The Liverpool Basque (21 page)

As he grew older, Rosita had prevailed upon him to do some of the jobs his grandfather had done for her. Grumbling, he had chopped up kindling wood, and carried buckets of coal up from the cellar each day. Once or twice, he had hung out the family wash for her in the tiny back
yard. His undeveloped muscles had ached, as he sought to avoid the wet sheets dragging on the ground as the freezing wind from the river caught them. He was embarrassed at pegging out his mother’s bloomers and his sister’s small undergarments, and he prayed, as he hung up a row of female stockings, that none of his friends would come through the door from the back alley, while he was doing it.

Now, as a very old man, he remembered with a pang his mother’s scarlet hands, so swollen from scrubbing clothes on a wash board and scrubbing floors with hot soda water that her wedding ring cut painfully into her finger.

He remembered, too, with some amusement, that in a burst of compassion at her fatigue he had undertaken the fortnightly cleaning of the flues of the big kitchen range on which she cooked and which gave warmth to their living-room-kitchen. He remembered inserting the long wire brush into the main flue and pulling it out too quickly, so that the whole room had been doused in soot. His mother kept finding the thick black powder in odd corners for months afterwards.

He decided to include in the notes he was writing for Lorilyn a list of domestic tasks that he hoped that she would never have to face.

He carefully made the list. Then he wondered if a female electrical engineer would deign to do any housekeeping at all. Once he himself had qualified in a similar field and had gone to sea, he had never done any domestic work – until Kathleen died.

He chewed his thumbnail and wondered if Lorilyn might serve at sea, once she had her degree. In the middle of describing his mother’s hard work, he suddenly wrote something that was a denial of his family’s traditions. ‘I hope you will neither have to serve at sea or marry a seaman, my dear. It causes too much heartache.’

She wouldn’t go to sea, would she? Well, some women were nowadays doing men’s jobs. He pursed his lips. She couldn’t say he hadn’t warned her.

He would leave the sentences in.

One miserable, overcast January afternoon in 1920, when the gas lamps in the street had already been lit, Madeleine Saitua flung open the Echanizes’ back door and rushed in like a flustered hen. With her came a blast of cold air and noise from the workshops. A surprised Rosita mechanically closed the door after her and the clangour of panel beaters was sharply reduced. ‘Madeleine! You shouldn’t come out in felt slippers in the rain; you’ll catch your death!’ she scolded.

Madeleine pulled out a kitchen chair from under the table, and sat down suddenly, realizing that she was still weak from the flu. She patted her big breast, as she panted to get her breath back.

Manuel had just returned from school and was unpacking his satchel, to return to his mother the piece of greaseproof paper in which his sandwiches had been wrapped; the paper would be used again and again. Now he stared at Madeleine apprehensively; it was not like Mrs Saitua to hurry about anything.

‘Rosita, is it true that Pedro’s ship’s overdue?’

Rosita gaped at her friend. ‘No. I haven’t heard anything.’ Her blue eyes were wide with shock. ‘They would’ve let us know if it was – wouldn’t they?’

Manuel’s heart gave a painful thud, and he turned quickly to look at his mother. She was slowly blenching. Madeleine had not said ‘late’; she had said ‘overdue’, with all that the word portended.

At Madeleine’s precipitous entry, Micaela had stopped knitting, and lifted her head towards the sudden rush of
cold air; she sensed trouble. Now, from her rocking chair close to the fire, she cackled suddenly, ‘They wouldn’t let us know until they were sure she was lost, they wouldn’t.’

The women’s silence after Micaela’s remark scared Manuel; it was clear that none of them wanted to face the import of Madeleine’s anxious inquiry.

The kettle on the fire boiled, and spat angrily. Without taking her eyes off Madeleine, Rosita told Manuel to take it off and put it on the hob. Then she asked, ‘Where did you hear about it, Madeleine?’ She pulled out a chair for herself and sat down carefully, afraid she would fall in a faint.

