The Liverpool Basque (17 page)

His elders decided that if they all practised the most rigorous economy, they would manage to send him.

‘As well as fees, there’ll be tram fares – and uniform,’ Rosita fretted, suddenly afraid that she was being too ambitious.

Micaela looked up from her knitting. ‘We’ll manage,’ she assured her daughter serenely. She already saw a purple biretta covering her grandson’s tousled dark hair. God would provide, she was sure.

In 1916, when, at the age of eight, Manuel entered St Francis Xavier School, he felt very lonely; Joey and Brian showed no signs of being able to follow him. On his first day he feared that he might be the only Basque boy attending because he was the only one in his class. He soon discovered that there was a sprinkling of them in the upper classes, though they were drawn from all over the city. They ignored him because they did not know that he was a Basque – he was just another new pupil, younger than they were.

Occasionally he heard them speaking to each other in Basque, frequently making derogatory remarks about English boys who had been too rough with them, because they were slightly sallower in complexion than British boys.

Real fights were rare in the school yard, but one day proud Manuel was called a dago by a nine-year-old Scot. Furious, Manuel struck out with all his force at the scornful, freckled red face of the bigger lad. He became immediately embroiled in a fight with a known bully that he could not win. The other boys formed a circle to egg on the Scot. With his nose already bleeding, it was clear to anyone passing that, despite his best efforts, Manuel was getting the worst of the encounter.

Held down on the asphalt playground, Manuel took a punch in the eye which made him cry out.

His cry was followed by a sharp yelp from his antagonist, who received a quick series of kicks in his ribs from a tall, thin youth standing over the pair of them.

The newcomer scowled at the ring of boys. Then he bent down, got a good grip on the back of the braces of the enraged Scot and hauled him off Manuel. He shook the boy, as he hissed into his badly scratched face, ‘Pick on someone of your own size, you little twerp!’ He shoved the boy away into the crowd.

Lying on the asphalt, trying to get his breath, a surprised Manuel viewed his rescuer through his unhurt eye. He was even more surprised when the boy said curtly in Basque, ‘Get up.’

The back of Manuel’s head was throbbing badly where he had hit it when falling backwards. His nose was still dripping and his eye seemed to be swelling. He staggered slowly to his feet, while his rescuer snarled at the retreating boys, ‘Get going you stinking pack of cowards, before I tell on you.’ They reluctantly dispersed, taking the young Scot with them, muttering to each other as they went.

The Basque boy was several inches taller than Manuel, blond, blue-eyed and pallid-skinned. He looked Manuel up and down, and said again in Basque, ‘Gosh, you do look a mess. Better get cleaned up before a teacher sees you.’ He picked up a blazer lying on the ground. ‘Is this yours?’

Manuel nodded dumbly, as he steadied himself on his feet. He felt his nose running and wiped it along his shirt sleeve. He was shaken to see a long streak of blood on the white cotton. His mouth began to tremble, and he had a strong desire to cry.

‘We’ll go to the cloakroom,’ said the older boy more kindly. ‘And get you cleaned up. You should have more sense to keep out of fights you can’t win – he’s much heavier than you.’

Manuel humbly agreed. Then, as they trailed round the edge of the playground, so as not to disturb the various games of football being played with tennis balls, Manuel said furiously, ‘He called me a dago!’

Pale-blue eyes were turned reflectively upon him, to examine a face which already showed something of the long flat planes of cheek and jaw, an upward curving mouth with full lower lip, which would be his as a man. ‘Well, you’re dark, but you don’t look like a Spaniard,’ the older boy said at length. ‘Did you tell him you were Basque?’

‘Na. He probably wouldn’t know what a Basque is,’ responded Manuel scornfully. The blood was beginning to coagulate in his nose, and he badly wanted to blow it. The eye still stung painfully.

The other boy was grinning. He said, ‘Dad says nobody really knows who we are or where we came from.’

They reached the cloakroom with its scuffed floor and long lines of black, iron clothes hooks. A tiny washbasin, cracked and grubby, was affixed to the far wall, and next to it hung a roller towel.

Manuel managed to pull the roller towel far enough to damp it under the solitary tap and then wipe his face with it. Streaks of blood were left on the towel. He damped it again and pressed it against the hurt eye. His nose still oozed slightly so he wiped it again.

