Family Stories

Altamore, Maria neè Angelico

1900 - 1993

 

Nonna Maria, my grandmother

Written March, 1995 by Sarina Greco  

 

I dropped in to see Nonna. It was three o’clock when I arrived and she was just dishing up a bowl of spaghetti for herself. She had made some fresh sauce, just enough for one serve, from the last season’s tomatoes growing in her small back garden. 

 

How times have changed for her. In her younger days. Sundays and holidays always brought a house full of family and friends to her table. From the years before the war, their home on the farm at Werribee was a popular gathering place for many of the paesani. Some were young single men or men who had come to Australia on their own before sending for their fiancés or for their wives and children. They would sit for hours on end after lunch talking with my grandfather, or more often listening to him. They respected him, says nonna, because he was a fine man and a good husband and father. People still recall how my grandfather would sit at the head of the table brushing the crumbs on the tablecloth towards him as he spoke, with deliberate tidy movements of his hand. 

 

I never knew my grandfather, Salvatore Altamore. He died soon after I was born, after being bedridden for months following a stroke. He left behind nine children, the youngest only two years old. 

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Thirty years before his death, Nonno Salvatore had left behind his young wife and their first born baby daughter, Anna, when he came to Australia to set up the beginnings of a new life for his young family.  

 

Two years later Nonna and Anna left Sicily to join him. She recalls with much detail the long voyage by ship. Nonna still remembers with pride how she dressed the toddler in an indigo blue velvet dress that she had made by her own hands, the way she combed the child’s hair, the anxious excitement she felt at seeing her husband again and wondering what her new life would bring in this new land. 

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My grandfather’s death brought many changes. Times were hard, there were debts and many mouths to feed. They had opened a delicatessen business in Richmond which Nonna then ran with the help of two of the older children. 

 

Copying with the demands of raising younger children on her own and making ends meet financially were not the most difficult changes to adjust to, it seems. What Nonna felt more perhaps was the change in her status and in the respect afforded her family now that her husband was no longer alive. For my grandmother, respect was an important value which she often talked about. 

 

As I sat with her that afternoon while she finished her lunch, I glanced around the room where most of her wake hours are spent nowadays.

 

The top of her glass cabinet is cluttered with photos, old and new. There are photos of her parents, of herself, and my grandfather in the middle age, of her brother and sister both dead now. In contrast to these old studio photos stand dozens of snap shots of family gatherings, of grandchildren’s weddings, of great-grandchildren. 

 

One is of Sammy, her youngest son, who died many years ago of leukemia just two weeks after he was married. Beside it stands the latest photo from her daughter, Rose, in New York, sent for Easter, which proudly presents her family and her newest grandchild, another great-grandchild for Nonna. On the television stands the large floral bouquet also sent for Easter from Rose in New York.

 

Nonna caught me looking at a large handwritten note clearly printed and displayed on the top of the television. I would read it from where I was sitting

 

It said:

 

   MUM,    

 

   DR. LIVINGSTONE COMES TUESDAY 11 0’CLOCK. TAKE A BATH IN THE MORNING I’LL COME AT 10 O’CLOCK

 

   CATHY. 

 

Nonna smiled and said – “Cathy thinks I might forget.” I laughed with her. 

 

Sarina Greco

March, 1986