The Liverpool Basque. Helen Forrester

and Pamplona; it was also spoken by lonely, elderly shepherds and their descendants in Nevada, Utah and Arizona, and by small groups of emigrants in Eastern Canada. It was a language so old that it was unrelated to any other language in the modern world, preserved by people shielded by nature’s walls, the Pyrenees, between France and Spain. It had the advantage that anyone in the cemetery who heard his words to his wife would not understand them.

      Manuel Echaniz was a Basque. Though he also spoke Spanish quite fluently, he seethed with anger when he was frequently mistaken for a Spaniard. He would occasionally flare up and say that though General Franco had, in the Spanish Civil War, bombed into submission his grandparents’ native city of Bilbao, he had never succeeded in making its Basque inhabitants into Spaniards, any more than Roman and Moorish invaders of Spain had been able to do so in much earlier times.

      He himself had been born in England, in the port of Liverpool, and he spoke English with a pronounced Liverpool accent. Nevertheless, he would affirm indignantly that, like his father and grandfather before him, he was a Basque and very proud of it. For the benefit of Canadians, he would add, also, that he was proud to be a Canadian citizen – but he was still pure Basque!

      He had married Kathleen Weston, a Vancouver Island girl, whom he had met, during the war, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She had tried several times to learn his native tongue, but had finally given up, arguing that his command of English was so good that they could communicate perfectly in that language. Because he had spoken to her consistently since babyhood only in Basque, his daughter Faith understood the language – but she would always answer him in English. As for Lorilyn, his only grandchild, now aged nineteen and doing her first year at the University of British Columbia, she would laugh and tell him to stop ‘talking funny’ and speak English.

      Sometimes, without his Canadian Kathleen to support him, he wondered why he stayed in Victoria. He frequently longed for the familiar dockside streets of Liverpool, for the warmth and friendliness of the Baltic Fleet or the Flags of all Nations, both pubs that he remembered as being packed with an international gathering of seamen, all talking exuberantly at once. And he wanted to hear again St Peter’s church bell calling him to Mass, a Mass celebrated in Latin. He could go to Mass in Victoria; he could even ease his soul by going to Confession; but it would all be in English, as lately ordained by the Vatican, and would have little of the comforting magic of a Mass chanted in Latin, as it had been when he was young. The Latin Mass, untouched by war or pestilence, unchanging like God himself, had been a dear familiar ceremony, no matter how strange a port his ship had been tied up in. If he had to listen to Mass in the vernacular, he wanted to hear it in Basque – and for that he would have to return to Vizcaya, the province of his forefathers.

      He sighed as he turned from Kathleen’s grave and began slowly to make his way homeward under the dripping pine trees. Both Liverpool and Vizcaya were a long way off; journeys to either of them were not to be undertaken lightly by an eighty-four-year-old. Then there was Faith who lived with her Canadian husband, George McLaren, in Vancouver; she was his living link with Kathleen. She did come occasionally, with her family, to visit him, but never frequently enough. He would smile when he thought of her and try to shake off his depression. Yet, sometimes when he could not sleep, a fearful inner loneliness would overwhelm him to the point of terror, and older voices called him, voices of others whom he had loved, Basque voices, Liverpool voices, people who were part of his very nature, people he had not been able to tell Kathleen much about.

      He knew that he dreaded dying in this pretty city on the west coast of Canada, even if they laid him beside Kathleen. It was too lonely – a single Basque name in a cemetery full of British pioneers. Kathleen was amid her own, but he would not be.

      He wanted, at least, to lie in a Liverpool churchyard or cemetery, surrounded by headstones with Basque names on them, to be laid to rest by Basques speaking either the thick colloquial English of his childhood friends or the language of his roots, Basque.

      As he pushed to one side a rain-dropped branch of Scottish pine, he considered soberly how strange it was that, when he thought about his own death, all that had happened to him in Canada was wiped out of his mind, even the long, contented years with Kathleen. What was left – the essence of himself – was Liverpool Basque; and he wanted to lie with his parents and grandparents and friends in a corner of Liverpool they had made their own. Afterwards, he wanted toasts to his memory drunk in wines familiar to him and funny stories told about him in pithy Basque phrases.

      Back on the pavement that led to his home, he shivered. It was not easy to have a conscience formed by Jesuits in the back streets of Liverpool. They taught perfection – but an ordinary man could do only his best – and he had done his best for Kathleen.

       Chapter Two

      Although the morning’s winter storm had been so intense and Victoria’s Scenic Drive had been, for once, deserted, Manuel’s expedition had not gone unnoticed.

      Seated in the bay window of the bungalow next door, Sharon Herman, daughter of an old friend of Veronica Harris, had noted with mild interest the very old man going for a walk despite the inclement weather.

      She was a nurse who specialized in the care of the terminally ill, and she had just arrived to take up a position in a local hospital about to open a palliative care ward. Her interest in the elderly pedestrian was kindly and caring – she felt he should not be getting soaking wet at his age.

      She turned towards Veronica, who was seated at her computer across the room, trying to unravel the complexities of Townsman’s Tailors’ accounts outstanding. An elderly widow, who lived alone, she earned her living by keeping the accounts of small businesses in the neighbourhood. Today, she was finding it difficult to work with someone else in the room, though she did not grudge, in the least, offering her friend’s daughter temporary accommodation until she found herself a flat conveniently close to the hospital.

      ‘Veronica, who’s the old man next door? He’s just gone out – in this weather! He’ll get soaked – hasn’t he got a car?’

      Veronica turned impatiently towards Sharon. Then she glimpsed through the bay window the bent figure plodding up the road. Her expression changed, and she smiled. ‘Oh, that’s Manuel Echaniz – Old Spanish, Kathleen’s husband. She was the friend I told you about – died of cancer.’

      ‘Is he Spanish?’

      ‘No. Kathleen told me he was born in the UK. She said he’s a Basque, whatever that might be. He speaks English and Spanish – and his own language, which only Faith seems to understand – that’s his daughter, you know.’ She paused to rub her eyes, tired from concentration on the computer screen. Then she said, ‘He’ll be going up to the cemetery.’

      ‘Does he work there?’

      ‘No. He goes up every day to put a flower on Kathleen’s grave. I’ve never known him miss a day since she passed away – must be eight years now.’

      Sharon laughed. ‘You’re kidding?’

      ‘No, I’m not. You should’ve seen them together. They were great!’

      Sharon moved uneasily in her chair by the window, and her book slid off her lap. She bent to pick it up. ‘He could take some flowers up every week – it would save him time. Or he could drive up on a day like this.’

      ‘Well, he does have a car – he doesn’t use it much, though.’ She smiled indulgently. ‘Weather never bothered him – I guess because he went to sea for years. And as for going every day, he told me once he wanted her to know that he thought of her each day.’ Her smile faded, and she sighed a little despondently; she had often wished that Manuel would think of her every day. He still seemed to her an attractive man, with his wide smile and twinkling black eyes. His finely lined face was still healthily tanned, and the long, narrow shape of it, with its flat cheekbones, still had the firmness of a much younger man.

      ‘Sounds like an old movie,’ Sharon was saying, as she put her book on a side table. ‘Do