I REMEMBER MY Nonna just before she died. Eighty-five, widowed and wheelchair-bound but still sharp, strong, smartly dressed and hair blue-rinsed every Wednesday morning. I had married just the year before and she approved of my choice and was thrilled to hold Francesca, my new baby daughter.
When I was much younger I had spent much more time with her. She lived in Port Seton, a picturesque fishing village with my uncle and his family. Most Sundays saw me helping her prepare lunch: setting the table, sieving tomatoes, grating Parmigiano. She was a natural cook, preparing only Italian recipes she had learned when she was young; seasonal food closely linked to the fasting and feasting of the Catholic Calendar. Homemade pasta on Sundays with a thick, sweet tomato sugo; homemade chicken broth if we were poorly; fish on Fridays; baccalá on Good Friday, no meat during lent – no discussion!
My first visit to Italy was with Nonna, she returned to her family home in the south for months every summer. I, an innocent fourteen-year-old, miniskirted and naive, was introduced to my first taste of prosciutto, first sip of Chianti and first kiss with a lovely Italian boy . . . the latter only because he was gay and studying to be a priest – no discussion!
She taught me to play ‘Scopa,’ the Italian card game, with her friends, groups of old folk who hung out in the bar in the piazza. Gambling was fine as long as you beat the men – no discussion!
During the last few years of her life, as she became ill and I pursued my life as a young career woman, I spent less and less time with her. She continued to cook every day and her afternoons found her sitting at her window, gazing out at life passing by, prayer book open and rosary beads in hand. She was quiet and peaceful, apparently content to be left alone.
She died, we wept and life went on. Francesca grew up, my own life took over and Nonna’s picture gathered dust at the side of my bed.
It was not until twenty years later, when my own father died and it was Francesca’s turn to leave home to study and work, that I started to think about Nonna again. It dawned on me that I knew little if anything about her. Though I had spent many happy times with her, she had never discussed things with me, her life, her views, her experiences.
She had never explained how it was she was Italian but lived in a Scottish fishing village and spoke English perfectly with a London accent. She never explained when she had been widowed or how. She never spoke to me in Italian.
It took me many years to piece together her story. She had been born in London in 1895, of two Italian immigrants from the Abruzzi region of Italy, poor shepherds who were driven to England with their family in order to survive.
She grew up in the slums of Little Italy, Saffron Hill; her father scraping a living in the streets making music with a barrel organ, a monkey dancing on top. When she was seven her mother died and her father and the rest of her five brothers were forced to return to the poverty in Italy they had tried to leave behind. They lived in a hovel of farm buildings with no running water or electricity and she spent most of her youth cooking and cleaning to care for her widowed father and orphaned brothers. She had to work on the land, herding sheep and making cheese.
When she blossomed into a beautiful young woman a second chance to start a new life came at nineteen when she fell in love with and married her first cousin Cesidio. Their first son died of fever aged three months, and then two other children were born, a daughter, Anna and a son, Giovanni, my father.
She never told me how her husband had been called up to fight with the Italian army when her son was just born or why, when he returned he left again to emigrate to join a cousin in Edinburgh. She never explained how she coped when he sent money over to her and asked her to follow him, alone with her two children, to a new life in Scotland.
She never discussed what she felt like when no sooner had they settled in a room at the back of a fish and chip shop in a fishing village outside Edinburgh then the First World War broke out and her young husband was called off to fight with the British in the Northern front. How did she manage to cope alone in a foreign country, expecting another child, left with a fledgling business to run and feed two children?
But she did manage. When her husband returned three years later she had not only survived but paid off debts, and made good friends among the Scottish women whose husbands were also at war.
When the Second World War broke out she was not so lucky. This time the Italians were the enemy. Who knows why she never spoke of her anguish and fear when, without warning, in the dark of night of the 20 June 1940, government officials came to her door and arrested her husband and two teenage sons at gunpoint. She never spoke of the terror and pain as she searched the city to find out what had happened. Not till the second week in July did she get news that he was missing and had probably drowned. Along with 446 other Italians, all men with similar stories and families left behind, he had gone down with the cruise ship, the Arandora Star, which was being used by the British government to transport ‘dangerous aliens’ to Canada. She never shared the anguish when she realised she would never see her husband again; she never screamed at her anger of why her loving, hardworking husband had been classed as a ‘dangerous alien’. Anyone who knew him said he was a quiet kind man with not an ounce of malice in him.
She never told me what it felt like during the war years, her husband missing at sea; her eldest son imprisoned on the Isle of Man; her youngest son, a British citizen, fighting with the RAF in Africa against Mussolini’s army. How could she talk about this?
Today, I am so proud of her and my grandfather. I regret deeply that I never talked with her while she was alive. I thought of her as an old lady, out of touch with my life. I loved her but I never knew her. Should I have tried harder? Oh yes – no discussion.
Mary Contini is a Director of the iconic Italian delicatessen, Valvona & Crolla, in Edinburgh. She writes about Italian food and her experiences of growing up in an Italian immigrant family. She campaigns avidly to improve children’s diets but eats too much ice cream! She is married with two girls.