An interesting observer of wartime Gibraltar was David James Scherr, who enlisted in the British army on 16 May 1940, three months short of his twenty-fifth birthday. He found himself square-bashing in a chemical warfare battalion of the Royal Engineers in Hampshire, but was too bright to stay long as gas-attack fodder.

David Scherr was a grammar-school boy from Walthamstow who had won scholarships and sailed through his Higher Certificates, before earning two university degrees in three years. Later he became a vigorous schoolmaster who spoke three languages and organised plays, debates and sports. He was an articulate, engagingly decent young man who taught Sunday school for the Congregationalists, had been one of Baden-Powell’s scouts since he was thirteen and was now an assistant scoutmaster.

Somebody removed this cheerful paragon from the Sappers and pushed him towards the new corps established on 19 July 1940 by Army Order 112. The Intelligence Corps was re-founded because military intelligence in the Second World War could no longer remain informal and ad hoc as it had been from 1914 to 1929; it was now granted its own administration and depot, its own badges and insignia: a double Tudor rose framed by green leaves, soon mockingly described as ‘a pansy resting on its laurels’.

The writer Norman Lewis served in the Intelligence Corps and later said its members were identifiable by their ‘fierce and vague eyes’ and ‘the faint aroma of lunacy’. In his fantastical autobiography Jackdaw Cake, Lewis wrote: ‘For centuries the meaning of the word “intelligence” had been changing, slowly assuming overtones of intellectuality it never originally possessed. Even the Army had fallen into the error of upgrading the mundane task of gathering information …’

David Scherr arrived in Winchester on 24 July, reporting to the teacher-training college that now housed the Field Security Other Ranks Wing. Exactly one month later, Private D. J. Scherr was transferred from the Sappers to the Intelligence Corps and, on passing the NCOs’ course and surviving the alarming motorcycle tests, became a temporary unpaid lance corporal in No. 54 Field Security Section, which was soon to be sent to Gibraltar.

*

Field Security was a good billet for the quick-witted and worldly wise in the Second World War. Geoffrey Household and Norman Lewis, who served separately in different Field Security posts across the Levant, North Africa, Greece and Italy, both describe in their autobiographies how enterprising Field Security NCOs could take advantage of their curious status, somewhere between military police and intelligence officers. Most people were simply not sure what Field Security was, or what exactly its people were supposed to be doing.

‘A Field Security Section’, wrote Geoffrey Household, ‘consisted of an officer, a sergeant-major and twelve NCOs. Its transport was a truck and thirteen motor-cycles; its armament fourteen pistols and a typewriter; its other lethal weapons, its comforts, its blankets and its furniture, when it had any, were whatever it could more or less legally acquire …’ The primary duty of an FS section, Household further explained in Against the Wind, was to take precautions for the security of the division or corps to which it was attached – which meant discreetly supervising all civilians the formation dealt with. They also had to investigate leaks of information and guard against the curiosity of enemy intelligence. Household thought this was interesting work, because ‘the section became the eyes, ears, languages and mobile reserve of I(b) …’*

People in Field Security came from ‘commerce, teaching, journalism, the law, the stock exchange: men of education with languages or experience which specially fitted them for the work. In those early days promotion from lance-corporal to lieutenant and then to captain could be very rapid …’

Norman Lewis thought that Field Security NCOs were regarded with suspicion, ‘seen as knowing more than was good for them, of being too clever by half, potentially dangerous, and therefore to be kept under constant supervision’ by a sporty officer and a reliable company sergeant major. In his biography of Lewis, Semi-invisible Man, Julian Evans describes Field Security Sections as ‘half envied, half distrusted, virtually autonomous’, and lists their duties as guarding wartime ports against looting and sabotage, inspecting vessels and aircraft, securing buildings, searching houses, rounding up suspects, arresting people, interrogating prisoners, escapers and refugees, vetting war brides, watching brothels and prostitutes, and trying to intercept Axis agents.

Mobilised on 18 September 1940, Scherr’s No. 54 Field Security Section left Liverpool the next day in convoy OG 43, Outward to Gibraltar No. 43. A recent tragedy meant the section was a reconstituted one. The first 54 FSS party had embarked with hundreds of sappers, gunners and pioneers on a Rock-bound ship, Mohamed Ali el-Kebir, but they had been torpedoed by the German submarine U-38 in the Western Approaches on 7 August, 230 miles west of Ireland’s Bloody Foreland. The doomed transport ship was the same vessel that had evacuated the thousands of Gibraltarian civilians to Casablanca in May and June of that year. Mohamed Ali el-Kebir’s master, John Thomson, died with his ship, as did the ship’s doctor, eight other merchant navy crewmen, four Royal Navy sailors and eighty-two British army soldiers, including two members of 54 FSS, Lance-Corporal William Young Brown and Lance-Corporal John Jack Antoine Sidney. Dozens of bodies from the ship eventually washed ashore in County Donegal.

