delphinavintage

Mary Muriel Hennessy 1925 to 2012

03 Apr 2012 1 Comment

by felicity1979 in 2012 March Blog Tags: Mary Muriel Hennessy 1925 to 2012

More often than not Grandparents get to indulge you in a more revised way than they did your own parents.  I watch this now on a daily basis as both my girls will often opt for time hanging with the ‘olds’ rather than with me.  I put this partly down, with my own experience in mind, to memories I have of my Nana which are mostly food/fun related.

I thought today of our trips as children to the Isle of Wight to stay with Auntie Pearl. Where we would go cockeling for hours in the setting sun, then return to Auntie Pearl’s bungalow to boil them up and then armed with a wooden tooth pick, drown them in malt vinegar and white pepper.  Our trips to Aunty Pearls were mainly geared towards eating something in a shell be it  winkles, cockles, Whelks (Nana’s favourite) or a nice crab sandwich.  That must have been the start of my love of seafood.

My love of 70’s bed linen was definitely born of my vivid memories of her St Micheal’s (Marks and Spencer today) bright pink busy floral bed sheets.  I always remember the highly polished wooden kitchen table under the orangey glow of a hanging ceiling lamp where we would be given steak with Fat homemade chips served on dark orange Hornsea china plates.  Nana always made her own chips and fried them in fat and covered them in salt, they were the best.  Saturday mornings was always started by a trip to the bakery for thickly coated white sugar jam doughnuts and a heavy sticky lardy cake all in white paper bags.  These things, forbidden at home, would be gone in minutes and remembered all day.

The Romsey show was another food/fun related annual Nana special but with the added bonus of getting to stroke and stare at cows, pigs and ferrets.  We would always meet at the W.I tent where Nana would be dealing out the Lemon Drizzle or tweaking a flower display in oasis whilst chatting to everyone milling about her.  The W.I to me were all just about baking the best cakes, making the best jam and growing the prettiest flowers and supporting the sisterhood.  I can really appreciate this now, these are really good things in life and generally make everyone happy in some way when presented with good homemade cake or home grown veg or flowers.

Nana’s garden was the best playground; it was huge and punctuated with large flower beds full of bushes and shrubs to hide in.  My sister and I would play outside for hours making camps from and old velour bed cover and a clothes horse, we were easily pleased.

At Christmas I would be her assistant, Alice, whilst she made the infamous Christmas cake, which I hated to eat but loved to bake.  There was always a Panto to be seen at Christmas at the Mayflower in Southampton, the best bit about that was the small rustling polythene bag of sweets she would give us to perpetually chew through out the performance.  My favourites specifically were the extremely chewy chocolate éclairs toffee sweets and a large mint imperial in a stripey wrapper for extra rustling effect.  We must have been quite wired by the end.

The Ultimate lasting memory of Nana style fun was when she would drive my sister and me in her Mini Metro through Hursley village and turn left down a long country road. She would take many turns that we desperately tried to remember for next time but never could.  It was always the same adrenalin rush when we saw the ‘witches’ house at the end of the track.  It was basically a crumbling derelict cottage on the edge of a wood with a completely overgrown garden, once there was a black cat in the window and this was all the evidence my sister and I needed to know that Nana was telling us the truth, so gullible.

Mary Hennessy stood for doing good things; cooking, gardening, dancing, singing, flirting, eating and many others that I too am partial to doing.

When I look at the pictures above of the baby in white christening robes, to the little girl in tap shoes, the happy bride, to the first time mum, I am so glad my girls got to hang with her and eat fish and chips with her and visit Aunty Pearl on a ferry with her.  I remember her smile when she first held Delphi and then Pearly. I hope that we all made her proud in our own ways.