The Liverpool Basque

by Helen Forrester

  At the mention of Pedro and Juan, her mother smiled at her. Her smile was sweet, and she said, ‘If you do as well as I did, it’ll be good.’

  So no more was said to Maria about her choice of Vicente, and within the month she had a modest diamond ring on her finger.

  It seemed to Rosita that the family had hardly got its collective life adjusted to their joint sorrows as a result of the Spanish Civil War, when the Second World War was upon them. As Basques, they had a better knowledge of what it might entail than most of the population of Liverpool; and all of them worried about Ramon, who, by the age of approximately two years, had had enough of conflict to last a lifetime.

  When war broke out on 3 September 1939 Manuel was nearly thirty-one years of age. Though he was now a refrigeration engineer in ships carrying fruit, and usually had a neat small cabin of his own – which he had promised himself on his very first voyage, he remembered with amusement – he was not paid very well. Like many during the Depression years, he had not thought seriously of marriage, because he, like Leo, had a commitment to help maintain the existing family home; to take a wife and start a new family could cause endless problems. Besides, Arnador was still single, and free to range with him as a fellow bachelor.

  A year older than Manuel, Arnador had at last established himself as a lecturer at the University of Liverpool, after doing post-doctoral work in Manchester. But even university staff were not paid that well, he confided to Manuel.

  Manuel was at sea when war was declared, but he docked a couple of weeks later, and came up to Toxteth to see his mother in a brief shore leave. Perhaps because the fright of the declaration of war tended to make some people look around them more and re-evaluate their lives, he noticed how greatly Rosita seemed to have aged; her red mane of hair had grown sandy-looking with the white in it; she was stouter and her movements slower. She greeted him cheerfully, however, with her usual ebullience, and Ramon toddled round after her, chattering all the time – speech which had to be translated for Manuel by his amused great-aunt. ‘He’s trying that hard to talk, bless him,’ she told Manuel.

  Manuel’s and Leo’s homecomings did not often coincide, though Leo had been home once since Ramon’s arrival. At that time, he had not seemed to have changed much. He was a bosun and enjoyed his job – he never seemed to change ships. He had gone bald and put on some weight under his navy jersey, and, sometimes by a turn of his head or a hand gesture, he reminded Manuel of Grandfather Juan. He had been badly shaken by the news of the loss of his brother and the Bilbao family, and he had been completely in agreement that Ramon and Quanito should stay with them as long as they wished.

  It had been expected that immediately upon the declaration of war, the city would be heavily bombed, and Rosita had received instructions from the newly appointed air raid warden about her being evacuated to the country with Ramon. If the boy had been at school, he would have gone with his teachers; the schools would be closed.

  ‘As if I’d leave you to be bombed!’ Rosita said to Francesca and Maria. ‘I’ll make a bed for the little lad under the cellar steps – that’s the safest place in the house, according to the air raid warden. The poor little lamb isn’t going anywhere.’

  So Ramon spent most nights, during the years of the war, sleeping soundly under the cellar steps, amid the smell and dust of the coal ration.

  The evacuated children drifted back from the country in such numbers that the schools had to be re-opened. In the meantime, Ramon learned how to put on a gas mask.

  Men were called up, further disorganizing businesses, which were trying to adjust to producing articles required for war, rather than for peace, amid stiff rationing of resources. Women in factories began to earn very good wages and to find that there was little to spend them on.

  Rosita suddenly found she was getting dozens of requests from young women in the immediate vicinity to make dresses for them. Most of the material presented to her was undoubtedly obtained on the black market, but she was also asked to recut dresses bought in second-hand shops or to make blouses out of men’s shirts, skirts out of men’s trousers – as brothers were called up and trustingly left their civilian clothes hanging in the wardrobe at home.

  At first she refused, but the young women were prepared to pay so much more than she had ever earned before, that she decided to leave Sloan’s, who were having their own problems, and concentrate on this new, very lucrative business.

