The Liverpool Basque. Helen Forrester

Opens Crippled Children’s Hospital.

      He glanced down at the weeping child, while saying to a customer, ‘Fourpence change, Sir. What’s to do, lad?’

      ‘I want me mam,’ howled Manuel, hastily taking refuge beside the news-vendor’s second blackboard, which proclaimed in white chalk, Big Fire at Huskisson Dock. ‘And I can’t reach me hen!’ He pointed upwards to the refuge on the windowsill.

      The newspaperman squinted quickly upwards, and grinned. The hen had squatted down, eyes still closed, and looked like a bundle of feathers. ‘That’s yours? Not to worry, lad. Soon as this little rush is over, I’ll get it for yez. It don’t look like it’s goin’ to fly away.’

      Manuel nodded, wiped his nose on the sleeve of his jersey, and continued to weep, though at a lower pitch. He had no idea where he was, and he didn’t really care what happened to the hen; all he wanted was his mother.

      Meanwhile, Rosita and Grandma had assumed that Manuel was still in the market lane, looking at the pets for sale, and had contentedly bought the two remaining live hens. The stallholder, still fuming over the loss of the third hen, sullenly wrung the birds’ necks, while Grandma went to the nearest greengrocery stall by the door of the main market, and bought onions and garlic.

      The crowd in the lane was thinning rapidly; the Irish women were packing up their remaining plates; some of the disconsolate, unsold pets had already been whisked away. Manuel was not visible, and Rosita became anxious.

      To save her carrying the baby around unnecessarily, her two friends ran the length of the lane, but there was no place in which he could have hidden. They came back panting and gesticulating.

      ‘Who you lookin’ for?’ asked a young woman, hooking a cage of kittens on to the handlebars of a bicycle, near the Elliott Street entrance.

      Rosita told her.

      ‘Oh, aye,’ she replied readily. ‘He were nearly run over, he was. You’ll mebbe find ’im across the road. I’ll bet you’ll find ’im in the station there – kids love trains.’ She smiled, and mounted her bike and wobbled over the cobblestones in the general direction to which she had pointed.

      ‘Oh, goodness!’ Rosita exclaimed, her face paling, as, united, the four women pushed their way to the edge of the Elliott Street pavement. A break in the traffic revealed Manuel, with his mouth as wide as a choir boy’s singing a Te Deum, shrieking, ‘I want me mam.’

      Rosita’s expression changed immediately to one of parental outrage. With baby Francesca bouncing on her chest and followed by the other three, shawls flapping like the wings of angry magpies, she surged through a break in the traffic, to face her tear-stained son. Before the child could do more than turn his face to her and reduce his sobs, she scolded him, ‘What do you mean by running off like this? We bin scared stiff for you. I’ll tell your dad about you, when he gets home!’ With her free hand, she grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him.

      Far from being more upset by this, Manuel recognized the typical reaction of a mam who had indeed been scared. His sobs became sniffs, as she alternately cajoled and scolded again.

      Meanwhile, Grandma Micaela, who was feeling extremely tired, looked on silently, and the news-vendor asked her, ‘Do you want the ’en, Queen?’ He pointed up to the bank windowsill, on which the hen lay inert.

      Grandma blinked, and her eyes followed the line of the man’s finger. She peered at the bank wall. Halfway up, she saw a vague, copper-coloured lump. ‘On the windowsill,’ the man said impatiently.

      Grandma was under five feet tall; the sill was impossibly high up for her. ‘Could you possibly reach it?’ she asked shyly.

      The man grinned. ‘Anything to oblige a lady,’ he responded with sudden gallantry. He reached up and managed to gather the bird into his hand. After inspecting it dubiously, he said, ‘It looks like dead, Missus.’

      ‘It’s fresh enough to cook,’ she told him, with a little laugh. Her faded blue eyes, though partially clouded by cataracts, still had a twinkle in them, and the news-vendor returned to his pitch feeling pleased with himself.

      Grandma laid the hen on top of the other two in her calico bag. Rosita had finished her scolding and was wiping Manuel’s face with the corner of her apron. Her friends stopped gossiping about the high price of rabbits – and the party straggled down Hanover Street towards home.

      At home, the oil lamp had been lit. Grandpa was seated at the kitchen table, writing in his ledger. Behind him, on the wall, the huge map on which Pedro recorded his voyages, glimmered softly, the net of inky lines linking the ports of call looking like a tangled mass of black cotton thread.

      As the shoppers entered, he closed the book wearily. He nodded to his wife and to Rosita, as they entered and thankfully plonked the shopping bags on the draining board by the kitchen sink. The baby was beginning to whimper from hunger, and Grandma said she would make a pot of tea before starting the evening meal. Rosita nodded agreement, and sat down in a rocking chair. She unbuttoned her black blouse and modestly arranged her shawl round the baby’s head and her breast, while she fed her new daughter.

      Manuel slunk to the other side of the fireplace, where Aunt Maria had, in their absence, established herself in an easy chair. He leaned against his aunt, who put down the knitting she had been struggling to do and put her arm round him. He was grateful for her presence; he had missed her during her stay in hospital.

      He could not have articulated his sense of desertion as he watched his mother feed the baby. He only knew he longed to be cuddled by her and to lay his head on her milky breast. Not even when she called him her big boy, and sent him off to school with a loving pat on his behind, was he comforted.

      Auntie Maria suddenly began to cough. She withdrew her arm, and fumbled for her handkerchief in her dressing-gown pocket. She put it to her mouth, and tried to smile at Manuel over its folds.

      As she had taught him, he stepped back from her while the spasm lasted. ‘I don’t want to splutter all over you,’ she had once explained to him. ‘It’s not very nice.’

      Aunt Maria’s cough was part and parcel of Manuel’s childhood; he slept in the same room as she did, and the sound of it comforted him when he woke in the night after a bad dream; it meant that she was awake, and if he were very scared, he could scramble out of bed and run to her. It puzzled him, however, that, unlike his mother, she would never let him into her bed, however much he was shivering with fright; and she was the only one of his doting relations who did not kiss him; even Grandpa kissed him sometimes. He occasionally thought that he would never understand the idiosyncrasies of grown-ups.

      After feeding Francesca, Rosita laid the dozing child in Manuel’s old cradle, near the fireplace, but far enough from it not to be spattered by the fat in which Grandma was frying fish for tea. She then unpacked the three hens and took them out into the brick-lined backyard, to feather and singe them. Though the stallholder had obligingly wrung the necks of the two hens, he had complained sourly that he would not have lost the third one if Grandma had not insisted on the cage being opened. He could not run after the flying bird himself, he said bitterly, because it would have meant leaving his stall untended in an area where petty theft was a fine art.

      After the meal, the hens were brought in and drawn on the draining board, giving Manuel an early lesson in anatomy, as he watched the operation.

      The naked birds were then washed and hung up in the larder overnight. Manuel stared up at them, and decided they did not look much different from Francesca, after she had been bathed in front of the kitchen fire.

      That night he dreamed that he had been hung up in the larder, by his feet. He was too terrified even to run across to Auntie Maria’s bed, and he lay quivering under his cotton sheet until sleep overtook him again.

       Chapter Eight

      In the golden summer