‘This is what happens when people fight back’: Ali Smith on standing up for justice

Last December. Five days after Christmas. England under a louring sky. Beyond, immediate, invisible, pressing down on every single person on the planet, the current international constellation of authoritarians, beneath them the tens of thousands of the dead.

In a liberal democratic time.

What could I, or any of us, do about what was happening daily and nightly to the people we could see in every news bulletin, in Gaza? In Ukraine? I couldn't even do anything much about some incompetent builders we'd contracted last year, who were supposed to be renovating our very small house and who'd wrecked everything they'd touched. Plus, I was now deep into several weeks of insomnia like never before. What could I do about that? I couldn't even sort a GP appointment any time soon. The one slot I'd been able to book back at the start of November had been knocked back by the surgery into January.

Anyway. 30 December, Saturday, half past three, midwinter light going dark, and my partner Sarah and I were walking home from town. Ahead of us a small man was approaching passersby with no luck; a couple of people in front of us dodged away from him, someone else walked past him like he wasn't there. He crossed the street towards us.

Can you help me? he said.

He had two children with him, a boy and a girl, the boy maybe 11 years old, the girl nine or thereabouts, both happed in warm winter clothes and hats; it was cold.

The man pointed over towards the hoarding round the building site where the multistorey car park used to be.

Do you think my car will be safe if I leave it parked there tonight, or will someone give me a fine? he said.

He had a slight accent, hardly noticeable. The car he pointed at was parked in a loading bay. It had an Italian number plate and a large luggage container on its roof shaped like an upside down boat.

We shrugged. We said, well, maybe, since it's the weekend and it's so near New Year, but maybe not. Hard to know how keen the traffic wardens will be.

Meanwhile the girl had leaned her head, then her whole self, against Sarah's side and closed her eyes.

We started in Italy, we've driven overnight from Geneva, the man said, and we're booked into a hotel next to the station, we came here because they want to see a Harry Potter shop and we're going to London tomorrow to see some more Harry Potter things. Then tomorrow night we're driving to Edinburgh for New Year. But I can't get my car into the hotel's underground parking space. My car is too tall for the ramp.

You'll probably be OK here for a couple of hours, we said. But if you like, if you can't find anywhere else, you can leave it in one of the parking places near our house.

What? the man said. Really?

Yes, we said. There's space. A lot of our neighbours are away for New Year. And it'll be pretty safe there.

We gave him our postcode.

I can't believe it, the man said.

And if you do decide to come, I said, knock on our door. I'll give you a bottle of wine. It's nearly Hogmanay.

The man shook his head.

Unbelievable, he said. Thank you.

We said goodbye.

Two hours later he knocked on the front door.

It fits the space perfectly, he said. Thank you. Oh. Can I ask? Are you an artist? You have so many paintings and books.

My partner's an artist, I said. I'm not. But I write books.

I went through to find the wine.

A writer, he said. There's a book about us. It's by a famous writer. Ah! It's Italian, this wine. You like Italy? But this is Emilia-Romagna wine, I'm from Sicily, have you been there? The south. Thank you. A safe place to park and you give me this.

It's no problem. It's a pleasure. We'll keep an eye on the car, I said.

Two minutes after he'd gone, another knock on the door. This time it was the two children.

Thank you for letting us leave our car here, the boy said in an English so precise and polite it was somehow doubly lovely.

Thank you very much, the girl said

She said it with the same care round each word.

Next night. Hogmanay. Six o'clock, a knock at the door. The man, the two children. The girl was holding out a box of Ferrero Rocher.

It is for you, she said.

How was Harry Potter? we said.

It was OK, the man said. London was tiring. We're driving to Edinburgh now. Thank you again. But before we go.

He opened his phone and showed us a photograph of what looked like a book on a shelf in a bookshop.

It is Andrea Camilleri , he said. You know Camilleri?

The man who wrote the Inspector Montalbano books, we said.

Yes, he said. He also wrote our book. In London we looked in some bookshops but we couldn't find this book for you. It's called after what our family got called a hundred years ago, a gang, the gang of the Saccos, that's our family. It happened in the 1920s in Sicily. The family started with nothing, but they made a farm out of this nothing, and a good life. They shared what they had. So the mafia got angry. They sent letters with threats saying who would die first and who would die next, if they didn't get paid a lot of money. So then my great-uncles went to the police and reported these letters and threats.

But the police told them there was nothing they could do. Then the mafia kept writing threats. Our uncle went back to the police. The police only did this [here he shrugged his shoulders]. So the family decide they will fight back by themselves. So they get strong. They fight back. One time, imagine, our uncles are going down a street and from one side of the road it's the mafia shooting at them and from the other it's the carabinieri shooting at them! But they survive.

But then a clever prefetto, a top Mussolini man from the cities, orders all the newspapers to use the word gang, to say they're bandits doing crimes. Three uncles go to prisons, for nearly 40 years.

Then more and more people complain to the authorities about the injustice and they are released. But not until the 1960s. I was a small boy but I remember them. When he came out of prison, in 1963, Uncle Alfonso married his same girlfriend who was waiting for him for nearly 40 years. Well. Goodbye. Pleased to meet you. Thank you.

We wish you a happy new year, the two children said. Goodbye.

Goodbye, we said. Good journey. All the best.

We closed the door. We stood and looked at each other, wide-eyed.

In the early new year, after this glancing chance encounter, we tracked down a copy: The Sacco Gang by Andrea Camilleri. It was first published in Italy in 2013 then published here, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, in 2018.

It's such a good read, shocking and heartening and galvanising by turn. Camilleri gets as close to the truth as he can, using family and local memory and sources in newspaper and police and court documents from the time. "The order is that the Saccos must be taken, dead or alive ... because at this point there are some people going around saying, in this era of the March on Rome, that if all socialists had taken action like the Sacco brothers, the fascists would never have risen to power."

Its story is exemplary: this is what happens when people fight back.

The story of the Saccos' trial is also exemplary, and sickening: this is what happens when farce and force conjoin.

The family's strength of resistance, when they're free and when they're imprisoned, is exemplary.

The resonance of all this is exemplary, and obvious, and at the same time thrilling: since truth doesn't stop being truth and justice doesn't stop being justice just because powerful people or politics or institutions tell lies about, attack, warp, or work to deny truth and justice.

On go the wars.

In January I finally saw a doctor, who prescribed iron.

I'd already started sleeping again by then.

At the same time I'd begun writing a new book.

It surprised me – it still does – with its own iron glance.