A Happy Man

Jan 2012

By Jack Krayenhoff
Photo by Jack Krayenhoff

Occasionally you meet somebody with a name that matches his job, like Baker, or his physique, like Short.

Harry AmabilinoBut here we have a man called Amabilino, and you don't need to be a great linguist to recognize that this is Italian for "Amiable One," a perfect description of this 93 year-old gentleman whose great-great-grandfather came indeed from Sicily. His first name is Harry, for he is a thorough-going Londoner). When he opens the door of his apartment to me, Harry Amabilino is courteous, taking my coat and offering me a cup of coffee right away.

Harry was suggested to me as a good man to interview because he had been in WW II and had some good stories to tell, so let us start there. But let me say first that the most memorable part of him was not those stories, but the impression of an engaging and cheerful man with whom one feels at home right away.

World War II stories? No, he doesn't want to talk about the war. "There's nothing good about it," he says. Oh well, he relents a little to recall the case of a fellow in barracks in India, who had been sent to fetch a big can of yellow paint. On the way back, on the corner of the parade ground, he stumbled and spilled it all. He tried to mop it up but it was too big a mess for that. So instead, he made a neat yellow square out of it. "Nobody queried it, and if I know the Army, they are still painting that yellow square at the corner of the parade ground."

And then, more recently, that time when he went to London. He wanted to be close to the centre, so somebody had told him about the Regent Palace Hotel, next to Piccadilly Circus. He went to see his room to unpack, but then discovered that the door could not be closed.

He called the desk and was told someone would be there in ten minutes. "Well, the ten minutes took an hour," he says, but they fixed the door. Down to the restaurant for roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. In the middle of the meal, bells started clanging. The waiter came and asked the guests to wait outside. They did, and the fire trucks came, but it was just a smoke alarm. So back to the restaurant, for a fresh plate of roast beef with Yorkshire pudding. It was now late, so he went upstairs to do some reading in bed. Above the bed there was a light with a chain dangling. To turn it on he pulled the chain, and the whole fixture crashed down. Another call to the front desk. They would send somebody along. That took a while, so he fell asleep. At two in the morning he woke up with a start, for somebody was a banging on his door: "I hear you need a new light bulb." But having seen the true dimensions of the problem, the fix-it man decided he should leave it till morning.

But back to Harry himself. He speaks about his wife who died in 1998, after a marriage that had lasted for 58 years. The way he talks about her makes it clear they were a very happy couple. They were already married when he went to war, and he was gone for 4½ years. "And was your wife waiting for you when you came home?" "Boy-oh-boy, yes!" he says. "The day of reunion was marvellous. We were in London, and she had had the great courage to buy an apartment at the time London was being bombed for me to come home to. When I did, I swore I would never leave England again."

"But here you are in Victoria."

"Well, I did have sisters in Canada, but the great advantage of this country is that you can build your own home here. That was unthinkable in the Old Country." So in 1951 the couple came here and bought a lot on Haro Road, off Arbutus. "That was in the sticks in those days," Harry remembers. He and his wife felled the trees with a big cross-cut saw, and built a house. However, when it was finished and they got their first property tax assessment, they realized they could not afford it, so they had to move (but they did get their own house a little later). Harry made his living doing accounting for a construction firm.

"How did you feel about retiring?"

"It's the best thing anybody can do. Take it, life is short," says Harry, forgetting he himself is 93. "My wife and I could do things together now. We travelled around England a lot. We had a wonderful life."

"And since your wife died, and also because you are older now, do you get lonely?"

"Well, you don't get so many Christmas cards. We had only one child, a daughter, but I had four siblings, my wife nine, so that way I got many nephews and nieces, and nephews-in-law and nieces-in-law, and grand-nephews and grand-nieces. So for Christmas dinner we sat around the table with seventeen people. Besides, I meet people in the buses, I have friends right here in the building. It's amazing how they pile up. I used to belong to a cycling club, but I gave that up a couple of years ago (when he was 91!); it was getting too dangerous."

"What do you think about James Bay?"

"It's the finest place to live in. I almost said the finest place in the world to live in. I go to the Centre, and everything is there: doctor, dentist, everything you need. I love walking along all these beautiful houses. There's a bus stop right outside my front door, and you don't even need a schedule. There's always one coming within a few minutes."

The tape on my little recorder is coming to its end, so I ask, "So what sort of a life have you had?"

Harry does not hesitate a second: "I've been very, very lucky in my life."