Ann Rennie Reflects

Ah, the memories that find me now my hair is turning gray,
Drifting in like painted butterflies from paddocks far away;
Dripping dainty wings in fancy -and the pictures, fading fast,
Stand again in rose and purple in the album of the past.

The Trimmin’s on The Rosary (John O’Brien)

The writer, Cassandra Clare, notes that we are all pieces of what we remember. My memories of growing up are tinged with all those loosening fragments swirling around me; those hints and echoes down the years of those who came before me, the great brooding sweep of Irishmen and women who arrived in the colony looking for a new life or escaping the old. Family stories are whispered or celebrated, characters magnified or diminished, episodes amplified or hushed up, habits confirmed, rumours denied, the jigsaw pieces of fate and family forever bound by the strange alchemy of blood and birth…and the faith of the fathers.

I have the inestimable blessing of happy memories to light my later years, although my siblings keep accusing me of being vague. I reply that with fourteen years between first and last child our cache of memories is significantly different. We can – and do – retell the same family story in seven different ways with a variety of rhetorical flourishes. Such narrative embroidery is part and parcel of all family lore.

My grandmother’s faith echoes through my life. The eldest of eleven Kavanagh children born in Gulargambone in country New South Wales, she left school at fourteen to go to secretarial college. I do not know how she met and married her husband, an industrial chemist, but I do know theirs was a deep and abiding love.

Greta loved the fact that she lived across the road from Raheen where the Archbishop resided. At the end of her street stood the Carmelite Monastery. It gave me the shivers as I hurried past the external wall with its jagged shards of glass erupting menacingly on top. I wondered whether this was to keep the enclosed sisters in or intruders out. Further along Studley Park Road were the Pallotine Fathers and on occasion we’d go to Mass in a small weatherboard chapel at the side of the property. Behind her home San Jose was Campion College and I remember hearing the thwack of tennis balls as young seminarians took a break from theology and I swept up leaves from the driveway in the desultory fashion of a moody teenager.

When I stayed overnight, we would always recite the rosary; the perfect enunciation of the first few Hail Marys dropping off into an almost mutinous mumble by the end of the Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious mysteries. I remember especially being a poor banished child of Eve and living in this vale of tears, as the Hail Holy Queen has it. I have topped and tailed this essay with John O’Brien’s (Monsignor Patrick Joseph Hartigan) wonderful poem of the doughty faith of the little mother who insists on this devotional practice for all and sundry. My grandmother had her own version of the trimmings, prayerful cover notes for family and friends, causes and catastrophes, the world at home and at large.

In this month of July, we celebrate the feast day of St Ann and St. Joachim, Mary’s parents and the grandparents of Jesus. I am mindful of the gift of faith nurtured in family circles. This column is being written as I gaze at a photograph of Greta and her husband, Tennyson. My grandfather died a few months before I was born. I like to think I provided some solace and distraction for her as she grieved the loss of her husband. I was the first grandchild of sixteen and routinely spoiled.

In the second bedroom I’d settle under a giant eiderdown quilt, exhausted by devotion. A large picture of the Sacred Heart hung above my head. My grandmother would come in to kiss me goodnight and we’d go through the God Bless litany.

As a pious pre-teen, I loved the rather martial air of We Stand for God, the third verse being written by the above-mentioned John O’ Brien to provide an Australian context. I would sing it out loud and proud knowing that I would never have to join a Children’s Crusade. And of course, I’d make eyes at friends in the pews and have a quick giggle behind the cloth-bound hymn book.

My grandmother made frequent novenas – nine days of special prayers for a special purpose. St. Jude was always a pin-up saint, the hope of the hopeless. St. Anthony was regularly called on to find lost things. St. Christopher was prayed to before long car trips. The saints in her household were as real as friends. These were no plaster-cast effigies but saintly interventionists who helped shape her day. The iconography of devotion decorated her home; crucifixes, a statue of the Infant of Prague, scapulars, medals, holy pictures and Mass books. Most beautiful was a large silver figurine of the Madonna and Child. I have it now sitting atop her escritoire in my lounge room. It is a constant and lovely reminder of her gift of faith to me.

I am looking back more than half a century to those formative years where patterns and behaviours are somehow imprinted. Certain seams were sown into my soul. And for that, I am ever and daily blessed. Let us pause now to pray and remember our grandparents and all grandparents whose love continues to nurture the next generation.

Ah, those little Irish mothers passing from us one by one!
Who will write the noble story of the good that they have done?
All their children may be scattered, and their fortunes windwards hurled,
But the Trimmin’s on the Rosary will bless them round the world.

By Ann Rennie