Early in September, news came from Geneva that the Republican Premier had offered to withdraw the International Brigade under the supervision of League of Nations observers. Pain and relief were equal. Pain at being forced to recognize that this was not just the beginning of the end of the Republic, it was the ending of the end; relief at knowing that if there was now no hope of winning, at least no more young men of the IB would end up in a shallow or communal grave.
Eve had heard nothing of Ken for a long time. There was little chance that, even if he was in the farewell parade, she would see him. The International Brigade was to be sent off with a great show of affection. Their numbers depleted by hundreds of thousands since its formation, the volunteers marched through the streets of Barcelona to assemble in a huge arena.
Eve, in the company of some of the Spanish women with whom she shared a room, wanted to see Dolores Ibarruri – La Pasionaria – their great idol. Everyone hoped at some time in their lives to hear La Pasionaria in full flight of inspiration. She wondered whether David might be here. If he was, she did not see him anywhere in the crowd of journalists, photographers and newsreel men. Even so, she would send Sid Anderson her own view of the returning Brigade.
It was only when she came to put it down on paper that she found that it was about as difficult a piece of writing as she had ever done. She was not up to capturing the mixed emotions of knowing that one is present at a great moment in history. If editors didn’t want it, never mind; she still felt compelled to mark the day.
Goodbye My Sons
Today I took part in a small bit of the history of the ordinary decent people of the world. I stood with an aching heart and tears running down my cheeks as these men from all corners of the world left Spain with the cheers of its people ringing in their ears. People who themselves have stood at the barricades, have joined the militia, have, in just the last few days, seen their streets and homes bombed into piles of smouldering rubble.
This, the International Brigade, of all the armies ever assembled, was the only one ever composed of truly selfless and moral soldiers. None came to Spain for the money – a few pesetas a day worthless outside the country. Nor did they come for the blue skies and the sun – there were times when the sun was the enemy, burning the fair skin of the northern races, drying the water-courses on the battle fields so that tongues swelled and throats barked with thirst. None came for glory – which was not to be had in trench warfare, in deep snow on precipitous mountain passes.
Many came against the laws of their own countries, others came from countries such as Germany and Italy where their own brothers may well have been conscripted and sent to fight on the side of the fascist Nationalists. They came because when the democracy and freedom of one country is threatened, then the democracy and freedom of the world is in danger.
My tears were for them, for Spain, for its people and a little for myself, for I had come as the men who were leaving had come, to help a democratic country whose splendid ideal was attacked. It will never be possible to know how many died for the splendid ideal. The terrible truth is that even those countless thousands have not been enough to stop the onward march of the jackboot.
My later tears sprang from a different emotion. La Pasionaria’s face is a familiar one in the newspapers all over the world. It shows her high forehead, beautiful cheekbones and long, straight nose, perhaps a typical image of a noble Spanish woman. Classical perhaps. No picture did, or ever could have, prepared me for the explosion of emotion when she spoke. Her emotion and mine.
Hundreds of men who had fought on all the battle-fronts of the civil war stood unashamed of their tears. She said, ‘Goodbye my sons. Come back to us. You have made history. You are a legend.’
E. V. Anders, Barcelona, October 1938
When she had finished, she read it through. It was not good; it was too emotional. A journalist is supposed to be able to stand back and be objective. She felt that she would never be able to do so. If she wanted to become a journalist then she would have to learn to be uninvolved. How was that possible? If only she could paint or write music, those were the passionate arts. Words were inadequate, too restricting, they stood there on the page blocking the way. What she wanted was a means of saying: This is what it was like, this was what I felt, this is what I saw. She wanted to write about how important the defence of Spanish democracy had been, but she was aware of attitudes towards women journalists. Politics was for the men.
Even so, and inadequate as they were, words were all she had. As she checked and corrected, she became aware that she was already thinking of the war in the past tense.
She would stay on with the Friends International – in some ways the worst might be yet to come. When autumn comes, is winter far behind? Anyone who was in Spain that autumn knew that a bleak winter was now bound to come to Europe. And yet, and yet, somehow what was left of the splendid ideal of the Republic kept on going and going. Barcelona went hungry, under constant bombardment. Many of the beautiful old buildings were reduced to smoking ruins.
The concentration camp of St Cyprien, in which David Hatton found himself, was near Perpignan in France. It was a stretch of sandy desert surrounded by impregnable barbed wire.
Had he not seen it for himself, he would never have believed in the callous indifference of the hundreds of armed guards towards the men, women and children refugees and soldiers who poured into France. He wished that he had not been forced to get rid of his equipment. The experiences he had undergone on the way here and now inside the camp he would never forget, but he wanted to record the appalling suffering on film and shove it in the faces of the Pontius Pilates of his own government.
The camp at St Cyprien was the underbelly… no, it was the arse of France.
