Life

Radio review: Embarking on an Italian adventure

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann is an Irish News columnist and writes a weekly radio review.

Nuala McCann
Nuala McCann Nuala McCann

Becoming Betty Radio Four

She was young and a student. It was 1986 and she had a dream that didn’t involve her doting but square boyfriend who was going on to be an accountant and was off to climb peaks in the Lake District with his trusty square Kendal Mint cake tucked into his pocket.

So Elisabeth saw the ad in the newspaper for a summer in Italy as au pair: speak Italian, cook Italian “two adorable children”, it said.

The irony, oh the irony.

Writer Elizabeth Lewis painted a wistful and laugh-out-loud funny portrait of a summer in la bella Italia as an au pair.

From the moment when her doting boyfriend waved her goodbye for 10 weeks – pressing a special mix cassette tape into her hand. Anyone for the hits of 1986? This girl is on her own.

“All I had was an address, I knew no-one in the whole of Italy,” she sighed.

Of course, there was the lecherous Italian porter on the train, there’s always one.

She was an English student in lacy knickerbockers – this was the 1980s and she was channelling her inner Kate Bush, but the people of the small village of Italy didn’t know that.

She was Elizabeth; they called her Betty. She has dreamed of marble floors, gilded floors and baskets of fresh lemons .... forget it.

And the children were not children, they were big nappy-wearing babies. It wasn’t what she had signed up for.

“The agency said they were two and six,” she cried.

Washing, cooking, children, exhaustion... and then a bad Italian boy arrives on a Cinquecento and she finds summer love Italian style.

Anyone who has ever landed in a foreign country with an address and nothing else, who has ended up with a PhD in making baby mush and nappy changing will identify with this.

There were tears, there was laughter, there was a lot of beautiful, romantic Italian.

This captured vividly the excited romanticism of youth when anything is possible. It was tender dreaming Italian style.