When family fury boiled up with the spaghetti

BY THE time journalist Nick Duerden approached 50, his mother had died and he had lost touch with his father.

So if he wanted to dig into his family history to make sense of his own identity, the only people left were his grandparents, shuffling through their twilight years in a stultifying suburb of Milan.

As a child attuned to the cultural stimulation of London, Duerden dreaded the annual summer visit to their dreary flat.

‘Their careers had been blue-collar, hard work and poorly paid,’ he writes. ‘They rarely travelled outside Italy . . . They spoke not a word of English and my Italian was, and remains, pidgin at best.

‘Consequently, I have never had a proper conversation with either of them, no eloquent heart-to-heart, no outpouring of feelings.’ Nor did he show interest in the war and hardship they had survived.

Yet, as he grew up, he continued his annual pilgrimages to their unchanging home, finding affection for his Nonna’s oily salad dressing and his grandfather’s reluctance to leave the flat. First he brought the girlfriends. Then the wife. And finally the great-grandchildren.

Because our grandparents are usually settled into sedentary routines by the time we know them, it’s hard to imagine the dramas of their youth. But Duerden’s tender little book reveals that his grandparents had had early lives of great turbulence.

After his grandfather’s death, he learnt that the old man once had a brother, who had committed suicide lying in bed beside him. The method was unclear, but there had been a lot of blood.

It was, perhaps, in seeking an instant family in the wake of this tragedy that Duerden’s grandfather had fallen in love with his grandmother, who had already become pregnant by a Russian soldier during the war.

His mother, the matriarch, had not wanted the ‘bastard’ — Duerden’s mother — in the house and the child had been sent away to a convent, where the nuns had not been kind.

No wonder strange rages had boiled up with the spaghetti, but Duerden can see both sides — his grandmother, with her illegitimate child, struggling for acceptance in the strict Catholic culture; his mother unable to let go of the pain of abandonment.

Duerden’s grandfather probably stayed out of it. The man had never boiled an egg or changed a nappy and was bewildered to see his grandson so deeply engaged in the care of his own daughters. It must have been difficult for this elderly couple to see the social structures for which they had sacrificed so much dissolving before their eyes.

By the end of Duerden’s tale, his Nonna is in her 90s, living in a care home. He knows that the last time she visited his mother — when she was dying of pancreatic cancer, aged 56 — the pair fought. He wonders if things would ever have changed had his mother lived.

But he looks into his grandmother’s still pure blue eyes at the age of 98, and reads ‘her disappointments and mistakes, her secrets, torments, delights and satisfactions’, more clearly than ever before. She only ever asks one question: ‘Sei contento?’ Are you happy? Yes, he replies. Yes we are.