Ken Wilmott and his men were now part of the force preparing to hold a strong point at Gandesa. On a halt on the journey to the front he again met up with David Hatton. They were both waiting for drinking water from the same tanker.
‘Captain, we do keep bumping into one another. Nice to see you. Are you OK?’
For a moment Ken Wilmott was nonplussed by the likeness to Richard Hatton. ‘Hey, Dave Hatton.’
‘Always turn up like a bad penny.’
‘I heard about your brother. I was sorry to hear… blinking shame, he was a good chap.’
‘He said pretty much the same about you. Said you and your sister braved a blizzard to get through to the hospital. Saved his life and then he went and…’
‘Don’t blame him. Don’t even try to understand. I thought about it when I heard. Look how fair-skinned he was, like you. You have to take care with sunburn and snowburn. There were some Swedish volunteers with us for a while – God, you should have seen them, blisters all over. Your brother was at Belchite, wasn’t he? Well, there you are, the heat there was beyond belief. I sometimes think a lot of us went off our rockers for a while.’
‘Yeah, could be. Like you said, he was a good chap.’
‘Still taking pictures, then?’
‘I’ve got leave to come along with you chaps. I’m doing some factual films, rather like the Voice of America. Short pieces, you know the kind of thing. I did have some notion about enlisting. You know, take on Rich’s place kind of style, but I’d make a bloody terrible soldier. This stuff helps swell the coffers.’
‘Trouble is, our side doesn’t appeal to the supporters with the biggest penny.’
‘We make up for it in numbers.’
‘That’s a fact.’
They were whistling in the dark. It was evident at every turn that the enemy was supported by every machine of war, and seemingly endless thousands of men. Even so, there was always the knowledge that the volunteers of the International Brigade were fighting for a cause, and not for the money.
Ken liked the chap. He’d probably been to Eton and all that, yet he always stood around with the blokes and mucked in. He didn’t realize that he was a fish out of water – the blokes did, but they liked and respected him for working on their own newspaper, The Volunteer. ‘My brother Ray used to believe that if you looked after the pennies the pounds would take care of themselves. I hated his blinking ideas then, because we were so bloody poor I could never wait to spend every penny I could lay my hands on. I was a bugger for clothes – liked dancing you see.’
For a second, David had a vivid image of Lu and her brother in that little back-street house, transforming themselves to go dancing. They were the two younger ones, he knew that, and the elder brother had been like a father to them. He needed to know everything about her if he was going to understand her. She was quite right, he really didn’t understand people like her. Before he found her in Spain, he had thought about meeting her, courting her, perhaps marrying her, but finding her had killed off those fantasies because she did not want him. Yet, now that he knew who she was, he was more entranced than ever. He did not want to accept that she would always reject him.
‘I heard this story about an extremely small mining village in Wales – no work, no hope of it, kids half-starved, no money for food – yet, apparently, they made a collection and raised two pounds. That’s a lot of money in farthings and ha’pennies. I think about that when I wonder whether I should take up a rifle.’
‘Somebody has to let people know what it’s like out here.’
They paid close attention to securing the caps of their flasks. This might be all the water they would get until after dark, and the Aragon plain would be searing hot.
‘Your sister is doing that; she writes some marvellous stuff.’
‘You know her?’
‘I was with her in Madrid not too long ago.’ He tried to sound as though it was a casual thing, but he needed to talk about her. This opportunity of talking to her brother was God-sent.
‘I didn’t realize that you knew her. How is she?’
‘As beautiful as ever. We shared a plate of chilli-beans, then she left to go on duty.’
Ken Wilmott smiled affectionately. What did he mean exactly, ‘as ever’? She hadn’t said anything about knowing the other brother during the time they were at Benicasim. The two Hattons were almost identical, she couldn’t not have noticed, yet she didn’t say. But then, there was a lot that he didn’t know about her. ‘Have you seen her in that bloody great lorry? She’s amazing. I could hardly believe it, she couldn’t drive pram wheels when she was a kid.’
‘Was she pretty then?’
‘Lu pretty? I wouldn’t know, I used to call her Lanky-legs, that made her mad.’ He trailed off. Damn! He had called her Lu. Taking a last swig of water he said, ‘Sorry, old son. Have to get back to my blokes.’ Sod it! He had let her down. He’d told her that she had no need to make him promise a thing like that. As far as he was concerned, she was Eve Anders, and their life before Spain was nobody’s business but their own. ‘Good luck, Dave.’
‘Good luck, Captain.’
At first Eve had taken Alex with her whenever possible because she felt so sorry for her. Alex had become approachable. Eve had grown to like her once she realized that under the self-possession was a woman as uncertain and vulnerable as herself.
In their new close association, with their earlier positions of responsibility reversed, they talked their way through the thickets of assorted prejudices. A thing that surprised Eve was Alex’s confession: ‘I envy your composure. Confidence like yours must be bred into your bones. Mine was painted on at finishing school when I was seventeen. You were doing real work when you were seventeen.’
When just the two of them were working together, Eve no longer felt constrained to deny her early life. ‘It was real, all right. My finishing school was the famous one of Hard Knocks.’
‘It didn’t do a bad job, you know.’
‘Do you know what I was doing about a year ago?’ She smiled at the memory. ‘I was standing in front of my employer’s desk as he told me that I was dismissed for organizing a trades union, and that I should never work in my home town again.’ She laughed outright. ‘How right he was! I told him that he couldn’t dismiss me because I had already handed in my notice.’
Dissimilar as their upbringing was, it had given them both the conviction that an outward display of deep emotion was embarrassing. But war brings about drastic changes in disposition.
‘Did your school of hard knocks teach you how one is supposed to mourn? Mine didn’t, at least I never came across it. I suppose that we girls preparing for our night out in gardenias and white satin were not expected to think of anything that might crease our flawless brows.’
‘When my mother died, my grief was mixed with such anger… I was so angry with her. Do you feel that?’
‘Yes, yes. It’s so bloody useless too. I want to kill him for leaving me like this. He didn’t have to be a bloody sacrifice for such a bloody useless cause.’