Madeleine had recovered her breath, and she responded promptly, ‘Well, Jean Baptiste was visiting friends living in Scottie Road, and the landlord of the Throstles Nest tells him – knowing he’s Basque, like. Said a couple of lads from Harrison was talking about it. He told me just now, when he come in. So I gave him his tea, and I run down to see if you was all right – if it were true, like.’ She leaned forward to lay her hand on top of Rosita’s which was clutching the table edge. ‘Have you been down to the office lately?’

‘No,’ Rosita answered her dazedly. ‘Allotment’s not due yet.’ She took a big breath, and said, ‘The Harrison Line men could be wrong.’

Manuel interjected. ‘I can run down to the office and ask them for you.’

Rosita glanced up at the old alarm clock on the mantelpiece. ‘They’d be closed, luv, before you got there.’ She grimaced, as she added, ‘And you being young, they’d fob you off with some official nonsense.’

‘Oh, aye, they would,’ agreed Micaela, and again picked up the sock she was knitting for Manuel, as if to impart some sense of normality to the frightened little group.

The kitchen-living-room was so still, while Madeleine waited for Rosita to say something more, that the click of
the knitting needles and the tick of the clock could be clearly heard, despite the roar of machinery and the clatter of metal sheets. Madeleine shivered.

Rosita did not know what to say. Her mind wavered between a frantic need to know the truth and the fact that the only place which could give her accurate news was shut until nine o’clock the following morning.

Watching her livid face and unable to bear the women’s unnatural quietness, Manuel suggested, ‘First, we don’t know if they really are overdue, do we? Dad could simply be late because they’ve had to stop for a repair or bad weather – a gale could have set them off course.’

His mother’s expression did not change; it was as if she were staring down a long, dark tunnel, which she did not wish to enter. She did switch her gaze towards her son, however, and it came to him vividly that she knew his father was dead.

But she couldn’t know, could she? It wasn’t logical. Passionately, he went on, ‘Maybe there’s something in the evening paper. I’ll go up to Park Lane and get one.’

Seeing the boy’s obvious anxiety, and worried about Rosita – she was far too quiet – Madeleine seized upon Manuel’s idea. She leaned closer to Rosita. ‘Let him go up and buy one,’ she advised.

Rosita nodded. ‘There’s some coppers in my purse over there, on the sideboard. Run and get one, dear.’

Rosita could hear her daughters chattering, as they opened the front door on their return from school. She frowned; she must teach them not to dawdle on the way home, now that the nights had drawn in. Manuel shot past them, twopence clutched in his hand, as they called to their mother and hung up their coats and hats in the hall.

She made herself call a cheery, ‘Hullo,’ as Madeleine tried to comfort her by saying, ‘Even if it is late, they’ll probably turn up. Pedro said a number of times what good mates he had – real experienced.’

‘Yes, you’re right. He was very happy with them.’ As she forced herself to her feet, to greet Francesca and Little Maria, she realized that she had expressed herself in the past tense, and it took all her courage to suppress her panic. She turned to the little girls and hugged them both, while she listened to the stories of their afternoon, and gave them a biscuit each to nibble on until tea was ready.

Over their heads, she looked warningly at Madeleine, and nothing more was said about the ship. Micaela needed no prompting; she knitted briskly, as she looked up to greet her burbling granddaughters.

Manuel stood in the tiny newsagent’s shop and frantically turned the pages to find the shipping news, while the newsagent stood patiently behind his magazine-laden counter. ‘I’m looking to see when Dad’s ship’s due.’

The newsagent took a puff from his cigarette. ‘In trouble, are you?’ he joked.

‘No. Mam wants to know.’

He hastily folded the paper, tucked it under his arm and ran home as hard as he could.

The
Esperanza Larrinaga
was not mentioned in the shipping news.

The rumour had spread. When, the next morning, after the children had been sent to school, Rosita put on her shawl and went down to the shipping office, there was a number of flustered women besieging the clerk at the counter. The frail-looking young clerk, only recently discharged from army hospital himself, said that the vessel was, as yet, listed only as being late. Inquiries were being made.

Whey-faced wives and mothers bowed their heads and went home to wait.