Convoy OG 43, however, reached the Rock safely. Lieutenant P. S. Gubbins and Company Sergeant Major Allan led David Scherr and the rest of 54 FSS ashore in Gibraltar, where they were installed in College Lane with the Defence Security Officer, Major H. C. ‘Tito’ Medlam. A photograph of the thirteen of them in thick khaki battledress, blinking in the bright Gibraltar sunshine, shows Scherr at top left in the back row, ‘looking dopey’, as he wrote on the back of a copy of the picture. Everyone but Gubbins is clean-shaven, but the latter sports a little moustache and is wearing a tie. Sitting cross-legged in the front row, either side of Sims, are a pair of black-haired identical twins, Nelson and Bernard Fisher. Almost immediately, two of the best Spanish-speakers were peeled off from the unit to work in HM Dockyard, keeping their eyes and ears open for any suspicion of sabotage, subversion and espionage.

When David Scherr got to Gibraltar in October 1940 with the Field Security Section he became a foot-soldier of MI5. The Security Service, along with the representatives of GCCS, the signals intelligence organisation, were the only two of the nine wartime British secret services then active on the Rock. The DSO, Major Medlam, communicated regularly with B Division of MI5 in London and so represented the Imperial Security Service. The Field Security Section also had three score Gibraltar Security Police at their disposal. The DSO’s office was next to the Gibraltar police station in Irish Town where they liaised with Inspector Gilbert, head of the CID, and had weekly meetings with the Staff Officer (Intelligence) RN and the GSO2 intelligence officers of the four infantry battalions.

The Defence Security Officer had the right of instant access to the governor. In Warren Tute’s knowledgeable novel The Rock, the fictional wartime DSO, Atcheson Hobart, is almost his own master. ‘He was responsible to the Governor as Defence Security Officer for certain parts of his duty, but in the main it was his headquarters in London with whom he dealt. He could come and go as he pleased. He had links in Tangier, Algeciras and Madrid …’

David Scherr would himself rise to become the DSO in Gibraltar, but that was in the future. In his first five-year posting on the Rock, which lasted from October 1940 to October 1945, D. J. Scherr was transformed. He went from a lonely lance-corporal to a married major of thirty whom everyone knew and all but his enemies liked. He was just the man for Gibraltar – he had Jewish ancestry, a good sense of humour, leaned more to the left than the right, and was fluent in Spanish. In his first five-year stint in Gibraltar, he flourished as a writer. The long report he completed for MI5 in 1949, flatly entitled The History of the Security Intelligence Department of the Defence Security Office Gibraltar 1939–1945, is actually one of the liveliest and most informative pieces of Rock reportage to come out of the war. No one knew the place better.

Scherr’s History, well illustrated with photographs, was more than a war diary. His commanding officer called it ‘a factual and interesting survey of Gibraltar and its environs’, and the first three chapters – ‘Gibraltar and the Campo’, ‘The People of Gibraltar’ and ‘Franco’s Spain’ – are travel writing of zest and depth.

From the streets of La Linea, the Spaniard can look up at the North Front and see the Union Jack fluttering dark against the steady bright blue of the sky, more than thirteen hundred feet above the sea. With a sense of dramatic purpose and effect most unusual to the English temperament, the conquerors of Gibraltar have kept their flag flying up there at Rock Gun, the summit of the northern face of the Rock, since 25 July 1704. The Spaniard can also see the row of those dark blotches splattered across the grey limestone face of the Rock which reveal the embrasures opening out from Gibraltar’s earliest tunnels, the Galleries designed in the seventeen-eighties by Sergeant Ince as a means of bringing flanking fire to bear on the besieging Spanish armies down below in the Neutral Ground. Against the skyline, and breaking the sharp downward plunge of the north-west angle of the Rock, he can see, too, the ponderous bulk of the Moorish Castle’s Tower of Homage, built one thousand years before Ince’s sappers started to hack their way through the limestone.