  In 1940, Ramon was sent to school in nearby Granby Street, and she had more time. Her sewing machine in the front room whirred throughout the war, as she put money away for a better education for Ramon.

  The boy grew up to be a typical Liverpool lad, unusual only in his ability to speak two languages. He played football, and, as he grew bigger, was always importuning for money to go to football matches. He became a sturdy boy with wavy black hair and a fair skin; and he blended into the amorphous mass of the population of the great port. Few would have guessed that his father had been a famous guerrilla, fighting a murderous battle of revenge against the fascists.

  On the outbreak of war, Vicente obtained a special licence, and he and Maria were quietly married in St Peter’s Church by an aged and sad Father Felipe. Francesca was the bridesmaid and Domingo Saitua was the best man. White-haired Madeleine Saitua put on a pretty wedding breakfast for them in her house, at which Domingo’s wife and daughter, Rosita and Ramon were the only guests. Manuel and Leo were both at sea. The newly married couple went to live with Madeleine, who said rightly that she had more than enough room in her house.

  Three months later, Boot’s regretfully told Francesca that their cosmetic trade would be almost wiped out by the lack of stock; they hoped she could find another post more closely connected with the war effort and would return to them when the conflict was over.

  Disconcerted, she discussed with Rosita the idea of volunteering for the Forces. ‘I don’t have any particular skills, Mam. I don’t know what else to do.’

  Her mother took off her spectacles and rubbed her eyes. She glanced doubtfully at her beautiful daughter; she did not want the girl in uniform – uniforms were for men. ‘You can speak and write three languages,’ she reminded her.

  ‘I’ve never found them a commercial asset,’ replied Francesca, with a wry grin.

  Rosita picked up a reel of cotton and carefully rewound a piece of thread on to it – appropriately coloured cottons were beginning to be in short supply. ‘Look, Boot’s have given you two weeks to find another job. Mannie’ll be docking in a few days, and I would like you to discuss it with him before you do anything drastic.’

  In the event, it was Arnador who settled the matter with one word. He said, ‘Censorship!’ He and Manuel were of one mind; neither of them wanted Francesca in the Forces, a very common state of mind amongst the male population, when their own sisters were involved!

  Encouraged by the young men, she applied to the Censorship Office and was sent to Glasgow. When, on 18 December 1941, the call-up of women was announced, she found, like many others, that she could not change her job without Government permission. She found the work so interesting, however, that she was happy to stay there. ‘And it is vital to the war, Mam,’ she told Rosita.

  Similarly, Arnador himself was co-opted by the Government to do highly secret work intercepting and translating radio messages and telephone calls, where his knowledge of Spanish and Basque was invaluable.

  Because he was convinced on moral grounds that this was a war which had to be fought, he had on its outbreak volunteered for the Air Force; to his astonishment, he had been turned down because of a partially dislocated shoulder, the result of the bite he had received from a horse, as a boy, an event which he had totally forgotten.

  Rosita and Ramon were a comfort to each other, as they took shelter under the cellar steps during air raids, and they gave thanks to God each time Manuel and Leo came home from sea.

  Chapter Forty-six

  With sorrow in his heart, Old Manuel t
ried to write something of the war for Lorilyn, to make her understand its personal impact, something separate from lists of battles. Just as Rosita used to do, he chewed his ballpoint pen, as he considered his healthy, lively granddaughter. She was not unlike her great-aunt Maria; she had the same dark colouring and vivacity, the same impatience with small obstacles in her life – dear Little Maria, who had had fifteen months of happy married life, before a direct hit in an air raid on Madeleine’s house, so near the target of the docks, had killed not only Madeleine herself, but also Vicente and Maria, who were expecting their first baby.

