The Liverpool Basque (20 page)

In 1919 the Liverpool City Police went on strike. As a result, there was so much violence in the city that both Mrs Ganivet and Rosita warned the boys not to go near the north end of the town. They scolded almost identically. ‘With no police, you don’t know what may happen to you – they’ve got
soldiers
on guard – with rifles, and they shot somebody last night. And see how it’s raining; you’ll be soaked!’

Determined not to miss the excitement, each boy told his mother cheerfully that he would be visiting the home of the other one.

In macintoshes and boots, their identifying St Francis Xavier caps stuffed into their pockets, they trudged along Lime Street to look at the London Road shopping area, which it was said had been hard hit by looting rioters. They found themselves in a fairly large crowd all going in the same direction.

They were struck dumb by what they saw; other appalled sightseers whispered to each other, as if they were at a funeral. Even Arnador seemed awed by the destruction. Though the pavements appeared to have been swept, bits of glass from shattered shop windows crunched under their feet or lay in neat heaps along the base of the gaping display windows, empty except for fluttering price tickets and knocked down shelves and stands. Behind them, the boys caught a glimpse of interiors reduced to a shambles. Some windows had already been boarded up, and, in front of others, men were at work with sheets of plywood closing off the rest from the wrath of further rioters.

They were relieved that the army did not appear to be on guard.

A solitary constable stood rigidly at a corner, truncheon drawn.

Arnador viewed him with interest. ‘The strike isn’t one hundred per cent,’ he remarked thoughtfully.

Manuel whispered back. ‘I thought they were all out.’ He gazed at the unmoving constable; there was something touching in the way he stood alone, waiting for further mobs to descend on the cruelly smashed tiny businesses.

Arnador’s eyes dropped, as the constable became aware of his stare. He said uneasily, ‘Perhaps he doesn’t believe it’s right to let ordinary people suffer, when it’s not their fault. It could be our house – or his – next.’

Manuel’s eyes widened in horror. ‘Do you think so?’

‘It’s possible.’ He waved a hand towards a corner shop, particularly devastated. ‘The mob that did this probably got upstairs and cleaned out the owner’s home, as well.’

Manuel felt slightly sick. ‘Mam says that they’re so poor up Scotland Road, it’s pitiful. They’d take anything.’

‘They’re very poor round Wapping Dock.’

‘Well, nothing happened round us.’

‘In the war, they sacked a German butcher’s shop on Park Road.’ The older boy paused to watch a man hammering boards over a side window, which, somehow, still had its glass intact. Then he added, ‘Because he was foreign – and the enemy. We’re foreign, and people would turn on us, if they didn’t like what Spain was doing.’

Manuel responded stoutly, ‘I’m not foreign; I was born here – and we’re not Spanish.’

Arnador smiled. ‘They don’t know the difference. And you look foreign.’

‘You don’t!’

‘I’m fair. I blend in better – it’s very convenient!’

As they climbed the hill and, with others, viewed the endless damage, a small fear entered Manuel’s heart.
Would people hurt you simply because you looked different? In the polyglot area in which he lived, he had never been made to feel different, except when, at school, Stewart had called him a dago. Could the brutes who had caused such chaos in friendly London Road turn on other people? If there were no police?

Sickened by his own thoughts, he was suddenly dimly aware that it was the police, taken for granted like letter boxes or lamp standards, who normally stopped people from wreaking havoc. At this moment, except for the defiant, almost heroic figure they had passed on the corner, there were no police.

‘Let’s go home,’ he urged Arnador.

They were dripping wet and they moved towards a shop entrance, to shelter for a minute, while they decided what to do. A deep voice said sharply, ‘Move along there, please.’

They jumped, and turned. A soldier not much older than themselves, his rifle on his shoulder, stood deeper in the entrance-way. He looked very grim.

Without a word, the youngsters moved away, and then, suddenly frightened, clattered as fast as they could through the thickening crowd, back down to Lime Street.

Actually being given an order by a soldier in khaki uniform, with a gun, confirmed their mothers’ scoldings. This was as serious as the paper said it was. Soldiers were normally men on leave; they did not order civilians around; they were meant to fight wars.