Wasn’t that what made you fall for him? A man who was everything you were supposed to reject?’
She smiled faintly. ‘Maybe I was ready for him. But, God knows, I wasn’t ready for this. Are you still angry with your mother? I mean, if you think this is a bloody intrusion, just say so.’
‘Give yourself a chance, Alex. If you ask me, when somebody you’re very close to, OK, somebody you love, is suddenly ripped out of your life, it’s a terrible thing. Terrible.’
Tears moistened Alex’s eyes, and she appeared not to know what to do about them except to bat her eyelids. She nodded.
Eve avoided looking directly at her. ‘I didn’t stay angry with my mother for very long, but I have stayed angry. She died because she was a woman, because she was a poor woman, because she was a woman who fell in love with an unsuitable man and because women like my mother are expendable. Nobody in the whole country ever cared about women like my mother – only her children, and we didn’t care enough.’
For a while they sat quietly, staring ahead. Eve was surprised that she could still be so affected by her old grief. Alex’s tears were an embarrassment, and she looked to one side as she blotted them from the corner of her eyes. Eve laid a tentative hand on Alex’s arm. Alex did not move away. ‘Alex, if you can’t cry when somebody you love dies, then when can you cry? People like us will never wail and rend our clothes but…’
Alex blew her nose and stretched her face. Turning to look directly at Eve, she said with a faint smile, ‘I think that’s all I can manage at this lesson. Could I ask you about your mother?’ Eve nodded. ‘Would it make her unhappy to see you doing what you are doing now?’
‘In some ways, yes. She would have liked to see me in mortar-board and gown, receiving a scroll at some famous university – and that still appeals to me. What would have pleased her is that I am not ruining my life over some man. She never said a word against my father, but his neglect of her and us was shameful to her. I think that she thought that she was to blame, that getting pregnant was her fault, nothing to do with him, my father. It’s just bad luck that men are made like that.’
‘You sound bitter.’
‘Do I? You should live in a street where every other house contains a woman hung about with a huge family – the results of the way men are made. There is contraception, but no one will tell the women. Where I lived, the women abort one another, you know.’
‘Where I lived, they went abroad, or to a surgeon in Harley Street, who would remove any kind of cyst from the womb for a three-figure cheque.’
Eve returned Alex’s wry look. ‘The going rate where I come from is half-a-crown.’
‘My father was – is still, I suppose – a paedophile.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Men who gratify their sex urges with children. Perhaps it’s a middle-class male aberration. I know they do funny things at school.’
‘You mean child-molesters. I never heard the other word.’
And so in the enclosed world of the cab, the two women gradually opened up to one another. They saw something unexpected and became closer than they would have imagined possible. They supported one another, and grew to appreciate qualities they had not been aware of for prejudice.
By July the Nationalists, having overrun Teruel, had reached the coast and effectively cut the Republic in two. Barcelona and Madrid were almost cut off from one another.
The casualties on both sides were high, but in the Republic there were ever fewer replacements. Conscription could not equal the huge numbers of trained soldiers and airmen flooding in from nations supporting the fascists, and although medical teams, aid and volunteers still arrived in support of the beleaguered Republic, they were not enough. Even so, in July, a confident army began to assemble with military precision and in secret. The plan was a surprise offensive. The river Ebro, broad and fast-flowing, needed to be forded. Then the terrain was rocky, giving waiting ambulances cover whenever enemy planes were spotted. Pontoon bridges were floated under cover of darkness, bombed the next day and refloated again.
The first troops to ford the great Ebro did so in rubber dinghies. Soon they were followed by more men, equipment, supplies and ammunition, which all went across on a pontoon bridge put in place with amazing speed.
‘I say, aren’t you the girl who lifted me when I left Albacete last year?’
Eve, on this journey driving a hospital supplies truck, looked up from her unloading. She connected the voice and face with her early days in Albacete. ‘I think so. Sister Smart, right?’
‘Actually, no. Smarty was the other one. I’m Haskell.’
‘Of course. Is your friend here?’
‘Typhoid. She was being sent back to England, but she didn’t make it. Dear old Smarty, she was a bloody good nurse. Terrible waste. We’d knocked about together for years.’ It wasn’t difficult to see through the off-hand manner, a stiff upper-lip could never distract attention from what was in the eyes.
‘I’m sorry. She seemed such a jolly person.’
‘Thanks. Yeah.’ Haskell straightened her back purposefully and rubbed her hands. ‘Okey-dokey. I’m told that you’re a pretty good general dogsbody. That right?’
‘I don’t like hanging around when I’m not driving. So tell me what to do.’
‘Grab some of that stuff and just keep bringing it in. It might look a touch chaotic, setting up shop always does, but it works. Can’t say I’m too keen on a cave, but it’ll be the first bomb-proof hospital I’ve worked in for many a long day.’ She guffawed. ‘If anyone had said two years ago that we’d be setting up an operating theatre in a cave… I ask you, in the twentieth century!’
Haskell was a tireless worker. Her previously full-bosomed figure had become almost slim, and she walked as though every step she took pained her. Big veins showed on one leg, and the other was laced up in a crepe bandage. Haskell was not young, but God help anyone who might think that she was past it.
‘There’s a rumour that there are hundreds of wounded on the other side of the river who can’t be brought across.’
‘Can’t stop rumours. But it’s probably the truth.’
‘Why won’t they let us go over and fetch them?’
‘They’re going to have to. We’ve already seen the chief. I dare say you’ll get your marching orders any time.’
The ambulances, autochirs (virtually operating theatres on wheels) and trucks rolled across the newly repaired bridge just as dawn was breaking. Soon after, when they were toiling along a rough road, there came the increasingly familiar warning shout: ‘¡Aviacion!’ Ambulances pulled into the shelter of the cliffs and the medics and drivers lay under cover in hollows and ditches, but only a single plane flew over.
