The Liverpool Basque

by Helen Forrester

  Whether she was paid or not, Bridget would come, she was sure; they had been friends for years. But Bridget had to augment Pat’s wages somehow.

  Rosita held her head in her hands, as she crouched on the stairs, and cried for Micaela, for Maria – and for herself. Then she suddenly lifted her head, arched her back and moaned. Effie heard her and came running down the stairs, and Rosita accepted her help to get up to her bedroom. She feared to ask Effie to help with the birth, in case the tiny woman lost her nerve in the middle of the delivery – and Effie probably did not know about how clean a midwife must keep her hands – childbed fever, Rosita knew from her reading, travelled from mother to mother via the midwife – and it was deadly.

  Perplexed and frightened, Manuel nearly fell over Mary, as he took the two hollowed-out steps in one careless bound on his way to school after leaving his mother.

  He paused in surprise, and said, ‘I thought you’d gone with Joey.’ She looked pinched and cold, though she had a tam o’shanter on her head and was encased in a shabby black coat too big for her.

  She scuffed one small boot against the other, and said, ‘Mam said to walk with yez.’

  ‘I’ve got to ask her to go in to me mam for a minute.’ He ran up Bridget’s steps, pushed open the door, and shouted down the passage, ‘Auntie Bridget, me mam wants you.’

  Bridget Connolly had just gone upstairs to lie down for half an hour, before starting her housework. She swung her stockinged feet to the floor, and went to the top of the stairs, ‘What’s up, Mannie?’

  ‘Mam says it’s the baby.’

  ‘Mother of God! At seven months?’ Bridget muttered, and then shouted back, ‘I’ll be there in a minute or two. Now you get to school. Hurry – you’re late.’

  Little Maria, as she was called all her life, not only because she was small of stature but also to differentiate her from her Auntie Maria who was with God, was born that evening. Peggy O’Brien resignedly fed Mary, Joey and Manuel with thick slices of bread and margarine and bowls of vegetable soup at lunchtime, and more bread and margarine, with tea to drink, at teatime. She hoped that Bridget would share with her a bit of the fee she would get for the delivery; otherwise, so tight was her housekeeping, she would not be able to feed her own three children and hungry husband the following day. Yet, it never occurred to her not to help Rosita and Bridget; she knew they would be among the first to come to her when her next baby was on the way.

  Late in the evening, when Peggy was beginning to feel harassed to death with so many children in her kitchen, and a very tired husband grumbling amid them, Pat Connolly came to take them home.

  In answer to a question from Manuel, he told him that the baby had arrived safely; and, to the boy’s relief, he was delivered to his own doorstep. He was met by a grave wraith of a grandma, who silently hugged both him and his sister tightly, before leading them upstairs to see their mother.

  She was lying quietly in her own bed, looking very tired and white. Though her eyes had large black rings round them, he was thankful to see that she was not crying. A big woman in black was putting more coal on the bedroom fire. She half-turned to smile at the children. Francesca ignored her and toddled straight over to the bed. Manuel paused to stare back at her. He knew where she lived, but he did not know that she was a more experienced midwife, whom Bridget had sent for, because the baby had presented herself upside down.

  As the boy moved towards Rosita, Francesca demanded to be lifted on to the bed. Laughing, Bridget laid her carefully beside her mother, where, from under the quilt, she eyed Manuel triumphantly at being allowed to be there, while he was not.

  Though so young, Francesca had been acutely aware that something was terribly wrong in her small world, and she had objected strongly when she had been taken straight from her bed into Effie’s room, to be hastily dressed and fed with bread and milk before being taken to Peggy’s house. She had howled like a banshee as Effie pushed her doggedly in her pushchair, though she had recovered somewhat after she had been with Peggy to the corner shop to spend a halfpenny, provided by Effie, on an ounce of dolly mixtures. Now, with her mother’s arm curved protectively around her, she felt safe once more.

  To Manuel, the bedroom smelled peculiar – faintly like a meat stall in the market. As he bumped against the bed, his mother smiled sleepily at him, and asked if everything had gone well at school and whether Peggy had given Francesca and him some tea.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, and she stroked his head and smiled again. Then she said, ‘Go and look in the drawer over there. You and Frannie have a baby sister.’