He was weary and hungry, but this did not stop his anger from bursting out. He remonstrated with an armed guard who, with the butt of his rifle, had clouted a man who had tried to get outside to post a letter. For his interference David Hatton received a prod with a bayonet. The wound festered and swelled and throbbed, but his unwashed wound was minor compared with those of the many other unattended casualties.
Fifteen to twenty thousand refugees were supplied with water from a single spring, and they were without food for five days. No one would explain why nurses were not allowed to tend the wounded, and they were left for six days. More and more refugees seemed to come, but none ever seemed to leave. Some must have, for from time to time there were little flurries of people gathering, forming anxious lines, stretching their necks to see what was at the head of the queue.
Ken Wilmott had arrived in the camp a couple of days before David Hatton and, having spent two years frequently living in conditions far worse than those in St Cyprien, and being still fairly fit in spite of his time in the military prison, he walked round as much of the camp as he could, looking for familiar faces. In spite of the dire conditions, he was so glad to find himself alive, that he didn’t grouse.
He came upon a black American from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Enro Peters, who had been in officer training at the same time. Like Ken, he was a poor boy who had risen from the ranks to officer class. It could happen in Spain, where ability counted for more than class or race; it could be done, and they and hundreds more had done it. They each understood the other’s pride in his success. Now they greeted one another with emotion, and set off together reconnoitring as any two hardened soldiers would.
It was the American who saw David Hatton first. ‘Say, I know that guy. He’s English, but he ain’t no soldier. He’s the guy who done good pictures of my company in action.’ He called, ‘Hey!’
‘What’s up with the arm?’ Ken asked.
David said grimly, ‘You’ve heard of war-wounds – well, this is a fucking peace-wound. I got it from a non-interventionist guard.’
‘Sit down and I’ll clean it up for you.’
From a capacious pocket, Enro Peters produced a hussif-roll that contained small items intended for first aid and began cleaning the wound. He smiled, ‘Ain’t had no chance to use this till now, seemed such a shame to break it open seein’ how pretty it was and all. When I said I was going away to fight some bad folk my little niece, Selma, stitched this with her own hands, and went to the store and got stuff with her own money. See, she even stitched on a little red cross.’
‘It won’t be too long before you’re back there again,’ Ken said. ‘Well, yeah… I guess. That feel better? This stuff’s called Tiger Balm, never used nothing else in my family. Sure-fire cure-all.’
‘It feels better all ready – quite soothed.’
The three men had hunkered down while the wound was dressed, so they stayed there, there being little point in going further now that they had made contact with each other.
They stayed together for another two days waiting to be told something. The two brigaders exchanged information about their different battles, while David was hanging on to their stories trying to fix their words in his memory, hoping that one day he would write a book. Although over the past twenty-four hours they had all tested the water, it was Enro Peters who took the plunge: ‘Our comrades are still fighting their asses off over there, while we’re sittin’ around telling war stories. It seems a dam’ waste of two trained men who hoist theirselves up by their boot-laces to get to be trained officers.’
‘I just want to get out of here and see if the Spanish army will have me,’ David Hatton said.
The other two looked at him; he was the bloke with the camera. ‘OK, maybe I won’t make much of a rifleman or whatever, but I’ve had it up to here. I say, fuck trying to tell people that if you show them what a mad dog can do, they’ll do something about putting it down. I say, fuck that and give me a rifle.’
Enro Peters made what was, for him, a long speech. ‘I guess that’s how it’s goin’ to be back home if my people don’t get the same rights as white folk does. We got mad dogs there too, comes out hiding theirselves under bed-sheets and sets fire to homes of anybody steps out of line. But I don’t know… is gunning them down the way? Maybe I’m going opposite direction to David here, maybe I’m thinking of more peaceful ways. Don’t want to see fighting on the streets like it’s been in Spain, but if decency don’t break out in the white population back home, then…’ He paused. The other two sat silently; Enro’s experience of Them and Us was something they had never encountered.
He went on, ‘I been out here long time. The Abr’am Lincoln Brigade, no black ’n’ white there. First time in my life I been with white men and haven’t been a nigger. It’s just ordinary respect for another human being, nothing big, just fit and proper. How it ought to be.’
‘It’s how it will be,’ Ken said. ‘Has to be. If nothing else comes out of this bloody war, it’s shown that, given half a chance, an ordinary bloke can do as well as a university-educated one like Dave. And as you say, a negro as well as a white man.’
David Hatton nodded. He felt out of this. Even though he had seen what was wrong and had joined the socialists to try to change things, his experience was not theirs; he had always been at the top of the pile, but he wanted them to know that even if he was not of them, he was with them. ‘Given half a chance is what you’d never have got in the British army.’
‘Fat lot of good it’s doing me sitting around here scratting for the odd bit of bread, waiting for some arrogant Frog to tell me when I can go home.’
Enro Peters smacked his palms together. ‘OK! What we go’n to do. Break out?’
