disparagingly at them. Rosita’s two friends, who had accompanied them, pursed their lips and agreed loudly with one another that they weren’t worth sixpence each. The man in charge of them said something inaudible under his breath.
Sighing, they looked desultorily at a pair of slaughtered hens, not yet cleaned or feathered, hanging heads down in front of the next small stall.
‘Here ye are, ladies,’ called the stallholder, beaming at them. ‘A real nice dinner. Good fat birds. One and sixpence each. Feather ’em yerself.’ He unhooked the hens and held them against his forearm for inspection. Four ladies pinched the hens’ breasts and declared in chorus that they had no fat on them.
The man lost his amiability as quickly as it had been assumed; the price he had asked was fair for two good birds. ‘Pack of bloody Israelites!’ he muttered, and turned angrily away to accost another shopper.
Though Grandma’s eyes were weak and she could not see any of the products very well, prompted by Rosita, she opened negotiations with the man who had three live hens. They were, apparently, the last of his offerings for that day; several empty cages had already been piled on a hand-cart behind him.
‘What do you think, Mother?’ Rosita asked.
Grandma bent down to squint carefully at the hens. One of them tried to peck her, and she hastily drew back. She nodded her head negatively, and said dolefully, ‘They might make good soup. Nothing on them for anything else.’ She glanced up at the vendor. ‘How much do you want for them?’ she inquired, her English difficult to understand.
‘How much?’ interjected Rosita. Her two friends stood behind her, politely silent, ready to murmur approbation or denigration, as required.
‘A bob each,’ he told her, hoping to get rid of three birds in one sale, so that he could wander off for a much-needed pint of bitter, before going home.
Rosita translated the price, and Grandma’s heavy eyebrows rose, as if in shock. ‘For those?’ She turned to their silent friends for confirmation of her horror at such an outrageous price. Like a Greek chorus, they nodded agreement and stared coldly at the stallholder. Still holding his mother’s skirt, Manuel scrubbed one small boot against another, and sighed; he had seen this pantomime so often. He watched a woodlouse, surprised by his shuffling feet from under a few wisps of straw, hasten into hiding beneath a couple of feathers.
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