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- Herausgeber: Brandon
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
The Irish nana is a repository of family history, memory and lore. Sometimes, like the Italian nonna, she is also a 'walking cookbook', carrying the old knowledge of how things were best done. Alice's own grandmothers, Nana Taylor and Nana Ballyduane, were the first generation after the Great Famine, born in the 1860s. These women taught their families the Irish traditions and habits of homemaking that survived for centuries, and are now almost gone. Now Alice herself is a nana too, and this book takes us through three generations and almost a century and a half. She explores the old and the new, the 'then' and 'now', the nana of yesteryear and of today, with her characteristic empathy and love.
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‘In these pages, we see Taylor’s remarkable gift of elevating the ordinary to something special, something poetic, even …’
Irish Independent on The Women
‘It’s like sitting and having a big warm blanket wrapped around you …’
Cork Today with Patricia Messinger on Tea for One
For more books by Alice Taylor, see obrien.ie
Dedication
Remembering Maureen, whose mission in life was to inspire and encourage
Contents
Introduction
Meeting the Nanas
When you opened the door from our small quarry-tiled front hall into the low-ceilinged parlour her calm, appraising gaze met you across the room. Her serene presence reached out from her picture and made you feel welcome. This was Grandmother Taylor and even though she had died years before I was born I grew up feeling that she was a comforting presence in our house. My grandfather had died when my father was sixteen, then she and Dad had run the farm together. It must have been a very amicable partnership because after her death at the age of sixty, he had taken her photograph to Cork, which was no mean journey at that time, and got her portrait painted. Money was a scarce commodity in rural Ireland of the 1930s and many years later, curious as to the motivation and the details behind this unusual undertaking, I enquired how much this portrait had cost back then. My father smiled and informed me in farmer’s language, ‘The price of an in-calf heifer.’ In an effort to equate that cost in today’s world I recently enquired from a local farmer as to how much money that would be nowadays and was told, ‘For a good one, about two thousand euro.’ A sizeable sum! But what a visionary investment by my father for our family, and because of it my grandmother lived on in all our lives, as indeed so did her tradition of music and song that she had brought into the austere Protestant lineage of the family she had joined on marriage.
My maternal grandmother, on the other hand, lived just back the road and was our living family matriarch. She was known as Nana Ballyduane, taking her name from the townland where she lived until the grand old age of ninety-eight. From there she was very much a force to be reckoned with right up to the end of her days.
Nana Ballyduane might remind you of the iconic picture of the Peig Sayers-type of Irishwoman, dressed in black, sitting by the fire. She certainly was not a ‘hugs and cuddles’ Nana, but kept us at arm’s length, feeling that her role in our lives was to ‘straighten us out and straighten us up’. She was of her time. These two women were the grandmother bookends of my childhood, one from her picture on the wall and the other from a few miles back the road from where she beamed like a far-ranging control tower.
My generation has gone through three reigns of Nanas – our own grandmothers, our mothers who were Nana to our children, and ourselves, now Nana to our children’s children. In my case this spans from Nana Ballyduane’s birth in 1860 up to the present day. What a long perspective we have on the role of Nana.
But in order to ascertain a broader view on the influence of the Irish Nana it was necessary for me to go further afield than my own experience. So views on the Nanas in our extended family were sought and then it was time to hear about the Village Nanas and some from further afield.
It was interesting to discover that our remembrances of our Nanas are largely very positive, which would lead one to the belief that the grandchild–Nana relationship is a special inter-generational comfort blanket.
This contradicts Shakespeare’s observation that ‘The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.’ Not so with Nanas! Not so. The Irish Nana is very lovingly remembered for all kinds of different reasons and she is a huge part of our national culture. Nana, as well as having a unique position in the family, also has it in society. In Italy, the ‘Nonna’ embodies, in particular, all the expert recipes from previous generations before cookbooks were on our bookshelves; they were and are the repositories of a wonderful and ancient cooking tradition. The Irish Nana, too, occupies a special space, though, probably due to famine and poverty, not so much for cooking, though there are wonderful traditions which she will recall and practice, but in the context of storytelling and music, and especially in her knowledge of family and local history. To the Irish Nana, family roots were and are of huge importance. She is the living history book.
