The fight had disturbed me deeply, but it had also sparked something off inside, like a fly buzzing angrily at a grimy window. First the mass grave near my house, then discovering an underworld of far-right thugs in Valencia which included someone I had considered a friend. I was used to Spain being a country where people turned away from the past, drawing a veil over anything that was too unpleasant or painful to remember, or which failed to fit in with whatever world-view held sway at the time. Often there was a sense that people skated over the surface of life without asking themselves what they were really doing. Yet I was beginning to confront the country’s darker history, which I myself had brushed over: a cruelty and violence I could no longer ignore. I wanted to understand what those men buried in the valley below my house had been fighting for. What were the passionately held beliefs that had set one countryman against another? And I wanted to know how a party bearing the same name as their killers could still be active almost seventy years later. Once upon a time Spain had been ripped apart by such as these. Could they do it again?
My growing fascination with the conflict was fuelled by the discovery that my great-grandfather, Jack Warnock, had been a gun-runner during the Civil War. I was already familiar with the stories concerning his Antarctic explorations during the 1930s (there was a group of islets named after him off Kemp Land); but on a brief trip back to England, Jack’s only remaining son, my Great-Uncle Iain, had told me about his father’s Spanish adventures.
Once he’d returned from the southern seas, Great-Grandpa Warnock, it turned out, had worked for the Stanhope Steamship Company, run by the ship-owner J. A. Billmeir. Billmeir had made his fortune by trading with the Spanish Republican government during the Civil War, at a time when few other people would. Dodging the Nationalist blockades and landmines, his crews often smuggled weapons in the holds of their vessels, thereby breaking the rules of Non-Intervention – an agreement by European powers not to send arms or military assistance to either side in the Spanish conflict. It was a farce, as Germany and Italy did little to hide their support for Franco, and Mussolini had thousands of men on Spanish soil. But the British went along with the pretence on the grounds of appeasement and in an attempt to prevent another pan-European war. Billmeir’s ships, along with a handful of other shipping companies, were one of the main lifelines for the Republic.
My great-grandfather had been running in and out of Spanish ports in the Mediterranean – Barcelona, Valencia, Cartagena – during the late spring and summer of 1937, almost a year after the conflict had started. Uncle Iain remembered his father telling of how he had almost been killed during a Nationalist air raid on Barcelona. The force from one of the blasts had thrown him to the ground, breaking the blue china plate he was holding in his hands at the time.
The traditionally Tory-supporting family back in Lancashire had tended to keep quiet about Jack’s smuggling of machine-guns past the international blockade to the under-armed ‘Reds’ of Spain. Jack survived Franco’s bombs only to die in an accident at the outbreak of the Second World War. Great-Uncle Iain, lung cancer gripping his chest, took any more details he might have known with him when he died shortly after my visit, and my own subsequent research had failed to bring up anything more. But the story gave me a personal link to the subject.
Some weeks after the fascist-sponsored wrestling match, an opportunity came up by chance for me to visit a part of the country I had always wanted to explore. Ceuta was an anomaly – a piece of Spain on the very tip of Africa, a large rock jutting out into the sea connected to the mainland by a tiny isthmus, very much like Gibraltar across the Strait on the northern horizon. A border outpost butting on to Morocco to the south, it was a fascinating little city, geographically cut off from the country to which it belonged, and culturally divided from its immediate neighbour. Here Christians, Muslims and Jews lived in relative peace, in a mirror image of what Spain might have been had its Jewish and Morisco populations not been expelled in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Ceuta and the area around it had been one of the main starting points for the coup which had led to the Spanish Civil War back in 1936. An invitation to a wedding in nearby Tetuán in northern Morocco gave me a chance to explore. A friend from university had fallen for a local girl – Muna – and was holding the Muslim ceremony for their nuptials in her home town. History books talked about Franco’s secret journey to this part of Morocco at the start of the conflict in order to take control of the Army of Africa. I would pass through Ceuta on my way down to the celebrations and get a flavour of the place. The city was the home of the Spanish Foreign Legion – the Legión – hardened fighting men who, the Spanish asserted, always made their French counterparts look like pussycats. They had played a key role in Franco’s campaign.
