The Liverpool Basque
The Liverpool Basque
Helen Forrester
Another moving and heart-warming tale set in Merseyside from the author of Twopence to Cross the Mersey.In the early years of this century, many Basques left their homeland in the Pyrenees, between France and Spain, to seek a better life in the New World. Most passed through the great port of Liverpool on their way. The family of little Manuel Echaniz stayed.The Liverpool Basque is the story of Manuel’s childhood and coming of age in the teeming streets of the Mersey docklands. It is a story of poverty, comradeship, hardship and generosity. Brought up by women while the men are at sea, Manuel grows up with a fierce pride in his heritage and a powerful will to survive in an era of deprivation and unemployment. Against all odds, he gets himself an education of sorts and sets off on the long voyage of his life.
HELEN FORRESTER
The Liverpool Basque
Copyright (#ulink_5f6dbf33-87a2-525d-bf58-cf081914e95f)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1993
Copyright © Helen Forrester 1993
The Author asserts the moral right tobe identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780006473343
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2012 ISBN 9780007392162
Version: 2016-08-26
Dedication (#u1f4bea9b-4c1f-5e77-bfbf-3b17c7e84034)
This novel is dedicated to my friend,Doroteo Vicente Elordieta, a Basque from Liverpool,whose wonderful stories about the cityinspired me to write it
Epigraph (#u1f4bea9b-4c1f-5e77-bfbf-3b17c7e84034)
Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined
Epistle i, line 149
Moral Essays
Alexander Pope, 1688–1744
Contents
Cover (#u7af291b3-3a47-5916-a3bc-5f5e6af4952d)
Title Page (#u7067352c-c347-5854-b8b8-aceeec7fc218)
Copyright (#u95806cd3-0a8d-5cbf-b267-0faaada15c0b)
Dedication (#ub9008e1e-c4f8-53f0-94a4-ee30ae9c198d)
Epigraph (#u7d437408-06de-5620-bd4a-e0ffe639a489)
Chapter One (#u8a7f2d63-6f60-5d60-85f0-bafde4e88b37)
Chapter Two (#u7cfed0a8-8bb0-5ad5-97b8-4c4048a46231)
Chapter Three (#u5a199f91-065f-51e9-8f66-d2c94501db88)
Chapter Four (#u17d869b0-c996-5bb7-b7ad-005ae7d59310)
Chapter Five (#u43bcbf1e-7298-5aa6-ac5a-e962689078b2)
Chapter Six (#u5d70d4d5-6017-5674-a4a8-9a3e0e3c9ab7)
Chapter Seven (#ub8e92ca0-6892-5804-9bdf-f18bfee0145e)
Chapter Eight (#u8393f47c-4b54-5094-99c4-5282ef1a082a)
Chapter Nine (#u121ec40b-5996-53b5-923e-b072899df364)
Chapter Ten (#u8e0ce94e-59dc-5643-a6a4-8ada16ad17f3)
Chapter Eleven (#ue0dedf4f-3e4d-5ef9-a4ff-d09e46ec1a5d)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Selective Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#ulink_f862c2b5-7808-5570-9180-7af313ed9f74)
Ignoring the pouring rain, he came out of the house, and then turned to check that the front door had closed properly behind him. Satisfied, he walked slowly down the path between the flowerbeds, empty except for a few winter aconites cautiously beginning to open.
When he reached the two steps which led down to the pavement, he paused before carefully descending them. As the wind off the Strait caught him, his shiny black oilskin flapped against his lean frame. A fringe of white hair fluttered round the edge of the black beret set firmly on his head; the beret had been arranged so that it had a small peak to protect his forehead and encourage the rain to fall down his cheeks instead of veiling his sight.
Safely on the narrow pavement, he lingered for a moment to look across the Juan de Fuca Strait. The Olympic Mountains were obliterated by the downpour, but nearer to hand a freighter was stubbornly butting its way through the sheeting rain towards Victoria Harbour. With a seaman’s eye for weather, he looked up at the louring clouds, pursed his lips and muttered, ‘Cold enough for snow.’
Water was trickling down his neck, so he heaved his collar up higher and then proceeded along The Esplanade towards the cemetery. He walked with his head bent, his shoulders slightly hunched, as if expecting to hit his skull on a door frame if he straightened up. Though his gait was light and steady, his old Wellington boots made an intermittent squishing sound as he slopped through muddy puddles.
In the large inside pocket of his oilskin was a single pink rose wrapped in damp tissue paper. He had bought it yesterday from the florist in Cook Street; throughout the winter he had a standing order with her, to purchase the flowers four at a time. He kept them fresh in a cut-glass vase on the dining-room table, and, regardless of the weather, he took one each day to the cemetery to lay on the grave of his wife, Kathleen.
Sometimes the florist was not able to obtain the pink or white blooms which he requested, and he would have to make do with red ones, which Kathleen had not loved quite so much. In summer, he cut roses in shades of pink or cream from the bushes which she herself had planted in their garden when first they had retired to Vancouver Island. While she had the strength, she had tenderly pruned and fertilized them herself. Then, when she had begun to fail, he had pushed her wheelchair on to the lawn, and had learned to look after them for her, doing his best to hide from her the agony of mind he had felt, as he watched her suffer the multiple infections to which leukaemia laid her open.
Seamen don’t get much chance to garden, he ruminated, as he gazed down at yesterday’s offering, which lay, tattered and sodden, on the grave in front of the memorial stone. But Kathleen had loved her garden, and every day he made this small pilgrimage to tell her that he was caring for it and for her household icons, and that he loved her still. Mostly, however, he came to ask her forgiveness for having failed, when she was so ill, to keep her out of pain. Mixed with the rain, tears ran down his face; no matter how the years since her death rolled along, they failed to obliterate from his mind the torture he had watched her endure. There were, of course, days when he took the walk to the cemetery from force of habit; but all too often he went in the hope of easing his own haunting memories. Today, his nightmare was very close.
He bent down carefully to avoid the dizziness which, nowadays, sometimes bothered him, and picked up yesterday’s battered bloom. Regardless of its wet condition, he stuffed it into his outside pocket. His chest felt tight, and he paused to take a few short breaths of the cold, damp air, before slowly opening his oilskin to retrieve the slightly flattened fresh rose from his inner pocket. He unrolled the tissue paper from it and laid the flower in front of the headstone. The wind was strong and capricious, so he picked up a small rock and laid it on the stalk to hold it down. Most people had a vase into which they put their flower offerings, but he laid them on the ground; in his mind’s eye he always saw the roses as lying between his wife’s perfect white breasts.
Then he addressed the marble headstone. He did not see the words cut into it, In loving memory of Kathleen Echaniz, beloved wife of Manuel Echaniz, born 3rd June, 1914, died 20th January, 1984. At peace. His first words were, as always, ‘Forgive me, my darling, forgive me.’ He paused, as if waiting for a reply. Then he swallowed hard, and lifted his head a little, to look out towards the heaving waters of the Strait. He saw his wife’s smiling face, her eyes unclouded by illness; he felt her fullness beneath him, before suffering reduced her to a skeleton; and, as he had always done, either by letter from distant ports or when they lay comfortably in bed together, he told her all that had happened to him in the previous twenty-four hours, all the funny things, all the small disasters. Today, he said that he had washed her Royal Doulton figurines in the cabinet in the sitting-room and had set them back exactly as she had left them, that last night he had cooked himself some fish for supper, and that Veronica Harris, her friend from next door, had brought him in some homemade cookies, as she did each week.
The soft words came out like a litany, not in Kathleen’s native English, but in a strange evocative language known only to a few, a language which Kathleen had never been able to master.
He spoke in Basque, a unique language of farmers and shepherds in the enclaves of the Pyrenees, of fishermen in the Bay of Biscay, of iron workers and factory hands in big cities like Bilbao and smaller ones like Guernica and Pamplona; it was also spoken by lonely, elderly shepherds and their descendants in Nevada, Utah and Arizona, and by small groups of emigrants in Eastern Canada. It was a language so old that it was unrelated to any other language in the modern world, preserved by people shielded by nature’s walls, the Pyrenees, between France and Spain. It had the advantage that anyone in the cemetery who heard his words to his wife would not understand them.
Manuel Echaniz was a Basque. Though he also spoke Spanish quite fluently, he seethed with anger when he was frequently mistaken for a Spaniard. He would occasionally flare up and say that though General Franco had, in the Spanish Civil War, bombed into submission his grandparents’ native city of Bilbao, he had never succeeded in making its Basque inhabitants into Spaniards, any more than Roman and Moorish invaders of Spain had been able to do so in much earlier times.
He himself had been born in England, in the port of Liverpool, and he spoke English with a pronounced Liverpool accent. Nevertheless, he would affirm indignantly that, like his father and grandfather before him, he was a Basque and very proud of it. For the benefit of Canadians, he would add, also, that he was proud to be a Canadian citizen – but he was still pure Basque!
He had married Kathleen Weston, a Vancouver Island girl, whom he had met, during the war, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She had tried several times to learn his native tongue, but had finally given up, arguing that his command of English was so good that they could communicate perfectly in that language. Because he had spoken to her consistently since babyhood only in Basque, his daughter Faith understood the language – but she would always answer him in English. As for Lorilyn, his only grandchild, now aged nineteen and doing her first year at the University of British Columbia, she would laugh and tell him to stop ‘talking funny’ and speak English.
Sometimes, without his Canadian Kathleen to support him, he wondered why he stayed in Victoria. He frequently longed for the familiar dockside streets of Liverpool, for the warmth and friendliness of the Baltic Fleet or the Flags of all Nations, both pubs that he remembered as being packed with an international gathering of seamen, all talking exuberantly at once. And he wanted to hear again St Peter’s church bell calling him to Mass, a Mass celebrated in Latin. He could go to Mass in Victoria; he could even ease his soul by going to Confession; but it would all be in English, as lately ordained by the Vatican, and would have little of the comforting magic of a Mass chanted in Latin, as it had been when he was young. The Latin Mass, untouched by war or pestilence, unchanging like God himself, had been a dear familiar ceremony, no matter how strange a port his ship had been tied up in. If he had to listen to Mass in the vernacular, he wanted to hear it in Basque – and for that he would have to return to Vizcaya, the province of his forefathers.
He sighed as he turned from Kathleen’s grave and began slowly to make his way homeward under the dripping pine trees. Both Liverpool and Vizcaya were a long way off; journeys to either of them were not to be undertaken lightly by an eighty-four-year-old. Then there was Faith who lived with her Canadian husband, George McLaren, in Vancouver; she was his living link with Kathleen. She did come occasionally, with her family, to visit him, but never frequently enough. He would smile when he thought of her and try to shake off his depression. Yet, sometimes when he could not sleep, a fearful inner loneliness would overwhelm him to the point of terror, and older voices called him, voices of others whom he had loved, Basque voices, Liverpool voices, people who were part of his very nature, people he had not been able to tell Kathleen much about.
He knew that he dreaded dying in this pretty city on the west coast of Canada, even if they laid him beside Kathleen. It was too lonely – a single Basque name in a cemetery full of British pioneers. Kathleen was amid her own, but he would not be.
He wanted, at least, to lie in a Liverpool churchyard or cemetery, surrounded by headstones with Basque names on them, to be laid to rest by Basques speaking either the thick colloquial English of his childhood friends or the language of his roots, Basque.
As he pushed to one side a rain-dropped branch of Scottish pine, he considered soberly how strange it was that, when he thought about his own death, all that had happened to him in Canada was wiped out of his mind, even the long, contented years with Kathleen. What was left – the essence of himself – was Liverpool Basque; and he wanted to lie with his parents and grandparents and friends in a corner of Liverpool they had made their own. Afterwards, he wanted toasts to his memory drunk in wines familiar to him and funny stories told about him in pithy Basque phrases.
Back on the pavement that led to his home, he shivered. It was not easy to have a conscience formed by Jesuits in the back streets of Liverpool. They taught perfection – but an ordinary man could do only his best – and he had done his best for Kathleen.
Chapter Two (#ulink_3db86357-afcc-5489-bff9-fbc878abcc88)
Although the morning’s winter storm had been so intense and Victoria’s Scenic Drive had been, for once, deserted, Manuel’s expedition had not gone unnoticed.
Seated in the bay window of the bungalow next door, Sharon Herman, daughter of an old friend of Veronica Harris, had noted with mild interest the very old man going for a walk despite the inclement weather.
She was a nurse who specialized in the care of the terminally ill, and she had just arrived to take up a position in a local hospital about to open a palliative care ward. Her interest in the elderly pedestrian was kindly and caring – she felt he should not be getting soaking wet at his age.
She turned towards Veronica, who was seated at her computer across the room, trying to unravel the complexities of Townsman’s Tailors’ accounts outstanding. An elderly widow, who lived alone, she earned her living by keeping the accounts of small businesses in the neighbourhood. Today, she was finding it difficult to work with someone else in the room, though she did not grudge, in the least, offering her friend’s daughter temporary accommodation until she found herself a flat conveniently close to the hospital.
‘Veronica, who’s the old man next door? He’s just gone out – in this weather! He’ll get soaked – hasn’t he got a car?’
Veronica turned impatiently towards Sharon. Then she glimpsed through the bay window the bent figure plodding up the road. Her expression changed, and she smiled. ‘Oh, that’s Manuel Echaniz – Old Spanish, Kathleen’s husband. She was the friend I told you about – died of cancer.’
‘Is he Spanish?’
‘No. Kathleen told me he was born in the UK. She said he’s a Basque, whatever that might be. He speaks English and Spanish – and his own language, which only Faith seems to understand – that’s his daughter, you know.’ She paused to rub her eyes, tired from concentration on the computer screen. Then she said, ‘He’ll be going up to the cemetery.’
‘Does he work there?’
‘No. He goes up every day to put a flower on Kathleen’s grave. I’ve never known him miss a day since she passed away – must be eight years now.’
Sharon laughed. ‘You’re kidding?’
‘No, I’m not. You should’ve seen them together. They were great!’
Sharon moved uneasily in her chair by the window, and her book slid off her lap. She bent to pick it up. ‘He could take some flowers up every week – it would save him time. Or he could drive up on a day like this.’
‘Well, he does have a car – he doesn’t use it much, though.’ She smiled indulgently. ‘Weather never bothered him – I guess because he went to sea for years. And as for going every day, he told me once he wanted her to know that he thought of her each day.’ Her smile faded, and she sighed a little despondently; she had often wished that Manuel would think of her every day. He still seemed to her an attractive man, with his wide smile and twinkling black eyes. His finely lined face was still healthily tanned, and the long, narrow shape of it, with its flat cheekbones, still had the firmness of a much younger man.
‘Sounds like an old movie,’ Sharon was saying, as she put her book on a side table. ‘Do you think he’s got a screw loose?’
‘Not him! He’s in his eighties now, but there’s nothing wrong with his brains – and I’ve never known him be sick.’ She hesitated, and then added, ‘He’s a great old guy.’
Sharon made a wry mouth. ‘Veronica, you’re too sentimental,’ she teased. ‘Men aren’t like that. Do you think he feels guilty about her in some way?’
The question irritated Veronica. Sharon, still smarting from a recent divorce, might be bitter about men – but she was, Veronica felt, being very unfair to Manuel.
‘You’ve read too much pop psychology,’ she responded huffily, and swung her chair round to face the computer screen again. ‘I would have thought that you, with your special training, would know how long a person can grieve.’
The rebuke, from a woman who was usually very mild-mannered, jolted Sharon. She realized that the question had arisen from the resentment she still felt as a divorcee. Veronica was right; each individual needed his own time in which to recover from bereavement.
Ashamed, she inquired in a conciliatory tone if Veronica would like her to make a cup of coffee. Privately, she thought how glad she would be to begin her new job on the following Monday; it would take her mind off her own troubles.
Thankful to get her guest out of the room for the moment, Veronica said politely that she would like a cup very much, and the coffee was on the bottom shelf of the cupboard next to the sink. She wished heartily that the rain would ease, so that Sharon could resume her hunt for an apartment.
In the cluttered kitchen, Sharon put a clean filter in the coffee maker, followed by spoonfuls of coffee. She swore softly as the old kitchen tap spattered water over her when she turned it on. After filling the pot, she stared with some despair through the kitchen window at the sweeping rain. The weather was as cold and dismal as she felt herself; her only consolation was that Winnipeg, from which she had come a couple of days before, would be suffering infinitely worse temperatures. In her pocket lay a well-thumbed last letter from her lawyer, enclosing his final bill for negotiating a parsimonious settlement with her husband. The letter wrote Finis to a whole segment of her life.
Divorce had been much more painful than she had expected. After seven difficult years of a childless marriage, she had anticipated a sense of joyous freedom; instead, she felt a numbing sense of loss. Was this how one felt after a bereavement? Was this how Old Spanish felt? God help her, if she still felt like this at the end of eight years. One thing was certain, her husband would never waste time putting flowers on her grave.
She had worked all her married life. Now, she was going to start anew, away from the people who had known her when she was married. It was the kind of work which would demand a great deal from her, as she dealt with the dying and with their grief-stricken families; yet, she knew from experience that the close relationship between patient and nurse was not a one-way situation; at no time did one come so close to a person as when that person was on his or her deathbed. Beside that experience, she considered as the coffee percolated, what was a divorce? Particularly when there were no children involved.
She carefully poured the coffee into two mugs, and told herself sharply to cheer up. After the coffee, she would go out to look at the apartments she had marked in the newspaper rentals column. Blow the rain. She took Veronica’s mug to her, and drank her own coffee despondently in the kitchen. Then, she quickly put on a raincoat, and took Veronica’s umbrella off a hook in the hall cupboard. Opening the door into the living-room a crack, she called to Veronica that she was going to look at an apartment and that she was not to bother about lunch for her. Then, map in pocket, she went firmly out into the rain.
The rain was lessening and the umbrella hardly necessary. She remembered suddenly her parents still living together in their Florida condominium and managing to keep extraordinarily well for their age, under the Florida sun. Married for thirty-five years, she considered with some wonderment, as she crossed the road at a traffic light. How did they do it? Old Spanish must have been married at least as long. Some people had all the luck.
But was it luck? Or was it some secret formula that the older generation used to build a happy marriage? Cynics said they stuck together because women had no means of earning a living, but it could not be that alone, because even slaves in the States who had no hope at all used to run away.
She looked up to check the street number of an apartment block and then absently pressed a bell marked Building Manager. No matter what the secret is, this is where you begin all over again, she told herself as she waited for a response.
Chapter Three (#ulink_ac5a6117-93ba-507b-8f3d-0a5bc5f77d3e)
Unaware of the interest he had sparked in Sharon Herman, Old Manuel stood in his narrow back hall and shook the rain off his beret and oilskin before hanging them to drip in a small washroom by the kitchen door. Without them, dressed in a white shirt and sleeveless pullover, he seemed extremely frail and thin. As he paused for a second to watch the water running down the oilskin, he smiled to himself; his daughter, Faith, was always warning him to keep himself warm and dry. At his age, she told him, he must take care not to get wet.
He would always tease her by replying that Basques had been pounded by rain in their native mountains for at least five thousand years, and they were immune to it.
He slowly heaved off his Wellington boots and laid them neatly in a boot tray. Like many men who had been to sea, he was extraordinarily neat, because he was used to making the most of the tiny space of a ship’s cabin.
In his thick white socks, he padded into the kitchen to find something to eat for lunch. He slapped a cheese sandwich together and then plugged in the kettle to make some instant coffee, and looked forward to the nap he always took after the midday meal.
As he put his plate and coffee mug down on the kitchen table and pulled out a chair, he asked himself ruefully, ‘Manuel, my lad, what have you come to, when all you look forward to is having a nap?’
The answer was a resigned shrug of one thin shoulder; he had sensed lately that his time was running out.
He decided that after he had slept a little, he would ring up his friend, Jack Audley, and suggest that he should come over for a game of pool on the billiard table in the basement family room. Jack was twelve years younger than he was, but they shared a common interest in fishing and ships – Jack had been a merchant seaman, too.
To help him get through his days without Kathleen, Manuel structured them as meticulously as he could, so that all the necessary domestic tasks and the garden were attended to. Sometimes, however, a thoroughly wet day upset the schedule.
If Jack was not at home, he thought, he would write to his young Liverpool cousin, Ramon Barinèta. He had already, on the first of the month, written to his oldest and dearest friend, Arnador Ganivet, another Liverpool Basque, who had been a Professor at the University of Liverpool, and he smiled gently at the recollection. Between himself and Arnador there was a frankness and concern for each other which probably exceeded that which might have been built up had they both spent their lives in Liverpool; the older they grew, the richer became the correspondence.
After supper each day, he added a page or two to the memoirs of his early life, which he was writing for the benefit of his granddaughter Lorilyn. He had a vague hope that, when she was older, she would read them and become interested in her Basque forebears. At times, her youthful scorn at his pride in his ancestry had hurt him so much that he longed to slap her; her ignorance of the world and its people, despite thirteen years of education, was absolutely abysmal, he fulminated. In frustration, he took to buying her, for her birthdays, books on European and Asian history. As far as he could tell, she never read them; the books were put on the bookshelf in the McLaren family room, their dust-jackets unbesmirched by handling, their pages stiff from never having been turned.
He never quite gave up on her immutability, though he had long since done so in the case of her mother.
He had remarked to Faith’s Grade Six schoolteacher that the child seemed to have no interest in her family’s past or their customs. The schoolteacher, who was an immigrant from Scotland, had tried to comfort him by saying that first-generation Canadian children were often so busy trying to be like the other children that they tended to discard, as much as possible, any trace of their immigrant origin. ‘It’s your grandchildren who will be passionately interested in where they sprang from; they’ll feel more secure,’ she had assured him.
But now, in Lorilyn, he had a grandchild, and she never read any book that she did not have to for her university courses. And what was she proposing to study? Engineering, God save her! Not a decent womanly occupation, like nursing or teaching.
While strolling along the cliffs with Jack, one fine summer day, when the gorse was in riotous yellow bloom and the bees were humming like tiny dynamos, he had broached the subject of human roots.
He said, ‘You know, Jack, people move around too much. A lot of ’em never see another relation, even their grandparents. Come to that, they don’t see much of their mum and dad either, in some cases.’
‘You’re right.’
‘All they’ve got is kids the same age as themselves or television to set the pace. They’ve no idea that we’ve learned ways to endure bad times – cope with difficulties – take disappointments in our stride. And the first time things don’t go just right – well, they’re sunk.’
He paused to watch a small yacht trying to tack against the wind, and muttered irritably, ‘He’ll drown if he don’t watch out.’ Then, picking up the original subject again, he went on, ‘There’s nothing much to make kids feel safe, no standards, no customs. They get no religion even – our Lorilyn’s never seen the inside of a church since she were christened – and I wouldn’t like to offend her father by askin’ what she’s doing with that young man always hanging around her.’ He gave a barking laugh. Then he added, ‘There’s no family discipline – I wouldn’t like my grandfather to see her; he’d have made her toe the line a bit, and he’d have had the backing of everybody else. Sometimes I feel like a voice in the wilderness. Do you?’
Jack’s round red face wrinkled up in a wry grin. Before he answered, he stopped to strike a match and light his pipe, shielding it from the wind with his curved palms. Then, as the pipe glowed and they continued to walk, he nodded agreement. ‘I used to slam my kids when they needed it. It didn’t do much good, because I wasn’t around that much – the wife had to manage while I was at sea.’ He drew slowly on his pipe. Then he continued, ‘And things seemed to be changed almost every time I came home. Nobody else’s kids were going to church any more – so ours wouldn’t. Discipline in school went out, and drugs came in. Like you say, the kids went around in herds all the same age – and there were no cow hands to keep them in line. And God help a cop who boxed their ears for them. I knew what I wanted for my kids, but I didn’t have much luck putting it over.’
Manuel dropped his cigarette butt and ground it out with his heel. ‘Seems to me that when we were having Faith, nobody dared touch a child – even to bath the poor little bugger – unless they had read at least three books by experts! Kathleen had a row of books.’
Jack laughed. ‘Same with us. It was like learning to dance from books – as if we’d no ideas of our own. My mother never needed a book to tell her what to do, and we all grew up knowing what was right and what was wrong – even if we weren’t perfect. I wish my mother had been around when our lads were growing up.’ His red face under his straw hat was filled with pain.
Manuel could have kicked himself for bringing up the subject of children. He had, for the moment, forgotten what a bitter disappointment both Jack’s boys had been to him. They seemed to lack motivation and found it difficult to keep jobs – like homing pigeons, they came back from Vancouver every few months, to live on their father.
Jack was saying bitterly, ‘I wish I’d taken a shore job, so I could’ve been home more.’
‘It’s not your fault, Jack. I’m sure of it. It’s the way things are. They’re treated as kids for far too long. In the old days, by thirteen or fourteen, they would’ve been learning a trade under a weight of older men, who’d have kept them in line; and they’d have learned there’s a limit to what you can get away with.’
‘Jobs are different now. How many of them ever go to sea?’
Manuel snorted. ‘Maybe we should send the whole pack of them to sea for a bit,’ he suggested, trying to lift Jack’s spirits. ‘They’d either drown – or learn their responsibilities mighty fast.’
Unexpectedly, Jack chuckled. ‘They’d soon learn who’s boss.’
Manuel began to laugh. ‘Oh, aye, they would. It would be great to see some of the little bastards in a force ten gale, telling the Old Man they were as good as him – or arguing they had rights, while waves as high as the mast were coming at them!’
‘Mannie, they don’t know nothing about natural things, like waves.’
‘I wouldn’t put it past our Lorilyn to explain the physics of a breaking wave to me!’ responded Manuel.
This made Jack really laugh, as they plunked themselves down on a bench, two old men silhouetted against the rippling sea, which had taught them most of their skills with an iron discipline.
‘Are you glad you went to sea?’ asked Jack from behind a cloud of tobacco smoke.
‘Never dreamed of doing anything else. Not till I met Kathleen, that is; she’d got her eyes on a shore job for me. After we was married, she kept on her nursing and she put me through college, and I come out a marine architect. We had a good life – but I missed the sea.’
‘Humph. My dad was a fisherman, and he took me out to sea when I was nine or ten. I was wet and cold and seasick, but I felt I was a real man. At fourteen, I was a deck boy.’ He made the statement with pride, and then a grin flashed across his face, as he added, ‘I’d never heard of being a teenager; I was a lad learning to be a man under real men. Had some good laughs, though.’
‘Oh, aye. I were happy when I were a little kid, too, with me dad and me Uncle Leo coming and going from sea – and being took down to visit their ships, and listen to them grumble and laugh. And getting a bit of pie from the ship’s cook.’ He paused to light another cigarette, and then went on. ‘And in the house, there was me granny and grandpa to tell me stories. After me mam slapped me for being naughty, me gran would wipe me face – and explain why I got the slap!’ Both men were silent, as they smoked and contemplated the sea and the mountains before them. Then Manuel said in a puzzled way, ‘Our Lorilyn never seems to need a grandpa at all.’
While he recalled this rambling conversation with Jack, he took the handmade patchwork quilt off the bed and folded it carefully and laid it on a chair, and sighed. Though he had tried, he did not feel that he had been a very good grandfather – unlike his own grandfather, Juan Barinèta.
He sat down on the side of his bed, pulled a faded crocheted shawl out of the drawer of the bedside table, and slowly eased himself down on to the bed until he lay on his back. He paused for a moment, while every bone and muscle in his body flashed with sudden aches, then he laid the shawl over himself, clasped his hands over his chest and thankfully closed his eyes. In the moment between waking and sleeping, he remembered Kathleen upbraiding him for resting on top of the patchwork quilt. Although he was tired from a very scary wartime voyage, he had pulled her down on top of him. They had forgotten about keeping the bedspread pristine, while they spent until nightfall making love so satisfactorily that even now, nearly fifty years later, he remembered it with awe. Had he really been that strong? And she so responsive?
After her death, he had come across the old quilt folded away at the back of the linen closet. Still beautiful, its colours muted by many drycleanings, it had been like meeting an old friend again. In a way, it had comforted him for the emptiness of the other side of the bed.
He had returned to his ship on the day following his happy afternoon with Kathleen, and her letter telling him the news about her pregnancy with Faith caught up with him in Galveston, Texas.
He remembered how excited he had been about the child, overwhelmed by the divine mystery of its existence and the sense of responsibility that it had laid upon him.
He had shouted the news to the few members of the engine room crew who had not gone ashore, and they had congratulated him on his sexual prowess with explicit pithiness. His news broke the astonished silence which had seemed to grip them at other news they had received that morning. The Yanks had dropped an amazing bomb on the port of Hiroshima and blown the whole city and its inhabitants to bits. The city was known to most of the crew and they had found it hard to accept its death – even if it was supposed to shorten the war. It was a port – like Liverpool!
He had immediately scribbled a few lines to Kathleen, expressing his pure joy at her news. After she was dead, he had found the letter in her jewellery box; she had kept it all her life.
He had also written to his mother, Rosita Echaniz, in Liverpool, urging her to come on a visit as soon as the war was over, to see the babe as yet unborn.
He had hoped for more children, but Kathleen had been adamant about limiting their family. ‘How will we ever afford to send them to university?’ she had asked. ‘And if you go back to college after the war …?’
Manuel was still uncertain that he himself wanted to return to college, and had never considered that a real university might be within the reach of any child of his, so he had reluctantly said he did not know.
The family remained at one.
The rainstorm which had swept the Juan de Fuca Strait came to an end. The sudden quiet woke the old man from his nap. He rose stiffly and put the shawl which had been keeping him warm back into the bedside drawer. With an amused awareness of his own finickiness, he carefully replaced the bedspread on the bed.
When he phoned Jack Audley, Mrs Audley said he had gone to Vancouver for the day.
Before going to his old-fashioned roll-top desk to write to Ramon in Liverpool, he went into the kitchen and took down from a cupboard a bottle of wine, already opened. He poured a glass of it carefully, so as not to disturb the sediment at the bottom of the bottle. Then picking it up, he went to the window and stood idly twirling it in the light of the first rays of the sun to pierce the rain clouds.
Instead of his own long, gnarled fingers holding the stem of the glass, he saw, with unexpected clarity, his grandfather’s huge paw holding a wine glass under his nose, to savour a bottle of a new year’s crop smuggled into Liverpool from Bilbao.
Those early years in the safety of his grandfather’s great shadow had been good years, he thought wistfully. He remembered how the old man’s beard waggled when he laughed, and when his grandfather picked him up it was like being hugged by a friendly bear.
He took his glass of wine into his den, where he had a small desk piled with notes and exercise books. Above the desk hung a ship’s chronometer, put there, he had told Jack with a laugh, to remind him that his time was short.
He put his glass down on the desk, drew up a chair and sat down. With slightly trembling fingers, he sought for and found a well-thumbed school exercise book. In it lay the life of a Basque; in fact, the lives of many of them, set down in the hope that Lorilyn would, one day, be interested in some of the men and women who were the cause of her existence. Like many Canadians, she shared a Scottish origin, too; but not everybody in the world is Scottish, considered Manuel tartly. He wanted her to know that she had roots in the oldest culture in Europe, going far back beyond written history. He wanted her to preserve something of it within her own being.
So that she would understand, he wrote in English, in an old-fashioned, neatly sloping, cursive hand. He poured out to her, as best he could, the story of his childhood and what little wisdom he felt he had acquired in the long years of his life, especially during the time that he had been part of a Basque community; he did not feel that he had to include much of his life with Kathleen – Lorilyn understood Canadian life – and the finale of Kathleen’s existence was, in any case, too painful for him to write about.
