Ye Wee Italian Bastird

Born into an Italian immigrant family in the early 1930s Renaldo Rossi gives, at times, a humorous insight into life as it was for him then. At the onset of World War II his young life was thrown into turmoil when, aged nine, he witnessed his father, now an enemy alien, being taken away in hand cuffs and he, his mother and younger brother being forced out of their home and taken to the west coast of Scotland and placed in the poorhouse, with tragic consequences. His later life took him in many directions, leaving the family business to work in the illegal world of gambling and to smuggling religious books and images into Communist Russia where he mingled with the people.