‘Have you been back there beyond the latrines?’
David Hatton shook his head. ‘I never felt compelled to explore.’
‘You should. Looked to me as if the constructors thought so too. The barbed wire just fades away in places. You can see what’s happened. Lorry drivers who had to come in and out couldn’t be bothered replacing it properly, so in places there are gaps where it must have been shoved together and it’s now sprung apart.’
‘Why’nt you say so before, Ken?’
‘Wasn’t too sure you blokes would want to risk it. I had to be sure, I don’t reckon it’s a thing to try on your own.’
‘OK, and then what do we do?’ the American asked. ‘It’s one-way traffic, and we’re kind of short of cash and papers.’
‘It’s been done plenty of times over the mountains,’ Ken said.
‘I’ve done it, twice,’ David said. ‘Once each way. I wanted pictures, but the enemy hold everything on the other side of the Pyrenees.’
The two soldiers smiled. Ken Wilmott said, ‘He wanted pictures!’
‘You two keep straight faces or the guards are going to take an interest and want to know what’s the good news.’
‘So what is the good news?’
‘I know this part well enough. Once we’re out of the camp, if we keep clear of St Cyprien itself, we go south to Argeles – I know people there – if we can’t get a boat going to Barcelona from there, then we’ll carry on down to Banyuis, where we are certain to be able to get somebody to take us.’
‘Yeah, it sounds good, but can you trust these people? Those guys who stuck your arm ain’t goin’ to just kick our asses if we’re caught on the loose in France. They’re mean enough to hand us over to the Nationalists.’
‘My contacts in Argeles, they’re good comrades.’
‘But are they good enough, Dave?’
‘Trust me, Captain, they are better than just good enough. I’d trust them with my life.’
‘You sure as hell are goin’ to have to.’
David said, ‘The difficult part is getting out of here.’
‘No problem,’ Ken said. ‘We join the latrine detail, trundle some buckets down there, and we’re away.’
‘If it’s that easy, why isn’t there a stream of people leaving?’
Ken laughed in spite of himself. ‘Why? How many silly buggers do you think there are in twenty thousand?’
Enro sucked his teeth, trying to mask his need to smile. ‘By my reckoning, there should be at least three.’
They entered Barcelona in what had once been a rather splendid yacht, but was now quite run down. David Hatton’s ‘contacts’, as he called them, kitted them out in warm clothing with money in the pockets. It had all gone as Hatton had said it would. Ken wondered how this chap had come to know his sister, but the truth was, he didn’t really want to know. He had seen enough of David Hatton by now to know that there was something reckless about him, something that went against the grain of his class and style. He had met blokes in the brigade who had been to Eton and university, and they were good blokes, really committed to the cause, but Dave Hatton? He was deeper than he made out.
Their plan was to enrol in the Republican army, two ex-brigade officers would be welcome. David Hatton said, ‘Gocl knows if I’ll be any use, but somebody has to dig the trenches.’
Eve, now part nursing aid, part kitchen-maid, and part driver, was skilled at getting food on the black market. She was seated in a roomful of little children. As always, it had taken a long time to settle them after hearing the air-raid warning. It always sent them into paroxysms of terror, and they would leap up and cling to the nearest adult. Eve had shepherded seventeen stricken children down to the basement and brought them back to the nursery where the toddlers slept and were fed. She was nursing a little girl who weighed about the same as a young baby, but who was probably about Bonnie’s age. Where her leg muscles would have been were ulcerated sores that were just beginning to heal. Margarita, a trained nurse, and Concha, a soldier’s young widow, watched as Eve spooned a vitamin mixture into the child’s mouth.
‘She took all the baby food, see, and now she is taking the vitamins.’ Margarita smiled warmly as she watched Eve concentrating on the baby. ‘Eve make very good wife, eh, Concha?’
‘Me?’ Eve laughed. ‘Not on your life, Margarita.’
‘Is different now. Womans is more equal with mans.’
Eve frowned. She had seen the equality they all talked about and the women cherished, but in all her time here she had still only come across one female Spanish doctor, and no English ones at all. ‘Don’t count on catching them up, Concha. In the human race, we run with a handicap.’ Concha was puzzled. Eve looked down at the little girl. ‘You think she can be premier?’
Concha nodded vigorously. ‘Si, La Pasionaria.’ She spread her hands, resting her case.
‘If she lives, I’ll be satisfied for now. A seat in the Cortez can come later. What do you think?’
Margarita felt the stick-like legs encased in thick woollen socks. ‘This child will live. Tomorrow you give her a little fish, is easy digest.’ Although fish was still being landed here, it disappeared in a flash. Eve, who now knew several fishermen by name, was always waiting with a small van, or a boy with a handcart, when a catch was about to be landed. Fish, plus the dried milk supplies that were still getting through in a variety of ways, were the main items of diet for the children suffering from malnutrition. The rest got bread, and an unchanging diet of tomato, onion and bell-pepper soup, and a small amount of beans for protein as well as oranges, most of which had to be brought in by sea from the south. Not an ideal diet, but in a city where there was not much food it kept them free of the scurvy-like symptoms with which many of them had arrived. Its reputation meant that the accommodation was bursting at its seams.