The modern barracks of the Legión were, unsurprisingly, closed to the public, but they had a museum in the centre of town. The place was dark and grotty; the main curator was an affable old Sikh with proud grey whiskers and a pot belly, who talked at length about his former life as a merchant seaman. Rows of guns and bombs sat next to photos of Franco and General Millán Astray, the co-founders of this elite force. Brightly coloured flags drooped sorrowfully from the walls while stiff dusty mannequins were used to display the evolution of the Legión’s uniform, a strangely macho affair where the men’s chests were exposed almost to the navel in true Latin style. Apart from the Sikh, who kindly informed me that he’d written to the colonel three times now complaining about the damp, there was just the man on the desk, who seemed keen to strike up a conversation.
‘This was the bullet that killed Kennedy,’ he told me.
I looked carefully at the pointed piece of metal he was holding up, imagining it hurtling through the air one November morning in Dallas. Strange that it should have ended up here in this forgotten corner of Spain. Strange, too, that the man holding it up to me should be the spitting image of Abraham Lincoln, that other assassinated American president. Apart from the military uniform and the tattoos, he might well have been the man himself, complete with fur-lined chin.
‘What, you mean the bullet?’
The soldier laughed contemptuously.
‘No. The same type of bullet. Six point five millimetre.’
A macabre image flashed through my mind of it crashing into JFK’s skull.
‘Did they use those in the Spanish Civil War?’
A munitions expert, Abe was more than happy to talk at length on the huge number of different bullets used during the war. Republican soldiers, he told me, often used to throw away their rifles once they’d finished the cartridges, as it was generally impossible to find the right-sized replacement bullets. With guns coming in from so many disparate sources – some of them brought in illegally by my great-grandfather – a company of men might be using over twenty different calibres at any one time. Grenades were so unreliable that the men refused to use them, preferring instead to stick a piece of dynamite in a tin can and throw it at the enemy.
It was a wonder many Republicans had guns at all. The government in Madrid had been very reluctant to hand out weapons to the unions and other left-wing groups at the start of the coup. When they finally capitulated and distributed rifles from the Ministry of Defence, the militiamen found that only five thousand out of a total of sixty-five thousand had bolts and so could be fired.
‘At least Franco’s forces had proper guns,’ Abe beamed through blackened teeth. I wondered if the state of this once historic fighting force was as bad as their museum. If so, there was little hope for them.
Fascinating though this all was, the place was a disappointment, and I had given up on finding anything more interesting when Abe pulled me outside to the entrance patio of the museum and pointed out over the sea and the curve of the bay south towards Morocco. In the distance I could make out the border checkpoint dividing Europe from Africa, the First World from the Third World. Beyond, the hillsides were dry scrubland, a few houses and villas dotted along the grey tarmacked road passing down the coast. The sea was surprisingly rough here, I noticed. I wondered if anyone ever tried swimming over the border.
‘Can you see?’ Abe said energetically. I looked in the direction he was indicating, not sure what I was supposed to be looking at. ‘There, the building just to the left of the white apartment blocks in the distance.’
I saw a smudge on a hill, over in Moroccan territory. It was hard to make out, but it appeared to be an old building.
‘That was our first headquarters,’ Abe said. ‘Our old home. Where Franco and Millán Astray first set up the Legión.’
I shook his hand: I knew immediately where I had to go.
An hour later I was crossing the border and heading in a tin-can taxi down the ancient Barbary Coast. Deep potholes made for wayward driving, the tarmac blending seamlessly with the sand and grit at the sides. Alongside the five-star hotels there for summer holiday-makers up from Casablanca and Rabat, elderly men in overalls and woollen hats stood at the entrance of a mechanic’s oily workshop, scratching their heads over deconstructed cars in pieces on the forecourt. Bars fronting on to the sea served mint teas and iced sherbets, without a sign of a cool beer anywhere in sight. Policemen in light-blue and grey uniforms and bubble-shaped helmets with bug-eyed goggles stood by their magnificent motorbikes and directed the careering traffic, whistles blowing furiously above the sound of the crashing waves on the beach below.
The taxi-driver knew exactly where I wanted to go, and after four or five miles stopped by the side of the road and pointed to a dirt track leading up a slope away from the coast.
‘That’s where it is,’ he said.
I quickly paid and set off up the hill at speed, not hearing what the taxi-driver shouted to me as he drove off, his words lost in the sound of the sea and the traffic.