‘Don’t touch it any more,’ advised the strange boy. ‘It’ll dry up in a minute. Wash the muck off your hands and put on your blazer.’

Manuel obediently soaped his hands and left a fair amount of greyish foam on the soap tablet and in the sink.

‘You’ll pass now. There goes the bell. You’d better hurry!’

Manuel gulped. He did not want to return to his classroom, but he knew he must. ‘Thanks,’ he said heavily. ‘Thanks for hauling Stewart off me.’

‘It’s nothing,’ the boy replied, and turned to wander off to his own classroom, as if to belie his own instruction to hurry. When he had gone, Manuel gave his nose a further good wipe on the towel, put on his blazer and fled before
he could be chastised for the mess he had made. He slid quickly into his desk, and was, for once, thankful for the fat boy who sat in front of him and partially masked him from the teacher’s icy stare.

After his mother had washed his face for him and bathed the black eye, clucking her tongue at the damage, and he had had his tea, his grandmother was surprised at the question suddenly fired at her. ‘Granny, what
is
a Basque?’

Before answering him, she knitted the two stitches remaining on her left-hand needle. Then she replied with puzzlement, ‘Well,
we
are Basques, dumpling.’ Although she could barely see him, she sensed that the answer had not sufficed, that he was still in some kind of quandary, so she added, ‘From Bilbao.’

‘I know that. But a boy at school – a Basque – said that nobody really knows what a Basque is.’

Micaela rested her knitting in her lap, while she considered this assertion. Then she said, ‘People have always moved about in the world, so they say that they come from the place their parents settled in. After a while, they become part of that place and its history. Your great-grandfather told me, though, that Basques had
always
lived in the Pyrenees and had married each other – for thousands and thousands of years, long before people wrote down their history. And nobody was able to shift us from the mountains – not Arabs, not French, not Romans nor Spaniards. We’ve been there since time began, so that even the stories of our beginnings have been lost.’ She was suddenly interested about the boy he had mentioned, and inquired, ‘He was a real Basque?’

‘Yes – not from round here, though.’ Manuel had been leaning against the side of her chair, and now he made to get on her lap. She quickly swept her four sharp needles and ball of grey wool on to the floor. The chair wobbled furiously as Manuel settled himself comfortably in the
curve of her arm, and she laughed. ‘It’s a long time since you’ve done that,’ she told him. ‘You’re too big to be nursed. What was the boy’s name?’

He grinned up at her and laid his head on her shoulder. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. Though he was proud to go to St Francis Xavier’s, he had felt very lonely today, with no Joey or Brian to help him in a fight. He needed the comforting warmth of Grandma, who always had time for him. She was always there and always would be. Or would she?

Micaela felt a faint shudder go through the child’s thin body. ‘What is it, dumpling?’ she asked as she carefully stroked his hair back from the black eye.

Manuel hesitated, and then answered, ‘I was thinking of Auntie Maria.’

His grandmother sighed. ‘Yes, dear?’

‘I miss her – and Grandpa.’

‘We all do, dear.’ Micaela hugged him closer, as the fearsome pain of loss went through her once more. They sat in silent communion together, the chair rocking slightly under them.

There was the patter of his mother’s carpet slippers, as she came downstairs. She called back up to Mrs Halloran, ‘Don’t let the girls bother you – send them down if you’re tired of them.’ As she hurried into the living-room-kitchen, she said in a quieter tone to Micaela, ‘I don’t want them to spend too much time with Effie – the girls’ll learn bad manners.’

‘Tut! Effie was a parlourmaid once – she knows her manners,’ Micaela immediately admonished.

Rosita shrugged, and then began to discuss the strange Basque boy.

She leaned against the sink and folded her arms, which were aching from hours of washing clothes and bedding on a scrubbing board. ‘There are a few other Basques scattered round the town – you do hear about them occasionally. Mostly, they’ve been here a long, long time.’

‘I was glad he came along,’ Manuel said with feeling; his eye was aching badly.

His mother nodded. ‘You know, dear, you must learn not to get into fights.’

Manuel sat up straight in Micaela’s lap, and the rocking chair rocked rather violently. ‘Stewart called me a dago,’ he said indignantly.

