Ice Cream, fish and chips . . . and fascism
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MIKE Maran is no stranger to touring in the Highlands, but even he hadn’t encountered the problem which arose after performing "Italia ’n’ Caledonia" in Lochinver at the start of his current tour.
They had just loaded up the truck when they contrived to break the ignition key. At midnight.
Fortunately it was not in the lock at the time.
"We had to get a local taxi to Edinburgh in the middle of the night, which was quite a journey," he said. "We got new keys and drove back to Lochinver to pick it up. It was all quite fun in a bizarre way, but very expensive!"
With luck no such calamities will befall Maran and accordionist David Vernon when they bring the show to Ardross and Inverness next week, where he can screen his treasured home movie to good effect.
"We have priceless colour film of the Italian community in Edinburgh having their annual picnic in Alva Glen in Clackmannanshire in 1936," he explained.
"We screen it at the start of the show, which is basically about these people. It gives the audience a real grip of who this story is about. My mother is in the film. I’ve had it in my possession for nearly 20 years — I got it from a man named Anthony Mancini, who is not a relative of mine, but was part of that community.
"It never occurred to me that it was something I would use publicly, but I showed it to a film director just to give him some idea of who the people were, and he was in tears. I was used to seeing it and had no idea of the impact it would have — he said ‘Mike, you must start with this film whatever else you do’."
The show chronicles the Italian presence in Edinburgh. Maran and his co-writer, Philip Contini, both grew up in that community and wrote the show for the Edinburgh Fringe 20 years ago, when Contini took over running the celebrated Edinburgh delicatessen, Valvona & Crolla.
"I used to shop there occasionally and he took me in to see a new room he had built at the back," Maran explained.
"As we stood there the idea occurred to us both to do a Fringe show in the room, with the aim of celebrating everything that was good about Italy and Scotland.
"We attacked it through rose-tinted spectacles, I would have to say now.
"Although I had grown up with it, I didn’t know a whole lot about the Italians in Edinburgh.
"I just had grandparents that spoke a bit funny and I drank wine with meals, but I was very much a Scottish boy.
"Philip probably knew more about it than I did. I was gob-smacked when I started to delve into it — it was too late to talk to my grandparents, but there were still elderly Italians around that were original immigrants."
Maran admits the most shocking revelation to him was the treatment of the Italians during World War II. As he grew up in post-war Edinburgh, the baddies in comics and films were always Germans.
He was shocked to learn that all Italians in Scotland were designated enemy aliens, and all Italian males between 16-70 were arrested and interned. Most of them went to the Isle of Man, but some were deported to Canada on the SS Arandora Star, which was sunk by a German U-boat off the west coast of Ireland, with around 900 fatalities.
"Almost every Italian family in Scotland lost someone," he said.
The sinking of the Arandora Star is now commemorated in a new memorial in the Italian Garden at St Andrew’s Cathedral in Glasgow. It remains a key element in "Italia ’n’ Caledonia", but Maran admits they have now grasped a more thorny issue.
"The thing that we didn’t really tackle in the original show was the mild embarrassment we felt about the fact that all these people were admirers of Mussolini," he said.
"They were Fascists and very proud of it, and some of them paid for it with their lives.
"Philip’s grandfather was the head of the Fascio in Scotland — that is why he was on the ship. In the film you will see him giving my mother a Mussolini-style fascist salute when he was presenting her with a prize for winning a race.
"Families were torn apart — my father and his brother fought for the British in the war. I felt then we were being brave even mentioning the issue then, but we never really dealt with it, and this time we have tried to create a context in which we could understand it.
"I don’t want to make it sound too serious, though — it’s still a lot of fun, and it’s still a story about fish and chips and ice cream."
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"Italia ’n’ Caledonia" is at Ardross Hall on Monday and the OneTouch Theatre, Eden Court, on Tuesday.