  He put down his pen, in order to rub his aching arthritic fingers. Thoughts of his sisters made him feel so lonely that he wanted to weep. The loss of Maria had broken his mother’s heart, and Manuel himself had not been able to believe that someone so lively, so close to him, could possibly be dead. Francesca, too, had been stunned by it. She came down from Glasgow to comfort her mother; but wars were such that they took little note of personal grieving, and Francesca had had to return to her work, and leave Rosita and Ramon to comfort each other as best they could. That same night Manuel went back to sea – it was pure chance that he had been in dock on the night of the tragedy. There was no individual funeral because there was nothing much left to bury. A communal service was held for all the victims of the incident and the bits were buried in a communal grave.

  The old man remembered all the fine women who had filled his young life, Grandma Micaela, Rosita, Francesca and Maria, dear delicate Aunt Maria, Bridget Connolly, Peggy O’Brien, Effie Halloran, Madeleine Saitua and vague ghosts of his Bilbao cousins and his Echaniz grandmother.

  With the weakness of great age, he let the tears run. Then, telling himself not to be an old fool, he took off his glasses and wiped them carefully. As he put them on again, he saw almost with shock, that he had not included Kathleen, his dear wife of many years, or Faith, who doggedly did her best for him even now, or Lorilyn, in whom he put his hopes for the future.

  He sighed, as he leaned back in his swivel chair. He had loved, still loved, Kathleen, and Faith and Lorilyn, too. But they had understood little or nothing of the world from which he had come; they belonged in another place, nice, sanitized, wealthy … But often dull, he considered suddenly.

  He went to have his afternoon nap. Before lying down, he stopped in the kitchen to get a glass of water and take one of his pills. It seemed to him that, lately, his damaged legs had ached a lot more than they used to, though ever since the day he had been carried into the hospital at Halifax, he had had to take an occasional pill to ease the pain. As he stood leaning against the kitchen counter, waiting for the pill to do its work, he told himself he was lucky; he could easily have had to have his legs amputated.

  After his nap, he made a cup of coffee and took it to his desk. He would tell Lorilyn how he met her grandmother.

  I was torpedoed off the coast of Nova Scotia, he wrote. It was the second time – the first time was near the coast of Northern Ireland; but we managed to get the lifeboats off, that night. This time, we weren’t so lucky and had to cling to a raft, with several men on it. The water was so cold, it was a miracle some of us survived – you probably know how the icebergs drift down from the North Pole in the western Atlantic; their chill seems to permeate the water all year. Some convoys had a rescue boat, to pick up men like us, after the convoy had extricated itself from the submarine attack. Ours did not, and, of a necessity, the convoy – what was left of it – had to continue on its way to Liverpool; otherwise they might lose more ships, while searching for men in the water. The last ship in the convoy passed right by us.

  By chance, Joey Connolly was an able seaman on the same ship, and he, too, was clinging to the raft. Because he was obviously weakening, two of the men tried to heave him on to it. He was far gone, however, and he slipped into the sea and we lost him, young Joey who never learned to cheat at marbles.

  Some fishermen risked their own lives to rescue the three of us still alive when they spotted the raft. They took us into a Newfoundland outport. The few inhabitants opened their doors and came running; they took blankets from their beds to wrap round us. We were nearly smothered in oil, and the women washed our faces as best they could, and then spooned hastily heated canned soup into us, while we waited for transport to Halifax, Nova Scotia. It seemed like eternity, waiting for medical help.

  A team of doctors and nurses was ready for us, when we did arrive, and we were stripped and washed and the damage assessed. Though the doctors had by that time had a fair amount of experience of resuscitating patients like us, one died.

  Thinking about it, Manuel mentally doffed his beret to the Halifax doctors and nurses. Thanks to them, he still had a pair of legs.

  In the night, when the sedation was wearing off, I must have made some sort of a noise, because the night nurse left her desk and came to my bedside. Fair, brisk and capable, she arranged pillows round me to ease the weight on tender parts, and she sat a few minutes with me until I must have dozed off.

  And that’s how I met Grandma Kathleen. I fell in love at first sight – not that I expected to live to do anything about it – I was sure I was a goner – I hurt everywhere!