It was dark by the time he had to stop because of fatigue and he had forgotten, for the moment, his intention of writing to Ramon. He leaned back in his chair to stretch himself. His eyes were watering and his shoulders ached from the concentrated effort he had been making.
When he looked again at what he had written, he wondered suddenly what lay behind his own boyhood memories. What was going on amongst the grown-ups, who surged in and out of his grandparents’ kitchen-living-room? Were they happy?
It took a minute or two for him to bring himself back from Wapping Dock in Liverpool, and when his mind was clear of it, he was left with an aching longing to go home to it, to shake Arnador’s hand once more and see Cousin Ramon, and speak Basque with both of them.
Although Faith will have a fit, if you suggest that you want to do such a long air journey, you could do it, he told himself. And perhaps you should, before it’s too late!
He grinned wickedly. This summer, he promised himself. And don’t tell Faith until it’s too late to cancel the flight.
Chapter Four (#ulink_7c0fe14b-71b0-5566-ba56-eb1cc033ca92)
Ports from which men go to sea are matriarchal societies; it is women who are in charge. They have to have their babies without any support from their husbands; and they have to teach their sons, as well as their daughters, to behave and mind their manners. Father is not at home frequently enough to take a strap to a delinquent lad.
Manuel, aged eighty-four, was trying hard to explain to Lorilyn, aged nineteen, that, even before feminism was invented, some women ruled their families.
In our house, he scribbled, it was Grandma Micaela Barinèta who was the undisputed boss. She was my mother’s mother, a shrunken ball of energy, always clothed in black, a piece of knitting, with a cork on the end of the needles, usually tucked into the pocket of her black apron. Even to me, when I was only three or four years old and all grown-ups seemed very tall, she appeared too little to possibly be the mother of my two uncles, one of whom, Leo Barinèta, lived with us. Whenever they had done something of which she did not approve, she lashed out at them with her tongue and scared them into line. She would not tolerate any nonsense from me, either, though I was only a toddler; and I soon learned to sit quietly, while the priest droned through the Mass, or to run away and play if she was gossiping with a neighbour.
Of course, Grandpa Juan Barinèta, who no longer went to sea, believed that he ruled the three generations in the house. He certainly received first consideration from Grandma – and from my mother, Rosita Echaniz, who always seemed to be in league with Grandma. Nevertheless, it was the two women who collected the men’s earnings from them and the rents from the emigrant lodgers, and laid out the family income to the best of their joint abilities. They bargained in the market for food, decided when new clothes would be bought, purchased coal for the fires, and paid the rent each week; they put every penny they could into three old biscuit tins under Grandma’s bed, until a few shillings had been accumulated to put into Post Office savings accounts.
If I had been good on the day that Grandma decided to go to the post office, she let me accompany her, and I had the honour of licking the savings stamps, which she purchased from the postmistress to put into her savings books; I must have licked pages and pages of sixpenny stamps, as Grandma laid away money, first for a rainy day, then for clothes, especially boots for all the menfolk, and finally for education.
The Basque community, nestled by the dock road, was united in its belief in education for their children; and the whole family was determined that the second child, which Mother was expecting, and I, should both go to a good private day school, rather than to the local Catholic school. In this emphasis on their children’s future, they differed somewhat from their polyglot neighbours, who tended, simply, to be thankful if their children managed to grow to adulthood in noisy, polluted Liverpool, knowing enough reading and writing to get a job in the docks or as deckhands.
I grew accustomed to hearing my future discussed, over many a glass of cheap, smuggled wine, by Grandpa, Uncle Leo, and my father, Pedro Echaniz, when he was home. Words like ‘university’…‘doctor’…‘solicitor’ whizzed over my head, strange words rarely used in our street.
At the beginning of each voyage, Father arranged with his employers for Mother to receive part of his wages each week. This was called an allotment, and, together with Grandpa’s and Uncle Leo’s earnings, was used for living expenses.
Grandma gave back to the men a little pocket money for wine and tobacco, both discreetly brought into the country by Basque seamen lucky enough to be sailing to and from their homeland, Vizcaya, in Spain.
A meal isn’t complete without wine, my grandfather would often say. Smuggled wines were cheap, and, on the whole, the customs officers did not worry too much about collecting duty on a few bottles of our native wines, as long as its illicit importation was on a very small scale.
Though ours was a very united household, it was not a placid one. Argument, debate were the salt of life, and, in addition, there were all kinds of small vendettas within the Basque community. The community became a solid block, however, whenever it felt it had, as a group, been insulted. The supreme calumny was to be referred to as Spaniards! Such a blunder was frequently made by our cheerful, easygoing fellow Liverpudlians, especially the Irish, who seemed sorely lacking in a knowledge of Iberian history, and by English clerks behind official counters, who didn’t really care what we were.
Amongst the men gathered round our kitchen table for a smoke and a gossip, such an allegation produced a glowering animosity; they sputtered like half-lit sparklers, and muttered about the improbable origins of all the accursed Spaniards they had ever met. Many of them spoke Spanish as well as they did Basque, and they could be equally rude in both languages; even in English, the English of the back streets, they could be quite lurid. My knowledge of lively curses in all three languages began at an early age.
So, from the time I was big enough to be carried around on Grandpa’s or Uncle Leo’s shoulder, I learned that I was a Basque and to be proud of it. I learned to speak Basque first; it was the language which flowed around my small world of kitchen-living-room and bricklined backyard; I learned good Castilian from the Spanish priests of St Peter’s Church – they were frequently in and out of our homes, to counsel or console, their lean, dark figures the epitome of God’s authority over little boys. And I learned English from my playmates in the street.
Grandpa had a beard heavily streaked with grey. His head was bald, except for a thin ring of neatly clipped black hair. Most of his teeth were deep-stained by tobacco, but a missing one had been replaced by a gold tooth which flashed as he talked; I was fascinated by it and my first ambition was to have a flashing gold tooth for myself. He had gone to sea in the days of sailing ships, and was proud to say that he had several times breasted the storms of Cape Horn, a place of terror at the most southerly point of Chile, where many a ship was lost before the advent of the Panama Canal gave a safer entry to the Pacific Ocean. ‘They don’t know what seamanship is, nowadays,’ he would grumble testily to my father, when he told of his adventures in a steamer.
For many years now, Grandpa Barinèta had held the agency for Basque emigrants passing through Liverpool on their way to Nevada, Arizona, California and Washington. An Agent was essential to protect such travellers from exploitation in a strange port, where their language was not spoken. He saw that they were housed and fed, while they waited for their ship; he kept their luggage safe, and delivered them to the correct ship at the right time. It was his pride that, to his knowledge, he had never lost even a piece of luggage, never mind an emigrant.
Many of these people were lodged in our own house, which was a large eighteenth-century dwelling, and I was quite used to our home being suddenly filled with strangers, who equally suddenly vanished a few days later. Even as a little child, I sensed how touchingly thankful they were to be in the hands of a fellow Basque, who took care that they were not robbed or cheated by local rascals who made a living by preying on confused travellers trying to get to the New World; and I will never forget Grandpa’s slow smile of satisfaction when he could close his ledger after a boat sailed, and sink into his carving chair at the kitchen table to enjoy a quiet glass of wine with Grandma and Mother.
These transitory invasions made our house a very lively one, and a centre for resident Basques, who often drifted in to hear recent news of Vizcaya from the emigrants. The house was opposite the Wapping Dock, except that across a narrow street, the tall flat-iron building of the Baltic Fleet intervened. This public house was a popular meeting place, almost a club, to the Basque community, and emigrants often took their ease there, too. My mother told me that she sometimes went for a drink there with my father, and that she used to park me, sound asleep in my pram, by its ample walls, while she went inside. No wonder it was one of my favourite pubs when I grew up!
As I grew a little bigger, my greatest ambition became to climb into the toast-rack horse-bus, with its little canopy over the rear seats, and have a ride with the emigrants down to the big ship which took them over the ocean to the New World. On the bus’s side was the name of a steamship company, and on a grubby white board at the front was the name of the ship on which the emigrants were booked. The bus was drawn by two patient, blinkered work horses, heads hanging and untidy short manes blowing in the sea wind, as they waited for the harassed, worried emigrants to be loaded.
‘Grandpa! Let me go down to the dock – please, Grandpa. I’m five now. I’m big enough,’ I pleaded, one sunny September day in 1913.
He stood on the pavement, between our front door and the horse-bus, in his hand a piece of board with innumerable sheets of paper pinned to it, his peaked cap pushed to the back of his head, while he supervised the people climbing on to the bus. I clutched at his long, serge-covered legs, and peered up at him to catch his eye.
He looked down at me impatiently. He was fond of me, I knew, but at that moment I was a nuisance, as round him swirled an anxious group of heavily laden men, women and children, all of them desperately dependent upon him.
‘Manuel Echaniz! The bus is too full,’ he responded with exasperation. ‘Go and see your mother in the kitchen.’ As I reluctantly let go of his leg, his voice rose to a shriek. ‘Mind out! You’re too close to the wheels. Get out of the way, boy.’
My face fell. I wanted to cry. At five, I felt I was grown-up enough to be able to keep out of the way of wheels and horses’ feet. But when Grandpa spoke like that, everyone obeyed, even Mother and Father. Sullenly and with difficulty, I turned away and pushed myself between long, trousered legs and flowing black skirts issuing from the house, an incredible stream of people. A white-faced little girl, with whom I had played for the past week, said shyly, ‘Goodbye, Manuel,’ as I shoved by her. I did not reply, as I fought my way kitchenwards. Through my ill humour, I smelled the emigrants’ underlying fear, and it made me uneasy, as baskets, bundles tied in old shawls, and the bare feet of small children carried in their parents’ arms brushed or bumped my head.
When I was a little older, I was able to visualize more accurately the discomforts of the long voyage in steerage still faced by our visitors, and could understand their dread. Meanwhile, infected by their fear, I almost ran down the deserted back part of the passageway leading to the kitchen and safety, while Grandpa, his pencil tucked behind his ear, continued to cope with the travellers.
Grandpa had a habit of rubbing his short beard when hard-pressed by nervous questions from his charges. Already tired from the journey from Bilbao, and distressed at leaving home, however poverty-stricken, the emigrants seemed to find great comfort and reassurance from the self-confident old man. Now, at the time of parting from us, some of the women were invariably near to tears; not only did they have yet to face the long voyage to New York, but also a long train journey to the West, with children and husbands to keep fed and happy. In some cases, they had to sustain a pregnancy and, at the end, a confinement amid strangers.
On the other hand, there was always a group of young, single men, excited, strung-up and sometimes drunk, for Grandpa to control; on each he pinned a numbered identity disc, while they laughed and joked, and talked of making a fortune in their new land. Not for ever would they tend other people’s sheep in Nevada, they assured each other.
In the big, stone-floored kitchen-living-room, with its high ceiling covered with a century of soot, my comfortable, plump mother took no notice of my entry; she was holding her youngest brother, Uncle Leo Barinèta, tightly to her and was weeping bitterly.
Frightened, and not a little jealous, I paused in the doorway.
Uncle Leo was saying, ‘It’s not for ever, Rosita. I’ll come back.’ His voice rose with false cheerfulness. ‘Come on. At worst, a seaman can work his way home again – even from Nevada! Don’t cry, Rosita.’
Mother leaned back in his arms, to look up at his face. ‘You’ve got a home with us,’ she wailed. ‘You can go on sailing out of Liverpool. Why move? Nevada sounds a godforsaken place.’
‘Tush, Rosita. I want to better myself. There’s land there, almost for the asking.’ He dropped his arms to his sides in a hopeless gesture, realizing that land meant nothing to her.
She drew away from him, and wiped her tears on the corner of her white apron. ‘Mother’s broken-hearted,’ she reproached him.
I watched wide-eyed. Uncle Leo was an essential part of my small world; it was frightening that he should be about to vanish like all the other emigrants. People poured in and out of our house, but the family members always came home; as seamen, Uncle Leo and Father, even Uncle Agustin, reappeared regularly, armed with presents for small boys. But Mother’s tears told me that this departure was very different.
‘Mam!’ I cried in a strangled, scared voice, and ran to her.
Mechanically, she picked me up and held me against her shoulder. I felt her slump slightly, and turned my face towards hers. Her pretty, little mouth was drooping, her whole expression woebegone. She was gazing at Uncle Leo as if she could never take her eyes off him. ‘I’ll miss you so much,’ she whimpered. ‘And Mother’s nearly out of her mind, up there on the bed.’
Uncle Leo swallowed, and I thought he was going to cry; it was a new and scary idea to me that a young man could cry. He controlled himself, however, and, instead, he put his arms round both of us together. He kissed my mother’s cheek and then I felt his lips on the back of my own head. He loosed his hold on us, and said, ‘I know. Mam’s been upset about it for weeks. Comfort her, Rosita – I feel bad about it. But I’ll be back, never fear.’
He turned abruptly and went out through the hallway to say farewell to his father and to join the embarking throng.
It was over nine years before I saw Uncle Leo again.
Mother stood silent for a moment or two; then she seemed to gather herself together and become aware of my own trembling. Through her tears, she smiled at me. She said brightly, ‘Pudding’s got a great surprise for you. Come and see.’
I missed Uncle Leo for his own sake. But, as I grew up, I learned that the loss of a man from a family weakens that family immeasurably. No one knew it better than Basque mountain farmers and their descendants, who dwelt in the rocky, inhospitable Pyrenees, between the French and the Spanish. For century upon century, they had to watch their younger sons leave their stony fortress, because the land could not feed them; they became famous mercenaries in foreign armies, or fishermen in the Bay of Biscay or iron workers in the foundries of Bilbao. When the New World opened up, they took their skills as shepherds and as seamen to it, and Uncle Leo, full of hope, went with them.
Mother slowly slid me to the floor. As she tried to control her grief, I saw her fine, round breasts rise and fall quickly under her black blouse, and I knew that Uncle Leo’s departure must be something very disturbing to her.
My childhood fears soon gave way to curiosity, as she led me to a small cupboard beside the big kitchen range on which she and Grandma cooked. The door was open, and she squatted down beside me. ‘Have a look,’ she urged me.
I approached the small, dark cavern of the cupboard with caution. Pudding was a very large, black cat with expressionless pale-green eyes; she was quite capable of giving a small boy a sharp clawing, if she felt her dignity was at stake.
She was curled up on a piece of grubby blanket in the darkest corner. Her green eyes flashed as she looked up quickly at her visitors, while round her crawled four tiny black bundles. Surprised, I put out my hand to touch one of them. Pudding peremptorily nuzzled my hand away.
In some astonishment, I turned to Mother. ‘Kittens! Where did she find them?’
‘She had them inside her. They came out in the night.’
The reply was so unexpected that I knew my mother was teasing me. I looked at her knowingly, and laughed. ‘They couldn’t. How would they get out?’
Mother hesitated, before she replied. Then she said, ‘Pudding won’t let me touch her at the moment; she’s tired. Tomorrow, I’ll lift her up and show you.’
Though she had been born in Bilbao, my mother had close relations who lived in the countryside, where, as a matter of course, children saw animals born and die. It had apparently not struck her that her little son was ignorant of birth – and, possibly, also of death.
Chapter Five (#ulink_2bcb8e59-13cc-5395-b1d6-3f2b47b5bf6e)
Laden with greyish sheets to be washed, Grandma Micaela came slowly and heavily down the stairs, and, as she entered the kitchen, I looked up from watching the kittens. A shaft of sunlight from the tall, narrow kitchen window lit up her paper-pale cheeks, wet with tears.
I was shocked. Grandma never cried. The worst she ever did was scold; and she was my rock, my safe refuge, when both Mother and Father were cross with me. Now, as Mother scrambled hastily to her feet, Grandma looked imploringly at her and quavered, ‘I can’t make myself go out to see him leave. I can’t bear it. I’ll never see him again!’ She dropped the sheets on to the stone floor; her hands, heavily veined, and scarlet from too much immersion in hot soda water, dangled helplessly at her sides.
Mother ran to her and took her in her arms. She patted her back and rocked her, just as she did me when I had hurt myself. ‘I know, Mam. I know,’ she crooned. ‘I can’t go out, either.’
‘He’s my baby,’ cried Grandma, with a further explosion of tears.
I stopped stroking Pudding, and interjected, with some derision, ‘Uncle Leo isn’t a baby – he’s a big man.’
Obviously startled, both women turned to look down at me, as I knelt by the open cupboard.
Grandma was the first to recover. She swallowed a sob, and then laughed through her tears. She slowly nodded her white head, and responded tenderly, ‘You’re right, my precious dumpling.’ She let out a long sigh, and lifted a finger to touch Mother’s round, pink cheek, a tiny, loving gesture of affection. She said, ‘He’s right. I mustn’t forget it. He is a real man – and I have to let him go.’ Then her tired voice rose, as she added, ‘But it hurts, Rosita. It hurts.’ Tears again trickled down her cheeks.
Mother hugged her, and said determinedly, ‘We’ll pretend he’s simply gone to sea again – on a long voyage. It’ll help. And he’ll write to you.’
Did grown-ups have to pretend things? I wondered uneasily. Like small boys do?
‘And, next month, Agustin should put into Liverpool. That’ll be nice for you – for all of us.’ She was referring to my elder uncle, who was an able seaman in a freighter which docked periodically in Liverpool with cargoes of iron ore. Between voyages he lived with Grandpa Barinèta’s brother and his two motherless daughters in Bilbao, because he himself was still a bachelor.
‘Yes,’ agreed Grandma heavily. Uncle Agustin was a dark, silent man, not nearly so exuberant or lovable as his younger brother, Leo. But Grandma smiled, and I felt better when I saw it.
My mother began to pick up the sheets that Grandma had dropped on the floor. ‘Let’s put these to soak – we can boil them later on this afternoon. Let’s do the bedrooms now. Would you like a glass of wine or a cup of camomile tea to carry round with you?’
Grandma sniffed. ‘No, thanks,’ she replied with a sigh. ‘I’ll have something at teatime.’
Uncle Leo was the first person to pass out of my childhood. For months, Grandma watched for his letters, but he wrote only two from Nevada, to which she replied immediately. Since she had no other address except the one he had given her in Nevada, she continued to write to him there, and she was always the first to reach the front door when a letter slid through the letter box and across the cracked tiled floor. But no more letters arrived, and she mentioned her son less and less and ceased to hope.
Unaware of the despondency the lack of news from Uncle Leo caused her, I regarded her as my own special property, always there to dispense comfort, wipe my nose and wash painfully grazed knees when I had fallen down.
Unlike Uncle Agustin, Uncle Leo and I had been born in Liverpool, and we spoke the thick catarrhal English, with a strong tinge of mixed Irish accents in it, that was current in the streets around the docks. Uncle Agustin spoke only Basque and Spanish.
It had been Uncle Leo’s custom during times of unemployment to go to Spain, to his maternal grandfather’s small farm in the Pyrenees, to work there in return for his food. It was there that he learned to care for sheep; and it was this skill that he hoped to build on in the United States. I had heard him discuss this with his father on a number of occasions, and I knew that he hoped eventually to have his own sheep farm.
Though he did not say much in the two letters Grandma received, I learned later that he had set his expectations of Nevada too high. Ashamed to tell his parents that he had not done too well, he put off writing to them, and moved to Arizona and, later on, wandered through Utah and Colorado. Grandma’s replies to his letters never reached him. He always told himself that he would write when he was settled, but as the years went by and memories of Liverpool dimmed, he had nothing very hopeful to tell his parents so he did not write.
I forgot him.
With a steady, though small family income from Grandpa’s activities amongst the emigrants and from my father, we were able to visit Spain occasionally. Carrying our own food in a big market basket, we sailed for Bilbao in Basque-owned fishing boats or small freighters. In part-return for our passage, Grandpa worked as a member of the crew. In Bilbao we stayed with Grandpa’s brother and his daughters, and, occasionally, our visit coincided with the homecoming of Uncle Agustin. A more rapid form of transport was sometimes used by both families, if they felt the need to see each other on some urgent matter; they went by rail. They caught the train from Liverpool and went to Dover, crossed on the Channel ferry to Calais, and took the train from there to Bilbao. This, however, was considered very extravagant because eight pounds had to be expended on the fare – and why part with hard cash, when you could go all the way by sea for almost nothing? Grandma’s sense of economy was almost as well developed as that of Mr and Mrs Wing, who owned the Chinese laundry and were the parents of one of my best-loved playmates, Brian Wing.
My childhood memories of Spain are faint, evoked mainly by the smell of baking bread and of farm animals, or the heavy odour of newly harvested hay, and a sense of having been particularly happy there, blissfully unaware of the hardship and oppression endured by the grown-ups. I took for granted callused hands and bent backs, chilblained fingers and toes, rooms where one moved like a small snake amid people, because homes were so crowded. In fact, the closeness in which everybody I knew lived was very comforting to a small boy.
As I grew bigger, I would, after a few weeks in Bilbao or up in the mountains with my father’s family, the Echanizes, and another bumper crop of Barinèta second cousins, suddenly feel homesick for Liverpool. Healthy from the mountain air and the coarse fresh food stuffed into me by endless loving relations, I longed to return to the lively world centred on the Wapping Dock. I wanted to play with a shoal of small friends, Malayans, Chinese, Irish, Filipinos, and black people both from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as one or two Basque boys who were a little older than me and sometimes condescended to let me join in their games. We darted like minnows in and out of dark, familiar narrow lanes and alleys, Brian Wing and I at the end of the line because we were the smallest. The black and bleak city, rich with the smell of horse manure, vanilla pods, fish and raw hides, was to us a wonderful playground. We barely took note of the racket of horses’ hooves and steel-bound wheels on the streets’ stone setts or the constant roar of machinery in the workshops round us; it was simply part of everyday life.
Despite our diversity of race and religion, all my small friends had two things in common: as the children of dockers, shipyard workers or seamen, our lives were inextricably bound to the sea; and we all shared a true Liverpool sense of humour – life was intrinsically so hard that one learned early to make a joke of it. How we laughed, Lorilyn! Deep belly laughs that I rarely hear nowadays.
After seeing off the emigrants on the day of Uncle Leo’s departure for Nevada, Grandpa Juan Barinèta came slowly into the kitchen and dropped his papers and house ledger on to the well-scrubbed deal table. His wooden chair, which he had made himself, scraped on the stone floor as he pulled it away from the table and wearily flopped into it. He said heavily, to nobody in particular, ‘Well, that’s that lot.’
Mother and Grandma Micaela had just come up from the cellar, after putting the sheets to soak in the copper before scrubbing and boiling them.
Seeing his wife’s red-rimmed eyes, Grandpa said kindly to her in Basque, ‘The boy’s going to be all right, never fear, my dear.’ He turned to my mother, and asked her, ‘Rosita, get out a bottle of wine – if there’s anything left after last night’s party. Let’s all sit down and have a drink.’
The reference to the previous night’s send-off party for Leo made even Grandma smile, though rather wanly.
Already packed with emigrants, the house had been further jammed as Basque neighbours dropped in to say farewell.
Uncle Leo and Jean Baptiste Saitua, who lived up the road, both had excellent singing voices, and they had sung all the old Basque songs they could remember, vying with each other in a good-humoured way.
Sitting on Mother’s lap, leaning on her swollen stomach and clinging to her so that I did not accidentally slip off, I had watched the oil lamp light up her bright red curls. Then, as I had listened, I had turned slightly to watch the spell-bound faces crowding round us; loving faces, cunning faces, fair faces, mahogany faces, bearded, sad old faces, young bright faces; not a dull or stupid face amongst them.
In this magic circle of friends, I must have fallen asleep, because I have no memory of being put to bed, only of being surrounded by warmth and lovely sounds of singing.
Chapter Six (#ulink_e775614a-55c7-569a-a2d0-3a6a9aea541e)
Manuel put down his pen and took off his spectacles, to rub his eyes. He stretched and yawned. He had better make some supper. Mechanically, he felt in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes, took one out and put it between his lips. He was just feeling in his trouser pocket for his matches when he heard the front door bell ring. Patting his empty pockets, he rose stiffly from his chair and looked up at his chronometer. ‘Five o’clock,’ he muttered irritably. ‘Must be Veronica.’ Veronica Harris was a creature of habit.
Outside, on his doorstep, Veronica, with a plate poised on one hand, turned to Sharon and said cheerfully, ‘He never answers on the first ring – I don’t think he hears all that well.’
‘Maybe we shouldn’t disturb him now.’ Sharon felt a little embarrassed at being coerced into calling on someone without first telephoning.
‘Oh, he’s used to me running in and out. He won’t mind.’ She pressed the bell again.
Manuel stood in the middle of his den and wondered if she would go away, if he stayed perfectly still. Veronica was kind, but he had never liked her very much; he was uneasily suspicious that she would have enjoyed taking Kathleen’s place, an idea which made him shudder. Since Kathleen’s death, he had been distantly polite to her, and reluctantly accepted her baked offerings because she insistently pressed them upon him to the point of rudeness.
He never went to her home; in fact, since Kathleen’s death he had rarely visited any of their friends. Their abounding energy made him feel tired. In nursing Kathleen for months, his strength had been sapped, and all he wanted was to be left alone with his grief.
He stood perfectly still in the back of the hall, but the bell was rung for the third time.
‘Why not leave the plate on the doorstep?’ suggested Sharon, who had already done an eight-hour shift in the Palliative Care Unit and found her feet to be aching abominably.
‘The dogs might get it,’ Veronica replied shortly.
Resigned, Manuel put down his unlit cigarette on the hall table and answered the door. As he opened it, he did his best to show pleasant surprise. He wondered who the other woman was – not a bad-looking judy.
Without hesitation, Veronica stepped into his hall, and he backed hastily. ‘Ah!’ she cooed. ‘I thought you’d never hear me. How are you doing?’ She half-turned towards Sharon, who was still teetering on the step. ‘I want to introduce you to Elaine’s daughter – you remember Elaine? She’s staying with me until she finds an apartment. Come in, Sharon.’
Old Manuel gave up.
He retreated further into the little hallway, while Sharon, loath to intrude, stepped into the doorway.
Who, in the name of God, was Elaine? Old Manuel could not remember.
Blithely oblivious to the lack of welcome, Veronica moved firmly through the archway that led to the sitting-room. ‘I’ve brought you some cold roast beef,’ she announced. ‘I got a roast when I knew Sharon was coming – and it’s too much for us, isn’t it, Sharon?’
Sharon smiled, and fidgeted uncertainly. What was she supposed to say?
Veronica was asking Manuel if she should put the meat in the refrigerator for him. He hastily took the plate from her. He had no desire to have her poking through the entrails of his refrigerator.
‘No. That’s OK. I’ll take it. I’ll put it on the table here.’ He darted through the opposite arch, which led into the dining-room, with an alacrity surprising for a man in his eighties. If he were quick enough, he thought, he could shoo her out of the door again quite rapidly.
He was too late. Veronica was already seated on the flower-covered settee in the sitting-room, and was patting the cushion beside her to indicate to Sharon that she, too, should sit down.
From the archway, Manuel viewed them both with trepidation, while Veronica chirruped on about Sharon coming to nurse in the Palliative Care Unit, and wasn’t it great that they would have such a unit in their closest hospital? Such a shame that there had not been one when Kathleen was so ill.
Manuel stiffened. He was not too clear what exactly a Palliative Care Unit was meant for; but he certainly did not feel like discussing Kathleen in front of a stranger.
The lack of welcome was all too obvious to Sharon, and her colour rose as her embarrassment increased. She glanced directly up at him, wondering how to retreat with grace. What she saw in his face was the closed-off look of suffering, all too familiar to her in her work.
She got up immediately and filled the gap in the conversation which Manuel’s silence had caused. ‘It’s suppertime, Veronica,’ she said firmly. ‘We should leave Mr Echaniz to enjoy the beef, and perhaps we could meet again another day.’ She held out her hand to Manuel, and, since Veronica had not introduced her properly, she added, ‘I’m Sharon Herman. It’s nice to meet you.’
The relief which flooded Manuel’s face was so blatant that she wanted to laugh. Her eyes must have twinkled, because there was the hint of an answering grin suddenly flickering round his wide, thin mouth.
She let go of his hand, and bent to help a disconcerted Veronica up from the low settee.
God’s blessings on the girl, the old man thought, as he assured her that he was pleased to meet her.
With her hand under Veronica’s elbow, she steered her towards the front door, which was still open, and guided Veronica down the steps. Not too sure what was happening to her, Veronica did her best, and said to Manuel, ‘I hope you’ll like the meat. You can bring the plate back another time.’
In her heart, she knew that he would never bring the plate back – the next time she called it would be sitting on the hall table, in a paperbag, waiting for her to pick it up.
He nodded agreeably to both of them. Then he shut the front door after them. He stood leaning against it for a moment, as if to make sure that they would not come back in. Veronica had been Kathleen’s devoted friend, he reminded himself for the umpteenth time. ‘And for her sake, I must be pleasant to her – even if she’s a real cross!’
As he retrieved his unlit cigarette and started back to his den to find some matches, he looked down at the plate of meat. He had a great urge to empty it straight into the rubbish bin – but she did mean kindly, and the young woman with her had understood well enough to take her away. Furthermore, it would save him cooking for himself.
He laughed at himself as he put the plate in the refrigerator, and then went to get his long-delayed smoke.
Nice young woman, he considered, as he thankfully drew on his cigarette. Just what does she do in palliative care?
Outside, as the women went down the steps to the pavement, to walk round to Veronica’s house, Sharon said soothingly, ‘He looked so exhausted and so upset when you mentioned Kathleen, I thought we’d better not stay.’
‘Oh? I didn’t notice.’ Veronica’s expression was puzzled. Then, accepting Sharon’s explanation, she said, ‘Well, I suppose at his age …’ And left it at that.
As he smoked, Manuel stood staring out of the window, rocking slightly on his heels, as if he were in a boat and must keep his balance. He did not notice the two ladies pass beyond his budding lilac tree. His mind had reverted to the memoirs he had been writing for Lorilyn, before the visit.
He smiled slowly at a sudden remembrance of a ship’s master saying to his Grandfather Barinèta that his crew were a lot of ‘hard cases’.
‘Oh, aye,’ he muttered to himself. ‘So were me granddad and me dad – tough as old boots. They could fight anybody if they had to – even other “hard cases” out on a spree of a Saturday night.’
Very thoughtfully, he stubbed out his cigarette in an overcrowded ash tray, and then stood absently rubbing his nicotine-stained thumb and forefinger together, as if to erase the yellow stain on them.
Was he remembering correctly? Had his life in Liverpool really been as golden as he had described? Had the other boys with whom he had played been as good mates as he remembered? While he played or went to school, safe in the shelter of his ferocious old grandfather, what was going on between the adult members of the family?
Chapter Seven (#ulink_fcad4a3b-3ed7-55d7-b8d5-7dea09f3c766)
Manuel would soon be six years old, a thin streak of a child, tall for his age. Filled with resentment, he was clutching his bag of marbles to his chest for fear that Andrew would snatch them from him.
Seven-year-old Andrew had just won his best blue-streaked ollie from him, and Manuel felt sure that Andrew had cheated him, but he was not certain how. Tears of rage sprang to his eyes at the smug look on Andrew’s face as he stowed the disputed marble in the pocket of his ragged shorts.
‘You don’t play fair,’ he yelled. ‘I’ll tell my dad of you!’
Andrew’s lips curled. ‘Who’s afraid of your dad? He’s not home.’
‘Me dad’s a Master Mariner, and he’ll get you when he does come home,’ cried Manuel furiously. ‘So there!’
The youngest of five unruly boys, Andrew was the offspring of a Filipino and an Irish girl, who lived in a nearby street. Nearly a year older than the young Basque, he enjoyed lording it over the smaller lads in the vicinity. Now he made a lewd gesture. ‘My dad’s a stoker, and he’s stronger ’n yours. He’s stronger than anybody in the world!’