Franco had come to this place as soon as he landed in Tetuan at the start of the coup. Colonel Yagüe, a member of the Falange, had been waiting for him, the troops primed for the coming assault against the government, with the secret rallying cry CAFE, an acronym for Camaradas ¡Arriba la Falange Española! – Comrades, Up with the Spanish Falange! Not all the soldiers were in the know, however. At a banquet just days before the coup, the Spanish High Commissioner in Morocco, a former artillery captain, was confused to hear other officers calling for ‘coffee’ as the fish course was being served. Later he was captured by the rebels when the coup broke out and shot for his loyalty to the government.
I clambered up the hill away from the road and the hooting of the taxi to where I thought the former Legión headquarters must be. As I reached the crest it came into view – a vast crumbling edifice, the shell of a once proud neo-Classical structure, now covered in weeds. I stood in awe. It was hard to believe that this had once been a military barracks. It reminded me of grand old Spanish tobacco factories, like the building in Seville – today a university – where Mérimée had situated the cigar-rolling women of Carmen. Either that or a palace for some long-forgotten duke. In front of me, a flat square of land that would once have been a parade ground stretched up to the main building – a rectangular construction covering an area of almost two acres. I walked across, stepping over flattened rusty cans among the knee-high dry grass, smudges of fox-brown in a sea of yellow and grey. The place had enormous presence and energy. Some ruins are simply dead – of architectural or historical interest, but little more. These barracks, the Dar Riffien headquarters of the Spanish Foreign Legion, were alive. Perhaps because they had been abandoned for so little time, or perhaps because they hadn’t been touched since. The ghosts that lived here had been left in peace, I felt, undisturbed and free to haunt their old home.
Large fig trees were growing inside the main building. The roof had fallen in and the remaining walls must have acted as a windbreak against the breezes blowing in from the sea. Great glassless windows eight feet high ran along the outside, delicate masonry curling around their empty frames. Inside, it was difficult to see anything for the mass of foliage that had taken over, trees and flowers claiming the place for themselves as though it were a vast conservatory. Dark-purple morning glories smothered the lower walls, gradually creeping their way into what once had been offices, a canteen, kitchens. Nature had quickly taken over the buildings, but something of the spirit of the place remained.
It was hard to believe that the Civil War had been launched from a place of such beauty and grandeur. This was a palace more suited to ballroom dancing than to drills and firing practice. Yet as I scrambled around, amazed at the scale of the building, so splendid and yet so decrepit, I began to understand the emotions that a structure like this could invoke, and how it might fuel the energy and drive needed to wage the kind of war that had ripped through Spain. Here I could imagine how you could easily fall into fervent dreams of superiority, order and resistance to change. Like the cloisters of a monastery, or the courtyard of an ancient university, such a building was flattering by association: ‘I belong here: this place is magnificent and therefore so am I.’ The soldiers of the Legión stationed here, with their traditions of strict discipline and hierarchy, would have needed little convincing to fight the church-burning anarchists and revolution-waging Marxists who were trying to take over Spain. It was their natural duty, and inclination, to defend the old ways.
What puzzled me, though, was why this once great building had been left to fall apart like this. I could appreciate that it no longer stood on Spanish territory – the tiny peninsula of Ceuta was visible from this vantage point back northwards up the coast: the place from which Abe had earlier shown me this very spot from outside the Legión museum. But surely the Moroccans could have made use of such a complex, perhaps for their own army. Then again, associations with the former colonial rulers might have left a nasty taste in the mouth. The Spanish had not been the most beneficent of masters in northern Morocco, spending much of the time fighting bloody and brutal campaigns against the locals. Incorporating Moroccans into their own forces – the Regulares – and then using them against their own kind in the Civil War had been one of the methods the Spanish used to channel the rebelliousness and aggression of the native tribes. Even so, to let the buildings fall to ruin like this?
As I was wondering, I spotted some Arabic lettering on the walls of a separate building set away from the main palace where I was standing. I could make out the words GOD, THE KING AND THE FATHERLAND – the motto, I remembered from somewhere, of the Moroccan Army. Then, among the ruins and the invading plant life, I caught sight of a line of clothes hung out to dry and some cooking utensils on the ground. Clean and rust-free, they must have been used recently.
As these images registered, two things happened almost simultaneously: a strong sense that I was in trouble came over me, a split second before I felt a hand grab me roughly by the shoulder. I spun round in surprise – two young Moroccan soldiers armed with rifles were staring at me with a combination of curiosity and menace.
