The Nana by Alice Taylor

Author:Alice Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brandon
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Herself Upstairs

She certainly was not the stuff that doting Nanas are made of! During the decade that she lived in our little upstairs apartment, ironically christened the ‘West Wing’, tales extolling the achievements of her grandchildren never escaped her lips or entered into any of her conversations. And neither was she interested in the activities of other people’s grandchildren, even those of her own family, as I discovered one afternoon when one of her long-lost relatives of the same vintage as herself came to visit her. These two cousins had grown up together in the West of Ireland and were meeting up for the first time in many years, so one would have assumed that grandchildren would be a big part of their conversation. But these two ladies had followed very different lifestyles.

The colourful cousin had spent her life in America, and she arrived in a flurry of flowing garments and large handbags. My lady, Mrs C, on the other hand, had lived mostly in France and brought to mind the famous Mrs Simpson – pencil slim, elegant, breathing sophistication, and with a biting wit. Her cousin, having puffed her way upstairs and obtaining a cool, obligatory peck on the cheek, collapsed inelegantly into a fragile, rigid, upright, unreceptive French armchair. I wondered how these two very different ladies were going to pass the afternoon and how their reunion might go.

That evening, when things had quietened in our downstairs, noisy domain, I called up to see Mrs C. ‘Well, Mrs C, how did things go with your cousin?’ I enquired. ‘Did you have a great afternoon catching up on family matters?’ ‘Not quite!’ she informed me in a cool, measured tone, ‘but once we had got one issue sorted, matters did resolve themselves satisfactorily.’ ‘In what way?’ I enquired curiously.

‘That woman,’ she informed me in an annoyed voice, ‘had scarcely collapsed into my chair before she proceeded to open up her enormous handbag and drag out, and proudly display, a photographic procession of bald babies and gowned graduates, in whom I did not have the slightest interest. So when I could no longer tolerate another one, I told her in no uncertain terms to put them all away. There is nothing, I told her, more boring than other people’s grandchildren.’ This treatment of her long-lost cousin did not surprise me in the least, as it was true to form. She had once informed me: ‘In life if you put up with too much you get too much to put up with.’ And she certainly adhered to that!

She definitely was not a baby cooer or an admirer of ‘bald babies’, whether they were of her own family or others. When a young friend who lived next door had a new baby, which, out of sheer courtesy, she brought to visit Mrs C, this young mother later reported with an amused, understanding smile: ‘We have been inspected! No cooing and billing over newborns from Mrs C!’

Born into one of the great

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