A few days later, in the newspaper, the ship was reported missing. The first half-pay allotments were withheld.

Rosita and Micaela were thrown back upon the diminished savings in the boxes under Micaela’s bed. ‘Keep the bit you’ve got in the Post Office,’ advised Micaela. ‘You may not need to use it.’ She came from a family of fishermen, and she comforted Rosita by saying insistently, ‘I’ve seen it happen more than once. Fishing boats, and all; and you’re fit to die yourself. Then the whole crew turns up weeks later in some outlandish spot. Been picked up by another small vessel – and had to go with them to whatever was their destination. And that may be what the company’s thinking – they haven’t written to you yet.’

Manuel was refilling the coal hod by the kitchen range from a bucket he had brought up from the coal cellar.

‘But, Grandma, if they’d been found, we’d know by radio, wouldn’t we?’

Grandma pulled a face. ‘Not many ships have got such new-fangled things. For sure, if your dad’s ship had it and
they were in trouble, they would have sent a message, I would think. I doubt they’ve got a radio.’

Manuel agreed. ‘I think Dad would’ve mentioned it if they’d had one.’

Rosita tried to smile. ‘You could be right, Mam. They’re safe in a boat without a radio,’ she said, but her mind was in a turmoil of sheer terror.

Manuel talked about it with Arnador when, as usual, he came to the Echaniz house to do his homework with him and with Francesca. Arnador had never been able to express his intense loneliness to his friend; he simply arrived with his school books most evenings, and thankfully sat down to work in Rosita’s busy kitchen-living-room with the family around him. Mrs Ganivet could never understand this, and always pointed out shrilly that he had a bedroom with a gas fire of his own. He told her dully that he and Manuel worked well together, which was true.

That night, as they sat at the table together, they whispered about Pedro’s ship, while, by the fire, Grandma and Rosita entertained two Basque ladies; the adults tried to keep their conversation free of reference to the feared disaster, so as not to frighten the children.

Struggling with an essay – at least a paragraph, Sister Winifred had insisted – on ‘What I Did in My Christmas Holidays’, Francesca caught the boys’ whispers. She looked up at Manuel and Arnador aghast. ‘Daddy’s ship’s lost?’ she hissed.

Manuel was jolted. He had forgotten that Rosita had not told his sisters. He quickly said comfortingly, ‘It’s a bit late – and everybody worries about men at sea when the winter storms are here.’

‘Are you sure?’ Her pinched little face lacked a trace of colour, as she spoke.

‘My dad hasn’t mentioned it,’ interjected Arnador. ‘He would know about it, and would have told us at home – because
it’s a Basque ship.’ He was sliding swiftly round the truth, trying to protect his friend’s little sister.

Francesca half-turned to ask her mother what had happened, but Manuel caught her and said, ‘Not now. It’s not fair to worry Mam.’

‘I want to,’ hissed Francesca.

‘Mam’s friends may have men in Dad’s ship. You’ll scare them!’

She stared resentfully at her brother through red-gold lashes, and said sulkily, ‘All right. How do you spell “plentiful”?’

Arnador told her.

When he returned to Catherine Street, his father was sitting in a red velveteen-covered chair in their sitting-room, with the newspaper spread out on the tea table in front of him. Mr Ganivet did not like being disturbed when he was perusing the newspaper; but Arnador was sufficiently shaken by Manuel’s news to ask, after he had divested himself of his outdoor clothes and hung his satchel up beside them, if he knew anything about the missing
Esperanza Larrinaga
.

‘Indeed, yes. We were talking in the office about it. A terrible loss to us, if it has foundered.’

His ponderous, often insensitive father seemed genuinely upset. Arnador inquired, ‘Do you mean to the business – or to us personally?’

Mr Ganivet looked nonplussed at the question, and then said almost indignantly, ‘A loss to the Basque community, of course. The crew is almost all Basque – it will be very hard on the families.’ He began to fold up the paper. ‘What made you ask about it?’

‘Manuel’s father’s on it.’

‘Oh, my goodness! That’s terrible! There are three children, I believe you said?’

