Vivante, Arturo (1923- ). "The Jump."

Vivante's narrator is a middle aged artist, an Italian (now an American citizen) who ponders a step not taken in this short story which is set in the early 1970s. Looking back over his life, the narrator relates how his anti-Fascist family had fled Italy in the late 1930s and sought refuge in England. Italy's entry into the Second World War had turned them (illogically) into enemy aliens, and the-then 16 year old narrator was placed in an internment camp; in July 1940 he was shipped across the Atlantic to another internment camp in Canada. Ironically, his fellow internees included very-real Italian Fascists, as well as captured German prisoners of war and Germans civilians caught in Britain when war had broken out. Once in the protected waters of the St. Lawrence River, the Italian boy briefly considers jumping overboard and swimming to shore (he'd been a champion swimmer at his English boarding school prior to internment) but in the end decides to stay aboard the ship and the known (read: safe) routine of internment. Years later the discontented artist thinks back on that trans-Atlantic journey and wishes"that long, long ago he had taken a step he hadn't taken - a jump, really." Vivante's story is particularly evocative of in his descriptions of life aboard a civilian liner requisitioned for wartime internee / prisoners of war transportation service.