‘Come with us,’ one of them said. ‘You’re under arrest.’
Speechless, I turned and walked away between the two of them. One of them held me firmly by the elbow. It was unnecessary: the suddenness of their appearance and the implicit threat of their weaponry left me no choice but to go with them. As they led me away, I began to realize just how blind I’d been to think the place deserted. Signs of life were everywhere – not just the clothes, but I could now hear faint Arabic music from a radio in a room somewhere. There were fresh animal droppings on the ground, chickens roaming among the dry weeds, bits of rubbish thrown about that were only days or weeks old. As I was escorted down the dusty track, everything around me seemed to talk of the present.
We headed to some green outbuildings on the edge of the complex. I had failed to notice them before, half hidden behind a cluster of strawberry trees. They were modern, undecorated cubes built out of breeze block, the red Moroccan flag with its green five-pointed star hanging limply in the still, hot air from a pole thrust into the flat roof. I sensed my nerves kicking in as we headed towards the front door, a black rectangular hole in the dusty facade. A coldness came over me, spreading across my chest and shoulders. I’d been a complete idiot. God knew how this was going to end.
The soldiers marched me down chipped blue-painted steps to a square blank room lit by a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. A small table stood in the middle, with white, scratched, dirty wooden legs. The soldiers closed the door. I expected to hear the clunk of a key locking me in, but instead, through the small hole at the top of the door where once a window might have been, I could see one of the soldiers standing on guard while the other climbed back up the stairs. I looked for a place to sit but there was nowhere to rest. Leaning in a corner I tried in vain to calm myself and remain positive, justifying what I’d done and trying to rehearse what I’d say. I had obviously broken the law by trespassing on military property, but only inadvertently; and from what I’d seen here this was not an important base. They couldn’t have been doing much more than standing guard at this old site. No matter – they’d caught me, and it was going to take some explaining. Curious about the Civil War? Wanted to see the old HQ of the Legión? They would think I was mad.
After a long hour’s wait I crouched down in the corner to rest my legs. The air was still and hot, while the floor looked just that bit too disgusting to sit on. But I found it hard to keep still, my cold, moistened fingertips circling around one another frantically as I waited. As the minutes passed my mind seemed to move into a kind of empty trance, my only thought being to try to remember the French word for ‘sightseer’. A kind of paralysis seemed to be coming over me. The soldiers who had once occupied these barracks, the Spanish legionaries, had been hardened killers, famed for their brutality. They particularly enjoyed cutting off the heads of anyone who got in their way.
Eventually I heard someone coming down the stairs and I stood up, my head reeling from the heat. A young officer came in, his sandy uniform as ruffled and unkempt as those of the soldiers who had arrested me. He looked me up and down with a rough disinterested stare, while I tried to gauge what kind of a man he might be. One of the soldiers brought him a chair. He demanded my passport and started meticulously taking down my details on a bundle of forms and papers he’d brought with him. He leaned his small head in as he wrote, concentrating on every letter, checking and rechecking several times that he’d got it right. The fact that it simply said ‘passport agency’ for place of issue gave him great concern.
‘C’est où, ça?’ he barked. They were the first words he’d directly addressed to me. I had no idea where the passport agency was, but he needed a city to place on his form, so I gave him one.
‘Londres,’ I replied. Sounded reasonable enough. His head bent down again as he scribbled away.
Then came a barrage of questions, very fast and all in French. Unfortunately, ‘being arrested’ hadn’t featured in the role-playing situations I remembered from French lessons at school. I silently cursed my teachers as I tried to understand what was being asked of me. A simple grammatical mistake might end me up in more trouble.
Who was I? I repeated my name.
Nationality? He had my passport in his hands.
Where was I staying? I gave the name of my hotel in Ceuta.
What was I doing here? This was the difficult one. I could only tell him the truth, but depending on what kind of a person he was – and I could already see he was not the most imaginative of people – it might only make things worse.
I told him the truth. I lived in Spain, I was a writer researching the Civil War, I had wanted to see the Legión’s old headquarters … and so I plodded on, hoping I wasn’t digging my own grave.