  He did not write that he had cried that night for Joey and for Auntie Bridget Connolly, whose heart would be broken when she got the news.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  It was several months before he was passed as fit, plenty of time in which to woo his night nurse. It was with reluctance that he joined a British ship sailing from Halifax, in convoy, to Liverpool. As before, the convoy was attacked by German submarines. Two ships were lost, and one damaged, but he himself was lucky this time.

  When he walked up the tree-lined street to his home, he found Uncle Leo sitting on the doorstep in the spring sunshine, reading the single sheet evening newspaper.

  Manuel dropped the small suitcase given him in Halifax with a few clothing basics and some toiletries, and grasped his uncle’s hand. They hugged each other until every distressed muscle and joint in Manuel’s body began to ache all over again. Both of them had been under the same intolerable stress for months and months and did not need to say much to each other to understand. Leo had not actually lost a ship under him, but he had had a number of uncomfortable encounters with subs.

  ‘We’d no means of knowing when you’d dock. There’s never a word of shipping news in the paper. Come in, lad. I docked yesterday – real lucky to see you.’

  As he took off his jacket, Manuel asked after the family and was assured that everyone was well, and that Arnador had left a telephone number with Rosita for him. ‘He’s gone to Manchester to be some sort of a back-room boy for the Government,’ Leo explained.

  ‘Any air raids?’

  ‘Oh, aye. But not much up this end – the north end’s taken a beating, though.’

  After a long, Basque-speaking evening with the family, where he seemed to have held Rosita’s hand for hours to reassure her that he was, indeed, there and was well again, Manuel said he thought he should go out to Norris Green, the next day, to see Bridget and Pat Connolly about the loss of Joey.

  ‘Yes, you must go. She came to me when Maria and Vicente …’ Words failed her, and she clutched Manuel’s hand even harder. ‘She’s taking Joey’s death very hard. She’d love to see you.’

  The next morning, with a heavy heart, he made the long tram journey out to Norris Green, and did his best in a hopeless situation.

  That afternoon, Ramon played truant from school to be with Manuel. They went down to the Mercantile Marine office, where he had to arrange for a new discharge book, and to inquire for a ship to Halifax, sailing fairly soon. He was told that it would be some days before he got his new book, and the clerk promised to bear him in mind for a likely ship.

  Afterwards, they walked along the landing stage to look at the river, crowded with shipping, and to catch up on their news.

  Kathleen was constantly at the forefront of Manuel’s mind, and one p
roblem in regard to her was troubling him; she was a Protestant and he was a Roman Catholic, a very serious matter in Liverpool.

  After he had heard about Ramon’s prowess in the school football team and how many pieces of shrapnel had just missed hitting him during the air raids, he asked the boy, ‘Do the kids get at you for being Catholic or speaking Basque?’

  Ramon laughed. ‘I never tell them – they don’t ask anyway. If the class goes into church for something special, I go along. What does it matter?’

  ‘I’m glad for you. Do you think you’ll get a scholarship to the Institute? Mam said she thought it was possible.’

  ‘I dunno. I’ll try. Uncle Arnie says he’ll coach me when I’m old enough.’

  That evening, Manuel asked Rosita what the feeling was about Catholics in the city. She thought it was an odd question, but she answered, ‘Well, for sure, you can get a job in a Prottie business now – and that wasn’t always easy. They’ll take anybody now. Remember when they used to ask what your religion was when you applied for a job? Well, not any more.’

  She smiled up at him impishly, and added, ‘When the bombs are dropping on you, Catholic and Prottie alike, you just think to comfort each other – you don’t think, “Is she a good Catholic?”’

  If anyone as devout as his mother could say that, Manuel decided, times were really changing. Perhaps there would no longer be bloody religious riots in Liverpool, as there had been before the war.

  The whole family had a good laugh that evening, as Manuel collected every big copper penny that anybody had, so that he could telephone Arnador in Manchester and Francesca in Glasgow from the public telephone box at the end of the road.