Too angry to care that he was probably stirring up a hornet’s nest, Manuel went a step closer. He thrust his chin towards Andrew and ground his teeth menacingly. He snarled, ‘No, he isn’t! And you cheated! I want me bluey back.’
Andrew pushed his face close to Manuel’s. Blue eyes, bloodshot with conjunctivitis, glared into clear brown ones, as Andrew made the worst grimace he could conjure up. ‘You’re not getting it back, see. You shut up, or I’ll put me brothers on to you!’ He stepped back, and grinned. ‘Me dad showed us how to break a man’s arm real quick last night.’ To demonstrate, he did a vicious twist with his right hand.
Apprehension cooled Manuel’s rage; he was scared suddenly of being beaten up by five known bullies. He glanced quickly around in search of adult help. None was visible.
Brian Wing, even younger than Manuel, had been watching Manuel’s defiance of Andrew in silent astonishment. Now, he squatted quickly down on his heels and began to pick up those of his marbles still on the pavement. Deftly, he shovelled them into a cotton drawstring bag. Manuel knew that he was preparing to run back home to the laundry, if a fight should start; Brian did not worry about being called a cowardy custard. When trouble threatened, he was the first to vanish. At this moment, as he rose to his feet, he was beaming amiably at both prospective combatants, his eyes thin slits above pudgy cheeks.
Manuel glanced again at Andrew. With a satisfied smirk, the bigger boy had taken the blue out of his pocket, and was holding it up to the sunlight. Manuel snatched unsuccessfully at it, and Andrew laughed.
Brian fled.
From round the curve of the street suddenly floated Grandma Micaela’s strident voice. ‘Manuel! Manuel Echaniz! Where are you?’
With total relief, Manuel edged back from Andrew, and shrieked, ‘Coming, Grandma!’ Then he turned and ran for home. It left Andrew in command of the field – but, Manuel solaced himself as he tore back to the safety of Grandma, he now had nobody to play with.
Thanks to Grandma’s calling him, his retreat was an honourable one; even Andrew would admit that. When mothers called, you responded fairly promptly. If you did not, you got soundly slapped the minute you showed your face at home – and there was always the overwhelming threat from the females of the family, ‘When your dad gets in, I’ll tell him about you!’ Fathers whacked much harder than mothers did; they sometimes took their belt to you.
Grandma bent to catch him in the curve of her arm. ‘Come along, dumpling,’ she said in Basque. ‘We’re going up to the market. Your dad’s docking tomorrow; and your mam wants to have chicken ready for him when he gets home.’
‘Do I have to come?’ asked Manuel in a whining voice. He had been to school, had his tea, and had then gone out into the street to play, only to find himself up against Andrew. He was tired, and the thought of the long, boring walk up to St John’s Market made his legs ache.
‘Yes, dear. With Auntie Maria only just out of hospital, she can’t watch you. Who’ll take care of you while we’re out? Your grandpa’s gone over to the Baltic for a game of chequers and a drink.’
With the threat of Andrew and his brothers still in his mind, Manuel saw the point of this, and made no further demur.
On her return from the hospital the previous day, Manuel had watched his spinster Aunt Maria being laid carefully on the old sofa in the big kitchen-living-room, so that Grandma and Mother would not have to run up and downstairs to and from her bedroom while nursing her.
She was his mother’s elder sister, and she and Manuel were great friends. She had taught him to play snap and snakes and ladders, and she usually took care of him whenever the others were out.
Now, back home, she was exceedingly quiet, her face white and haggard, except for a single hectic pink spot on either cheek.
It was called convalescence, which Manuel understood was another word for getting better. But he had noticed that all the ladies who had crowded in to see her during the last twenty-four hours looked sad, and sighed. ‘TB’s a terrible thing, God save us,’ they had murmured to each other. Then they had spoken to Auntie Maria in bright, artificial voices.
Even seventy-eight years later, as he wrote about them in his Canadian home, for Lorilyn, he could still remember clearly the black-clad women, their arms wrapped in their woollen shawls, despite the summer heat, while they smiled determinedly and chirruped like birds, as they bent over the stricken invalid.
Grandma took his hand and led him up the worn sandstone steps into the soot-blackened house, to see if his mother and two of her Basque friends were ready to set out.
Rosita was just wrapping Manuel’s new baby sister, Francesca, into the folds of the black shawl she wore. He felt a sting of jealousy at the baby’s privileged position in his mother’s arms; she had usurped his place. Admittedly, Grandma had been particularly kind since Francesca’s birth – but Grandma was kind to the baby as well.
As he waited in the crowded kitchen-living-room for the women to marshal themselves, Aunt Maria put out a bone-thin hand and held his fingertips, as she smiled up at him. Manuel looked down at her. Neither said anything, but Manuel found it consoling that he still appeared to be his aunt’s favourite; she had never even held Francesca in her arms, as far as he was aware.
It was always a matter of earnest debate between Grandma Micaela, Rosita and Aunt Maria whether it was better to go to the market early in the morning, when there was lots of choice; or to go at the end of the day, when it was possible to beat down the prices of wares which vendors did not want to have to take back home. Since a live chicken was as fresh in the late afternoon as it would have been in the early morning, they had decided to go at the last possible moment.
Aunt Maria felt well enough to be disappointed that she would miss the excitement of the market, and she said wistfully that she wished she had an invalid chair to go out in.
Grandma grunted. Invalid chairs were beyond the dreams of avarice, so she said comfortingly, ‘Never mind, dear, save your strength for tomorrow. We’ll get you up and dressed in time to greet Pedro when he arrives. He’d be so happy to see you up and about – so you mustn’t tire yourself today.’
Mollified, she allowed Grandma to prop her up with another cushion and put an extra shawl around her, though the day was warm. With a glass of water, her spectacles and her rosary on a stool by her couch, she settled down resignedly to await their return.
By the time the four chattering ladies reached the beginning of the narrow lane at the back of the market, where poultry was sold, Manuel’s feet were dragging through the straw which littered the cobblestones. Fine beads of perspiration lay on his forehead, and he clutched Rosita’s black skirt, in order to keep up with her. The smell of poultry droppings and other manure lay like a blanket over the crowded lane, and was not improved by the intense odour of dozens of unbathed women, who sat amid their goods for sale. He felt stifled and began to grizzle.
Amid the din and the thick black skirts flapping round him, his wails went unremarked. Men and women shouted, puppies yapped, ducks quacked; fouled in their own excrement, kittens mewed pitifully and scratched at the bars of their cages; next to a cage of clucking hens, a lone goose hissed at passersby. Only rabbits crouched quietly, their quivering noses a tiny indication that they were still alive, despite the heat.
The approach of a small group of Basque women, chattering loudly in their own peculiar language, did not raise the hopes of the purveyors of poultry. They, too, were hot and weary. An impending Basque invasion made their spirits wilt: if the women bought anything, it would only be after strenuous bargaining; it would surely make any stallholder they fastened upon late home for his tea.
After strolling the length of the still busy lane, the target of the Basque attack became a small cage holding three hens, which appeared not to have sold because they were rather scrawny. Before showing any direct interest in the birds, Grandma Micaela led a distracting minor scrimmage by examining carefully a pair of rabbits. She poked at them through the bars of their cage, and they stared back at her without hope. She drew Rosita’s attention to them, and she also poked disparagingly at them. Rosita’s two friends, who had accompanied them, pursed their lips and agreed loudly with one another that they weren’t worth sixpence each. The man in charge of them said something inaudible under his breath.
Sighing, they looked desultorily at a pair of slaughtered hens, not yet cleaned or feathered, hanging heads down in front of the next small stall.
‘Here ye are, ladies,’ called the stallholder, beaming at them. ‘A real nice dinner. Good fat birds. One and sixpence each. Feather ’em yerself.’ He unhooked the hens and held them against his forearm for inspection. Four ladies pinched the hens’ breasts and declared in chorus that they had no fat on them.
The man lost his amiability as quickly as it had been assumed; the price he had asked was fair for two good birds. ‘Pack of bloody Israelites!’ he muttered, and turned angrily away to accost another shopper.
Though Grandma’s eyes were weak and she could not see any of the products very well, prompted by Rosita, she opened negotiations with the man who had three live hens. They were, apparently, the last of his offerings for that day; several empty cages had already been piled on a hand-cart behind him.
‘What do you think, Mother?’ Rosita asked.
Grandma bent down to squint carefully at the hens. One of them tried to peck her, and she hastily drew back. She nodded her head negatively, and said dolefully, ‘They might make good soup. Nothing on them for anything else.’ She glanced up at the vendor. ‘How much do you want for them?’ she inquired, her English difficult to understand.
‘How much?’ interjected Rosita. Her two friends stood behind her, politely silent, ready to murmur approbation or denigration, as required.
‘A bob each,’ he told her, hoping to get rid of three birds in one sale, so that he could wander off for a much-needed pint of bitter, before going home.
Rosita translated the price, and Grandma’s heavy eyebrows rose, as if in shock. ‘For those?’ She turned to their silent friends for confirmation of her horror at such an outrageous price. Like a Greek chorus, they nodded agreement and stared coldly at the stallholder. Still holding his mother’s skirt, Manuel scrubbed one small boot against another, and sighed; he had seen this pantomime so often. He watched a woodlouse, surprised by his shuffling feet from under a few wisps of straw, hasten into hiding beneath a couple of feathers.
Meanwhile, the face of the chicken vendor went as dark as an angry cockerel’s comb. ‘Wass the matter with ’em?’ he asked indignantly. ‘Best roastin’ chicken you could buy. Why, one of ’em would feed six, easy.’
Manuel saw his mother’s generous chest expand, as she readied herself to dive into the fray. It was going to be a long and boring battle. He let go of her skirt and wandered down the sloping lane for a few yards, to look at ugly white dishes laid out on straw; they were tended by three Irish women from the north end of the city.
‘Mind your clumsy feet!’ one of them shouted at him, as he stumbled over a cobblestone. He backed hastily away; to a small boy, they seemed very big and threatening.
Further down, towards Elliott Street, there were still a few puppies for sale, and he paused to watch them, as they stumbled over each other in the dirty cage. In the background, he could hear his mother arguing volubly, as she sought to bring down the price of the hens; she was demanding that they be taken out of the cage, so that she could feel how much flesh there was on the unfortunate creatures.
He was wondering if he could persuade his father, when he came home, to get him a puppy, when there was a chorus of female shrieks accompanied by a roar of male anger. He jumped, and whipped around to see if his mother was all right.
His view was blocked by a large woman with a shopping basket on her arm. He tried to edge around her. She looked down kindly at him, and said, ‘Careful, sonny, mind the pile of saucepans behind me.’ Then, at a slight noise, she glanced back. ‘Holy Mary!’ she cried shrilly, and jumped to one side, sending the pile of iron saucepans in all directions, so that cursing market women leapt to their feet to avoid them.
Flapping awkwardly on clipped wings, a terrified, squawking hen sailed over their heads. The poor bird was unable to gain any height and came down to earth, momentarily, in front of Manuel. He laughed, and instinctively grabbed at it. It managed to scuttle a few feet away from him towards Elliott Street. Then, seeing a break in the highly amused crowd, it took off again in a series of desperate hops and flaps.
Manuel forgot his mother. Hens lived in cages, so this one must have escaped. In high glee, he scampered after it, dodging in and out between piles of kitchenware and ironmongery. He bumped into two young men entering the lane. ‘Watch it, kiddo!’ one shouted after him, irritably.
Driven by panic and despair, the hen managed to soar upward a little. Absorbed in the chase, Manuel ran faster.
As the bird descended, to perch for a moment on top of a fire hydrant in busy Elliott Street, the boy plunged across the pavement towards it, tripping up and confusing the crowd of office workers hurrying homeward. A young clerk made a playful grab at the bird, to the amusement of the girl accompanying him. The frantic hen immediately hopped off its perch on the edge of the pavement, and staggered into the heavy traffic, as if to cross the road. Intent on catching it, Manuel shot after it.
The hen ran directly under a work horse pulling a small cart. The horse reared in fright. The cart skidded past Manuel. It missed him by a hand’s breadth, as the carter swore and fought to rein in the animal. A few yards behind came three errand boys on their bicycles, hurrying to finish the last deliveries of the day. They swerved to avoid the child. Two of them collided and tumbled off, the packages in their front baskets scattering amid both lines of traffic; the third boy managed to reach the gutter, and dismounted; he yelled imprecations at a heedless Manuel, while more cyclists wobbled and dodged around the two bikes tangled in the middle of the lane. Two chauffeur-driven private cars came to a screeching halt, and the drivers impatiently blew their klaxon horns.
All traffic was coming quickly to a halt; and harsh words were exchanged between drivers and carters in the near lane, as horses, set to breast the upward slope of the street, were hauled to a clattering stop, their shoes striking sparks from the setts, and foam from their mouths splattering passersby.
Nobody attempted to rescue Manuel – or the hen.
At the sight of the traffic coming the other way, he had, in the middle of the street, suddenly ceased his headlong chase; he could see that, on the other side, the hen had found a safe perch on the high windowsill of a bank.
With disorganized traffic still edging past him, both before and behind, he was suddenly very frightened. As he stood frozen, at the back of him the driver of a carriage with two ladies in it, leaned down, whip in hand, and shouted at him, ‘Gerroff the street!’ He glanced up over his shoulder, and the high wheels, far higher than him, rolled past him dangerously closely. He turned back towards the opposite pavement. A tram, unable to stop quickly, rolled slowly past him on its rails. It was followed by a brewer’s dray which had been successfully slowed by the drayman; it was pulled by two huge horses and the dray itself was piled high with barrels of beer. Though the upward slope meant it would be hard to start the horses again, the driver drew to a careful stop, thus blocking any further traffic in that lane. He stood up and called to the frightened child, ‘Get on pavement, luv. Quick, now.’
Though all Manuel could see was the slavering mouth and huge, bronze-coloured legs of the lead horse, he heard the voice, and he obediently trotted, almost under the great animal’s nose, to the safety of the pavement.
As the traffic began to move again, he stood, bewildered, on the kerb, and looked up at the hen. From the safety of the bank’s windowsill, the hen opened its eyes and looked down at him with grave suspicion; then, the lids closed again.
Distraught, the child began to cry.
Standing against the bank wall, an elderly newspaperman was calling to the homegoing crowd of pedestrians, ‘Echo! Liverpool Echo! Read all about it!’ Perspiration was running down his bulbous red nose, as he shoved a neatly folded newspaper into any hand proffering the necessary coppers for it. On a blackboard beside him was scrawled the day’s headline, Countess of Derby Opens Crippled Children’s Hospital.
He glanced down at the weeping child, while saying to a customer, ‘Fourpence change, Sir. What’s to do, lad?’
‘I want me mam,’ howled Manuel, hastily taking refuge beside the news-vendor’s second blackboard, which proclaimed in white chalk, Big Fire at Huskisson Dock. ‘And I can’t reach me hen!’ He pointed upwards to the refuge on the windowsill.
The newspaperman squinted quickly upwards, and grinned. The hen had squatted down, eyes still closed, and looked like a bundle of feathers. ‘That’s yours? Not to worry, lad. Soon as this little rush is over, I’ll get it for yez. It don’t look like it’s goin’ to fly away.’
Manuel nodded, wiped his nose on the sleeve of his jersey, and continued to weep, though at a lower pitch. He had no idea where he was, and he didn’t really care what happened to the hen; all he wanted was his mother.
Meanwhile, Rosita and Grandma had assumed that Manuel was still in the market lane, looking at the pets for sale, and had contentedly bought the two remaining live hens. The stallholder, still fuming over the loss of the third hen, sullenly wrung the birds’ necks, while Grandma went to the nearest greengrocery stall by the door of the main market, and bought onions and garlic.
The crowd in the lane was thinning rapidly; the Irish women were packing up their remaining plates; some of the disconsolate, unsold pets had already been whisked away. Manuel was not visible, and Rosita became anxious.
To save her carrying the baby around unnecessarily, her two friends ran the length of the lane, but there was no place in which he could have hidden. They came back panting and gesticulating.
‘Who you lookin’ for?’ asked a young woman, hooking a cage of kittens on to the handlebars of a bicycle, near the Elliott Street entrance.
Rosita told her.
‘Oh, aye,’ she replied readily. ‘He were nearly run over, he was. You’ll mebbe find ’im across the road. I’ll bet you’ll find ’im in the station there – kids love trains.’ She smiled, and mounted her bike and wobbled over the cobblestones in the general direction to which she had pointed.
‘Oh, goodness!’ Rosita exclaimed, her face paling, as, united, the four women pushed their way to the edge of the Elliott Street pavement. A break in the traffic revealed Manuel, with his mouth as wide as a choir boy’s singing a Te Deum, shrieking, ‘I want me mam.’
Rosita’s expression changed immediately to one of parental outrage. With baby Francesca bouncing on her chest and followed by the other three, shawls flapping like the wings of angry magpies, she surged through a break in the traffic, to face her tear-stained son. Before the child could do more than turn his face to her and reduce his sobs, she scolded him, ‘What do you mean by running off like this? We bin scared stiff for you. I’ll tell your dad about you, when he gets home!’ With her free hand, she grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him.
Far from being more upset by this, Manuel recognized the typical reaction of a mam who had indeed been scared. His sobs became sniffs, as she alternately cajoled and scolded again.
Meanwhile, Grandma Micaela, who was feeling extremely tired, looked on silently, and the news-vendor asked her, ‘Do you want the ’en, Queen?’ He pointed up to the bank windowsill, on which the hen lay inert.
Grandma blinked, and her eyes followed the line of the man’s finger. She peered at the bank wall. Halfway up, she saw a vague, copper-coloured lump. ‘On the windowsill,’ the man said impatiently.
Grandma was under five feet tall; the sill was impossibly high up for her. ‘Could you possibly reach it?’ she asked shyly.
The man grinned. ‘Anything to oblige a lady,’ he responded with sudden gallantry. He reached up and managed to gather the bird into his hand. After inspecting it dubiously, he said, ‘It looks like dead, Missus.’
‘It’s fresh enough to cook,’ she told him, with a little laugh. Her faded blue eyes, though partially clouded by cataracts, still had a twinkle in them, and the news-vendor returned to his pitch feeling pleased with himself.
Grandma laid the hen on top of the other two in her calico bag. Rosita had finished her scolding and was wiping Manuel’s face with the corner of her apron. Her friends stopped gossiping about the high price of rabbits – and the party straggled down Hanover Street towards home.
At home, the oil lamp had been lit. Grandpa was seated at the kitchen table, writing in his ledger. Behind him, on the wall, the huge map on which Pedro recorded his voyages, glimmered softly, the net of inky lines linking the ports of call looking like a tangled mass of black cotton thread.
As the shoppers entered, he closed the book wearily. He nodded to his wife and to Rosita, as they entered and thankfully plonked the shopping bags on the draining board by the kitchen sink. The baby was beginning to whimper from hunger, and Grandma said she would make a pot of tea before starting the evening meal. Rosita nodded agreement, and sat down in a rocking chair. She unbuttoned her black blouse and modestly arranged her shawl round the baby’s head and her breast, while she fed her new daughter.
Manuel slunk to the other side of the fireplace, where Aunt Maria had, in their absence, established herself in an easy chair. He leaned against his aunt, who put down the knitting she had been struggling to do and put her arm round him. He was grateful for her presence; he had missed her during her stay in hospital.
He could not have articulated his sense of desertion as he watched his mother feed the baby. He only knew he longed to be cuddled by her and to lay his head on her milky breast. Not even when she called him her big boy, and sent him off to school with a loving pat on his behind, was he comforted.
Auntie Maria suddenly began to cough. She withdrew her arm, and fumbled for her handkerchief in her dressing-gown pocket. She put it to her mouth, and tried to smile at Manuel over its folds.
As she had taught him, he stepped back from her while the spasm lasted. ‘I don’t want to splutter all over you,’ she had once explained to him. ‘It’s not very nice.’
Aunt Maria’s cough was part and parcel of Manuel’s childhood; he slept in the same room as she did, and the sound of it comforted him when he woke in the night after a bad dream; it meant that she was awake, and if he were very scared, he could scramble out of bed and run to her. It puzzled him, however, that, unlike his mother, she would never let him into her bed, however much he was shivering with fright; and she was the only one of his doting relations who did not kiss him; even Grandpa kissed him sometimes. He occasionally thought that he would never understand the idiosyncrasies of grown-ups.
After feeding Francesca, Rosita laid the dozing child in Manuel’s old cradle, near the fireplace, but far enough from it not to be spattered by the fat in which Grandma was frying fish for tea. She then unpacked the three hens and took them out into the brick-lined backyard, to feather and singe them. Though the stallholder had obligingly wrung the necks of the two hens, he had complained sourly that he would not have lost the third one if Grandma had not insisted on the cage being opened. He could not run after the flying bird himself, he said bitterly, because it would have meant leaving his stall untended in an area where petty theft was a fine art.
After the meal, the hens were brought in and drawn on the draining board, giving Manuel an early lesson in anatomy, as he watched the operation.
The naked birds were then washed and hung up in the larder overnight. Manuel stared up at them, and decided they did not look much different from Francesca, after she had been bathed in front of the kitchen fire.
That night he dreamed that he had been hung up in the larder, by his feet. He was too terrified even to run across to Auntie Maria’s bed, and he lay quivering under his cotton sheet until sleep overtook him again.
Chapter Eight (#ulink_21146223-29f0-534e-8192-d11efc9535e4)
In the golden summer days of 1914 his view of his world was that of a child, considered Manuel. His was a permanent world which Grandpa Barinèta would rule for ever. Ample food arrived on the table at least three times a day, and boys did their best not to offend Grandma Micaela or Mother, who ruled the kitchen-living-room like royal queens.
Close by his home was the world of school, where nuns in white wimples and long black dresses talked of eternity and the need to be a good Catholic boy; so that when one died – an event which would take place so far ahead that one could not envision it – one could, in a state of grace, enjoy eternity sitting on the right hand of God, where, hoped Little Manuel fervently, there would be no nuns with sharp voices and spanking rulers to tell you that you had been naughty again. He had secretly wondered if God liked nuns. Old Manuel reflected that the latter thought had seemed so wicked that he had hastily stifled it and had hoped that St Peter would not make a note of it.
At the edge of his world, not counting St John’s Market, lay St Peter’s Church in Seel Street, where, every Sunday morning, he went to Mass with either Grandma or his mother. Though the conversation of the congregation was split between Spanish, Basque and English, the Mass was said in Latin; his father said that it did not matter which port he was in, the Mass was always there, always the same – in Latin. Little Manuel began to think that there was something magical about Latin.
Some of the priests were Jesuits and good scholars. Scholarliness was not something particularly appreciated in the dockside parish, but the Jesuits’ awesome reputation as missionaries, many of whom had come to untimely ends in foreign parts, gained them a grudging respect. They always made Little Manuel feel nervous. They seemed so disciplined; and he could not imagine them sneaking off to see a music hall show or having a drink in the local, like any normal human being.
At home, he took for granted the constant work which engaged Grandma and his mother, how they washed and scrubbed and cooked, knitted and sewed, in a house with one cold-water tap and no electricity or gas. In addition to their usual chores, they endured the house being periodically filled with emigrants, all wanting to prepare food, wash clothes and cope with husbands and babies.
He never considered that his grandfather might be very tired and long to retire, but could not because he had never been able to save much; or that he might be homesick for his native country. It never occurred to him that his father had any feelings beyond affection for his son – and a curious desire to lie on her bed with his mother, with the big iron key turned in the doorlock.
It seemed a very safe world, though Mother sometimes announced herself worried. Exactly what she meant by that, Little Manuel was not very sure, except that it manifested itself in the form of a sharp slap if he did not come straight home from school, and an irate warning never to go with a strange man or accept a sweet from one; the vague warnings of dire results, if he ever took a sweetie from a stranger, remained with him long after he understood what lay behind them, so that even as an adult he always refused a proffered sweet.
The fear of unemployment must have haunted his father, considered Old Manuel. Some of his friends’ fathers were out of work from time to time; and their mams grew short-tempered, and hoped they would not have another baby that year.
Mr Connolly, who lived next door with his wife, Bridget, and little Mary and Baby Joey, was periodically without employment. But he was more cheerful than his neighbours, and he would sit on his front doorstep and play simple hand games with Manuel and Mary. It was he who taught the little boy how to catch and throw an old tennis ball. He was so good at lip-reading that it was a long time before Manuel understood that he was deaf, the usual fate of ships’ scalers, who spent their working lives inside ships’ boilers chipping away at accumulated scale, a job which created tremendous noise.
Pedro was fortunate in being steadily employed by a small freighting company sailing out of Liverpool, though he always hoped that when times improved he would get a better ship. When he was at home for a few days, he would take Manuel swimming, or up to the park to play ball. Sometimes, they walked down to the Pier Head, and, looking out across the river, he taught his small son how to identify the ownership of the vessels plying the river, by the colours of their funnels. Manuel also learned that each country had its own flag fluttering from ships belonging to it; when he and his father got home, they found the countries on the big map pinned to the wall of the kitchen-living-room.
Pedro had a shrewd eye for what might interest a boy and told him stories about the ports he had visited, including small details which Old Manuel still remembered, like the kind of sweets on sale in the streets of Bombay or the kind of clothing that ladies in Yokahama wore.
‘You’ll see them all yourself, one day,’ his father assured him, certain that his boy would follow in his footsteps, though with better qualifications.
As he wrote for Lorilyn, Old Manuel wondered if Faith would remember him with the same uncritical love with which he remembered his father. He doubted it; his Canadian wife and child seemed to live lives crammed with commitments. They were far too busy to spend much time listening to what had happened to him in his last absence from them; they appeared to exist deep in a women’s world of school, voluntary work, dancing classes, music lessons, skating classes, teas and ladies’ bridge parties. Sometimes, Kathleen did a spell of nursing which gave her a whole new collection of women with whom to become involved. Men seemed to be expected to keep to their world and not intrude – even to their half of a room, if they were at a party, Manuel remembered with a rueful smile.
Perhaps it was his own fault, he thought. Even when he had become a marine architect, he had sometimes been away for weeks. As a seaman from a family of seamen, this had not appeared unusual to him; but it had probably made Kathleen and Faith cling more closely to each other for support.
He sighed, and paused in his writing to light another cigarette. He had got to know Kathleen in her final illness better than he had ever known her before, and, in his current loneliness, he regretted that he had not tried harder to be closer to her in their earlier married life. They had not been unhappy, he considered, just not quite as happy as they might have been.
In marrying a Canadian and settling in Canada, Manuel had achieved a much higher standard of living than he could have reasonably hoped for if he had stayed in Liverpool. After qualifying as a marine architect, he had worked in Montreal, and he had had to acquire a working knowledge of yet another language, French; it had added to the difficulties of adjusting himself to North American life.
After enjoying the close support of an extended Basque community in Liverpool and Bilbao, he had been, for a time, intensely lonely. It was some time before he met anyone who knew what a Basque was, and he remembered his intense thankfulness when he met a sprinkling of fellow Basques and could speak his own language to them. His neighbours were supremely indifferent that he could switch in and out of four languages – being multilingual was something that born Canadians were not supposed to worry about; English-speaking Canadians seemed to take it for granted that even their French compatriots would be able to speak English – just as the Spaniards expected the Basques to be competent in Spanish, thought Manuel tartly.
Though sometimes he tripped up, for Kathleen’s sake he made a great effort to sink into her world. He had, however, done his best to teach Faith to speak Basque, and as a little child she had always spoken to him in that language – until she went to school, when, under the tight conforming pressure of her school life, she had soon discovered that it was convenient to forget that her father was an immigrant.
As he worked on his notes for his granddaughter, Old Manuel wondered if his quiet, capable father felt like a stranger in his own home, when he carried a kitbag full of grubby clothes up the steps of Grandpa Barinèta’s house, at the end of long boring weeks at sea in a tramp steamer.
Was it difficult for Pedro Echaniz to re-establish a rapport with his wife and mother-in-law and his rather forbidding father-in-law, all of whom seemed to talk to him at once?
Mulling over his memories of his father sitting in the crowded kitchen-living-room, smoking his pipe and listening to the chatter, Old Manuel realized that, sometimes, it may have been quite hard; only when he was alone with Little Manuel had the dam burst, and Pedro himself had talked and talked, creating a fabulous world of distant places and homespun philosophy for his small son. God keep him, prayed Old Manuel, with a surge of love.
The day after the three chickens had been carefully prepared for cooking, Pedro had run up the steps of his father-in-law’s house. The front door was hospitably ajar, and through it wafted an excellent smell of cooking – olive oil, garlic, onions, herbs and chicken. How good it would be to eat some decent food!
In the narrow hall, he slung his kitbag to the floor and threw down his heavy jacket and peaked cap.
‘Rosita!’ he shouted, over the clamour of the riveters in the workshop immediately to the rear of the house. Dear God! How could she stand that kind of noise all day long? ‘Rosita!’
She heard him and came running, plump face beaming and blue eyes flashing, her mass of wavy red hair bouncing round her shoulders. She flew into his arms, and, over the odours of cooking and babies, he smelled the freshness of her. He always swore to himself that every time he returned home he fell in love with her again.
Before the family caught up with them, he hugged and kissed her, cupping one breast in an eager hand, feeling the dampness of her milk soaking through her starched flowered pinafore.
She giggled happily; seconds of privacy were precious in a house full of relations – and often with emigrants as well.
He dropped his hand, as his tiny mother-in-law came pattering after her daughter, followed closely by Grandpa Juan Barinèta. Behind them, Manuel stood shyly by the kitchen door, waiting to be noticed.
Over his wife’s head, Pedro greeted his parents-in-law; he was struck by how old they seemed suddenly to have become. He was fond of both of them, and was thankful that Rosita had their company while he was at sea.
With a twinge of anxiety for the old people, he loosened himself from Rosita, to bend and kiss Micaela’s cheek. He then embraced Juan.
‘It’s been a long time,’ Grandpa said, keeping his arm round the younger man’s shoulder. ‘Come in, boy. Come in.’
Pedro moved down the passage, and then saw Manuel. He stopped and squatted down close to him. ‘How’s my big lad?’ he asked, and opened his arms to him, and the boy went joyfully into them. There was the feel of his father’s beard on his cheek, the smell of sweat and tobacco and wine, the total comfort of his being.
Manuel chuckled in his father’s ear, and said shyly that he was all right.
In the steamy kitchen, Pedro stretched himself and looked around the familiar domain. Auntie Maria shyly and carefully rose from her chair to greet him; she was dressed in her best black skirt and black silk blouse. Jet earrings hung against her cheeks.
‘Maria! You’re up and about!’ exclaimed Pedro, as if he had already been primed by Grandma what to say to the stricken woman. Without hesitation, he went to her and put his arm protectively round her shoulders, as she subsided again into her chair, and kissed her on both cheeks. ‘I thought you would still be in hospital.’
She glowed, as she looked up at him with frank yearning. Why tell him that she was at home because the doctors could do no more for her?
‘I’m doing quite well,’ she affirmed. ‘I can sit in the yard – or on the steps, and I’m hoping to walk out soon.’
He looked into the big blue eyes turned up towards him, so like his wife’s but without her beauty; and he knew that she was lying. He played up to her, however, and joked about all the young Basques who would ask her out when she could get about again. Manuel came to lean against her, so as to be included in his father’s attention. He realized that nobody but his father ever kissed Auntie Maria, and he sensed his aunt’s pleasure at being so closely touched by another human being, though he did not yet fully understand her inner loneliness, caused by other people’s fear of catching her dread disease.
