My Great aunt used to go up the fields and pick the nettles; she put them in her soups and stews and swore by their medicinal attributes. They were good for your blood and your joints. She picked the nettles in the springtime when they were young. Sometimes we went along to help her, not that she ever needed much help. We really just larked around, one year I fell into a nettle patch and stung my bum. Aunt just picked extra docket leaves and told me to stop my gurning’ threatening that ‘if I didn’t stop gurning my face would stick like that and that’ll teach me to be a wee bit more careful in future’.  She probably sounds harsh but she wasn’t, not really. Aunt Sarah was born in the late 1880’s. When I was a kid she already seemed ancient, she must have been at least one hundred when she died for she died in the late 1980’s when my daughter was about three.

For the last few years of her life she had stopped going out for her walks to collect nettles and over to the chapel and her weekly trips to the bingo she had become practicably housebound because she was going blind. The day she died was still a sad day. She was my mum’s last link to a past that was long gone the last of her fathers family so it wasn’t just the sadness of losing a loved one but the sense that an era in our family’s history was over.

I come from a family of tall tale tellers. I remember when I was very young there was a photo of John F Kennedy and Cardinal Newman in our living room. I asked my mum who the young handsome man was. “He’s the president …and your cousin’s cousin love” I believed for years that the President of the United States of America was one of my distant American cousins. As a matter of fact members of our family turned up at so many historic and famous events as far as I knew, and the Mc Alisters , O’Hara’s and Mc Caffrey’s where all over the world. When my dad told me about stories of the second world war and what had happened he told me them through the eyes of ‘uncle Shamus’ who’s life was never the same after guarding the terrible war criminals at Nuremburg. I think he fought the second world war practicably single handed because he was at so many battles! We also had a relative at the battle of Islandlwana between the Zula’s and the British in 1878  (on the Zula side). Our family build bridges and railways and give advice to the rich and famous. I believed it all for so long even though I never actually met ‘uncles Shamus’ or cousins’ Pat and Terrence and then there was great great aunt Peggy Daniels who was famous for her poteen in Ireland and helped Jim Beam  invent his famous bourbon when she emigrated to America. I believed it all, I believed my family helped to save the world, build the world and quench its thirst. Obviously I grew up with a notion that we were pretty special.

At the wake there was five generations of our family in the small parlour mostly women, the men were either in the yard smoking and talking or some of them had snuck of to the pub for a pint. This was a dry wake. Tea and sandwiches and cakes Sarah had been teetotal all her life. My family was typical half of them were altar eating Catholics the other half were drinking, fighting scallywags.

Mary, Sarah’s eldest daughter who was in her seventies and a formidable woman was having a bit of an argument with my mum about Sarah’s recipes.  “It wasn’t turnip it was parsnip” she was saying loudly her voice was shrill. This was a woman who was sure of her facts. My daughter was tucked up beside me with Sooty the cat on her lap, three years of age and all ears. Her wee head high and imperious, last week I had brought her up to Donegal town and give her a tour of the O’Donnell’s castle. I had told her she was a Donegal princess on her father’s side because her great grandmother was one of the O’Donnell’s from Donegal. She off course believed it and so identified totally with her favourite Disney heroine of the moment Snow White. She was a nosy child and was sitting listening to the two old women intently.

“Mary your bums a plum” My mum said “It was turnip! Your mammy’s stew was nettles, turnip, an onion and a leek with a bit of shin if there was any.”

“Not anytime I got it it wasn’t” Mary argued back. Both women agreed Sarah used a lot of nettles and dandelions. “Do you remember that terrible dandelion tea that she made us drink when we were sick?” said Sadie who was trying to get them away from the turnip/parsnip debacle.

“Uggh” they both said together. Then everyone agreed although it was awful it did seem to help what ever she put in it. My mum adding “Well if it wasn’t going to kill us maybe it was going to cure us.” Then they started to reminisce about where she got her nettles and remembered going nettle picking with her. Down the glen was the most memorable place for all of them because it was so spooky and scary and there was that old fairy thorn that always looked eerie. My daughters face was growing quizzical and concerned, she looked at Sooty the cat and a thought most have crossed her mind. She threw him down of her knee.

She looked up at me and whispered. “Was Auntie Sarah a witch”? Her wee face looked frightened. I started to laugh. When I was a kid walloping about the fields with Auntie Sarah trying to pick out the nicest looking nettles and seeing who liked butter with the buttercups it never occurred to me that  this might be a bit ‘odd’. It seemed a perfectly normal thing to do. The fact that neither my mum nor any of my other aunts picked nettles (and dandelions) didn’t occur to me. This was just something that we did with great aunt in the springtime. Becca hadn’t ever had that experience, Aunt Sarah was too old by the time she had started to toddle.

The older women started to laugh to; I think they were tempted to spin a yarn about her being a refugee from the Salem witch trials.  Mary said “Becca we are talking about your aunties famine recipes. Her mammy and daddy were alive when there was a terrible famine in Ireland and everyone was hungry because there was no food.

It had never occurred to me that a member of my family would have such a close insight into something that happened so long ago (1845-52)Mary was telling Becca that Sarah’s mammy had told her about being so hungry that she had eaten grass and that they made a soup with nettles and onions if they could find one. Whether Sarah had known hunger that bad I don’t know, but the stories must have stayed with her because she still gathered nettles and dandelions and added them to soups and stews to make them go further. That day, history came off the page for me, I understood my Aunt Mary’s bitterness towards the British and her willingness to blame just about everything on them. (even bad weather). She must have been raised on the stories of her Grandmother and grandfather. The real stories not the silly ones my family told me. Sarah’s mother’s family was practicably wiped out by the famine and they lost what little they had that any of them survived was probably a miracle but in all disasters there are always survivors and people do carry on.

That day five generations of my family sat in a little parlour to say their final farewell to its oldest member and I thought five strong healthy generations.  My generation, never give much of a thought to the fact that we are here at all but that day  I couldn’t help thinking I am here because a little girl and boy survived on  grass and nettles, for Sarah’s mammy and daddy must have been very young and born maybe right in the middle of the famine so that they lived at all is miraculous.