Scherr’s travelogue surveyed the peninsula from the heights of the Upper Rock, panned over the Spanish hinterland and then zoomed in on one of the ‘obvious bases for subversive activity against Gibraltar’, the frontier town that fastidious Sir Samuel Hoare had found ‘sordid’:

La Linea de la Concepción, though of recent growth, has a population (c. 70,000) more than three times that of Gibraltar … Some eight thousand people leave it daily to work on the Rock, returning at night. It is a depressing town built on sandy wastes, and degenerating in its outskirts into primitive huddles of one-roomed huts made of flattened-out petrol tins obtained by stealth from Gibraltar. [But] alongside these miserable huts are ornate and expensive villas built from the proceeds of tobacco-smuggling or ships’ chandling or some other local industry …

La Linea is chiefly remarkable for its flies, its beggars, its pimps and touts galore, its large bullring, its football team (the Real Balompedica Linense, if you please), and an extraordinary number of bars and cafes. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that its chief industry is the organisation of teams of petty smugglers or estraperlistas to bring out of Gibraltar and into Spain quantities of foodstuffs, tobacco, medicines, wool, tyres and petrol, and in fact anything portable that can be bought more cheaply on the Rock than off it … Thus, during the war, enemy agents in Algeciras and La Linea were drinking English whisky, washing with English soap, smoking English cigarettes, and buying English tyres for their cars on the black market.

One of the advantages of being in Field Security was the pass that freed a man to go anywhere, in any dress, because authorised ‘to wear plain clothes’ or ‘vestir de paisano’. David Scherr went regularly to and fro across the Spanish frontier, enabled by his cream-coloured, bilingual military identity card – cedula personal militar – stamped ‘54 F.S.S. Gibraltar’, and bearing his photograph, right index fingerprint, name, rank, number, signature and authorising officer’s signature. Armed with his card, Scherr saw the seamy side of Spanish La Línea, whose brothel quarter was based on the straggling cobbled street known as Calle Gibraltar:

What about the natives of Gibraltar? Scherr wondered. Who were they? A Gibraltarian was any British subject born in Gibraltar, regardless of ethnic ancestry, and the population was therefore of mixed origins. To illustrate this, Scherr printed the programme of a Dockyard Police Institute concert containing twenty-six Gibraltarian surnames. Nine are Spanish, four Maltese, four Italian (probably Genoese), four English, two Scots, and one each Catalan, Portuguese and Moroccan Jewish.

Scherr noted that the Gibraltarian male was ‘the butt of contemptuous humour’; today, the terms would be called racist. To the Englishman, he was a ‘Rock Scorpion’ or merely a ‘Scorp’. To the Spaniard, he was a chingongo, from some African tribe, or more commonly a llanito. Scherr did not know the origin of this term but believed it to be a diminutive of ‘Johnny’, which Andaluces and Maltese thought every Englishman was called. In The Yanito Dictionary, the Gibraltarian historian Tito Vallejo Smith says there could be three spellings of the name – llanito (Spanish), giannito (Italian) or johnnito (English); he prefers ‘Yanito’, which has the virtue of distinctiveness and is easier for foreigners to pronounce correctly. He suggests that llanito derives from the days of the Barbary pirate attacks, when gente alta, high-class people, were afraid to settle on the Rock, but gente llana, common people, weren’t. Hence the diminutive llanito, ‘little commoner’.

‘The ordinary Gibraltarian speaks English, if at all, only as a foreign language, and rarely uses it at home,’ Scherr opined. He printed a letter of denunciation written by a Gibraltarian to the ‘Cheafe of Polise’ in June 1940: ‘I have heard some conbercachion on wish they are dangers for the Scetuachion’. Scherr also warned that even though the Gibraltarians spoke an anglicised corruption of Andalusian Spanish, woe betide anyone who ever confused one of them with a Spaniard. The Gibraltarian would then insist, vociferously, on his British status: ‘When talking with an Englishman, he will insist on talking what he thinks is English. Being more emotional and high-strung than the average Englishman, he is apt to overdo the flagwagging. At the same time, he has developed the Colonial’s traditional dislike of the Englishman’s traditional assumption of superiority.’ This is perceptive. A modern Gibraltarian writer, novelist and historian, M. G. Sanchez, has commented on the experience of encountering English soldiers and sailors, ‘nearly all of whom were aloof and high-handed when sober, and aggressively, shockingly insulting when drunk’. Just as George Orwell saw that patriotism had nothing to do with conservatism, so David Scherr was learning that Britishness was not at all the same thing as Englishness. As someone working in security, the paramount question for him was whether the British Fortress could trust the Gibraltarians. From the wartime evidence, Scherr estimated that there had been an absolute maximum of twenty-five rotten apples out of a barrel of seventeen thousand Gibraltarians. This meant only 0.15 per cent were unsound: 99.85 per cent were completely loyal. This remarkably high figure is consistent with Gibraltar’s post-war referendums. Asked in 1967 if they wanted British or Spanish sovereignty, 99.64 per cent voted British. Asked in 2002 if they wanted Britain to share sovereignty with Spain, 98.48 per cent of the Gibraltarian electorate said ‘No’. They saw themselves as British and European, however. In the ‘Brexit’ referendum of June 2016, 96 per cent of Gibraltarians voted for Remain.