  Obediently, he went towards the fire, which the midwife was now poking into a blaze. In front of it, set on two straight chairs was a drawer taken from the big dresser in the upper hallway. Exactly like Grandpa’s coffin, he thought with a burst of fear. In the drawer, however, was a bundle no bigger than Mary Connolly’s doll. A shawl that Auntie Maria had crocheted was wrapped round it, so that only a wizened red face was visible. A tiny tongue licked perfectly formed lips, and the closed eyelids looked like the small pink shells he had once picked up on New Brighton beach.

  He turned to Rosita. ‘What’s its name?’

  It was Grandma who interjected immediately: ‘Maria, of course, after your auntie.’ Her shrivelled brown hands were clenched in front of her, and Manuel sensed, nervously, how distressed she was beneath her calm exterior.

  ‘Of course,’ agreed Rosita immediately. ‘Little Maria. Now you go downstairs with your granny, and then you must go to bed.’

  He was astonished when his grandmother picked him up, to hold him to her and to give him an unexpected kiss. Micaela had, for some time, been telling him that he was too big a lad to be picked up or sat on her knee. Her red-rimmed eyes suddenly twinkled close to his. ‘Now you’ve got another person to add to your prayers,’ she said, as she put him down. ‘You run downstairs, while I put Frannie into her own bed. I’ll be down in a moment.’

  Because the damp winds of winter were making the old house cold, Grandma collected his nightshirt from Auntie Maria’s bedroom. She brought it downstairs to the kitchen-living-room and put it on the oven door to warm, together with the kitchen towel. Then she brought the enamel basin from the sink and filled it with warm water from the oven tap. She set the bowl on a wooden chair beside the fire. In the warm glow, he stripped and washed himself, while she made cups of cocoa for both of them. Afterwards, they sat knee to knee, he with her shawl over his shoulders to keep him warm, while they drank their cocoa together.

  Looking back, Old Manuel, snug in his Victoria bungalow which boasted a fine warm bathroom, as well as a cloakroom, could not imagine sitting in its glossy pinkness to drink cocoa, in close communion with a loving grandmother, his cotton nightshirt so hot on his back that he could hardly bear the first touch of it. He had never seen Lorilyn being bathed when she was a child – or Faith, for that matter. Perhaps it was because he had been away so much – or, perhaps, an innate prissiness of Kathleen’s.

  Vaguely puzzled, he returned to his notes.

  Without Auntie Maria presiding from the sofa, the kitchen-living-room seemed empty, though his grandmother was being wonderfully comforting. He wondered if she missed Auntie Maria as he was doing; yet, she was still in the house – in the parlour – and Grandma was, he realized with relief, still strong and well, even if she did have to feel her way round the house.

  What a frightful twenty-four hours it must have been for the women concerned, mused Old Manuel, feeling very tired himself. A painful death with a subsequent laying-out with all its grief, to be followed almost immediately by a premature birth.

  His grandmother must have summoned all her courage to make that evening seem cosy and normal to him; inside, she must have been storming with grief at the loss of her elder daughter. She had heard his prayers there, by the fire, ordering him to include Auntie Maria, as well as Little Maria. As if I would forget Auntie Maria, the little boy had thought indignantly, as he got up off his k
nees.

  Because she had a chronic disease, Burial Insurance for Maria was unobtainable, so she had a pauper’s funeral. No men followed the coffin, except for Father Felipe and the undertaker and his employees. It was a sombre, black-clad procession of women, carrying small bunches of flowers, who piled into the tram that would take them to the cemetery. Only Grandma, Rosita, with Little Maria in her arms, Manuel, Francesca and Father Felipe rode in a carriage kindly provided free by Ould Biggs. It was a bitter, frosty day and all the mourners were thankful when it was over, and they could crowd into the Barinèta home for tea and cakes and a good warm.

