(Canscene) “How does it feel to be 90?” everyone asks me. I’ll let you into a secret….. no different from being 89.

But it has become a time of evocation when often, unbidden, thoughts of other times, places and people come to mind. Like:

*** My first visit to Italy at four which, through change in surroundings, completely wipes out all earlier infanthood recollections. The sights, first Paris and the Eiffel Tower then the long overnight train ride to Rome and its marvels. Then on to Saints Cosma and Damiano for my one and only stay with paternal grandparents, the formidable Don Silvestro and Nonna Concetta.

*** My first exposure to film and the beginning of a lifelong passion. At the annual saints’ day in San Cosma watching a film projected onto a huge sheet outdoors. On screen, there’s a man in white tie and tails wearing a pig’s head mask. Years later, as I watch Cinema Paradiso, my eyes moisten.

***While enrolled at a Jesuit college, making an agonizing decision of conscience to skip religious instruction because I can’t believe in the infallibility of popes. How do I, at thirteen, get the courage when on other occasions, I’ve caved in to pressure?

***Standing my ground leads to my parents being asked to withdraw me and remove me to another private school which one year, organizes a memorable hiking trip to Denmark.

There, bathing nude close to Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid statue, meeting teenage Danish peers at youth hostels for sing songs and hiking through a wooded countryside. The outdoor cafe just outside the Tivoli gates where I surreptitiously enjoy my first glass of beer. The taste of the Danish porridge and snacks purchased from windowed smorgasbord machines in train stations and other public places.

*** And always, the affection of parents and maternal grandparents. No less, the thoughts of those in Italy. In my father’s papers I discover a letter from Nonno Silvestro written in an old man’s shaky hand and expressing deep concern over the fact I’d been hospitalized with scarlet fever.

***After the Dunkirk evacuation, on the run in France with the hastily put together E Field Battery. After a few days it becomes obvious we’re part of a risky feint — to convince the enemy the remaining forces are holding the line until troops refit and return to France.

Lieutenant Lawrie and I, as driver, are reconnoitering the Normandy countryside when coming straight toward us is a German armoured car. Lawrie cocks my rifle as we spot to our immediate left a side road and for the first time I experience cornering on two wheels. Our light truck lands back on all four and we bump through what is no more than an unmapped cart track for miles. The armoured car can’t follow us through such a narrow passage.

We find suitable sites, dig gun pits and retreat, often by night. And dig and retreat. Mercifully, food is plentiful from abandoned village stores and those humans we do encounter treat us well. One terrible day we are dug in by a main highway when we watch the hours long retreat of French forces; that same evening we learn that Paris has fallen.

Eventually, we have fallen back to the sea and are awaiting evacuation at Cherbourg. I am one of ten drivers ordered back north to Caen to pick up some stranded Cameron Highlanders. We’re under command of second Lieutenant Oakes, a seedy recent arrival who, short of our rendezvous, takes fright and commands his reluctant driver to return to Cherbourg. The kilted ones are no longer at the rendezvous having obviously seized other opportunities of transportation. We pick up other uniformed stragglers and head back to Cherbourg. Machined gunned from the air twice on our return trip, but make it safely to learn that the entire Battery is embarking without a single loss. In Southampton, we’re treated like royalty, but saddened to learn that the Battery is to be disbanded. Today, nearly seventy years later I can find no mention of it in British Army records. In retrospect one understands why we were expendable, but we gave no cause for shame to the Allies and wonder why here’s no trace of E Field Battery in military records.

*** In Italy, as war ends, I’m eventually posted to something mysterious called MMIA where deeper lifelong ties to Italy are to begin. After three weeks of hitchhiking from Cattolica up to the Yugoslavian border then back to Naples I find the MMIA is in Rome and I’m a now staff sergeant and interpreter translator. We call it the “Mamma Mia” but it’s the Military Mission to the Italian Army a branch of the Allied Commission. Here I pass the last year of my six and a half in uniform — very often in civilian dress enjoying the company of Roman friends.

*** I’m free again and employed by the Rank Organization as a story analyst and an earmarked trainee for better things, but fate intervenes in a government-initiated slump in the British Film industry. Canada calls.

*** Two weeks after arrival in Toronto, a young RCAF vet (friend of friends in England but whom I’ve never met) invites me by telegram to his home in Woodstock for a New Year’s Eve party, even finding me a tux. Bill McVean then takes me with him to the radio station in Wingham through roads flanked by piles of snow higher than our car. He’s DJ, newscaster and host of an interview show there and puts me on the air a few times. Bill is still broadcasting today on Oakville’s CHWO.

Bill McVean (with golf club) and Ben Viccari

***At the groundbreaking for The Toronto International Film Festival’s new headquarters, I’m handed a glass jar of rich black earth from the excavation site. It stays with me today as a reminder of my first job, on Toronto’s John Street at whose corner (with King) the building is rising.

At 126 John, literally my first try at a job from a long list Bill McVean has helped me get, I’ve just been hired by W.Gordon Turnbull, president of the now defunct and all-Canadian Turnbull Elevator Company. Knowing already that there’s prejudice in the land, I volunteer heritage information. “W.G.” tells me Canada is in for big changes and diversity will be a good thing for the nation. Surprise! I’m hired to start a company magazine at $35.00 a week. This, after only three weeks in the country!

Long gone, the Turnbull company as been replaced by an Indigo/Chapters store, but the original facade at and above the entrance has been preserved and each time I pass, I look up to the second floor at a window behind which my office was located.

*** Above all, I remember witnessing the first chuckles of my infant children and grandchildren.

–30–

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