Grandma Micaela turned quickly away from the little group, and went to fetch some wine glasses from the dresser. There was a lump in her throat and she wanted to cry. With Leo gone and Agustin rarely in Liverpool, her daughters were doubly precious to her, and yet she had to accept that Maria was preparing for a much longer journey.
She took a big breath, and, with her hands full of glasses, she turned back to the family. ‘Let’s have a drink,’ she suggested gaily. ‘Juan, dear. Get a bottle out for us.’
As Grandpa produced a bottle of good Basque wine, Rosita said cheerfully to Pedro, ‘You haven’t met your daughter yet!’
She bent down and scooped the child out of her wooden cradle, and thrust her into her father’s arms. Francesca stared up at him with some perplexity. She opened her tiny mouth to cry. Pedro suddenly laughed, and said to Rosita, ‘She’s the dead spit of you. Look at her! Blue eyes and all that red fluff on her head.’
His wife playfully shook her red mane over the baby’s face. ‘She’s goin’ to be just like her mam, aren’t you, luv,’ she said to the child, and Pedro’s loins ached, as the creamy skin of his wife’s neck came close to him.
The baby whimpered uncertainly, and Rosita snatched her back. Manuel promptly eased himself on to his father’s knee. Over his head, Pedro asked her, ‘Did you have a bad time with her?’
‘Not too bad,’ she told him.
He took a sip of his wine, and looked wickedly over his glass at her. She flounced provocatively away from him to return the child to her cradle, and stood, hand on hip, watching him, as she rocked the cradle with her foot to soothe the baby.
The kitchen fell silent after this as everyone sipped their wine, and listened to the tolling of the bell of the dock railway train, as it passed along the street under the overhead railway, and to the usual turmoil of the machinery in the buildings at the back of the house.
While the train clattered rhythmically on its way, Pedro stared at his half-empty glass and wondered what to say. Once greetings had been exchanged, he had to pick up the threads of his life ashore; it was like trying to understand the gist of a novel after commencing to read it in the middle of the volume.
Rosita wrote to him regularly during his absences, though, occasionally, he received the letters only when he returned to Liverpool; in any case, they did not really convey to him the daily ups and downs of the family. It took time to understand all the references made in the course of the family’s conversations.
There were times when Pedro felt that his shipmates were closer to him than his family was; they certainly knew more about each other than their families did. He had sailed with some of them for years. Yet he loved Rosita; and Manuel was someone to boast about through many a monotonous day at sea. He felt guilty that his first inner reaction to the new baby had been that it would be something to tell his mates about when he returned to sea – another beautiful redhead. He ran his fingers through his roughly cut hair; it was sticky with salt. He could use a good scrub down in the old tin bath; but he could have it only when all the family had gone to bed, and he could have the privacy of the empty kitchen-living-room. He sighed, and puffed at his pipe.
The awkward silence was broken by Manuel. With his head against his father’s shoulder, he asked shyly, in Basque, ‘What’ve you brought me, Daddy?’
Pedro immediately snapped out of his reverie and put down his pipe. ‘Aha!’ he exclaimed mysteriously. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ He clutched the boy tighter, enjoying the child’s warm trust.
Manuel giggled and pushed himself off Pedro’s knee. ‘Let’s see,’ he urged, and trotted towards the kitbag, still lying in the hall.
Underneath all the impedimenta of a seaman’s life, just when it seemed to Manuel that his father must have lost the gifts he had purchased, they unearthed a cream jug in the shape of a cow, for Grandma to add to her collection of little jugs, and a big tin of good Virginia tobacco for Grandpa.
A parcel, wrapped in tissue paper, was handed to Rosita, who cautiously peeped into it, and then blushed and giggled when she discovered a lace-trimmed petticoat. She hastily wrapped it up again, while Manuel’s mouth drooped and his eyes grew wide with disappointment. A further burrowing in the bag produced a pretty pair of hair combs for Auntie Maria.
Pedro glanced up at Manuel, as he felt down to the bottom of the bag. ‘I hope I haven’t lost it,’ he said, with mock anxiety. He pulled out an old sweater, and then another one. But the second sweater was wrapped around something.
Very carefully, Pedro loosened the bundle and lifted out a model yacht, its mast and sails folded flat. He handed it to his son. ‘Guaranteed to sail – and not to sink,’ he told his son.
Manuel took it gingerly from him. Nobody amongst his school friends had anything to equal it – he was sure of that. ‘Will it really sail?’ he asked, as he twisted it round to have a better look at it.
‘Given a decent breeze it will – like a real one. Tomorrow, we’ll go up to the park and try it on the pond. You’ll soon get the hang of it.’
The pond? That was where grown-up men took their model yachts, yachts carefully pushed through the town in old perambulators, because they were too big to carry.
The child’s face was beatific. He determined that he would never let Andrew get even a glimpse of the little boat; he was not going to chance its being taken from him.
Grandpa leaned forward. ‘Let me see it, Mannie.’
Manuel used both hands to pass it to his grandfather, and the old man took a closer look at it: the brass rails, the finely polished wood, and the correct rigging. ‘Nice piece of work,’ he said. ‘Must’ve taken a while to do that.’
‘Aye, it did. It’s to scale.’
Juan handed the boat back to his grandson. ‘You don’t take that up to the park by yourself,’ he instructed. ‘When your dad’s away, I’ll come with you.’ He, too, was aware of the predatory children, some of them homeless, who ran wild in the streets.
Manuel promised.
Rosita bent over them, to admire the little vessel, and Pedro slyly pinched her bottom.
She shot a shocked glance of reproof at him. ‘Not in public!’ she hissed, trying to look suitably outraged.
A further diversion, which relieved Pedro’s feeling of strangeness in his own home, was created by the sound of hob-nailed boots in the hall, as Jean Baptiste Saitua and two of his sons stepped tentatively through the open front door; it did not take long for the Basque community to learn through the grapevine any bit of news, like a return from sea, and these old friends of the entire family felt free to step in and inquire how Pedro was.
Grandpa leaned back in his chair to look down the hall. ‘Come in,’ he shouted. ‘How are you, Jean – Domingo – Vicente?’
They tramped in and shook Pedro’s hand and slapped him on the back, while Rosita quietly slid over to the fireplace, to remove the chicken casserole from the oven and place it on the warming shelf above the fire; she winked at Aunt Maria, sitting quietly watching the scene. ‘Heaven only knows when we’ll get our tea,’ she muttered to her sister. ‘Would you like another glass of wine?’
Maria smiled gently and nodded. ‘Yes.’
Grandma, equally resigned to a long session of male reminiscences, was already getting more glasses and another bottle of wine. Jean Baptiste was a bosun with a small Basque shipping company sailing out of Liverpool; he had a couple of nights’ leave. Domingo was a ferryman, and Vicente was in his last year at school. After much joking, Vicente was allowed a glass of wine, though Jean Baptiste said his mother would probably be after him, if she smelled it on his breath.
The cakes intended for dessert were brought out and handed round, and the party became quite merry. Pedro abandoned hope of a bath that evening, and Rosita was beginning to wonder if she could stretch her chicken casserole to feed three extra men, when Maria began to cough violently. The hilarity ceased immediately, and Grandma said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll take her upstairs – it’s just the smoke.’
Fat, jolly Jean Baptiste quickly rose from the table, however, his heavy jowls suddenly drooping. ‘Ah! I forgot!’ He looked round the room, thick with blue tobacco smoke. ‘I’m sorry, Maria.’ He turned to Grandpa, and said, ‘We can meet in the Baltic later on; some of the other lads’ll be sure to be there.’
With grave dignity, he eased himself and his sons out of the crowded room, calling his thanks to Grandma for the wine and cake.
His sons clattered down the steps to the pavement, while he paused at the top, to speak to Juan and Pedro. ‘The wife told me Maria was back home. I thought she must be well again. How is she?’
Grandpa’s shoulders went up in a hopeless shrug. ‘They can’t do anything for her – but you mustn’t worry about the tobacco smoke; she loves to be part of what’s going on. If we put her upstairs all the time, she’d die of loneliness.’
‘Of course, poor girl. It must be a terrible worry to you.’
He turned to Pedro. ‘See you later, lad.’
And Pedro, who simply wanted to go to bed with his wife, nodded agreement.
Chapter Nine (#ulink_88f2ccda-c91f-5917-a1a9-0d0b94caeb95)
While Micaela unbolted the back door to open it, to let out the tobacco smoke, Rosita quickly filled a glass of water and handed it to Manuel. ‘Give this to Auntie; it’ll help her stop coughing.’
The little boy obediently took the glass over to his struggling aunt. Rosita leaned over the sink to heave up the sash window; it had been partially open during the Saituas’ visit; now she struggled to push it up further, but after a couple of inches, it stuck in its rotting wooden frame. ‘Blast,’ she muttered, ‘I’ll have to tell the rent collector when he comes.’
Micaela pushed her slightly aside, so that she could damp a towel under the tap. As she turned and wiggled her way between the scattered kitchen chairs to get to Maria, she said grimly, ‘You can tell him – but don’t expect him to do anything. Better to get your father to have a look at it.’
Maria had been coughing so violently that she had not been able to take the glass of water from Manuel; he was standing by her, wide-eyed, not knowing what to do.
The sick woman held a big man’s handkerchief over her mouth to catch the blood-streaked phlegm which she was coughing up.
‘It’s all right, Mannie, dear. Put the glass on the little table, and go and help your mam.’ Micaela gently wiped her daughter’s face with the damp cloth, and, as fresh air entered the room, the coughing lessened enough for Maria to be eased on to the oil-cloth-covered sofa and be propped up with a myriad of patchwork cushions. Her mother covered her with a knitted shawl, and persuaded her to take a sip or two of water.
After chatting for a minute or two with Jean Baptiste Saitua, Juan and Pedro sat down on the front doorstep to continue their smoke. They remained there, in companionable silence, until Rosita called them in to eat.
While Rosita took a bellowing Francesca out of her cradle and put her to the breast under the cover of her shawl, Micaela served the family. She put a plate of food in front of Rosita, so that she, too, could eat, while nursing the baby.
Before sitting down, Pedro looked across at his sister-in-law, lying limply on the sofa. ‘Sorry the smoke made you cough, Maria. Cigarette smoke’s the worst. I’ll smoke outside in future.’
The kindly meant words spoken softly in Basque brought tears of weakness to Maria’s eye. She made a small gesture with her hand, as if to say it did not matter.
Micaela took a little bowl, put a spoonful of rice in it, and covered it with a ladle of gravy from the casserole. Very slowly, teaspoonful by teaspoonful, she got the food into the invalid. Only then did she sit down to eat herself.
Pedro had been praising the dinner to Rosita, and she smiled happily, while she shifted the baby to the other breast. She remembered suddenly what had happened when she had bought the hens in the market, and she told him the story of the third hen, retrieved from the bank windowsill.
Juan was silent during this recital. He carefully masticated his last piece of chicken and swallowed it, and, with his fingernail, released a bit of meat that had lodged between his front teeth. He did not laugh at the story; he sounded grumpy, as he said, ‘I hope you paid for that chicken?’
Rosita laughed. ‘We paid for the two we bought.’
‘The third one was dead when we found it,’ Micaela told him. She obviously expected Juan to shrug and say no more. But the old man stiffened up. He rubbed his beard, as he always did when thinking something over. ‘So you didn’t pay for it?’
‘Well, of course not. We just found it dead.’ She put down her fork.
‘But it was still good enough to eat?’
‘You’ve just eaten it! Rosita wouldn’t cook anything that had gone bad.’
Grandpa looked at her frigidly. ‘In that case, shouldn’t you have gone back and paid for it?’
Micaela was annoyed at this. She replied huffily. ‘It was lost – and we found it. Anybody else who’d found it would have taken it.’
‘But you asked for the cage to be opened. If you hadn’t, it would not have been lost.’
Manuel realized that a sharp family tiff was in the offing, and he wondered if he could get down from the table, without first asking Grandpa. His grandfather was looking extremely grim, however, and he decided he had better sit very quietly and not draw attention to himself.
Micaela tossed her head. ‘Tush!’ she exclaimed. ‘The poultry man must’ve believed it had got crushed underfoot in the crowd – or in the traffic. He’ll never know we found it.’
Juan’s long, dark face darkened further, his beard tilted up as if in pride. Pedro discreetly kept his mouth shut.
‘My dear, it should be paid for; it was our fault it was lost.’ Though the words were not unkind, it was an order.
‘Juan! You’re being unreasonable. You really are.’ Impatiently, Grandma made to rise from the table. ‘He’ll have forgotten about it by now.’
‘I want it paid for. He won’t’ve forgotten that the whole hassle was caused by a bunch of Basque women, and he’ll talk about it. We’ve got to live here; and we Basques have a good reputation – and it’s small things that keep that reputation up.’ He slapped his hand crossly on the tabletop. ‘And what will your grandchild think? That if he can get away with something, it’s automatically all right?’ His gold tooth flashed between his beard and his moustache. ‘Not on your sweet life! What a Basque takes, he pays for.’
‘Really, Juan!’ Grandma was trembling now, her face flushed, her fingertips on the table to steady herself. Rosita opened her mouth to join in, but was quelled by a look from Juan.
‘Listen to me. You and Manuel – I want him to go, too – go back to the market tomorrow and pay for that bird.’
‘But, Papa …’
‘Tomorrow!’
Grandma took a big breath, and then said, ‘Well, if you feel that strongly about it, Manuel and I can walk up and do it.’ Then she spat out, ‘But I think you’re being terribly fussy!’
Grandpa got up from the table. ‘I know what I’m about,’ he growled. ‘Come on, Pedro, let’s get down to the Baltic; Jean Baptiste’ll be waiting.’
Chapter Ten (#ulink_42169a00-cae2-5b2b-8c2c-6598c3d67a78)
Calmly clipping the hedge in the early-morning peace of his Victoria garden, Old Manuel smiled over this episode, which he had included in his notes for Lorilyn as an example of the stiff honesty of Basques; and wondered if he should also include what extraordinarily able smugglers they were.
‘What are you laughing at?’ asked a cheery voice from behind the hedge.
Surprised at his peace being intruded upon, he told Sharon Herman that it was a memory of his childhood; and continued clipping along the hedge, while he asked politely how she was.
Sharon had a plate of buttered toast in her hand, and as she followed him down the hedge, she continued to eat. ‘I’m just fine,’ she told him. ‘Got myself an apartment, but the possession date isn’t for a month. So Veronica says to stay with her till it’s ready.’
‘She’s very kind,’ Old Manuel replied dryly, and put his shears down, while he pulled at an old bird’s nest tangled in the hedge.
‘She is, isn’t she?’
I wish Veronica wasn’t so persistent, thought Old Manuel. High above his neighbour’s roof a gull soared effortlessly and he speculated idly that in another few seconds it would dive to snatch a piece of Sharon’s toast. But she turned suddenly towards him, and the gull flew swiftly seaward.
‘Tell me what you were laughing at,’ she demanded playfully.
He told her the story of the lost hen. ‘My grandfather knew that it isn’t enough to be honest – if you were foreign immigrants, like we were, you’ve got to be seen to be honest.’
As he slowly clipped his way down the length of the hedge, he told her of his Basque origins and the tiny community near the Wapping Dock. Then he paused, to hold his shears in his left hand, while he carefully stretched the fingers of his right hand. He saw her glance at his hand, and said, with a rueful smile, ‘It’s a touch of arthritis. Hurts sometimes.’
She nodded sympathetically, and he went on, ‘I never thought of being foreign – I were born in Liverpool and christened in St Peter’s. All the little kids I played with were born there – though their dads came from all over the world – as near as Ireland or as far as the Philippines.’
‘Like Canada.’ Sharon bit into another piece of toast with strong, even teeth.
He agreed. She looked much healthier than she had done when Veronica had brought her to his house, and he was glad. Her fair skin had acquired a slight tan, and her blonde hair was blowing in a wild tangle in the wind. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but she had a pleasant open look about her and her figure had a cuddly roundness which reminded him of his mother. She was very likeable, he decided. Easy to talk to.
‘I’ve got to get to work,’ she told him briskly, and his wise eyes nearly vanished amid the wrinkles, as he smiled goodbye to her.
The next time he saw her she was seated on a huge log on the beach, staring disconsolately out on to a placid pale-blue sea. She was obviously crying, her shoulders heaving under her sweater.
He hesitated in embarrassment. They were the only people on the shore that morning. She must have felt sure of her solitude to cry so openly, he debated uncertainly with himself. Should he go to her or not?
Aware of a sense of inadequacy at the idea of dealing with a young woman’s tears, he decided to avoid invading her privacy, so he curved up the beach to pass well behind her. He was sure that she had not noticed him, but the crunch of pebbles under his feet drew her attention, and she turned a woebegone face towards him. She lifted a hand in slow salute and, embarrassed, he waved back, continuing to plod slowly on his chosen route.
She quickly took a paper handkerchief out of her pocket and wiped her face and blew her nose. He had only just passed her when she shouted, ‘Are you walking home?’
He stopped, and nodded his head a little guiltily.
‘Wait a minute, and I’ll walk with you.’
‘I’m rather slow,’ he called back. Though her distress troubled him, he hoped she would change her mind and allow him to go on walking alone. She ran lightly over the pebbles, however, until she reached him.
He looked her up and down in a bemused way. She had cried enough to make her face swollen and her eyes mournful; yet she did not seem to want to hide it. ‘I guess you didn’t hurt yourself, if you can run like that,’ he remarked tentatively, to give her an opening if she wished to explain her distress.
As she fell into step alongside him, she asked with a tight, wry grimace, ‘You mean you thought I was crying because I’d fallen or something?’
He considered her query, and then said, ‘Well, I didn’t know. I didn’t want to intrude. I thought I should let you be.’
She sighed. ‘I’m OK. I was feeling a bit down, that’s all – a bit lonely in a new place, I guess.’
Walking on pebbles was tiring him, and he wished he had taken the path at the top of the cliff. ‘You’re working in the new ward at the hospital, I think Veronica mentioned?’
‘The Palliative Care Unit? Yes.’
‘Patients who are going to die are put in there? Must be hard on you.’
‘Not really.’ She went on to tell him how worthwhile she thought her work was. Her enthusiasm surprised him.
Though he was interested in what she was saying, he began to feel that he must sit down to rest; there was an unpleasant tightness in his chest. He stopped, and said, ‘At the top of the cliff staircase here, there’s a little park kiosk that sells coffee. Would you like a cup?’ He was panting slightly and his speech came slowly. ‘We have to get up the cliff, somewhere, to get home.’
She looked at him with concern. ‘Could you climb the steps all right?’
‘If I do a few at a time.’
She was immediately practical. ‘Let’s sit on the bottom steps for a few minutes – until you get your breath.’
Manuel thankfully sat down suddenly on the steps, and they listened to the waves lapping on the beach for about ten minutes. Then she asked, ‘Have you seen your doctor lately?’
Manuel’s mouth turned up in a quick grin; he was feeling better. ‘Saw him in the winter. He always says the same thing – you’re in great shape – for your age! He’s a nice kid.’
She laughed. A wonderful old dear, gentle to the point of passivity.
She judged him wrongly. Manuel was feeling a little exhausted – but he was cussing inwardly at his weakness. He got slowly to his feet, and looked down at her quite blankly. What was the girl’s name? For the life of him, he could not recall it.
Unaware of his dilemma, she took his hand to help him up the wooden staircase.
‘I’m all right,’ he told her a trifle peevishly, and she quickly withdrew her hand. Old people could be quite tetchy about being helped, she knew.
Over coffee and muffins, which he insisted on paying for, he sat quietly for a few minutes, thinking that Jack Audley would be highly amused when he told him that he had, that morning, taken a bright young thing out to coffee!
‘Why were you crying?’ he finally asked her baldly, and then felt that he was being inquisitive and should not have said anything. She answered him without hesitation, however, and told him, ‘We lost a patient last night, not unexpectedly. It was her widowed daughter’s reaction that got me. She had lived with her mother for years. She’s got no children; and she was beside herself.’ She paused, her expression desolate. ‘I guess I could relate to her feeling of being bereft.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The feeling that nobody is left to care what happens to you.’
‘Tush. A bright young woman like you must have lots of friends – and even parents still alive!’ He tried to sound cheering.
Sharon bit her lower lip. ‘Well, you see I’m divorced, and I don’t have any kids – and Mum and Pop live in Florida; I’m their only child.’ She sighed. ‘When I was married, I went to live in Toronto. My husband wasn’t the social type, so we didn’t make any friends to speak of. I was a fool to marry him. We weren’t really suited to each other from day one.’
He nodded understandingly. ‘So what brought you here?’
‘Well, I need to work – and I’m a qualified nurse. I saw the ad for this job at the hospital, and applied. When I was a very little girl, I lived here – and it’s such a truly beautiful place. I’m glad I came – but I’ve got to start again, making friends.’ She smiled suddenly, and said, ‘At least I’ve made one, haven’t I?’
Manuel gave a little chuckle. ‘Of course,’ he assured her. Loneliness makes strange bedfellows, he thought with amusement; then decided hastily that ‘bedfellows’ was not quite the word – not at your age, old boy, he told himself.
She caught the smile that flicked across his face. ‘Now, what are you laughing at?’ she demanded, smiling herself.
‘I don’t think I can explain it to you,’ he replied with a chuckle. Then he laughed.
Laughter is infectious and soon they were giggling like a couple of children, about nothing.
Nevertheless, when he got home, he was thankful to crawl on to his bed. But he was still smiling to himself.
Chapter Eleven (#ulink_8874814c-c299-5c01-a85e-23e9f7770479)
In June 1914, Rosita announced that she wanted Pedro’s family to see Francesca, who was their first granddaughter; Pedro himself was at sea, but to Juan and Micaela it seemed a good opportunity to take a holiday, so a visit to Spain was arranged. Little Manuel was thrilled.
Juan tried to persuade Maria to accompany them. ‘You could go up into the mountains with Rosita to visit the Echaniz family, while your grandmother and I are in Bilbao. It would do you good to breathe mountain air,’ he told her.
Maria was feeling a little better and, at first, had been tempted to make the journey. Then, when she discovered that the family would be travelling by sea, she said she could not face being seasick.
Though horribly disappointed, Micaela said she would remain at home to care of her.
Rosita looked at her mother’s bent, tired figure and, at first, said nothing; instead, she went to see Bridget Connolly next door. Rosita often looked after Mary and Joey, when their mother was helping to nurse a sick neighbour or delivering a baby. Now, she asked a favour on Micaela’s behalf.
Would Bridget keep an eye on Maria, if Micaela went to Spain for three weeks in July? If Bridget could watch her during the day and cook for her, she thought that Mrs Saitua’s daughter, Panchika, could be persuaded to sleep overnight in the Barinèta home and give Maria a bit of breakfast.
‘Panchika doesn’t have to be at work till eight o’clock,’ she explained to Bridget. ‘She’s got a daily job as a cook-general in a fine house in Princes Road, with very nice people.
‘Maria can get herself to the can in the yard, now,’ she added. ‘And she can keep a fire going, if someone’ll bring in the coal for her and start it each morning. And she can wash her hands and face at the kitchen sink. But she’s not strong enough to stand and cook – or go to the shops, or anything like that.’
Bridget was seated by her own fire, sipping a mug of vintage tea – it had been simmering on the hob for hours. At Rosita’s suggestion, she nodded her head; her black hair was done up in untidy, coiled plaits, from which the hairpins constantly threatened to fall out; before answering Rosita, she absently pushed one back into her hair.
Plump, patient and very knowledgeable about the needs of the sick, she looked up at her neighbour, and said, ‘Oh, aye, I could do that, if you could manage to pay for the food I’d give her. It’d only be the price of a potato or two and what we’re havin’ ourselves – me housekeeping won’t stretch to feed another.’ At the latter statement, her voice was full of apology.
‘I’d get the coal up from the cellar for her, Mam,’ her daughter Mary volunteered; she had been listening avidly to what Rosita had had to say. ‘And I could chop some wood chips for her every day – and put it all in the hearth. It wouldn’t take a minute, then, for Panchika to make her fire for her.’
Panchika Saitua, a grumbling, middle-aged spinster, was ordered by her mother to sleep in her neighbour’s bedroom and to get up half an hour earlier, so that she could build Maria’s fire for her and give her tea and bread and margarine for breakfast.
Although she had not seen so much of her since she had been in service, Panchika knew Maria quite well; her working day was long and exacting and the idea of making the effort to visit someone, except, perhaps, on her Sunday off once a month, filled her with added gloom.
In the event, however, she thoroughly enjoyed her time with Maria, away from under her mother’s thumb. They spent an hour or two each evening before bedtime contentedly commiserating with each other; so much so, that, even after the family returned from Spain, Panchika discovered that she could endure to walk down the road in her carpet slippers, in the late evening, for an hour’s visit to Maria.
Maria was very appreciative of her visits, and missed her sorely when she failed to let herself in and come through to Rosita’s busy kitchen, to sink on to the chair by the old sofa, and gasp, ‘Ee! Me pore feet!’
Once the trip to Bilbao had been arranged, the family looked forward to it very much. The summer of 1914 was a gorgeous one and they could hope for a pleasantly calm passage. Grandma included in the food basket a gift of fresh eatables for the crew, whose diet was very monotonous. The present was much appreciated.
It was clear that Juan enjoyed such temporary returns to sea. It gave him a fresh audience of younger Basques, to whom he could relate stories of his early days sailing before the mast, when they had none of these new-fangled steam engines. ‘Seamanship was seamanship, in those days,’ he told them. ‘Rounded the Horn four times, I did, in storms like you’d never believe – and the cold!’ He shuddered.
This time, one young man told him, with equal pride, that he’d gone through the Panama Canal on an experimental voyage the previous year. ‘We were scared stiff,’ he said, ‘because we were afraid landslides would block us in, and we’d die of fever if we had to come out overland.’
‘Oh, aye. You’re right about the fever. That canal’s a waste of good money. Whole crews’ll get fever going through it – like the navvies building it get sick and die.’
When they arrived in Bilbao, they were met by Juan Barinèta’s brother, who looked even tougher and older than Juan himself. Little Manuel viewed him with awe. Rosita said he worked in an iron foundry, and that that accounted for the mass of white scars that crisscrossed his hairy arms, his hands and his face. ‘They’re from burns,’ she explained.
Great-uncle was a widower. His two single daughters looked after him; they also took care of Uncle Agustin, Rosita’s brother, when he was in port or out of work. Both young women did piecework at home, and their eyes were black-rimmed and bloodshot from long hours spent peering at the silk shawls they embroidered. They were gentle creatures, who, much to Manuel’s annoyance, adored baby Francesca and presented her with an exquisitely embroidered bonnet which they had made for her. They patted him on his head and exclaimed at how much he had grown; then they encouraged him to go out into the street to play with another small boy, who had wandered in from next door, to stare at the new arrivals.
In the narrow, medieval street sloping down to the river Nervión, he felt, at first, closed in, and unnerved at facing a number of strange urchins, who looked him over as if he were a peculiar animal of some kind. When the boys discovered, however, that he had never tried to play pelota vasca, they produced a rock-hard ball and showed him how to hit it against a wall with his bare hands. They approved of him when he bore stoically the pain of it, and he was almost overwhelmed by their friendly advice and instruction; he went back to his great-uncle’s house with several self-appointed coaches in tow, and badly bruised hands.
Before the evening meal, his hands were washed and regretfully cooed over by his two second cousins. Grandpa laughed, and said they would soon toughen up; he showed Manuel two of his fingers which had been disjointed when he had played as a young man.
At the end of a week, he was leaping about in front of the wall with the same abandonment – and lack of finesse – as the other youngsters. Then he was told that he and his mother and Francesca would be going up into the mountains to see Grandpa and Grandma Echaniz, while Juan and Micaela remained in Bilbao.
As a baby and a toddler, he had already made three journeys to Spain, but he had few clear recollections of them. Going first by train and then in a rickety donkey cart up narrow roads into the foothills was a new adventure. He tucked his small aching hands underneath his jersey, and was relieved not to have to play pelota that day.
Grandpa and Grandma Echaniz were younger than Micaela and Juan Barinèta, and Little Manuel noted that they did not talk so much. They greeted the little family, however, with bear hugs and kind kisses; small in stature, sun-burned and stolid, they were not otherwise particularly demonstrative, but it was obvious that they were fond of their beautiful daughter-in-law and very taken by Francesca’s blue eyes and red hair.
Rosita explained to Manuel that, once upon a time, his father had had two brothers to play with up here in the mountains, but they were now with God. Later, Manuel felt that perhaps the loss of her two middle sons accounted for Grandma Echaniz’s affection for himself. She took him into the big living-room of their wooden house and made him her special companion. He had a great time, helping to punch down bread dough and learning how to milk a cow – he had stood, astonished, watching a pail slowly fill with milk. His grandmother let him try to milk a particularly patient cow; and he was wild with excitement when he managed to spray himself with milk. She gave him a small basket and showed him where to find eggs from the hens and ducks. He was warned not to go too close to a nanny-goat tethered to a tree in case she butted him. He discovered with amazement that she also produced milk.
The donkey lived under the house, in a small stable, next to a series of storerooms, though, since it was summertime, it was left to graze in a little field near the house; his grandfather amused him by giving him a ride on it occasionally.
While Rosita sat on the high front steps in the sun and nursed Francesca, Grandpa Echaniz took him, one morning, further up the mountain to see his father’s surviving elder brother, Uncle Vicente, who was shepherding the family’s flock of sheep. The climb made all the aches he had acquired playing pelota ache a lot more.
At first, he was nervous of the sheep, which looked quite large to him, despite the fact that they had been sheared of their winter coats. The bellwether ram lifted its nose out of a weed patch and looked him up and down with cold brown eyes. Then, satisfied, it returned to its grazing. When Manuel moved, the other sheep bounced away from him, towards the bellwether, whose bell tinkled as he led the flock a little away from the strangers.
They approached a series of rough shelters, fronted by a stone hut, but could not find Vicente. While his grandfather looked for him further up the mountain, Manuel turned to look back along the path they had just traversed.
Far below him lay the valley dark with trees, interspersed with tiny fields nearly ready for harvesting. From the chimneys of toy houses curled the smoke from kitchens like Grandma’s. He could see a whole village, with a church spire, and a road winding through it. It was very quiet, except for the occasional jingle of the bellwether’s bell and the shush-shush of the sheep as they followed him. To a child brought up amid the constant racket of machinery and traffic, it felt unearthly, and he was relieved when Uncle Vicente shouted that he was coming down; he had been sitting on a promontory further up, from which he could see the whole flock at a glance. When Manuel looked up, he saw a tall, lanky man coming slowly down towards his grandfather, who had climbed a little way to meet him. From under the man’s black beret fell the same golden hair as his father had, and the sun glinted on his beard, stained with tobacco smoke just as his father’s was.
Vicente greeted his father, and then came running down the slope towards Manuel. He flung down his staff and picked the boy up to toss him in the air with a friendly shout. Then he put him down on his feet again, and, while he held the child’s hand, he looked into his face. ‘You look exactly like my mother,’ he announced. ‘Her dark hair and eyes. Doesn’t he, Dad?’
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/helen-forrester/the-liverpool-basque/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Helen Forrester
Another moving and heart-warming tale set in Merseyside from the author of Twopence to Cross the Mersey.In the early years of this century, many Basques left their homeland in the Pyrenees, between France and Spain, to seek a better life in the New World. Most passed through the great port of Liverpool on their way. The family of little Manuel Echaniz stayed.The Liverpool Basque is the story of Manuel’s childhood and coming of age in the teeming streets of the Mersey docklands. It is a story of poverty, comradeship, hardship and generosity. Brought up by women while the men are at sea, Manuel grows up with a fierce pride in his heritage and a powerful will to survive in an era of deprivation and unemployment. Against all odds, he gets himself an education of sorts and sets off on the long voyage of his life.