‘Bloody observation planes, I hate them,’ Haskell said bitterly. ‘They’re just like a bloody herald-symptom of some rotten bloody disease. Twenty minutes and the bombers will be here.’
It was twenty-five minutes.
Twelve huge bombers came into sight. The new autochirs and ambulances had already been drawn into the shelter of an olive grove and hastily camouflaged. All that they could do was lie and wait under the trees and bushes.
The planes bombed up and down the riverbanks and along the roads. Anti-aircraft guns fired constantly. This was the closest Eve had ever been to the fighting.
As she lay in the ditch, she thought of Kenny. The last she had heard on the grapevine, which worked pretty well, was that the British Battalion were in the rearguard of the Aragon retreat and had fought fiercely every inch of the way.
Then she went on to wonder where David was, and felt sorry that she had rounded on him for having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and guilty that he had gone away before she had explained. Not that there was an explanation, just excuses. They were both the products of their class, each of them pretending that they were not.
And Ozz. It wasn’t unusual for her not to see Ozz for weeks at a time, but he usually left a message of some sort scrawled on any bit of paper he could find. The last message had been written just before he set out in a supplies convoy for the Belchite sector, but Belchite had fallen to the other side.
Suddenly a machine-gun opened up, strafing anything in sight. Then six tiny fighter aircraft attacked the huge bombers. In spite of herself, Eve was thrilled by the dramatic dog-fight that went on for an hour. One bomber was shot down, and the rest soared upwards and disappeared. The raid was over and they could continue to push on to Santa Magdalena, a hermitage where they were to set up a hospital.
‘Ah, splendid,’ said Haskell wryly, when they saw Santa Magdalena from a distance. It was a landmark visible for miles around. Set high on the hills, its white walls caught in the afternoon sun, the place was lit up like a beacon. ‘Nobody will ever know we’re here.’ It had been Hobson’s choice, for there was no other building available that could be turned into a hospital.
Haskell went off to help set up another operating theatre. Eve got stuck in with scrubbing and cleaning. By eleven that same day the hospital was ready to receive the steady stream of ambulances bringing in the more severely wounded men.
The days that followed were very difficult. Eve’s truck, parked after unloading, received a direct hit and was totally destroyed. Several ambulances were lost. There was little food. With no truck to drive Eve scuttled around helping the dedicated Spanish nurses and medical auxiliaries. Many of the latter had never had a day’s schooling and were fast learning every skill the trained nurses could teach them. Eve fetched and carried, wrote up details and washed away blood; sometimes she held feeding-cups and blood-transfusion lines. Hard as she worked, with few breaks, she did not seem to be able to keep up with the auxiliaries. If she had grown up tough and poor, many of them had had a worse start. And if, as the outside world had been told, Spain was fast becoming a godless state, it wasn’t evident from the blessings and quick pleas to ‘Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God’ the Spanish nurses and auxiliaries made.
At some time during the second night, Eve went outside the walls of the hermitage to try to rest. She longed to write, for her mind was full of what she wanted people back home to know, but it was too dark to see and too dangerous to risk a light. But she knew what she would write about when she got out of there.
A Front-line Hospital in Spain
This is a most extraordinary place. High up, overlooking a jagged terrain is a hospital that could be a model for the League of Nations.
The senior surgeon is Dr J. who is a Christian Socialist from New Zealand. Of the many nurses, there are Lillian from Yorkshire, Patience and Ada from the Australia, Nuala from Belfast, Consuella and Maria who escaped from Santander, Aurora from Barcelona.
Then there is Sister H. I first met her months ago when I was newly arrived, naive, and expected the invaders to be quickly expelled with the support of the League of Nations. Nurses such as Sister H. put on a hard-bitten act, which I have taken to copying. And no wonder. How on earth can these nurses and doctors live so close to extreme fear and unendurable pain? Do Lillian and Patience and Ada and Aurora and Sister H. ever give way to tears? Perhaps they fear that they might not stop, as I too might not.
My vehicle has been destroyed, so here I will stay until something happens to move me. It is far into the night, this is my second one here. I, with two or three nurses, have come into the open to try and get some sleep where it is quieter and cooler. Except for the faint glow of the white walls of this makeshift hospital, the darkness is complete. I am fatigued, but too tired for sleep, I can only lie and look up at the restful night sky.
If she went to sleep, she was not aware of it, her thoughts drifting back and forth, from missing eyes and shattered arms and legs to the cool green water of the Swallitt Pool where she had spent her twelfth birthday; from jagged bone and stretchers carrying bodies that didn’t even make it to the operating table, to the meadow with poppies where the first photograph of herself had been taken.
There must be hundreds of trucks passing somewhere below – our men going to the front.
If today had been bad, they were all aware that tomorrow would be worse. This might be her last night on earth.
She didn’t want it to be, she was only twenty and there was more to do now than she had ever supposed. Her writing case contained dozens of scraps of paper, each with a scribbled home address:
Come and stay when this is all over.
I’d love you to see my children/my wife/my hometown.
You’d like my Mom and Pop.
We could have a whale of a time.
I’d take you to see the Great Lakes/the West Coast of Scotland/the Empire State Building/Ayers Rock/Mount Tanganaua/the Yorkshire Moors.
Every time she had been given that assurance that there would be a future, she had said, yes she would love to. Every time she was sincere. Australia, America, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, France, Germany, Italy, and of course this beautiful, terrible country that she felt owned her, but owed her nothing. Having no home address except care of her aunt’s strawberry farm where all her close family except Kenny now lived, she cherished those names. She had daydreams of herself crossing and re-crossing the world in the way all those audacious Victorian and Edwardian women had done. On horseback, too, as they had. Or in a flying-boat or a car like David used to have, low and sleek and powerful.
From far below the crest on which the Santa Magdalena hospital had been set up, she heard singing. Soldiers’ voices as the trucks took them to the front. The song was the Internationale, the one she had heard sung in a hundred places, in a dozen languages. She might have cried, but didn’t, couldn’t. It was too tragic for tears. She knew that although those men, and the others who would keep coming, would hang on to the bitter end, there was little hope left for the Republic.
