The Liverpool Basque

by Helen Forrester

  Rosita was stunned at such an offer of help. Tears sprang up in her eyes, and her lips quivered. And he was a real Basque, speaking Basque!

  She had been worried to death about Manuel. He had said he would try for a job as a ship’s boy, and lie about his age. But she had told him tartly that his fees were paid until Easter – and he had not yet grown out of his latest set of trousers and blazer – so he should continue at school. Despite her deep anxiety about money, she added with artificial cheerfulness, that she and Granny would probably find his future fees from somewhere, at least until he was fourteen.

  Now, by the Grace of God and a small ship’s chandler, her forecast could come true.

  Mr Ganivet, enchanted by her, was continuing. He said, ‘Boys grow so fast – I would help with his uniform, as well, of course. As long as you can manage to feed him …’

  She felt she could take this offer of help from a fellow Basque – it would be different, she told herself, if he had been of another nationality – so she thanked him gratefully.

  He rubbed his hands and smiled jovially, and she wondered suddenly if there was going to be a price to pay for the help. But he did not touch her. He finished his wine, got up and said, ‘I will write to you in a few days.’ He felt it would not be the best of manners to open his wallet then and there, and give her the money; he would post it to her.

  He did not tell his wife what he had done. Mrs Ganivet was extremely good to Manuel when, increasingly, he and Arnador did their homework in Arnador’s room because of the growing turmoil in the Echaniz home. She did not, however, feel it necessary to call on his widowed mother; nor did it strike her as odd that he was able to continue school. Wapping Dock was a faraway place, like China, as far as she was concerned.

  To Rosita, Mr Ganivet’s offer of help seemed like a miracle, and the memory of it helped to sustain her through the bitter early days of her widowhood. Behind her mourning had lurked the worrying thought that Manuel would not be thirteen until September 1921, and was, consequently, physically immature to be sent to sea, where the work was usually very demanding. At fourteen, he would have some muscle on him. He would also benefit, in the long term, from having completed the minimum schooling required by the Education Committee.

  She quietly wept into her pillow, however, as her dreams of letting him matriculate and, perhaps, go to university faded and died.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  On his way to his wife’s grave with a pink rose in a plastic grocery bag, to protect it from a buffeting summer breeze, Old Manuel thought about his mother in her years of limbo. With his own Kathleen in her grave, he could understand her anguish and despair. She and his father had been so close, despite his being much at sea. Much closer than Kathleen and he had been, he thought with regret. But then Rosita had not had to contend with such a formal society as Kathleen had; Rosita’s life was her family which flowed gently alongside that of other families close by, where most of the little neighbourhood saw each other every day; they did not have to make appointments with each other, or give formal invitations in order to mix. There were no organized charities to be run – you simply helped the neighbours when they were in crisis – and, then, men understood that need as well – they themselves often helped, if they were ashore and muscle-power was required.

  The few real rows he had had with Kathleen had been about her not being home when he returned from his travels; or, if she were at home, she went off to some meeting or other, rather than sit with him over supper to hear his adventures. He had done his best to accept Kathleen’s world, because she was still the woman with whom he had fallen in love and, in bed, he could still express that love. She was trustworthy with money, too, a very important facet of married life. He grinned to himself, as he walked along; Basques at least shared the Canadians’ belief in saving. She had many virtues.

  As, for the hundredth time, he went over in his mind what had been missing in his married life, he felt again a sense of mental confusion, doubts as to how he had dealt with his life in Canada, with Kathleen. After he had become aware of the enormous gap in understanding of each other’s background, he had stopped complaining, accepted whatever was happening as best he could, though within him had grown a terrible sense of isolation. The isolation had been mitigated while he was at sea, in company, as usual, with mates that he knew. To a lesser degree, he had been glad of the male world of designing ships, too. Only when he had retired and was at home all the time had it hit him full in the face, that men and women in the affluent society in which he found himself lived very separate lives.