  Unlike Francesca, who had been a placid, contented baby, Little Maria filled the house with steady yelling for some months after she was born. Even a neglected Manuel was sometimes pressed into service to sit in a chair and rock her. All the women visitors, who came in to admire her, laughed knowingly and said she was colicky, whatever that was, and that she would grow out of it. Manuel wished intensely that she would simply shut up. He would wake in the night to hear her screaming; and his mother looked daily more tired and sounded ever more irritable with young boys.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The frazzled mood of the family was lifted somewhat by an unexpected visit from Uncle Agustin. His ship had docked in Birkenhead, across the River Mersey, and he had begged shore leave to see his family, because of the loss of his father and sister.

  When Manuel came home from school and found his uncle sitting at the kitchen table, he had not, at first, recognized him; Agustin had been at sea during their last visit to Bilbao, and he had not docked in Liverpool for some time before that. Then, when the thin, saturnine man had greeted him by name and grinned at him, the boy said delightedly, ‘Uncle Agustin!’ His relief at having a male relative sitting in his home was so great that he laughed aloud.

  Though Agustin had not lived with his parents for years, he had felt keenly the loss of his father and his sister, and when he entered Rosita’s house, he was very downcast. His arrival caused a fresh burst of grief to well up in his mother and Rosita, which he tried hard to alleviate by delivering affectionate messages to them both, from aunts and uncles, cousins and friends, of whom Manuel had little recollection. He told them, also, that he had just married his sweetheart – very quietly because of Juan’s death. The news about Maria had reached them two days later.

  He spoke in Basque, and Manuel immediately felt a close fellowship with him and with his relations in Vizcaya.

  After Agustin had returned to his ship, Grandma sat wrapped in thought for some time. Manuel had heard her beg Agustin to write to her from time to time, and he had said he would.

  ‘But he never will,’ Grandma said later to Rosita. ‘He never was any good at learning his letters.’ Then, perhaps feeling that she was being unfair to her eldest child, she added, ‘But your father always said he was a born seaman.’

  As Agustin left the house, he dropped some silver coins into his mother’s apron pocket. It was the first money that she had received, which she felt she could call her own, since the Prudential man had brought her husband’s burial money. She knew Agustin could not spare it; but she carried it for several days, jingling it comfortably in her pocket, until Rosita suggested that she buy a new, much-needed pair of winter boots with it. After some persuasion, she did this, and Manuel remembered her smiling down at their shiny, laced-up newness.

  Rosita wrote to both Leo and Pedro about Maria’s death and the premature birth of the new baby. Without much hope, she addressed Leo’s letter to Nevada, but again there was no response. Her letter to Pedro, however, did catch up with him, and some weeks later both Micaela and Rosita received kindly letters of real sympathy. He also said how he himself would miss Maria, who had, he wrote, always been so easy to talk to – and to please. He was glad the new baby had been called after her. Although Rosita had not told him how difficult the birth had been and how weak she still felt, he must have sensed something was wrong, because he inquired anxiously after her own health, which he rarely did.

  By late January 1915 Little Maria’s shrieks had been reduced to occasional spasms, and her mother began to think that, after all, she would not go out of her mind for lack of sleep.

  ‘There’s nothin’ more exhausting than a colicky baby,’ agreed Micaela. ‘Now she’s napping a bit in the afternoon, you must rest, too.’

  So Rosita retired to bed for an hour with a battered novel from the second-hand shop whenever Little Maria closed her eyes in the afternoon. As her mother said, ‘The front steps won’t hurt, if you scrub them only every other day, instead of every day.’

  In the middle of a blizzard carrying heavy sleet, Pedro thankfully docked in Liverpool, to unload a cargo of raw cotton. Though they had not been attacked by German submarines, the whole crew had once again been drained by the tension of crossing the Atlantic in a slow tramp, unable to keep up with a convoy. The men were irritable and on edge, longing to get ashore as soon as they could: to get thoroughly warm in dry clothes, and eat a well-cooked meal.

  Rosita met him with her usual hugs, and yet there was a restraint about her. She was not her former bubbling self.

  He dropped his suitcase and kitbag in the narrow hall, and held her pallid face between his wind-chapped hands. His own weariness was forgotten. A spasm of fear hit him. In nursing Maria, had she caught the same dread disease?