HELEN FORRESTER
The Liverpool Basque
Copyright (#ulink_5f6dbf33-87a2-525d-bf58-cf081914e95f)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1993
Copyright © Helen Forrester 1993
The Author asserts the moral right tobe identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780006473343
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2012 ISBN 9780007392162
Version: 2016-08-26
Dedication (#u1f4bea9b-4c1f-5e77-bfbf-3b17c7e84034)
This novel is dedicated to my friend,Doroteo Vicente Elordieta, a Basque from Liverpool,whose wonderful stories about the cityinspired me to write it
Epigraph (#u1f4bea9b-4c1f-5e77-bfbf-3b17c7e84034)
Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined
Epistle i, line 149
Moral Essays
Alexander Pope, 1688–1744
Contents
Cover (#u7af291b3-3a47-5916-a3bc-5f5e6af4952d)
Title Page (#u7067352c-c347-5854-b8b8-aceeec7fc218)
Copyright (#u95806cd3-0a8d-5cbf-b267-0faaada15c0b)
Dedication (#ub9008e1e-c4f8-53f0-94a4-ee30ae9c198d)
Epigraph (#u7d437408-06de-5620-bd4a-e0ffe639a489)
Chapter One (#u8a7f2d63-6f60-5d60-85f0-bafde4e88b37)
Chapter Two (#u7cfed0a8-8bb0-5ad5-97b8-4c4048a46231)
Chapter Three (#u5a199f91-065f-51e9-8f66-d2c94501db88)
Chapter Four (#u17d869b0-c996-5bb7-b7ad-005ae7d59310)
Chapter Five (#u43bcbf1e-7298-5aa6-ac5a-e962689078b2)
Chapter Six (#u5d70d4d5-6017-5674-a4a8-9a3e0e3c9ab7)
Chapter Seven (#ub8e92ca0-6892-5804-9bdf-f18bfee0145e)
Chapter Eight (#u8393f47c-4b54-5094-99c4-5282ef1a082a)
Chapter Nine (#u121ec40b-5996-53b5-923e-b072899df364)
Chapter Ten (#u8e0ce94e-59dc-5643-a6a4-8ada16ad17f3)
Chapter Eleven (#ue0dedf4f-3e4d-5ef9-a4ff-d09e46ec1a5d)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Selective Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#ulink_f862c2b5-7808-5570-9180-7af313ed9f74)
Ignoring the pouring rain, he came out of the house, and then turned to check that the front door had closed properly behind him. Satisfied, he walked slowly down the path between the flowerbeds, empty except for a few winter aconites cautiously beginning to open.
When he reached the two steps which led down to the pavement, he paused before carefully descending them. As the wind off the Strait caught him, his shiny black oilskin flapped against his lean frame. A fringe of white hair fluttered round the edge of the black beret set firmly on his head; the beret had been arranged so that it had a small peak to protect his forehead and encourage the rain to fall down his cheeks instead of veiling his sight.
Safely on the narrow pavement, he lingered for a moment to look across the Juan de Fuca Strait. The Olympic Mountains were obliterated by the downpour, but nearer to hand a freighter was stubbornly butting its way through the sheeting rain towards Victoria Harbour. With a seaman’s eye for weather, he looked up at the louring clouds, pursed his lips and muttered, ‘Cold enough for snow.’
Water was trickling down his neck, so he heaved his collar up higher and then proceeded along The Esplanade towards the cemetery. He walked with his head bent, his shoulders slightly hunched, as if expecting to hit his skull on a door frame if he straightened up. Though his gait was light and steady, his old Wellington boots made an intermittent squishing sound as he slopped through muddy puddles.
In the large inside pocket of his oilskin was a single pink rose wrapped in damp tissue paper. He had bought it yesterday from the florist in Cook Street; throughout the winter he had a standing order with her, to purchase the flowers four at a time. He kept them fresh in a cut-glass vase on the dining-room table, and, regardless of the weather, he took one each day to the cemetery to lay on the grave of his wife, Kathleen.
Sometimes the florist was not able to obtain the pink or white blooms which he requested, and he would have to make do with red ones, which Kathleen had not loved quite so much. In summer, he cut roses in shades of pink or cream from the bushes which she herself had planted in their garden when first they had retired to Vancouver Island. While she had the strength, she had tenderly pruned and fertilized them herself. Then, when she had begun to fail, he had pushed her wheelchair on to the lawn, and had learned to look after them for her, doing his best to hide from her the agony of mind he had felt, as he watched her suffer the multiple infections to which leukaemia laid her open.
Seamen don’t get much chance to garden, he ruminated, as he gazed down at yesterday’s offering, which lay, tattered and sodden, on the grave in front of the memorial stone. But Kathleen had loved her garden, and every day he made this small pilgrimage to tell her that he was caring for it and for her household icons, and that he loved her still. Mostly, however, he came to ask her forgiveness for having failed, when she was so ill, to keep her out of pain. Mixed with the rain, tears ran down his face; no matter how the years since her death rolled along, they failed to obliterate from his mind the torture he had watched her endure. There were, of course, days when he took the walk to the cemetery from force of habit; but all too often he went in the hope of easing his own haunting memories. Today, his nightmare was very close.
He bent down carefully to avoid the dizziness which, nowadays, sometimes bothered him, and picked up yesterday’s battered bloom. Regardless of its wet condition, he stuffed it into his outside pocket. His chest felt tight, and he paused to take a few short breaths of the cold, damp air, before slowly opening his oilskin to retrieve the slightly flattened fresh rose from his inner pocket. He unrolled the tissue paper from it and laid the flower in front of the headstone. The wind was strong and capricious, so he picked up a small rock and laid it on the stalk to hold it down. Most people had a vase into which they put their flower offerings, but he laid them on the ground; in his mind’s eye he always saw the roses as lying between his wife’s perfect white breasts.
Then he addressed the marble headstone. He did not see the words cut into it, In loving memory of Kathleen Echaniz, beloved wife of Manuel Echaniz, born 3rd June, 1914, died 20th January, 1984. At peace. His first words were, as always, ‘Forgive me, my darling, forgive me.’ He paused, as if waiting for a reply. Then he swallowed hard, and lifted his head a little, to look out towards the heaving waters of the Strait. He saw his wife’s smiling face, her eyes unclouded by illness; he felt her fullness beneath him, before suffering reduced her to a skeleton; and, as he had always done, either by letter from distant ports or when they lay comfortably in bed together, he told her all that had happened to him in the previous twenty-four hours, all the funny things, all the small disasters. Today, he said that he had washed her Royal Doulton figurines in the cabinet in the sitting-room and had set them back exactly as she had left them, that last night he had cooked himself some fish for supper, and that Veronica Harris, her friend from next door, had brought him in some homemade cookies, as she did each week.
The soft words came out like a litany, not in Kathleen’s native English, but in a strange evocative language known only to a few, a language which Kathleen had never been able to master.
He spoke in Basque, a unique language of farmers and shepherds in the enclaves of the Pyrenees, of fishermen in the Bay of Biscay, of iron workers and factory hands in big cities like Bilbao and smaller ones like Guernica and Pamplona; it was also spoken by lonely, elderly shepherds and their descendants in Nevada, Utah and Arizona, and by small groups of emigrants in Eastern Canada. It was a language so old that it was unrelated to any other language in the modern world, preserved by people shielded by nature’s walls, the Pyrenees, between France and Spain. It had the advantage that anyone in the cemetery who heard his words to his wife would not understand them.
Manuel Echaniz was a Basque. Though he also spoke Spanish quite fluently, he seethed with anger when he was frequently mistaken for a Spaniard. He would occasionally flare up and say that though General Franco had, in the Spanish Civil War, bombed into submission his grandparents’ native city of Bilbao, he had never succeeded in making its Basque inhabitants into Spaniards, any more than Roman and Moorish invaders of Spain had been able to do so in much earlier times.
He himself had been born in England, in the port of Liverpool, and he spoke English with a pronounced Liverpool accent. Nevertheless, he would affirm indignantly that, like his father and grandfather before him, he was a Basque and very proud of it. For the benefit of Canadians, he would add, also, that he was proud to be a Canadian citizen – but he was still pure Basque!
He had married Kathleen Weston, a Vancouver Island girl, whom he had met, during the war, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She had tried several times to learn his native tongue, but had finally given up, arguing that his command of English was so good that they could communicate perfectly in that language. Because he had spoken to her consistently since babyhood only in Basque, his daughter Faith understood the language – but she would always answer him in English. As for Lorilyn, his only grandchild, now aged nineteen and doing her first year at the University of British Columbia, she would laugh and tell him to stop ‘talking funny’ and speak English.
Sometimes, without his Canadian Kathleen to support him, he wondered why he stayed in Victoria. He frequently longed for the familiar dockside streets of Liverpool, for the warmth and friendliness of the Baltic Fleet or the Flags of all Nations, both pubs that he remembered as being packed with an international gathering of seamen, all talking exuberantly at once. And he wanted to hear again St Peter’s church bell calling him to Mass, a Mass celebrated in Latin. He could go to Mass in Victoria; he could even ease his soul by going to Confession; but it would all be in English, as lately ordained by the Vatican, and would have little of the comforting magic of a Mass chanted in Latin, as it had been when he was young. The Latin Mass, untouched by war or pestilence, unchanging like God himself, had been a dear familiar ceremony, no matter how strange a port his ship had been tied up in. If he had to listen to Mass in the vernacular, he wanted to hear it in Basque – and for that he would have to return to Vizcaya, the province of his forefathers.
He sighed as he turned from Kathleen’s grave and began slowly to make his way homeward under the dripping pine trees. Both Liverpool and Vizcaya were a long way off; journeys to either of them were not to be undertaken lightly by an eighty-four-year-old. Then there was Faith who lived with her Canadian husband, George McLaren, in Vancouver; she was his living link with Kathleen. She did come occasionally, with her family, to visit him, but never frequently enough. He would smile when he thought of her and try to shake off his depression. Yet, sometimes when he could not sleep, a fearful inner loneliness would overwhelm him to the point of terror, and older voices called him, voices of others whom he had loved, Basque voices, Liverpool voices, people who were part of his very nature, people he had not been able to tell Kathleen much about.
He knew that he dreaded dying in this pretty city on the west coast of Canada, even if they laid him beside Kathleen. It was too lonely – a single Basque name in a cemetery full of British pioneers. Kathleen was amid her own, but he would not be.
He wanted, at least, to lie in a Liverpool churchyard or cemetery, surrounded by headstones with Basque names on them, to be laid to rest by Basques speaking either the thick colloquial English of his childhood friends or the language of his roots, Basque.
As he pushed to one side a rain-dropped branch of Scottish pine, he considered soberly how strange it was that, when he thought about his own death, all that had happened to him in Canada was wiped out of his mind, even the long, contented years with Kathleen. What was left – the essence of himself – was Liverpool Basque; and he wanted to lie with his parents and grandparents and friends in a corner of Liverpool they had made their own. Afterwards, he wanted toasts to his memory drunk in wines familiar to him and funny stories told about him in pithy Basque phrases.
Back on the pavement that led to his home, he shivered. It was not easy to have a conscience formed by Jesuits in the back streets of Liverpool. They taught perfection – but an ordinary man could do only his best – and he had done his best for Kathleen.
Chapter Two (#ulink_3db86357-afcc-5489-bff9-fbc878abcc88)
Although the morning’s winter storm had been so intense and Victoria’s Scenic Drive had been, for once, deserted, Manuel’s expedition had not gone unnoticed.
Seated in the bay window of the bungalow next door, Sharon Herman, daughter of an old friend of Veronica Harris, had noted with mild interest the very old man going for a walk despite the inclement weather.
She was a nurse who specialized in the care of the terminally ill, and she had just arrived to take up a position in a local hospital about to open a palliative care ward. Her interest in the elderly pedestrian was kindly and caring – she felt he should not be getting soaking wet at his age.
She turned towards Veronica, who was seated at her computer across the room, trying to unravel the complexities of Townsman’s Tailors’ accounts outstanding. An elderly widow, who lived alone, she earned her living by keeping the accounts of small businesses in the neighbourhood. Today, she was finding it difficult to work with someone else in the room, though she did not grudge, in the least, offering her friend’s daughter temporary accommodation until she found herself a flat conveniently close to the hospital.
‘Veronica, who’s the old man next door? He’s just gone out – in this weather! He’ll get soaked – hasn’t he got a car?’
Veronica turned impatiently towards Sharon. Then she glimpsed through the bay window the bent figure plodding up the road. Her expression changed, and she smiled. ‘Oh, that’s Manuel Echaniz – Old Spanish, Kathleen’s husband. She was the friend I told you about – died of cancer.’
‘Is he Spanish?’
‘No. Kathleen told me he was born in the UK. She said he’s a Basque, whatever that might be. He speaks English and Spanish – and his own language, which only Faith seems to understand – that’s his daughter, you know.’ She paused to rub her eyes, tired from concentration on the computer screen. Then she said, ‘He’ll be going up to the cemetery.’
‘Does he work there?’
‘No. He goes up every day to put a flower on Kathleen’s grave. I’ve never known him miss a day since she passed away – must be eight years now.’
Sharon laughed. ‘You’re kidding?’
‘No, I’m not. You should’ve seen them together. They were great!’
Sharon moved uneasily in her chair by the window, and her book slid off her lap. She bent to pick it up. ‘He could take some flowers up every week – it would save him time. Or he could drive up on a day like this.’
‘Well, he does have a car – he doesn’t use it much, though.’ She smiled indulgently. ‘Weather never bothered him – I guess because he went to sea for years. And as for going every day, he told me once he wanted her to know that he thought of her each day.’ Her smile faded, and she sighed a little despondently; she had often wished that Manuel would think of her every day. He still seemed to her an attractive man, with his wide smile and twinkling black eyes. His finely lined face was still healthily tanned, and the long, narrow shape of it, with its flat cheekbones, still had the firmness of a much younger man.
‘Sounds like an old movie,’ Sharon was saying, as she put her book on a side table. ‘Do you think he’s got a screw loose?’
‘Not him! He’s in his eighties now, but there’s nothing wrong with his brains – and I’ve never known him be sick.’ She hesitated, and then added, ‘He’s a great old guy.’
Sharon made a wry mouth. ‘Veronica, you’re too sentimental,’ she teased. ‘Men aren’t like that. Do you think he feels guilty about her in some way?’
The question irritated Veronica. Sharon, still smarting from a recent divorce, might be bitter about men – but she was, Veronica felt, being very unfair to Manuel.
‘You’ve read too much pop psychology,’ she responded huffily, and swung her chair round to face the computer screen again. ‘I would have thought that you, with your special training, would know how long a person can grieve.’
The rebuke, from a woman who was usually very mild-mannered, jolted Sharon. She realized that the question had arisen from the resentment she still felt as a divorcee. Veronica was right; each individual needed his own time in which to recover from bereavement.
Ashamed, she inquired in a conciliatory tone if Veronica would like her to make a cup of coffee. Privately, she thought how glad she would be to begin her new job on the following Monday; it would take her mind off her own troubles.
Thankful to get her guest out of the room for the moment, Veronica said politely that she would like a cup very much, and the coffee was on the bottom shelf of the cupboard next to the sink. She wished heartily that the rain would ease, so that Sharon could resume her hunt for an apartment.
In the cluttered kitchen, Sharon put a clean filter in the coffee maker, followed by spoonfuls of coffee. She swore softly as the old kitchen tap spattered water over her when she turned it on. After filling the pot, she stared with some despair through the kitchen window at the sweeping rain. The weather was as cold and dismal as she felt herself; her only consolation was that Winnipeg, from which she had come a couple of days before, would be suffering infinitely worse temperatures. In her pocket lay a well-thumbed last letter from her lawyer, enclosing his final bill for negotiating a parsimonious settlement with her husband. The letter wrote Finis to a whole segment of her life.
Divorce had been much more painful than she had expected. After seven difficult years of a childless marriage, she had anticipated a sense of joyous freedom; instead, she felt a numbing sense of loss. Was this how one felt after a bereavement? Was this how Old Spanish felt? God help her, if she still felt like this at the end of eight years. One thing was certain, her husband would never waste time putting flowers on her grave.
She had worked all her married life. Now, she was going to start anew, away from the people who had known her when she was married. It was the kind of work which would demand a great deal from her, as she dealt with the dying and with their grief-stricken families; yet, she knew from experience that the close relationship between patient and nurse was not a one-way situation; at no time did one come so close to a person as when that person was on his or her deathbed. Beside that experience, she considered as the coffee percolated, what was a divorce? Particularly when there were no children involved.
She carefully poured the coffee into two mugs, and told herself sharply to cheer up. After the coffee, she would go out to look at the apartments she had marked in the newspaper rentals column. Blow the rain. She took Veronica’s mug to her, and drank her own coffee despondently in the kitchen. Then, she quickly put on a raincoat, and took Veronica’s umbrella off a hook in the hall cupboard. Opening the door into the living-room a crack, she called to Veronica that she was going to look at an apartment and that she was not to bother about lunch for her. Then, map in pocket, she went firmly out into the rain.
The rain was lessening and the umbrella hardly necessary. She remembered suddenly her parents still living together in their Florida condominium and managing to keep extraordinarily well for their age, under the Florida sun. Married for thirty-five years, she considered with some wonderment, as she crossed the road at a traffic light. How did they do it? Old Spanish must have been married at least as long. Some people had all the luck.
But was it luck? Or was it some secret formula that the older generation used to build a happy marriage? Cynics said they stuck together because women had no means of earning a living, but it could not be that alone, because even slaves in the States who had no hope at all used to run away.
She looked up to check the street number of an apartment block and then absently pressed a bell marked Building Manager. No matter what the secret is, this is where you begin all over again, she told herself as she waited for a response.
Chapter Three (#ulink_ac5a6117-93ba-507b-8f3d-0a5bc5f77d3e)
Unaware of the interest he had sparked in Sharon Herman, Old Manuel stood in his narrow back hall and shook the rain off his beret and oilskin before hanging them to drip in a small washroom by the kitchen door. Without them, dressed in a white shirt and sleeveless pullover, he seemed extremely frail and thin. As he paused for a second to watch the water running down the oilskin, he smiled to himself; his daughter, Faith, was always warning him to keep himself warm and dry. At his age, she told him, he must take care not to get wet.
He would always tease her by replying that Basques had been pounded by rain in their native mountains for at least five thousand years, and they were immune to it.
He slowly heaved off his Wellington boots and laid them neatly in a boot tray. Like many men who had been to sea, he was extraordinarily neat, because he was used to making the most of the tiny space of a ship’s cabin.
In his thick white socks, he padded into the kitchen to find something to eat for lunch. He slapped a cheese sandwich together and then plugged in the kettle to make some instant coffee, and looked forward to the nap he always took after the midday meal.
As he put his plate and coffee mug down on the kitchen table and pulled out a chair, he asked himself ruefully, ‘Manuel, my lad, what have you come to, when all you look forward to is having a nap?’
The answer was a resigned shrug of one thin shoulder; he had sensed lately that his time was running out.
He decided that after he had slept a little, he would ring up his friend, Jack Audley, and suggest that he should come over for a game of pool on the billiard table in the basement family room. Jack was twelve years younger than he was, but they shared a common interest in fishing and ships – Jack had been a merchant seaman, too.
To help him get through his days without Kathleen, Manuel structured them as meticulously as he could, so that all the necessary domestic tasks and the garden were attended to. Sometimes, however, a thoroughly wet day upset the schedule.
If Jack was not at home, he thought, he would write to his young Liverpool cousin, Ramon Barinèta. He had already, on the first of the month, written to his oldest and dearest friend, Arnador Ganivet, another Liverpool Basque, who had been a Professor at the University of Liverpool, and he smiled gently at the recollection. Between himself and Arnador there was a frankness and concern for each other which probably exceeded that which might have been built up had they both spent their lives in Liverpool; the older they grew, the richer became the correspondence.
After supper each day, he added a page or two to the memoirs of his early life, which he was writing for the benefit of his granddaughter Lorilyn. He had a vague hope that, when she was older, she would read them and become interested in her Basque forebears. At times, her youthful scorn at his pride in his ancestry had hurt him so much that he longed to slap her; her ignorance of the world and its people, despite thirteen years of education, was absolutely abysmal, he fulminated. In frustration, he took to buying her, for her birthdays, books on European and Asian history. As far as he could tell, she never read them; the books were put on the bookshelf in the McLaren family room, their dust-jackets unbesmirched by handling, their pages stiff from never having been turned.
He never quite gave up on her immutability, though he had long since done so in the case of her mother.
He had remarked to Faith’s Grade Six schoolteacher that the child seemed to have no interest in her family’s past or their customs. The schoolteacher, who was an immigrant from Scotland, had tried to comfort him by saying that first-generation Canadian children were often so busy trying to be like the other children that they tended to discard, as much as possible, any trace of their immigrant origin. ‘It’s your grandchildren who will be passionately interested in where they sprang from; they’ll feel more secure,’ she had assured him.
But now, in Lorilyn, he had a grandchild, and she never read any book that she did not have to for her university courses. And what was she proposing to study? Engineering, God save her! Not a decent womanly occupation, like nursing or teaching.
While strolling along the cliffs with Jack, one fine summer day, when the gorse was in riotous yellow bloom and the bees were humming like tiny dynamos, he had broached the subject of human roots.
He said, ‘You know, Jack, people move around too much. A lot of ’em never see another relation, even their grandparents. Come to that, they don’t see much of their mum and dad either, in some cases.’
‘You’re right.’
‘All they’ve got is kids the same age as themselves or television to set the pace. They’ve no idea that we’ve learned ways to endure bad times – cope with difficulties – take disappointments in our stride. And the first time things don’t go just right – well, they’re sunk.’
He paused to watch a small yacht trying to tack against the wind, and muttered irritably, ‘He’ll drown if he don’t watch out.’ Then, picking up the original subject again, he went on, ‘There’s nothing much to make kids feel safe, no standards, no customs. They get no religion even – our Lorilyn’s never seen the inside of a church since she were christened – and I wouldn’t like to offend her father by askin’ what she’s doing with that young man always hanging around her.’ He gave a barking laugh. Then he added, ‘There’s no family discipline – I wouldn’t like my grandfather to see her; he’d have made her toe the line a bit, and he’d have had the backing of everybody else. Sometimes I feel like a voice in the wilderness. Do you?’
Jack’s round red face wrinkled up in a wry grin. Before he answered, he stopped to strike a match and light his pipe, shielding it from the wind with his curved palms. Then, as the pipe glowed and they continued to walk, he nodded agreement. ‘I used to slam my kids when they needed it. It didn’t do much good, because I wasn’t around that much – the wife had to manage while I was at sea.’ He drew slowly on his pipe. Then he continued, ‘And things seemed to be changed almost every time I came home. Nobody else’s kids were going to church any more – so ours wouldn’t. Discipline in school went out, and drugs came in. Like you say, the kids went around in herds all the same age – and there were no cow hands to keep them in line. And God help a cop who boxed their ears for them. I knew what I wanted for my kids, but I didn’t have much luck putting it over.’
Manuel dropped his cigarette butt and ground it out with his heel. ‘Seems to me that when we were having Faith, nobody dared touch a child – even to bath the poor little bugger – unless they had read at least three books by experts! Kathleen had a row of books.’
Jack laughed. ‘Same with us. It was like learning to dance from books – as if we’d no ideas of our own. My mother never needed a book to tell her what to do, and we all grew up knowing what was right and what was wrong – even if we weren’t perfect. I wish my mother had been around when our lads were growing up.’ His red face under his straw hat was filled with pain.
Manuel could have kicked himself for bringing up the subject of children. He had, for the moment, forgotten what a bitter disappointment both Jack’s boys had been to him. They seemed to lack motivation and found it difficult to keep jobs – like homing pigeons, they came back from Vancouver every few months, to live on their father.
Jack was saying bitterly, ‘I wish I’d taken a shore job, so I could’ve been home more.’
‘It’s not your fault, Jack. I’m sure of it. It’s the way things are. They’re treated as kids for far too long. In the old days, by thirteen or fourteen, they would’ve been learning a trade under a weight of older men, who’d have kept them in line; and they’d have learned there’s a limit to what you can get away with.’
‘Jobs are different now. How many of them ever go to sea?’
Manuel snorted. ‘Maybe we should send the whole pack of them to sea for a bit,’ he suggested, trying to lift Jack’s spirits. ‘They’d either drown – or learn their responsibilities mighty fast.’
Unexpectedly, Jack chuckled. ‘They’d soon learn who’s boss.’
Manuel began to laugh. ‘Oh, aye, they would. It would be great to see some of the little bastards in a force ten gale, telling the Old Man they were as good as him – or arguing they had rights, while waves as high as the mast were coming at them!’
‘Mannie, they don’t know nothing about natural things, like waves.’
‘I wouldn’t put it past our Lorilyn to explain the physics of a breaking wave to me!’ responded Manuel.
This made Jack really laugh, as they plunked themselves down on a bench, two old men silhouetted against the rippling sea, which had taught them most of their skills with an iron discipline.
‘Are you glad you went to sea?’ asked Jack from behind a cloud of tobacco smoke.
‘Never dreamed of doing anything else. Not till I met Kathleen, that is; she’d got her eyes on a shore job for me. After we was married, she kept on her nursing and she put me through college, and I come out a marine architect. We had a good life – but I missed the sea.’
‘Humph. My dad was a fisherman, and he took me out to sea when I was nine or ten. I was wet and cold and seasick, but I felt I was a real man. At fourteen, I was a deck boy.’ He made the statement with pride, and then a grin flashed across his face, as he added, ‘I’d never heard of being a teenager; I was a lad learning to be a man under real men. Had some good laughs, though.’
‘Oh, aye. I were happy when I were a little kid, too, with me dad and me Uncle Leo coming and going from sea – and being took down to visit their ships, and listen to them grumble and laugh. And getting a bit of pie from the ship’s cook.’ He paused to light another cigarette, and then went on. ‘And in the house, there was me granny and grandpa to tell me stories. After me mam slapped me for being naughty, me gran would wipe me face – and explain why I got the slap!’ Both men were silent, as they smoked and contemplated the sea and the mountains before them. Then Manuel said in a puzzled way, ‘Our Lorilyn never seems to need a grandpa at all.’
While he recalled this rambling conversation with Jack, he took the handmade patchwork quilt off the bed and folded it carefully and laid it on a chair, and sighed. Though he had tried, he did not feel that he had been a very good grandfather – unlike his own grandfather, Juan Barinèta.
He sat down on the side of his bed, pulled a faded crocheted shawl out of the drawer of the bedside table, and slowly eased himself down on to the bed until he lay on his back. He paused for a moment, while every bone and muscle in his body flashed with sudden aches, then he laid the shawl over himself, clasped his hands over his chest and thankfully closed his eyes. In the moment between waking and sleeping, he remembered Kathleen upbraiding him for resting on top of the patchwork quilt. Although he was tired from a very scary wartime voyage, he had pulled her down on top of him. They had forgotten about keeping the bedspread pristine, while they spent until nightfall making love so satisfactorily that even now, nearly fifty years later, he remembered it with awe. Had he really been that strong? And she so responsive?
After her death, he had come across the old quilt folded away at the back of the linen closet. Still beautiful, its colours muted by many drycleanings, it had been like meeting an old friend again. In a way, it had comforted him for the emptiness of the other side of the bed.
He had returned to his ship on the day following his happy afternoon with Kathleen, and her letter telling him the news about her pregnancy with Faith caught up with him in Galveston, Texas.
He remembered how excited he had been about the child, overwhelmed by the divine mystery of its existence and the sense of responsibility that it had laid upon him.
He had shouted the news to the few members of the engine room crew who had not gone ashore, and they had congratulated him on his sexual prowess with explicit pithiness. His news broke the astonished silence which had seemed to grip them at other news they had received that morning. The Yanks had dropped an amazing bomb on the port of Hiroshima and blown the whole city and its inhabitants to bits. The city was known to most of the crew and they had found it hard to accept its death – even if it was supposed to shorten the war. It was a port – like Liverpool!
He had immediately scribbled a few lines to Kathleen, expressing his pure joy at her news. After she was dead, he had found the letter in her jewellery box; she had kept it all her life.
He had also written to his mother, Rosita Echaniz, in Liverpool, urging her to come on a visit as soon as the war was over, to see the babe as yet unborn.
He had hoped for more children, but Kathleen had been adamant about limiting their family. ‘How will we ever afford to send them to university?’ she had asked. ‘And if you go back to college after the war …?’
Manuel was still uncertain that he himself wanted to return to college, and had never considered that a real university might be within the reach of any child of his, so he had reluctantly said he did not know.
The family remained at one.
The rainstorm which had swept the Juan de Fuca Strait came to an end. The sudden quiet woke the old man from his nap. He rose stiffly and put the shawl which had been keeping him warm back into the bedside drawer. With an amused awareness of his own finickiness, he carefully replaced the bedspread on the bed.
When he phoned Jack Audley, Mrs Audley said he had gone to Vancouver for the day.
Before going to his old-fashioned roll-top desk to write to Ramon in Liverpool, he went into the kitchen and took down from a cupboard a bottle of wine, already opened. He poured a glass of it carefully, so as not to disturb the sediment at the bottom of the bottle. Then picking it up, he went to the window and stood idly twirling it in the light of the first rays of the sun to pierce the rain clouds.
Instead of his own long, gnarled fingers holding the stem of the glass, he saw, with unexpected clarity, his grandfather’s huge paw holding a wine glass under his nose, to savour a bottle of a new year’s crop smuggled into Liverpool from Bilbao.
Those early years in the safety of his grandfather’s great shadow had been good years, he thought wistfully. He remembered how the old man’s beard waggled when he laughed, and when his grandfather picked him up it was like being hugged by a friendly bear.
He took his glass of wine into his den, where he had a small desk piled with notes and exercise books. Above the desk hung a ship’s chronometer, put there, he had told Jack with a laugh, to remind him that his time was short.
He put his glass down on the desk, drew up a chair and sat down. With slightly trembling fingers, he sought for and found a well-thumbed school exercise book. In it lay the life of a Basque; in fact, the lives of many of them, set down in the hope that Lorilyn would, one day, be interested in some of the men and women who were the cause of her existence. Like many Canadians, she shared a Scottish origin, too; but not everybody in the world is Scottish, considered Manuel tartly. He wanted her to know that she had roots in the oldest culture in Europe, going far back beyond written history. He wanted her to preserve something of it within her own being.
So that she would understand, he wrote in English, in an old-fashioned, neatly sloping, cursive hand. He poured out to her, as best he could, the story of his childhood and what little wisdom he felt he had acquired in the long years of his life, especially during the time that he had been part of a Basque community; he did not feel that he had to include much of his life with Kathleen – Lorilyn understood Canadian life – and the finale of Kathleen’s existence was, in any case, too painful for him to write about.
It was dark by the time he had to stop because of fatigue and he had forgotten, for the moment, his intention of writing to Ramon. He leaned back in his chair to stretch himself. His eyes were watering and his shoulders ached from the concentrated effort he had been making.
When he looked again at what he had written, he wondered suddenly what lay behind his own boyhood memories. What was going on amongst the grown-ups, who surged in and out of his grandparents’ kitchen-living-room? Were they happy?
