THIS LIFE Moïra Fowley-Doyle

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, my mother used to tell me and my sister that the women in my family were witches. I believed her because of how she would anoint our pillows with three drops of lavender oil to give us good dreams, because of how my grandmother would teach us relaxation exercises as magic spells to send us to sleep when we were anxious, because of how my great-grandmother kept magical music boxes and knew all the most gruesome lullabies, because of how my sister always knew how to find lost things. I believed her because of my great-great grandmother Berthe’s rings.

I never met my maternal grandmother’s grandmother, but by all accounts she was a formidable woman. She was born just before the turn of the last century outside a small town in the south-west of France and she became the first female schoolteacher of the region.

Every year the town held a summer fête which culminated in a great feast at which the most important members of the community were seated at the head table. Berthe, as town schoolteacher, sat beside the mayor and the local priest.

In the middle of dinner, in front of the whole town, the priest announced theatrically that women who wanted to be teachers in a state school must have questionable morals. He said that women were not fit to be teachers, and that, in fact, such a female teacher could be nothing other than a trollop. Berthe, understandably furious, smacked the priest across the face. The priest smirked and said, ‘Just like Jesus did, madame, I will turn the other cheek.’

‘Oh you will, monsieur priest?’ replied my great-great-grandmother – and she smacked his other cheek just as hard.

This particular family legend is just as infamous as my great-great-grandmother’s large feet (which inspired her nickname, Berthe aux Grands Pieds, meaning Bertha of the big feet) and the enormous rings she wore on every finger. When she died, these rings – huge semi-precious stones held in place by small silver claws – went to her daughter (my great-grandmother) who passed away when I was 15. She knew I always loved wearing big rings so she left me one of Berthe’s. The smallest one, the amethyst one, the one Berthe wore on her pinkie, but still a giant on my right ring finger.

For two years I wore my great-great grandmother’s ring every day, until the day, somehow, I lost it. I was heartbroken. I searched everywhere. I tore my room apart. I scoured the whole house. I emptied my school locker and retraced my steps but it was gone. I was devastated to have lost this heirloom, this magical object, this physical reminder.

My grandmother, who had been left the rest of Berthe’s rings when my greatgrandmother died, knowing how upset I was, gave me another of the rings: a topaz, even bigger, that Berthe used to wear on her thumb. I never took it off to wash my hands again; I kept it in a special box by my bed when I slept.

Every time I thought of lost things, I thought about that amethyst ring. When I moved out of my parents’ house, I removed every bookshelf from the walls of my old bedroom, I tore off the skirting boards, I stuck knitting needles between the floorboards, to no avail. I took the last boxes of my teenage things into my new home and I mourned the ring.

A few years later, my husband and I were clearing out our old things and decluttering the house after having our first baby. I’d filled boxes full of stuff I’d never really used or didn’t need any more to bring to charity shops. My husband noticed that there was a tiny pocket inside an old picnic bag in the oldest of the boxes. He opened the pocket. In it was Berthe’s amethyst ring. It had been there for ten years. Now, I have two daughters. Little witch babies to whom I sing all the most gruesome lullabies, whose pillows I anoint with lavender oil, to whom I teach the same small spells for sweet sleep that my grandmother taught to me.

I wear the past on my fingers. So many of us do: we keep the dead close to our skin. My grandmother wears her mother’s engagement ring on a necklace. My mum wears my grandmother’s bracelet. My sister wears my mum’s gold chain. My great-grandmother wore her mother’s silver gemstone rings. I wear them now. Objects passed down the generations. The past becomes physical: people who are no longer with us can still be touched, kept close, called back, remembered. Even people we never really knew. An object becomes a link, a talisman, a reminder of who we are and where we’ve come from.

I wear Berthe’s rings every day and they remind me that I come from a long line of strong and formidable women. And the amethyst in particular reminds me to trust in luck and magic – and to always check the pockets.

This family legend is just as infamous as my great-great-grandmother’s large feet, which inspired her nickname Berthe aux Grands Pieds