It was becoming more evident to Eve that there had perhaps never been hope. It was known that anarchists had different views about women’s education and freedom from those of the communists. She had worked with nurses who had laughed when they told how the anarchists, in an area where they were in charge, had said that the sight of women swimming in the river, even well away from the villages, even when dressed in swimsuits, would frighten the mules.
The communists, on the other hand, were generally believed to be controlled by the USSR. And, as Eve was already aware – not only from what she knew of Dimitri’s increasing concern – Soviet intervention was not altruistic. She could not yet decide whether Dimitri was naive, which she doubted, or having seen the true situation was disturbed that he was a part of it.
The fractures in the left-wing parties that, in the early days of her involvement and in her youthful idealism, Eve had not even suspected, she now saw were opening up. She had gradually become aware that the differences between extremist left factions – the anarchist FAI, the Marxist POUM and what Ozz had called general-purpose reds, the PSUC – led them to fight for something other than the maintenance of the Republic.
Feelings between the factions ran high. Assassinations, revenge, punishment and retribution now split families and villages in a way that they had earlier split more simply between left and right, Republicans and Nationalists. To the world outside Spain, it seemed muddle enough for anyone who wished to wash their hands of the whole civil war.
But to Eve, it was no longer a muddle, and the clearer the situation became to her, a fascist takeover, in her view, seemed to be inevitable. The greater enemy of the Republic, though, was still a chronic shortage of both food and raw materials.
She missed Ozz. Of all the people she now knew in Spain, Ozz Lavender was the only one with whom she could have discussed her growing disillusion. She wanted to know how he felt, what he had seen and heard. Was hers simply the view from the cab of her own truck, or had he observed a similar breakdown. Where was he?
It was an odd place to hear a cock crow and then a dog bark. Soon after that a bird started a song she didn’t recognize. If it wasn’t for the rumbling lorries and the soldiers’ voices, she might have been awake under her aunt’s roof, thinking of the day that lay ahead, driving a vanload of strawberries to catch the London train.
Sleep wouldn’t come. One cigarette and then she would go back inside. She could see something light on the horizon – the river Ebro. Perhaps the next time she crossed it, if she ever did, it would be…? She had lost track of time. Was it August? Good Lord, I suppose I must be twenty-one. Coming of Age. That meant something, she didn’t know what. She’d had the key of the door since she was fourteen. The vote! Yes, she had become one of the great British electorate. She laughed aloud. It was quite funny. She didn’t know why.
Captain Wilmott’s companies were among some of the first of the 15th Brigade to cross the mighty Ebro. In small boats, rowed by local men who knew the river’s currents and landing places, the first men crossed six at a time. The boats were small and each man carried a good weight of equipment, so that the surface of the water was close to the gunwales. Great care was needed to keep from shipping water in such strong currents. Six at a time, hundreds of them crossed to the south bank. A few at a time, thousands made a perilous crossing on the pontoon bridge.
They were taking the war to the enemy this time. Their route was westward, towards Cobera, and their objective was to sever the enemy’s main route between Aragon and the front. Troubled only by minor skirmishes with Moorish troops and other enemy units used to delay their advance, the Republican army and the International Brigade surged on.
One of the singing voices Eve had heard in the darkness might have been her brother’s, but they would never know. That same night Captain Wilmott and his men were part of the British Battalion on its way to fight for possession of a strategic hill, fortified with concrete bunkers.
Ken and Lieutenant Harry Pope were still, somehow, together. At Gandesa the lieutenant’s scalp had been scraped by a rifle bullet. The wound had bled profusely and left a scar like a parting in the wrong place. Near miss didn’t say the half of it. Indicating their objective, Harry said, ‘Look familiar to you, Ken old man?’
‘God above, Harry, there can’t be two of them.’
But there were. As at Brunete, they were again confronted by bare, rocky, exposed terrain with the enemy at the top within a concrete bunker. Again there was blazing heat, the problem of drinking water, and the same sweat, flies and excrement.
‘If you couldn’t laugh, old man, you’d have to fucking cry.’
For two days they tried to inch forward over the few acres of rocky ground, while bullets constantly rained down upon them. When the time came for Ken Wilmott’s company to lead an ascent, they were all exhausted and weak from the heat and lack of sleep. Some of his men had been wounded, but it was impossible to move them except under cover of night when they had to be dragged off by stretcher-bearers to ambulances waiting to carry them to the hospital. Many did not make it.
Just before dawn the company started its cautious ascent, keeping low, crawling from rock to rock, but they had not moved far when they were pinned down by a fusillade of machine-gun fire. Ken could not move his men either forward or back.
Harry’s voice came from behind a bit of craggy rock. ‘Fancy our chances, old man?’
Well aware that their only water was what each man carried in his flask, and with scarcely any food, the captain could only give the order to lay low till darkness fell. There was no option but to lie in the shallow trenches in the full heat of the day.
At about midday, Ken Wilmott called to Harry Pope, ‘Harry. Try to keep me covered. I’m going to see how scattered our blokes are.’
When his lieutenant gave the signal that he was ready, the captain cautiously raised his head. When nothing happened he slithered to a new position to look for his men. Before he could move further he felt a blow in his neck that laid him flat on his back. Beautiful shooting! Two of his men dragged him back into their cover. ‘Only a flesh wound, passed right through,’ a corporal said cheerfully, as blood poured from the wound. ‘A lot of blood cleans out the germs.’ He unwrapped a sterile field-dressing and applied it to the wound.
It was a minute or so before he realized that, although the bleeding was stopping, he could not move his head; it was immobile as was his company, and neither they nor he could move until dark.
He handed over command to Harry Pope and waited. The day seemed endless.
At last, those who, like the captain, could walk began to make their way to a dressing-station and after that back to the river Ebro. A pontoon bridge over which supplies and men had crossed had been under constant attack and was no longer safe until engineers could again work on it under cover of darkness. When he began to wade into the water, he heard the shouts and warnings, but there was only one way to get to the north bank and that was hand to hand along the line of boats that composed the pontoon bridge.
