dark period in history and at the same time present Sicily as another character in the book. I visited and talked with relatives in Italy, read stories of the second world war and watched old newsreel clips.
If you’re interested in the history behind this story, you might like to read more about it. The invasion of Sicily by the Allies was codenamed ‘Operation Husky’ and it was the first of a series of attacks on German-occupied Europe – attacks that eventually ended one of the most terrible wars in history.
But not everything happened exactly as I’ve written it here. For one thing, the publication of The Little Prince was April 1943, and I set this story in May 1943 (two months before the invasion of Sicily). Chris would have left America for training in Africa before the book was published, but it’s one of my favourites and there are parallels with Antonio’s story. If you get a chance, borrow the The Little Prince from the library and see if you can figure out why I chose it.
As much as I loved writing the adventure and action in this story (and I hope you enjoyed reading it) this was always going to be more than a spy adventure. For me this story is about family and what that means. When I was a kid one of my closest friends told me he was adopted, and my first response was, ‘Are you going to find your real parents one day?’ He explained to me that his adoptive parents were his real parents. Families come in different shapes and sizes – I bet you know lots of different kinds of families. Each one quite different, but each one just as important and real.
I hope you’ll think of Antonio from time to time. I know I will. And now, my mind keeps drifting to Simonetta and her mum. What did they do after the bombing? Did they still work with the Resistance? Where did they go after the war? Perhaps there’s another story in that. Maybe I’ll write it. Or maybe you can!
Auguri! (Best wishes!)
Also by Felice Arena
The Specky Magee series
Specky Magee
Specky Magee and the Great Footy Contest
Specky Magee and the Season of Champions
Specky Magee and the Boots of Glory
Specky Magee and a Legend in the Making
Specky Magee and the Spirit of the Game
Specky Magee and the Battle of the Young Guns
Specky Magee and the Best of Oz
The Andy Roid series
The Sporty Kids series
and
Whippersnapper
Find out more at felicearena.com
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First published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd, 2017
Text copyright © Red Wolf Entertainment Pty Ltd, 2017
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ISBN: 978-1-76014-29
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