Helen Forrester - The Liverpool Basque

Meanwhile, the face of the chicken vendor went as dark as an angry cockerel’s comb. ‘Wass the matter with ’em?’ he asked indignantly. ‘Best roastin’ chicken you could buy. Why, one of ’em would feed six, easy.’

Manuel saw his mother’s generous chest expand, as she readied herself to dive into the fray. It was going to be a long and boring battle. He let go of her skirt and wandered down the sloping lane for a few yards, to look at ugly white dishes laid out on straw; they were tended by three Irish women from the north end of the city.

‘Mind your clumsy feet!’ one of them shouted at him, as he stumbled over a cobblestone. He backed hastily away; to a small boy, they seemed very big and threatening.

Further down, towards Elliott Street, there were still a few puppies for sale, and he paused to watch them, as they stumbled over each other in the dirty cage. In the background, he could hear his mother arguing volubly, as she sought to bring down the price of the hens; she was demanding that they be taken out of the cage, so that she could feel how much flesh there was on the unfortunate creatures.

He was wondering if he could persuade his father, when he came home, to get him a puppy, when there was a chorus of female shrieks accompanied by a roar of male anger. He jumped, and whipped around to see if his mother was all right.

His view was blocked by a large woman with a shopping basket on her arm. He tried to edge around her. She looked down kindly at him, and said, ‘Careful, sonny, mind the pile of saucepans behind me.’ Then, at a slight noise, she glanced back. ‘Holy Mary!’ she cried shrilly, and jumped to one side, sending the pile of iron saucepans in all directions, so that cursing market women leapt to their feet to avoid them.

Flapping awkwardly on clipped wings, a terrified, squawking hen sailed over their heads. The poor bird was unable to gain any height and came down to earth, momentarily, in front of Manuel. He laughed, and instinctively grabbed at it. It managed to scuttle a few feet away from him towards Elliott Street. Then, seeing a break in the highly amused crowd, it took off again in a series of desperate hops and flaps.

Manuel forgot his mother. Hens lived in cages, so this one must have escaped. In high glee, he scampered after it, dodging in and out between piles of kitchenware and ironmongery. He bumped into two young men entering the lane. ‘Watch it, kiddo!’ one shouted after him, irritably.

Driven by panic and despair, the hen managed to soar upward a little. Absorbed in the chase, Manuel ran faster.

As the bird descended, to perch for a moment on top of a fire hydrant in busy Elliott Street, the boy plunged across the pavement towards it, tripping up and confusing the crowd of office workers hurrying homeward. A young clerk made a playful grab at the bird, to the amusement of the girl accompanying him. The frantic hen immediately hopped off its perch on the edge of the pavement, and staggered into the heavy traffic, as if to cross the road. Intent on catching it, Manuel shot after it.

The hen ran directly under a work horse pulling a small cart. The horse reared in fright. The cart skidded past Manuel. It missed him by a hand’s breadth, as the carter swore and fought to rein in the animal. A few yards behind came three errand boys on their bicycles, hurrying to finish the last deliveries of the day. They swerved to avoid the child. Two of them collided and tumbled off, the packages in their front baskets scattering amid both lines of traffic; the third boy managed to reach the gutter, and dismounted; he yelled imprecations at a heedless Manuel, while more cyclists wobbled and dodged around the two bikes tangled in the middle of the lane. Two chauffeur-driven private cars came to a screeching halt, and the drivers impatiently blew their klaxon horns.

All traffic was coming quickly to a halt; and harsh words were exchanged between drivers and carters in the near lane, as horses, set to breast the upward slope of the street, were hauled to a clattering stop, their shoes striking sparks from the setts, and foam from their mouths splattering passersby.

Nobody attempted to rescue Manuel – or the hen.

At the sight of the traffic coming the other way, he had, in the middle of the street, suddenly ceased his headlong chase; he could see that, on the other side, the hen had found a safe perch on the high windowsill of a bank.

With disorganized traffic still edging past him, both before and behind, he was suddenly very frightened. As he stood frozen, at the back of him the driver of a carriage with two ladies in it, leaned down, whip in hand, and shouted at him, ‘Gerroff the street!’ He glanced up over his shoulder, and the high wheels, far higher than him, rolled past him dangerously closely. He turned back towards the opposite pavement. A tram, unable to stop quickly, rolled slowly past him on its rails. It was followed by a brewer’s dray which had been successfully slowed by the drayman; it was pulled by two huge horses and the dray itself was piled high with barrels of beer. Though the upward slope meant it would be hard to start the horses again, the driver drew to a careful stop, thus blocking any further traffic in that lane. He stood up and called to the frightened child, ‘Get on pavement, luv. Quick, now.’

Though all Manuel could see was the slavering mouth and huge, bronze-coloured legs of the lead horse, he heard the voice, and he obediently trotted, almost under the great animal’s nose, to the safety of the pavement.

As the traffic began to move again, he stood, bewildered, on the kerb, and looked up at the hen. From the safety of the bank’s windowsill, the hen opened its eyes and looked down at him with grave suspicion; then, the lids closed again.

Distraught, the child began to cry.

Standing against the bank wall, an elderly newspaperman was calling to the homegoing crowd of pedestrians, ‘ Echo! Liverpool Echo ! Read all about it!’ Perspiration was running down his bulbous red nose, as he shoved a neatly folded newspaper into any hand proffering the necessary coppers for it. On a blackboard beside him was scrawled the day’s headline, Countess of Derby 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.