In a little room in what had once been a small convent, Ken Wilmott saw how desperate the situation had become. Little food, few medical supplies. The wound in his neck was not bad enough to warrant using even that small amount of material to make stitches. He could have cried for Spain. But he had healed quickly before and he would heal again.
News came by way of a mail-lorry driver. The hill had never been taken. They had been forced to withdraw. The battalion was now in a reserve position. ‘Want to come with us? We can hide you in the back.’
In his pyjamas, with the driver carrying his nicely laundered uniform, Ken Wilmott was hidden under some sacks and driven back to take command of his men once again.
For four days work carried on at the Santa Magdalena hospital while enemy planes droned overhead. Roads were bombed and more ambulances destroyed or disabled.
Haskell flopped down on a chair opposite Eve. ‘What’s this, still that bloody roasted wheat stuff? I’d sell myself for a decent cup of coffee.’
‘Dr J. says it’s better for your health than coffee – no caffeine.’
‘Caffeine’s the only bit I need. Strewth, here they come again.’
It never stopped: the drone of the planes, the banging of anti-aircraft guns, the crunch of high explosives. There was a constant bombardment of the roads and bridges and crossing points all along the Ebro. Haskell quickly ate a small dish of white beans and tomato, and drank her roasted grain beverage. ‘Actually it’s not all that bad. Old Grandma Haskell would never drink anything except her American Postum, which is the same as this.’
There was a whistle and an explosion, quickly followed by others. Eve jumped up. ‘They’re shelling us!’
‘The buggers! If they start on us with their heavy guns we’ll have to move out.’
The hospital evacuated at two a.m. Eve took over the truck of a driver who had received a shell splinter and was now himself a casualty. Going ahead of the ambulances and the autochirs, she drove in a small convoy of supplies trucks which composed the vanguard of non-medical people, the wonderful hard-working auxiliaries who had rushed back and forth collecting anything and everything to clean up the new place before the wounded arrived. The road to a safer place was along ten kilometres of shell-potted roads, driving without lights. Someone had the idea of taking over a disused railway tunnel at Flix.
The tunnel, which was near the river, was reached just as dawn was breaking. It was a mass of ruins, the grime of years hanging from its walls. Tired and hungry they stumbled along in the dark. But for all its drawbacks, it was ideal as far as safety from shelling was concerned.
So, having recently scrubbed and cleaned Santa Magdalena, the advance party started to convert the railway tunnel at Flix into an enormous ward lit by candles. Three operating tables were lit by electric light generated by ambulance and truck engines, but fuel was in short supply so some operations were performed by oil-lamp light.
Since the truck’s original driver was in no position to argue, Eve drove back across the river at one of the constantly shattered and rebuilt crossing points, and started once again to ferry supplies to the front.
On a morning after she had come across the Ebro under cover of darkness, Eve was in Madrid signing herself out for the two days’ rest-leave due to her, when the duty clerk said, ‘A man is waiting,’ adding confidentially, ‘GPU. An officer.’
‘How do you know he’s secret service?’
‘You think I don’t know? My home is Ukraine. For sure he is GPU.’
He sat on a low wall waiting for her. Impressive in his uniform, he was good-looking and appeared very desirable to a young woman whose libido could easily get the better of her good sense.
‘There is entertainment at taberna, you come, Eve?’ Taking her elbow he guided her to a nice-looking car painted camouflage green.
‘I was on my way to the cantina, I haven’t eaten all day.’
He helped her in and said something in Russian to the driver, who started the engine. ‘What is English to say pig leg, smoke pig-meat, is slice thin?’ Actions accompanied his struggle for the word.
‘Bacon? Ham?’
‘Is ham, yes. Is ham at taberna. I know… I take ham there. We eat there. You again teach some dances.’
‘Dancing in these clothes?’
‘These clothes I like. Women in pants, I like.’ He pursed his lips in a provocatively fake kiss.
She smiled at him, it was easy to smile at such an easy-going and persuasive man and pleasant to let somebody else take over for a short while. ‘I thought you liked women in silk dinner gowns.’
He grinned and put his arm about her shoulders, lightly, friendly, making no advances. ‘I like this woman many ways.’
Good as his word, they ate the most amazing tinned ham served by the proprietor of the small restaurant herself. There was only bread, fruit and wine to accompany it, but it seemed to be one of the best meals Eve had had in a long time. It was such a pleasure to be out with him, and an indulgence to spend the night with him at his hotel where there was soap and shampoo.
After such daily deprivation, breakfast consisting of a small amount of toasted bread and olive oil and plenty of orange juice became a kind of orgy when he produced a packet of Swiss chocolate and offered it to her a square at a time between his teeth. She lay back against the headboard, taking in his nice face with its alien features and noticing again how often he smiled. ‘Dimitri? Can I ask you something?’
‘Of course.’
‘Are you GPU?’
‘GPU? I am Dimitri, is all that I am. And happy lover. You want to do some more now?’ He broke off more chocolate, teasing her with it. ‘What for you ask about GPU?’
She snatched the chocolate, bit it in two and pushed the other half into his mouth. ‘I heard a rumour that you were and I wondered whether you had any pull. Pull? Influence? A friend of mine. I was going to ask whether you would be able to find out what has happened. GPU are reputed to know all the right people.’
He paused before responding, perhaps trying to decide whether the question was as casual as it sounded. ‘Most people like to make mystery. Your friend is English? Is volunteer brigade?’
‘An aid-worker. Driver like me.’
‘Is possible I could discover something. Maybe. I could try. Is she missing?’
‘Not she. He’s a man. An Australian. I haven’t heard from him in ages. I’ve tried all sorts of people. Last thing anyone seems to know is that he was taking ammunition up to the front just before it was overrun by the Moors. I just wondered… perhaps he has been taken prisoner, but they say the Moors take no prisoners.’