*

Chapter 4 of Scherr’s History is called ‘The Spanish Invasion’. Every day, from 5.30 a.m., the wartime fortress opened its gates to between eight thousand and ten thousand Spanish workers. Hundreds came on the morning ferry from Algeciras to Waterport, and thousands from La Línea to the gate at Four Corners.

There was a tension here. The Rock’s need for manpower – Spanish muscle for docks and tunnels – conflicted with the Rock’s requirement for security. Actually, most of those entering Gibraltar wanted to smuggle luxuries out, but security worried about what dangers they might be bringing in.

Of course, not just anybody could enter in wartime. All Spanish workers had to have an identity carnet with their photograph and registration number, personal data and employment record, plus the special passes or permits needed for more restricted areas. Having shown their papers to the Gibraltar Security Police on entry, they could be searched by customs officers or soldiers detailed for the task who were looking for explosives, fuses and time pencils, possibly hidden in boxes, bottles, cases, cans, lunch-pails, lanterns, almost anything. Searches were a deterrent, keeping folk on their toes, but intelligence from informers helped most.

The compulsory ID card, with its duplicate held in an efficient filing system, was the best way of keeping tabs on the great shoal that flowed in and out of the Fortress. As Scherr observed, this was largely a negative process, recording black marks against a few offenders, but you could not know about the motives or loyalties of the vast majority, nor could you effectively police everything that these visitors saw or heard inside Gibraltar, all those bits of information that might be useful to an enemy, supplementing their continuous hostile visual observation from Spain. Where did you draw the line with people? The deeper frontiers of insular Gibraltar – frontiers of ancestry and history, the frontiers of heart and mind – were harder to chart than the line of the rusting border fence.

In wartime, the names of ships, their cargoes, their crews, their destinations, the identities and movements of soldiers being carried on board, were all supposed to be kept secret. When the writer Muriel Spark escaped from Rhodesia to England, the black-bearded ‘black’ propagandist Sefton Delmer interviewed her in the Political Warfare Executive offices on the eighth floor of Bush House, Aldwych WC2.

‘Did you come in a convoy?’ asked Delmer.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, smiling a little.

It was an elementary test: we had all been warned ‘not to know’ about the movement of ships and troops, past and present. Great signs were plastered over the walls of public buildings: ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’.

Vigilant security was not easy. Donald Darling of SIS said that ‘Gibraltar was the most loquacious place I had ever known and the manner in which the grape vine hummed was uncanny.’ Sometimes only a deliberate provocation could sharpen people’s awareness of the potential dangers.

Nick van der Bijl tells how two Field Security NCOs dressed up in Spanish workmen’s overalls and, carrying fake ID cards made out to ‘A. Hitler’ and ‘B. Mussolini’ as well as their coils of wire and pliers, managed to get through the building’s outer security right into the Gibraltar Fortress HQ in Line Wall Road, where, while shouting at each other in guttural Andaluz, they filched various documents from officers’ desks. That was one lesson well learned.

David Scherr relates how three other Field Security NCOs got onto the Gibraltar airfield on April Fool’s Day 1942 for a joke with a serious point.

Two were disguised as Spanish workmen. They were equipped with homemade identity cards, obviously false … They were carrying a box of dummy bombs, a 100 foot tape measure, some tent-pegs and a couple of mallets. They acted a pantomime of measuring out a strip of grassland to be covered in tarmac, stretching from the administrative buildings out to the planes.

They spent an hour among the aircraft without being challenged or questioned, and left a dummy time-bomb under a tailplane.

