No washing knickers of strangers for kids today

I’M going to go on a bit of a rant. There’s an 85-year-old granny whose grandson has turned her into an internet star. She’s cooking her favourite recipes and telling tales of her youth and the relatively tough but happy life she had. Nana Nora is her name.

When she was 12, she went to work for two women on the northside of Cork city and a few raw carrots and celery sticks were left out for her to sustain herself for the day. She had never seen celery in her life. She had to wash their underwear on a washboard in a ‘tinny bath’. She tells it without rancour. Now, I’m not for one second suggesting that any 12-yearold should have to do this but to hear that they were struggling and traumatised during the lockdown because they couldn’t see their friends in person was doing my head in. Some of them were finding it difficult to stay inside their warm comfy homes with Skype, Zoom, PlayStation or whatever it is now and about 9,000 TV stations.

I know I sound like an ‘auld crabby wan’ and I am. I was the youngest in my family by a good bit (my father, after a few hot whiskeys, once told one of my friends that I was the result of the Billings method going wrong) and spent hours on my own. Banging a tennis ball against the wall with my mother screaming, “Jesus, mind the window”. Reading and rereading my Enid Blyton book. I actually played with stones (we had gravel in our garden) and if I whinged, I was annihilated. So I just wonder how today’s kids would deal with washing the knickers of strangers. On a washboard. In a ‘tinny bath’.