Margarita and Concha were the experts on malnutrition. When two-thirds of their home city of Malaga fled before the German and Italian contingents of the Nationalist army, they fled with them. Ignoring the doctors who had ordered the usual treatment of injections into the wasted muscle, Margarita had started the child on vitaminized fluid a few days ago. ‘She is responding?’
‘She is. Look, she is beginning to take notice.’
‘These city doctors, they all know hunger, but they have not experienced malnutrition.’ Concha, not being a trained nurse, was not in awe of doctors.
Margarita, who was a most dedicated nurse, did not like going against orthodox treatment, but it was obvious that if a child had no muscles, then to try and inject fluid was to create a problem, which was why her limbs were ulcerated. ‘Is best treatment, for sure. Return to vitamin injections when she more fit.’
This was siesta, and once the two Spanish women had gone to continue their rounds of the nurseries, the whole place was silent. Eve continued cuddling the little bag of skin nicknamed Posa, whose name had stuck after someone had commented that she weighed no more than una mariposa, a butterfly.
Although she had still as yet not seen two complete cycles of seasons, she was familiar enough with them to know that they were predictable. When warm weather started in springtime it kept going and never returned to winter as it often did in England; when the sun rose in summer it was pretty certain to be visible throughout the day. Strawberry season back on her aunt’s farm, you might pick in baking heat one day, and see the fruits spoiled by rain the next.
These days, she scarcely gave a thought to anyone or anything outside her work with the refugees. There was never time; the flood of people trying to escape the oncoming enemy grew so huge that it seemed impossible to imagine that it could continue for much longer.
People escaped by various means. If little Posa could be got back to a reasonable state of health, then Eve hoped that she would be accepted as one of the orphans going to Mexico. The Mexican government had been considerably more generous in giving asylum to refugees than Eve’s own. To Eve, who had become almost obsessed with getting Posa back to health, the fate of this one child was a kind of talisman for all the others. Bar Barney would understand. You imbued one thing with a good spirit, which affected everything around it. In the ‘sacred grove and sacred pool’ of their childhood, Bar had cast a spell which had purified the whole place. In her saner moments she was aware that any good spirit that may once have lived in Barcelona was being bombed out of existence. But, as she had said to Alex with whom she kept in touch, a little madness is what keeps us all sane.
Alex’s experience with her Children’s House was no different from the Friends Refuge in Barcelona. It was as if the whole landscape of the Republic was on the move. People were fleeing from the rumours of the atrocities being committed as the Republic shrank daily; nobody wanted to discover whether there was truth in the rumours. Better to die from strafing in a refugee column than in the streets of your hometown. Thousand upon thousand of them took what they could carry and left.
Inevitably there were lost, abandoned and orphaned children. Nobody could estimate how many there were. Many children were too young or disturbed to know who they were, or where they came from. Many died before a refuge could be found. Many, like the Chacolatti Children, were maimed. It seemed to women like Eve and Alex and Margarita and Concha, and Leah, who ran the place, and the hundreds of Spanish people who tried to cope with the sea of unclaimed children, that they all ended up on their particular doorstep.
‘Hsst, Señorita Eve, is…’ Eugenia, who spent as many waking hours as possible as Eve’s shadow, gabbled an excited and unintelligible message. Two words, ‘come pronto’, were enough to indicate that visitors were waiting.
Still wearing an old rubber surgical apron she wore when feeding the babies, and carrying a bundle of ragged muslin used for mopping faces, and a pap basin, she put her head round the door. It was her brother. She flung herself at him.
‘Kenny… oh, Kenny… I thought you must be dead. I’m sorry, oh God, I don’t want to cry.’
By now she was hugging him and burying her wet face into the side of his unshaven neck. The feel of his hard, strong arms was wonderful, the rancid smell of sweat and stale tobacco made her want to laugh.
‘Come on, let’s have a look at you. I’ve come all the way from France to see you.’
She pulled back and looked through tears. ‘From France?’
‘Yeah. We got away in a posh yacht, belongs to a friend of Dave’s.’
She sensed him there, handsome and desirable as ever. Wiping her nose and eyes on the bundle of soiled muslin, she looked round and saw David Hatton and a large, smiling, black man she had never seen before. David held out a hand and shook it formally.
‘Great to see you again, Eve.’
The black man snapped to attention and held out a hand that was warm and dry when Eve took it.
‘Enro Peters, Captain, late Abraham Lincoln Brigade, ma’am.’ Eve had seen Sanders of the River three times because Paul Robeson spoke with that same quality in his voice.
