Free The Liverpool Basque by Helen Forrester Page A

wall of the kitchen-living-room.
    Pedro had a shrewd eye for what might interest a boy and told him stories about the ports he had visited, including small details which Old Manuel still remembered, like the kind of sweets on sale in the streets of Bombay or the kind of clothing that ladies in Yokahama wore.
    ‘You’ll see them all yourself, one day,’ his father assured him, certain that his boy would follow in his footsteps, though with better qualifications.
    As he wrote for Lorilyn, Old Manuel wondered if Faith would remember him with the same uncritical love with which he remembered his father. He doubted it; his Canadian wife and child seemed to live lives crammed with commitments. They were far too busy to spend much time listening to what had happened to him in his last absence from them; they appeared to exist deep in a women’s world of school, voluntary work, dancing classes, music lessons, skating classes, teas and ladies’ bridge parties. Sometimes, Kathleen did a spell of nursing which gave her a whole new collection of women with whom to become involved. Men seemed to be expected to keep to their world and not intrude – even to their half of a room, if they were at a party, Manuel remembered with a rueful smile.
    Perhaps it was his own fault, he thought. Even when he had become a marine architect, he had sometimes been away for weeks. As a seaman from a family of seamen, this had not appeared unusual to him; but it had probably made Kathleen and Faith cling more closely to each other for support.
    He sighed, and paused in his writing to light another cigarette. He had got to know Kathleen in her final illness better than he had ever known her before, and, in his current loneliness, he regretted that he had not tried harder to be closer to her in their earlier married life. They had not been unhappy, he considered, just not quite as happy as they might have been.
    In marrying a Canadian and settling in Canada, Manuel had achieved a much higher standard of living than he could have reasonably hoped for if he had stayed in Liverpool. After qualifying as a marine architect, he had worked in Montreal, and he had had to acquire a working knowledge of yet another language, French; it had added to the difficulties of adjusting himself to North American life.
    After enjoying the close support of an extended Basque community in Liverpool and Bilbao, he had been, for atime, intensely lonely. It was some time before he met anyone who knew what a Basque was, and he remembered his intense thankfulness when he met a sprinkling of fellow Basques and could speak his own language to them. His neighbours were supremely indifferent that he could switch in and out of four languages – being multilingual was something that born Canadians were not supposed to worry about; English-speaking Canadians seemed to take it for granted that even their French compatriots would be able to speak English – just as the Spaniards expected the Basques to be competent in Spanish, thought Manuel tartly.
    Though sometimes he tripped up, for Kathleen’s sake he made a great effort to sink into her world. He had, however, done his best to teach Faith to speak Basque, and as a little child she had always spoken to him in that language – until she went to school, when, under the tight conforming pressure of her school life, she had soon discovered that it was convenient to forget that her father was an immigrant.
    As he worked on his notes for his granddaughter, Old Manuel wondered if his quiet, capable father felt like a stranger in his own home, when he carried a kitbag full of grubby clothes up the steps of Grandpa Barinèta’s house, at the end of long boring weeks at sea in a tramp steamer.
    Was it difficult for Pedro Echaniz to re-establish a rapport with his wife and mother-in-law and his rather forbidding father-in-law, all of whom seemed to talk to him at once?
    Mulling over his memories of his father sitting in the crowded