He did not respond to that speculation, as it was well-known that the Moorish mercenaries took no prisoners and treated no wounded. ‘Perhaps is not possible, but I try.’ Dismissing the subject, he said, ‘Now eat. I like for you to have fat here, and here, and also here.’
He was such fun, such a good lover, this was such a wonderful break from the ever-growing tension and stress of daily life as it now was. She had heard stories of soldiers, in the zone of a ferocious battle, without food for days, retreating and dispirited, eating the leaves of a tree reputed to lift the spirits and curb hunger pangs. As she returned to duty she felt that the effect of such a narcotic could never equal last night. In a world that wasn’t so set on curbing natural pleasures, she thought, people would be able to spend their lives enjoying one another. As things are now, people don’t value one another. If children were seen as the wealth of the next generation, which is what they are, how different everything would be. She imagined herself with a child of her own, perhaps living within an extended family. She smiled to herself – maybe not such a good idea with some of her grim-faced, censorious aunts and uncles.
As she drove out of Madrid, her mind slipped into thinking about home. How had those aunts and uncles who had despised her mother for having airs and graces, and who would have called Eve a ‘tart’ for sleeping with Dimitri, how had they managed to hold up their heads after the Mary ‘trouble’? The Good Name of the Family was their icon; it was what gave them the assurance that they were better than the rest. Perhaps they were, and it was her own values that were impoverished. Certainly, she had been an embarrassment to them the year before she left home. Mary, her cousin, Eve’s own age, had Gone off the Rails, with a marine who had a wife in the North of England. (Any man from the North was a bit of a foreigner; it was a hard and unknown country.) This must have happened before Eve had left home, as in Ray’s last letter he had said that Mary had ‘nice little twins, but nothing near as pretty as our little Bonnie. Mary’s gone back to the factory, and her mother is looking after the babies and cleans Barclays Bank in the morning for a bit of extra money now she can’t work herself.’ In that situation, it was always the grandmothers who stopped work, the nimble fingers of the daughters being able to turn out much more work which was paid by the piece.
How remote that life was now.
Her conscience prompted her to use her turnaround time to write home.
My Dears, all,
It did not matter that I forgot my own birthday, but to have missed the first birthday of my one and only niece does. At the moment, life is so hectic that, even with my pocket diary, I cannot remember where I was on that day in August. Not that I imagine she is wanting for yet another adoring female telling her how wonderful she is. I should like to send her something significant, but of course there is very little of anything. I had thought of sending her a box of the dusty dry Republican soil that follows the tyres of my truck on many of my journeys, but the Republic has lost enough already. So, I send her this beautiful set of buttons as a keepsake. Not Spanish, yet they tell a story, which I will tell now, and hope one day to tell you in person.
When I was in Paris on my way to Spain, I helped sort and pack some clothes sent out from England as comforts for refugees. Among these was a splendid waistcoat which the aid-worker recognized as once having been Lord Lovecraft’s. We were amused that such an exotic item should appear among the mounds of practical clothes. However, it happened that on a journey when I was transporting some young volunteers we stopped at an orange plantation – oh, so different from the strawberry fields which loomed so large in my young life. To me an orange grove is a wonderful place, blossom, dark-green glossy foliage and perfume. This was my first real encounter with a Spanish family, my Spanish almost non-existent and my ignorance of the country appalling, but they shared their meagre stew with us and were happy to do so even though their entire crop was rotting on the roadside for want of transport.
All that we could give was some of the clothes I was taking to the depot. The young mother appropriated Lord Lovecraft’s waistcoat – it was more suited to her anyhow.
Now to the buttons. They are, as you see, more like miniature works of art than mere waistcoat buttons. Also, they turn out to be currency in the market where everything has its barter price. I don’t know what the Spanish woman from the orange groves got for them, or who had exchanged them before I saw them, but there they were again, on a stall that had a greater assortment of items than the church bazaar. I must say that my heart leapt when I recognized them.
It’s a strange thing, but for the first time in my life I have a surplus of money. Plenty, in fact, for I get paid a decent wage but have little upon which to spend it. You see, it’s all barter, barter, and I have to confess that I do occasionally exchange one of your homemade cakes, perhaps for a supply of toilet paper, or some marvellous delousing shampoo. I can say that to get Lord Lovecraft’s buttons for Bonnie, I literally greased the stall-holder’s palm as I had a packet of butter that I had only that morning acquired in exchange for a toothbrush and half a lipstick.
I hope that one of you will make Bonnie a party frock and sew the buttons all down the front. How I would love to make the little dress myself. Do you remember how good I became at sewing fine fabrics? I couldn’t do it now, my hands are in a terrible state.
But this is my job. The ingrained oil, callouses and nails broken from all the loading and unloading, remind me that, however little my contribution is, I do it because it is perhaps the most important thing I may ever do. I don’t know how you view it from where you are, but you must surely see that Spain is being used as a practice ground. This war is a dress-rehearsal. If the fascists are not turned back in Spain, then they will not be turned. And those nations – our own being one – who refused to help the Republic, will regret that they behaved with such indifference to the future. Everybody goes to the pictures, so everybody must have seen Hitler who is surely mad as a hatter. He intends to take over the world. Most of my friends here believe that he could. Spain could still be our salvation, but time’s running out.
There are people trying to get this message over and I think if I were back home I would have to get on a soap-box in Hyde Park. What use would that be? So I stay here and drive my supplies trucks or transport injured men from the field-hospitals whenever there is a shortage of ambulance-drivers.
I have to chance whether this letter will be selected for examination and then arrive with you heavily censored. But I feel a need to say these things to you who are dearest to me so that you will understand why Ken and I will cling on to the bitter end. Disillusioned we may be, but we have seen the planes of the German Condor Legion raining bombs on civilians and know that huge numbers of Italian fascist soldiers have been brought in on the side of the Nationalists. Then there is Russia, pitting its tanks and guns against them.
Here in the city, we have seen the killing machines turned on schools and hospitals. They can wreak as much destruction and spill as much blood in a city as they may in a battle on some bare mountainside.