‘I’m proud to meet you, Captain. I’ve got several friends in the Lincolns.’ She smiled. ‘If I accepted every invitation to visit America, I would need five years.’
‘You should try it, ma’am. One day we goin’ to have our own revolution.’
‘I thought you already had.’
‘That was white breakin’ away from white. Next one will be my folk doin’ the breakin’ away.’
‘I’ll drive a truck for you, it’s something I’m quite good at now.’
‘Eugenia, coffee, por favor?’ Eugenia, wide-eyed at what must have been a puzzling drama, rushed out, offering David Hatton a big smile.
‘You don’t have to, Eve. But we couldn’t leave until we had seen that you were OK.’
‘Leave? Where are you going, Ken? What were you doing in France?’
‘It’s a long story, and I’ll write to you all about it. Now that the brigade’s stood down, the three of us are going to join the Republican army.’
There ought to be something that she could say, but she could not think what. ‘I saw the parade, I wondered if you would be there.’
‘No, I went straight to St Cyprien.’
‘You’ve been a prisoner?’
‘We all have.’
Enro Peters said, ‘An’ we didn’t think it was too hot, so we going back to get even.’ He smiled, suggesting that it was just a bit of a playground fight.
At last she had pulled herself together sufficiently to turn to David and ask, ‘You too, David? I thought you were no good with firearms.’
‘I’m not. I’ve always been a decent bowler, so I dare say I can lob a few grenades.’
Eve could have hit them for their machismo. If they had been at St Cyprien, then they had been almost home and dry, yet they had decided to come back and fight on. The feeling passed. Now she wanted to hug them.
Eugenia came in with a tray she had obviously taken some trouble over; there was even a tin of condensed milk and a spoon which she offered round like a hostess.
Although David had taken a seat a little away from the table where Eugenia had placed the tray, Eve was aware that he hardly seemed to take his eyes from her. Suddenly conscious of her rubber apron, she slipped it off and pushed it under her chair, and could have kicked herself for caring how she looked. She said, ‘I should have thought the last thing the army wants now is a left-handed cricketer.’
Ken said, ‘You a left-hander, Dave?’
Suddenly, Eve started to laugh, one of those inexplicable fits that is difficult to stop. The three men and Eugenia looked at her. ‘I’m sorry… but you men are so strange. You are going off to this dreadful war and you talk about your cricketing techniques.’
‘Yeah, well. Listen, what are you going to do? You’re going to have to leave before long.’
‘Have to?’
‘Look, Eve, if this goes on another six months it will be a miracle.’
‘OK, then pray for a miracle. Damn it, Kenny, pray for a thousand miracles. You should see the state of the kids we have here.’ She put an arm about Eugenia’s waist. ‘When I was Eugenia’s age, I spent the summer with Bar Barney, traipsing the country lanes, and swimming in that lovely green pool in the birch woods, you know the place.’ David Hatton was obviously taking in every word, but so what! He knew everything else about her life. It was mortifying to think of him poking around on the streets of her childhood, the factory. Her pride had been hurt, she had felt herself as very shallow and foolish. ‘You remember that summer, Kenny?’
‘You’d had diphtheria and went away to get better.’
‘When Eugenia was twelve, she was on that great exodus from Malaga. She got separated from her mother and grandfather, the only people of her family left alive. Somewhere along the road she was molested… she was raped, damn it! At twelve years of age she was raped by a youth from her own street.’
The men were silent. Here was something beyond their experience, a casualty of war who could not be comforted by a show of comradeship and a shared smoke. It was the American who asked, ‘How did she get this far?’
‘Women. They took her under their care and,’ Eve smiled affectionately at the girl who blushed, ‘here she is, all ready to grow up and do what we all did. What I want to do, is to try to see that she gets her chance.’ Eve was aware that Eugenia had done her growing up, but that didn’t mean that she should not still experience something that would compensate for the innocence she had lost.
This was an awkward meeting. Nobody appeared to know what their role was, so they took cover in a kind of cheerful formality that was posing as naturalness.
David said, ‘Does that mean that you will stay on here?’
‘Where would I go?’
Her brother said, ‘You could take Eugenia back home.’
‘And leave my baby?’
Three male minds seemed to spring to attention. Ken said, ‘Not actually your baby?’
‘She is now, but whose she was, Kenny, God only knows.’
Ken was puzzled by the tension there was between her and Dave Hatton; she didn’t really want him there. In the awkward atmosphere, they all seemed to be waiting for somebody else to say something. It fell to David.
‘I read a piece about the Chacolatti Children. It was impressive.’
‘You did? I thought no one would publish it.’
‘It’s out in a little pamphlet. Somebody sent me a copy. I’m surprised you haven’t received one yourself, but so many mail trains are…’
‘It doesn’t matter, I know what I wrote. It only matters that people back home will be reading it. Come and see our children here.’