Rosita sighed. ‘When you’re foreign, you have to ignore petty insults, my pet.’

‘I’m not foreign. I live here.’

‘Yes, dear. But you’re Basque, same as Brian is Chinese and Joey’s Irish.’

‘Are we all foreign?’

‘Down here, we are.’

Manuel slumped back into his grandmother’s arms and gave up.

About a week later, they met at the tram stop, two nondescript schoolboys in grey woollen shorts, their bare knees chapped by cold, damp winds. They both wore navy-blue gabardine macintoshes, and caps with the St Francis Xavier badge on them. Each carried on his back a satchel of books required for that evening’s homework. Neither boy looked particularly healthy, their complexions pale and eyes ringed.

Manuel ventured a shy grin, and the older boy nodded lordly acknowledgement of it.

A horsedrawn delivery van splashed through the puddles in the gutter. They both stepped back to avoid their shoes and socks being soaked, and the bigger boy asked, ‘What’s your name?’

‘Manuel Echaniz. What’s yours?’

‘Arnador – Arnador Ganivet. Where do you live?’

Manuel told him, and Arnador looked at him speculatively. Wapping Dock was where a lot of first-generation Basques lived. According to his father, they were poor and illiterate seamen working for de Larrinaga. It definitely was not what his mother would call a good address.
His
parents and his grandparents had all been born in Liverpool; they did not mix with common seamen’s families, though they were quite proud of their Basque origins. He wondered, if he brought a Basque boy home, which attitude would weigh heaviest with them, that he could speak good Basque or that he was lower class.

He decided that he did not care; he admired Manuel for having taken a bad licking from a bully while defending
his Basqueness. He grinned at Manuel, and asked, ‘How does your eye feel?’

Manuel grinned back. ‘It feels OK. It’s a bit yellow still. Where do you live – which tram do you take?’

‘I usually bike to school, but I couldn’t today – I’ve got a couple of broken spokes – my uncle’s going to put new ones in tonight. Anyway, I’m going across the water – I’m going out to tea with my cousin.’ He frowned, and added, ‘She’s a girl. Awful bore.’

As a cumbersome tram rolled down towards them, sparks flying from its pole when it touched a crossline, they stepped out into the street to get on it, and he added, ‘I live in Catherine Street. We’ve a flat – two floors.’ They swung up the winding stairs to the upper deck, and sat down together on a wooden, slatted seat at the front. As they took off their satchels and laid them at their feet, he went on, ‘A dentist has the ground floor. It’s handy for Dad – he’s a ship chandler, down on Chaloner Street. He likes to walk down the hill to work every day.’

Manuel was impressed; he had never before heard of a Basque who owned his own business – he discounted the Basque shipowners in the city – to him, they were as far removed from normal life as earls or lords were. In his own small, sea-going world, everyone worked for somebody else.

‘Have you got any brothers or sisters?’ Manuel asked.

‘One sister – Josefa. She’s a nurse at the Ear, Nose and Throat on Myrtle Street – she walks to work as well. She’s nearly nineteen. Have you got any?’

‘Two little sisters.’

‘What does your dad do?’

‘He goes to sea.’

They spent the rest of the journey down to the Pier Head exploring their interests in cricket and who they liked and disliked amongst the teaching staff at school.

As they descended from the tram, Arnador to catch the
ferry across the river, Manuel to cross the roads back to the Goree Piazzas and Strand Street to walk along to Wapping, they called cheerfully to each other, ‘’Bye. See you tomorrow.’

He was exhilarated by the new contact, and his mother was pleased when he told her about it; a slightly older Basque friend might smooth the path through school for Manuel.

A week, two games of football in the school yard, and a number of amiable conversations later, Arnador invited his new friend to Saturday tea.

Rosita was delighted. Scrubbed until his skin was red, and dressed in his Sunday shorts and best jersey, he walked up the hill to Catherine Street and nervously pressed the lower bell of two big brass ones by the Ganivets’ white enamelled front door.

He was received with mild approval by Mrs Ganivet, and, later on, by portly, bald Mr Ganivet, whose late arrival upon the scene was explained in English by his wife, who said, ‘He were doin’ his books in the front room. Always goes over his books of a Saturday, don’t you?’

