The End of Innocence

Learning to knit, eating cheesecake and the arrival of my adopted sister, Betty: this is what I remember from the time I spent with grandma Rosa. But actually, there was so much more – I now regard this time as a defining episode in my childhood, one which marked the end of innocence, the beginning of a darker period of turning inwards, of feeling that the world was an unsafe place in which unpleasant surprises sprang from nowhere.

During my childhood, I walked past the photograph of grandma Rosa, my mother’s mother in its gilt frame hundreds of times barely noticing it. But since my mother’s passing, I’ve become interested in the chain of mothers and daughters, stretching from my granddaughter back to her great grandmother – 150 years of the female family line. I’ve been studying the photograph looking for clues to Rosa before she…