As finances get tighter,we might start to appreciate the skills of our grandparents. MICHAEL KELLYtalks to Darina Allen,who has come up with the idea of Grandmothers' Day, and,we celebrate some great grannies
WE ALL HAVE tales to tell about a particular skill our grandmothers had. I will always associate my granny with killer “choc-toffees” and pancakes in which she managed to hide 50p pieces wrapped in greaseproof paper. What skills did your grandmother have? Could she milk a cow, make butter and cheese, or sow her own spuds and carrots? Could she ride a horse, or knit or sew? Could she feed a family on leftovers that you would now toss in the bin? There is a sense in these difficult times of a new-found appreciation and respect for the ancient skills of our forebears. A sense that perhaps we should have listened more carefully when our grandmothers were telling us about them. A sense that somehow, we find ourselves in a time and place where these skills are relevant again.
Over the years our grannies smiled knowingly while we went off and pursued other interests, buying apartments in Bulgaria and other frivolities. Thankfully, they are not mad at us now that we’re back looking to pick their brains on ways to get through the recession. Grannies are cool like that.
International Grandmothers’ Day is the brainchild of grandmother-of-six Darina Allen. The idea is for grandparents (grandfathers are not excluded) to gather together some or all of their grandkids to pass on those invaluable forgotten skills. “Bake a cake, catch a fish, plant a seed, sow a button, skin a rabbit,” says Allen, when I ask her what she has in mind. “These are all incredibly valuable life skills.”
Over the 25 years since she established the cookery school at Ballymaloe, Allen has been conscious of a gradual erosion of basic homemaking skills among her students. “As food has become more and more convenient, we have become increasingly de-skilled. Being able to cook or grow things is almost looked down upon.” The past few months, she believes, have been a wake-up call for many of us.
“People have been so focused on careers and academia that they are helpless when they lose their jobs. They don’t have money and they realise they don’t have skills that would help them through.”
What started as a Slow Food Ireland event quickly went global when Allen mentioned the idea to Carlo Petrini, the Italian founder of Slow Food International. Petrini was enthralled and encouraged 132 other countries to get on board. So today, around the world, Grannies are on the case. In Ennistymon Co Clare, grannies are gathering for baking and butter-making, while in Dunhill, Co Waterford, grannies are being encouraged to come forward with family recipes. In Northern Ireland, there’s a food education programme in which kids learn from their grandparents about growing and cooking, while kids teach the grandparents how to use a PlayStation. I wonder which skill will prove more useful?
“There are lots of events on,” says Allen, “but basically we are trying to get the word out to grandparents to take a day a month where they make it their mission to teach their grandkids something.
“It’s a celebration of the special bond and the great joy and pleasure that you get from sharing these things. Our granddaughter Willow has been growing radishes since she was three years old. We have given her a priceless gift for life by teaching her how to do that.”
For details, see www.slowfoodireland.com
Fashion designer Eilis Boyle recalls her grandmother, CARMEN GONZALEZ
MY GRANDMOTHER, Carmen Gonzalez, was an only child who spent most of her life in a small town in Granada, Spain. She was the daughter of a doctor and she became a nurse, and how she met my grandfather was like something out of the movies. Higinio Mancebo from Ceuta in North Africa was studying to be a doctor when civil war broke out in Spain. He had to join the army, and was injured. They met in Motril, in Granada, where she nursed him.
He carried that experience of the war all his life, but she never talked about the past. She always lived in the present and the future. A tiny woman, at five feet two inches, she was commander-in-chief at home, very strict – but very interested in beautiful things and very, very funny. She always had an interest in clothes, and that was a huge connection between us. She used to travel to Madrid to see what was in fashion, then draw it, and the live-in seamstress made the clothes for her. She wanted her daughters to be the pride of the village.
I think I spent more time with my grandparents than most. I think her big influence on me was her optimism – even at 90 she was talking about knocking a wall down to make a better bathroom, or changing curtains. She had the mind of a 30-year-old in a body of a 90-year-old, and even at 87 was determined to come to my wedding in Mexico. And she did, with my grandfather.
My grandparents lived together for 70 years, independently. That relationship is also an inspiration. They were devoted to each other and he would always say that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. She always took care of herself and was dark-haired and very Spanish, very petite. She always wore make-up and had a passion for colour. She wore shirts and dresses and even at 91, after a hip replacement, wore specially made high heels, so she could have what she wanted. Even in her last year she was still making clothes because what she found in the shops was not adequate.She liked a bit of cleavage and all her blouses were made by seamstresses.
My parents are nomads and my mother tries not to be attached to things, so I have very little from my grandmother except for a big silver safety pin she would use towards the end of her life when she was getting smaller and didn’t want her bra strap to show. She was a very strong character and her personality never changed. What I think is interesting is that she never looked back, even in tough times. She was an amazing cook and cooking was probably their team project in latter years – he would research recipes on the internet and she would cook them – he’d have a feast! At 8am she would already be preparing the traditional sofrito.
