Should I return to the land of my Italian ancestors?

When I was growing up, my Italian grandfather was my favourite person. He taught me to play a mean game of draughts. He told me stories about his childhood in a remote mountain village in Abruzzo. I couldn’t hear often enough about how he got the deep scar across the bridge of his nose.

He was standing as a little boy behind his father who had a pair of shears slung over his back and they fell and sliced his face. He told me they had to stick the adhesive strip of an envelope over the cut. My mother told him to be quiet every time he gave me the lurid details but I loved it.

The builder boyfriend and I have been thinking a lot about our heritage. Like many Brexit voters, we find the charge of ‘little Englander’ ironic.

We are a nation of immigrants, and the BB and I are hardly indigenous. We both have Italian mothers. My father is from Lancashire, but his father was brought to England by the Red Cross as a refugee orphan from Guernsey. The BB is French on one side, Italian on the other, a fact he finds amusing whenever a Remainer is berating him.

It is strange to have to explain that because our continental ancestors came to this country and were proud to become British, bequeathing that attitude to us, we are more distressed not less by our own patriotism now being frowned upon.

My grandfather was so keen to be British he anglicised his Italian surname to something quite ordinary. You wouldn’t hear of that today, but in those days it was what you did.

I never heard him speak Italian except to say ‘Come stai?’ or when he taught me to count to ten — if I could get to ‘otto nove dieci’, he would clap his hands.