Though the strike was not undertaken without cause, none of the striking men got their jobs back. New recruits, many of them Irish, were taken into the Force; this was deeply resented by many people on Merseyside, and remained a rankling grievance for half a century.

Even seventy-three years later, Old Manuel recalled how terrified he had been at Arnador’s idle remark about mobs
turning on people. Until then, he had always believed that a man belonged where he was born, though he could also be proud of his racial origins. Perhaps, he considered, as he carefully shaved himself one morning, it was that incident which had made him more stubbornly Basque than he would have otherwise been.

He grinned, as he peered into the bathroom mirror to dab a small nick in his chin – despite Kathleen’s best efforts to convert him to an electric razor, he still shaved with an old-fashioned cutthroat. We always were an obstinate lot, he told his mirror image with blatant pride.

That same year, Brian Wing electrified the neighbourhood round Wapping by winning one of the very few scholarships then available, to the highly respected Liverpool Institute.

Struggling to keep their little laundry going, his father and mother were considered poor even by the hard-up residents around them. How could Brian have ever learned enough to do it? Manuel and Arnador wondered.

Auntie Bridget Connolly, who was credited with knowing everything about the area, soon told them that the family had given a home to a poor university student of Chinese descent, on a promise that he would tutor Brian in maths and English. The young man and the nervous little boy had liked each other; and the pair of them were so proud of their success that, according to Bridget, ‘When I saw ’em this mornin’, they were grinnin’ at each other like two Buddhas out of Bunney’s gift shop.’ She smiled softly at Manuel and Arnador, and went on, ‘He looked proper nice in his uniform, he did. He’s a lovely little lad.’

‘He’ll probably be the only Chinese kid in the school,’ Pat Connolly remarked, as he checked the racing news at the back of his newspaper. ‘Poor little tyke.’

‘He won’t have no trouble,’ Bridget assured him. ‘He’s smart at avoiding it – watched him many a time I have.’

Manuel and Arnador agreed. They were both intrigued at having another friend in Wapping who, like themselves, would be better educated.

The next time Manuel went up to the laundry to see Brian, Rosita instructed him to tell his small friend how happy the Echaniz family was at his success.

Brian’s eyes became slits behind his Woolworth’s glasses, as he grinned. He was dressed in his usual slightly large woollen shorts, handed down from his older brother. ‘Got any ciggie cards to swop?’ he asked.

Still the same old Brian, Manuel decided with an odd sense of relief.

Pedro missed the fun of preparing for Christmas.

Manuel did all kinds of small jobs round the Pier Head and the dock, to earn pennies to buy presents for Grandma Micaela, Rosita, Francesca and Little Maria, and for his father. He caught ropes thrown by boatmen approaching the dockside; he held horses occasionally for delivery van men – horses that pulled drays were too big for him to cope with; for a halfpenny, he watched a telegraph boy’s bicycle at the kerbside; and, once, he actually watched that a motor car remained untouched, when a very well-dressed man wanted to walk down to the Pier Head to take a photograph of a ferry coming in. He shared the latter job with Brian, and they stood one on each side of this most unusual vehicle and scowled ferociously at any street kid who came to stare at it. The man gave them twopence each, when he returned and found it safe and unblemished. Both boys were ecstatic. Manuel also got a whole series of pennies from Mrs Saitua, for running her messages for her. She had caught the Spanish flu and, though she had survived it, she still had not recovered her strength, so she was very glad of his help.

Pedro docked a few days after Christmas. Since he had missed the traditional Christmas Eve feast, though he had
had a Christmas dinner aboard ship, Rosita and Micaela again made some of the customary Basque Christmas Eve dishes for him, and the family enjoyed roasted bream, fried potatoes and new bread, followed by a big plate of choux pastries filled with cream and covered with chocolate. The Saituas, two sturdy Basque friends of Pedro’s, the Connollys and the Hallorans were invited to visit and share the cakes.

Bottles of wine and a box of cigars were opened, and, in the ensuing merriment, even Rosita’s tired, pale face began to show some colour.

