The Liverpool Basque (19 page)

As Pedro agreed, she sat down by a little mahogany table. He half rose to go, but she saw the movement. ‘Stay a bit,’ she urged. ‘Betty’s making the tea. It’s nice to meet Manuel’s father.’ Within her, she was acutely aware of the handsome man before her and was slightly ashamed of herself. How could a decent Catholic woman feel like that?

To cover her embarrassment, she plied Pedro with quick questions about where in the Pyrenees his family lived and confided that her husband’s and her own grandparents had come from Pamplona. As she spoke of Pamplona, she shyly
changed from English into Basque, and Pedro smiled and spoke Basque in return.

While the adult conversation flowed back and forth, Manuel watched Arnador. Though his colour was better, he reclined awkwardly on the sofa. His eyes were closed and he was, for once, silent. ‘Is it still hurting?’ Manuel whispered.

Arnador opened his eyes, and nodded.

‘Sorry,’ Manuel muttered.

The day after Old Manuel had written for Lorilyn how Arnador had been bitten by a horse, he awoke to a flawless summer morning. When he looked across the drive at the Strait dappled with sunshine, he decided that he would take the
Rosita
out in the afternoon; if the wind were right, he would sail her up the coast. First, however, he had to take the rose up to Kathleen’s grave and then go to buy some much-needed groceries.

Because of the need to carry the groceries home, he took the car out and carefully drove it up to the cemetery. He did not linger there very long; just stood looking at her memorial stone, which was brightly lit by a shaft of sunlight, and then, with a sigh, went back to the car, and drove downtown to Safeway’s.

In the car park, he parked carefully between a couple of trucks, and went into the shop. As he entered, a blast of air-conditioning made him wish he had put on a pullover; sudden changes of temperature bothered him sometimes.

He looked very frail as, with slow care, he moved down the aisles, picking out the things he needed. Sharon Herman noticed his entry, as she contemplated the offerings of the meat department. His frailty and the resigned droop of his shoulders moved her in a way she could not explain to herself. She quickly dropped two lamb chops into her basket, and walked towards the aisle down which he had vanished. She soon caught up with him, as he stopped to pick up a tin of coffee.

Manuel was startled by a plump, soft hand being laid
over his thin brown one pushing the shopping trolley. ‘How are you?’ asked the feminine voice.

He jumped, and looked up.

Not Veronica, thanks be to Holy Mary, but her house guest. His brown eyes twinkled amid a myriad of wrinkles, and his wide mouth curved up into his usual quirky smile, as, with some relief, he assured her that he was very well. He could not think of anything more to say, so, on the spur of the moment, she asked him if he would like to have a cup of coffee with her. She joked that the store had a small corner with a coffee machine, which was meant for the use of senior citizens – she was tired and needed to sit down – but she was really too young to sit there without embarrassment – it would be so much easier if he could spare the time to sit with her!

He laughed, and wheeled his trolley over to the corner she indicated. They filled paper cups with coffee, and sat down at a small table. Manuel put two packets of sugar into his coffee and stirred it with a plastic stick. ‘Bridget! That’s it,’ he said, as he looked earnestly into her face.

She looked so startled that he had to smile again. ‘You remind me of someone I knew when I was a small boy. She delivered babies and often she nursed people who were sick. She actually brought me into the world. She wasn’t a qualified nurse, like you, of course.’ He was too shy to tell her that everybody loved and trusted Bridget.

She was interested, and, because it had been in the forefront of his mind the previous evening, he told her how his friend Arnador’s shoulder had been treated at home with arnica; and its partial dislocation discovered over twenty years later when he volunteered for the Royal Air Force.

‘I used to carry his school satchel for him, because his shoulder hurt him – and he never played cricket again – or pelota. But I’m grateful for it,’ he assured her. ‘If he had gone into the Air Force, he would probably have been
killed in the Battle of Britain – so many of them died. As it is, he’s still pretty spry. Best friend I could ever hope for.’

‘Really?’

Manuel’s face was suddenly a little wistful. ‘He’s a great lad. I get a letter from him most months. I wish he were nearer.’

‘Has he ever come over here?’

‘Oh, yes. He came a couple of times when Kathleen was alive. And he’s been twice since – since she passed away. It’s my turn to go to Liverpool.’