Eugenia led the way into one of the big nurseries, empty of almost everything except mattresses and assorted cribs and the babies who were asleep, but filled with the smell of milk-fed babies wearing well-washed woollen clothes.
Eve lifted Posa from her mattress and, having taken a moment to decide, placed her in David Hatton’s arms. ‘This is Posa, David. I want you to remember her when you get back to London. Maybe you could tell your grandmother about her.’
He didn’t appear to have been thrown off balance by Eve. ‘There’s not much of her.’
‘The doctors say she is probably two years old.’
Enro said, ‘She minds me of a new-hatched bird with big eyes and all, always seem too big for their heads, you know what I mean? Kin I hold her?’
Eve was surprised. She had supposed that the men would have been repelled by the unattractive little creature, which was why she had chosen David as the recipient of a lesson in yet another kind of war casualty. She felt that they must understand that war wasn’t just between soldiers; they must understand that because they were soldiers, at least Kenny and the American were. ‘Have you got children, Captain?’
‘Enro, ma’am. No, not so far as I know.’ He grinned, ducking his head and raising his shoulders. To Eve, he seemed to exude warmth and geniality. And he was honest and open, not afraid to show that he had a gentle side to him. There was something almost feminine in his attention to the baby. She had seen Kenny handle a shotgun, she could visualize David with a rifle, yet she could not imagine the big, black American in his soldier’s role. But then, neither her brother nor the man who said that he loved her could have imagined the girl they had known before she came to Spain pouring everything she had into a houseful of sick children.
‘Peters family is a big one. I got five sisters and four brothers older than me, and they all got kids. Guess they miss good Ol’ Uncle Enro. I always been a fool where kids is concerned. Would you like to see the first aid kit one of my little nieces made? Saved Dave’s arm, I reckon. She’ll be no end pleased when I write and tell her.’ He handled Posa with the assurance of a man who revelled in being Ol’ Uncle Enro. ‘Say, you goin’ a be a pretty little thing, when you get them muscles filled out.’
Eve could have kissed the American for his praise. ‘I think so.’
They made their way back through the house, Eugenia hanging on one arm and the baby cradled in the other. Eve turned to David. ‘You see why I can’t take you up on your offer to get out of Barcelona, David?’
He nodded. ‘I’d say you have your hands full here, Eve. However, I’d like it if you’d…’ He tore a scrap of paper from an envelope. ‘Here’s a number to ring, in Tarragona, just say you’re one of Hatton’s friends.’ He looked straight at her and smiled.
Ken said, ‘You can rely on Hatton’s friends.’ He grinned. ‘They seem to have boats and things just when you need them. Being in the know isn’t at all bad.’ Strings had tightened again, she looked ready to twang. What had he said?
She said, ‘Well, that’s nice. I’ll use anybody and anything these days if it will help these kids. When you write home, tell your friends we need things. Does your grandmother knit, David?’
He looked perplexed. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Most grandmothers love to knit baby socks, maybe you could ask her if she could make us some.’ To Ken, ‘I think they must have got a real knitting circle going back home, we’ve had quite a lot of baby clothes.’ She smiled. ‘You can tell which are Bar’s, unintentionally lacy from dropped stitches.’
Posa picked up the tension in the arms holding her, and gave a cat-like wail. ‘I’m sorry, Kenny, but I have to… Ah well, you wouldn’t know about such things, but milk has to be scalded and feeding bottles sterilized. Will I see you again before you go?’
Ken wasn’t sure whether she was asking himself or David. ‘I’ll try to come again, but, you know…’
‘I know.’ She kissed him and held on. ‘I want you back when…’
‘Come on. I’ve got a hide like a rhino. Two wounds and frost-bite didn’t stop me. You take care. And, listen. You do as Dave says, get out before it’s too late.’
She smiled, but made no promise. He didn’t expect one. She kissed Enro Peters’ cheek. ‘You just make sure that you get Uncle Enro safely back, children need their uncles. Goodbye, David. I feel sure that you will get a book out of all this. Kenny, what I said to Enro goes for you too, the only uncles Bonnie has got are you and Duke.’ Her voice cracked. Brother and sister held each other tightly for a few seconds and then let go.
It was not long after that visit that the last of the Republic began to crumble before the onslaught of the combined forces of the Right.
In posters that had been pasted up in the early months of the conflict, the enemies of democracy were shown as ridiculous figures afloat in a toy-like boat with a gallows for a main-mast on which dangled Spain, and over which a vulture had settled in the crow’s-nest. There were five passengers – a fat capitalist with his bag of gold and wearing a swastika on his lapel; a priest in a biretta; a haughty soldier with a ceremonial cannon; a white-turbanned Arab; and an armed Moorish mercenary. The monarchy was not represented, as it had already fled. Below decks, pinched, anonymous faces peered from portholes.