It took a minute or two for him to bring himself back from Wapping Dock in Liverpool, and when his mind was clear of it, he was left with an aching longing to go home to it, to shake Arnador’s hand once more and see Cousin Ramon, and speak Basque with both of them.
Although Faith will have a fit, if you suggest that you want to do such a long air journey, you could do it, he told himself. And perhaps you should, before it’s too late!
He grinned wickedly. This summer, he promised himself. And don’t tell Faith until it’s too late to cancel the flight.
Chapter Four (#ulink_7c0fe14b-71b0-5566-ba56-eb1cc033ca92)
Ports from which men go to sea are matriarchal societies; it is women who are in charge. They have to have their babies without any support from their husbands; and they have to teach their sons, as well as their daughters, to behave and mind their manners. Father is not at home frequently enough to take a strap to a delinquent lad.
Manuel, aged eighty-four, was trying hard to explain to Lorilyn, aged nineteen, that, even before feminism was invented, some women ruled their families.
In our house, he scribbled, it was Grandma Micaela Barinèta who was the undisputed boss. She was my mother’s mother, a shrunken ball of energy, always clothed in black, a piece of knitting, with a cork on the end of the needles, usually tucked into the pocket of her black apron. Even to me, when I was only three or four years old and all grown-ups seemed very tall, she appeared too little to possibly be the mother of my two uncles, one of whom, Leo Barinèta, lived with us. Whenever they had done something of which she did not approve, she lashed out at them with her tongue and scared them into line. She would not tolerate any nonsense from me, either, though I was only a toddler; and I soon learned to sit quietly, while the priest droned through the Mass, or to run away and play if she was gossiping with a neighbour.
Of course, Grandpa Juan Barinèta, who no longer went to sea, believed that he ruled the three generations in the house. He certainly received first consideration from Grandma – and from my mother, Rosita Echaniz, who always seemed to be in league with Grandma. Nevertheless, it was the two women who collected the men’s earnings from them and the rents from the emigrant lodgers, and laid out the family income to the best of their joint abilities. They bargained in the market for food, decided when new clothes would be bought, purchased coal for the fires, and paid the rent each week; they put every penny they could into three old biscuit tins under Grandma’s bed, until a few shillings had been accumulated to put into Post Office savings accounts.
If I had been good on the day that Grandma decided to go to the post office, she let me accompany her, and I had the honour of licking the savings stamps, which she purchased from the postmistress to put into her savings books; I must have licked pages and pages of sixpenny stamps, as Grandma laid away money, first for a rainy day, then for clothes, especially boots for all the menfolk, and finally for education.
The Basque community, nestled by the dock road, was united in its belief in education for their children; and the whole family was determined that the second child, which Mother was expecting, and I, should both go to a good private day school, rather than to the local Catholic school. In this emphasis on their children’s future, they differed somewhat from their polyglot neighbours, who tended, simply, to be thankful if their children managed to grow to adulthood in noisy, polluted Liverpool, knowing enough reading and writing to get a job in the docks or as deckhands.
I grew accustomed to hearing my future discussed, over many a glass of cheap, smuggled wine, by Grandpa, Uncle Leo, and my father, Pedro Echaniz, when he was home. Words like ‘university’…‘doctor’…‘solicitor’ whizzed over my head, strange words rarely used in our street.
At the beginning of each voyage, Father arranged with his employers for Mother to receive part of his wages each week. This was called an allotment, and, together with Grandpa’s and Uncle Leo’s earnings, was used for living expenses.
Grandma gave back to the men a little pocket money for wine and tobacco, both discreetly brought into the country by Basque seamen lucky enough to be sailing to and from their homeland, Vizcaya, in Spain.
A meal isn’t complete without wine, my grandfather would often say. Smuggled wines were cheap, and, on the whole, the customs officers did not worry too much about collecting duty on a few bottles of our native wines, as long as its illicit importation was on a very small scale.
Though ours was a very united household, it was not a placid one. Argument, debate were the salt of life, and, in addition, there were all kinds of small vendettas within the Basque community. The community became a solid block, however, whenever it felt it had, as a group, been insulted. The supreme calumny was to be referred to as Spaniards! Such a blunder was frequently made by our cheerful, easygoing fellow Liverpudlians, especially the Irish, who seemed sorely lacking in a knowledge of Iberian history, and by English clerks behind official counters, who didn’t really care what we were.
Amongst the men gathered round our kitchen table for a smoke and a gossip, such an allegation produced a glowering animosity; they sputtered like half-lit sparklers, and muttered about the improbable origins of all the accursed Spaniards they had ever met. Many of them spoke Spanish as well as they did Basque, and they could be equally rude in both languages; even in English, the English of the back streets, they could be quite lurid. My knowledge of lively curses in all three languages began at an early age.
So, from the time I was big enough to be carried around on Grandpa’s or Uncle Leo’s shoulder, I learned that I was a Basque and to be proud of it. I learned to speak Basque first; it was the language which flowed around my small world of kitchen-living-room and bricklined backyard; I learned good Castilian from the Spanish priests of St Peter’s Church – they were frequently in and out of our homes, to counsel or console, their lean, dark figures the epitome of God’s authority over little boys. And I learned English from my playmates in the street.
Grandpa had a beard heavily streaked with grey. His head was bald, except for a thin ring of neatly clipped black hair. Most of his teeth were deep-stained by tobacco, but a missing one had been replaced by a gold tooth which flashed as he talked; I was fascinated by it and my first ambition was to have a flashing gold tooth for myself. He had gone to sea in the days of sailing ships, and was proud to say that he had several times breasted the storms of Cape Horn, a place of terror at the most southerly point of Chile, where many a ship was lost before the advent of the Panama Canal gave a safer entry to the Pacific Ocean. ‘They don’t know what seamanship is, nowadays,’ he would grumble testily to my father, when he told of his adventures in a steamer.
For many years now, Grandpa Barinèta had held the agency for Basque emigrants passing through Liverpool on their way to Nevada, Arizona, California and Washington. An Agent was essential to protect such travellers from exploitation in a strange port, where their language was not spoken. He saw that they were housed and fed, while they waited for their ship; he kept their luggage safe, and delivered them to the correct ship at the right time. It was his pride that, to his knowledge, he had never lost even a piece of luggage, never mind an emigrant.
Many of these people were lodged in our own house, which was a large eighteenth-century dwelling, and I was quite used to our home being suddenly filled with strangers, who equally suddenly vanished a few days later. Even as a little child, I sensed how touchingly thankful they were to be in the hands of a fellow Basque, who took care that they were not robbed or cheated by local rascals who made a living by preying on confused travellers trying to get to the New World; and I will never forget Grandpa’s slow smile of satisfaction when he could close his ledger after a boat sailed, and sink into his carving chair at the kitchen table to enjoy a quiet glass of wine with Grandma and Mother.
These transitory invasions made our house a very lively one, and a centre for resident Basques, who often drifted in to hear recent news of Vizcaya from the emigrants. The house was opposite the Wapping Dock, except that across a narrow street, the tall flat-iron building of the Baltic Fleet intervened. This public house was a popular meeting place, almost a club, to the Basque community, and emigrants often took their ease there, too. My mother told me that she sometimes went for a drink there with my father, and that she used to park me, sound asleep in my pram, by its ample walls, while she went inside. No wonder it was one of my favourite pubs when I grew up!
As I grew a little bigger, my greatest ambition became to climb into the toast-rack horse-bus, with its little canopy over the rear seats, and have a ride with the emigrants down to the big ship which took them over the ocean to the New World. On the bus’s side was the name of a steamship company, and on a grubby white board at the front was the name of the ship on which the emigrants were booked. The bus was drawn by two patient, blinkered work horses, heads hanging and untidy short manes blowing in the sea wind, as they waited for the harassed, worried emigrants to be loaded.
‘Grandpa! Let me go down to the dock – please, Grandpa. I’m five now. I’m big enough,’ I pleaded, one sunny September day in 1913.
He stood on the pavement, between our front door and the horse-bus, in his hand a piece of board with innumerable sheets of paper pinned to it, his peaked cap pushed to the back of his head, while he supervised the people climbing on to the bus. I clutched at his long, serge-covered legs, and peered up at him to catch his eye.
He looked down at me impatiently. He was fond of me, I knew, but at that moment I was a nuisance, as round him swirled an anxious group of heavily laden men, women and children, all of them desperately dependent upon him.
‘Manuel Echaniz! The bus is too full,’ he responded with exasperation. ‘Go and see your mother in the kitchen.’ As I reluctantly let go of his leg, his voice rose to a shriek. ‘Mind out! You’re too close to the wheels. Get out of the way, boy.’
My face fell. I wanted to cry. At five, I felt I was grown-up enough to be able to keep out of the way of wheels and horses’ feet. But when Grandpa spoke like that, everyone obeyed, even Mother and Father. Sullenly and with difficulty, I turned away and pushed myself between long, trousered legs and flowing black skirts issuing from the house, an incredible stream of people. A white-faced little girl, with whom I had played for the past week, said shyly, ‘Goodbye, Manuel,’ as I shoved by her. I did not reply, as I fought my way kitchenwards. Through my ill humour, I smelled the emigrants’ underlying fear, and it made me uneasy, as baskets, bundles tied in old shawls, and the bare feet of small children carried in their parents’ arms brushed or bumped my head.
When I was a little older, I was able to visualize more accurately the discomforts of the long voyage in steerage still faced by our visitors, and could understand their dread. Meanwhile, infected by their fear, I almost ran down the deserted back part of the passageway leading to the kitchen and safety, while Grandpa, his pencil tucked behind his ear, continued to cope with the travellers.
Grandpa had a habit of rubbing his short beard when hard-pressed by nervous questions from his charges. Already tired from the journey from Bilbao, and distressed at leaving home, however poverty-stricken, the emigrants seemed to find great comfort and reassurance from the self-confident old man. Now, at the time of parting from us, some of the women were invariably near to tears; not only did they have yet to face the long voyage to New York, but also a long train journey to the West, with children and husbands to keep fed and happy. In some cases, they had to sustain a pregnancy and, at the end, a confinement amid strangers.
On the other hand, there was always a group of young, single men, excited, strung-up and sometimes drunk, for Grandpa to control; on each he pinned a numbered identity disc, while they laughed and joked, and talked of making a fortune in their new land. Not for ever would they tend other people’s sheep in Nevada, they assured each other.
In the big, stone-floored kitchen-living-room, with its high ceiling covered with a century of soot, my comfortable, plump mother took no notice of my entry; she was holding her youngest brother, Uncle Leo Barinèta, tightly to her and was weeping bitterly.
Frightened, and not a little jealous, I paused in the doorway.
Uncle Leo was saying, ‘It’s not for ever, Rosita. I’ll come back.’ His voice rose with false cheerfulness. ‘Come on. At worst, a seaman can work his way home again – even from Nevada! Don’t cry, Rosita.’
Mother leaned back in his arms, to look up at his face. ‘You’ve got a home with us,’ she wailed. ‘You can go on sailing out of Liverpool. Why move? Nevada sounds a godforsaken place.’
‘Tush, Rosita. I want to better myself. There’s land there, almost for the asking.’ He dropped his arms to his sides in a hopeless gesture, realizing that land meant nothing to her.
She drew away from him, and wiped her tears on the corner of her white apron. ‘Mother’s broken-hearted,’ she reproached him.
I watched wide-eyed. Uncle Leo was an essential part of my small world; it was frightening that he should be about to vanish like all the other emigrants. People poured in and out of our house, but the family members always came home; as seamen, Uncle Leo and Father, even Uncle Agustin, reappeared regularly, armed with presents for small boys. But Mother’s tears told me that this departure was very different.
‘Mam!’ I cried in a strangled, scared voice, and ran to her.
Mechanically, she picked me up and held me against her shoulder. I felt her slump slightly, and turned my face towards hers. Her pretty, little mouth was drooping, her whole expression woebegone. She was gazing at Uncle Leo as if she could never take her eyes off him. ‘I’ll miss you so much,’ she whimpered. ‘And Mother’s nearly out of her mind, up there on the bed.’
Uncle Leo swallowed, and I thought he was going to cry; it was a new and scary idea to me that a young man could cry. He controlled himself, however, and, instead, he put his arms round both of us together. He kissed my mother’s cheek and then I felt his lips on the back of my own head. He loosed his hold on us, and said, ‘I know. Mam’s been upset about it for weeks. Comfort her, Rosita – I feel bad about it. But I’ll be back, never fear.’
He turned abruptly and went out through the hallway to say farewell to his father and to join the embarking throng.
It was over nine years before I saw Uncle Leo again.
Mother stood silent for a moment or two; then she seemed to gather herself together and become aware of my own trembling. Through her tears, she smiled at me. She said brightly, ‘Pudding’s got a great surprise for you. Come and see.’
I missed Uncle Leo for his own sake. But, as I grew up, I learned that the loss of a man from a family weakens that family immeasurably. No one knew it better than Basque mountain farmers and their descendants, who dwelt in the rocky, inhospitable Pyrenees, between the French and the Spanish. For century upon century, they had to watch their younger sons leave their stony fortress, because the land could not feed them; they became famous mercenaries in foreign armies, or fishermen in the Bay of Biscay or iron workers in the foundries of Bilbao. When the New World opened up, they took their skills as shepherds and as seamen to it, and Uncle Leo, full of hope, went with them.
Mother slowly slid me to the floor. As she tried to control her grief, I saw her fine, round breasts rise and fall quickly under her black blouse, and I knew that Uncle Leo’s departure must be something very disturbing to her.
My childhood fears soon gave way to curiosity, as she led me to a small cupboard beside the big kitchen range on which she and Grandma cooked. The door was open, and she squatted down beside me. ‘Have a look,’ she urged me.
I approached the small, dark cavern of the cupboard with caution. Pudding was a very large, black cat with expressionless pale-green eyes; she was quite capable of giving a small boy a sharp clawing, if she felt her dignity was at stake.
She was curled up on a piece of grubby blanket in the darkest corner. Her green eyes flashed as she looked up quickly at her visitors, while round her crawled four tiny black bundles. Surprised, I put out my hand to touch one of them. Pudding peremptorily nuzzled my hand away.
In some astonishment, I turned to Mother. ‘Kittens! Where did she find them?’
‘She had them inside her. They came out in the night.’
The reply was so unexpected that I knew my mother was teasing me. I looked at her knowingly, and laughed. ‘They couldn’t. How would they get out?’
Mother hesitated, before she replied. Then she said, ‘Pudding won’t let me touch her at the moment; she’s tired. Tomorrow, I’ll lift her up and show you.’
Though she had been born in Bilbao, my mother had close relations who lived in the countryside, where, as a matter of course, children saw animals born and die. It had apparently not struck her that her little son was ignorant of birth – and, possibly, also of death.
Chapter Five (#ulink_2bcb8e59-13cc-5395-b1d6-3f2b47b5bf6e)
Laden with greyish sheets to be washed, Grandma Micaela came slowly and heavily down the stairs, and, as she entered the kitchen, I looked up from watching the kittens. A shaft of sunlight from the tall, narrow kitchen window lit up her paper-pale cheeks, wet with tears.
I was shocked. Grandma never cried. The worst she ever did was scold; and she was my rock, my safe refuge, when both Mother and Father were cross with me. Now, as Mother scrambled hastily to her feet, Grandma looked imploringly at her and quavered, ‘I can’t make myself go out to see him leave. I can’t bear it. I’ll never see him again!’ She dropped the sheets on to the stone floor; her hands, heavily veined, and scarlet from too much immersion in hot soda water, dangled helplessly at her sides.
Mother ran to her and took her in her arms. She patted her back and rocked her, just as she did me when I had hurt myself. ‘I know, Mam. I know,’ she crooned. ‘I can’t go out, either.’
‘He’s my baby,’ cried Grandma, with a further explosion of tears.
I stopped stroking Pudding, and interjected, with some derision, ‘Uncle Leo isn’t a baby – he’s a big man.’
Obviously startled, both women turned to look down at me, as I knelt by the open cupboard.
Grandma was the first to recover. She swallowed a sob, and then laughed through her tears. She slowly nodded her white head, and responded tenderly, ‘You’re right, my precious dumpling.’ She let out a long sigh, and lifted a finger to touch Mother’s round, pink cheek, a tiny, loving gesture of affection. She said, ‘He’s right. I mustn’t forget it. He is a real man – and I have to let him go.’ Then her tired voice rose, as she added, ‘But it hurts, Rosita. It hurts.’ Tears again trickled down her cheeks.
Mother hugged her, and said determinedly, ‘We’ll pretend he’s simply gone to sea again – on a long voyage. It’ll help. And he’ll write to you.’
Did grown-ups have to pretend things? I wondered uneasily. Like small boys do?
‘And, next month, Agustin should put into Liverpool. That’ll be nice for you – for all of us.’ She was referring to my elder uncle, who was an able seaman in a freighter which docked periodically in Liverpool with cargoes of iron ore. Between voyages he lived with Grandpa Barinèta’s brother and his two motherless daughters in Bilbao, because he himself was still a bachelor.
‘Yes,’ agreed Grandma heavily. Uncle Agustin was a dark, silent man, not nearly so exuberant or lovable as his younger brother, Leo. But Grandma smiled, and I felt better when I saw it.
My mother began to pick up the sheets that Grandma had dropped on the floor. ‘Let’s put these to soak – we can boil them later on this afternoon. Let’s do the bedrooms now. Would you like a glass of wine or a cup of camomile tea to carry round with you?’
Grandma sniffed. ‘No, thanks,’ she replied with a sigh. ‘I’ll have something at teatime.’
Uncle Leo was the first person to pass out of my childhood. For months, Grandma watched for his letters, but he wrote only two from Nevada, to which she replied immediately. Since she had no other address except the one he had given her in Nevada, she continued to write to him there, and she was always the first to reach the front door when a letter slid through the letter box and across the cracked tiled floor. But no more letters arrived, and she mentioned her son less and less and ceased to hope.
Unaware of the despondency the lack of news from Uncle Leo caused her, I regarded her as my own special property, always there to dispense comfort, wipe my nose and wash painfully grazed knees when I had fallen down.
Unlike Uncle Agustin, Uncle Leo and I had been born in Liverpool, and we spoke the thick catarrhal English, with a strong tinge of mixed Irish accents in it, that was current in the streets around the docks. Uncle Agustin spoke only Basque and Spanish.
It had been Uncle Leo’s custom during times of unemployment to go to Spain, to his maternal grandfather’s small farm in the Pyrenees, to work there in return for his food. It was there that he learned to care for sheep; and it was this skill that he hoped to build on in the United States. I had heard him discuss this with his father on a number of occasions, and I knew that he hoped eventually to have his own sheep farm.
Though he did not say much in the two letters Grandma received, I learned later that he had set his expectations of Nevada too high. Ashamed to tell his parents that he had not done too well, he put off writing to them, and moved to Arizona and, later on, wandered through Utah and Colorado. Grandma’s replies to his letters never reached him. He always told himself that he would write when he was settled, but as the years went by and memories of Liverpool dimmed, he had nothing very hopeful to tell his parents so he did not write.
I forgot him.
With a steady, though small family income from Grandpa’s activities amongst the emigrants and from my father, we were able to visit Spain occasionally. Carrying our own food in a big market basket, we sailed for Bilbao in Basque-owned fishing boats or small freighters. In part-return for our passage, Grandpa worked as a member of the crew. In Bilbao we stayed with Grandpa’s brother and his daughters, and, occasionally, our visit coincided with the homecoming of Uncle Agustin. A more rapid form of transport was sometimes used by both families, if they felt the need to see each other on some urgent matter; they went by rail. They caught the train from Liverpool and went to Dover, crossed on the Channel ferry to Calais, and took the train from there to Bilbao. This, however, was considered very extravagant because eight pounds had to be expended on the fare – and why part with hard cash, when you could go all the way by sea for almost nothing? Grandma’s sense of economy was almost as well developed as that of Mr and Mrs Wing, who owned the Chinese laundry and were the parents of one of my best-loved playmates, Brian Wing.
My childhood memories of Spain are faint, evoked mainly by the smell of baking bread and of farm animals, or the heavy odour of newly harvested hay, and a sense of having been particularly happy there, blissfully unaware of the hardship and oppression endured by the grown-ups. I took for granted callused hands and bent backs, chilblained fingers and toes, rooms where one moved like a small snake amid people, because homes were so crowded. In fact, the closeness in which everybody I knew lived was very comforting to a small boy.
As I grew bigger, I would, after a few weeks in Bilbao or up in the mountains with my father’s family, the Echanizes, and another bumper crop of Barinèta second cousins, suddenly feel homesick for Liverpool. Healthy from the mountain air and the coarse fresh food stuffed into me by endless loving relations, I longed to return to the lively world centred on the Wapping Dock. I wanted to play with a shoal of small friends, Malayans, Chinese, Irish, Filipinos, and black people both from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as one or two Basque boys who were a little older than me and sometimes condescended to let me join in their games. We darted like minnows in and out of dark, familiar narrow lanes and alleys, Brian Wing and I at the end of the line because we were the smallest. The black and bleak city, rich with the smell of horse manure, vanilla pods, fish and raw hides, was to us a wonderful playground. We barely took note of the racket of horses’ hooves and steel-bound wheels on the streets’ stone setts or the constant roar of machinery in the workshops round us; it was simply part of everyday life.
Despite our diversity of race and religion, all my small friends had two things in common: as the children of dockers, shipyard workers or seamen, our lives were inextricably bound to the sea; and we all shared a true Liverpool sense of humour – life was intrinsically so hard that one learned early to make a joke of it. How we laughed, Lorilyn! Deep belly laughs that I rarely hear nowadays.
After seeing off the emigrants on the day of Uncle Leo’s departure for Nevada, Grandpa Juan Barinèta came slowly into the kitchen and dropped his papers and house ledger on to the well-scrubbed deal table. His wooden chair, which he had made himself, scraped on the stone floor as he pulled it away from the table and wearily flopped into it. He said heavily, to nobody in particular, ‘Well, that’s that lot.’
Mother and Grandma Micaela had just come up from the cellar, after putting the sheets to soak in the copper before scrubbing and boiling them.
Seeing his wife’s red-rimmed eyes, Grandpa said kindly to her in Basque, ‘The boy’s going to be all right, never fear, my dear.’ He turned to my mother, and asked her, ‘Rosita, get out a bottle of wine – if there’s anything left after last night’s party. Let’s all sit down and have a drink.’
The reference to the previous night’s send-off party for Leo made even Grandma smile, though rather wanly.
Already packed with emigrants, the house had been further jammed as Basque neighbours dropped in to say farewell.
Uncle Leo and Jean Baptiste Saitua, who lived up the road, both had excellent singing voices, and they had sung all the old Basque songs they could remember, vying with each other in a good-humoured way.
Sitting on Mother’s lap, leaning on her swollen stomach and clinging to her so that I did not accidentally slip off, I had watched the oil lamp light up her bright red curls. Then, as I had listened, I had turned slightly to watch the spell-bound faces crowding round us; loving faces, cunning faces, fair faces, mahogany faces, bearded, sad old faces, young bright faces; not a dull or stupid face amongst them.
In this magic circle of friends, I must have fallen asleep, because I have no memory of being put to bed, only of being surrounded by warmth and lovely sounds of singing.
Chapter Six (#ulink_e775614a-55c7-569a-a2d0-3a6a9aea541e)
Manuel put down his pen and took off his spectacles, to rub his eyes. He stretched and yawned. He had better make some supper. Mechanically, he felt in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes, took one out and put it between his lips. He was just feeling in his trouser pocket for his matches when he heard the front door bell ring. Patting his empty pockets, he rose stiffly from his chair and looked up at his chronometer. ‘Five o’clock,’ he muttered irritably. ‘Must be Veronica.’ Veronica Harris was a creature of habit.
Outside, on his doorstep, Veronica, with a plate poised on one hand, turned to Sharon and said cheerfully, ‘He never answers on the first ring – I don’t think he hears all that well.’
‘Maybe we shouldn’t disturb him now.’ Sharon felt a little embarrassed at being coerced into calling on someone without first telephoning.
‘Oh, he’s used to me running in and out. He won’t mind.’ She pressed the bell again.
Manuel stood in the middle of his den and wondered if she would go away, if he stayed perfectly still. Veronica was kind, but he had never liked her very much; he was uneasily suspicious that she would have enjoyed taking Kathleen’s place, an idea which made him shudder. Since Kathleen’s death, he had been distantly polite to her, and reluctantly accepted her baked offerings because she insistently pressed them upon him to the point of rudeness.
He never went to her home; in fact, since Kathleen’s death he had rarely visited any of their friends. Their abounding energy made him feel tired. In nursing Kathleen for months, his strength had been sapped, and all he wanted was to be left alone with his grief.
He stood perfectly still in the back of the hall, but the bell was rung for the third time.
‘Why not leave the plate on the doorstep?’ suggested Sharon, who had already done an eight-hour shift in the Palliative Care Unit and found her feet to be aching abominably.
‘The dogs might get it,’ Veronica replied shortly.
Resigned, Manuel put down his unlit cigarette on the hall table and answered the door. As he opened it, he did his best to show pleasant surprise. He wondered who the other woman was – not a bad-looking judy.
Without hesitation, Veronica stepped into his hall, and he backed hastily. ‘Ah!’ she cooed. ‘I thought you’d never hear me. How are you doing?’ She half-turned towards Sharon, who was still teetering on the step. ‘I want to introduce you to Elaine’s daughter – you remember Elaine? She’s staying with me until she finds an apartment. Come in, Sharon.’
Old Manuel gave up.
He retreated further into the little hallway, while Sharon, loath to intrude, stepped into the doorway.
Who, in the name of God, was Elaine? Old Manuel could not remember.
Blithely oblivious to the lack of welcome, Veronica moved firmly through the archway that led to the sitting-room. ‘I’ve brought you some cold roast beef,’ she announced. ‘I got a roast when I knew Sharon was coming – and it’s too much for us, isn’t it, Sharon?’
Sharon smiled, and fidgeted uncertainly. What was she supposed to say?
Veronica was asking Manuel if she should put the meat in the refrigerator for him. He hastily took the plate from her. He had no desire to have her poking through the entrails of his refrigerator.
‘No. That’s OK. I’ll take it. I’ll put it on the table here.’ He darted through the opposite arch, which led into the dining-room, with an alacrity surprising for a man in his eighties. If he were quick enough, he thought, he could shoo her out of the door again quite rapidly.
He was too late. Veronica was already seated on the flower-covered settee in the sitting-room, and was patting the cushion beside her to indicate to Sharon that she, too, should sit down.
From the archway, Manuel viewed them both with trepidation, while Veronica chirruped on about Sharon coming to nurse in the Palliative Care Unit, and wasn’t it great that they would have such a unit in their closest hospital? Such a shame that there had not been one when Kathleen was so ill.
Manuel stiffened. He was not too clear what exactly a Palliative Care Unit was meant for; but he certainly did not feel like discussing Kathleen in front of a stranger.
The lack of welcome was all too obvious to Sharon, and her colour rose as her embarrassment increased. She glanced directly up at him, wondering how to retreat with grace. What she saw in his face was the closed-off look of suffering, all too familiar to her in her work.
She got up immediately and filled the gap in the conversation which Manuel’s silence had caused. ‘It’s suppertime, Veronica,’ she said firmly. ‘We should leave Mr Echaniz to enjoy the beef, and perhaps we could meet again another day.’ She held out her hand to Manuel, and, since Veronica had not introduced her properly, she added, ‘I’m Sharon Herman. It’s nice to meet you.’
The relief which flooded Manuel’s face was so blatant that she wanted to laugh. Her eyes must have twinkled, because there was the hint of an answering grin suddenly flickering round his wide, thin mouth.
She let go of his hand, and bent to help a disconcerted Veronica up from the low settee.
God’s blessings on the girl, the old man thought, as he assured her that he was pleased to meet her.
With her hand under Veronica’s elbow, she steered her towards the front door, which was still open, and guided Veronica down the steps. Not too sure what was happening to her, Veronica did her best, and said to Manuel, ‘I hope you’ll like the meat. You can bring the plate back another time.’
In her heart, she knew that he would never bring the plate back – the next time she called it would be sitting on the hall table, in a paperbag, waiting for her to pick it up.
He nodded agreeably to both of them. Then he shut the front door after them. He stood leaning against it for a moment, as if to make sure that they would not come back in. Veronica had been Kathleen’s devoted friend, he reminded himself for the umpteenth time. ‘And for her sake, I must be pleasant to her – even if she’s a real cross!’
As he retrieved his unlit cigarette and started back to his den to find some matches, he looked down at the plate of meat. He had a great urge to empty it straight into the rubbish bin – but she did mean kindly, and the young woman with her had understood well enough to take her away. Furthermore, it would save him cooking for himself.
He laughed at himself as he put the plate in the refrigerator, and then went to get his long-delayed smoke.
Nice young woman, he considered, as he thankfully drew on his cigarette. Just what does she do in palliative care?
Outside, as the women went down the steps to the pavement, to walk round to Veronica’s house, Sharon said soothingly, ‘He looked so exhausted and so upset when you mentioned Kathleen, I thought we’d better not stay.’
‘Oh? I didn’t notice.’ Veronica’s expression was puzzled. Then, accepting Sharon’s explanation, she said, ‘Well, I suppose at his age …’ And left it at that.
As he smoked, Manuel stood staring out of the window, rocking slightly on his heels, as if he were in a boat and must keep his balance. He did not notice the two ladies pass beyond his budding lilac tree. His mind had reverted to the memoirs he had been writing for Lorilyn, before the visit.
He smiled slowly at a sudden remembrance of a ship’s master saying to his Grandfather Barinèta that his crew were a lot of ‘hard cases’.
‘Oh, aye,’ he muttered to himself. ‘So were me granddad and me dad – tough as old boots. They could fight anybody if they had to – even other “hard cases” out on a spree of a Saturday night.’
Very thoughtfully, he stubbed out his cigarette in an overcrowded ash tray, and then stood absently rubbing his nicotine-stained thumb and forefinger together, as if to erase the yellow stain on them.
Was he remembering correctly? Had his life in Liverpool really been as golden as he had described? Had the other boys with whom he had played been as good mates as he remembered? While he played or went to school, safe in the shelter of his ferocious old grandfather, what was going on between the adult members of the family?
Chapter Seven (#ulink_fcad4a3b-3ed7-55d7-b8d5-7dea09f3c766)
Manuel would soon be six years old, a thin streak of a child, tall for his age. Filled with resentment, he was clutching his bag of marbles to his chest for fear that Andrew would snatch them from him.
Seven-year-old Andrew had just won his best blue-streaked ollie from him, and Manuel felt sure that Andrew had cheated him, but he was not certain how. Tears of rage sprang to his eyes at the smug look on Andrew’s face as he stowed the disputed marble in the pocket of his ragged shorts.
‘You don’t play fair,’ he yelled. ‘I’ll tell my dad of you!’
Andrew’s lips curled. ‘Who’s afraid of your dad? He’s not home.’
‘Me dad’s a Master Mariner, and he’ll get you when he does come home,’ cried Manuel furiously. ‘So there!’
The youngest of five unruly boys, Andrew was the offspring of a Filipino and an Irish girl, who lived in a nearby street. Nearly a year older than the young Basque, he enjoyed lording it over the smaller lads in the vicinity. Now he made a lewd gesture. ‘My dad’s a stoker, and he’s stronger ’n yours. He’s stronger than anybody in the world!’
Too angry to care that he was probably stirring up a hornet’s nest, Manuel went a step closer. He thrust his chin towards Andrew and ground his teeth menacingly. He snarled, ‘No, he isn’t! And you cheated! I want me bluey back.’