Some of these Nanas were the bridges between generations, linking us back to our ancestors. Often they were the family genealogists, who told us who we were and where we came from. They had an in-depth knowledge of the extended branches of the family tree with whom they kept in touch and could trace their genealogy back through the generations, believing that our roots were important, and if we did not know where we came from, we did not know where we were going. Some of them were earthed in another time and brought a sense of tribal belonging into their grandchildren’s world. Their values were of a thriftier, more frugal and environmentally caring era, and they endeavoured to hand on that creed.
We have a huge variety of grandmothers. The lovable, cuddly grandmother, the ‘do as you’re told’ grandmother, the demonstrative grandmother, the cranky grandmother, the austere ‘children should be seen and not heard’ grandmother, and the one who brightened up your life and made the world a kinder place. Grandmothers come in many formats. They are afforded many titles, varying from Grandmama, Grandma, Granny, Gran, Nan, or the more Irish rural Nana or Nanna, and each name conjures up a different image.
Some women are natural mothers and grandmothers and take to those roles like ducks to water. Born with an abiding maternal instinct, mothering is second nature to them. Others go with the flow and learn on the job, while still others are slightly overwhelmed by the immensity of the tide of responsibility and constantly struggle to keep their heads above water. I think that I come into this last category. With the advent of becoming a grandmother, these waters calmed a little and there is now more time to appreciate and be aware of what in previous years may have been perceived as very demanding and challenging.
Of course, Nanas do occupy a special position. As one Nana told me, ‘It’s the best of all worlds because you have all of the pluses and none of the minuses.’ Isn’t that a lovely situation to be in? The grandchildren may come and wreck the house, but at the end of the day they go home and then Nana is back to her orderly self-catering solo living. Nanas have the luxury of being able to indulge their grandchildren, knowing this will not become the norm, because in the heel of the hunt the creation of boundaries in the children’s world is the responsibility of the parents. But Nana, if she so desires, can also be stern and uphold strict standards when needed, but again this is not an everyday requirement. So, this is one of the great freedoms in being a Nana.
To be afforded an opportunity to view a grandmother though the eyes of a small child is to get an insight into this unique child–grandmother relationship. John Moriarty, that amazing Kerry visionary and writer, writes about this in one of his books. John was home on holiday on the family farm in Kerry from Canada, where he lectured in the University of Manitoba. It was Good Friday, and while the rest of the family went to the local church for the Easter ceremonies, John and his little niece, who was about six years old, remained at home taking care of a cow that was due to calve. As John and this little girl watched the calf emerge from the cow, the child turned to John and informed him with assurance that she too had come out of her Mammy’s tummy, and when John asked her where her mother had come from he was confidently told, ‘Oh from Nana’s tummy, of course!’, but when he queried as the where Nana had come from, the child, looking amazed at his profound lack of knowledge, assured him with absolute conviction, ‘Oh, Nana was always there.’ To this little girl a world without her Nana was inconceivable. Nana was the back wall of her world. There simply was no life before her Nana.
Traditionally, some Nanas lived in the family home and were part of daily life, and some lived next door or down the street, where a child could run for comfort if things got out of hand at home. If you lived in a city, you might have a grandmother in a village or town, or on a farm down the country where you spent your summer holidays and experienced a whole different world. Sometimes grandchildren from abroad came home on holidays to their Irish Nana and were introduced to their family roots and to a very different way of life. My niece Lisa, who grew up in England, discovered another world on coming back to visit her Nana in our family farm in Lisdangan.
Some years ago when book-signing in Dublin I also came across a number of Dubs, who, when I enquired why they were buying this book based on country living, told me they had a Kerry, Mayo or Galway grandmother and had spent all their summer holidays on a farm down the country, and had loved it. And now in adulthood these people, because they had such good memories of their childhood holidays, recalled those days with great warmth and wanted to revisit that world. They recalled with gratitude the grandmothers who had made those holidays possible – and usually it was the grandmother who was prepared to take responsibility and look after these grandchildren for long summer holidays, though grandad also played his part. At the time, the children took all of this for granted, but now years later came the appreciation and a loving remembrance of their grandmother and that experience. These adults now felt a huge debt of gratitude.