She was very generous, while not very affectionate. She had her own ways of showing affection through food. As a schoolgirl, I would have lunch with them on Sundays and after the meal she would be asking me what I'd like to have the following Sunday. I would come to stay and all my favourite things would be packed into the fridge for me. Though she was a strict mother, she enjoyed being a grandmother because she didn't need to be a disciplinarian and so my relationship with her is very different to that of my mother, who in turn had a very close relationship with her grandmother. In conversation with Deirdre McQuillan
Amanda Higgins on her grandmother, NETTA MITCHEL
MY GRANDMOTHER, Netta Fitzgerald, was an English Catholic who came over to a soiree in Dublin where she met my grandfather, an Irish protestant called Albert Mitchel who made rosary beads. They married, went to live in Montpelier Manor in Monkstown and had four children, Charles, Alec, Rosemary and Geraldine, my mother. However, the marriage was not successful and they lived separately for the rest of their lives. It must have been hard for her at the time, but her attitude was, “you have made your bed and now you must lie on it.” That generation put up with their lot. It would be so different now.
I remember the house very well. It had a grand hall with stags’ heads everywhere and a bifurcating staircase with a gallery all around. Granny used to have Mícheál MacLíammóir for evenings – he gave my mother a lovely wedding present. Her eldest son, my uncle, was Charles Mitchel, who acted in the Gate and was the first newscaster on RTÉ. She had a beautiful voice and used to give elocution lessons to some of the young continuity announcers in the newly-opened RTÉ. “If they don’t learn to speak properly how will they get on?” she would ask.
The voice is the connection between us all. I read the Lessons at Mass in Booterstown, and people always come up afterwards and say how much they appreciated it. That makes me think of her and her beautiful voice. She was very much a grande dame – she had her cinq à sept, a little sherry in the evenings, and used to say grandly " pas devant les domestiques", which I used to find so funny.
She was educated in Belgium and France, at the Holy Child in Neuilly, and Catholicism was a strong influence in her life. One of her brothers was a canon and another brother had a farm in Tipperary. I used to stay with her at weekends and she would always leave a jar of Cutex cream beside the bed and tell me to apply it as if I was putting on kid gloves and to keep my hands out of sight.
I used to love getting her letters when I lived in Rome. In fact, I was there when she died in l962. I remember loving the six or three pence – or “thruppence”, as she called it – that she would give me out of her huge bag, which always smelled of the lovely powders and junk it contained. I would never spend the money she gave me, but used to put it under my pillow because of the comforting smell of Granny.
She always wore a large hat, and I remember once she was chatting with her great friend Mrs Nelly Bonaparte Wise, and my cousin and I tossed a bit of jelly onto her hat and roared with laughter as we watched it wobble. We were always allowed to rummage in her drawers and take anything we liked and I remember a lovely pair of earrings she gave me.
I feel sorry for people who don't have a granny like mine. I could share so much with her today now that I am a grandmother too. There must have been something to that strong French influence because I now have three French grandsons and I love having them to stay with me just like I used to stay with her. In conversation with Deirdre McQuillan
Orna Mulcahy recalls her grandmother, ANNE DUFFY
LIVING TO A great age was no fun, my grandmother used to say. Many of her old friends from Ballytrain in Monaghan, where she grew up and where her thoughts returned again and again, had died by the time she came to live with us in Dublin in the late 1970s. She mourned them with a sorrowful nod of her head and said prayers for the repose of their souls from her chair beside the Aga. She was around 80 then and considered herself a very old woman, with little time left in “this valley of tears”. Though she loved clothes, she worried about buying expensive garments in case she didn’t live to get the wear out of them.
She also advised us children to be nice to her, because she would not be around for much longer. As it happened, she lived to the age of 108, her life spanning three centuries, her last birthday parties photographed for local and national newspapers. She received letters from the President and was celebrated by the INTO as the oldest school teacher in Ireland.
She was born Anne Duffy, one of 13 children (one died at just a day old) in a pretty lakeside village, where her father kept a pub and grocery and her mother, Mary Anne O’Connor, ran the house and the shop. Granny, arriving into the middle of the family, was a gentle, clever and athletic child. Her childhood memories, written in scraps in an old red notebook from a distance of 80 years, recalled the time she skipped rope 1,000 times, without tiring herself out, and how her sisters excelled at school, to the envy of other families. She herself excelled, easily winning a place at Carysfort teacher training college in 1916. There she befriended the sister of the Republican Thomas Ashe, who died on hunger strike a year later. Her siblings scattered, many to the US.
