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Madrigueras,
29th July 1937

Dear Sis,

Well, I did it, didn’t I? It’s what you suspected I was going to do all along, I know, even though you never said so. But we don’t need to speak in order to communicate, do we? Not you and I. We understand each other. We always have and we always will. Even if sometimes we don’t like what we understand.

The Writers’ Congress was a bigger farce than I’d anticipated, which is saying something. The usual caravanserai of windbags and wineskins swapping insults and exhortations, gesturing with clenched fists and feeble minds. If I hadn’t been planning to enlist when I came out, I think their intellectual posturings would have convinced me I should. I can’t tell you what a relief it was to leave them to it and make the only gesture that means a damn thing in this tortured country. I should have volunteered for the International Brigade last autumn. Would have, but for Mary and the boy. Well, better late than never, I suppose.

I won’t pretend this outfit isn’t amateurish and inefficient. I certainly won’t claim I’m being adequately trained or am likely to find myself properly armed and equipped when the time comes to fight. But that isn’t the point, is it? The point is simply to do something – anything – rather than sit idly by and let the Fascists do as they please. All the reasoning – all the temporizing – in the world won’t stop them. Maybe nothing will. I don’t give a lot for our chances and that’s a fact. But at least we have a chance – a fighting chance. It’s the only kind that really matters.

I know what you’ll be thinking. I know because I often think it myself. Am I trying to live – or die – up to Lionel’s example? Am I trying to prove a point to those who reckon I’m just another high-sounding nothing? Well, maybe. Maybe and why the hell not? I’m not Byron or Brooke or Cornford. Not yet, anyway. If I end up being killed out here, it will be a kind of immortality, judging by their examples, but then poets ought to die in battles rather than bathchairs in my opinion!

What do you say to that, Sis? After all, your opinion’s worth more than mine. It always has been, ever since you first planted the idea in my mind. When was that, do you remember? Nine years ago, or ten? A long time, anyway. Too long, some would say, to be living a lie. And I’d agree with them. Even though the lie has often seemed more like the truth than those burrs to the spirit we call facts. It can’t continue. I know that. But how to end it? How and when? Perhaps by coming here I’m trying to run away from the answer. You wouldn’t have run, I know. You’d have consented to whatever I decided. But you’re stronger than me and you haven’t had to carry this pretence as I have all this time, like an invisible ball and chain round my feet, pulling me back, weighing me down, reminding me that every accolade is hollow, every triumph a defeat in disguise. How apt that my poetic début should have been entitled Blindfold, since a blindfold is what my readers have unwittingly worn over the years. I wonder if it will ever be removed.

The boy is the problem, Sis. Maurice Tristram Abberley. Just four months old and already I feel he’s reproaching me. Friends, lovers, critics, poets and the whole great gullible reading public were fair game. Even Mary’s starry-eyed trusting nature doesn’t seem to have troubled my conscience. Not half as much, anyway, as having a son who will one day grow to be a man and want to know the truth about his father.

The truth for the moment is that I’m doing my bit for Spain, for which read the lost cause of socialist brotherhood, and am proud of what I’m doing. Fear, anger, frustration and disillusionment are no doubt queuing up outside even as I write these words, but they haven’t battered down the door yet and, when they do, I can be sure of facing them without feeling like an impostor.

Don’t worry too much about your little brother. Spare any sympathy you have for Mary, who deserves more of it than I do. I shall probably be back sooner than I expect, shame-faced and resentful at the premature end of my preposterous adventure. You can tell me then what a fool I’ve been. Or maybe I’ll tell you.

I’ll write again as soon as I can.

Much love,

Tristram.