That was then. This was now. The five were on their way back to rid that part of Spain that was still free of its freedom. The five of the Right were safeguarded and upheld by planes and tanks and a great army of foreign mercenaries swelling the ranks of the haughty soldier. The five were no longer comic. The imminent return of the old oppressors sent hundreds of thousands of people looking for a means of escape. Those who had proudly acclaimed ‘They shall not pass!’ were now under threat of death, torture and years of imprisonment.
Dimitri Vladim saw how few options he now had. He had seen his once great hero, Stalin, from outside the USSR and had come to the conclusion that his country had used Spain as cynically as the right-wing nations. Soviet armaments and supplies and men had not been given without forfeit. On several occasions he had hinted to Eve how disillusioned he was becoming. She neither encouraged nor discouraged him in his dilemma.
‘Could you guess, Eve, what it is that I have been doing today?’
‘Something that gives you a sour face, Dimitri.’
‘Also a troubled mind.’
‘Ah, poor Dimitri, you want me to kiss it better?’
‘Is not a joke, Eve. You may kiss me, but it will not make better. Russian soldiers all day loading on ship, what is it? Hierro. Iron! Natural i-ron stone.’
‘Iron ore?’
‘Is this, yes. We steal this i-ron. We say we give aid. No, is not so. We have surplus tank, we send. Not needed. I-ron ore, yes! Russia very much need i-ron ore. Spain not give this, my country send no tanks, guns. I go home too.’
Sometimes during the autumn Dimitri had turned up at the refuge bringing vodka, and tinned fish for the children. Only the food was welcome under a Quaker roof, so the good-time Russian officer took Margarita and Concha for an evening of dancing and laughter, and Eve for a night of immoderate sex.
‘The people here get bad deal from USSR. Is wrong. I love my country. Is being made bad by so many bad things. Is not communism, is state too powerful. Leaders forget people.’
‘Doesn’t only happen in Russia – leaders always forget they are supposed to be leading their people. When I came to Spain, I was innocent enough to believe that here it was the people who held the power.’
‘Eve?’ He didn’t finish, but enclosed her hands within his. When he held her gaze she was startled to see the depth of sadness in his own. That look scared her. She was going to lose him. Suddenly the loss of yet another person who had been so close to her seemed too much.
At last he said, ‘Eve, I bored of politics. Forget state for moment. You hear me. I say I am in love, Eve, with you. When you leave Barcelona, please I must go with you. I cannot leave you and the children.’
He had said what she had never dared to hope he would say. He was a rare man, a political commissar born and bred under communism, yet he was sufficiently his own person to have an opinion about it. She herself had come to see that the ideals that she had seen as ‘red’ or socialist when she came to Spain, actually covered that part of the spectrum from pink to purple.
At that moment she was so full of feeling for him that she would have said anything. David, Duke, Ozz. They had all stirred up intense emotions in her. She had mistaken it all for love. It had been something, but not the intense passion that she could now admit she felt for Dimitri Vladim.
‘Is not necessary that you say anything to me now about love. Please say just that we shall take the children and leave Barcelona together.’
‘That is what I want more than anything else.’
They kissed with great tenderness. They had known great moments of passion and lust. This was something else. This, Eve thought, is probably what makes it love, but she could still not bring herself to say that it was.
Days, weeks, months passed in an almost routine sequence of air-raids, until it was hard to believe that there could be a building left standing. In the outside world, only the Vipps who had been in Spain and the brigaders who had fought there understood how it was that what was left of the Republic still hung on tenaciously and fought fiercely.
In Eve’s small world of women and children, orphaned children came and stayed for as long as it took to get them away to any country that would take them.
A boat left carrying refugees to Mexico, but Posa was still far from being robust. The decision not to select her had been taken by others, and it was with a kind of relief that she heard that Posa was still too weak to make the journey. Bad as things were in Barcelona, Eve was convinced that she could bring her back to health, given time. There was no problem as far as Eugenia was concerned, she was attending school regularly, and for a pre-pubescent girl who had been raped when she was still a child, she had become as near normal as anyone could expect.
During the difficult and troubled months of autumn and winter, Eve felt wonderfully at ease in spite of the turmoil around her. It was becoming increasingly obvious that it would not be possible for her to remain in the country after there had been a settlement between the two sides. The Nationalists were not magnanimous in victory; at every step of the way they eliminated anyone with socialist sympathies. As a foreign aid-worker, she would be known to the Falangists and other right-wingers in Barcelona.
At one of the regular meetings of contemplation and discussion, it was decided that they should gradually wind down the refuge by getting children into places of safety, send the foreign aid-workers home and take with them any Spaniards who wished to go.
Eve made a plan and talked it over with the others. She would try to adopt the two children, give them British passports and take them with her. It would be hard to leave. This had become her country by virtue of what it had given her: friends all over the world, two children to care for and a Russian lover. The tragedy being enacted all around her every day was so great that the only way to cope with its consequences was to be fatalistic. She could plan, but she was not in control. Whatever will be, will be.
