Prologue

Two months after my first wedding anniversary and five months before the birth of my first child I found myself on a plane heading to Pisa and the embrace of a fading Italian beauty I’d met two years before.

We were going to spend one last summer together, enjoying a carefree jaunt through Sardinia and Sicily and along the Amalfi Coast. Then, with my skin tanned and my belly full, I’d head back to my wife in London and all the responsibilities that impending fatherhood brings.

The whole affair had my wife’s blessing. Indeed it was Sally’s idea in the first place. She said that it was better that I got it out of my system now than waiting until after our daughter was born. I guess it helped that the faded Italian beauty in question had been instrumental in getting us together in the first place and was a 1961 Vespa called Sophia.

Those of you who have read Vroom with a View will know that I spent the summer of my fortieth birthday travelling from Milan to Rome on a coffee-coloured Vespa as old as I was. I rode past stone villas and fields of sunflowers, and the hook under the front of the seat was the perfect place for the breads, cheeses, hams and tomatoes that I bought fresh from markets in hilltop towns each morning. It was a magic three months with the sun on my skin and the smell of freshly cut hay in my nostrils.

Sally joined me for two weeks in Tuscany and then a weekend in Rome at the end. In Rome we pretended we were in Roman Holiday, scooting up cobbled streets past the Coliseum, right up to the Pantheon and to the tiny cafés and restaurants of Trastevere, ignoring police who tweeted at us with whistles. Sally made a good Audrey Hepburn. I was a decidedly low rent Gregory Peck. Within a year we were married. A few months later Sally was pregnant. As I’m fond of telling anyone who will listen, inviting your girlfriend to ride around Italy on a Vespa can have serious consequences.

Still, a wild, two-stroke-powered fling around the sunny parts of Italy can hardly be considered a traditional way of preparing for fatherhood. A quick surf through the multitudes of parenting websites on the internet indicated that I should have been painting the nursery, assembling the cot and attending birthing classes. At the very least I should have been sorting out life insurance.

Sally was the first to spot that I was having problems coming to grips with the idea of fatherhood. Don’t get me wrong. I was excited and elated about becoming a father. At forty-two years old I had long given up hope of doing my bit to help propagate the species. It was the prospect of added responsibilities – and the long-term nature of them – that I was having difficulty to coming to grips with.

I’d spent my entire adult life living like a student. I lived in share households. I spent most of my money on CDs. And when I scraped up enough money I’d disappear and wander around the world a bit. I never went hungry but there were times I got close.

Even the first year of my marriage to Sally had a touch of transience about it. We’d spent the first five months of it travelling around Australia in an old car. And a few months into the pregnancy we decamped to London to start a new life there.

Now I was meant to be the responsible one. Another tiny human being was relying on me to provide food and shelter. I’d spent most of my life avoiding responsibility and now I had the biggest one of all on the way.

It didn’t help that other fathers made fatherhood sound like a trial to be endured. One friend likened the arrival of a child to a bomb going off in your life. ‘A good bomb,’ he hurriedly corrected himself, but his scrambling only made it worse. A good bomb sounded like a euphemism for something really bad – like the term ‘collateral damage’ explaining away civilian deaths, or using ‘extraordinary rendition’ to describe being dragged off to Guantanamo Bay to have car batteries attached to your testicles.

So it was decided that I would spend the summer before my daughter was born with Sophia. Maybe Sally would join us for a week in July, around my birthday, somewhere on the Amalfi Coast. It would be the last week that she’d be able to fly.

I’d been dreaming of doing this trip since I’d finished the last one. I’d always imagined it as Sophia introducing me to the sunny parts of her country we hadn’t got to the first time round. Now it would be a valediction to my old life and the last chance to savour heady moments of freedom before settling down to two-hourly feeds and, eventually, the less exotic school run.

On the surface it looked like it would be all glorious beaches, gourmet meals and Camparis at sunset. But the sheer number of kilometres I’d be covering meant that I’d also get the chance to get my head together. The thing about riding a scooter, especially an old one, is that you get plenty of time to think. I needed to forget about birth plans and nappies and get my head around what was about to happen to me, to us. If I didn’t, no birth plan – no matter how detailed – was going to help.

I still felt guilty about going. Sally would be left to cope with her pregnancy on her own for a couple of months, and I’d miss the first few antenatal classes. Sally said she’d tell them that she was a single mum so when I turned up halfway through I’d be seen as some dashing chap, happy to get involved in the life of a child that wasn’t his. She also said she was looking forward to getting the whole bed to herself.

And so it was, right in the middle of Sally’s second trimester, in the twenty-fourth week of her pregnancy, that I boarded a Ryanair flight to Pisa. I felt like a sales rep going out on the road, leaving the wife and kids at home. Where your average sales rep has a snapshot of a loving family in his wallet, I had a twenty-two week scan. Sally told me not to start showing it to people – she thought that might be a little freaky. But she did suggest that I should pull it out occasionally and remind myself of the little baby on the way.

Sally and I said our farewells at Stansted airport, just outside WH Smiths, and I put my hand on her belly before I walked towards security. I tried not to seem too excited about my trip. For all my rationalising and Sally being magnanimous, it wasn’t really fair that I got this chance when Sally didn’t. So I held it in, pretending for both our sakes that it was just another job.

But I was excited. Two years after our first summer together I was heading back to Italy and into the embrace of Sophia.