Mr Ganivet gave a dignified nod.

‘Now, as you’re here, luv, we might as well have tea. It’s ready.’

Indeed, it was. While he played a game of lotto with Arnador on the gaily patterned hearth rug, he had surreptitiously watched a young maidservant lay the table and then bring out plate after plate of food. He had already formed the mistaken opinion that the Ganivets must be very rich, much richer than even the Saituas, who now had three men in the family, all working; and, when he saw the groaning table, he was certain of it. There was sliced ham with sliced tomatoes, bread and butter, scones accompanied by a huge glass dish of jam, and a big fruit cake on a fancy glass stand. There was a large silver cruet
stand, in which were set a pot of mustard, a bottle of vinegar and dishes of salt and pepper with a tiny spoon in each. There were table napkins rolled into confining silver rings, and a mystifying array of knives and forks, plates and glasses in front of each chair. Finally, the maid staggered in with a tray resplendent with two linen-covered teacosies, which Manuel presumed was the tea arriving.

Despite Manuel’s feeling rather overwhelmed, Mr and Mrs Ganivet were very kind to him; it was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between the two boys. At school, Arnador, one year older than Manuel, was the closest Basque in age to him. Living in the upper half of a Victorian house in Catherine Street, where there were few other children, the older boy had been extremely lonely. He was a deeply intelligent child and a born leader; he found great solace in Manuel’s increasing admiration of him.

Like a Highland Scot, Manuel had imbibed from his father and grandfather a natural grace of manner and a certain pride in being what he was. To Mr and Mrs Ganivet, stout in figure and their belief that being a Basque was a gift from God, Arnador’s new friend was welcome.

‘His granddad was the Basque emigrant agent for years, he says,’ Mrs Ganivet whispered to her spouse, ‘and his dad’s got his Master’s. And his Basque is better than Arnador’s; Arnie’ll learn from him – it would be awful if he lost the language.’

An expression of irritation passed over Mr Ganivet’s round, pink face. His daughter, Josefa, refused to speak her mother tongue, and she insisted upon being called Josie by her English friends. She had said tartly to her parents that she was a third-generation Liverpudlian – she had never been to Vizcaya – so why couldn’t she be like other people?

Mrs Ganivet had earnestly hoped that her daughter would meet some nice Basque boy and would give up her nursing, to settle down and breed some more little Basques.
It appeared, however, that strong-minded Josefa would end up as a formidable nursing sister, a spinster like her heroine, Florence Nightingale. Her mother had been appalled when, at home, Josefa had dared to criticize the work of some of the doctors at the hospital, and said that if she were a doctor she would do things very differently. It was wicked, stormed Mrs Ganivet, like criticizing the Pope; a woman’s place was to serve, not pick holes in physicians’ diagnoses or want to be a doctor herself.

Manuel was an answer to her prayers that Arnador might grow up to be proud of his linguistic group, and marry his cousin from Wallasey, who spoke perfect Basque.

Not for nothing were Arnador and Manuel descendants of mountain people and of whalers and other seamen; they were born explorers. They ranged around Liverpool as far as they could walk; they had so little pocket money that neither would waste a penny on an unnecessary tram fare. Once or twice, Arnador and he cycled out of the south end of the city, Manuel sitting uncomfortably on the luggage carrier of Arnador’s bicycle. When he heard about it, Mr Ganivet put a stop to it – it was dangerous, he said.

‘He’s more afraid that I’ll park it somewhere, and wander off and it’ll be stolen,’ confided Arnador, with a wry grin.

‘But you’ve got a chain and lock – you lock it at school.’

‘It’s fairly safe at school, after they’ve locked the front gates. Anywhere else, someone with a pair of tin snips or a wire cutter could snap the chain.’ He laughed, and added, ‘Or pick the lock in seconds.’

Arnador was not at all put off by the humbleness of Manuel’s home. He fell hopelessly in love with Rosita, and was delighted to eat with the family. He tolerated the two little girls, and was quite willing to put together a street
cricket team with Joey and Brian, using beer bottles as wickets. He had a happy knack of adapting himself to his surroundings; when they were grown men, he once said to Manuel that he learned as much about how people functioned, while sloping round Wapping Dock and up through the tough north end of the city, as he ever did in university.

