Lieutenant Kenneth Wilmott, International Brigader of the 15th Brigade, British Battalion, was moving over the hilly countryside towards Villanueva de la Cañada. He was accompanied by 50,000 men. This was the number committed by the Republic to prevent the fascists from taking Madrid. The offensive was on a small front and as the 50,000 progressed towards the new battle front, they fouled the very atmosphere in which they moved. Dust flew up at every step, encrusting their profusely sweating bodies. There was precious little water to drink, certainly none at all to wash in. It was not surprising that flies were everywhere.
Spanish soldiers from the south, many of whom worked in the vineyards and vegetable fields, were accustomed to working under the sun, but to the men of the 15th Brigade it was hot beyond anything they had ever thought possible. Their thirst was almost unbearable.
As they progressed slowly towards the battle, with shells from enemy guns falling all around them, Vallee, a Welsh sergeant of the 15th Brigade, who had been with Ken Wilmott since they had had their Jarama battle-wounds treated at La Pasionaria hospital, shouted, ‘You know, boy, they say a pebble is the thing. You suck it like a boi-eld sweet.’
Ken Wilmott shouted over his shoulder to the NCO, whom he had grown to like for his humour and his generous nature, and to admire for his courage and intelligence, ‘I’ve been sucking a bloody button the last half-hour, and I can’t spit sixpence. Makes me think about water, buckets and buckets of it.’ Here, in the sweltering mid-summer heat, there was none. If they weren’t all to die of thirst they needed to take the fortified village. The young lieutenant couldn’t imagine how they would keep going in the dreadful heat without water. ‘If you can find a pebble that hasn’t been peed or shat on, then help yourself, Vallee old son.’
Sergeant Vallee suddenly shouted, ‘Bloody hell! Will you look at that, boy.’
Suddenly, as though by magic, a refugee family appeared on the battle field, their meagre belongings piled on to a cart drawn by two horses with rags binding their eyes. Atop their possessions were seated two small children and an ancient couple. A youth and a woman were hanging on like grim death to one horse, while a man and a girl tried to control the other. The grandmother told her beads as she bent protectively over a baby, and the grandfather protected a couple of hens in a wicker cage without the aid of a rosary.
The little group halted. The soldiers shouted at them to get off the road. Go away. Get going, anywhere but here. The horses bucked and shied at every shell which made the exchange with the soldiers very difficult. Ken Wilmott patted the rump of one of the horses and gave the grandmother a friendly smile which she did not receive at all well. Vallee fared better with her. He produced three glacier mints from somewhere, one each for the children and one for the grumpy old lady. With forceful gesticulations the soldiers tried to tell the family that there was a battle going on.
‘Hell’s bells, Pedro, they know that. Let’s get them off the road.’ (Vallee, who called all Spanish soldiers Pedro, was in turn called Blanco which, because Vallee had the blackest of black skins, the Pedros thought was a very original and hilarious idea. ‘I been called worse than that, boy. I been called a Taffy before now.’)
Once the family had been moved away from the falling shells, the little group which had dealt with them turned its attention back to the objective of cutting off Villanueva de la Cañada where a fascist resistance force was holding fortified positions. As the Republican troops advanced they were subjected to continual machine-gun fire. Ken Wilmott, making his way a little ahead of his friend, called back, ‘Suck a pebble you said, didn’t you? And you had glacier mints all the time.’
‘I was keeping them as a surprise. For after we have taken this place.’
Lieutenant Wilmott was about to reply when his left hand was knocked away from his rifle. He felt nothing, but from his previous experience he knew that he had been hit. Blood ran down his arm.
Crouching, Vallee ran forward. ‘You been ’it, boy.’
‘I know that, you dozy Welshman.’
Vallee pulled a dressing from his pouch and ripped it open with his teeth. Already flies were buzzing at the scent of blood.
As Vallee bound the wound, he read aloud from the packet, ‘“Sterile field-dressings, DO NOT BREAK OPEN UNTIL NEEDED FOR IMMEDIATE USE.” Thank the Lord it was an Englishman needed this, boy. If it had been one of the Pedros, they wouldn’t have known about that. Might have been ripping dressings open any old time.’ He grinned, his large mouth pulling back over his large teeth.
