The 67-year march to “Angel of Petawawa”

On August 15, 1945, 25-year-old Attilio Favro walked off an army base in southwestern Ontario onto a road lined by thick stands of trees. It was a warm, rainy night and he was hitchhiking to Niagara Township, over a hundred miles away. Or rather he would have been hitchhiking, had he seen any headlights.

     And so, Attilio walked –– into and out of towns in the midst of celebration, the main streets filled with people singing, kissing, laughing, crying, praying, waving flags. Most of the time, he walked the road alone. Eventually he would walk out of a tumultuous time not only in his own life but in Canadian history.

      Attilio was my father –– or would be, years later, when Elvis was recording Jailhouse Rock. By the time I showed up, the birth of a baby had become old hat for him, with none of the drama of that night when his regiment was moving by train from their base in Petawawa, Ontario to the Pacific coast. Their orders were to board a troop ship to Japan –– to go help the Americans, as he put it to my mother –– but they had only made it as far as southwestern Ontario when the War ended. That same day, Attilio received a telegram from his father, informing him that he would soon become a father himself.

      Push come to shove, I would have gone AWOL, he told us, although that could have proved risky for an enemy alien. Instead he talked an officer into granting him a few days’ leave, after which he had to report back to Petawawa.     

     Ironically, Petawawa served not only as an army base but a prisoner of war camp for Italian Canadian internees and other enemy aliens. My father was not an internee but had been put on the list of enemy aliens in 1940, when Italy went to war against Great Britain and by extension her allies, including Canada. He was nineteen, the son of a Communist father who fled Italy to escape a fascist regime that had tortured and murdered like-minded friends in various gruesome ways. (My father’s description of castor oil as a weapon of torture sounded so absurd that I didn’t really believe him until I saw it depicted in the Fellini movie Amarcord.) But Communist or no, the family was ordered to report to a building with other Italian immigrants en masse, to be catalogued and fingerprinted and, if they owned guns, disarmed. Being an enemy alien meant that your movements were monitored; if you were planning to cross any type of border, even between municipalities, you were required to check in with the police. In my father’s line of work –– an electrician –– he had to cross municipal boundaries in the Niagara Peninsula several times a day, but was scrupulous about visiting the local police every time. He said the cops got tired of seeing him walk through the door.

     From what I understand, the implications of enemy alien-hood varied: for some it meant the check-ins Dad described. Others lost jobs or were denied schooling. Mounties could, and did, show up any time to search homes. (One of my mother’s favourite stories from that era was about my father and grandfather going to a friend’s house to rebuild the furnace, broken to pieces by the Mounties in a nighttime search for guns.)

     The one thing everyone worried about was being sent to an internment camp: a number of men from my parents’ neighbourhood ended up behind barbed wire at Petawawa under the War Measures Act. Some men were taken away for openly expressing Fascist sympathies. Others were accused of being ‘fifth columnists’ –– potential saboteurs –– by unnamed finger-pointers and never really understood why they were there. Still others believed that their only crime had been to gather in groups with other Italians at social clubs. The National Film Board’s 1997 documentary “Barbed Wire and Mandolins” includes interviews with a number of men and their families describing the round-ups. 

     Internees remained in camp for up to three years, their families sometimes falling into destitution. All the men were released without charges being laid. Some were drafted, returning to Petawawa as soldiers rather than prisoners of war.

     The Italian internment is a little known event in Canada’s wartime history, almost a footnote to it. It was not the sweeping round-up of Japanese Canadian families who lost not only years of their lives but the confiscation of property. Stories have been forgotten, events forgiven. But partly because they are so little known, these stories remain surprising, a snapshot of a very different time. Given today’s popularity of Italian culture –– from food to fashion to language –– it’s hard to imagine the atmosphere of distrust and dislike that prevailed even before War broke out. Numbering just over 100,000 in 1940, the Italian Canadian community had not reached the size it did after the War nor the respectability it enjoys today.

