The Liverpool Basque

by Helen Forrester

  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.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Every time his father docked during the First World War Manuel’s tight-clenched stomach would relax, and he looked forward to their doing things together. As he grew bigger, he understood clearly that it was Pedro who maintained the household. His mother worked very hard; when she was not scrubbing floors, she was cooking, washing or driving bargains in the market. In her spare time, she knitted and mended, as she gossiped to neighbours, who wandered freely in and out of the house.

  But women had only the money their husbands or fathers gave them. And without money everything collapsed. Manuel looked forward to when he could go to sea, and, when he returned, drop money and chocolates into his mother’s lap. He ignored his grandma’s hints about the Church and university; having to go to school until one was sixteen was a long enough stretch.

  Arnador did not agree with Manuel about his future; he had his own eyes fixed on university, though he was unclear what he would study.

  On his return, Pedro was invariably greeted with almost hysterical relief by Rosita and Micaela. Not for them were the grumbles of other local women about the meanness of their menfolk, or the groans at the likelihood of another pregnancy. There was an abiding love and general agreement between Rosita and Pedro, and quiet, patient Micaela had a place both in their hearts and in the home.

  Manuel had little idea how lucky he was to have such a peaceful home; he took it for granted. If, when visiting his young friends, he stumbled upon a family row with dishes flying, or a wife or son being beaten, he was always alarmed and nonplussed. Rosita might shout at him for entering the house with dirty boots or slap her little daughters for being rude, but it had nothing of the ferocity he observed elsewhere.

  Street fights were rare in his small corner of the dockside. Arnador said, however, that they were common in the north end of the city, particularly when the pubs closed on Saturday night. ‘Sometimes the police get beaten up,’ he told Manuel.

  By silent consent they kept out of that area. Arnador was careful, and had a disarming way of dealing with people, considered Old Manuel, with some amusement. He could not recall his ever getting into a physical fight, though he could be a formidable debater, the old fox.

  While Pedro was at home, Rosita’s face would look a little less drawn, and Micaela would lose some of the gravity which had become habitual to her. The house would be cheered up by the friendly rumbling of Basque voices, as friends of Pedro’s dropped in to see him, on their way to the Baltic Fleet.

  Like most seamen during the war, Pedro had an uneasy feeling that his time might be short. Whenever he was at home, he made a habit of taking Manuel to the park to sail his boat on the pond, or they played pelota against a warehouse wall. To the amusement of the dock watchman, who knew Pedro quite well, they sometimes swam together in Wapping Dock; it was common to see boys diving off the steps there, but it was rare to see a man. The watchman, who was supposed to keep people out of the water, sometimes turned a blind eye.

  They also went across the river in the ferryboat, to explore the Wirral countryside beyond Birkenhead, or, when the tide was in, to swim in the sea at Hoylake.

  One evening, Pedro found Arnador doing his arithmetic homework with Manuel at the kitchen table. He found Arnador’s slightly pompous character amusing, and, when he heard from the boy that he hoped to go to the university, he was keen to foster the friendship with Manuel. If Mannie was destined for higher education, he had better have friends who also studied; he realized that Wapping Dock boys were unlikely to comprehend the necessity of hard work at school.

  Manuel forgot about little Brian Wing, the last hope of the Chinese laundry, who, most evenings, sat by his mother’s ironing board, while she heard him spell in English, a decrepit dictionary at hand to confirm the correctness of his efforts. His eldest brother now worked full-time in the laundry, and the next one had just gone to sea, but, with the elder boys now adding to the family income, Mr Wing wanted better things for his smallest son; the child never moved out of the steamy laundry until his homework was done.

  Pedro was the first seaman with whom Arnador became friends. His father dealt with them every day in his chandlery business, as they came to buy all the requirements of a ship from rope to teapots; but Arnador was not encouraged to visit the warehouse. He was much more fascinated by Pedro’s stories of his life at sea than Manuel was. Manuel had listened to his father and his grandfather talking about their lives ever since he could remember; he regarded their adventures as a man’s normal life. He believed that everybody understood seagoing and docks and foreign ports – they were all part of the life you hoped to escape to the minute you could finish school and be a man, preferably not later than aged thirteen. It was as well that he did not take seriously his family’s determination that he should have further education; if he had, there would probably have been an instant rebellion; he accepted the discipline of St Francis Xavier’s, but he assumed it would not last for that long.

  It was through a horse that Pedro made the acquaintance of Arnador’s mother. Once, on shore leave, he took both boys to see the Annual Horse Parade in Lime Street. Liverpudlians flocked there to see working horses groomed to perfection, their tails and manes plaited with coloured ribbons. Their polished harnesses glittered with brightly shining horse brasses and had flowers attached to them.

  Though Francesca had little idea of the reason for the outing, she howled to be taken along. As usual, she was bought off by Rosita’s promise of a halfpennyworth of dolly mixtures from the corner shop. Rosita would have enjoyed going to see the Parade, too, but she earnestly wanted Manuel to have his father’s company; amongst seagoing families, too many boys barely knew their fathers, except when they sat, downcast, by their empty fireplaces, unemployed.

  In Lime Street, Pedro and the boys stood beh
ind a temporary barrier to watch the heaving, shining mass of animals. While Pedro, a cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth, gossiped with another man in the crowd, Arnador and Manuel sucked boiled sweets produced from the depths of Pedro’s tobacco-dusty pocket. A few police kept the crowd orderly, so that no one was kicked by an irate horse or run over by a backing wagon.

  Living at a distance from the docks, Arnador did not see as many horses as Manuel did, nor had he had the regular warnings from his mother to keep out of reach of them. He was enthralled by the sheer beauty of the animals, which were not ordinarily so well groomed. The nearest to him was a neat little carriage horse with a coat like polished coal; it was in the shafts of a light trap. The driver held the reins loosely in his lap, and tipped his straw hat to someone on the other side of the carriage. A lively exchange of jokes ensued, and the horse stirred uneasily.

  Cautiously, Arnador slipped under the barricade, and approached the dark beauty.

  Pedro called, ‘Hey! Come on back, lad.’

  Arnador ignored him, and patted the horse’s neck.

  ‘Arnador!’ Pedro was not used to being disobeyed.

  The youngster half turned, grinned at Pedro, and said, as he stretched out his hand to stroke the animal’s nose, ‘He’s OK, Mr Echaniz. He likes it.’

  Pedro saw the animal’s lips curl back from its yellowed teeth, as it moved its head from the caressing hand. He swiftly ducked under the barrier to pull the boy back. Arnador saw the movement and reluctantly turned to obey Pedro. The irritated animal leaned forward and bit into his shoulder. The heavy teeth did not manage to bite through his jacket, but had a firm enough grip to give the boy a sharp shake.