  ‘There didn’t seem to be any time to do nothing very much together,’ he told himself. While, between voyages, Pedro sloped around in his father-in-law’s kitchen, doing a few odd jobs for Rosita and Micaela, there had been a good deal of communication in an unthreatening, non-confrontational way. It had been the same with his grandfather, Manuel remembered. The old man had been very dogmatic and acted as if he were the cock of the walk, but he was aware of how the others felt, and tacit adjustments were made to accommodate the needs of his family.

  Maybe it was because they were used to living on top of each other; if there were a verbal quarrel or a physical fight, it was difficult in a tiny living-room to carry on for long. He laughed to himself – there wasn’t enough room! And there would always be family onlookers, who would separate the combatants and take them away to be soothed in different corners, and point out the good reasons for not fighting.

  Manuel paused in his walk to take out a cigarette from his shirt pocket and light it. As he drew hard on it, he thought with satisfaction that his had been a wonderful tribe, Barinètas and Echanizes alike. He had been lucky, except for the loss of his father, and Kathleen had never faced the kind of problems that had ensued for Rosita.

  At the time of Pedro’s being lost at sea, there was no Widow’s Pension for Rosita, though the shipping company did pay a lump sum in compensation. With five of them to feed, however, it had not lasted very long. Similarly, there had been no government pension for his grandmother, when his grandfather had been killed; Pedro had, as a matter of course, maintained his mother-in-law, though he must have hoped, at times, that Leo would return to help them.

  Only in the last few months, since Old Manuel had begun to write his memoirs, had he truly appreciated the dogged courage of the two women, as they brought up his sisters and himself. Neither was ever idle – except Micaela in the last month of life – and what physical and mental stress Micaela must have endured as a blind widow, crippled by arthritis, in a foreign country – with nothing of her own!

  And his mother? As she faced the devastation of her life, she had still been handsome, though with hands roughened by years of scrubbing, and a waistline expanded by pregnancies and the need to make do with a starchy diet. Though the passion she had shared with Pedro must have eaten into her very being, she had never, to Manuel’s knowledge, taken a lover after her husband’s death; nor did she marry again, when after seven years, she had been free to do so.

  At the latter thought, Old Manuel made a face. Those were the days when, at the age of forty, a woman was considered hopelessly old; and, in fact, he could remember a swath of neighbouring men and women who had died around that age – or were invalids, living on the kitchen sofa.

  As each room was let, the old house by Wapping Dock rapidly became a nightmare to live in. The women vied with each other for the use of the kitchen oven; for other cooking, they tramped back and forth through Rosita’s kitchen-living-room with buckets of coal from deliveries dumped in the back yard, to build fires in the small bedroom fireplaces. From time to time, there would be bitter quarrels, as tenants accused each other of stealing their coal. At other times, they would make a tremendous dust in the tiny back yard, as they sieved cinders from the ashes to burn them on subsequent fires.

  The single lavatory in the back yard frequently became choked, as tenants, unused to modern plumbing, failed to flush it. They all had cham
ber pots in their rooms, so that they did not have to come downstairs every time nature called. The pots were not always carried through Rosita’s room to be emptied when they should have been; and the stench became all-pervading in the house.

  Periodically, Manuel was faced with having to clear the lavatory. To drown the disgusting smell and to control his desire to vomit, he began to smoke, and smoking became a lifetime habit.

  Rosita did not dare to ask the help of the landlord’s agent to improve the plumbing, because the agent would probably have insisted on turning out most of the subtenants – or have demanded an increase in rent to reap some of the financial benefit.

  The only water tap in the house was in the kitchen-living-room, so pails of water were filled and slopped across the room, to be taken upstairs – or to the parlour, where an elderly hospital cleaner existed as best she could.

