"Down to Nana's." - When we visited our Nana and Grandad. World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly 2021

Pope Francis has named this Sunday, World Day of Prayer for Grandparents and the Elderly. In the liturgy we thank God for our parents and grandparents and their love and faith which they generously passed on to us. Since the Pandemic began, Grandparents and Great-Grandparents have suffered greatly not being able to see and hold their grandchildren. Pope Francis reminds us of how much he loved his grandparents and sets all grandparents and elderly persons up as examples of faith and living links to the past to strengthen us. 

I clearly remember the day my mother sent myself and my brother Kevin on the bus for the first time on our own. We must have been nearly nine and nearly eleven years old. We got the 19A Bus from the County Bar in Rialto village to the Stadium (the National Boxing Stadium on the South Circular Road). It was a short trip as the Bus went on into town as we called it and out over to the north side. I remember it must have been the summer time as we weren’t in school. We generally went down to our Nana's on Tuesday's and Saturday afternoons.  This was more or less a routine all my life and the older of us siblings will remember this well.

Mam coached us as to what to say as we boarded the bus, a CIE black-and-white Atlantean type bus. “Two halves to the Stadium please.” “He will let you out beside the Spar”, she said. The memories are coming back as I write. The hiss of the doors as we got on. The black and grey fleck floor-covering. The blue rope bell that went along the ceiling and the button bell on the wall with the instruction to ‘push once’ “Ná ghabh thar an líne ban go stada an bus.” was the warning to all passengers waiting to get off. In those days there were bus conductors with a silver ticket machine which printed the chit on blue ink in Irish and English. The smell of the ticket paper was the same smell as the paper that wrapped up the fish and chips. They also had a leather satchel with the money in it to give back the change. If downstairs was full you would hear the conductor announce “Seats on the top.” There was no smoking downstairs on the bus, but people were allowed to smoke upstairs on the bus. The thick stench of smoke found its way onto everyone’s clothes. On a wet day, the smell of cigarettes on the upper deck seemed to be even more toxic and even sticky. In the 21^st century it is almost impossible to imagine that people were allowed to smoke on busses, trains and even in aircraft once upon a time. Perhaps in the future it will be hard to imagine that one-time people even smoked.

Myself and my brother Kevin travelled the five stops or so, up to Dolphin’s Barn and along the South Circular Road by the old Player Wills cigarette factory and up to the Stadium. We got off the bus at the Spar and walked down Greenville Terrace and around onto Dufferin Avenue and on to Petrie Avenue and to O’Curry Road. Mam followed along later and Dad would meet us there after work.

We arrived at no 33 and blew into my poor Nana’s house. Herself and our grandfather, we called him Grandpop or ‘Grompop’, were sitting by the fire.  The fire would be lit off the embers of last night’s fire. He would be smoking his pipe filled with Condor tobacco and she smoked John Player Red. He would be waiting on the Evening Press newspaper to be delivered into the letter box where he would glance at the headlines but quickly get stuck into crossword. He had a well-thumbed copy of the Collins Gem Dictionary in the famous press to his left hand. Their cat, Cola, would be looking for her ears to be scratched while purring loudly. Grampop would be called for his dinner and he would sit up from his arm chair and sit at the table. Lamb Chops and peas and buttery mashed potatoes. Tinned pears or peaches and custard or ice-cream for dessert. When I was very small, Nana’s Bachelor bother, Tommy lived in the house. He was known as Uncle Me-Me. He had a nick-name for myself and Kevin. I was 'Johnny Banger' and Kevin was ‘Two Ton’ He died not long after my sister Gráinne was born. He sat over on his own armchair and read the paper and often compare notes with my grandpop.

Nana had a picture of the Sacred Heart over on the wall as many homes did in the past. The family would be consecrated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and signed by the priest. Nana would burn a little lamp under the picture and I’m sure she remembered all of us in prayer each day. It is probably fair to say that nearly all grandchildren love their grandparents. Someone said that God couldn’t be everywhere so that’s why he created grandmothers. The Catholic Grandparent’s Association holds up Saints Joachim and Anne, the parents of Our Lady as patrons and also Louis and Zélie Martin, the recently canonized parents of St. Therese of Lisieux. I am confident that my four grandparents are in heaven and the main reason I believe this is that they passed on the faith, no questions asked, to our parents. Also, Pope Francis had a great love for his grandparents and often holds up grannies and granddads as models of faith.

Nana’s master piece was her stew. I acknowledge that Irish grannies will be remembered for generations for the ability to make something out of nothing and therefore feed the neighborhood and for the flavour of their stews and coddle. Our mam will readily agree that she could never quite get the hang of the unique flavour of her mother’s stew and coddle. I can still taste every bit of it and it is almost sacramental to me. There was goodness, and love, and generosity in it.

Nana was a natural grandmother with stories and tales of her own childhood and she grew up in tough times where there was very little money and those in authority really were in authority, state and church. It was hard to be a young person and a young married couple in the 1930’s and 40’s. We look from the prism of today and all that we have in our lives in terms of progress and technology. But in our Nana’s day and even in our Mother’s Day, life was often hard. Nana’s sister, Auntie Chrissie, had an old friend, who was a member of the Church of Ireland who died, and Chrissie attended the funeral service even though it was forbidden at the time for a Catholic to enter a Protestant Church. That rule seems so crazy today yet Chrissie was afraid to tell the priest she went to the funeral. Thank God those days are gone. When I read of old Dublin and old Ireland, I know we learned about much of it from school but thank God we also learned about it while sitting on her knee.

Our Dad would pull up outside around 6.00 p.m. in his red Mini Traveller, or his Renault 12. He had a special type of knock which is hard to describe in writing. It was that classic tune ending; “Shave-and-a-haircut. Bay Rum.”  Or the Ronnie Drew version; “How-is-your-auld’-wan? -game-ball. He would come in, pipe in his mouth, and have a fill (a smoke) with grampop and soon we’d be piled into the car, no seatbelts, because there were no seatbelts, and back home again. When we lived in Kilnamanagh, near Tallaght, we’d stop at the shops for smokes for my mother on the way. And this was the routine as we grew up.

Nana died in February 1991. She was still relatively young at 74 years old. While she hadn’t been well, we never really wanted to believe she would die. She worried about death and like many God-fearing people of her generation, some priests filled their people with more scruples than mercy. I mean, week- in and week-out, she and Grampop went to Mass and even met Saint Mother Theresa of Calcutta on the street in the Parish where she lived. She baptized her children, my mother and my aunts, and brought them up to believe in God. They did the same for us. All her life Nana and Grampop, Granny Gretta and Grandad, practiced their faith and yet many of their generation lived with some fear that God was not a god of mercy and forgiveness.  She introduced me to Saint Padre Pio who she loved, and we walked years later up to the Irish Office for Padre Pio which was on Dufferin Avenue till 2018. Nana often said to me when she died and she met Jesus she would grab on to his tunic hold on tight to him so he couldn’t let her go (to hell?) I feel angry when I reflect on this. Where did she get this from? I would be angry with any theology or homily which frightened her like that. I am critical of any attitude that would lay that burden on a person who, in great difficulty and with a hard life, kept the faith through thick, and thin, and even did so often with a sense of humour. I'm convinced I'll meet my grandparents again. 

Those ordinary parents and grandparents, were a heroic generation who built our nation because they were, to paraphrase Pope Francis, the heart of the family and provide a link to the past. Their strength and faith fortify us in our lives today. Their love runs through our veins.