The Liverpool Basque. Helen Forrester

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      ‘Are you glad you went to sea?’ asked Jack from behind a cloud of tobacco smoke.

      ‘Never dreamed of doing anything else. Not till I met Kathleen, that is; she’d got her eyes on a shore job for me. After we was married, she kept on her nursing and she put me through college, and I come out a marine architect. We had a good life – but I missed the sea.’

      ‘Humph. My dad was a fisherman, and he took me out to sea when I was nine or ten. I was wet and cold and seasick, but I felt I was a real man. At fourteen, I was a deck boy.’ He made the statement with pride, and then a grin flashed across his face, as he added, ‘I’d never heard of being a teenager; I was a lad learning to be a man under real men. Had some good laughs, though.’

      ‘Oh, aye. I were happy when I were a little kid, too, with me dad and me Uncle Leo coming and going from sea – and being took down to visit their ships, and listen to them grumble and laugh. And getting a bit of pie from the ship’s cook.’ He paused to light another cigarette, and then went on. ‘And in the house, there was me granny and grandpa to tell me stories. After me mam slapped me for being naughty, me gran would wipe me face – and explain why I got the slap!’ Both men were silent, as they smoked and contemplated the sea and the mountains before them. Then Manuel said in a puzzled way, ‘Our Lorilyn never seems to need a grandpa at all.’

      While he recalled this rambling conversation with Jack, he took the handmade patchwork quilt off the bed and folded it carefully and laid it on a chair, and sighed. Though he had tried, he did not feel that he had been a very good grandfather – unlike his own grandfather, Juan Barinèta.

      He sat down on the side of his bed, pulled a faded crocheted shawl out of the drawer of the bedside table, and slowly eased himself down on to the bed until he lay on his back. He paused for a moment, while every bone and muscle in his body flashed with sudden aches, then he laid the shawl over himself, clasped his hands over his chest and thankfully closed his eyes. In the moment between waking and sleeping, he remembered Kathleen upbraiding him for resting on top of the patchwork quilt. Although he was tired from a very scary wartime voyage, he had pulled her down on top of him. They had forgotten about keeping the bedspread pristine, while they spent until nightfall making love so satisfactorily that even now, nearly fifty years later, he remembered it with awe. Had he really been that strong? And she so responsive?

      After her death, he had come across the old quilt folded away at the back of the linen closet. Still beautiful, its colours muted by many drycleanings, it had been like meeting an old friend again. In a way, it had comforted him for the emptiness of the other side of the bed.

      He had returned to his ship on the day following his happy afternoon with Kathleen, and her letter telling him the news about her pregnancy with Faith caught up with him in Galveston, Texas.

      He remembered how excited he had been about the child, overwhelmed by the divine mystery of its existence and the sense of responsibility that it had laid upon him.

      He had shouted the news to the few members of the engine room crew who had not gone ashore, and they had congratulated him on his sexual prowess with explicit pithiness. His news broke the astonished silence which had seemed to grip them at other news they had received that morning. The Yanks had dropped an amazing bomb on the port of Hiroshima and blown the whole city and its inhabitants to bits. The city was known to most of the crew and they had found it hard to accept its death – even if it was supposed to shorten the war. It was a port – like Liverpool!

      He had immediately scribbled a few lines to Kathleen, expressing his pure joy at her news. After she was dead, he had found the letter in her jewellery box; she had kept it all her life.

      He had also written to his mother, Rosita Echaniz, in Liverpool, urging her to come on a visit as soon as the war was over, to see the babe as yet unborn.

      He had hoped for more children, but Kathleen had been adamant about limiting their family. ‘How will we ever afford to send them to university?’ she had asked. ‘And if you go back to college after the war …?’

      Manuel was still uncertain that he himself wanted to return to college, and had never considered that a real university might be within the reach of any child of his, so he had reluctantly said he did not know.

      The family remained at one.

      

      The rainstorm which had swept the Juan de Fuca Strait came to an end. The sudden quiet woke the old man from his nap. He rose stiffly and put the shawl which had been keeping him warm back into the bedside drawer. With an amused awareness of his own finickiness, he carefully replaced the bedspread on the bed.

      When he phoned Jack Audley, Mrs Audley said he had gone to Vancouver for the day.

      

      Before going to his old-fashioned roll-top desk to write to Ramon in Liverpool, he went into the kitchen and took down from a cupboard a bottle of wine, already opened. He poured a glass of it carefully, so as not to disturb the sediment at the bottom of the bottle. Then picking it up, he went to the window and stood idly twirling it in the light of the first rays of the sun to pierce the rain clouds.

      Instead of his own long, gnarled fingers holding the stem of the glass, he saw, with unexpected clarity, his grandfather’s huge paw holding a wine glass under his nose, to savour a bottle of a new year’s crop smuggled into Liverpool from Bilbao.

      Those early years in the safety of his grandfather’s great shadow had been good years, he thought wistfully. He remembered how the old man’s beard waggled when he laughed, and when his grandfather picked him up it was like being hugged by a friendly bear.

      He took his glass of wine into his den, where he had a small desk piled with notes and exercise books. Above the desk hung a ship’s chronometer, put there, he had told Jack with a laugh, to remind him that his time was short.

      He put his glass down on the desk, drew up a chair and sat down. With slightly trembling fingers, he sought for and found a well-thumbed school exercise book. In it lay the life of a Basque; in fact, the lives of many of them, set down in the hope that Lorilyn would, one day, be interested in some of the men and women who were the cause of her existence. Like many Canadians, she shared a Scottish origin, too; but not everybody in the world is Scottish, considered Manuel tartly. He wanted her to know that she had roots in the oldest culture in Europe, going far back beyond written history. He wanted her to preserve something of it within her own being.

      So that she would understand, he wrote in English, in an old-fashioned, neatly sloping, cursive hand. He poured out to her, as best he could, the story of his childhood and what little wisdom he felt he had acquired in the long years of his life, especially during the time that he had been part of a Basque community; he did not feel that he had to include much of his life with Kathleen – Lorilyn understood Canadian life – and the finale of Kathleen’s existence was, in any case, too painful for him to write about.

      It was dark by the time he had to stop because of fatigue and he had forgotten, for the moment, his intention of writing to Ramon. He leaned back in his chair to stretch himself. His eyes were watering and his shoulders ached from the concentrated effort he had been making.

      When he looked again at what he had written, he wondered suddenly what lay behind his own boyhood memories. What was going on amongst the grown-ups, who surged in and out of his grandparents’ kitchen-living-room? Were they happy?

      It took a minute or two for him to bring himself back from Wapping Dock in Liverpool, and when his СКАЧАТЬ