She started writing longer pieces than before, but sent none of it to London because of a vague idea that she might try to write a serious novel. The journal she had managed to carry with her wherever she went was filled with her uncharacteristically neat writing. There were cigarette burns on the cover, mug rings, and addresses scratched on the leather with a hairpin when there was no pencil to be had, but within there was a scrupulously honest account of her experiences. The journal was written for herself alone, so there was no point in being anything but honest, no point in not admitting that she had been unfair to David. Had she been given the job of looking into his background because he was trusted enough to be asked to join an undercover group, she knew very well that she would not have resisted the temptation to go and stand outside his home, look for the street where his Hatton + Hatton offices were sited.
In December, a parcel addressed to ‘The Babies in the care of Miss Anders’ arrived at the refuge. It contained a dozen or more pairs of beautifully knitted little stockings of fine rainbow wool. Also enclosed were three lengths of wide satin hair-ribbon. The letter in a Christmas card read:
Miss Anders,
My grandson, David Hatton, has mentioned that these few items would be of use to the children in your care. If you would like more, perhaps you would let me know as one gets ever more useless in old age. Also, I have been pleased to discover that I have the facility to turn a neat heel, something every young girl was taught. I remember how well children love bright colours. I do myself. You may not know that my grandson was quite badly injured, and has been with me since October. He is unable to hold a pen, so has asked that I send you his kind regards and as soon as he is able to sit at his typewriter, he will write you a letter. May I add my good wishes, and say how greatly I admire young women like yourself.
Yours most sincerely,
Margaret, Lady Gore-Hatton
Eve, her emotions already heightened by painful and frequent departures as members of the refuge got out of the city, was brought to tears by the humility of this old lady. She remembered their one telephone conversation: ‘Can I speak to David, please?’ ‘No, I’m afraid that you may not!’ Eve would never forget that imperious voice, yet behind it had been an old lady who liked rainbow colours and who felt useful to be knitting babies’ socks.
What if David’s grandmother had replied, ‘Of course, my dear, he’s got a broken leg, but if you’d just hold on…’?
Bar Barney’s mother had said that there appeared to be many possible paths, but there was just the one true one and you were bound to follow it. So was Dimitri bound to be waiting somewhere along Eve’s path?
Shortly afterwards she at last had news of Ken. It had come in a letter from Ray. Ken had once again been taken prisoner of war, but arrangements had been made for his repatriation.
Then came a letter came from Enro Peters bearing a Louisiana date-stamp and containing a photograph of himself at the centre of an enormous gathering of the Peters family. All of them, even the littlest child, held their fists in the people’s salute. He had written across the corner, ¡No pasarán!
To Lady Margaret she sent a little note and pencil drawing of a row of socks that one of the boys had made. It had not been spontaneous, it had taken an extra handful of peanuts to extract it. A reply came from David, who said that he felt rather a fraud about his injury, which he had not received in battle, but was from a reinfection of the bayonet wound he’d received in the camp at St Cyprien. He said that he had lost touch with her brother somewhere along the Ebro. It was good to know that he had been repatriated; he had the greatest admiration for him and, if it were possible, hoped that they could meet. He asked her whether she had heard anything about Peters, would she please let him know. He had been commissioned to make a series of films about the southern states of America, and would like to make contact with the Peters family. He had signed it, ‘Yours, David’. She replied at once, knowing that there was little time left. Now that Dimitri was part of her life, the part that David once had played lost any importance. It proved easy to write to him.
Dear David,
Thank you for writing. I am so pleased to hear that you are beginning to get back the use of your hand. I hope that the injury will not prevent you from returning to your camera work. I have probably never told you how much I admire your work, but I do.
It was nice of you to offer help through your friends, but if I do need it I shall not be too proud to ask – it is a long time since I had any of that kind of pride.
My brother reached home safely and at once joined the regular army. His rank in the IB of course stands for nothing there, in fact he has had to fight prejudice against the brigaders to get accepted at all. I expect to hear that he is wearing ‘pips’ on his shoulder before long.
When the three of you left to enlist that day, I felt certain that the odds were against you all surviving the same war twice, but you have. Not entirely whole, but you have survived, and it makes me very happy to know that. Ol’ Uncle Enro’s artificial leg provides endless interest to his nephews and nieces. He says too that he is ready to join in that other revolution, the one for equality for his own people. He says that it will come from within the church – the ministry as he calls it. Did you know that he had been a Pentecostal Minister before he enlisted in the IB?
In answer to your query about my trying to follow a career in writing, I have thought about it a lot, but have decided that it is time for E. V. Anders to think about her future.
You and I have had the knack of turning up in one another’s lives, I have no doubt that we shall again. Thank you for mentioning the children to your grandmother, she has obviously been rounding up her friends. Such comforts and pretty things for the children here are appreciated.
Eve.