approached the small, dark cavern of the cupboard with caution. Pudding was a very large, black cat with expressionless pale-green eyes; she was quite capable of giving a small boy a sharp clawing, if she felt her dignity was at stake.
She was curled up on a piece of grubby blanket in the darkest corner. Her green eyes flashed as she looked up quickly at her visitors, while round her crawled four tiny black bundles. Surprised, I put out my hand to touch one of them. Pudding peremptorily nuzzled my hand away.
In some astonishment, I turned to Mother. ‘Kittens! Where did she find them?’
‘She had them inside her. They came out in the night.’
The reply was so unexpected that I knew my mother was teasing me. I looked at her knowingly, and laughed. ‘They couldn’t. How would they get out?’
Mother hesitated, before she replied. Then she said, ‘Pudding won’t let me touch her at the moment; she’s tired. Tomorrow, I’ll lift her up and show you.’
Though she had been born in Bilbao, my mother had close relations who lived in the countryside, where, as a matter of course, children saw animals born and die. It had apparently not struck her that her little son was ignorant of birth – and, possibly, also of death.
Laden with greyish sheets to be washed, Grandma Micaela came slowly and heavily down the stairs, and, as she entered the kitchen, I looked up from watching the kittens. A shaft of sunlight from the tall, narrow kitchen window lit up her paper-pale cheeks, wet with tears.
I was shocked. Grandma never cried. The worst she ever did was scold; and she was my rock, my safe refuge, when both Mother and Father were cross with me. Now, as Mother scrambled hastily to her feet, Grandma looked imploringly at her and quavered, ‘I can’t make myself go out to see him leave. I can’t bear it. I’ll never see him again!’ She dropped the sheets on to the stone floor; her hands, heavily veined, and scarlet from too much immersion in hot soda water, dangled helplessly at her sides.
Mother ran to her and took her in her arms. She patted her back and rocked her, just as she did me when I had hurt myself. ‘I know, Mam. I know,’ she crooned. ‘I can’t go out, either.’
‘He’s my baby,’ cried Grandma, with a further explosion of tears.
I stopped stroking Pudding, and interjected, with some derision, ‘Uncle Leo isn’t a baby – he’s a big man.’
Obviously startled, both women turned to look down at me, as I knelt by the open cupboard.
Grandma was the first to recover. She swallowed a sob, and then laughed through her tears. She slowly nodded her white head, and responded tenderly, ‘You’re right, my precious dumpling.’ She let out a long sigh, and lifted a finger to touch Mother’s round, pink cheek, a tiny, loving gesture of affection. She said, ‘He’s right. I mustn’t forget it. He is a real man – and I have to let him go.’ Then her tired voice rose, as she added, ‘But it hurts, Rosita. It hurts.’ Tears again trickled down her cheeks.
Mother hugged her, and said determinedly, ‘We’ll pretend he’s simply gone to sea again – on a long voyage. It’ll help. And he’ll write to you.’
Did grown-ups have to pretend things? I wondered uneasily. Like small boys do?
‘And, next month, Agustin should put into Liverpool. That’ll be nice for you – for all of us.’ She was referring to my elder uncle, who was an able seaman in a freighter which docked periodically in Liverpool with cargoes of iron ore. Between voyages he lived with Grandpa Barinèta’s brother and his two motherless daughters in Bilbao, because he himself was still a bachelor.
‘Yes,’ agreed Grandma heavily. Uncle Agustin was a dark, silent man, not nearly so exuberant or lovable as his younger brother, Leo. But Grandma smiled, and I felt better when I saw it.
My mother began to pick up the sheets that Grandma had dropped on the floor. ‘Let’s put these to soak – we can boil them later on this afternoon. Let’s do the bedrooms now. Would you like a glass of wine or a cup of camomile tea to carry round with you?’
Grandma sniffed. ‘No, thanks,’ she replied with a sigh. ‘I’ll have something at teatime.’
Uncle Leo was the first person to pass out of my childhood. For months, Grandma watched for his letters, but he wrote only two from Nevada, to which she replied immediately. Since she had no other address except the one he had given her in Nevada, she continued to write to him there, and she was always the first to reach the front door when a letter slid through the letter box and across the cracked tiled floor. But no more letters arrived, and she mentioned her son less and less and ceased to hope.
Unaware of the despondency the lack of news from Uncle Leo caused her, I regarded her as my own special property, always there to dispense comfort, wipe my nose and wash painfully grazed knees when I had fallen down.
Unlike Uncle Agustin, Uncle Leo and I had been born in Liverpool, and we spoke the thick catarrhal English, with a strong tinge of mixed Irish accents in it, that was current in the streets around the docks. Uncle Agustin spoke only Basque and Spanish.
It had been Uncle Leo’s custom during times of unemployment to go to Spain, to his maternal grandfather’s small farm in the Pyrenees, to work there in return for his food. It was there that he learned to care for sheep; and it was this skill that he hoped to build on in the United States. I had heard him discuss this with his father on a number of occasions, and I knew that he hoped eventually to have his own sheep farm.
Though he did not say much in the two letters Grandma received, I learned later that he had set his expectations of Nevada too high. Ashamed to tell his parents that he had not done too well, he put off writing to them, and moved to Arizona and, later on, wandered through Utah and Colorado. Grandma’s replies to his letters never reached him. He always told himself that he would write when he was settled, but as the years went by and memories of Liverpool dimmed, he had nothing very hopeful to tell his parents so he did not write.
I forgot him.
With a steady, though small family income from Grandpa’s activities amongst the emigrants and from my father, we were able to visit Spain occasionally. Carrying our own food in a big market basket, we sailed for Bilbao in Basque-owned fishing boats or small freighters. In part-return for our passage, Grandpa worked as a member of the crew. In Bilbao we stayed with Grandpa’s brother and his daughters, and, occasionally, our visit coincided with the homecoming of Uncle Agustin. A more rapid form of transport was sometimes used by both families, if they felt the need to see each other on some urgent matter; they went by rail. They caught the train from Liverpool and went to Dover, crossed on the Channel ferry to Calais, and took the train from there to Bilbao. This, however, was considered very extravagant because eight pounds had to be expended on the fare – and why part with hard cash, when you could go all the way by sea for almost nothing? Grandma’s sense of economy was almost as well developed as that of Mr and Mrs Wing, who owned the Chinese laundry and were the parents of one of my best-loved playmates, Brian Wing.
My childhood memories of Spain are faint, evoked mainly by the smell of baking bread and of farm animals, or the heavy odour of newly harvested hay, and a sense of having