‘Are you going?’

‘I hadn’t thought of it – not seriously, that is.’

‘Perhaps you should.’ She did not want to point out that, at their age, one or the other of them might die quite soon.

He caught the implication of her remark, however, and considered it for a moment. Then he replied, ‘Perhaps I should. I won’t tell Faith, though. At least not until the last moment.’

‘Who won’t you tell?’

‘My daughter Faith. She always worries when I travel. Says I’m too old.’

‘Live dangerously!’ she advised. ‘Do what you want to do.’

He laughed, as he turned to look at her. ‘You’re dead right,’ he told her. ‘I will.’

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918, the great war to end all wars came to a finish. Throughout the war, my daily life had gone on much the same, wrote Old Manuel to Lorilyn; yet, behind everything I did, it lay like a threatening black shadow; your Auntie Francesca and I used to dread that Father would be killed, and we were so relieved every time he docked, especially when he came home a few days after the war ended. We knew then that he was safe.

On 11 November, Rosita stood on her doorstep, leaning against the doorjamb, one arm round ten-year-old Manuel, and thanked God that the child had been too young to serve in the conflict.

At her feet, on the step, sat Francesca, aged five, and Little Maria, just four. Between them sat Grandma Micaela. They were watching fireworks rocket into the sky, and riotously drunk neighbours dancing round a bonfire. Micaela could actually see nothing, but she could hear the crackle of the fire, the reports of the fireworks and the shouts and shrieks of the dancers; earlier, she had heard all the church bells of Liverpool ring out the victory. In her mind, however, she heard the frantic weeping for those who would not return home – and she saw the shocked faces of wives whose husbands had returned so badly mauled that they would have to be nursed for the rest of their lives – on minuscule pensions, if they were lucky enough to get one.

While the little girls chattered excitedly and drew her
attention to scenes she was too blind to see, she fingered the rosary in her pocket. Her faith had been tried to the limit by the senseless slaughter of the war; and yet, she ruminated sadly, what hope had she to cling to, other than the belief that God knew what he was doing.

Francesca snuggled down closer to her. ‘I’m cold, Granny,’ she said in Basque.

The old woman opened her shawl and wrapped it round her little granddaughter.

The huge bonfire fell in with a crash and a rain of sparks, and some of the more noisy dancers went in a mob to the Baltic Fleet. Joey Connolly asked his father to take him closer to watch a few Catherine wheels whizzing bravely on warehouse doors. Pat agreed, and asked Manuel if he would like to come, too.

Rosita had expected Manuel to leap at the offer. But he scuffed his feet, and said he did not want to go. Though he and Arnador often played with Mary and Joey, he was beginning to feel oddly uncomfortable in his own neighbourhood. A better education and a growing awareness of a bigger and more interesting world than that of Wapping Dock or being a seaman was beginning to make him feel cut off. At times, when playing in the street with the international collection of children from nearby, he found himself carefully silent; they had once or twice given him a hard time when he had made some ill-considered remark, which, in St Francis Xavier’s, would have passed for humour.

On Armistice Night, he sensed the terrible sadness beneath the jollity of the singing, dancing people, and he felt sick.

Arnador, bespectacled and earnest, had never shared his schoolfellows’ jingoistic acceptance of the nobility of dying in muddy trenches; there had to be better ways of stopping the Germans, in his opinion. He read the papers far more
thoroughly than Manuel did, and observed the increasing number of discharged, wounded men on the streets, many of them dressed in hospital blue. He told his father flatly that he would never be so stupid as to volunteer and probably would not answer a call-up.

Mr Ganivet lectured him angrily that, though he was a Basque, England was his country and he should be prepared to lay down his life for it.

Afterwards, Arnador told Manuel about the ensuing family row, and said angrily, ‘It doesn’t make sense. Who wants to be blown to bits? I bet the Germans don’t.’

Manuel was quite shaken by Arnador’s passionate outburst. He responded promptly, by saying, ‘Well, they can stop fighting.’

Yet, twenty years later, when the German Nazis threatened Britain, Arnador had tried to get into the Royal Air Force. Perhaps he had felt that a fundamental principle was at stake that time, Manuel decided.

