The Nana: Alice Taylor on the glories of grandmothers
Alice Taylor at her home in Innishannon Co Cork. Picture: Eddie O'Hare
IT is hard to keep up with Alice Taylor, Ireland’s chronicler of rural life and lore who lives in the village of Innishannon in Co Cork but whose work is celebrated nationwide and far beyond our shores. She is one of Ireland’s most prolific authors and even she has difficulty totting up the number of books she has written and had published to date.
It all started in 1988 with To School Through the Fields. It quickly became the biggest selling book ever published in Ireland and sequels like Quench the Lamp, The Village, Country Days and The Night Before Christmas, were also very successful, and were sold internationally and translated into many languages.
“I imagine it is well up to 29 or 30,” she says as we chat about her latest book, The Nana, a celebration of grandmothers and the unique role they play in the lives of young people. “There is a kind of silent world out there of people, even those living in towns and cities, who identify with rural Ireland through their Nanas. The idea sprung up some years ago when I was doing a book signing in Dublin. This real Dub told me that his fondest childhood memories were being in Mayo during the summer with his grandmother and that it gave him a lifelong love of the countryside, even though he was city born and bred.”
The Irish grandmother is a repository of family history, memory and lore. Taylor celebrates her own nanas, part of the generation born after the Great Famine. She herself is now a Nana, too and says the benefits of grandparenting works both ways.
“I have six grandchildren and I find they keep you abreast of things. It is nice to chat with them and as the years go on, you appreciate them more. Both generations benefit hugely. And with Christmas coming up, the children bring the dream to the Nana’s house, allowing us to see the world through their eyes. It is a two-way street.”
Luckily for Taylor and her grandchildren, they live nearby. “They live up the hill and come to me after school and they get undivided attention. Being with them also evokes memories of my own childhood. I went out collecting chestnuts a couple of weeks ago with my six-year-old granddaughter and those beautiful shiny chestnuts brought back lovely experiences as a child.”
Taylor loves to tell the story that the late Kerry poet and philosopher John Moriarty recalled in one of his books. “He was home from Canada where he was lecturing in the university of Manitoba. He and his little niece who was around six were on the family farm caring for a cow that was about to calf. The little girl explained to him that she had come from her Mammy’s tummy and her Mammy had come from her Nana’s tummy.
‘Where did Nana come from? He asked. 'Oh, Nana was always there,' came the reply."
Taylor laments the changes to life in rural Ireland that means this is no longer the case. “Those grandmothers were the stay-at-home ones. Today’s grandmothers are no longer at home on the farm. Both children and grandmothers are holidaying in other places. Long ago, their presence in the home would solve the problem of who would hold the baby and who would mind Nana. Now the baby is in a crèche and Nana is in a nursing home.”
Apart from family, community and writing, Alice, who is 83, has other passions, honed from memories of growing up on a farm in Lisdangan, Newmarket, along the Cork-Kerry border.
“Growing up on a farm shaped me. It was being around fields, animals, trees, birds and the dawn chorus. My father was very into preserving nature. He was away ahead of his time. He taught us to have great respect for water and trees. There was a small river at the bottom of the farm. We didn’t call it a stream, we called it a 'glaishe'.
"He used to check the water. We had geese and ducks. He was afraid they would pollute – along with the cow’s slurry – the water. He was hugely conscious of keeping the water clean for trout, salmon and eels. He never cut trees. He planted trees.”
After school, Taylor worked as a telephonist in Killarney and Bandon. When she married, she moved to Innishannon where she ran a guesthouse at first, then the supermarket and post office. She and her husband, Gabriel Murphy, who died in 2005, had four sons and one daughter. She is an avid gardener and, now that she lives alone, she has rekindled an interest in painting.
“You get into hobbies that maybe you put on hold all your life and then you indulge with things you might not have done otherwise. Gardening is great as there is constant stimulation of the senses. Yesterday I planted my window boxes. I love planting bulbs because when the grey days come in January, we need flowers.”
Those flowers were particularly welcome during the pandemic. “When Covid came I had planted loads of tulips and when it hit my garden was alive with tulips. A neighbour told me that my window boxes were keeping her alive.”
She is also something of a tree-hugger and engages with wider environmental issues. “They used to laugh at Prince (now King) Charles, but there is healing in trees. In Innishannon we are on the river and close to the wood and now we are all hugging trees. A chapter in the book is called The Nana Knickers. We will all be wearing Nana knickers this winter and long johns, too. if we don’t protect nature, nature will bite us.”
Alice has had written two books within the space of a year, Tea For One, a book about living alone, came out in 2021, and The Nana has just been published. Of the 30 or so books to date, many have been bestsellers, appealing to readers not only in Ireland but all over the world. Since her eldest son has taken over responsibility for the shop, she has been able to devote more time to her writing. Therefore, the obvious question: any more books?
“Yes, of course,” she says, with perhaps a hint of irritation. “ Asking me that is a bit like asking a knitter if they are still knitting or a gardener if they are still gardening.”
- The Nana is out now, published by O'Brien Press
