by Rita Siligato
Dear Redenta,
I am writing to you because Mama would not understand and I’m sure she will be terrible with you. I know, because every time I send her a letter I can hear her shouting all the way to Liverpool.
I am pleased to be married and to be a mother: I would like you to see Rachel, she is a beauty! She has fair hair – as you can see from the pictures I sent you – and she is a happy soul. At three, she is able to speak Triestino with me and with her dad.
Little Robert is one now. How I wish you could come to Liverpool to meet my children!
I hope to be home next summer, if I will not be pregnant again, eheheh…
And Mama would make a fuss of the little ones, and she will teach them many words I tried not to teach them. You know how Mama is!
Harry and I managed to rent a small house in a suburban neighborhood here in Liverpool.
We have a (very small) garden on the back. We have a lavatory in the small garden at the back! You have to see me running in the night in my nightie and slippers outside the house! But we have a sink in the kitchen and a good stove, and a room for the babies.
But let me start from the beginning. As you know, I spent two Purgatory years living with my mother-in-law. She is a good lady, but I don’t understand a single word she says! She wears dentures (big yellow teeth, eheheh) and she stammers a lot. And when Harry came back from Korea he saw yours truly “peaked and sallow”, so he said (which means “palida come una straza”), and every night we talked and talked, and when I found myself pregnant for the first time we found a house of our own.
As you know, Harry can speak Triestino like a native. And I used him as a translator when we went around house-seeking. The Municipality gave us one, in the end.
Here all of the houses are very similar: two stories, tiny back garden with the lavatory. They (the houses and the lavatories) are red, because here in Liverpool they don’t paint the houses but let the bricks show. Can you believe it? A full row of red houses, a kilometer long (they don’t use kilometers, they would say “a mile long”) and the only difference, the only way to tell a house from another are the curtains. They dress every single window with net curtains, mostly white.
Inside, the houses are similar too. There is a small hall and a kitchen to the right (or to the left) and on the other side there is a small parlor. In front of the front door there are steep stairs that lead to the bedrooms, one on the right and one on the left.
I told you this puzzling thing of the right and the left because the tiny municipality houses are joined in the middle in pairs (that is, every house has a twin attached on the side) and the inside is the mirror image of its twin (I hope it makes sense, hehe).
So, my kitchen is on the left and the parlor is on the right. In the kitchen I don’t have room for a table, there is one in the parlor. And our bedroom is on the left and Rachel’s room is on the right: Robert sleeps in a cot by our bed. And I have white net curtains on every single window, except for the lavatory, that has only a hatch right under the roof and does not need it. A tiny house is easier to keep clean, I tell myself every single day.
I have a strange thing in the back garden that I never saw before: a laundry tree!
That is what I call it: it is not a real tree… it is a rotary dryer (I don’t know if it has a name in Triestino or even in Italian, eheheh) shaped like a metal tree with clothes lines tied to the branches. But I prefer to wash Rachel’s and Robert’s things by hand, wring them in a towel and dry them inside, near the Aga.
We have a lot of rainy days here, believe me. I love to go walking, pushing the pram and letting Rachel run around: I go to the docks, that remind me of Trieste, even if the sun is on the wrong side for me. When we have a bit of sun… summers are cold here, Redenta, and I miss the Bagno Ausonia.
You know it is hard for me to make friends. I talk to no one. I loved to go dancing, and we can’t do that anymore, with two small children. And Harry is always tired, after a week’s work.
I forgot to tell you that in the kitchen I have a strange thing, stranger than the laundry tree! Nailed to the wall I have a kind of rack that makes toast! It runs on gas. In the morning, you just have to remember to switch it on, ignite it (with a match, you have to be careful, I burnt my hair once, eheheh) and put the slices of bread in. Have I told you they sell pre-sliced bread here?
Please tell Mama I am happy here. And I believe I am happy, even if I cry every night thinking of home. Tell her that if I can save enough to afford to travel with the children I will come home next summer. Harry will stay here, he has to work. I will stay home for a month, and then I will go back to Liverpool.
I enclose a picture of yours truly, coiffed and smiling, taken by a good photographer a few days ago: Harry spoiled me with it on my birthday. Don’t I look like a turkey, with my long neck?
I hope to see you next year, dear sister, and write soon! (and please tell Mama only the good things!)
Nella