‘Yes, and Grandma – she’s blind.’

Mrs Ganivet came bustling in to say that her husband’s
evening supper and Arnador’s bedtime cocoa awaited them in the dining-room, and she would be with them in a minute. She trotted out again, and Arnador said to his father, ‘Manuel loves his father – there’s nobody like him.’

The stout little man nodded absently, his thoughts already on the Cheddar cheese and crackers awaiting him.

Arnador followed him to the dining-room; he thought resentfully that he never seemed to be able to get close to his father; he could talk to Pedro more easily. As he sipped his hot cocoa, he wondered idly what his mother would do if
his
father was suddenly missing. Would he himself then be responsible for her? At fourteen? It was a shattering thought, and he wondered if it had occurred to Manuel, who was not yet thirteen.

A few days later, Micaela heard the flap of the letter-box rattle, as a letter was pushed through it. She went into the hall and ran her foot gently round the floor near the front door, until she heard the soft swish when her foot moved a letter. She picked it up and felt the ominous length of a business envelope.

‘Rosita!’ she called down the cellar steps. ‘There’s a letter come.’

Rosita had been checking how much coal she had in the cellar; Manuel often neglected to tell her when he brought up the last bucket of slack. Now, wild with hope that it would be a letter from Pedro, she flew up the stone steps.

When she saw the long narrow envelope in her mother’s hand, she paused, too scared to take it from her.

‘Here, luv,’ prompted Micaela, and held it out to her, while she waited for the sound of its being torn open. She tensed herself to cope with a wild explosion of grief.

She heard, instead, Rosita walk slowly into the kitchen-living-room, pull out a chair from the table and sit down. Only then did she hear the letter being slowly torn open.

Micaela felt her way to the table and also sat down.
From the alley at the back of the house, clearly over the racket of workshops, came the singsong shout, ‘Any old iron, ra-ags, jars or bones?’

As the sound receded down the passageway, Rosita said wonderingly, ‘How could such a big ship go down with all hands – without a trace?’

‘Dear God! Is that what they say?’

‘Yes.’ It was only a whisper. ‘They say they’ve searched and searched.’ She looked beseechingly at her mother, begging for a denial of the news. But her mother’s blind eyes were closed, the toothless mouth pinched, a thin line in a bloodless face, as if she were overwhelmed.

‘Mam! Mam!’ Rosita screamed at her in sudden agony, and hammered the table with her fists. ‘Help me, Mam! Help me, Mam.’

Micaela dragged herself back to her daughter’s desperate pain. ‘My lovey,’ she crooned, as she made herself get up from her chair, to hold her well-loved, stricken daughter.

The awful shrieks penetrated the thin wall which separated them from Bridget’s house. At the first scream, Bridget paused, her paring knife suspended over a potato. When the second one assailed her ears, she dropped vegetable and knife, whipped off her grubby apron, shoved her bare aching feet into her husband’s carpet slippers, and fled next door. She had been waiting for this dread day, having heard the rumour about the
Esperanza Larrinaga
. Only yesterday, she had begun a special novena to the Virgin Mother to protect Pedro – but she knew from the frantic cries coming from next door that she had been too late. On her way out, she snatched up half a small bottle of gin, which Pat had bought cheap from a docker the day before; it was the only sedative she had in the house.

When Manuel came home from school, the house was deadly quiet. He almost tiptoed into the kitchen-living-room, past the parlour door, which was open.

By the fireplace, his grandmother sat in her rocking chair,
eyes closed; she was so still that, for a second, Manuel thought she had been taken ill. By her side, in a straight chair sat tiny, shrunken Effie Halloran. Both had their rosaries wound round their fingers.

At his entry, Effie turned a lugubrious face towards him. Tears oozed down the deep lines in her wizened face. ‘Hush,’ she said. ‘I think she’s dropped off.’

Manuel carefully laid two text books on the table. He was scared. ‘Dad?’ he asked.

Effie nodded. ‘I’m proper sorry, duck.’

‘Where’s Mam?’ The question came urgently from white lips.

