Return to the old country

My mother’s mum and dad were Italian, a fact that I’d always taken for granted as a child, rather like having a kleptomaniac aunt – which in fact I also had – or perhaps owning a one legged dog – which we didn’t.

It’s just one of those things you grow up with. My gran died long before I was born and I only had mum’s eccentric father Clemente, or nonno as I called him, with his strong accent and fiery temper as a grid reference to the old country.

It wasn’t until I was married, and nonno had also died, that we decided to visit one of my only remaining known Italian relatives. This was mum’s cousin Marina who spoke no English, was very old, and lived alone up in the mountains in a fairly remote area not far from the Swiss border. It didn’t sound a bundle of laughs, and I was also concerned about the paucity of conversational chit chat between four people, three of whom already had thick Midlands accents. Marina would probably decide we were from Barcelona or something. Mum was her usual enigmatic self as we finally came to rest, weary, dusty and decidedly exhausted, at the outskirts of the small town where Marina was supposedly meeting us. This had been pre-arranged via an English speaking neighbour of hers, who assured us it was no distance at all to Marina’s place.

Half an hour later, with the sun beating relentlessly down and three ridiculously heavy suitcases between us, we bit the bullet and started reluctantly to attempt to walk up the mountain. Yes, really. Poor mum was turning puce and I was seriously starting to wonder what the Italian for life support was, when a noisy old car hove into view, kicking up red dust and making alarming sounds. An old gentleman was waving frantically to us and shouting in Italian while jerking his thumb back the way he’d come. My mum then astonished me by breaking into fluent Italian. Now this was a woman who had never uttered a foreign word in all my life except for when she announced it was spaghetti Bolognese night, never spoken to her father in his native tongue and certainly had never indicated that she even remembered how to speak it. I was well impressed, and would have told her so if I’d not been on the verge of collapse. The bad news was that the car would only hold the cases and one other person.

We arm wrestled at the side of the road, played rock, paper, scissors and each vigorously defended our right to ride, but of course mum won, being not only old but our only means of interacting with Marina. Rather than make the chap trundle all the way back down the mountain for us, we stoically said we’d walk the mile or so.

What seemed like days later we crested the enormous hill and spotted mum, wine glass in hand, waving to us from the porch of Marina’s hillside house. Our luggage had gone on ahead in the car thankfully, so we were at least able in between gasps to wave back. Mum’s cousin then pushed her way past mum to inspect the foreigners. She was around 70 which seemed ancient to us youngsters, she was nut brown, terminally wrinkled and extremely thin to the point of emaciation. She wore a permanently stern expression as if she strongly disapproved of us all interrupting her busy routine. She was also freakishly strong, as witnessed the following day in searing heat, when we spotted her marching up the mountain with a pile of logs on her back, ready for the winter. When I say a pile of logs I don’t mean one or two wussy pieces of kindling – these were proper logs, heavy, dirty, prickly and I’ve no doubt hacked straight from the surrounding forest by her own gnarled hands. Before my husband had a chance to jump up and offer to help she’d already thrown them into the cellar, fed the chickens, hung out her washing and put a large saucepan on to boil.

Marina never married. She’d spent her youth working as a ladies’ maid in Paris and every month sent money back to Italy towards having the house built, so that when she retired she had a home ready to move into. She had a large wooden chest full of neatly folded linen, sheets, tablecloths, pillowcases, bedspreads, all beautifully embroidered and all presumably collected over the years for a trousseau that never happened.

My mother had spent several years living with Marina when she was a child, in order that her own mother back in London could go out to work. While this arrangement seemed to my modern eyes to be distinctly odd, it worked pretty well. Her Italian mother had a job, her only child wasn’t left with dodgy English people, mum learned Italian and apparently led a great life in the country and had exciting visits from her parents every year. She told me she remembered going down into the town on the top of an uncle’s cart, sitting high up on sacks of grain and feeling like a queen, while her uncle proudly informed all who he passed “this is my niece. She’s English!”

My Italian grandmother