Grandmothers

A woman holding a scalpel dives into the wine-dark waters off the Sardinian Island of Sant’Antioco. She swims to the secluded seagrass beds, home of the endangered Mediterranean clam, Pinna nobilis. Here, early in the morning, by the light of the late spring’s full moon, she collects the byssus or sea silk produced by the clam’s byssus gland—keratin threads that anchor the shell to the rocks.

At this time of year, the mud of the lagoon is soft; she can extract the animal, cut the byssus filaments and replace the clam without damaging it, thus abiding by the rules of the European Union Habitats Directive.

After one hundred dives, she has gathered only thirty grams of byssus. Back in her studio, she removes the sea sediment with a carding comb and rinses the fibres in fresh water. Then she spins them into silky thread finer than that of silkworms, a third the width of a human hair, chanting melodies taught to her by her grandmother, intoning prayers in a mixture of Sardo (the ancient Sardinian dialect) and Hebrew. She prays for what has been and what will be. Watching her on my computer screen, I recognise the Hebrew words Elohim and Adonai, two of the names given to the God of Moses. She dyes the strands in secret concoctions of lemon juice, spices and varieties of seaweed. The fibres soon become elastic and shimmer in the sunlight like threads of gold.

The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Chinese all make mention of sea silk, sometimes calling it sea wool, or mermaid silk. In Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the crew of the Nautilus wore clothes of spun sea silk.

Now in her sixties, Chiara Vigo claims she is the last woman alive who knows the secrets of working byssus, secrets that are whispered, never written, entrusted from woman to woman, the daughters and granddaughters in her family, for twenty-four generations. She remembers her grandmother teaching her, aged three, to dive. Her surname reveals her family to be from Spain or Liguria. Local Sardinians were not sailors but shepherds, afraid of the sea, which for them was the portal for invasions from abroad—Phoenicians, Arabs and Catalans. Many had never seen the sea, much less learned to swim.

According to the Sea Oath she is bound by, the precious byssus, like the sun, or the tides, or the flight of an eagle, can never be bought or sold. There is a sign on the door of her studio, the Museo del Bisso: Haste doesn’t live here.

Vigo embroiders the byssus thread onto pieces of fabric, or braids bracelets as gifts or for those who seek her help: byssus is said to bring both good fortune and fertility. Her work is displayed in the Louvre, the Vatican and the British Museum.

By twelve Vigo knew how to weave, but who will collect and spin the fine silk when she is gone? Her daughter lives in Dublin, and in 2017 told the BBC: ‘My mother and I are very different. People have always told me that I’d be a fool to allow this art to die, but I’m desperately torn. My life is mine.’

Might there be no more mermaid silk for the coming generations? We have our own miraculous man-made fibres now, and cheaper and more efficient ways to manufacture threads that look golden, so why does it seem such a pity to allow the hidden knowledge of byssus—the word itself sounds like a whispered prayer—to fade and die?

How I longed to be a granddaughter in a long line of granddaughters, like Chiara Vigo, learning secret chants from my grandmother and, when the day came, teaching them to my own grandchildren. But fate had delivered me to a mother who was a Holocaust survivor, the only one out of her once large Polish Jewish family. Here was I at the bottom of the world, a child with no grandparents. At special school assemblies, when grandparents filled the rows, I sang for nobody. Old people remained a mystery.

At fifty-one I became a grandmother to Maya. With no fond memories of being grandmothered, I was free to create my own role. But who I should be? Certainly not a silly old woman fooled by the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood?

Over the next nine years my brood enlarged—Maya was joined two years later by her sister Eden, and a few months after that their cousin Bella arrived. Nearly three years passed and then we welcomed the twins, Milly and Jesse, a girl and our only boy, and finally, four years after that, Layla completed the picture.

I taught my grandchildren to call me Booba, Yiddish for grandmother, a word linguistically related to the Slavic Baba, and through this to the story of Baba Yaga, the mythic Grandmother Witch. She lived in a cottage built upon outsized chicken’s feet and surrounded by a fence made from human bones, the results of her penchant for cooking and eating people who displeased her. But some stories tell of her offering guidance to those who approached her with openness and honesty. Connected to the supernatural power of the underworld, she was eternally wise, knowing the medicinal secrets of plants and potions and flying in a magic mortar, the pestle a rudder.

