Читать книгу The Liverpool Basque - Helen Forrester - Страница 14

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.