I may not send you these last few sheets, but I must write and if you do not get them now, then I shall send them from a place where you are sure to receive them. The dress-rehearsal is almost over, three big nations have tried out their weapons, their armies and air-raid plans.
Dimitri had not been able to discover where Ozz Lavender was. It was well into autumn before she heard that he had been killed. She overheard the news as just another item of gruesome gossip offered over a mug of coffee and a cigarette.
‘…they found that Australian driver, Ozz Lavender, well what was left of him, Ozz and a whole lot of others… they were carrying explosives. Direct hit on a mountain pass… couldn’t have known anything about it. Not enough left to bring back. I heard that they put what was left of the whole convoy into a single grave. Well, that’s what I heard…’
Eve was devastated by the news. She would miss him very much.
In total, their time together was not that much, yet they had packed so much into odd days and hours. She had come to understand something of what it must be like to live as two people, one the manly athlete, the other a pariah. When they didn’t see one another for long stretches at a time, she would often talk to him in her head, using his image as a sounding-board for ideas, or as a confessor for her guilts and ambitions. Ozz never judged.
For months now, she had lived with the starving and the dead and dying and it had been Ozz who had helped her keep her nerve by talking about the unspeakable sights and the gross misery instead of denying them. When she had said, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ he had given her a big bear-hug and said, ‘Ah, come on, sweetheart, you’re same as me – tough as old boots.’ But that was just what Ozz was not. Within the self-assured, bronzed and beautiful athlete, Ozz had been tender and vulnerable and alone.
Haskell was a pillar of strength in her stiff-upper-lip way. Unlike Ozz, Haskell never made sympathetic noises, her advice was, ‘Pull yourself together… Keep on keeping on… Swim for the shore.’ In her case the shore was alcohol. When Eve told her about Ozz, she said, ‘I’ve got the evening off. Go out and find some decent cognac and we’ll send a message home in the empty bottle.’ They had holed up in the nurses’ quarters. Eve had cried for Ozz, they had drunk the cognac and Eve slept like the dead until next morning and it was time to go back on duty. It was one way of coping.
Eve was on her way now to a children’s house that Helan Alexander was setting up in Murcia. Alex refused to call it an orphanage.
The power money gives you, Eve thought when she saw the place. Once Alex had decided on the project, there was nothing to stop her carrying it out. She had money in Switzerland, transferred it to Barcelona and bought the house, some distance north of Alicante.
‘Come and see.’ Alex seemed to be back on form, but she had changed. Perhaps she was not so arrogant, or perhaps it was that now she no longer had to take orders from her, Eve had lost her prejudices.
The house was large, with a great deal of white plaster and tiles, built round a rear courtyard with a glass roof. An iron-railed gallery ran round the first floor overlooking the courtyard which seemed to be filled with babies. ‘There!’
‘Christ, Alex! I never knew that you meant it to be on such a large scale.’
Down in the well of the courtyard, Eve looked into a score of makeshift cots containing little bags of bones. She had been born and bred among children who were dreadfully undernourished, often hungry, but she had never seen anything like these babies. It seemed impossible that they could live.
‘There is only so much one can do,’ Alex said. ‘We do it.’ There were cages of canaries and finches, and baskets of profusely flowering plants hanging by ropes overhead. ‘Stimulation,’ Alex explained. ‘I believe that seeing and listening to pretty things can only do good. These are all orphaned or abandoned.’
‘Are there older children as well?’
‘Oh, yes, I want you to meet them too. Did you manage to get leave to stay over a couple of days?’
‘I have the weekend, but I must be back in Madrid by Monday afternoon.’
In the kitchen three Spanish women chattered as they worked. Alex touched and hugged them briefly as they showed Eve the stove and the charcoal fire and the plate-rack as though these were modern conveniences. The perfection of the tiled surfaces attracted Eve as she thought of the dreadful draining-board and partition walls of her old home. How much easier it must be to keep sweet and clean, no scrubbing down with hot soda water in the constant battle against infestation.
‘Well? What do you think? You hold yourself so close, Eve, one can never tell.’
‘It’s a small miracle, Alex. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘You mean that? You can see that it’s working, can’t you?’
Eve thought how strange it was that a woman who, back in England, had lived in the world of the rich and powerful Poveys, idle and pampered, remote and unapproachable to Eve’s kind, how strange that such a woman hung on her approval.
‘Of course it’s working, Alex. If you saved a child from drowning, you would get praised to high heaven. You are saving them by the dozen. Alex, you are amazing.’
Alex grinned, a rare sight. ‘I know, bloody amazing.’
‘Your husband would be pleased.’
‘Wouldn’t he just. Odd thing that, if they hadn’t murdered him, then this would not have entered my mind. There’s something about saving the lives of children, do you know what I mean?’
For a moment, Eve wondered just what the lives of these pathetic little babies were being saved for, but Alex was right; any human life was valuable, but a child’s life was an unknowable part of the future.
‘I want to set this place up so that, whatever happens to this country, the children’s house will survive. No politics, no race, no religion. Any sort and kind of kid can come – even if its name is Baby Franco. Now come and see the chickens – we keep them upstairs on the roof and a few on various balconies. It’s terribly sensible, no fear of them being taken by wild animals.’
Eve admired the nesting boxes and was at once transported by the smell of warm straw and feathers to the first time she saw live chickens. ‘Can I look in the nests?’ She slid her hand under a sitting hen and withdrew a warm egg.
‘How do you do that? They scare the pants off me with their beady eyes, and pecky beaks. You look as pleased as if you had laid the thing yourself.’
‘I was remembering.’
‘Of course, don’t I remember you being brought up on a farm?’
They strolled outside to inspect the goats.
‘We don’t keep them in the house, but I wonder whether we ought, they are so vital for those poor little stomachs. They shrink, you know, it’s terribly difficult to get the digestion going again. The body feeds upon itself, did you know that? That’s why their little limbs are down to skin and bone. I’ll tell you something, when I’m trying to get one to start taking an interest in the bottle, I look down at my tits and wonder what in hell’s name is the use of us women having to carry the bloody things around empty most of our lives. Fault in our design, don’t you think?’ She patted a kid as though it were a dog. ‘I suppose that you know about milking goats too?’