One of Manuel’s saddest memories of the First World War was that of Effie Halloran sobbing bitterly in his mother’s kitchen-living-room, because both her boys had been killed. He had wanted to run away from grief so close to home. But he had sat at the kitchen table trying to do his homework, and chewed the end of his wooden penholder. Awful things happened to women, as well as to men, he had thought. Men went to sea and faced danger daily – that, in his head, was the essence of being a man – but he felt uneasily that the women at home had to be pretty brave, as well.

Men poured home, ships were laid up, war factories closed. Women who had worked hard and well during the war years were impatiently shoved aside and told to go back home and raise a family.

Women resented this, not only because their modest wages had given them a modicum of independence, but
because for many of them earning was a necessity; they had lost husbands, sweethearts, brothers and fathers, and had, therefore, to maintain themselves. It was some time before such women were absorbed by light industry as welcome cheap labour.

The land fit for heroes was slow in arriving. Pedro’s ship returned to its old routes down the west coast of Africa, and he took good care not to give a hint of his desire for a move to another company, until he was sure of a ‘hit’. Meanwhile, cargoes were not so easy to come by and, to cut costs, the quality of food supplied by the owners deteriorated from poor to worse. Seamen and engine room crew were increasingly recruited from Lagos at wages much lower than those asked for by Liverpool men. The officers made little complaint; they were worried enough about retaining their own jobs, and, as repairs were deferred, how long the old tub would stay afloat.

When ashore, Pedro looked up all the men he knew who worked for de Larrinaga, most of whose crews were Basque. His friends all said mournfully that the competition was wicked; every company had its own group of men who had served it before and who were competing anxiously for any vacancies.

Pedro understood the pressure only too well. Some of the Negroes in his current ship felt themselves to be so vulnerable to unemployment that they hastened to sign on for the next voyage immediately the previous one was completed, to make sure of retaining their job; in effect, they never stepped off the ship for months at a time.

In the event, another enemy swept through the population. Spanish flu, incurable, unstoppable, took thousands upon thousands of lives, particularly amongst young adults, already thinned out in Europe by the slaughter of the war. It left those who survived the attack weakened and deeply depressed. Ships’ crews were far from immune, and that was, perhaps, why a jubilant Pedro suddenly hit
on a berth with de Larrinaga in the
Esperanza Larrinaga
. It had a Liverpool crew, mostly Basque.

‘The wages aren’t a lot better,’ he told Rosita. ‘But the conditions are. Jean Baptiste knows the cook and says he’s great.’

He suggested that with the small increase in pay they might manage to send Francesca and Little Maria to a good school run by nuns; the fees were not very great. Rosita was overwhelmed that he should give such consideration to his small daughters. ‘I can’t think of anybody else who would try that hard for their girls,’ she told him, as she hugged him hard.

He kissed her and said, ‘I want them to have decent jobs – not to have to sew till their eyes drop out, like you had to when you were little.’

Remembering her long apprenticeship as a seamstress, Rosita was in hearty agreement with him.

A delighted Micaela expressed the hope that one of them would become a nun.

‘If she has a calling to it,’ replied Rosita cautiously. She had observed that her own small world of the dockside and the city centre was not returning to its pre-war pattern. The brighter girls were trying for clean factory jobs, or, better still, office work, which paid more.

Even the Church felt subtly different. A lot of her neighbours had never been particularly devout – but there was a wavering in the ready acceptance of priestly pronouncements, a sly shift in the way people addressed their hardworking Jesuit mentors – they were still polite, but not so respectful. Even her own belief had been shaken. How could one worship a God who had taken away Effie’s boys, her only joy in a bitterly hard life? It was all very well to tell the poor demented soul that it was God’s will – but what kind of God was he to allow men to murder each other?

As Manuel grew bigger, she worried constantly that he might fall into bad company. The church still offered a certain discipline in this regard, and she insisted that he say his prayers and attend Mass.

She was glad that he had a nice, steady friend in Arnador; only yesterday, he had brought his books to her house to do his homework with Manuel; and he had helped Francesca with the more difficult words she had to learn to spell. Two decent lads together could sustain each other.

She smiled as she went to get water and a big stick with which to clean the outside drains; she was so lucky to have Pedro and Manuel – and the girls. Best of all, Pedro had, at last, got a decent berth with a good company.