He held his palms together in front of him as though in prayer while I spoke. Anxious as I was, I forced myself to speak as slowly and clearly as possible, not wanting to make the slightest mistake that might give him the excuse he wanted to jump down my throat. But I was well aware of the danger of incriminating myself through zeal of innocence.
‘You’re lying!’ he shouted, interrupting me mid-flow. Something in me jumped, my heart freezing, then pounding violently in my chest. But as fear cast a net over my mind, I sensed his move was forced. It seemed mad, helpless as I was, but I couldn’t help feeling that his outburst had been planned from the beginning, as though it was some primitive interrogation technique he’d been taught on a course.
‘Who are you?’ he demanded again. I forced down a desire to be facetious and repeated my name. The man might have been an idiot, but he was an idiot with power, and the soldiers outside were carrying rifles. My only concern was to get out of there.
‘Where are you staying?’ Ceuta, I said.
‘Where are you heading next?’ This was a new one. ‘Tetuan,’ I answered. The old capital of the Spanish Protectorate was only a few miles further south. The first of the wedding guests would be arriving by now, I thought. God, did I wish I was with them. A quick trip back to Ceuta to pick up my things and I could be there in a couple of hours.
At this point the officer stood up, picked up the chair and walked out, carrying my passport with him. He muttered something to the soldiers on the door, one of them staying put while the other accompanied him back up the stairs. That’s it, I thought. I should have insisted I was only staying in Ceuta, not planning on travelling down to Tetuan as well. As a tourist staying in Spain on a day trip I might have had some more protection. Now that I had admitted I was going to be travelling inside Morocco as well, they could do with me what they liked.
The interrogation had made me light-headed, my nerves and the effort of answering the officer’s questions leaving my mouth clammy and dry. What was he doing? Perhaps he needed to get clearance to have me locked up for the night? Or taken to another army base? I tried to keep a check on my thoughts, with only partial success. I would find out in good time. Meanwhile, I could do nothing.
The officer returned sooner than I’d expected.
‘Where are you going in Tetuan?’ he asked directly. I had nothing to lose so I mentioned Daniel and his wedding to Muna.
‘Muna Bouaiss?’ he asked. I had no idea of Muna’s surname, but decided to take a punt on it. The expression of surprise on his face when I’d mentioned her seemed promising.
‘Yes, that’s her,’ I said, not sure if I was digging an even deeper hole for myself.
In a flash he was gone again, this time running up the stairs. The other two soldiers remained behind, peering in through the open door and smiling. Why hadn’t they shut me in this time? I wondered. What did those sudden grins mean? I smiled back, confused.
When my interrogator returned, he walked in, passed round the table to approach me and with his hands outstretched patted me on the shoulders in a kind of half-embrace. His face was all light and joy.
‘Please pardon our mistake,’ he said. ‘We did not know you were a friend of the colonel’s.’
‘Ah, of course.’ I was desperately trying to think on my feet. The colonel? ‘That’s quite all right,’ I said with a laugh. ‘How were you to know?’ I had no idea who this mysterious benefactor was, but I was quickly becoming very fond of him.
‘We have all heard of his niece’s wedding to the Englishman,’ the officer explained. He led me out of the door and up the stairs again. My knees were still shaking, my heart slowly trying to recover its poise. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but from the rapid change in manner and tone it looked as though I was being released. Was Muna’s uncle in the military, then? (Later I would find out that indeed he was.) I quickly looked back: the soldiers were smiling and laughing sheepishly behind us. Suddenly they were the ones to be frightened.
‘The colonel, as you know, used to be the military governor of this region,’ my former interrogator told me. ‘Until only four months ago, in fact. We have to be careful. This is army property. It is our duty to stop people.’
‘Yes, that’s fine,’ I said. As quickly as I’d been arrested, I was now a free man.
‘Would you like some tea?’
Twenty minutes later I was driving back up the coast to the border with Ceuta in a pale-blue taxi hailed down on the road for me by one of the soldiers who had originally taken me in. The churning waters of the Mediterranean lapped at the oily beaches beneath us, while boys with skinny brown legs cycled barefoot in and out of the traffic. The sweet peppermint tea had helped quench my burning thirst somewhat and calmed me a little, but my head still reeled from what had happened, and how close I’d felt to disappearing into the Moroccan jail system altogether. Daniel and Muna would doubtless laugh when I told them the story, and I longed to meet the mysterious colonel whose name alone had secured my release, but at that moment I wanted nothing more than to get back to the relative safety of Ceuta and Spain.
