WE CALLED HER Nonna – which is Italian for grandmother. She was reluctant to be called ‘gran’ or ‘granny’ as many a smart youngish grandmother understandably is – and this was a time when grandmothers were supposed to sit by the fire and spin – chance would be a fine thing, these days! She came to live with us in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1941, daring submarine-infested seas to do so. It was wartime. I was ten, my sister Jane twelve. Nonna had been living in fashionable San Francisco: my mother, divorced from my father, was a working single parent and Nonna was needed to help keep house for Jane and me. So she came at once.
New Zealand all those years ago was still very much a pioneering country: hard working and without frills. The living was hard. I remember the amazement with which I watched Nonna unpack her trunk. From it she drew things I did not know existed – silks and satins, little veils and Chinese wraps, delicate high-heeled shoes – we only ever wore great stompy lace ups – fancy hair combs, the Rubaiyat of Omar Kyyam, tissue-wrapped. Ribbon-bound love letters. She travelled nowhere without a soft pillow for her head.
I ran ceaseless errands for her: sheet music from the library – she was a concert pianist now without concerts – detective novels likewise. She read them first, I read them when she had finished. Warships, not cargo ships, tied up in Lyttleton harbour – books were in short supply. So we too quickly got through all the green Penguins in town – Penguin paperbacks were colour-coded by subject, green was ‘mystery’ – and had to start again at the beginning. But most of the time Nonna played the piano – Scarlatti Variations and Mozart and a little Bach, or she sang Schubert Lieder – she’d been taught by a pupil of Clara Schumann. I don’t think she did much housework but every Tuesday she made a meat loaf to the same recipe out of the remains of Sunday’s roast, and every Monday early we’d light the fire in the wash-house which boiled the water in the copper for the weekly wash – and I’d come back after school and take the washing dolly to heave the dripping sheets through the ranked tubs of rinsing water to the wringer at the end of the line. I loved it.
The war ended: we returned to England; there was little luxury here either – let alone room for a proper Victorian washhouse – and Nonna went to live in comfort with my uncle Selwyn Jepson, a writer of detective novels. I think without her I’d have been a deeply and dully workaday and practical person, let alone learned that in the end you have to write the books you want to read, because no one else has written them.
Fay Weldon is a novelist, short-story writer, playwright and essayist.