11 hours ago
My daring escape from the Italian police
Dante's Beach, Ravenna
I often feel as if I know what it was like to be a member of La Résistance in Nazi–occupied France because I have three disco-age daughters. Last week, the call-to-action stations flashed up on WhatsApp at 03.06, just as the cockerels were beginning to crow and the enemy was setting up his road blocks. 'Papà, can you come and get me?' It was Rita, aged 16.
'Where are you?'
'Marina.' Cristo bloody Santo! A 25-minute drive away. 'I can walk towards you,' suggested Rita, the little sweetie.
'No! Not if you're wearing a miniskirt,' I messaged back. 'Or hot pants.'
She had gone with a girlfriend to Marina di Ravenna, where all the fashionable summer discos are to be found on a dead-straight, three-mile stretch of road that tracks the beach. I felt not anger, but foreboding. To drive along such a road at such a time means running the gauntlet of the numerous types of Italian police, who include the polizia stradale, the vigili urbani and the carabinieri – the military police.
The Italian police spend most of their time, it seems, flagging down cars at random to test not just for drink and drug use, but whatever tickles their fancy. It is the difference between a country like Britain where you are free to do anything as long as the state has not stopped you from doing it, and a country like Italy, where you are not free to do anything unless the state has granted you the right to do it.
Police roadblocks, along with compulsory identity cards, are the most obvious manifestation of this. You must prove your innocence. So even during my periods of not drinking, as at present, to tackle such a road at disco closing time is asking for trouble.
'Papers!' they will bark, just like the fascist blackshirts used to. And off they will go to the squad car to check you out on the computer. Potential issues in my case include the possibility that our old black seven-seater Land Rover Defender is under an impoundment order for unpaid debt. If so, and the police stop it, they will seize it on the spot. There may, too, be one or two residual problems relating to my drink-driving record which is – dare I say? – pretty impressive. Six bans in all; three in Britain, and three in Italy. Yet I have never had a road accident in all my decades at the wheel.
That night, for better or worse, as I set off to retrieve Rita, I was stone-cold sober. I know more or less where the police set up their roadblocks round here and how to avoid them, but on that long straight road through the distant land of disco the police can see you a mile off and there are virtually no side roads to disappear down. My fate was largely in the hands of God.
I reached the danger zone without seeing a single police car, but then, ovviamente, there they were: two of them – a patrol car and van, vigili urbani, glorified traffic wardens with weapons, the worst of the lot because the most petty-minded. They were parked up behind a couple of pine trees with their blue lights switched off, the sneaky swine. Luckily, they were on the other side of the road and dealing with another car as I drove on towards Rita. I'd have to think of something on the way back.
Lovely Rita! Oddly enough, the previous day I had found a document on the stone floor of the room they call my 'study'. I picked it up and opened it in case it was something important like a threat to seize money, but no, it was an old school report of mine from when I was Rita's age, at the start of the academic year in which I took my A-levels one year early – something I have always felt was wrong. The young should not be forced to give up their youth too soon. Who would have thought that report would end up on the floor of a farmhouse in Italy half a century later? It felt like an omen.
Eventually, there was Rita, a shimmering apparition in white, picking her way along the road next to the pine forest separating it from the beach. She had disobeyed my orders, of course, and had started walking.
We set off. She seemed as sober as a judge, so I asked her to keep her gimlet eyes fixed on the road and tell me as soon as she saw the enemy roadblock. On we drove, towards dawn and destiny, and then she said in a hushed voice: 'There it is, I think.' She was right. There was nothing for it: U-turn, or else we were dogmeat. We were still about 100 yards away from them on the dimly lit road, so there was a chance they would not abandon their roadblock and give chase.
Fate was with us and they did not come after us. The alternative route home meant a longer journey, but such was the euphoria of escaping safe and sound, who cared?
At long last we arrived at the dirt track where we live. The blood-red sun was coming up over the sea as I stopped the Defender and opened the windows wide. The wonderful sound of nightingales filled the air. 'Give me a five!' I said to Rita. She did.
