Dandelions

I.

A woman with a soft brown perm walks slowly through tall grasses, between a Co-op distribution centre and an abandoned warehouse. She is far from Maniago, the small Italian town where she was born, where the plains pucker along the seam of the north-eastern Alps. Her dress – a simple, straight-skirted, below-the-knee affair in muted green polyester with, perhaps, some swirling pattern in a pale yellow – almost blends into the surroundings. You wouldn’t spot her but for the occasional glint of a faux gold button on her cuff and the electric pink and blue of her half-apron, with its deep pockets designed to contain the multitudes of needles, threads, thimbles and safety-pins that are the seamstress’s tools. She stops at irregular intervals and bends over, almost double, to pinch her fingers around clumps of leaves and delicately, decisively, pluck. As she straightens, she pushes handfuls of green into a bag before continuing on her way.

It’s probably mid-morning on a Sunday, not long after Mass at St Robert’s Roman Catholic Church on Hamilton Road, where the priest always stops her after the service to thank her for the cake, ask after the boys, or to see if she would like to help with a new family just settling into the area. Any other day, she’d be curved over the sewing machine. The shops are closed so there aren’t many people about. Those who are tend to look over with furrowed brows and perhaps a shake of the head, before moving on. They’re not sure what this woman is up to – has she lost something? – but they know they wouldn’t be caught dead rooting around where stray cats and dogs and Godknowswhat do their business. Now she is alone, but often there is a boy, too – probably no older than twelve, the age at which he starts to think twice about these family customs. His skin is darker than hers, which has its own subtle olive hue, and this causes him grief at school. They have many names for him.

The woman is my grandmother, mia nonna – sometimes with my father beside her, tugging awkwardly at the shorts she made him – and she is picking dandelions to go with the evening meal. She bobs and weaves between the flowers’ perky heads, dotted like asterisks on a densely annotated page.

This is in Longsight, Manchester, sometime in the late 1950s, and it’s one of my prevailing images of Nonna, who is now halfway through her nineties and living back in Maniago. I wasn’t there, of course, so it’s a kind of fiction implanted through decades of other people’s talk. In the family, the story of Nonna collecting dandelions – tarassaco, in Italian; pestonala, pissecìan or radicèla (derived from radici, roots) in the dialects of her native Friuli – has always carried more weight than fact alone. It’s like a well-worn fable, a matter-of-fact fairy tale that doesn’t accommodate requests for supplementary detail about dates and times, relationships or materials. Che importa?, she says, ‘What does it matter?’; a question some would extend to whole lives and cultures.

All immigrants have narratives in which the mundane is ripe with symbolism, centred on moments in which the difference between them and us, the natives and the newcomers, are somehow distilled. We recycle abstruse parables, pass them down the generations, and find in them nourishment, confirmation of something never fully articulated. We keep the lines of the stories more or less straight, because embellishment, like questions, only complicates.

We Italians know how good gently wilted tarassaco tastes, once tossed with salt, perhaps a splash of vinegar or squeeze of lemon, and the essential olive oil, which, in England, you had to buy from the pharmacy back then (t’immagini? Can you imagine?). The British, on the other hand, do not. Dandelion and burdock is one thing, they’d say, picking weeds from a wasteland, something else entirely. So they think we’re mad and we think they are – they’re missing out. Free food! (That dandelion leaves were once a popular garnish among well-heeled Victorians doesn’t quite fit this particular story.)

There isn’t a family without such stories, in fact, whether they have travelled hundreds of miles from home or only down the road. They are a means by which outsiders and insiders are distinguished, often protracted in-jokes that acknowledge or test closeness, belonging, heredity. In Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg’s restrained and radical novel-memoir, published in 1963, the repeated tales and linguistic tics of her relatives trigger in her and her siblings an immediate falling back

into our old relationships, our childhood, our youth, all inextricably linked to those words and phrases … It takes one word, one sentence, one of the old ones from our childhood, heard and repeated countless times… If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a dark cave or among millions of people, just one of those phrases or words would immediately allow us to recognize each other.

Experience becomes language becomes story becomes identity, and everyone’s place is settled. Each family has its own ‘dictionary of our past’.

A couple of summers ago, imagining myself as an archivist of family lore, I sat down with Nonna, a thermos of coffee between us on the kitchen table to forestall our having to get up for more, the blinds pulled down against the late morning sun, and the rest of the family shooed. I had warned her it might take hours – I wanted to start ‘at the beginning’, meaning her birth, and proceed from there. But no sooner had I tapped the record button on my phone, its mic propped up against a packet of biscuits, than linear time deserted me. Nonna’s memory was in full bloom and would not be tamed by anything like conventional narrative structures. Like an excited schoolgirl, her stories began and ended abruptly in mid flow; topics were conjoined indiscriminately, little and large weighted equally. Words and names were left hanging like loose threads, sometimes accompanied by a gesture, a shake or nod of the head, a shrug or sigh, ‘Ma Pietro…’, ‘eh, si…’, ‘purtroppo…’ But Pietro, oh yes, unfortunately.

Some stories, prompted by yellowed photographs released from ancient rubber bands as brittle as dried linguine, took shape in increments. ‘He was a local boxer, a friend of a friend,’ Nonna said, pointing at one man who towered above her uncles and cousins and their companions, excitedly arranged either side like a billowing cape. ‘And,’ she placed her finger on one smart, smiling man, ‘my father, here.’ He seemed Lilliputian by comparison. Nonna knew little more than that the shot was taken outside a nearby restaurant, probably sometime in the early 1930s. The local boxer, I later discovered with the help of the internet, was Primo Carnera, the Ambling Alp, the Vast Venetian, back home on a visit from America. At the time, he was the heavyweight champion of the world, the tallest anyone had seen. In 1931, he made the cover of Time magazine. Today he is remembered less for his skill than for his associations – with Benito Mussolini, who saw him as a model of Italian masculinity, and with American mobsters, who took control of his career, and probably his finances, bribed opponents and transformed him into a professional ‘monster’. For my family, though, Carnera is a footnote, asterisked in the main story. ‘He died. I don’t know when.’

(…)