  In the days when emigrants had filled the house, it had been for very short periods; as soon as a group embarked for New York, Micaela and Rosita had been able to give the house a thorough cleaning. Many of the emigrant women had been good housewives, who left the room they had occupied immaculate. This was not so amongst the type of tenants who had to live permanently in such primitive circumstances.

  Though two of Pudding’s great-grandchildren hunted industriously and grew fat on their efforts, the whole dock area was cursed with rats and mice; and in a house where food was kept in every room, rodents and cockroaches began to flourish.

  Rosita’s greatest dread was dealing with tenants who failed to pay their rent. She had no man to threaten them, and, in any case, as the years crept on, unemployment with its consequent hardships became a city-wide, chronic disease.

  She would sit by her own, often empty, fireplace, and weep to Micaela. ‘How can I turn Iris Mary out, with her expecting, and her hubbie with no work – they hardly eat!’

  Bundled up in a blanket on the sofa, in increasing pain from her arthritis and with little heat to assuage it, Micaela would not reply, because there was nothing to say that would comfort.

  Rosita continued to try for finishing work from the big dress houses in the city; but the elaborate dresses of pre-war days, with their infinite amounts of embroidery to be done and flounces to be hemmed, had given way to very short, comparatively plain fashions; and she was turned away.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Fifteen months after Pedro’s ship foundered, when softer winds blowing up the Mersey heralded the spring of 1921, and the corner shop had a pile of small Easter eggs on its counter, George Halloran had a stroke and died on his bed, upstairs. Once again, the house resounded to the cries of bereavement; and the women gathered to comfort hysterical, penniless Effie, who wept not only for her husband but for her dead boys.

  After the added sorrow of a pauper’s funeral because Effie was behind with her burial insurance, Effie wiped her reddened eyes and said she would find a job. Micaela was thankful, because the woman was a week behind in her rent as a result of George’s unexpected demise.

  Even in the worst of economic times, there are jobs that no one wants to do, and, for a while, Effie toiled in a stapler’s workshop in St Anne Street, where all day long she teased wool for stuffing mattresses.

  She would return home, worn-out, her black shawl a mass of fluff. The same fluff clung to her hair; and Micaela said that if you touched her you could feel the fine hairs stuck to her face and arms; she began to cough, as the hair accumulated in her lungs.

  By the time Effie had obtained her job, she had missed another week’s rent, which was a serious problem for Rosita.

  ‘I can’t make myself turn her out,’ she said anxiously to Manuel, and the boy instantly agreed with her; Effie had become almost part of the family.

  ‘If only I could get some sewing work,’ Rosita fretted. ‘It would really help. I could do it at home and watch the tenants don’t pilfer food or coal – now your grandma can’t see, she can’t really watch.’

  Since her search for sewing work was fruitless, she borrowed the Evening Express from Pat Connolly, and finally found an advertisement put in by a firm which offered a small fortune to those who would affix green baize linings into cutlery baskets – at home. Upon inquiry, she discovered that the company, in the shape of a small, sharp-faced man called Mr Holley, would pay ten copper pennies per basket for this fiddling piecework.

  The family became accustomed to her sitting at the table, snipping at the green baize, and cursing quietly when the glue made the pieces stick to her fingers. Manuel did his best to help by contributing the two shillings and sixpence a week which he earned by doing an early-morning paper round; and both he and Francesca handed over any pennies they earned by going messages for the neighbours.

  Though Manuel would not be fourteen until September 1922, he could legally leave school at the end of the previous summer term. He was counting the days until he would be free to look for a job. His mother had been so forceful about the importance of his continuing in school until he was fourteen that he had obeyed her. When he had asked impatiently, how she could pay the fees, she had snapped, ‘I’ll manage, somehow. Don’t worry.’

  She did not want to tell him of Mr Ganivet’s help, because she felt it might spoil the easy friendship between Manuel and his son. ‘Arnador’s a good friend to him,’ she said to Micaela. ‘And I want to keep it that way.’

  Micaela agreed.