At the border there was the same chaos I’d witnessed when I’d crossed into Morocco earlier in the day. Bread-sellers huddled around the makeshift taxi rank perched on a dusty outcrop overlooking the sea, while spherical women from the Riff mountains in bright-red and white shawls and straw hats with dark-blue bobbles struggled with canvas bags full of goods to sell. No one here, at least, wanted Ceuta handed over to Moroccan control, as the politicians in Rabat were demanding. There was too much money to be made from the situation as it stood.
Hustlers selling exit documents jigged energetically among the heaving cars lined up trying to get into Spain. The Ceutans had expensive new vehicles, with the usual bumps and scratches you expected from Spanish driving; the Moroccans’ cars were ancient and dusty, the majority apparently held together with bits of string. Choking on the exhaust fumes, I handed my passport to the Moroccan authorities for the superfluous stamping procedure, adrenaline pumping nervously through my veins. But after a haughty delay it was handed back to me and I was free to cross the border. I wandered down long wire tunnels to where the Spanish police were waiting, keen to get back to the European side and the safety of my adopted country for a while before heading back into Morocco for the wedding.
A typical member of the Civil Guard was on duty, all lime-green uniform and paunch. This paramilitary police force had originally been set up in the nineteenth century to combat bandits in rural areas. Franco had later used it as one of the pillars of his regime, and its members had developed a reputation as authoritarian thugs. But now in democratic Spain they were milder – polite, bored-looking, but usually all right. A couple of Muslim girls dressed in Moroccan-style clothes were ahead of me. The guard scanned their Spanish passports, flicking through the pages as though trying to see if they were forged. Not finding anything amiss, he handed them back with a grunt.
‘We’re Spanish, you know,’ one of the girls said. ‘Just like you.’ And they walked on. I had the impression they had to face this kind of thing every day.
‘Spanish,’ the guard said as I approached, with a tone of disbelief and resigned despair. ‘What do they mean, Spanish?’
As a rule I tried never to speak to customs people or policemen at borders. They were a mild annoyance – obstacles to get past as quickly as possible, without drawing their attention to you. But after my recent experience at the Moroccan barracks, I felt the urge to talk to this surly Spaniard and found myself blurting out my story in a desperate bid for sympathy.
‘Can you believe it? I’ve just been arrested,’ I said. ‘Over there in Dar Riffien.’ As I indicated behind me with my thumb I could barely hear the voice of warning screaming at the back of my head, What are you doing? You don’t tell border guards you’ve just been arrested!
The policeman had been about to hand me my passport, but pulled it back and started checking again. Meanwhile my voice had a life of its own and was continuing with the story.
‘At the old barracks of the Legión,’ I said. Somehow I thought the man would applaud me for trying to visit such a site. And as a Spaniard he would immediately give me the sympathy I craved for having been so mistreated by those nasty Moros on the other side of the border.
‘Where are you staying?’ he snapped. I told him the name of my hotel.
‘How long are you going to be in Ceuta? What’s your business here?’
Still holding my passport, he had stood up from his stool and was towering over me from inside his control booth. I drew a deep breath, realization of what I’d done seeping slowly into my brain.
‘Why were you arrested?’
It seemed I was back with the Moroccans. Having blundered into being arrested that morning, I was on the brink of repeating the same mistake.
I told him what I’d said to the Moroccan officer. But my voice was trembling from the mental kicking I was giving myself for being so stupid. I looked beyond the checkpoint towards the city in the distance. There was a row of taxis waiting only a few steps away, ready to take me into town. I imagined sitting in one, being whisked away from all this, back into the warm, welcoming safety of Spain.
The guard looked at me with an expression of disgust.
‘I can’t stop you crossing this border,’ he said. ‘But would to God I could. We get enough arseholes like you coming here.’
I stared at him in disbelief. Although officious, Spanish policemen in my experience always had good manners. I had never been spoken to like this before, as he dropped the respectful usted form for the familiar – and in this case rude – tú.
‘I don’t want to see you here again.’
He handed me back my passport. It took me a second to react and take it out of his hand before he could drop it on the floor.
‘Now fuck off !’
I walked over the border and into Spain in shock, the noise of the waves beating at the crumbling coastline crying in my ears.