Could I have the courage and wisdom of Baba Yaga without her ghoulish streak? I knew I could defend my grandchildren against schoolyard bullies and unreasonable teachers and adult predators. I could provide my home, a place where they would always be safe and welcome, with clean, comfortable beds and delicious food. I would be a wise truth-teller of my own making, explaining the world with frankness and humour. I would read them stories and do all the voices. There would be unlimited kisses.

I am a swot by nature, so my disconnection from the line of grandmothers that had preceded me fostered a dispassionate examination of grandmothering. I even extended my research to other mammals. Like grandmother killer whales, human grandmothers live many years beyond the end of their fertility—thanks to menopause. Our fellow primates—chimps, for example—die soon after their fertility ends. So this gift of extra years must have an evolutionary value.

Killer whale grandmothers live for twenty-five years after menopause, long enough to see the oldest of their grand-calves to sexual maturity. There is much variation in foraging tactics between killer whale kin groups. Some learn to take fish from fishing trawlers, others know the timing and location for catching particular salmon species. This cultural knowledge is taught by the wise elders.

Unlike many of our fellow land mammals, human babies are born unable to stand, much less walk or find food. In the wild, parents, especially mothers, must feed them, protect them, keep them at the right temperature, avoid them becoming some predator’s lunch, wash them, not drop them, not crush them while sleeping, not let them be attacked by siblings, and not strangle them out of stress and sleep-deprivation. We are immensely social creatures, and human societies have put sanctions in place to prevent such transgressions, and much attention is required for their coordination.

When I held my own baby for the first time, I was overcome with the crushing weight of responsibility to keep the child alive, breathing and whole. In the first two months of her life, I dreamed that my baby’s head fell off onto the floor, and that I made a shameful attempt to secure the head back on the neck with sticky-tape. When I began helping to care for my infant grandchildren, the effort, time, attention and sheer complexity of it seemed a revelation from the wiser perspective of grandmotherhood. I see parents at their wits’ end, wheeling prams erratically in the street, their splotchy, red-eyed toddlers having nonetheless survived their infancy. Someone, perhaps the grandmother, has helped shepherd the infants through vulnerable times.

I noticed more and more grandmothers at kindergarten and school pickup times. If you couldn’t discern them by their clothes and laugh lines, the grandmothers were obvious as the ones holding surprises of unsuitable afternoon tea, chocolates and sweet biscuits, while the mothers picking up their own children cast disapproving glances.

A study of modern Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania found grandmothers were more important to child survival than fathers, who went out every day to feed themselves and hunt, but who were successful in bringing home nutritious meat only 3.4 per cent of the time. Women, young and old, were providing the majority of calories for the women and children of the family. The old women, for example, were digging deep in the ground for calorie-rich tubers. Humans resume ovulation quickly after giving birth, which means a Hadza mother might have a helpless infant, a two-year-old, a five-year-old and a seven-year-old, all of whom have to be fed—a task only possible with the help of the still-fit grandmothers.

I once went honey-ant collecting with a group of Pitjantjatjara grandmothers in Central Australia. They spent hours in the sun digging a hole deep enough to crouch in and then extracted less than a mug-full of ants, whose abdomens were distended with golden honey. Back at camp, when the children were given this treasure, they bit off the abdomens to release the sweet nectar into their mouths.

In most tribal human societies, old people are esteemed, not because of any formal status, but because the younger people have an innate respect and admiration for them. The elderly have knowledge of important matters: folklore, magic, hunting, rituals, decision-making and medicine. There is a touch of Baba Yaga to this. But this status does not always last their whole lifetime. In some societies, once old people lose their mental faculties, they are considered incompetent. Some are even killed, or at least abandoned to their deaths.

Now that my direct responsibilities for children are not so urgent, I can afford to take the longer view. In the face of my looming irrelevance, I feel an urgent need to tell my children and grandchildren what I know about the world, what I have learned through struggle and failure. Am I naive in thinking they might avoid the worst and find the best if they are armed with my lessons?