  Deep in his heart, Manuel’s desire to go to sea to help his mother was tempered by the memory of Pedro’s fate; yet, he told himself crossly, most of the men in the neighbourhood faced the very real threat of injury or death, wherever they worked. But you never heard them complain about it.

  He wished he could discuss this cowardice with Arnador. Arnador was very practical, however, and he knew he would say immediately that Manuel should stay ashore and try for a fairly safe job, like clerical work. And if I do that, thought Manuel fretfully, not only would I be a coward, but Mother would have to spend my wages on food for me; if I go to sea, I get food thrown in – and she can have all my wages.

  One warm Friday evening in June, near the end of his last term at school, Rosita put her head down on the kitchen table and unexpectedly burst into tears.

  Micaela got up from her sofa and hobbled towards the sound of weeping, while the children asked in alarm, ‘What’s up, Mam?’

  ‘It’s the rent,’ she wailed. ‘First the collector ticked me off this morning because I couldn’t pay the arrears. And this afternoon, the agent himself – Roy Fleet – came, and said if we don’t pay up he’ll put us out – on Monday morning.’

  ‘But we’ve been in this house for thirty-five years,’ protested Micaela, as she bent over her daughter.

  ‘I told him that. But I’ve got behind since Pedro went – because the tenants don’t pay me regularly.’

  Micaela sighed – she still could not believe the threat. ‘To think that Juan or Pedro did all the repairs!’ she exclaimed. ‘Isn’t that worth something?’

  A very shaken Manuel bent to pick up a scared Little Maria, who was not sure what the threat was, but had begun to whimper. He held her close and whispered to her not to be afraid, while Francesca, who had been laboriously knitting by the empty fireplace, put down her pins, and sat like a small white statue, staring at him, aghast.

  ‘Mr Fleet’s not a bad man,’ Rosita said dully, ‘but he’s got an owner pushing him. He’s knows I’m a widow – and he’ll be thinking that I can’t afford such a big house any more – but it’s only because I let rooms that I can get by.’

  ‘What happened finally?’ Manuel asked, as he mechanically patted Little Maria’s back to comfort her.

  ‘Well, he said if we could pay a pound by Sunday night, and the rest of the arrears at a shilling a week, he’d rescind the eviction order. He’s given me his home address, so that I can pay it any time up to eleven o’clock Sunday night. I suppose he’s trying to be kind.’ Elbows on table, her head between her sticky hands, she wept again. ‘I hav
en’t got a pound – and neither your grandma nor I know what to do.’

  Her arm still round her daughter’s shoulder, Micaela felt defeated. Though blind, she could feel the dampness of the house from leaking gutters and drainpipes, and she could smell the extra smokiness from downdraughts caused by a crumbling collection of chimneys. Rosita had remarked recently that, after one hundred and fifty-odd years of use, not a door handle or a lock worked properly, and every door and window rattled in the wind.

  ‘Conor and Lily and Effie – they’ve all missed paying this week. They can’t help it sometimes when there’s no work – and Effie changed her job this week, so she’s short.’

  ‘Have you got any money at all?’ asked Manuel. He jumped as Francesca sidled up close to him. He looked down and winked at her, and said to her, ‘Don’t you be afraid. We’ll fix it somehow.’ His deep-timbred voice sounded manly and comforting.

  His mother sobbed. ‘I’ve two and sixpence – your newspaper money. I have to keep that for a bit of food for us.’

  ‘Phew!’

  ‘Lily Rawlings says her hubbie’s got work for Monday and Tuesday – she’ll pay me Tuesday night. They owe two weeks now, because he didn’t have any work last week – and she’s got morning sickness so bad that she can’t go charring for a bit – till it settles down.’ She wiped her eyes with the back of her hands.

  A small voice piped up. ‘What about going to the post office to get some money?’ Going to the post office with Granny had recently been one of Little Maria’s delights – because she sometimes was allowed to buy a halfpenny lollipop on the way back.