Spaghetti

Sally Ward | She/Her

I am about the same height as my nana Mary. I think about this often because we are not very tall. I like to imagine the way she moved about in the world. Did she have to take up the hems of her skirts like I do, or did they make skirts shorter in the 50s? I have a blue cable knit jumper that was knitted for her by my aunty. It fits me perfectly, as though it was made for me, too. It is distinctly grandma—feels like I should find some butter to churn.

My Grandparents lived in a homestead on Waiwhare Station. Waiwhare is 45 minutes from Hastings. It probably took longer than 45 minutes to drive it in the 50s. The Old Coach Road they took has been replaced by a tar sealed edition, but you can still see its gravelly outline etched into adjacent paddocks. They went to town once a week in their ‘town clothes’.

Going to lunch at my grandparents’ house was a big deal when I was a small person. The homestead had a large dining space and a tiny kitchen. The fire was always going. Nana made spaghetti. Watties spaghetti with the sausages that are not really deserving of the word ‘sausage’. She made toast fingers slathered in butter and served them on her fine china with bone handle knives. The lemonade in the fridge was always flat.

I don’t know what it is about traditional men and their carving knives, but they’ve all got one. After the spaghetti, Grandad would cut the lamb. Slowly. He was also the slowest eater I have ever known, a trait my Dad seems to have inherited. So by the time the lamb came out, I’d been swinging my little legs off the edge of the red linoleum chairs for what seemed an hour. Nana’s spaghetti tasted better than any other spaghetti. Why though? It all comes from the same factory. I suppose when you have 5 children, you become an expert in heating up spaghetti.

Outside are citrus trees—grapefruit and a lemon tree. We would cut the grapefruit open, dunk them in sugar and eat them with teaspoons. We’d take buckets of sunshine lemons back to town.

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Nana was born during WW1, and lived through the depression and WW2. The legacy of these experiences has found its way into my deep disdain for waste. Dad’s fridge is full of food reaching expiry because he refuses to throw anything away, but doesn’t have the organisational skills to eat it before it goes off. He once fed us lamb sausages that had been in the freezer for 5 years, they were preserved but awfully freezer burnt. Once we had finished eating he said:

Did those sausages taste funny to you?

Well, now that you mention it.

Dad has also been known to rinse off-colour chicken in vinegar before serving. Regrettably, this always came out after I’d swallowed it. It is nothing short of a miracle I haven’t had food poisoning. When I approached Bernie for comment, he wanted it known that he would under NO circumstances feed this to dinner guests and believes it to be a “testament to intestinal fortitude”. The worst part is, I’m playing the same gambling game with my fridge. Milk a bit funky? Unless it’s curdling in my tea, I’ll be drinking it. I do this because of how Nana raised Dad. She lived 45 minutes from a supermarket with 5 children. You do not waste food. She lived her life on a wartime rationing attitude. It reminds me not to take what I have for granted. And to use some old kitchen fixes to save bits and pieces from the bin. One must always have vinegar on hand.

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When she passed I was about six. I was given a pair of her gloves, a (not real) gold diamante necklace and clip-on earrings. I was not woman enough to wear these things, but I thought they were so beautiful I kept them in my special jewellery box, lest they got mixed up in my jelly bracelets.

When I was 9, my Dad and I moved to Waiwhare, into the cottage next door to the vacant homestead I had visited as a child, the house Dad had grown up in. I picked the lemons from the tree and tried to grow vegetables in the same soil. I collected walnuts and dried them on her porch. When I felt isolated I thought about Nana, hanging out the laundry and feeding the lambs and tending to her hydrangeas. I’ve always admired the way hydrangeas grow in shade, blues and pinks blooming in darkness.

Perhaps I romanticise her life. It was hard. She couldn’t drive. Not because no one was willing to teach her, but because she was too anxious to get behind a wheel. As someone who failed their restricted license THREE times before succeeding on the fourth, I can understand this. Nana had to rely on Grandad to take her into town, on those weekly trips. I think about what it would have meant to be a farmer's wife. I wonder if she had friends to call up on the landline to complain about the endless sheep shit finding its way into the laundry. When I drive to Waiwhare I look out for the stitches of the Old Coach Road, a path that no longer exists but remains all the same.