Those grandmothers were the stay-at-home, working-on-the-farm grandmothers, who are now no longer part of Irish life as farming has changed. Today’s grandmothers are no longer at home on the farm – both children and grandmothers are now holidaying in other places. Long ago, though, their presence in the home solved the problem of who would hold the baby and who would mind Nana. Now the baby is in a crêche and Nana is in a nursing home.
But how the grandmother fitted into the family circle depended a lot on the dynamics within the family. If those dynamics were not harmonious, it was the grandchildren who missed out. Sometimes it might have been the mother’s mother who was the one more involved with the grandchildren, and this could be because grandmothers felt more at ease expressing opinions on child-rearing to their own daughters rather than to daughters-in-law. Though this might not always be the case, of course, and when at book signings I come across a daughter-in-law buying a book for her mother-in-law, I might sometimes pass the comment, ‘You must be a great daughter-in-law’, and the return comment is usually, ‘I have a great mother-in-law.’ It works both ways. But to the children it matters little which side of the family their grandmother comes from, and if the overall family dynamics are comfortable the grandmother–child relationship benefits the children enormously.
In the racing world the ‘dam’ is the maternal anchor through which the bloodline is traced as it is regarded as the most generative. It is often, apparently, the maternal more than the paternal genes that dictate the psyche of the offspring. The human species may also inherit many of our family traits from our grandmothers, and, irrespective of what we may like to think, some of the ways we are and how we function comes from our family gene pool.
Sometimes, however, the grandmother role can be filled by a loving, kindly neighbour or family friend, and this bond can be very enriching to both parties. These women who may sometimes have no grandchildren of their own can become much-loved adopted Nanas. John O’Donoghue, the Connemara poet and philosopher, wrote about an elderly, kindly neighbour whom he loved dearly – and one evening on coming home from school, he was met with the news that she had died suddenly. He felt his first huge sense of loss as if one of the roots of his world had gone. Sometimes in the life of a child it is the death of a grandmother that first introduces them to the experience of dying. One grandchild told me that to her this event was of such earth-shaking importance that she felt that it should be on the Six o’clock News. I myself was twenty when I heard of the death of Nana Ballyduane, with whom I did not have a deep, loving relationship, but I sat down and cried, remembering the nights when she and I, alone together aboard her large, comfortable feather bed, had sailed off into the world of nod as she had taught me her special prayers.
As I begin this book, I feel a queue of these wise women looking over my shoulder. I hope to give them a voice – and hopefully amongst these pages you may find memories of your own Nana and little reminders of her way of life.
Grandmother Taylor.
The open farm kitchen fire, which was cooker, home heating, water warmer, Nana’s corner and the heart of the home.
Pre-electricity this was the clothes iron that was heated in the fire and eased out all our wrinkles. If not handled with caution it could be a dangerous lad!
Before walk-in wardrobes, this chest of drawers, known as the ‘tall boy’, was where all foldable clothes were stored.
Most Nanas had a set of good china brought forth for the Stations and special visitors.
Before liquidisers became part of the kitchen, the humble mincer did the needful. But the mincer required much more physical effort. The items went in the top and the handle was turned to grind them through a series of iron discs and out the spout at the front.
The little skillet pot, used for cooking delicacies over the open fire. Mine is now a water supply for the birds in the garden.
Brass candlesticks were used for the Station Mass and for wakes.
My Nanas’ Generation
Chapter One
The Homemakers
We were bacon, cabbage and spuds children, as indeed were many generations before us. In later years this fare may well have been regarded with some disdain as unimaginative food for the peasants. However, long-ago Nanas kept their families strong and healthy on it and when the potato crop failed we died by the thousand or were forced to emigrate on coffin ships. No wonder then that our Nanas treated the ‘royal spud’ with the respect it deserved. They oversaw the cutting of the seed potatoes from Golden Wonders, Kerr’s Pinks, and Aran Banners into ‘scealláns’ and rejecting the ‘sceallógs’ which were termed ‘blind’ as they did not have the necessary productive eye for sprouting new life. The cutting of the scealláns was timed so that planting the potatoes could begin from St Patrick’s Day onwards and the aim then was not to have ‘cuckoo spuds’, as late planting was ironically termed. Back then we children had a little verse that we quoted as we waited eagerly to catch sight of the early swallows and to hear the first call of the cuckoo:
The cuckoo comes in April
And sings his song in May
In the middle of June he plays his tune
And July he flies away.
