The Liverpool Basque. Helen Forrester

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      As he put his plate and coffee mug down on the kitchen table and pulled out a chair, he asked himself ruefully, ‘Manuel, my lad, what have you come to, when all you look forward to is having a nap?’

      The answer was a resigned shrug of one thin shoulder; he had sensed lately that his time was running out.

      He decided that after he had slept a little, he would ring up his friend, Jack Audley, and suggest that he should come over for a game of pool on the billiard table in the basement family room. Jack was twelve years younger than he was, but they shared a common interest in fishing and ships – Jack had been a merchant seaman, too.

      To help him get through his days without Kathleen, Manuel structured them as meticulously as he could, so that all the necessary domestic tasks and the garden were attended to. Sometimes, however, a thoroughly wet day upset the schedule.

      If Jack was not at home, he thought, he would write to his young Liverpool cousin, Ramon Barinèta. He had already, on the first of the month, written to his oldest and dearest friend, Arnador Ganivet, another Liverpool Basque, who had been a Professor at the University of Liverpool, and he smiled gently at the recollection. Between himself and Arnador there was a frankness and concern for each other which probably exceeded that which might have been built up had they both spent their lives in Liverpool; the older they grew, the richer became the correspondence.

      After supper each day, he added a page or two to the memoirs of his early life, which he was writing for the benefit of his granddaughter Lorilyn. He had a vague hope that, when she was older, she would read them and become interested in her Basque forebears. At times, her youthful scorn at his pride in his ancestry had hurt him so much that he longed to slap her; her ignorance of the world and its people, despite thirteen years of education, was absolutely abysmal, he fulminated. In frustration, he took to buying her, for her birthdays, books on European and Asian history. As far as he could tell, she never read them; the books were put on the bookshelf in the McLaren family room, their dust-jackets unbesmirched by handling, their pages stiff from never having been turned.

      He never quite gave up on her immutability, though he had long since done so in the case of her mother.

      He had remarked to Faith’s Grade Six schoolteacher that the child seemed to have no interest in her family’s past or their customs. The schoolteacher, who was an immigrant from Scotland, had tried to comfort him by saying that first-generation Canadian children were often so busy trying to be like the other children that they tended to discard, as much as possible, any trace of their immigrant origin. ‘It’s your grandchildren who will be passionately interested in where they sprang from; they’ll feel more secure,’ she had assured him.

      But now, in Lorilyn, he had a grandchild, and she never read any book that she did not have to for her university courses. And what was she proposing to study? Engineering, God save her! Not a decent womanly occupation, like nursing or teaching.

      While strolling along the cliffs with Jack, one fine summer day, when the gorse was in riotous yellow bloom and the bees were humming like tiny dynamos, he had broached the subject of human roots.

      He said, ‘You know, Jack, people move around too much. A lot of ’em never see another relation, even their grandparents. Come to that, they don’t see much of their mum and dad either, in some cases.’

      ‘You’re right.’

      ‘All they’ve got is kids the same age as themselves or television to set the pace. They’ve no idea that we’ve learned ways to endure bad times – cope with difficulties – take disappointments in our stride. And the first time things don’t go just right – well, they’re sunk.’

      He paused to watch a small yacht trying to tack against the wind, and muttered irritably, ‘He’ll drown if he don’t watch out.’ Then, picking up the original subject again, he went on, ‘There’s nothing much to make kids feel safe, no standards, no customs. They get no religion even – our Lorilyn’s never seen the inside of a church since she were christened – and I wouldn’t like to offend her father by askin’ what she’s doing with that young man always hanging around her.’ He gave a barking laugh. Then he added, ‘There’s no family discipline – I wouldn’t like my grandfather to see her; he’d have made her toe the line a bit, and he’d have had the backing of everybody else. Sometimes I feel like a voice in the wilderness. Do you?’

      Jack’s round red face wrinkled up in a wry grin. Before he answered, he stopped to strike a match and light his pipe, shielding it from the wind with his curved palms. Then, as the pipe glowed and they continued to walk, he nodded agreement. ‘I used to slam my kids when they needed it. It didn’t do much good, because I wasn’t around that much – the wife had to manage while I was at sea.’ He drew slowly on his pipe. Then he continued, ‘And things seemed to be changed almost every time I came home. Nobody else’s kids were going to church any more – so ours wouldn’t. Discipline in school went out, and drugs came in. Like you say, the kids went around in herds all the same age – and there were no cow hands to keep them in line. And God help a cop who boxed their ears for them. I knew what I wanted for my kids, but I didn’t have much luck putting it over.’

      Manuel dropped his cigarette butt and ground it out with his heel. ‘Seems to me that when we were having Faith, nobody dared touch a child – even to bath the poor little bugger – unless they had read at least three books by experts! Kathleen had a row of books.’

      Jack laughed. ‘Same with us. It was like learning to dance from books – as if we’d no ideas of our own. My mother never needed a book to tell her what to do, and we all grew up knowing what was right and what was wrong – even if we weren’t perfect. I wish my mother had been around when our lads were growing up.’ His red face under his straw hat was filled with pain.

      Manuel could have kicked himself for bringing up the subject of children. He had, for the moment, forgotten what a bitter disappointment both Jack’s boys had been to him. They seemed to lack motivation and found it difficult to keep jobs – like homing pigeons, they came back from Vancouver every few months, to live on their father.

      Jack was saying bitterly, ‘I wish I’d taken a shore job, so I could’ve been home more.’

      ‘It’s not your fault, Jack. I’m sure of it. It’s the way things are. They’re treated as kids for far too long. In the old days, by thirteen or fourteen, they would’ve been learning a trade under a weight of older men, who’d have kept them in line; and they’d have learned there’s a limit to what you can get away with.’

      ‘Jobs are different now. How many of them ever go to sea?’

      Manuel snorted. ‘Maybe we should send the whole pack of them to sea for a bit,’ he suggested, trying to lift Jack’s spirits. ‘They’d either drown – or learn their responsibilities mighty fast.’

      Unexpectedly, Jack chuckled. ‘They’d soon learn who’s boss.’

      Manuel began to laugh. ‘Oh, aye, they would. It would be great to see some of the little bastards in a force ten gale, telling the Old Man they were as good as him – or arguing they had rights, while waves as high as the mast were coming at them!’

      ‘Mannie, they don’t know nothing about natural things, like waves.’

      ‘I wouldn’t put it past our Lorilyn to explain the physics of a breaking wave to me!’ responded Manuel.

      This made Jack really laugh, as they plunked themselves СКАЧАТЬ