  She smiled weakly at him.

  ‘You look ill,’ he said gently. ‘Are you OK?’

  She sighed, and enclosed one of his hands against her cheek. ‘I’m not sick,’ she assured him. ‘I’m tired, that’s all, what with Maria being so ill, and Little Maria screaming her head off, night and day.’

  He dropped his hands from her face and put one round her waist, as they went into the back room, where Micaela had discreetly waited, sitting in her rocker, to give the young couple a chance to greet each other.

  Pedro went straight to his mother-in-law, and put his arms round her as if she were his own mother. ‘I’m so sorry about Maria, Mother,’ he said. He was shaken to see how Micaela had, in a few short months, aged so much; and he realized from the slightly fumbling way in which she sought to clasp his hand that her sight was nearly gone.

  Both the women were quick enough, however, to prepare a fish meal for him, which, with the bottle of wine he had brought in his suitcase, cheered them all up considerably.

  When Manuel came home from school, he was ecstatic to see his father. Pedro had Francesca on his knee, and the boy stood in front of him, grinning from ear to ear, scrubbing one boot against the back of the other. He longed to dislodge his sister but had learned from experience not to try to – if she were thwarted, she had a scream which would outdo Little Maria’s best efforts.

  Pedro laughed and caught the boy in his free arm, and Rosita said suddenly, ‘You’re the spitting image of each other, except for Manuel’s dark hair.’

  It was true, considered Pedro. As the boy lost his baby nose, he was acquiring a slightly flattened one with wide nostrils, exactly like his own, and the child’s face was already longer and narrower, with flatter cheekbones than most children round the neighbourhood. He looked Basque, and Pedro swelled with pride in him.

  Once Little Maria had been persuaded to go to sleep in her cot in the corner of their bedroom, and Micaela had retired to her own room, Pedro lay naked beside his wife, and grinned wickedly at her. Her hair on the pillow was a flaming background to her pale face. The blue eyes were shadowed, however, as if she did not want to look at him. He began to caress her and tried to kiss her mouth, but she turned her face away.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked surlily. She had never behaved like this before. Then, in the candlelight, he saw tears glisten on her long golden lashes. ‘Is something wrong, love?’

  She opened her eyes and really looked at him. She said hoarsely, as if forcing herself, ‘I’m scared. I don’t want another kid.’

  He stared at her bewilderedly, and she hastened to say, ‘I l
ove you. I want to make love. But I’m afraid of what happened with Little Maria happening again – and killing me. You’d never believe the pain I had.’

  He stirred uncomfortably, some of the desire going out of him, with the unexpected disappointment. Then he shrugged. ‘Kids come from God,’ he said.

  There was a sudden twinkle in her fine eyes, as her sense of humour began to surface. ‘They come from men, you old rogue.’

  He nodded. ‘I suppose.’

  She turned towards him, and her long generous curves so close to him roused him again. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her; he was her husband, wasn’t he? He wanted what was his God-given right. But she was speaking again. ‘I’m tired to death, what with being so torn with the baby, and nursing Maria – and no sleep – and Mother not able to help so much now. And then Mannie and Frannie. I couldn’t face another baby.’

  He kept a hold on himself, torn between his own needs and her obvious distress. He closed his eyes, while she spoke again.

  ‘I want to ask you something. You know Mary Challoner – lives in Park Lane – she’s a Prottie, but she’s a decent woman for all that. She was sitting next to me the last time I took Maria to the doctor. She thought she was pregnant, she told me. Then she said, “But I’ve had a good run for my money – four years since the last one.”’

  It took all his patience to make himself listen, but he did.

  ‘When Maria had gone into the surgery,’ Rosita continued, ‘and there was no one else in the waiting room, I asked her what she meant – and she said her hubbie did his best to see she wasn’t left with a kid.

  ‘He covers his you-know-what with a rubber cover – buys ’em in London and in France, when he goes there. She says they still have a good time – but no baby.’ She propped herself up on her elbow, and added earnestly, ‘It’s not like aborting a kid – I know women who’ll do that for me – but it’s terribly dangerous – and it’s wrong.’