*

In his early days in Field Security, Scherr got to know the Rock by mixing and mingling with soldiers and sailors, listening, observing, sometimes eavesdropping, keeping his eyes and ears open for any loose talk or breaches of security. ‘I like to get around and see things for myself’ is the first line of the very first article that Sergeant D. J. Scherr wrote in August 1941 for the sixth issue of the Gibraltar magazine The Rock. The twenty-page magazine, ‘By the Troops, For the Troops’, price threepence, had been started in March by a gunner from Cardiff called Reg Cudlipp, a sub-editor on the News of the World before the war. (The Cudlipp brothers had a genius for journalism: by 1953, Reg, Hugh and Percy Cudlipp were all editors of British national newspapers.)

‘Roaming Round the Town’ headlined the first of Scherr’s regular columns, written under the appropriate byline ‘N. Parker’, soon to be revealed as ‘Nosey Parker’. There is a rather rose-tinted visit to Gibraltar’s Little Bay Rest Camp, where men could take three days’ leave. Scherr describes ‘men reading or playing table-tennis in the Recreation Hut; others throwing darts and drinking beer in the Canteen. They all thought the Camp grand. The Camp staff does all the work so there are no fatigues … The Camp meals are excellent. There are swimming-sports, films, concerts, dance-bands, sea-trips etc.’

Mason-MacFarlane later turned Governor’s Cottage into another rest-camp, where Jimmy Jacques ran the cinema. Jacques told the pioneering historian of sexuality Emma Vickers:

Scherr’s September ‘Roaming Round the Town’ column wrote up Mr William Edwards’s forty-strong Gibraltar Symphony Orchestra, now looking for double basses, French horns, clarinets, tubas and bassoons – both instruments and players. His piece began in his favourite little bar on Main Street where he could get a café con leche for two pence or an almendrita (brandy and hot milk) for three pence.

The house begins to fill. In Main Street, beyond the barred window, I can see the heads of a hopeful group of soldiers waiting for the Emporium to close [and for the girls who worked there to come out]. The old dockyard worker at my table shows me the six latest photos of his daughter in London and promises me an introduction; the Navy and the Black Watch begin to sing, sometimes the same tune but more often in a spirit, I think, of friendly rivalry.

The future author of The Cruel Sea, then Lieutenant Commander Nicholas Monsarrat RNVR, ashore from his corvette, saw similar scenes at the Rock:

Gibraltar becomes a sort of Boom Town at night, the narrow streets crammed with Forces in white or khaki shorts. Standing, as I did, at a balcony window with a tallish glass of Tio Pepe sherry, one looks down on Main Street chockful of people, a parading stream eddying out at the corners and overflowing into shops and bars. The latter, luring customers with music and chorus-singing, do a roaring trade; and in the oddly-named shops everyone buys silk stockings and cosmetics and perfumes of considerable fame and rarity and suspicious abundance.

The naval coder Charles Causley arrived in Gibraltar in autumn 1940. ‘October (when it doesn’t rain) is I think the best month in Gib: clear, crisp & a view for miles over the hills in Spain.’ He found Main Street ‘always a bedlam: a frieze of drunks and the competing bands of the bars, the taxi-men banging their car-doors (no horns were allowed in Gibraltar), and the clop-clop of the weary gharry horses.’ Causley the young Cornishman, whose first poems were published in The Rock and who took part in plays and concerts, kept observant diaries.

By the time David Scherr started writing his monthly column for The Rock, Garrison Variety Entertainments was working hard to keep up morale. Listlessness and depression had to be fought against hard. ‘Nosey Parker’ reviewed the shows, reporting on the development of Ince’s Hall, half the year a cinema with a one-hour programme shown continuously from 4 to 10 p.m., and the other half a repertory theatre for variety acts and straight plays. An amateur dramatic society was being formed, as well as a full-time concert party with a twelve-man dance band to tour different venues on the Rock. Keeping the men lively and active was the thing, not slumping into torpor, drink and depression.

In a solidly male garrison, Spanish-speaking Scherr made a point of talking to the dancing girls who came across the frontier to entertain the soldiers and sailors in theatre shows, and he also reported the arrival of the first dozen WRNS or ‘Wrens’, led by Second Officer Langmaid, whose husband was a naval officer in Alexandria.

None of the others is married and their average age is just under twenty-three … About half are blondes and half brunettes, though one of the prettiest has auburn hair … Their first reaction on arrival here was to note that there was no black-out and that the shops were chock-full of silk stockings and cosmetics! They work hard, for long watches, and are allowed out only with an approved escort. (Still, there’s no harm in your trying, Sgt Snooks!)

