In June 1914, Rosita announced that she wanted Pedro’s family to see Francesca, who was their first granddaughter; Pedro himself was at sea, but to Juan and Micaela it seemed a good opportunity to take a holiday, so a visit to Spain was arranged. Little Manuel was thrilled.
Juan tried to persuade Maria to accompany them. ‘You could go up into the mountains with Rosita to visit the Echaniz family, while your grandmother and I are in Bilbao. It would do you good to breathe mountain air,’ he told her.
Maria was feeling a little better and, at first, had been tempted to make the journey. Then, when she discovered that the family would be travelling by sea, she said she could not face being seasick.
Though horribly disappointed, Micaela said she would remain at home to care of her.
Rosita looked at her mother’s bent, tired figure and, at first, said nothing; instead, she went to see Bridget Connolly next door. Rosita often looked after Mary and Joey, when their mother was helping to nurse a sick neighbour or delivering a baby. Now, she asked a favour on Micaela’s behalf.
Would Bridget keep an eye on Maria, if Micaela went to Spain for three weeks in July? If Bridget could watch her during the day and cook for her, she thought that Mrs Saitua’s daughter, Panchika, could be persuaded to sleep overnight in the Barinèta home and give Maria a bit of breakfast.
‘Panchika doesn’t have to be at work till eight o’clock,’ she explained to Bridget. ‘She’s got a daily job as a cook-general in a fine house in Princes Road, with very nice people.
‘Maria can get herself to the can in the yard, now,’ she added. ‘And she can keep a fire going, if someone’ll bring in the coal for her and start it each morning. And she can wash her hands and face at the kitchen sink. But she’s not strong enough to stand and cook – or go to the shops, or anything like that.’
Bridget was seated by her own fire, sipping a mug of vintage tea – it had been simmering on the hob for hours. At Rosita’s suggestion, she nodded her head; her black hair was done up in untidy, coiled plaits, from which the hairpins constantly threatened to fall out; before answering Rosita, she absently pushed one back into her hair.
Plump, patient and very knowledgeable about the needs of the sick, she looked up at her neighbour, and said, ‘Oh, aye, I could do that, if you could manage to pay for the food I’d give her. It’d only be the price of a potato or two and what we’re havin’ ourselves – me housekeeping won’t stretch to feed another.’ At the latter statement, her voice was full of apology.
‘I’d get the coal up from the cellar for her, Mam,’ her daughter Mary volunteered; she had been listening avidly to what Rosita had had to say. ‘And I could chop some wood chips for her every day – and put it all in the hearth. It wouldn’t take a minute, then, for Panchika to make her fire for her.’
Panchika Saitua, a grumbling, middle-aged spinster, was ordered by her mother to sleep in her neighbour’s bedroom and to get up half an hour earlier, so that she could build Maria’s fire for her and give her tea and bread and margarine for breakfast.
Although she had not seen so much of her since she had been in service, Panchika knew Maria quite well; her working day was long and exacting and the idea of making the effort to visit someone, except, perhaps, on her Sunday off once a month, filled her with added gloom.
In the event, however, she thoroughly enjoyed her time with Maria, away from under her mother’s thumb. They spent an hour or two each evening before bedtime contentedly commiserating with each other; so much so, that, even after the family returned from Spain, Panchika discovered that she could endure to walk down the road in her carpet slippers, in the late evening, for an hour’s visit to Maria.
Maria was very appreciative of her visits, and missed her sorely when she failed to let herself in and come through to Rosita’s busy kitchen, to sink on to the chair by the old sofa, and gasp, ‘Ee! Me pore feet!’
Once the trip to Bilbao had been arranged, the family looked forward to it very much. The summer of 1914 was a gorgeous one and they could hope for a pleasantly calm passage. Grandma included in the food basket a gift of fresh eatables for the crew, whose diet was very monotonous. The present was much appreciated.
It was clear that Juan enjoyed such temporary returns to sea. It gave him a fresh audience of younger Basques, to whom he could relate stories of his early days sailing before the mast, when they had none of these new-fangled steam engines. ‘Seamanship was seamanship, in those days,’ he told them. ‘Rounded the Horn four times, I did, in storms like you’d never believe – and the cold!’ He shuddered.
This time, one young man told him, with equal pride, that he’d gone through the Panama Canal on an experimental voyage the previous year. ‘We were scared stiff,’ he said, ‘because we were afraid landslides would block us in, and we’d die of fever if we had to come out overland.’
‘Oh, aye. You’re right about the fever. That canal’s a waste of good money. Whole crews’ll get fever going through it – like the navvies building it get sick and die.’
When they arrived in Bilbao, they were met by Juan Barinèta’s brother, who looked even tougher and older than Juan himself. Little Manuel viewed him with awe. Rosita said he worked in an iron foundry, and that that accounted for the mass of white scars that crisscrossed his hairy arms, his hands and his face. ‘They’re from burns,’ she explained.
Great-uncle was a widower. His two single daughters looked after him; they also took care of Uncle Agustin, Rosita’s brother, when he was in port or out of work. Both young women did piecework at home, and their eyes were black-rimmed and bloodshot from long hours spent peering at the silk shawls they embroidered. They were gentle creatures, who, much to Manuel’s annoyance, adored baby Francesca and presented her with an exquisitely embroidered bonnet which they had made for her. They patted him on his head and exclaimed at how much he had grown; then they encouraged him to go out into the street to play with another small boy, who had wandered in from next door, to stare at the new arrivals.
In the narrow, medieval street sloping down to the river Nervión, he felt, at first, closed in, and unnerved at facing a number of strange urchins, who looked him over as if he were a peculiar animal of some kind. When the boys discovered, however, that he had never tried to play pelota vasca, they produced a rock-hard ball and showed him how to hit it against a wall with his bare hands. They approved of him when he bore stoically the pain of it, and he was almost overwhelmed by their friendly advice and instruction; he went back to his great-uncle’s house with several self-appointed coaches in tow, and badly bruised hands.
Before the evening meal, his hands were washed and regretfully cooed over by his two second cousins. Grandpa laughed, and said they would soon toughen up; he showed Manuel two of his fingers which had been disjointed when he had played as a young man.
At the end of a week, he was leaping about in front of the wall with the same abandonment – and lack of finesse – as the other youngsters. Then he was told that he and his mother and Francesca would be going up into the mountains to see Grandpa and Grandma Echaniz, while Juan and Micaela remained in Bilbao.
As a baby and a toddler, he had already made three journeys to Spain, but he had few clear recollections of them. Going first by train and then in a rickety donkey cart up narrow roads into the foothills was a new adventure. He tucked his small aching hands