Vallee was the first black man Ken had ever known, and he could still be surprised by the pinkness inside his friend’s mouth and on the palms of his hands and soles of his feet. In their weeks together they had become good friends. They had promised one another that once the Republic had ousted the insurgents, the two of them would ‘Go and have a dekko’ at Africa. ‘Land of my Fathers, you see, boy,’ Vallee would say, demonstrating great Welshness in his vowels.
The wound dressed, they resumed their previous positions in the advancing line. Keeping his mind on the cover ahead, Ken supported his courage by shouting inconsequential banter at Vallee. ‘What else…?’ A spray of machine-gun bullets ricocheted around them, cutting off sound.
Vallee, a few yards to the Lieutenant’s rear, shouted, ‘What else what?’
‘What else you got stowed away, like the mints? A nice cold beer? How about it, old son?’
Ken Wilmott couldn’t hear Vallee’s reply in another hail of machine-gun bullets and artillery shells exploding very close to their positions. He looked back and saw Vallee half-concealed behind a little rise of rock. ‘You all right, Vallee?’
Vallee did not reply.
When Ken Wilmott crawled back to his friend, he found the black Welshman face down in a pool of blood. He turned him over. The bullet must have gone straight into his mouth and out of the back of his neck. Already the flies were black swarms in his mouth, his ears and along the rims of his large open eyes. Wilmott closed the sergeant’s eyes and tried to pull his tin hat over them, but in the urgency of battle there was no time for the dead. ‘Sorry, old son, it’s the best I can do.’
By now the pocket of Nationalists in Villanueva de la Cañada were within firing range, but the fascists had the advantage of machine-guns. To Ken Wilmott, as he lay in a ditch, just one in a line of men with rifles, the day seemed endless. Perhaps it was the loss of blood, perhaps it was the intense heat, or the raging thirst, but the battle took on a strange air of unreality. It was as though he was in a picture house watching a film, urging on the good guys. Then, quite suddenly, as dusk was falling, the firing petered out.
Something was happening in the village.
The brigade held their breath as a group of women and children moved towards them, shuffling along the road in close formation. Between the two lines of fire they came slowly forward, huddled, crouching, the kids wide-eyed and clinging, all of them obviously scared to death. In any number of different languages, the men of the brigade started to shout at them to move, to hurry, to get away, to get off the road. But still the group shuffled slowly forward.
Ken Wilmott raised his head and was about to rush forward to urge them on when, like others in the advance line of the brigade, he saw that the tight formation and the shuffling progress was because they were being used as a human shield, urged on by a group of Nationalist troops with bayonets fixed.
Both sides fired at once. Not all the women and children dropped to the ground of their own volition.
Perhaps the field-dressing acted as a target for a Nationalist sniper, or maybe it was coincidental, but the second wound Lieutenant Wilmott of the 15th Brigade received that day was hardly a couple of inches from the first. It didn’t take him long to realize that he was out of this particular battle, so he reported to his leader who ordered him to make for the ambulances. He joined other walking wounded, had his arm looked at and dressed by an American nurse, and was pointed in the direction of an ambulance taking less seriously injured men to a hospital in Madrid.
At that moment Ken didn’t care where he was taken; it was enough for now that he had been given a swig of water. It was warm, but it was water. Suddenly he remembered the leaking tap at home that had been his job to fix, but which in his excitement to leave he had forgotten. Had Ray fixed it? In his next letter he would tell Ray he was sorry he hadn’t done the washer. He could hardly bear the thought of two years of water dripping away into the sink, down the drain, through the sewers and out into the Solent. He hoped Ray had fixed it. He vowed at that moment that he would never again waste a single drop of water.
It was dawn by the time Ken Wilmott’s wound had been cleaned and strapped. He was right-handed, so he could still manage a rifle and not be away from his men for very long. As on the previous occasion when he had ended up in hospital, his mind became infested with little memories of his day-to-day life at home, the time after his parents had died and the three children had held on to the home, somehow remaining a family of sorts, and pooling their three wage-packets, of which only Ray’s contained anything much. One of his chores had been to fetch and carry the bag-wash. Nobody knew how much he had hated that job, it was women’s work, and he would do it only if the bag of clothes was put inside a potato sack.
