The Liverpool Basque. Helen Forrester
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.
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’