So if you were planting your spuds to the call of the cuckoo you were really running behind schedule and deemed to be planting ‘cuckoo spuds’, which were not as tasty as spuds planted earlier.
Children were shown the correct procedure of planting potatoes by a Nana who knew exactly what to do as she too had inherited this knowledge from her Nana. It is not surprising that Jean-Francois Millet’s famous painting The Angelus, like his other works, incorporates a strong female presence out in the fields. Women shared the farm work, as he shows. In Ireland they also led the way on Rogation Days when the blessing of the crops with holy water took place, thus uniting the natural and the divine to bless the land and ensure a good harvest, and food on the table. The children, of necessity, were brought along to help and to learn. These skills were soon mastered by the young – the correct spacing of the ‘scealláns’ into little beds of dung brought from outside the cow houses (dung from the hen house was deemed unsuitable), and then laid out along the drills. I remember long, cold days with my siblings, on our hands and knees, slowly making our way up the long field that was the bread basket of the house because in it all that was to sustain us for the year ahead was planted. That was the time for us young ones to apply our neighbour’s philosophy of ‘Head down, arse to the wind and keep going.’ It certainly cultivated our tenacity and ‘stickatitness’, and was undoubtedly good for flexibility and fitness too.
When the time came for picking the potatoes we children were also part of the work team, and I still remember the sense of wonder that one small sceallán we had planted months previously had blossomed into this shower of round, white potatoes now erupting up through the brown earth behind the plough. Nana was then the best judge of how good the potato return was, and if the first tasting got her stamp of approval, then all was well for the year ahead. She had been down this road many times and so was a tried and tested expert on potato quality. Before these potatoes were pitted for the winter, it was often the Nana who came out in the morning to dig the potatoes for that day’s dinner from a drill left unharvested for that purpose. Many grandchildren carry fond memories of their Nana making ‘pandy’ for them – this was made with a big, soft, floury spud mashed up with butter and warm milk, and was a soothing comfort-food that slipped down many a sore throat or into an upset stomach with effortless ease. Even now when I am recovering from a ’flu or any ailment, I still find that a warm mashed spud can bring me right. Nana also made colcannon by mixing chopped kale and cabbage water, which was full of vitamins, through this pandy, rendering it very flavoursome. This colcannon was made in a little skillet pot, which was a very small version of its larger cousin that was used for the boiling of the bacon, cabbage and spuds, but the little skillet was preserved for making delicate niceties. A traditional song was written about it, sung by many performers, but made famous by Mary Black and the Black Family:
…Oh weren’t them the happy days
When troubles we knew not
And our mother made colcannon
In the little skillet pot.
I now have a Nana skillet pot hanging off a tree in the garden and the little birds perch on the rim and have a drink, and a blackbird dives in and uses it as a bird-bath, sending out a shower of spray while he is in action.
And when Nana was bringing in the spuds for the dinner, she would also cut heads of cabbage growing in the same field and so arrive in the kitchen carrying the makings of the dinner for the day with her. Already in a large timber barrel in a cool room off the kitchen were sections of salted bacon waiting to be hauled out and landed into a large, cast-iron black pot and hung over the fire to boil. Once the bacon was cooked, the cabbage, which had been well washed to evict the numerous little tenants harbouring within, was then plunged into the boiling salted bacon water to cook and absorb the flavours. This supply of bacon too had come under Nana’s capable supervision because it was often she who had taken care of the mother pig who had produced the young. If one of the litter of bonhams was a bit weak and unable to hold its own amongst the other stronger piglets, it was known as the ‘íoctar