While men died in scores in French battlefields, the boys swam naked in Wapping Dock, until chased out by the watchman, and on wet days lounged through bicycle shops and Lewis’s Department Store, until they were shown the door by the shopkeeper – or, in the case of the larger shops, by the shop-walker. They warmed themselves by the coke fires of nightwatchmen on construction sites, and Arnador would get into conversation with the garrulous old men who took these cold, thankless jobs. They heard wild tales from them of the days of sail or of being navvies building railways or canals, of being gloriously drunk on paydays and very hungry the day before.

Arnador taught Manuel how to avoid direct confrontations with other youngsters, how to make friendly jokes to avoid unnecessary scrapping. As they wandered into unknown territory, he also warned him against men who hung around public lavatories, or in the narrow back alleys. He was surprised that Manuel was well aware of child prostitution and the sickening diseases, deadly at that time, that he could pick up, if he allowed himself to be touched by an older man.

‘Auntie Bridget told Joey and me to watch out for ourselves – and the locals to stay clear of. If you want to know anything, you can always ask Auntie Bridget, and she’ll tell you flat – she doesn’t hide things like some grown-ups do. She told me how babies come.’

‘How do they?’ asked Arnador. ‘I’ve never been sure.’

Manuel was surprised to find there was something he knew that Arnador did not; and he gave him a short lecture on human mating and reproduction that did real credit to
Auntie Bridget’s clear teachings. ‘She says that to father a baby outside marriage is mortal sin.’

Arnador was impressed. Unlike Francesca and Little Maria, Josefa was much older than him, so he had not had the advantage of seeing a girl naked in her tin bath. He had observed from paintings of nudes in the Art Gallery that women apparently did not have penises; but Manuel had confirmed that what some of the boys said at school was true – they really did not.

When Manuel forgot to draw his bedroom curtains one night and the light of his candle shone out across the yard, he got a different kind of lecture from his mother. She told him crossly, ‘I’ve told you before about the Zeppelins, for Heaven’s sake. Remember to draw the curtains before you light your candle. They’re waiting up there to see a light. A single one could bring bombs straight down on us. And that would be goodbye to all of us.’

Suddenly afraid, Manuel dutifully blew out his candle and then drew the curtains. He had heard of the Germans’ cigar-shaped airships that could float silently over a city and bomb it. His mother had mentioned them before. But he had recently seen a picture of one in Pat Connolly’s newspaper, which proved to him that they did indeed exist – he had rather suspected before that they were figments of his mother’s imagination, like Jack the Giant Killer and a number of other story-book characters. The war seemed suddenly to close in on him from a direction other than the sea.

Though no adult ever discussed the matter with either lad, they knew about the terrible losses of ships and men at sea. Wherever women congregated, in tiny corner shops, outside the church after Mass, in little groups gossiping in the streets or back kitchens, women talked in quavering voices of dead husbands, sons or sweethearts; of allotments cancelled because ships simply and inexplicably went
missing; of children going hungry. They wept into their aprons or on the shawl-draped shoulders of other women, ignoring the children who stood uneasily round them or played at their feet.

Many of the women in the dock area normally wore black. To a casual observer, their state of mourning did not stand out so much as it did amongst the upper classes, whom the boys passed in the centre of the city and around Arnador’s home. In fashionable shops in Church Street, Bold Street and Lord Street, however, young girls worked long hours stitching black mourning dresses and mantles. Another group trimmed black hats and, for older women, black bonnets, both with long veils to cover the faces of the bereaved. It was to become a thriving industry before the war ended.

When the headmaster rose, one morning, to report, not without pride, that most of the boys who had left the school in 1915 had given their lives for their country, the war began to breathe down the backs of the necks of the younger pupils. Though they listened quietly to the rhetoric about the nobility of giving one’s life for one’s country and never doubted whether it was necessary or not, the fear of death was there. In the school playground, boys boasted about which regiment they would join, as soon as they were old enough, and what they would do to the bloody Boche as soon as they could get to France. But Arnador said nothing, as his quiet orderly mind examined the whole idea of war. Manuel said flatly he would be going to sea, and felt sick at the reminder that his father was actually out there, facing submarines and battleships alike.