Many Neanderthal women were probably grandmothers by the time they were thirty. Their grandchildren also had a prolonged childhood, and the evidence from their bones and teeth indicates it may have even been slightly longer than ours. For hundreds of thousands of years, each Neanderthal generation led the same kind of lives as the last one, and grandmothers’ tales must have been important for transmitting traditions, assuming they had the ability to speak. But what could they have possibly told their little ones about the advent of the fearsome strangers, Homo sapiens, striding across their hills and valleys with their odd-shaped heads and their newfangled throwing spears and their obedient hunting-dog companions? They could not have known what was in store for their grandchildren: that in a thousand years or so their species would be extinct.

At the Japanese takeaway, I ask if there is a carry bag. Told of the charge, I grimace and pack my arms with the items. ‘Booba, it’s okay,’ says my eldest granddaughter, attuned to my sighs. ‘It’s a good thing they’re charging for plastic bags. They’re not good for the environment.’ ‘I know, I know,’ I tell her.

I do know. It’s a small thing, but it is a significant change when you have been used to certain conveniences. I think of my assumptions that the tap will deliver water when I turn it, that there will be power when I press the light switch. The rise in average global temperature has already been 1.8 degrees Celsius just in my lifetime. I read graphs and measurements and watch the news about rising carbon dioxide levels with unease.

The rate of warming increased steeply in the mid-1970s, when my children were born, and each of the last three decades has been warmer than all the decades before that since 1850. The Bureau of Meteorology projects that, without emissions control, by 2090 my city, Melbourne, will be ten per cent drier and 3.8 degrees Celsius hotter than now. Fifty-degree days could occur by the 2040s; in those temperatures, hospitals, electricity systems and infrastructure would all struggle. Already the bitumen on the roads softens in the heat. What can I tell my grandchildren about what they might expect? Haste doesn’t live here might be the watchword on Chiara Vigo’s studio, but not for me. Time is running out and I have no time to lose. Like Chiara Vigo, I am already in my sixties and, while I will avoid the worst consequences of climate change, I fear that my grandchildren won’t.

Some have farsighted plans to escape to an alternative planet once ours becomes unfit for life. Even if I was younger and single, I doubt I would sign up for the training and the Martian voyage and then settle on a cold planet covered with deserts, subject to dust storms that can last for months, and with a thin atmosphere made up mostly of carbon dioxide, which we can’t breathe. I dislike the idea of being stuck on a cruise ship, much less a never-ending cruise ship of testy Martian pioneers, without a buffet service. But I am a curious creature, so I am nevertheless fascinated by the stories we tell ourselves about what it might be like to be on one of those voyages: I imagine having my heart in my mouth as we deal with the small and large threats and victories en route.

But while we watch movies and dream about fantastic voyages, we hear news of floods and droughts and wildfires and hurricanes. I think of the people close to those disasters and thank my lucky stars that I am not them. But we are all them, or might be very soon.

We are different from Neanderthal grandmothers in that we do know what’s in store. One of our most powerful forecasting tools is a deep understanding of our history and how to use it to chart new courses. What help to our grandchildren is the sentimental mystery of byssus and other ancient songs? Chiara Vigo prays for what has been and what will be. Prayer? We need to do more than pray. We can tell our stories of what will be with so much more data now, and we can encourage and model urgent action beyond the whispered secrets and the confines of the hearth and home.

And anyway, is Chiara Vigo really the last woman alive who holds the secret of byssus? A deeper investigation into the mysteries of Sant’Antioco reveals a rival sea silk collective: the sisters Assuntina and Giuseppina Pes learned the secrets from Efisia Murroni, who herself was instructed by Italo Diana at a school for weaving that opened on the island in 1923. In 2013, the Pes sisters ran a byssus workshop and explained every step of the process to the participants. There were no chants, promises and obligations here, but there was documentation, which was presented to a conference organised in the Italian town of Lecce by the Centre for Textile Research at the University of Copenhagen.

In 2016, the local municipality closed Chiara Vigo’s Museo del Bisso because of noncompliant electrical installations. She claims they were forcing her to charge entrance fees and ‘to write down my secrets’. She says she now wants to live overseas.

I am a little sorry to ruin a perfectly enchanting story. We are readily seduced by the hushed prayers, the diving by moonlight, the golden threads, but now, more than anything, we need to convey to our grandchildren our lived wisdom, together with our data and our fighting spirit. Defending these children should now reach well beyond the schoolyard, outwards towards a global movement for action and change, as we take flight in our magic mortars, wielding our pestles as rudders.

We are all Baba Yaga now.