As he looked now for somewhere to wash himself and his shirt, he thought about how things had changed. For over two years he had been doing his own washing, rubbing soap in with his knuckles, when there was any soap, sometimes sluicing his clothes in a stream, or a trough, and on occasions, as when he had worked his way down through France, washing out the field dirt in some commemorative stone bowl or fountain.
Having cleaned himself as well as he could with one arm, he sat outside on the hospital steps and savoured the only bit of the day when the heat was bearable, wondering briefly where Vallee’s body would be buried. If the village had been taken by his own side, then he might be buried in a communal grave. It was possible that he was still there where he had fallen, the flies at work on him, as also might be the women and children who had been caught between the two sides as they fired. There, on the steps of the hospital, not far from the old gates of the city, for the first time since he had joined the Internationals, the young soldier – who had been catapulted into the rank of lieutenant at the battle of Jarama because he was next in line – wondered how Spain could possibly survive as one nation. Perhaps, like Ireland, they would have to partition the country: monarchy and Church ruling one part, Republic and people the other.
It was only when he was sorting through his haversack that he remembered the letter. Mail had been handed out almost at the same time as orders were given for the advance on Villanueva de la Cañada. The letter was from his sister. He smoothed it out and read: ‘Salud! Kenny. By the time that you receive this I too shall be in Spain.’
He read the sentence again.
I have offered myself as a driver. You remember Dad’s friend Sidney Anderson? He has fixed me up with the necessary papers to get me into the Republic, which means that I have become a card-carrying communist. It is a complicated story, which with any luck I may be able to tell you, but for now suffice to say, not only have I left home, I have also left my old self there and from here on I function as someone new. I am determined to make something of myself and the first step is to leave behind all preconceptions and stereotypes that people have about the kind of people we come from. I am no longer a working-class girl. I am in the process of making myself classless.
I am now me, one Miss Eve Anders. That is who I am. I am a twenty-year-old truck driver who has volunteered to work to help keep Spain’s democratically elected government in power. That is all that I am. I have no past which means that no one can enter there and classify me, by which I mean classify as in to see me by class and not by ability and character. My papers say that I am Eve Anders, niece of Sidney Anderson. How did I arrive at that name? At first I was to be Elvi Anders (LV from my old initials, see?). Then I tried E. V. Anders and so became Eve. Are you shocked? Probably not, because I believe that you may have had something similar in mind when you left home. You wanted to know what was out there. Since I came here, you have become ‘My brother in the 15th Brigade of the International Brigade’. The IBs (or do you say brigaders?) do seem to be well thought of.
The greatest hurdle was to try to make Ray see that it was not that I was ashamed of what we were – are, and inside ourselves will always be – but that this bit of my life was over. My love for my two brothers will never diminish. I think that he did not entirely understand, but what with him now having Bar in his life and the baby coming, he was able to let me go. With his wife much of an age with me, how could he not admit that I was no longer his little sister, no longer the girl he had protected and provided for for so long, but that I had become a woman capable of going it alone.
I am not asking your blessing, Kenny, as I might once have done, feeling that I should explain and placate. You might be surprised to hear that I ever did that, but I did. For years I cleaned the old gas cooker and the lavs on Sunday morning in the hope that you and Ray wouldn’t think I spent too much time at night-school or with my head in a book. If I have grown to be more forthright and independent than all the girls I went to school with (‘with whom I went to school’ as we both know from our years at Lampeter C of E, that most exclusive school for the children of the elite of the Pompey back-streets), then it is quite likely because I was brought up by a mother who had no husband to speak of, and by two brothers who had the vision to see a world beyond the end of Lampeter Street.
Please write to me, Ken. To Eve Anders, c/o Auto-Parc, Albacete, which is, of course, your own address. Odd thing that. I shall try to follow closely the fortunes of the 15th Brigade, so that if and when my orders take me anywhere near, then I shall search you out. Much love, Kenny. ¡Hasta la vista!