Andrew pushed his face close to Manuel’s. Blue eyes, bloodshot with conjunctivitis, glared into clear brown ones, as Andrew made the worst grimace he could conjure up. ‘You’re not getting it back, see. You shut up, or I’ll put me brothers on to you!’ He stepped back, and grinned. ‘Me dad showed us how to break a man’s arm real quick last night.’ To demonstrate, he did a vicious twist with his right hand.
Apprehension cooled Manuel’s rage; he was scared suddenly of being beaten up by five known bullies. He glanced quickly around in search of adult help. None was visible.
Brian Wing, even younger than Manuel, had been watching Manuel’s defiance of Andrew in silent astonishment. Now, he squatted quickly down on his heels and began to pick up those of his marbles still on the pavement. Deftly, he shovelled them into a cotton drawstring bag. Manuel knew that he was preparing to run back home to the laundry, if a fight should start; Brian did not worry about being called a cowardy custard. When trouble threatened, he was the first to vanish. At this moment, as he rose to his feet, he was beaming amiably at both prospective combatants, his eyes thin slits above pudgy cheeks.
Manuel glanced again at Andrew. With a satisfied smirk, the bigger boy had taken the blue out of his pocket, and was holding it up to the sunlight. Manuel snatched unsuccessfully at it, and Andrew laughed.
Brian fled.
From round the curve of the street suddenly floated Grandma Micaela’s strident voice. ‘Manuel! Manuel Echaniz! Where are you?’
With total relief, Manuel edged back from Andrew, and shrieked, ‘Coming, Grandma!’ Then he turned and ran for home. It left Andrew in command of the field – but, Manuel solaced himself as he tore back to the safety of Grandma, he now had nobody to play with.
Thanks to Grandma’s calling him, his retreat was an honourable one; even Andrew would admit that. When mothers called, you responded fairly promptly. If you did not, you got soundly slapped the minute you showed your face at home – and there was always the overwhelming threat from the females of the family, ‘When your dad gets in, I’ll tell him about you!’ Fathers whacked much harder than mothers did; they sometimes took their belt to you.
Grandma bent to catch him in the curve of her arm. ‘Come along, dumpling,’ she said in Basque. ‘We’re going up to the market. Your dad’s docking tomorrow; and your mam wants to have chicken ready for him when he gets home.’
‘Do I have to come?’ asked Manuel in a whining voice. He had been to school, had his tea, and had then gone out into the street to play, only to find himself up against Andrew. He was tired, and the thought of the long, boring walk up to St John’s Market made his legs ache.
‘Yes, dear. With Auntie Maria only just out of hospital, she can’t watch you. Who’ll take care of you while we’re out? Your grandpa’s gone over to the Baltic for a game of chequers and a drink.’
With the threat of Andrew and his brothers still in his mind, Manuel saw the point of this, and made no further demur.
On her return from the hospital the previous day, Manuel had watched his spinster Aunt Maria being laid carefully on the old sofa in the big kitchen-living-room, so that Grandma and Mother would not have to run up and downstairs to and from her bedroom while nursing her.
She was his mother’s elder sister, and she and Manuel were great friends. She had taught him to play snap and snakes and ladders, and she usually took care of him whenever the others were out.
Now, back home, she was exceedingly quiet, her face white and haggard, except for a single hectic pink spot on either cheek.
It was called convalescence, which Manuel understood was another word for getting better. But he had noticed that all the ladies who had crowded in to see her during the last twenty-four hours looked sad, and sighed. ‘TB’s a terrible thing, God save us,’ they had murmured to each other. Then they had spoken to Auntie Maria in bright, artificial voices.
Even seventy-eight years later, as he wrote about them in his Canadian home, for Lorilyn, he could still remember clearly the black-clad women, their arms wrapped in their woollen shawls, despite the summer heat, while they smiled determinedly and chirruped like birds, as they bent over the stricken invalid.
Grandma took his hand and led him up the worn sandstone steps into the soot-blackened house, to see if his mother and two of her Basque friends were ready to set out.
Rosita was just wrapping Manuel’s new baby sister, Francesca, into the folds of the black shawl she wore. He felt a sting of jealousy at the baby’s privileged position in his mother’s arms; she had usurped his place. Admittedly, Grandma had been particularly kind since Francesca’s birth – but Grandma was kind to the baby as well.
As he waited in the crowded kitchen-living-room for the women to marshal themselves, Aunt Maria put out a bone-thin hand and held his fingertips, as she smiled up at him. Manuel looked down at her. Neither said anything, but Manuel found it consoling that he still appeared to be his aunt’s favourite; she had never even held Francesca in her arms, as far as he was aware.
It was always a matter of earnest debate between Grandma Micaela, Rosita and Aunt Maria whether it was better to go to the market early in the morning, when there was lots of choice; or to go at the end of the day, when it was possible to beat down the prices of wares which vendors did not want to have to take back home. Since a live chicken was as fresh in the late afternoon as it would have been in the early morning, they had decided to go at the last possible moment.
Aunt Maria felt well enough to be disappointed that she would miss the excitement of the market, and she said wistfully that she wished she had an invalid chair to go out in.
Grandma grunted. Invalid chairs were beyond the dreams of avarice, so she said comfortingly, ‘Never mind, dear, save your strength for tomorrow. We’ll get you up and dressed in time to greet Pedro when he arrives. He’d be so happy to see you up and about – so you mustn’t tire yourself today.’
Mollified, she allowed Grandma to prop her up with another cushion and put an extra shawl around her, though the day was warm. With a glass of water, her spectacles and her rosary on a stool by her couch, she settled down resignedly to await their return.
By the time the four chattering ladies reached the beginning of the narrow lane at the back of the market, where poultry was sold, Manuel’s feet were dragging through the straw which littered the cobblestones. Fine beads of perspiration lay on his forehead, and he clutched Rosita’s black skirt, in order to keep up with her. The smell of poultry droppings and other manure lay like a blanket over the crowded lane, and was not improved by the intense odour of dozens of unbathed women, who sat amid their goods for sale. He felt stifled and began to grizzle.
Amid the din and the thick black skirts flapping round him, his wails went unremarked. Men and women shouted, puppies yapped, ducks quacked; fouled in their own excrement, kittens mewed pitifully and scratched at the bars of their cages; next to a cage of clucking hens, a lone goose hissed at passersby. Only rabbits crouched quietly, their quivering noses a tiny indication that they were still alive, despite the heat.
The approach of a small group of Basque women, chattering loudly in their own peculiar language, did not raise the hopes of the purveyors of poultry. They, too, were hot and weary. An impending Basque invasion made their spirits wilt: if the women bought anything, it would only be after strenuous bargaining; it would surely make any stallholder they fastened upon late home for his tea.
After strolling the length of the still busy lane, the target of the Basque attack became a small cage holding three hens, which appeared not to have sold because they were rather scrawny. Before showing any direct interest in the birds, Grandma Micaela led a distracting minor scrimmage by examining carefully a pair of rabbits. She poked at them through the bars of their cage, and they stared back at her without hope. She drew Rosita’s attention to them, and she also poked disparagingly at them. Rosita’s two friends, who had accompanied them, pursed their lips and agreed loudly with one another that they weren’t worth sixpence each. The man in charge of them said something inaudible under his breath.
Sighing, they looked desultorily at a pair of slaughtered hens, not yet cleaned or feathered, hanging heads down in front of the next small stall.
‘Here ye are, ladies,’ called the stallholder, beaming at them. ‘A real nice dinner. Good fat birds. One and sixpence each. Feather ’em yerself.’ He unhooked the hens and held them against his forearm for inspection. Four ladies pinched the hens’ breasts and declared in chorus that they had no fat on them.
The man lost his amiability as quickly as it had been assumed; the price he had asked was fair for two good birds. ‘Pack of bloody Israelites!’ he muttered, and turned angrily away to accost another shopper.
Though Grandma’s eyes were weak and she could not see any of the products very well, prompted by Rosita, she opened negotiations with the man who had three live hens. They were, apparently, the last of his offerings for that day; several empty cages had already been piled on a hand-cart behind him.
‘What do you think, Mother?’ Rosita asked.
Grandma bent down to squint carefully at the hens. One of them tried to peck her, and she hastily drew back. She nodded her head negatively, and said dolefully, ‘They might make good soup. Nothing on them for anything else.’ She glanced up at the vendor. ‘How much do you want for them?’ she inquired, her English difficult to understand.
‘How much?’ interjected Rosita. Her two friends stood behind her, politely silent, ready to murmur approbation or denigration, as required.
‘A bob each,’ he told her, hoping to get rid of three birds in one sale, so that he could wander off for a much-needed pint of bitter, before going home.
Rosita translated the price, and Grandma’s heavy eyebrows rose, as if in shock. ‘For those?’ She turned to their silent friends for confirmation of her horror at such an outrageous price. Like a Greek chorus, they nodded agreement and stared coldly at the stallholder. Still holding his mother’s skirt, Manuel scrubbed one small boot against another, and sighed; he had seen this pantomime so often. He watched a woodlouse, surprised by his shuffling feet from under a few wisps of straw, hasten into hiding beneath a couple of feathers.
Meanwhile, the face of the chicken vendor went as dark as an angry cockerel’s comb. ‘Wass the matter with ’em?’ he asked indignantly. ‘Best roastin’ chicken you could buy. Why, one of ’em would feed six, easy.’
Manuel saw his mother’s generous chest expand, as she readied herself to dive into the fray. It was going to be a long and boring battle. He let go of her skirt and wandered down the sloping lane for a few yards, to look at ugly white dishes laid out on straw; they were tended by three Irish women from the north end of the city.
‘Mind your clumsy feet!’ one of them shouted at him, as he stumbled over a cobblestone. He backed hastily away; to a small boy, they seemed very big and threatening.
Further down, towards Elliott Street, there were still a few puppies for sale, and he paused to watch them, as they stumbled over each other in the dirty cage. In the background, he could hear his mother arguing volubly, as she sought to bring down the price of the hens; she was demanding that they be taken out of the cage, so that she could feel how much flesh there was on the unfortunate creatures.
He was wondering if he could persuade his father, when he came home, to get him a puppy, when there was a chorus of female shrieks accompanied by a roar of male anger. He jumped, and whipped around to see if his mother was all right.
His view was blocked by a large woman with a shopping basket on her arm. He tried to edge around her. She looked down kindly at him, and said, ‘Careful, sonny, mind the pile of saucepans behind me.’ Then, at a slight noise, she glanced back. ‘Holy Mary!’ she cried shrilly, and jumped to one side, sending the pile of iron saucepans in all directions, so that cursing market women leapt to their feet to avoid them.
Flapping awkwardly on clipped wings, a terrified, squawking hen sailed over their heads. The poor bird was unable to gain any height and came down to earth, momentarily, in front of Manuel. He laughed, and instinctively grabbed at it. It managed to scuttle a few feet away from him towards Elliott Street. Then, seeing a break in the highly amused crowd, it took off again in a series of desperate hops and flaps.
Manuel forgot his mother. Hens lived in cages, so this one must have escaped. In high glee, he scampered after it, dodging in and out between piles of kitchenware and ironmongery. He bumped into two young men entering the lane. ‘Watch it, kiddo!’ one shouted after him, irritably.
Driven by panic and despair, the hen managed to soar upward a little. Absorbed in the chase, Manuel ran faster.
As the bird descended, to perch for a moment on top of a fire hydrant in busy Elliott Street, the boy plunged across the pavement towards it, tripping up and confusing the crowd of office workers hurrying homeward. A young clerk made a playful grab at the bird, to the amusement of the girl accompanying him. The frantic hen immediately hopped off its perch on the edge of the pavement, and staggered into the heavy traffic, as if to cross the road. Intent on catching it, Manuel shot after it.
The hen ran directly under a work horse pulling a small cart. The horse reared in fright. The cart skidded past Manuel. It missed him by a hand’s breadth, as the carter swore and fought to rein in the animal. A few yards behind came three errand boys on their bicycles, hurrying to finish the last deliveries of the day. They swerved to avoid the child. Two of them collided and tumbled off, the packages in their front baskets scattering amid both lines of traffic; the third boy managed to reach the gutter, and dismounted; he yelled imprecations at a heedless Manuel, while more cyclists wobbled and dodged around the two bikes tangled in the middle of the lane. Two chauffeur-driven private cars came to a screeching halt, and the drivers impatiently blew their klaxon horns.
All traffic was coming quickly to a halt; and harsh words were exchanged between drivers and carters in the near lane, as horses, set to breast the upward slope of the street, were hauled to a clattering stop, their shoes striking sparks from the setts, and foam from their mouths splattering passersby.
Nobody attempted to rescue Manuel – or the hen.
At the sight of the traffic coming the other way, he had, in the middle of the street, suddenly ceased his headlong chase; he could see that, on the other side, the hen had found a safe perch on the high windowsill of a bank.
With disorganized traffic still edging past him, both before and behind, he was suddenly very frightened. As he stood frozen, at the back of him the driver of a carriage with two ladies in it, leaned down, whip in hand, and shouted at him, ‘Gerroff the street!’ He glanced up over his shoulder, and the high wheels, far higher than him, rolled past him dangerously closely. He turned back towards the opposite pavement. A tram, unable to stop quickly, rolled slowly past him on its rails. It was followed by a brewer’s dray which had been successfully slowed by the drayman; it was pulled by two huge horses and the dray itself was piled high with barrels of beer. Though the upward slope meant it would be hard to start the horses again, the driver drew to a careful stop, thus blocking any further traffic in that lane. He stood up and called to the frightened child, ‘Get on pavement, luv. Quick, now.’
Though all Manuel could see was the slavering mouth and huge, bronze-coloured legs of the lead horse, he heard the voice, and he obediently trotted, almost under the great animal’s nose, to the safety of the pavement.
As the traffic began to move again, he stood, bewildered, on the kerb, and looked up at the hen. From the safety of the bank’s windowsill, the hen opened its eyes and looked down at him with grave suspicion; then, the lids closed again.
Distraught, the child began to cry.
Standing against the bank wall, an elderly newspaperman was calling to the homegoing crowd of pedestrians, ‘Echo! Liverpool Echo! Read all about it!’ Perspiration was running down his bulbous red nose, as he shoved a neatly folded newspaper into any hand proffering the necessary coppers for it. On a blackboard beside him was scrawled the day’s headline, Countess of Derby Opens Crippled Children’s Hospital.
He glanced down at the weeping child, while saying to a customer, ‘Fourpence change, Sir. What’s to do, lad?’
‘I want me mam,’ howled Manuel, hastily taking refuge beside the news-vendor’s second blackboard, which proclaimed in white chalk, Big Fire at Huskisson Dock. ‘And I can’t reach me hen!’ He pointed upwards to the refuge on the windowsill.
The newspaperman squinted quickly upwards, and grinned. The hen had squatted down, eyes still closed, and looked like a bundle of feathers. ‘That’s yours? Not to worry, lad. Soon as this little rush is over, I’ll get it for yez. It don’t look like it’s goin’ to fly away.’
Manuel nodded, wiped his nose on the sleeve of his jersey, and continued to weep, though at a lower pitch. He had no idea where he was, and he didn’t really care what happened to the hen; all he wanted was his mother.
Meanwhile, Rosita and Grandma had assumed that Manuel was still in the market lane, looking at the pets for sale, and had contentedly bought the two remaining live hens. The stallholder, still fuming over the loss of the third hen, sullenly wrung the birds’ necks, while Grandma went to the nearest greengrocery stall by the door of the main market, and bought onions and garlic.
The crowd in the lane was thinning rapidly; the Irish women were packing up their remaining plates; some of the disconsolate, unsold pets had already been whisked away. Manuel was not visible, and Rosita became anxious.
To save her carrying the baby around unnecessarily, her two friends ran the length of the lane, but there was no place in which he could have hidden. They came back panting and gesticulating.
‘Who you lookin’ for?’ asked a young woman, hooking a cage of kittens on to the handlebars of a bicycle, near the Elliott Street entrance.
Rosita told her.
‘Oh, aye,’ she replied readily. ‘He were nearly run over, he was. You’ll mebbe find ’im across the road. I’ll bet you’ll find ’im in the station there – kids love trains.’ She smiled, and mounted her bike and wobbled over the cobblestones in the general direction to which she had pointed.
‘Oh, goodness!’ Rosita exclaimed, her face paling, as, united, the four women pushed their way to the edge of the Elliott Street pavement. A break in the traffic revealed Manuel, with his mouth as wide as a choir boy’s singing a Te Deum, shrieking, ‘I want me mam.’
Rosita’s expression changed immediately to one of parental outrage. With baby Francesca bouncing on her chest and followed by the other three, shawls flapping like the wings of angry magpies, she surged through a break in the traffic, to face her tear-stained son. Before the child could do more than turn his face to her and reduce his sobs, she scolded him, ‘What do you mean by running off like this? We bin scared stiff for you. I’ll tell your dad about you, when he gets home!’ With her free hand, she grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him.
Far from being more upset by this, Manuel recognized the typical reaction of a mam who had indeed been scared. His sobs became sniffs, as she alternately cajoled and scolded again.
Meanwhile, Grandma Micaela, who was feeling extremely tired, looked on silently, and the news-vendor asked her, ‘Do you want the ’en, Queen?’ He pointed up to the bank windowsill, on which the hen lay inert.
Grandma blinked, and her eyes followed the line of the man’s finger. She peered at the bank wall. Halfway up, she saw a vague, copper-coloured lump. ‘On the windowsill,’ the man said impatiently.
Grandma was under five feet tall; the sill was impossibly high up for her. ‘Could you possibly reach it?’ she asked shyly.
The man grinned. ‘Anything to oblige a lady,’ he responded with sudden gallantry. He reached up and managed to gather the bird into his hand. After inspecting it dubiously, he said, ‘It looks like dead, Missus.’
‘It’s fresh enough to cook,’ she told him, with a little laugh. Her faded blue eyes, though partially clouded by cataracts, still had a twinkle in them, and the news-vendor returned to his pitch feeling pleased with himself.
Grandma laid the hen on top of the other two in her calico bag. Rosita had finished her scolding and was wiping Manuel’s face with the corner of her apron. Her friends stopped gossiping about the high price of rabbits – and the party straggled down Hanover Street towards home.
At home, the oil lamp had been lit. Grandpa was seated at the kitchen table, writing in his ledger. Behind him, on the wall, the huge map on which Pedro recorded his voyages, glimmered softly, the net of inky lines linking the ports of call looking like a tangled mass of black cotton thread.
As the shoppers entered, he closed the book wearily. He nodded to his wife and to Rosita, as they entered and thankfully plonked the shopping bags on the draining board by the kitchen sink. The baby was beginning to whimper from hunger, and Grandma said she would make a pot of tea before starting the evening meal. Rosita nodded agreement, and sat down in a rocking chair. She unbuttoned her black blouse and modestly arranged her shawl round the baby’s head and her breast, while she fed her new daughter.
Manuel slunk to the other side of the fireplace, where Aunt Maria had, in their absence, established herself in an easy chair. He leaned against his aunt, who put down the knitting she had been struggling to do and put her arm round him. He was grateful for her presence; he had missed her during her stay in hospital.
He could not have articulated his sense of desertion as he watched his mother feed the baby. He only knew he longed to be cuddled by her and to lay his head on her milky breast. Not even when she called him her big boy, and sent him off to school with a loving pat on his behind, was he comforted.
Auntie Maria suddenly began to cough. She withdrew her arm, and fumbled for her handkerchief in her dressing-gown pocket. She put it to her mouth, and tried to smile at Manuel over its folds.
As she had taught him, he stepped back from her while the spasm lasted. ‘I don’t want to splutter all over you,’ she had once explained to him. ‘It’s not very nice.’
Aunt Maria’s cough was part and parcel of Manuel’s childhood; he slept in the same room as she did, and the sound of it comforted him when he woke in the night after a bad dream; it meant that she was awake, and if he were very scared, he could scramble out of bed and run to her. It puzzled him, however, that, unlike his mother, she would never let him into her bed, however much he was shivering with fright; and she was the only one of his doting relations who did not kiss him; even Grandpa kissed him sometimes. He occasionally thought that he would never understand the idiosyncrasies of grown-ups.
After feeding Francesca, Rosita laid the dozing child in Manuel’s old cradle, near the fireplace, but far enough from it not to be spattered by the fat in which Grandma was frying fish for tea. She then unpacked the three hens and took them out into the brick-lined backyard, to feather and singe them. Though the stallholder had obligingly wrung the necks of the two hens, he had complained sourly that he would not have lost the third one if Grandma had not insisted on the cage being opened. He could not run after the flying bird himself, he said bitterly, because it would have meant leaving his stall untended in an area where petty theft was a fine art.
After the meal, the hens were brought in and drawn on the draining board, giving Manuel an early lesson in anatomy, as he watched the operation.
The naked birds were then washed and hung up in the larder overnight. Manuel stared up at them, and decided they did not look much different from Francesca, after she had been bathed in front of the kitchen fire.
That night he dreamed that he had been hung up in the larder, by his feet. He was too terrified even to run across to Auntie Maria’s bed, and he lay quivering under his cotton sheet until sleep overtook him again.
Chapter Eight (#ulink_21146223-29f0-534e-8192-d11efc9535e4)
In the golden summer days of 1914 his view of his world was that of a child, considered Manuel. His was a permanent world which Grandpa Barinèta would rule for ever. Ample food arrived on the table at least three times a day, and boys did their best not to offend Grandma Micaela or Mother, who ruled the kitchen-living-room like royal queens.
Close by his home was the world of school, where nuns in white wimples and long black dresses talked of eternity and the need to be a good Catholic boy; so that when one died – an event which would take place so far ahead that one could not envision it – one could, in a state of grace, enjoy eternity sitting on the right hand of God, where, hoped Little Manuel fervently, there would be no nuns with sharp voices and spanking rulers to tell you that you had been naughty again. He had secretly wondered if God liked nuns. Old Manuel reflected that the latter thought had seemed so wicked that he had hastily stifled it and had hoped that St Peter would not make a note of it.
At the edge of his world, not counting St John’s Market, lay St Peter’s Church in Seel Street, where, every Sunday morning, he went to Mass with either Grandma or his mother. Though the conversation of the congregation was split between Spanish, Basque and English, the Mass was said in Latin; his father said that it did not matter which port he was in, the Mass was always there, always the same – in Latin. Little Manuel began to think that there was something magical about Latin.
Some of the priests were Jesuits and good scholars. Scholarliness was not something particularly appreciated in the dockside parish, but the Jesuits’ awesome reputation as missionaries, many of whom had come to untimely ends in foreign parts, gained them a grudging respect. They always made Little Manuel feel nervous. They seemed so disciplined; and he could not imagine them sneaking off to see a music hall show or having a drink in the local, like any normal human being.
At home, he took for granted the constant work which engaged Grandma and his mother, how they washed and scrubbed and cooked, knitted and sewed, in a house with one cold-water tap and no electricity or gas. In addition to their usual chores, they endured the house being periodically filled with emigrants, all wanting to prepare food, wash clothes and cope with husbands and babies.
He never considered that his grandfather might be very tired and long to retire, but could not because he had never been able to save much; or that he might be homesick for his native country. It never occurred to him that his father had any feelings beyond affection for his son – and a curious desire to lie on her bed with his mother, with the big iron key turned in the doorlock.
It seemed a very safe world, though Mother sometimes announced herself worried. Exactly what she meant by that, Little Manuel was not very sure, except that it manifested itself in the form of a sharp slap if he did not come straight home from school, and an irate warning never to go with a strange man or accept a sweet from one; the vague warnings of dire results, if he ever took a sweetie from a stranger, remained with him long after he understood what lay behind them, so that even as an adult he always refused a proffered sweet.
The fear of unemployment must have haunted his father, considered Old Manuel. Some of his friends’ fathers were out of work from time to time; and their mams grew short-tempered, and hoped they would not have another baby that year.
Mr Connolly, who lived next door with his wife, Bridget, and little Mary and Baby Joey, was periodically without employment. But he was more cheerful than his neighbours, and he would sit on his front doorstep and play simple hand games with Manuel and Mary. It was he who taught the little boy how to catch and throw an old tennis ball. He was so good at lip-reading that it was a long time before Manuel understood that he was deaf, the usual fate of ships’ scalers, who spent their working lives inside ships’ boilers chipping away at accumulated scale, a job which created tremendous noise.
Pedro was fortunate in being steadily employed by a small freighting company sailing out of Liverpool, though he always hoped that when times improved he would get a better ship. When he was at home for a few days, he would take Manuel swimming, or up to the park to play ball. Sometimes, they walked down to the Pier Head, and, looking out across the river, he taught his small son how to identify the ownership of the vessels plying the river, by the colours of their funnels. Manuel also learned that each country had its own flag fluttering from ships belonging to it; when he and his father got home, they found the countries on the big map pinned to the wall of the kitchen-living-room.
Pedro had a shrewd eye for what might interest a boy and told him stories about the ports he had visited, including small details which Old Manuel still remembered, like the kind of sweets on sale in the streets of Bombay or the kind of clothing that ladies in Yokahama wore.
‘You’ll see them all yourself, one day,’ his father assured him, certain that his boy would follow in his footsteps, though with better qualifications.
As he wrote for Lorilyn, Old Manuel wondered if Faith would remember him with the same uncritical love with which he remembered his father. He doubted it; his Canadian wife and child seemed to live lives crammed with commitments. They were far too busy to spend much time listening to what had happened to him in his last absence from them; they appeared to exist deep in a women’s world of school, voluntary work, dancing classes, music lessons, skating classes, teas and ladies’ bridge parties. Sometimes, Kathleen did a spell of nursing which gave her a whole new collection of women with whom to become involved. Men seemed to be expected to keep to their world and not intrude – even to their half of a room, if they were at a party, Manuel remembered with a rueful smile.
Perhaps it was his own fault, he thought. Even when he had become a marine architect, he had sometimes been away for weeks. As a seaman from a family of seamen, this had not appeared unusual to him; but it had probably made Kathleen and Faith cling more closely to each other for support.
He sighed, and paused in his writing to light another cigarette. He had got to know Kathleen in her final illness better than he had ever known her before, and, in his current loneliness, he regretted that he had not tried harder to be closer to her in their earlier married life. They had not been unhappy, he considered, just not quite as happy as they might have been.
In marrying a Canadian and settling in Canada, Manuel had achieved a much higher standard of living than he could have reasonably hoped for if he had stayed in Liverpool. After qualifying as a marine architect, he had worked in Montreal, and he had had to acquire a working knowledge of yet another language, French; it had added to the difficulties of adjusting himself to North American life.
After enjoying the close support of an extended Basque community in Liverpool and Bilbao, he had been, for a time, intensely lonely. It was some time before he met anyone who knew what a Basque was, and he remembered his intense thankfulness when he met a sprinkling of fellow Basques and could speak his own language to them. His neighbours were supremely indifferent that he could switch in and out of four languages – being multilingual was something that born Canadians were not supposed to worry about; English-speaking Canadians seemed to take it for granted that even their French compatriots would be able to speak English – just as the Spaniards expected the Basques to be competent in Spanish, thought Manuel tartly.
Though sometimes he tripped up, for Kathleen’s sake he made a great effort to sink into her world. He had, however, done his best to teach Faith to speak Basque, and as a little child she had always spoken to him in that language – until she went to school, when, under the tight conforming pressure of her school life, she had soon discovered that it was convenient to forget that her father was an immigrant.
As he worked on his notes for his granddaughter, Old Manuel wondered if his quiet, capable father felt like a stranger in his own home, when he carried a kitbag full of grubby clothes up the steps of Grandpa Barinèta’s house, at the end of long boring weeks at sea in a tramp steamer.
Was it difficult for Pedro Echaniz to re-establish a rapport with his wife and mother-in-law and his rather forbidding father-in-law, all of whom seemed to talk to him at once?
Mulling over his memories of his father sitting in the crowded kitchen-living-room, smoking his pipe and listening to the chatter, Old Manuel realized that, sometimes, it may have been quite hard; only when he was alone with Little Manuel had the dam burst, and Pedro himself had talked and talked, creating a fabulous world of distant places and homespun philosophy for his small son. God keep him, prayed Old Manuel, with a surge of love.
The day after the three chickens had been carefully prepared for cooking, Pedro had run up the steps of his father-in-law’s house. The front door was hospitably ajar, and through it wafted an excellent smell of cooking – olive oil, garlic, onions, herbs and chicken. How good it would be to eat some decent food!
In the narrow hall, he slung his kitbag to the floor and threw down his heavy jacket and peaked cap.
‘Rosita!’ he shouted, over the clamour of the riveters in the workshop immediately to the rear of the house. Dear God! How could she stand that kind of noise all day long? ‘Rosita!’
She heard him and came running, plump face beaming and blue eyes flashing, her mass of wavy red hair bouncing round her shoulders. She flew into his arms, and, over the odours of cooking and babies, he smelled the freshness of her. He always swore to himself that every time he returned home he fell in love with her again.
Before the family caught up with them, he hugged and kissed her, cupping one breast in an eager hand, feeling the dampness of her milk soaking through her starched flowered pinafore.
She giggled happily; seconds of privacy were precious in a house full of relations – and often with emigrants as well.
He dropped his hand, as his tiny mother-in-law came pattering after her daughter, followed closely by Grandpa Juan Barinèta. Behind them, Manuel stood shyly by the kitchen door, waiting to be noticed.
Over his wife’s head, Pedro greeted his parents-in-law; he was struck by how old they seemed suddenly to have become. He was fond of both of them, and was thankful that Rosita had their company while he was at sea.
With a twinge of anxiety for the old people, he loosened himself from Rosita, to bend and kiss Micaela’s cheek. He then embraced Juan.
‘It’s been a long time,’ Grandpa said, keeping his arm round the younger man’s shoulder. ‘Come in, boy. Come in.’
Pedro moved down the passage, and then saw Manuel. He stopped and squatted down close to him. ‘How’s my big lad?’ he asked, and opened his arms to him, and the boy went joyfully into them. There was the feel of his father’s beard on his cheek, the smell of sweat and tobacco and wine, the total comfort of his being.
Manuel chuckled in his father’s ear, and said shyly that he was all right.
In the steamy kitchen, Pedro stretched himself and looked around the familiar domain. Auntie Maria shyly and carefully rose from her chair to greet him; she was dressed in her best black skirt and black silk blouse. Jet earrings hung against her cheeks.
‘Maria! You’re up and about!’ exclaimed Pedro, as if he had already been primed by Grandma what to say to the stricken woman. Without hesitation, he went to her and put his arm protectively round her shoulders, as she subsided again into her chair, and kissed her on both cheeks. ‘I thought you would still be in hospital.’
She glowed, as she looked up at him with frank yearning. Why tell him that she was at home because the doctors could do no more for her?
‘I’m doing quite well,’ she affirmed. ‘I can sit in the yard – or on the steps, and I’m hoping to walk out soon.’
He looked into the big blue eyes turned up towards him, so like his wife’s but without her beauty; and he knew that she was lying. He played up to her, however, and joked about all the young Basques who would ask her out when she could get about again. Manuel came to lean against her, so as to be included in his father’s attention. He realized that nobody but his father ever kissed Auntie Maria, and he sensed his aunt’s pleasure at being so closely touched by another human being, though he did not yet fully understand her inner loneliness, caused by other people’s fear of catching her dread disease.
Grandma Micaela turned quickly away from the little group, and went to fetch some wine glasses from the dresser. There was a lump in her throat and she wanted to cry. With Leo gone and Agustin rarely in Liverpool, her daughters were doubly precious to her, and yet she had to accept that Maria was preparing for a much longer journey.
