For CAROLYN REYNIER, giving her godchildren travel experiences they wouldn't otherwise have is a great privilege
I HAVE FIVE godchildren. When Rebecca was born, her mother, an atheist, suggested that I should be an honorary godmother. I accepted with pleasure. Many years later, Rebecca’s brother Sam – obviously hedging his bets – asked if I’d be his godmother too.
The other three are “official” godchildren, in that we actually set foot inside a church. I am the eldest of five. When Michael John, the youngest, arrived – 16 years after me – my parents asked me to be his godmother. Guy is my nephew. The third is the lovely Lucy, daughter of dear friends.
Godmother. I have a problem with both parts of the word. None of them appear to believe in God. When I sent them each a text asking if they believed in God, my brother, who has a degree in archaeology, replied: “I don’t know. Not my period.” Sam was finishing his gap year abroad, but Rebecca texted back: “We’re all atheists here.” Guy replied that he believed in St Rita of Cascia, patron saint of hopeless causes, and Lucy was in Majorca. As for the second part of the word – well, I’m not a mother.
Laying down cases of claret or pipes of port isn’t an option – I have no money and I remember only too well what happened when my first brother was born, after three daughters. Our wine-shipping father bought a barrel of burgundy – Hospices de Beaune 1961 – and had it bottled up in magnums with my brother’s name on the label. Over the years, my father said: “We’d better drink it, it won’t keep.” So we did, and it didn’t. By the time he reached 21, all my brother had to show for it were a couple of token magnums and a bedside lamp made by my mother from one of the empties, bearing a large shade covered in labels soaked off the others.
So what’s a conscientious godmother to do? I’d like to be someone who can act as a sounding board for their hopes and aspirations, someone they can turn to for a listening ear. Michael John (Griotte Chambertin 1967, and yes, another splendid bedside lamp) once said he thought of me as an older female friend rather than as his sister. That pleased me. And I can try to give them experiences they wouldn’t normally have.
Sam, now 23 – a city lad – has spent holidays with us in Scotland. In Dumfriesshire, he picked samphire in the Solway Firth, chased our ducklings, collected eggs from the hen coop, helped clean and gut grilse salmon (he didn’t care for that much) straight out of the nets. I hope these experiences gave him an appreciation of another way of life, albeit one he may never want to lead.
Even his older sister Rebecca visited. I sold it as a few days’ RR. She delighted us with her chatter and conversation. I thought she might have been a vegetarian, as many young folk are these days. Certainly not, she replied, Hitler was a vegetarian.
I’ve not been a very good godmother to 18-year-old Lucy, my youngest godchild. But it’s never too late. When I flew back to my Hebridean island home of Islay, for Lucy’s 16th birthday party, I invited her to dinner at the Port Charlotte Hotel. I was more than a little nervous about spending a few hours with this young lass. What would we talk about?
I needn’t have worried. Over Islay beef and scallops we talked and talked. No, she talked, I listened. It was very special. We meet up now each time I go home. She talks, I listen.
Our surname was originally Raineri. I decided it was important to show my brother around Nice and Liguria, just over the Italian border, where our paternal grandfather’s family originated. We finally made it one sweltering August a few years back. We strolled through the Cours Saleya market in Nice, where great-aunt Léonore, who cooked for the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck, used to shop. Over the border, we bought 35-month-old Parmesan in San Remo’s Via Palazzo, then lunched on spaghetti con vongole and a warm squid salad at tiny Nuovo Piccolo Mondo. We visited the cemetery in the hilltop village of Castellaro (great-aunt Paulina plus – a bonus – MJ discovered the broken remains of great-aunt Maria’s tombstone). Further south we visited for the first time Costarainera, the birthplace of our great-grandfather.
More recently, I repeated the exercise with Guy, my 22-year-old nephew. We had a magical time. He loved Nice. I took him to the small over-the-top baroque Church of the Annunciation in the Old Town. We lit a candle at the side chapel of St Rita of Cascia.
The priest in the church shop gave Guy a St Rita prayer card for students. He later lost it and asked if we could go back to get another one. I thought that was promising.
En route to Italy, we lunched in a tiny, family-run bistro at La Turbie, where Augustus built his Trophée des Alpes. Over the border, we added another piece to the family jigsaw: we drove further south on the Via Aurelia, then turned up into the hills to tiny, ancient Boscomare, where his great-great-grandmother was born.
In 2006, shortly after I moved to Nice, I drove over to pretty Juan-les-Pins to lunch with MJ, my beautiful sister-in-law Katya and my six-month-old nephew Theo, who were staying there.
Over lunch at a beach restaurant, my brother was complaining bitterly about the lack of space since Theo’s arrival. You need to decide on your priorities, I said. “If you want a bigger house now Theo’s here, the financial implications are bigger mortgage and less travelling. You fly to Florida to visit Katya’s parents, to San Francisco to stay with her sister,” I continued, warming to my subject. “You’re in France now, Italy in September for a wedding – something has to give.”
My brother replenished our glasses with the refreshingly cool Côte de Provence rosé. Silently, he sipped his wine, gazing out over the sparkling Mediterranean. Then he said: “I’ll be sorry to see Theo go. I’ve grown rather fond of the little fellow.”