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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 been particularly happy there, blissfully unaware of the hardship and oppression endured by the grown-ups. I took for granted callused hands and bent backs, chilblained fingers and toes, rooms where one moved like a small snake amid people, because homes were so crowded. In fact, the closeness in which everybody I knew lived was very comforting to a small boy.
    As I grew bigger, I would, after a few weeks in Bilbao or up in the mountains with my father’s family, the Echanizes, and another bumper crop of Barinèta second cousins, suddenly feel homesick for Liverpool. Healthy from the mountain air and the coarse fresh food stuffed into me by endless loving relations, I longed to return to the lively world centred on the Wapping Dock. I wanted to play with a shoal of small friends, Malayans, Chinese, Irish, Filipinos, and black people both from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as one or two Basque boys who were a little older than me and sometimes condescended to let me join intheir games. We darted like minnows in and out of dark, familiar narrow lanes and alleys, Brian Wing and I at the end of the line because we were the smallest. The black and bleak city, rich with the smell of horse manure, vanilla pods, fish and raw hides, was to us a wonderful playground. We barely took note of the racket of horses’ hooves and steel-bound wheels on the streets’ stone setts or the constant roar of machinery in the workshops round us; it was simply part of everyday life.
    Despite our diversity of race and religion, all my small friends had two things in common: as the children of dockers, shipyard workers or seamen, our lives were inextricably bound to the sea; and we all shared a true Liverpool sense of humour – life was intrinsically so hard that one learned early to make a joke of it. How we laughed, Lorilyn! Deep belly laughs that I rarely hear nowadays.
    After seeing off the emigrants on the day of Uncle Leo’s departure for Nevada, Grandpa Juan Barinèta came slowly into the kitchen and dropped his papers and house ledger on to the well-scrubbed deal table. His wooden chair, which he had made himself, scraped on the stone floor as he pulled it away from the table and wearily flopped into it. He said heavily, to nobody in particular, ‘Well, that’s that lot.’
    Mother and Grandma Micaela had just come up from the cellar, after putting the sheets to soak in the copper before scrubbing and boiling them.
    Seeing his wife’s red-rimmed eyes, Grandpa said kindly to her in Basque, ‘The boy’s going to be all right, never fear, my dear.’ He turned to my mother, and asked her, ‘Rosita, get out a bottle of wine – if there’s anything left after last night’s party. Let’s all sit down and have a drink.’
    The reference to the previous night’s send-off party for Leo made even Grandma smile, though rather wanly.
    Already packed with emigrants, the house had beenfurther jammed as Basque neighbours dropped in to say farewell.
    Uncle Leo and Jean Baptiste Saitua, who lived up the road, both had excellent singing voices, and they had sung all the old Basque songs they could remember, vying with each other in a good-humoured way.
    Sitting on Mother’s lap, leaning on her swollen stomach and clinging to her so that I did not accidentally slip off, I had watched the oil lamp light up her bright red curls. Then, as I had listened, I had turned slightly to watch the spell-bound faces crowding round us; loving faces, cunning faces, fair faces, mahogany faces, bearded, sad old faces, young bright