‘Upstairs with Mrs Connolly. She’s havin’ a little lie-down.’

He turned and took the narrow staircase two at a time. He burst into his mother’s bedroom. On the bed lay Rosita in the arms of Bridget. The younger woman was wailing into her friend’s shoulder, and Bridget was saying, ‘There, there, me darling, there, there.’

As the boy came up short by the bed, Bridget said softly to him, ‘I’m so sorry, luv.’

‘Oh, Bridget!’ he exclaimed frantically. ‘What shall we do?’ He began to cry hopelessly.

‘You poor lad!’ she replied softly. The boy needed comfort, and the little girls would be in soon. Yet, she did not want to let go of the stricken woman in her arms.

Desperately, she asked him, ‘Could you be a brave lad and run up to Madeleine’s and ask her to come. If she’s not in, get Peggy O’Brien from across the road – she’s got little kids, and I don’t want to ask her unless I have to.’

Manuel wiped his tears on the sleeves of his blazer, as he tried to control himself. He sniffed hard. He was grateful to be asked to do something positive.

Bridget said, ‘Before you go, give your mam a hug and a kiss.’ She loosened her hold on Rosita, and with her face still buried in Bridget’s shoulder, his mother lifted an arm
vaguely to encompass him. He bent to kiss her and she held him for a second. She smelled of gin. Fighting back his own grief, he said, ‘I’ll get Mrs Saitua for you.’

The faded red-gold head nodded slightly.

Within five minutes, Madeleine and her daughter, Panchika, who had been enjoying an afternoon off, came running through the front door, followed by a panting Manuel. They brought with them a bottle of wine and a big loaf of bread, fresh out of the oven.

Micaela awoke from her doze of exhaustion. She felt tired enough to die herself. ‘Is that you, Madeleine?’ she asked.

‘Yes, dear – and Panchika.’ She went to Micaela, ignoring poor Effie, and kissed her. ‘We’ll soon have the kettle on – and I’m going to ask Manuel to get Father Felipe.’

Effie heaved a sigh of relief. It had not occurred to her to go and get a priest; she was not an ardent Catholic.

While Madeleine spoke, Manuel had stood, white and trembling, by the door of the room, with no idea what to do. During the previous few days, he had done his best to prepare himself for this situation; but all his good intentions had gone out of his head and all he wanted to do was find a quiet place in which to cry. Now he said, ‘I’ll go now, Mrs Saitua.’

‘They’re all out,’ the priest’s housekeeper told him, not unkindly. ‘Except Father Clement. It’s your dad, you say? In the
Esperanza Larrinaga?
You’re the fifth one today.’ She nodded her wimpled head sadly. ‘It’s a bad day for the parish. Come in, lad, and I’ll ask Father Clement if he thinks he could walk down to your house – he’s very frail now and it’s hard for him to walk.’

Manuel, cap in hand, stepped into the linoleumed hall which shone with polish.

Wrapped in a cloak pressed upon him by the housekeeper, together with his walking stick, the old priest
slowly accompanied the young boy down to the dock road. He asked Manuel to steady him by holding his arm, and Manuel respectfully did so; he had rarely touched a priest before. Priests were holy – you did not go too close to them. As they walked, the priest spoke very gently to him about the wisdom of God in all He did, and suggested that he could express his love for his father by a series of prayers for his soul. Brokenly, Manuel said he would.

The crowd in the Echanizes’ kitchen-living-room had been augmented by Francesca, who, like Manuel had tried hard to prepare herself for this day, and Little Maria, who did not exactly understand what had happened to Daddy, but that something awful had, and was howling steadily in Grandma’s arms.

At the entry of the priest, all the to-do ceased, and Manuel hastily put a chair under the old man. In a way, thought Old Manuel, tears springing to his eyes at the memory of the loss of his father, though he himself was an old man now – in a way, Father Clement had been better than Father Felipe would have been; his age and frailty commanded added respect, and his mother had knelt before him to be comforted with charm and delicacy. Her rosary had been found for her; prayer suggested; the smell of gin ignored.