She took a big breath, and, with her hands full of glasses, she turned back to the family. ‘Let’s have a drink,’ she suggested gaily. ‘Juan, dear. Get a bottle out for us.’
As Grandpa produced a bottle of good Basque wine, Rosita said cheerfully to Pedro, ‘You haven’t met your daughter yet!’
She bent down and scooped the child out of her wooden cradle, and thrust her into her father’s arms. Francesca stared up at him with some perplexity. She opened her tiny mouth to cry. Pedro suddenly laughed, and said to Rosita, ‘She’s the dead spit of you. Look at her! Blue eyes and all that red fluff on her head.’
His wife playfully shook her red mane over the baby’s face. ‘She’s goin’ to be just like her mam, aren’t you, luv,’ she said to the child, and Pedro’s loins ached, as the creamy skin of his wife’s neck came close to him.
The baby whimpered uncertainly, and Rosita snatched her back. Manuel promptly eased himself on to his father’s knee. Over his head, Pedro asked her, ‘Did you have a bad time with her?’
‘Not too bad,’ she told him.
He took a sip of his wine, and looked wickedly over his glass at her. She flounced provocatively away from him to return the child to her cradle, and stood, hand on hip, watching him, as she rocked the cradle with her foot to soothe the baby.
The kitchen fell silent after this as everyone sipped their wine, and listened to the tolling of the bell of the dock railway train, as it passed along the street under the overhead railway, and to the usual turmoil of the machinery in the buildings at the back of the house.
While the train clattered rhythmically on its way, Pedro stared at his half-empty glass and wondered what to say. Once greetings had been exchanged, he had to pick up the threads of his life ashore; it was like trying to understand the gist of a novel after commencing to read it in the middle of the volume.
Rosita wrote to him regularly during his absences, though, occasionally, he received the letters only when he returned to Liverpool; in any case, they did not really convey to him the daily ups and downs of the family. It took time to understand all the references made in the course of the family’s conversations.
There were times when Pedro felt that his shipmates were closer to him than his family was; they certainly knew more about each other than their families did. He had sailed with some of them for years. Yet he loved Rosita; and Manuel was someone to boast about through many a monotonous day at sea. He felt guilty that his first inner reaction to the new baby had been that it would be something to tell his mates about when he returned to sea – another beautiful redhead. He ran his fingers through his roughly cut hair; it was sticky with salt. He could use a good scrub down in the old tin bath; but he could have it only when all the family had gone to bed, and he could have the privacy of the empty kitchen-living-room. He sighed, and puffed at his pipe.
The awkward silence was broken by Manuel. With his head against his father’s shoulder, he asked shyly, in Basque, ‘What’ve you brought me, Daddy?’
Pedro immediately snapped out of his reverie and put down his pipe. ‘Aha!’ he exclaimed mysteriously. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ He clutched the boy tighter, enjoying the child’s warm trust.
Manuel giggled and pushed himself off Pedro’s knee. ‘Let’s see,’ he urged, and trotted towards the kitbag, still lying in the hall.
Underneath all the impedimenta of a seaman’s life, just when it seemed to Manuel that his father must have lost the gifts he had purchased, they unearthed a cream jug in the shape of a cow, for Grandma to add to her collection of little jugs, and a big tin of good Virginia tobacco for Grandpa.
A parcel, wrapped in tissue paper, was handed to Rosita, who cautiously peeped into it, and then blushed and giggled when she discovered a lace-trimmed petticoat. She hastily wrapped it up again, while Manuel’s mouth drooped and his eyes grew wide with disappointment. A further burrowing in the bag produced a pretty pair of hair combs for Auntie Maria.
Pedro glanced up at Manuel, as he felt down to the bottom of the bag. ‘I hope I haven’t lost it,’ he said, with mock anxiety. He pulled out an old sweater, and then another one. But the second sweater was wrapped around something.
Very carefully, Pedro loosened the bundle and lifted out a model yacht, its mast and sails folded flat. He handed it to his son. ‘Guaranteed to sail – and not to sink,’ he told his son.
Manuel took it gingerly from him. Nobody amongst his school friends had anything to equal it – he was sure of that. ‘Will it really sail?’ he asked, as he twisted it round to have a better look at it.
‘Given a decent breeze it will – like a real one. Tomorrow, we’ll go up to the park and try it on the pond. You’ll soon get the hang of it.’
The pond? That was where grown-up men took their model yachts, yachts carefully pushed through the town in old perambulators, because they were too big to carry.
The child’s face was beatific. He determined that he would never let Andrew get even a glimpse of the little boat; he was not going to chance its being taken from him.
Grandpa leaned forward. ‘Let me see it, Mannie.’
Manuel used both hands to pass it to his grandfather, and the old man took a closer look at it: the brass rails, the finely polished wood, and the correct rigging. ‘Nice piece of work,’ he said. ‘Must’ve taken a while to do that.’
‘Aye, it did. It’s to scale.’
Juan handed the boat back to his grandson. ‘You don’t take that up to the park by yourself,’ he instructed. ‘When your dad’s away, I’ll come with you.’ He, too, was aware of the predatory children, some of them homeless, who ran wild in the streets.
Manuel promised.
Rosita bent over them, to admire the little vessel, and Pedro slyly pinched her bottom.
She shot a shocked glance of reproof at him. ‘Not in public!’ she hissed, trying to look suitably outraged.
A further diversion, which relieved Pedro’s feeling of strangeness in his own home, was created by the sound of hob-nailed boots in the hall, as Jean Baptiste Saitua and two of his sons stepped tentatively through the open front door; it did not take long for the Basque community to learn through the grapevine any bit of news, like a return from sea, and these old friends of the entire family felt free to step in and inquire how Pedro was.
Grandpa leaned back in his chair to look down the hall. ‘Come in,’ he shouted. ‘How are you, Jean – Domingo – Vicente?’
They tramped in and shook Pedro’s hand and slapped him on the back, while Rosita quietly slid over to the fireplace, to remove the chicken casserole from the oven and place it on the warming shelf above the fire; she winked at Aunt Maria, sitting quietly watching the scene. ‘Heaven only knows when we’ll get our tea,’ she muttered to her sister. ‘Would you like another glass of wine?’
Maria smiled gently and nodded. ‘Yes.’
Grandma, equally resigned to a long session of male reminiscences, was already getting more glasses and another bottle of wine. Jean Baptiste was a bosun with a small Basque shipping company sailing out of Liverpool; he had a couple of nights’ leave. Domingo was a ferryman, and Vicente was in his last year at school. After much joking, Vicente was allowed a glass of wine, though Jean Baptiste said his mother would probably be after him, if she smelled it on his breath.
The cakes intended for dessert were brought out and handed round, and the party became quite merry. Pedro abandoned hope of a bath that evening, and Rosita was beginning to wonder if she could stretch her chicken casserole to feed three extra men, when Maria began to cough violently. The hilarity ceased immediately, and Grandma said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll take her upstairs – it’s just the smoke.’
Fat, jolly Jean Baptiste quickly rose from the table, however, his heavy jowls suddenly drooping. ‘Ah! I forgot!’ He looked round the room, thick with blue tobacco smoke. ‘I’m sorry, Maria.’ He turned to Grandpa, and said, ‘We can meet in the Baltic later on; some of the other lads’ll be sure to be there.’
With grave dignity, he eased himself and his sons out of the crowded room, calling his thanks to Grandma for the wine and cake.
His sons clattered down the steps to the pavement, while he paused at the top, to speak to Juan and Pedro. ‘The wife told me Maria was back home. I thought she must be well again. How is she?’
Grandpa’s shoulders went up in a hopeless shrug. ‘They can’t do anything for her – but you mustn’t worry about the tobacco smoke; she loves to be part of what’s going on. If we put her upstairs all the time, she’d die of loneliness.’
‘Of course, poor girl. It must be a terrible worry to you.’
He turned to Pedro. ‘See you later, lad.’
And Pedro, who simply wanted to go to bed with his wife, nodded agreement.
Chapter Nine (#ulink_88f2ccda-c91f-5917-a1a9-0d0b94caeb95)
While Micaela unbolted the back door to open it, to let out the tobacco smoke, Rosita quickly filled a glass of water and handed it to Manuel. ‘Give this to Auntie; it’ll help her stop coughing.’
The little boy obediently took the glass over to his struggling aunt. Rosita leaned over the sink to heave up the sash window; it had been partially open during the Saituas’ visit; now she struggled to push it up further, but after a couple of inches, it stuck in its rotting wooden frame. ‘Blast,’ she muttered, ‘I’ll have to tell the rent collector when he comes.’
Micaela pushed her slightly aside, so that she could damp a towel under the tap. As she turned and wiggled her way between the scattered kitchen chairs to get to Maria, she said grimly, ‘You can tell him – but don’t expect him to do anything. Better to get your father to have a look at it.’
Maria had been coughing so violently that she had not been able to take the glass of water from Manuel; he was standing by her, wide-eyed, not knowing what to do.
The sick woman held a big man’s handkerchief over her mouth to catch the blood-streaked phlegm which she was coughing up.
‘It’s all right, Mannie, dear. Put the glass on the little table, and go and help your mam.’ Micaela gently wiped her daughter’s face with the damp cloth, and, as fresh air entered the room, the coughing lessened enough for Maria to be eased on to the oil-cloth-covered sofa and be propped up with a myriad of patchwork cushions. Her mother covered her with a knitted shawl, and persuaded her to take a sip or two of water.
After chatting for a minute or two with Jean Baptiste Saitua, Juan and Pedro sat down on the front doorstep to continue their smoke. They remained there, in companionable silence, until Rosita called them in to eat.
While Rosita took a bellowing Francesca out of her cradle and put her to the breast under the cover of her shawl, Micaela served the family. She put a plate of food in front of Rosita, so that she, too, could eat, while nursing the baby.
Before sitting down, Pedro looked across at his sister-in-law, lying limply on the sofa. ‘Sorry the smoke made you cough, Maria. Cigarette smoke’s the worst. I’ll smoke outside in future.’
The kindly meant words spoken softly in Basque brought tears of weakness to Maria’s eye. She made a small gesture with her hand, as if to say it did not matter.
Micaela took a little bowl, put a spoonful of rice in it, and covered it with a ladle of gravy from the casserole. Very slowly, teaspoonful by teaspoonful, she got the food into the invalid. Only then did she sit down to eat herself.
Pedro had been praising the dinner to Rosita, and she smiled happily, while she shifted the baby to the other breast. She remembered suddenly what had happened when she had bought the hens in the market, and she told him the story of the third hen, retrieved from the bank windowsill.
Juan was silent during this recital. He carefully masticated his last piece of chicken and swallowed it, and, with his fingernail, released a bit of meat that had lodged between his front teeth. He did not laugh at the story; he sounded grumpy, as he said, ‘I hope you paid for that chicken?’
Rosita laughed. ‘We paid for the two we bought.’
‘The third one was dead when we found it,’ Micaela told him. She obviously expected Juan to shrug and say no more. But the old man stiffened up. He rubbed his beard, as he always did when thinking something over. ‘So you didn’t pay for it?’
‘Well, of course not. We just found it dead.’ She put down her fork.
‘But it was still good enough to eat?’
‘You’ve just eaten it! Rosita wouldn’t cook anything that had gone bad.’
Grandpa looked at her frigidly. ‘In that case, shouldn’t you have gone back and paid for it?’
Micaela was annoyed at this. She replied huffily. ‘It was lost – and we found it. Anybody else who’d found it would have taken it.’
‘But you asked for the cage to be opened. If you hadn’t, it would not have been lost.’
Manuel realized that a sharp family tiff was in the offing, and he wondered if he could get down from the table, without first asking Grandpa. His grandfather was looking extremely grim, however, and he decided he had better sit very quietly and not draw attention to himself.
Micaela tossed her head. ‘Tush!’ she exclaimed. ‘The poultry man must’ve believed it had got crushed underfoot in the crowd – or in the traffic. He’ll never know we found it.’
Juan’s long, dark face darkened further, his beard tilted up as if in pride. Pedro discreetly kept his mouth shut.
‘My dear, it should be paid for; it was our fault it was lost.’ Though the words were not unkind, it was an order.
‘Juan! You’re being unreasonable. You really are.’ Impatiently, Grandma made to rise from the table. ‘He’ll have forgotten about it by now.’
‘I want it paid for. He won’t’ve forgotten that the whole hassle was caused by a bunch of Basque women, and he’ll talk about it. We’ve got to live here; and we Basques have a good reputation – and it’s small things that keep that reputation up.’ He slapped his hand crossly on the tabletop. ‘And what will your grandchild think? That if he can get away with something, it’s automatically all right?’ His gold tooth flashed between his beard and his moustache. ‘Not on your sweet life! What a Basque takes, he pays for.’
‘Really, Juan!’ Grandma was trembling now, her face flushed, her fingertips on the table to steady herself. Rosita opened her mouth to join in, but was quelled by a look from Juan.
‘Listen to me. You and Manuel – I want him to go, too – go back to the market tomorrow and pay for that bird.’
‘But, Papa …’
‘Tomorrow!’
Grandma took a big breath, and then said, ‘Well, if you feel that strongly about it, Manuel and I can walk up and do it.’ Then she spat out, ‘But I think you’re being terribly fussy!’
Grandpa got up from the table. ‘I know what I’m about,’ he growled. ‘Come on, Pedro, let’s get down to the Baltic; Jean Baptiste’ll be waiting.’
Chapter Ten (#ulink_42169a00-cae2-5b2b-8c2c-6598c3d67a78)
Calmly clipping the hedge in the early-morning peace of his Victoria garden, Old Manuel smiled over this episode, which he had included in his notes for Lorilyn as an example of the stiff honesty of Basques; and wondered if he should also include what extraordinarily able smugglers they were.
‘What are you laughing at?’ asked a cheery voice from behind the hedge.
Surprised at his peace being intruded upon, he told Sharon Herman that it was a memory of his childhood; and continued clipping along the hedge, while he asked politely how she was.
Sharon had a plate of buttered toast in her hand, and as she followed him down the hedge, she continued to eat. ‘I’m just fine,’ she told him. ‘Got myself an apartment, but the possession date isn’t for a month. So Veronica says to stay with her till it’s ready.’
‘She’s very kind,’ Old Manuel replied dryly, and put his shears down, while he pulled at an old bird’s nest tangled in the hedge.
‘She is, isn’t she?’
I wish Veronica wasn’t so persistent, thought Old Manuel. High above his neighbour’s roof a gull soared effortlessly and he speculated idly that in another few seconds it would dive to snatch a piece of Sharon’s toast. But she turned suddenly towards him, and the gull flew swiftly seaward.
‘Tell me what you were laughing at,’ she demanded playfully.
He told her the story of the lost hen. ‘My grandfather knew that it isn’t enough to be honest – if you were foreign immigrants, like we were, you’ve got to be seen to be honest.’
As he slowly clipped his way down the length of the hedge, he told her of his Basque origins and the tiny community near the Wapping Dock. Then he paused, to hold his shears in his left hand, while he carefully stretched the fingers of his right hand. He saw her glance at his hand, and said, with a rueful smile, ‘It’s a touch of arthritis. Hurts sometimes.’
She nodded sympathetically, and he went on, ‘I never thought of being foreign – I were born in Liverpool and christened in St Peter’s. All the little kids I played with were born there – though their dads came from all over the world – as near as Ireland or as far as the Philippines.’
‘Like Canada.’ Sharon bit into another piece of toast with strong, even teeth.
He agreed. She looked much healthier than she had done when Veronica had brought her to his house, and he was glad. Her fair skin had acquired a slight tan, and her blonde hair was blowing in a wild tangle in the wind. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but she had a pleasant open look about her and her figure had a cuddly roundness which reminded him of his mother. She was very likeable, he decided. Easy to talk to.
‘I’ve got to get to work,’ she told him briskly, and his wise eyes nearly vanished amid the wrinkles, as he smiled goodbye to her.
The next time he saw her she was seated on a huge log on the beach, staring disconsolately out on to a placid pale-blue sea. She was obviously crying, her shoulders heaving under her sweater.
He hesitated in embarrassment. They were the only people on the shore that morning. She must have felt sure of her solitude to cry so openly, he debated uncertainly with himself. Should he go to her or not?
Aware of a sense of inadequacy at the idea of dealing with a young woman’s tears, he decided to avoid invading her privacy, so he curved up the beach to pass well behind her. He was sure that she had not noticed him, but the crunch of pebbles under his feet drew her attention, and she turned a woebegone face towards him. She lifted a hand in slow salute and, embarrassed, he waved back, continuing to plod slowly on his chosen route.
She quickly took a paper handkerchief out of her pocket and wiped her face and blew her nose. He had only just passed her when she shouted, ‘Are you walking home?’
He stopped, and nodded his head a little guiltily.
‘Wait a minute, and I’ll walk with you.’
‘I’m rather slow,’ he called back. Though her distress troubled him, he hoped she would change her mind and allow him to go on walking alone. She ran lightly over the pebbles, however, until she reached him.
He looked her up and down in a bemused way. She had cried enough to make her face swollen and her eyes mournful; yet she did not seem to want to hide it. ‘I guess you didn’t hurt yourself, if you can run like that,’ he remarked tentatively, to give her an opening if she wished to explain her distress.
As she fell into step alongside him, she asked with a tight, wry grimace, ‘You mean you thought I was crying because I’d fallen or something?’
He considered her query, and then said, ‘Well, I didn’t know. I didn’t want to intrude. I thought I should let you be.’
She sighed. ‘I’m OK. I was feeling a bit down, that’s all – a bit lonely in a new place, I guess.’
Walking on pebbles was tiring him, and he wished he had taken the path at the top of the cliff. ‘You’re working in the new ward at the hospital, I think Veronica mentioned?’
‘The Palliative Care Unit? Yes.’
‘Patients who are going to die are put in there? Must be hard on you.’
‘Not really.’ She went on to tell him how worthwhile she thought her work was. Her enthusiasm surprised him.
Though he was interested in what she was saying, he began to feel that he must sit down to rest; there was an unpleasant tightness in his chest. He stopped, and said, ‘At the top of the cliff staircase here, there’s a little park kiosk that sells coffee. Would you like a cup?’ He was panting slightly and his speech came slowly. ‘We have to get up the cliff, somewhere, to get home.’
She looked at him with concern. ‘Could you climb the steps all right?’
‘If I do a few at a time.’
She was immediately practical. ‘Let’s sit on the bottom steps for a few minutes – until you get your breath.’
Manuel thankfully sat down suddenly on the steps, and they listened to the waves lapping on the beach for about ten minutes. Then she asked, ‘Have you seen your doctor lately?’
Manuel’s mouth turned up in a quick grin; he was feeling better. ‘Saw him in the winter. He always says the same thing – you’re in great shape – for your age! He’s a nice kid.’
She laughed. A wonderful old dear, gentle to the point of passivity.
She judged him wrongly. Manuel was feeling a little exhausted – but he was cussing inwardly at his weakness. He got slowly to his feet, and looked down at her quite blankly. What was the girl’s name? For the life of him, he could not recall it.
Unaware of his dilemma, she took his hand to help him up the wooden staircase.
‘I’m all right,’ he told her a trifle peevishly, and she quickly withdrew her hand. Old people could be quite tetchy about being helped, she knew.
Over coffee and muffins, which he insisted on paying for, he sat quietly for a few minutes, thinking that Jack Audley would be highly amused when he told him that he had, that morning, taken a bright young thing out to coffee!
‘Why were you crying?’ he finally asked her baldly, and then felt that he was being inquisitive and should not have said anything. She answered him without hesitation, however, and told him, ‘We lost a patient last night, not unexpectedly. It was her widowed daughter’s reaction that got me. She had lived with her mother for years. She’s got no children; and she was beside herself.’ She paused, her expression desolate. ‘I guess I could relate to her feeling of being bereft.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The feeling that nobody is left to care what happens to you.’
‘Tush. A bright young woman like you must have lots of friends – and even parents still alive!’ He tried to sound cheering.
Sharon bit her lower lip. ‘Well, you see I’m divorced, and I don’t have any kids – and Mum and Pop live in Florida; I’m their only child.’ She sighed. ‘When I was married, I went to live in Toronto. My husband wasn’t the social type, so we didn’t make any friends to speak of. I was a fool to marry him. We weren’t really suited to each other from day one.’
He nodded understandingly. ‘So what brought you here?’
‘Well, I need to work – and I’m a qualified nurse. I saw the ad for this job at the hospital, and applied. When I was a very little girl, I lived here – and it’s such a truly beautiful place. I’m glad I came – but I’ve got to start again, making friends.’ She smiled suddenly, and said, ‘At least I’ve made one, haven’t I?’
Manuel gave a little chuckle. ‘Of course,’ he assured her. Loneliness makes strange bedfellows, he thought with amusement; then decided hastily that ‘bedfellows’ was not quite the word – not at your age, old boy, he told himself.
She caught the smile that flicked across his face. ‘Now, what are you laughing at?’ she demanded, smiling herself.
‘I don’t think I can explain it to you,’ he replied with a chuckle. Then he laughed.
Laughter is infectious and soon they were giggling like a couple of children, about nothing.
Nevertheless, when he got home, he was thankful to crawl on to his bed. But he was still smiling to himself.
Chapter Eleven (#ulink_8874814c-c299-5c01-a85e-23e9f7770479)
In June 1914, Rosita announced that she wanted Pedro’s family to see Francesca, who was their first granddaughter; Pedro himself was at sea, but to Juan and Micaela it seemed a good opportunity to take a holiday, so a visit to Spain was arranged. Little Manuel was thrilled.
Juan tried to persuade Maria to accompany them. ‘You could go up into the mountains with Rosita to visit the Echaniz family, while your grandmother and I are in Bilbao. It would do you good to breathe mountain air,’ he told her.
Maria was feeling a little better and, at first, had been tempted to make the journey. Then, when she discovered that the family would be travelling by sea, she said she could not face being seasick.
Though horribly disappointed, Micaela said she would remain at home to care of her.
Rosita looked at her mother’s bent, tired figure and, at first, said nothing; instead, she went to see Bridget Connolly next door. Rosita often looked after Mary and Joey, when their mother was helping to nurse a sick neighbour or delivering a baby. Now, she asked a favour on Micaela’s behalf.
Would Bridget keep an eye on Maria, if Micaela went to Spain for three weeks in July? If Bridget could watch her during the day and cook for her, she thought that Mrs Saitua’s daughter, Panchika, could be persuaded to sleep overnight in the Barinèta home and give Maria a bit of breakfast.
‘Panchika doesn’t have to be at work till eight o’clock,’ she explained to Bridget. ‘She’s got a daily job as a cook-general in a fine house in Princes Road, with very nice people.
‘Maria can get herself to the can in the yard, now,’ she added. ‘And she can keep a fire going, if someone’ll bring in the coal for her and start it each morning. And she can wash her hands and face at the kitchen sink. But she’s not strong enough to stand and cook – or go to the shops, or anything like that.’
Bridget was seated by her own fire, sipping a mug of vintage tea – it had been simmering on the hob for hours. At Rosita’s suggestion, she nodded her head; her black hair was done up in untidy, coiled plaits, from which the hairpins constantly threatened to fall out; before answering Rosita, she absently pushed one back into her hair.
Plump, patient and very knowledgeable about the needs of the sick, she looked up at her neighbour, and said, ‘Oh, aye, I could do that, if you could manage to pay for the food I’d give her. It’d only be the price of a potato or two and what we’re havin’ ourselves – me housekeeping won’t stretch to feed another.’ At the latter statement, her voice was full of apology.
‘I’d get the coal up from the cellar for her, Mam,’ her daughter Mary volunteered; she had been listening avidly to what Rosita had had to say. ‘And I could chop some wood chips for her every day – and put it all in the hearth. It wouldn’t take a minute, then, for Panchika to make her fire for her.’
Panchika Saitua, a grumbling, middle-aged spinster, was ordered by her mother to sleep in her neighbour’s bedroom and to get up half an hour earlier, so that she could build Maria’s fire for her and give her tea and bread and margarine for breakfast.
Although she had not seen so much of her since she had been in service, Panchika knew Maria quite well; her working day was long and exacting and the idea of making the effort to visit someone, except, perhaps, on her Sunday off once a month, filled her with added gloom.
In the event, however, she thoroughly enjoyed her time with Maria, away from under her mother’s thumb. They spent an hour or two each evening before bedtime contentedly commiserating with each other; so much so, that, even after the family returned from Spain, Panchika discovered that she could endure to walk down the road in her carpet slippers, in the late evening, for an hour’s visit to Maria.
Maria was very appreciative of her visits, and missed her sorely when she failed to let herself in and come through to Rosita’s busy kitchen, to sink on to the chair by the old sofa, and gasp, ‘Ee! Me pore feet!’
Once the trip to Bilbao had been arranged, the family looked forward to it very much. The summer of 1914 was a gorgeous one and they could hope for a pleasantly calm passage. Grandma included in the food basket a gift of fresh eatables for the crew, whose diet was very monotonous. The present was much appreciated.
It was clear that Juan enjoyed such temporary returns to sea. It gave him a fresh audience of younger Basques, to whom he could relate stories of his early days sailing before the mast, when they had none of these new-fangled steam engines. ‘Seamanship was seamanship, in those days,’ he told them. ‘Rounded the Horn four times, I did, in storms like you’d never believe – and the cold!’ He shuddered.
This time, one young man told him, with equal pride, that he’d gone through the Panama Canal on an experimental voyage the previous year. ‘We were scared stiff,’ he said, ‘because we were afraid landslides would block us in, and we’d die of fever if we had to come out overland.’
‘Oh, aye. You’re right about the fever. That canal’s a waste of good money. Whole crews’ll get fever going through it – like the navvies building it get sick and die.’
When they arrived in Bilbao, they were met by Juan Barinèta’s brother, who looked even tougher and older than Juan himself. Little Manuel viewed him with awe. Rosita said he worked in an iron foundry, and that that accounted for the mass of white scars that crisscrossed his hairy arms, his hands and his face. ‘They’re from burns,’ she explained.
Great-uncle was a widower. His two single daughters looked after him; they also took care of Uncle Agustin, Rosita’s brother, when he was in port or out of work. Both young women did piecework at home, and their eyes were black-rimmed and bloodshot from long hours spent peering at the silk shawls they embroidered. They were gentle creatures, who, much to Manuel’s annoyance, adored baby Francesca and presented her with an exquisitely embroidered bonnet which they had made for her. They patted him on his head and exclaimed at how much he had grown; then they encouraged him to go out into the street to play with another small boy, who had wandered in from next door, to stare at the new arrivals.
In the narrow, medieval street sloping down to the river Nervión, he felt, at first, closed in, and unnerved at facing a number of strange urchins, who looked him over as if he were a peculiar animal of some kind. When the boys discovered, however, that he had never tried to play pelota vasca, they produced a rock-hard ball and showed him how to hit it against a wall with his bare hands. They approved of him when he bore stoically the pain of it, and he was almost overwhelmed by their friendly advice and instruction; he went back to his great-uncle’s house with several self-appointed coaches in tow, and badly bruised hands.
Before the evening meal, his hands were washed and regretfully cooed over by his two second cousins. Grandpa laughed, and said they would soon toughen up; he showed Manuel two of his fingers which had been disjointed when he had played as a young man.
At the end of a week, he was leaping about in front of the wall with the same abandonment – and lack of finesse – as the other youngsters. Then he was told that he and his mother and Francesca would be going up into the mountains to see Grandpa and Grandma Echaniz, while Juan and Micaela remained in Bilbao.
As a baby and a toddler, he had already made three journeys to Spain, but he had few clear recollections of them. Going first by train and then in a rickety donkey cart up narrow roads into the foothills was a new adventure. He tucked his small aching hands underneath his jersey, and was relieved not to have to play pelota that day.
Grandpa and Grandma Echaniz were younger than Micaela and Juan Barinèta, and Little Manuel noted that they did not talk so much. They greeted the little family, however, with bear hugs and kind kisses; small in stature, sun-burned and stolid, they were not otherwise particularly demonstrative, but it was obvious that they were fond of their beautiful daughter-in-law and very taken by Francesca’s blue eyes and red hair.
Rosita explained to Manuel that, once upon a time, his father had had two brothers to play with up here in the mountains, but they were now with God. Later, Manuel felt that perhaps the loss of her two middle sons accounted for Grandma Echaniz’s affection for himself. She took him into the big living-room of their wooden house and made him her special companion. He had a great time, helping to punch down bread dough and learning how to milk a cow – he had stood, astonished, watching a pail slowly fill with milk. His grandmother let him try to milk a particularly patient cow; and he was wild with excitement when he managed to spray himself with milk. She gave him a small basket and showed him where to find eggs from the hens and ducks. He was warned not to go too close to a nanny-goat tethered to a tree in case she butted him. He discovered with amazement that she also produced milk.
The donkey lived under the house, in a small stable, next to a series of storerooms, though, since it was summertime, it was left to graze in a little field near the house; his grandfather amused him by giving him a ride on it occasionally.
While Rosita sat on the high front steps in the sun and nursed Francesca, Grandpa Echaniz took him, one morning, further up the mountain to see his father’s surviving elder brother, Uncle Vicente, who was shepherding the family’s flock of sheep. The climb made all the aches he had acquired playing pelota ache a lot more.
At first, he was nervous of the sheep, which looked quite large to him, despite the fact that they had been sheared of their winter coats. The bellwether ram lifted its nose out of a weed patch and looked him up and down with cold brown eyes. Then, satisfied, it returned to its grazing. When Manuel moved, the other sheep bounced away from him, towards the bellwether, whose bell tinkled as he led the flock a little away from the strangers.
They approached a series of rough shelters, fronted by a stone hut, but could not find Vicente. While his grandfather looked for him further up the mountain, Manuel turned to look back along the path they had just traversed.
Far below him lay the valley dark with trees, interspersed with tiny fields nearly ready for harvesting. From the chimneys of toy houses curled the smoke from kitchens like Grandma’s. He could see a whole village, with a church spire, and a road winding through it. It was very quiet, except for the occasional jingle of the bellwether’s bell and the shush-shush of the sheep as they followed him. To a child brought up amid the constant racket of machinery and traffic, it felt unearthly, and he was relieved when Uncle Vicente shouted that he was coming down; he had been sitting on a promontory further up, from which he could see the whole flock at a glance. When Manuel looked up, he saw a tall, lanky man coming slowly down towards his grandfather, who had climbed a little way to meet him. From under the man’s black beret fell the same golden hair as his father had, and the sun glinted on his beard, stained with tobacco smoke just as his father’s was.
Vicente greeted his father, and then came running down the slope towards Manuel. He flung down his staff and picked the boy up to toss him in the air with a friendly shout. Then he put him down on his feet again, and, while he held the child’s hand, he looked into his face. ‘You look exactly like my mother,’ he announced. ‘Her dark hair and eyes. Doesn’t he, Dad?’
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/helen-forrester/the-liverpool-basque/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Helen Forrester
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: Another moving and heart-warming tale set in Merseyside from the author of Twopence to Cross the Mersey.In the early years of this century, many Basques left their homeland in the Pyrenees, between France and Spain, to seek a better life in the New World. Most passed through the great port of Liverpool on their way. The family of little Manuel Echaniz stayed.The Liverpool Basque is the story of Manuel’s childhood and coming of age in the teeming streets of the Mersey docklands. It is a story of poverty, comradeship, hardship and generosity. Brought up by women while the men are at sea, Manuel grows up with a fierce pride in his heritage and a powerful will to survive in an era of deprivation and unemployment. Against all odds, he gets himself an education of sorts and sets off on the long voyage of his life.