The reality of the womanless Rock was that a lot of men turned to other men for emotional comfort and sometimes for sexual release. Charles Causley, who was sensitive and artistic, but not gay, noted ‘shocking homo-displays’ among other sailors and was bothered by the behaviour of his ‘hyper-sensuous’ friend Frank, who

As Gore Vidal used to point out, in those days homosexual acts did not always equate with homosexual identity. Doing was not being. For a straight sailor, a friendly ‘flip’ or a ‘wet-dream with a hand-start’ did not necessarily make a man a ‘poof’. Of course, homosexual acts were illegal then and punishable. En route from Dakar to Gibraltar, for example, Captain Evelyn Waugh RM had to defend in a court martial one of two marines accused of buggery. His man got eight months, his ‘oppo’ eleven. Yet Gibraltar had a certain reputation, even toleration. One of the Rock’s nicknames was ‘Brown Hatter’s Castle’, a queering of the title of A. J. Cronin’s first novel and 1942 film, Hatter’s Castle. Twenty-year-old Jimmy Jacques, who already knew he was gay, had only been in Gibraltar for a few hours when he was seduced by a physical training instructor in the showers.

I had regular sex with him. He done special favours and put me on special jobs and things like that and of course it was very much against the law and if you were caught you were court-martialled and sent home. Well I had an affair with him until I was moved up to work with an entertainment group. They had a newspaper called The Rock magazine. Reg Cudlipp, one of the newspaper group executives came out there and they wanted to know whether anybody knew anything about films and projectors and so on and to cut a long story short, I was made to be in charge of seven or eight people, they sent projectors out to Gibraltar, and I used to go round the Rock every night showing films and to the navy and the air force …

Like many gay people, Jimmy Jacques had learned when young the art of the bluff, unconsciously developing techniques of dissimulation and concealment, so leading the double life that kept him safe until he could reveal himself to another he could trust. He told Emma Vickers about the importance of discretion in those days when it was criminal to be ‘out’:

I mean there were lots of people who were gay in the army, and in the navy and in the air force as you can imagine and you just kept everything hushed up. You weren’t able to, you know. Anything you did was illegal, sexually I’m talking about. No, all these things were clandestine. In Gibraltar, just off the town, there’s Trafalgar cemetery and also a garden called the Alameda Gardens which is a kind of tropical garden in Gibraltar and that was the cruising place which was very, very dangerous because the Red Caps came round you know. You could cruise in the Alameda Gardens and meet sailors and soldiers … big long toilets there, Victorian toilets that ran right, very much like the ones that used to be in Hyde Park here and you could meet people in there you know, a lot of people in there.

Gibraltar was a small place where it was easy to feel trapped: ‘cabined, cribbed, confined’. A lot of men felt lonely and bored, a mood made worse by the oppressive Levanters, when the easterly wind forms a muggy cloud over the Rock. One of Scherr’s pieces in The Rock caught the melancholy.

When I feel moody and depressed, I like to climb up out of the steep crooked alleys till I am high above the town and there sit on a wall in the sunshine for an hour.

The Rock towers over my right shoulder and beneath me the flat roofs go cascading down to the sea. Past the harbour and the bay, sprinkled with shipping, lie the glittering towns of Spain, white and tantalising in the clear air, and beyond the towns rise the gaunt, grey-green hills.

There I squat, scowling at it all.

The thin wail of flamenco oozing up from a far away radio is interrupted by a harsh voice, the whimper of a dog, and the slapdash of bare feet in loose sandals on a stone roof.

He described a slatternly washerwoman called Mariana, scrubbing clothes in a tin bath and moaning about her hard life:

‘My sister is a widow with six children, but they do not allow her into Gibraltar. They have put my young brother in prison for twelve years and my other brother for thirty years. Thirty years!’

There follows an unprintable Spanish oath. Suddenly, with fear in her tiny eyes, she looks round; then, reassured, spits freely into the suds and goes on scrubbing.

Seeing someone else’s sadder life, David Scherr thought, was ‘a grand cure for the blues’. It helped him to remember that although the Rock could feel like a prison to those confined on it, it was also a zaguán, a portal to freedom, an escape valve from the oppressions of Spain, and of all Europe under the jackboot.

* ‘And here … is I or Intelligence. I is subdivided into I(a), which obtains information about the enemy, and I(b), which prevents the enemy obtaining information about us.’ Compton Mackenzie, Gallipoli Memories (Cassell, 1929), pp. 46–7.