On qualifying as a teacher she entered the Carmelite order, thinking to become a nun, but it wasn’t to be. After some years – the details are sketchy here – she left the convent, afterwards meeting my grandfather Denis Callan who, having made his way in the US, came home to buy a farm and settle down. They married and had five children in the space of 12 years. He died in 1940 and thus began her long widowhood. She let out the farm and resumed teaching at Ballymackney school, taking the pony and trap every day, or cycling when the pony was moody. Her children grew up smart and brave. Four out of five emigrated, returning in later years for family reunions at the farm. She worked until her retirement in her early 60s, living on the farm until her move to Dublin.
Granny was a handsome woman, and proud of it. She was never overweight, but often talked about losing a pound or two. Her mantra was “everything in moderation”, including the odd cigarette and thimbleful of sherry. She had a beautiful complexion and was constantly advising us girls to drink buttermilk and wash our faces in nothing more than the morning dew.
She enjoyed mental arithmetic – you could ask her to multiply three- and four-digit numbers and the answer always came out right – and she had an old Irish phrase suitable for every occasion. She could list off the rivers and mountains of Europe and frequently talked in verse, drawing on a fund of mournful poems, of which The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck, and Lord Ullin's Daughter(who also drowned) were favourites. For children there was a terrible dirge about losing a doll "away on the heath one day" and finding it many moons later all trampled by the cows. She wasn't a fan of television and would often offer to lead us in a decade of the rosary, just as we were settling down to watch Dallas.
A gentle, softly-spoken person who never raised her voice and spoke in a whisper because of her false teeth, she abhorred rowdiness, warning us as children that there was “a man sick in Jericho” , meaning that we were disturbing him. She was devoted to the Little Flower and tried to get us to pray to her, as well as to St Anthony, St Martin and many others for specific requests. She always prayed for us at exam time, and when we travelled abroad.
Eventually, our own children were a little afraid of great-grandma because of her great age and they tiptoed around her chair and later her nursing home bed. She became a marvel to all who knew her as she made it year after year, past the 100 mark. By then she had a long roll-call of all the people she hoped to see in heaven, including her daughter Mary. I hope they were reunited.
Poet and psychotherapist Christina Reihill on her grandmother, MAIRE COLLINS
HER NAME WAS Maire Collins and she was a schoolteacher from Cork who married Archie Collins (they had the same surnames). He was a student she met in her parents’ digs and was a relative of Michael Collins.
Archie was older and became the headmaster of the school in which she also later taught. He died when the youngest of their five children, my mother Emer, was 16 years old, leaving her alone to manage farm and family. Whenever she spoke about Archie, it was like a song, it was a story for her. I remember she had this huge bag and every time she told a story about him, she would carefully unwrap a parcel tied up in layers and layers of paper, which contained a lock of his hair. Each time she talked about him, it was like the first time.
She was a musician, a teacher and a poet. She played the fiddle and the piano and had a natural and complete contentment in who she was. What I loved about her was that she inhabited herself and had a kind of grandeur without the affectation. She was tall and had presence, great dignity and integrity. We called her NanAnne and she embodied your greatest fantasies of what a grandmother should be. She told stories around the fire and today my work is trying to recall the role of the seanchaí. My poetry is for people who don’t read poetry. All of my poetry is for her. She was of the earth.
I remember going to the farm where she lived on our summer holidays and walking barefoot in the fields and being scared of the cows and my grandmother saying – and she sang as she spoke – that I would have to sing to the cows, so I learned Che Sera Serafrom her. I remember her playing the piano and singing Danny Boy– if a song or idea came to her, she would get up and play. I would sit beside her and she would almost weave me into her soul – it was beyond words, and I felt entirely safe. She was like a container in which I could rest.
If you wrote to her, she would write long letters back that always opened with a quotation from Shelley or Yeats – she loved the Romantics. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was absolutely inspired by her and now I am a poet myself. I have a quote from her chalked on my wall, which I have adopted as my creed: “The true value of living is not the acquisition of money or power or reputation, it is awareness. It is the intensity of the awareness that is the greatest of gifts.”
That really has inspired my whole work and purpose in life. I’m interested in people and in people’s awareness, and my poetry is about people accessing their own awareness. That steely belief in yourself and regard for others – respect – is her legacy. Her perception of the world was a door she opened for me, a world full of magic and surprises and endless possibilities. That door got slammed when my mother died.
My mother's death at the age of 36 from cancer crushed her; it was the beginning of the end for her because she then lost her son Oscar, my uncle, a dentist in his 40s. She died in the 1980s, when she was in her late 70s. When she stopped playing the piano and the fiddle, she was as good as dead. If I stopped writing, that would be the end of me too. When you can't play your music any more, it's over. Now, when I write my poems, I think they come from her, from an ancient psyche. She was very powerful and gives me life. In conversation with Deirdre McQuillan