Since middle-age struck, I miss my grandmother in a different way

ONCE a high-flying magazine editor in Dublin, living the classic, harried executive lifestyle, Kate Kerrigan swapped it all to be a fulltime novelist and live in her idyll — the fishing village of Killala, Co. Mayo. But rather than being a sleepy existence, it’s been anything but for the 50-something mother of The Teenager (15), and The Tominator, seven (oh, and there’s the artist husband Niall, too). It’s chaos, as she explains every week in her hilarious and touching column...

IHAVE always been the sort of person who stores half-onions under saucers and saves bits of leftover bacon in the fridge. My husband hates it. I never throw food away. ‘Anything in a tub lasts forever,’ I tell him. ‘Supermarket sell-by dates are a con designed to make me buy more yogurt.’

This thriftiness is not a reaction to the economy — it is bred into me.

Most of my ‘old crap’ went with the old house. Everything in our new build is shiny and new. New house, new stuff, new start. I’m happy with that, but there is one old thing I am nor prepared to relinquish.

‘Where’s my knife?’ I asked the other half. I was making an apple tart and always used the old bone-handled knife to peel apples. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He looked sheepish. A fizz of panic shot through me and with it, a picture I hope never lose. My grandmother was seated at the table in her simple kitchen tearing the leaves off rhubarb stalks, in her hands that very same bone-handled knife.

My Mayo grandmother lived with us in London and she died when I was in my early 20s. I have always missed her humour and her presence but since middle-age struck I have begin to miss her in a different way. I am nearing the age she was when I first became aware of her blustering housewifery.

I want to show her my own wonderful rhubarb patch, ask her advice on keeping the crows away from my gooseberries, have her to show me how to darn the elbow on a cardigan. Mostly I want to stand at her side and have her teach me to make her wonderful soda bread again.

This time, I would take real note as she threw the flour and bread soda into the bowl, measuring by eye alone, gradually adding in the soured milk then gently kneading the dough into a delicate round, gathering in every last crumb. I’m ready to learn from her now. I am ready to listen. I want my time back with her not as a girl in my 20s, my head full of new clothes and boyfriends but as a mature woman with children whose domestic situation reflects so much of her own. When my mother refurbished the kitchen in her family home, she passed me on a number of Granny’s things. Her cookery books, the mixing bowl she had made her bread in for 40 years, and crucially — the bone-handled knife that she carried about in the pocket of her apron, always.

The small, flat instrument with the rounded blade had started its life as a dinner knife, but, for some eccentric reason, Granny had sharpened the centre of it until the blade was concave. To this day it is extraordinarily effective in cutting everything from vegetables to bread. In the old house ‘Granny’s Knife’ sat in my cutlery drawer and I used it everyday. But now it’s gone. I felt bereft and looked at my husband accusingly. He has always been slightly nervous of the thing and never touched it. With its ancient yellowed handle, and strange shaped blade it looked like a hybrid butter knife — but it still works, and using it was a way of keeping her with me. Often, when I am chopping an onion, or peeling an apple she comes into my mind — stout and stern working at our kitchen table, then throwing her head back into a loud burst of laughter so suddenly you’d nearly jump out of your skin!

Material possessions are not as important as people, but they often outlive them and for what they represent, for the way they remind you of a person, they are important. The knife is part of that legacy for me. I glared at him accusingly. ‘I haven’t seen it,’ he said, and made a run for it. ‘Is it in with the baking stuff?’ the Teen asked, as he breezed past. It was. Shoved in beside an ancient baking tin. I was surprised but also glad that he had even remembered what it was.

I let my sons know ‘this is my grandmother’s recipe’ when I serve traditional baking. They aren’t listening, they don’t care that I ate the same foods as a child but I still hope that by some mysterious process they will absorb the old ways from me as I did from my mother. Despite their eye rolling, the meals I cooked and the knife that I used — which once belonged to their great grandmother —will all log in their memories.

When I was done peeling the apple I put it back in the cutlery drawer. Pride of place.