Alexander's Roots and Nonna's Ribbons

My mother wrote a book of family history, completing it about six months before she died. It was written for her grandson (Alexander) in her words "to record some family stories which were in danger of being lost and forgotten".

Here is one such story, describing my mother's Italian grandmother.

"I have few personal memories of Nonna Rita but they are very vivid. They include sitting in the dining room at the Weiss family home at 38 St Andrew's Road, around 1949, watching Nonna make pasta. She put tea towels over the backs of the chairs and hung strips of pasta in great pale swathes of lasagne and pappardelle flowing over the chair backs, and we called the pasta Nonna's ribbons.
...
My mother found her quite demanding, and the problem was probably compounded by communication failures because Eve spoke no Italian and Nonna very little English. Eve remembered raised voices on one occasion when guests were coming for dinner and at the very last moment before they arrived Nonna insisted on having the meal served to her in her bedroom instead of joining the party."

Nursery food

The occasion was a family summit, a summit to discuss my grandmother's fast progressing Alzheimer's. There had been a meeting in Henley, where she then lived. While the adults talked, the four cousins window-shopped in town.

After the serious business, whatever it was, had been transacted, the adults and children regrouped and headed to my uncle and aunt's house - Hereward Cottage in Chalfont-St-Giles - for lunch. My aunt Lynda was not there but had left us a large and delicious lasagna to eat.

It was some words of Alex as he served us that have stuck in my mind: "Apologies", he said, "that it's nursery food." No one, of course, accepted the apology (a chorus of "Nonsense" etc) and I don't think anyone was merely being polite. After all, what could have been more comforting and warming than a plate of lasagna after (for the adults) a rather gloomy morning of seriousness?

But something else occurs to me many years later, probably at about the age Alex was then. His comment was certainly not meant to make the children present feel more childish. Instead, Alex was, probably entirely subconsciously, reminding himself and his sisters that once upon a time they had all been used to eating "nursery food", in a nursery, in Henley, cooked by their mother, my grandmother.