It was so clear, you know, whose side you were on.

Even though my dad was Italian, it was easy to be Australian for us kids. We were tall and blonde, and I had green eyes, while my siblings were blue. We had no trace of any kind of foreign accent. We didn’t run the local milk bar. And while we had, no doubt, exotic names, they were not identifiably Italian.

Any Australian kid who gets hooked on Australian history does so through a limited number of events. Ned Kelly, Gold, World War I. I got hooked on World War I. The reasons now are murky – a great history book, Wilfred Owen, a novel. Who can say? But in getting hooked, I wanted to some share in the wine-dark mud of those battlefields.

I found that share in my great uncle Harry. I had always thought that he had raised arms at Gallipoli – for many of us educated in the history classrooms of Australian secondary schools, Gallipoli was the only battle we had ever heard of – but I discovered he had, in fact, fought in the grim clays at Ypres and, if my research was any good, possibly at Passchendaele.

The side, as I say, was easy to pick.

The details of Uncle Harry World War I service were surprising accessible, so many heroes so far from home have been honoured through the amazing work of the Australian War Museum, now online. On that site, just by searching his name, I found his sign-up sheet, his embarkation list, his repatriation list. It seemed he was in the 14th Battalion – Albert Jacka’s battalion – and so I read through the diaries of that battalion. When I saw A Jacka’s signature on the bottom of some of these diaries, it was like touching (and this will seem sappy, possibly unlikely) Time.

‘I managed to get the beggars, sir,’ Jacka was reputed to have said when found by his CO having killed seven Turks single-handedly at Gallipoli. He had an unlit cigarette between his lips. He would win a VC for his efforts.

Uncle Harry’s sign-up sheet felt too precious to me. I pored over it – there were his father’s details, John Keenan – Big Da – on the form, knowingly assisting his older son onto the killing fields even though Harry was only seventeen and should never have been allowed to sign up. Harry’s painfully youthful signature, carefully rendered. Harry signed up in 1916, over a year after the landing at Gallipoli, and at least some months after the stories had begun to come in about the experiences in the Dardanelles. When Uncle Harry faced the field in 1917 at Ypres, at Passchendaele, he would be wounded – shot up with shrapnel in his hip and pelvis – and repatriated back home. He never spoke of his experiences to family as far as I’m aware.

I told my family of this story.

And then my father asked me whether I had researched his father’s war experience. This research had never occurred to me. My grandfather, my father’s father, had fought on the side of Mussolini in World War II. My grandfather joined the Grenadiers of Sardinia at the beginning of the war, and was on board the SS Francesco Crispi on 19 April 1943 when the HMS Saracen torpedoed it, and sank it. He was fighting for Mussolini and against the Allies. He fought with the Axis. He was a proud fascist. The research tells me this about the sinking of the SS Francesco Crispi: ‘Italian passenger ship of 7,464 tons, built in 1926 and used by the Italian Army as a troop transport was torpedoed and sunk by HMS Saracen off Punta Nere in position 42º46’N 09º46’E. The Francesco Crispi was en route from Leghorn to Bastia in Corsica when attacked. She sank with the loss of around 800 men.’*

So eight hundred men died when the SS Francesco Crispi went down. My grandfather was not one of them. He did, however, float about in the sea for hours before he was picked up by another ship – this one manned by Allied soldiers – and was then put in a prisoner of war camp for the duration of the war.

His history now descends into family legend.

There is no corroborating evidence for what comes next other than my dad telling and me listening. Once the war finished, or once Italy had swapped sides – this is not clear – my grandfather walked out of the gates of the PoW camp. He somehow had a loaf of bread. Who gave it to him or how he bought it is not clear. He had to get north, and with the war and with the peace, and with his years of incarceration and no money, his only option was to walk. So he walked. It took him nine months.

When he arrived at the town of Rovigo where he had last seen his family in 1940, my father was at school.

He was called home to meet his father. This skeletal man in the dining room was terrifying to my father’s schoolboy eyes. They sat at the table. His father reached into his bag and pulled out a loaf of bread, the loaf of bread he had tucked into his bag when he had left the gates of the POW camp. He had carried it for his family for nine months. It was mouldy right through to the centre. They sliced and ate it.

I can’t find much more out about the SS Francesco Crispi. The HMS Saracen I did find a little more. She was sunk in the same year as the SS Francesco Crispi, and received a memorial on Corsica for her service, and for the men who served in her. There was a dedication. There is no memorial to the men of the SS Francesco Crispi. Villains aren’t celebrated.

I had a share in this story too.

So nothing is really clear.

* http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/maritime-1a.html#maritime_disasters_1943