Mr John Costa recalls his family feeding American Italian soldiers on their Liverpool farm during World War II, interviewed in 1986

Mr John Costa was born in 1928 and was interviewed in 1986 for the 'Looking Back at Liverpool: An Oral History of the Liverpool Region 1900 to 1960' project. Here he recalls his mother feeding American soldiers on their Italian family farm during World War II.
Transcript

JOHN: My parents were from Italy, from Sicily. My father came out and three years after my mother came out. My people, they came to Chipping Norton, we had a vineyard there and a market garden and I can remember then across the river from our place there was Warwick Farm Racecourse, where quite a few American sailors were in there at the time and they used to come across the river. The river at that time you could walk across it at low tide, it wasn’t very deep, and they used to come around and up to the house, ‘cause a lot of Americans were Italians too, and they used to come over there and have feeds of spaghetti and stuff, Mum used to feed them. I can never forget their faces (we had a couple of cows) they used to like milk shakes, egg flips, and all that sort of thing. They really made us at home - we used to go across with them and they used to give us a few supplies, to keep us going because we had a family, I’m from a family of ten, and they were all born around the Liverpool area, all except my sister [who] was born in Pamarea in Italy.