      But let’s return to enemy alien/infantryman Attilio, out walking the road. When my father told us the story of his journey on the last day of the War –– it was a family favourite –– there was one line we would anxiously wait for: All I could hear was the click-click-click of my heels on the wet cement. His sound effects always gave me a little shiver because they made him seem so utterly alone; I suspected he was worried about meeting a wolf, which had happened to him during basic training in Petawawa after falling up to his waist into a gully filled with snow. He was immobilized but well armed; the wolf took one look at his rifle and ran. But on that night at the end of the War all he had with him were his wits and a powerful determination to get home to the woman he loved (and his mother’s cooking).

   At last, a car pulled up. And not just any car: a Rolls Royce with a woman sitting in the back seat wearing a fur stole (a fur on a hot night –– that’s what Dad said, and he didn’t make things up, unlike his youngest daughter). She offered him a ride.

     Dad was always a little fuzzy about this woman but I visualized her as a rich matron, a Margaret Dumont type from the Marx Brothers movies with one of those mid-Atlantic accents and a corseted bosom. She most certainly would have had a chauffeur. The question always nagged me: who was she? And what was she doing, driving around in a Rolls that night? Why wasn’t she celebrating like everyone else? Did Dad talk to the driver? Dad provided none of these details; once the car picked him up, the story skipped forward to his arrival home, the wild partying going on in the main street of St. Catharines, the tragic death of teenaged revelers who fell to their deaths climbing a flagpole, and the family’s doctor, Michael Sabia, who leaned on his horn and forced his car through throngs of people so that he could attend to my mother. (Historical footnote: in the early 1970s, Dr. Sabia’s wife, Laura, would go on to be one of the founders of the National Action Committee for the Status of Women.)

     When we were  kids, we never questioned why Dad would go to such lengths to get home for the birth of his first child. But when I think about it, it seems odd. In 1945, lots of men were entirely unaware that they were fathers until the event was over. Certainly no one would have expected a soldier to return home for the birth of a baby. It didn’t make practical sense, and my father was a practical man whose heroes were Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla. Still, he must have had a streak of the romantic. Or perhaps he simply wanted to reassure his wife that hostilities really were over. For whatever reason he was determined to go home, even though he had to quickly turn around and return to Petawawa. (Dad would not be demobilized for another full year; I wonder now whether this was because of a belief that fresh troops should be kept in reserve in the event that a land war broke out with the Soviet Union –– but as we all know, that particular war was going cold, not hot.)

      And so, all of this found its way into “Angel of Petawawa” in Behind Barbed Wire, an anthology published as part of a remembrance project about Italian Canadians during the Second World War. Behind Barbed Wire was spearheaded by the Association of Italian Canadian Writers in partnership with Guernica Editions and Accenti Magazine, with the Columbus Centre of Toronto as co-publisher of the companion volume of non-fiction essays, Beyond Barbed Wire.

      “Angel of Petawawa” is a fictionalized account of my father’s journey home and the end of an era my mother still speaks about with some bitterness. Those who knew Dad would find it easy to recognize him as the main character ‘Mario’ right down to his shy stammer and love of science and technology. Although the story was, as the movies say, ‘inspired by real events’, I made the decision to write a fictional story in order to offer a fuller picture of the times and develop characters who remained shadowy in my father’s account ––  specifically, the woman in the Rolls and her driver –– as well as the interned friend whose furnace was torn apart in a search for guns. I also turned to fiction because of my own struggle with writing directly about my father in his youth; a short story felt like safer ground than memoir. But the themes at the heart of the story –– family love, friendship, loyalty –– are true to life.

     Behind Barbed Wire and Beyond Barbed Wire are launching in print and as e-books in Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa, Halifax and Toronto through March 2012. “Angel of Petawawa” has also been published in the Spring 2012 issue of Accenti Magazine and can be read online at www.accenti.ca