Mysterious parcels were unearthed from Pedro’s kitbag and hidden until 6 January, Epiphany, when they would be placed in a basket in the front window as gifts from the Three Wise Men on their feast day.

In English fashion, Manuel, Francesca and Little Maria had all hung their stockings up in front of the fireplace at Christmas, into which both grandmother and mother had contrived to put small presents. None of them seemed to remember that 6 January was still to come.

While Francesca was cuddled on her father’s lap, Manuel leaned on the back of his father’s chair until he reeked of smoke from Pedro’s cigar. He longed to have his father to himself for a little while; but, meanwhile, he listened to a heated discussion of British and Spanish politics, interspersed with joking references to the hazards of shipboard life. Sometimes, the words poured out so fast that the Basques present broke into their own language, and everything had to be quickly translated by Rosita for the benefit of the Connollys and Hallorans, as she refilled glasses and handed round the cakes.

When Pedro asked Rosita to pour half a glass of wine for the boy, Manuel felt he had suddenly become an adult. Francesca and Little Maria promptly demanded a glass, too. Drops of wine were put into two glasses and then surreptitiously topped up with water. Everybody laughed
when Little Maria carefully held her glass by the stem, exactly as Micaela did.

Even though the war was over, Bilbao was doing quite well, Pedro told them; he had gleaned this news from other Basques in his new ship, and now he floated the idea of, perhaps, going back there.

Mr Saitua made a face over the rim of his glass. ‘It won’t last,’ he said. ‘The blasted Spanish’ll drain it dry.’

‘There’s a lot of talk of fighting for a country of our own. What do you think?’

Jean Baptiste Saitua pulled another face. ‘There’s always been talk – but have you ever heard of a Spaniard letting go of anything he thinks he owns?’

Rosita intervened to ask her husband, ‘Do you think the children would have a better chance there than they do here?’

Pedro again looked to Jean Baptiste for comment on this.

The older man scratched his sunburned bald head with huge, swollen fingers. ‘I doubt it. My boys are in steady jobs. And Manuel could do better, if he stays in school long enough.’

Pedro felt that now he was with the de Larrinaga Line he was doing fairly well himself, though one never knew with certainty when a ship might be laid up. If Manuel got into a profession, however, he would never be out of work – and the possibility of that was much greater for him in Liverpool. He nodded his head, and said to Rosita, ‘I believe he’s right.’

A day or two later, Pedro sailed again. Manuel was playing football with Brian Wing further up the street, and the two little girls had gone together to the corner shop to buy a penny block of salt for their mother. In the dark hall, Pedro held his wife in his arms, while Micaela busied herself making beds upstairs. She laid her head on his shoulder
and said, with a sigh, ‘I wish you didn’t have to go.’

‘It’d be much worse if I didn’t have a ship to go to!’ he replied. ‘There’ve been a few that have been laid up recently.’

He felt her shrug slightly as she said, ‘I wish you could’ve had Dad’s Basque agency. You could have had it, if you’d asked.’

‘There aren’t that many emigrants going through, nowadays.’

‘Humph.’ She giggled suddenly, as he fondled her. ‘Get away with you,’ she told him. ‘Start that little game and you’ll never get down to the ship before she sails. Come on, now. Let go!’

He laughed, loosed her, and gave her a quick kiss, before picking up his kitbag and tin suitcase. ‘See you soon, luv. Ta-ra.’

She opened the door to let him out, and stood on the step to watch him swing down the road towards Queens No. 2. Then she shivered, wrapped her woollen cardigan closer round herself and went slowly indoors.

Seated in his neat Canadian kitchen, Old Manuel read a letter from his cousin, Ramon Barinèta, in Liverpool, sipped coffee, and, with half his mind, considered the steady rhythm of Rosita’s work during her husband’s absences.

She was always busy in the stone-floored, eighteenth-century house. He himself had loved the old lodging house and had, as a boy, never noticed its total lack of convenience; or that his grandmother was steadily becoming more frail and dependent upon her daughter.