It was 1991, and I was 13. My family lived in a large, misshapen cottage in the English county of Hertfordshire. My grandma, who lived with us, was dying, and my parents were tending her through her difficult last months. Offering what help she could, my mum’s best friend, Annie, volunteered to take my sister, Katie, and me abroad for a week, a little respite for us all.
A single woman in her 30s of meticulous taste, Annie had (and still has) a particular love of Italy, an irresistible, almost religious feeling for the place, akin to Michelangelo’s passion for marble, or Garfield’s for lasagna. And so we were dispatched to Venice—along with Kate, another family friend of Annie’s who was my sister’s age—as the charges of an untested parent.
Thanks to her sophistication and style, Annie’s idea of a holiday was as close to ours as Camembert is to string cheese. She revered the Renaissance, basked in the baroque. We liked to eat ice cream. On the first day, she produced J.G. Links’s 1973 Venice for Pleasure and began to read aloud. The history of the doges, the origins of the Carnevale—the words of the guidebook became our soundtrack as we roved through churches and climbed campaniles. At mealtimes, Annie quizzed us to discover whether we had absorbed the knowledge so generously bestowed upon us. Via these impromptu exams, the guidebook became the dispenser and withholder of pleasures—a scoop of ice cream, instead of fruit; french fries with dinner, instead of spinach. Could we describe the ceremony of La Sensa, in which the Venetians rowed out into the Adriatic in all their pomp and threw a ring into the waves, to honor their “marriage” to the sea? I can, to this day. My unlucky sister, however, ate a lot of spinach.
I don’t want to give the wrong impression. For all of us, this was one of the most memorable trips of our lives, a heady cultural hit laced with an intoxicating freedom from normal parental controls, aided by some of the most eccentric chaperoning the city had seen. A twist of luck landed us in a 17th-century palazzo in the heart of Venice. The furniture, all antique, was defended against the arrival of a 13-year-old and two 11-year-olds with not-to-be-removed plastic sheeting, and the three of us slept together in an enormous four-poster bed. One night, as we slipped under the duvet, we heard a singing gondolier. With one mind, we leaped from the bed, threw on our shoes, and, led all the way by Annie, chased the sound down the alleyways of the San Marco district. Rushing onto a bridge, we watched the operatic operator glide beneath us. All four in our pajamas.
Twenty years later, and approaching my mid-30s, I have had even less exposure to children than Annie had when she gamely took us on. This isn’t from lack of opportunity, mind you, but by choice. My friends have patiently accepted that I grow bored easily around their offspring, and that I have the maternal instinct of a mollusk. The only regular kid contact I’ve had—and by regular, I mean a couple of encounters a year—is with Annie’s own daughter, Niambh (an old Irish spelling; you pronounce it “Neev”). Niambh was born while I was in college, and last year she turned 13. Ready or not—and I really wasn’t—I sensed that a debt must be paid.
And so, one morning in May, I stand at London Gatwick, accepting a minor into my care and checking in for a flight to Venice’s Marco Polo Airport. It is 6:30 a.m., and Niambh is surprisingly chipper for a teenager forced so early from her bed. Annie, at an even greater pitch of excitement, has brought along that guidebook by J.G. Links as well as a large sketchbook. All we need is a wooden tennis racket, and we’ll be characters in A Room with a View. “You simply must make her speak Italian,” Annie trills as we join the line at Departures. “We told the school it was an educational trip.”
Niambh huffs and makes a face behind her mother’s back. “You really don’t need to do that,” she says as soon as we’ve bid Annie good-bye. “My Italian teacher will never know the difference. I’ll just say everything with more of an accent when I get back.” She seems far more assured than I did at 13. I am intimidated by her already.
by Emma John, Afar | Read more:
Photo: by Peter Dench