‘Fetch me a pail and I’ll show you.’
‘Good God! I wasn’t serious. I say, you wouldn’t like a job, I suppose?’
‘As I said the last time you offered me a job, Alex, I’m a truck-driver. Do you need help?’
‘No, no. Plenty of local people. In any case, I want the children to be in the care of Spaniards. All those thousands of Basque children distributed all over the world, will they ever know who they are if they grow up in Canada or Russia?’
‘Better than not growing up at all.’
‘Of course, but to grow up with no knowledge of the ways of one’s own country, one’s own culture. No, one thing I do have is money, which means that the children can have local people around them.’
‘Isn’t there any difficulty in getting money from England out here?’
‘England! That’s where the Poveys keep the petty cash. There isn’t a country in the world where Povey money isn’t available. Well, perhaps not Russia, though I shouldn’t wonder if there were bars of Russian gold stacked away in Siberia. You haven’t got any smokes, I suppose?’
Eve produced the ‘emergency’ pack that she repeatedly found it necessary to replace and they both lit up.
‘Thanks. I don’t encourage cigarettes in the house. Can you stand the rest of this squalid tale?’
‘Having too much money may be squalid, but it is fascinating to the rest of us.’
‘Believe me, it is squalid. I come from long line of money-grubbers, and I am the last in line. I am pretty rich already, and when Daddy darling goes to meet Old Nick, I shall become seriously wealthy. You understand the difference? Of course you do. That is the difference between you and me, you understand the way the world works. Carl did. You are a leader like Carl. I am a follower.’
‘What was wrong with the way that you ran your bit of the Auto-Parc?’
‘My dear, I just happen to have the voice for it. We learn to use it early on. You’ve seen me in action. I say “Jump” and people jump.’ She took a long look at Eve. ‘But you didn’t, and I liked that. You didn’t sulk or mutter into your beard. I knew on that first time out with the ambulance that you would never jump. I knew that you were one of those with a rod from your arse to your neck. When I was eighteen I was dressed up in white satin and taken to curtsy low before the King and Queen. I would have bet my life that Anders would go to the wall rather than perform such a demeaning act. I’m right, aren’t I?’ A smile hovered round Eve’s mouth but she didn’t reply. ‘You see. You read me like a damned book, yet I know as much about you as I did the day you arrived in Albacete. I almost wish that I had read that damned intelligence report of David’s. Not that he would have let me. My guess was that you were some MP’s daughter, or you had come from some terribly famous libertarian menage.’
‘I’m neither.’
‘Don’t tell me. I don’t wish to know who you might or might not have been. I know who you are, and your people must be proud of you.’
Eve felt almost intoxicated with success. She had achieved what she had set out to do a year ago, to be accepted for herself alone. To hide her elation she said, ‘So, about the children.’
‘Yeah, well. I’ve been thinking that, eventually, I shall start up other houses like this one and work to get them recognized as non-partisan in the way Switzerland and the Red Cross are. If our people lose this war, I want the other side to understand that this is a non-partisan orphanage – damn! I vowed I would never use that word. Oh, call a spade etcetera, and an orphanage is what it is. As far as anyone knows, none of my kids have kith or kin.’
‘But you aren’t non-partisan, Alex. You are working for Aid to Spain, and you are a card-carrying Marxist. They murdered your husband, they must surely know about you too. There’s no way that you can stay in Spain if the Republic goes under.’
They were walking slowly through a citrus grove that had gone wild. Alex sank to the ground, and patted the place beside her. ‘Sit, Anders?’ Eve could see that behind Alex’s eyes, thoughts were gathering, and she recognized the almost furtive look that she and Ozz used to exchange as they took each step in the direction of mutual trust. In the end, she had told him everything. Would she come to terms with the loss of Ozz? In many ways, Alex was as unlikely a confidante as Ozz had been, but they were growing easier with one another.
‘I’ll tell you why I can survive in Spain, Eve. Because I’m a Povey. Because Daddy, that decadent paedophile who sired me, is third generation PEC. Do you know the PEC?’
‘Vaguely, the something Electric Company.’
‘Oh, how the Poveys would like to be another General Electric. Great-grandfather Povelli – Italiano – was the Povelli Engineering Company. Grandfather was Precise Engineering; Daddy is Precision Engineering. Weapons of war – some of the most precise engineering going. A nice little war, anywhere in the world and PEC sells to both sides without fear or favour, so whichever side wins, is in favour. Neat, isn’t it?’
Eve did not respond because she didn’t know how to. Finally she said, ‘I’d like to write about your set-up here, Alex.’
‘Good, I was hoping you would, but wait until you’ve met the other children.’
That day the world turned around for Eve.
Chacolatti Children
This, I warn you, is not a traditional bedtime story, for all that you might be reminded of Hansel and Gretel or of jelly-babies, sugar-mice and gingerbread-men. Chacolatti Children are quite, quite different.
Chacolatti Children are not born, they have been made. Made in Spain. In Madrid and Barcelona, in Valencia and Murcia, and although they have all been made in Spain, and bear the same trademark, they are obviously not from the same mould. They all have bits missing.
Thus they are rejects, and like broken biscuits you get a lot of them for your money because nobody much wants a product with bits missing.
I did say that this is not a traditional story told at bedtime to warn children against wandering alone in the woods or visiting gingerbread houses. In this story ordinary little Spanish children were leading their good and naughty little lives as children do, when they see chocolate bars falling from the sky, or they find them hidden in odd places as in a treasure hunt. And what treasure, for until now chocolate has disappeared from their lives. They scramble for it, pounce upon it, grab and scramble for it.
Another surprise, the chocolate bar goes BANG!
What inventiveness, what imagination, what skill and planning and raw materials must have gone into making a bar of chocolate that is booby-trapped.
You get a lot of Chacolatti Children for your money.
E. V. Anders, Murcia, 1938