No Pasarán!

by Pete Ayrton

  I found later that Pilar and I had received the same impression from the little groups going to the mountains: we wanted to go too. Not then, but if things got very much worse and if ‘the Moors were coming’. We found each other out in this, and used to enjoy planning it all. We decided that we would try to buy a donkey to carry our food and blankets, and a couple of milk goats to take with us, we would grind the maize which we had just harvested to make corn meal mush of, and buy as much flour as we could, and we would take the chickens, but would have to eat them soon as we could not feed them. The chief problem was ‘Piggy’, Enrique’s pig, who like all Spanish swine was practically a household pet – should we take him on the hoof or in the form of hams and sausages? He was still small, but could we find enough acorns to feed him during our Robinson Crusoe life among the cork oaks. I regretfully decided that Piggy probably ought to be turned into sausages.

  For I was much attracted by the vision of our expedition to the woods and the wilds accompanied by Platera, two brown nanny goats and Piggy; led by tall, fair Don Geraldo springing actively up the mountain with the goats and followed by severe black-clothed Maria acting as rearguard and turning back to lay a final curse upon the wicked city. Pilar and I could not help feeling that even after Piggy was disposed of, Maria might turn out to be an insoluble difficulty; so we rather tended to leave her out of our dream of desert island life in the sierra.

  But often later on when things began to get worse, I used to wander off in my mind to the mountains – I would be sitting by a stream under an ilex tree with Piggy eating up the acorns on the ground, and the donkey and the goats cropping the grey, sweet mountain herbs, while Don Geraldo leaped from rock to rock above us looking for dangers and Enrique gathered sticks for the little fire on which the corn meal was cooking in a black iron pot, and Pilar sang Mariquilla to sleep with a Christmas copla.

  ‘The Virgin hung her washing

  On the rosemary to dry,

  All the birds were singing

  And the river running by.’

  Or I would imagine that we were just setting out, going further and further away from towns and men, weary and hungry, but climbing higher and higher into the clear, free, mountain air.

  Air raids soon became almost a part of normal life. It is strange how quickly you become accustomed to them; and in a curious way when there was no air raid as sometimes happened I missed it. I was keyed up to expect it, and if it did not come I felt a sort of flatness. But our raids were not really bad ones, the bombs were usually small and we always felt that unless there was a direct hit on the house just above us, or unless we were hurt by flying splinters or glass, we were fairly safe indoors; and Gerald and I were fortunate in both being of rather philosophic temperament and inclined to feel the bombs probably were not going to hit us and if they were we could not help it – and of course Gerald had had so many worse times in the last war already.

  When huge modern bombs are being used I know from experience in Malaga when they were trying to wreck the port with them, it is impossible to be philosophic. The noise and shock are appalling and the feeling that there is no defence anywhere, that whole houses will fall upon you, is horrible.

  What I really minded most about the air raids in our village was the terror of the villagers. Our servants were very stoical, but some of the women lost all control of themselves and sobbed and screamed hysterically, while the poor children, terrified by the behaviour of their parents as much as by the unknown horror of the sky, shrieked and sobbed convulsively. Something I felt then (and am ashamed to have felt) was a physical repugnance towards these poor frightened creatures, towards their lack of control which is always an ugly thing to see and to the sharp fetid smell which fear produces. I felt all the time that my sensations were meanly fastidious just when I should have felt the strongest solidarity with my fellow men. But I could not help that instinctive distaste and withdrawal into myself when outwardly I was being kindest and most reassuring. But there were times when the pain of these others melted the thin icicle in my heart (we need no Snow Queen, any of us, to put one there).

  One day one of the village women was caught out of the village by an air raid while she was taking some food to her husband at the airfield. Her fear for herself alone in the fields with huge planes hovering overhead scattering death must have been very great, it must have seemed like a horrible nightmare to her, but her fear for her children was much greater, and she did not try to take cover, but ran all the way home to them. They had already come in to us and were crying ‘Oh! Mother! Mother!’ sure that she had been killed by the first explosions. When she rushed in, not having found them at home and desperate with anxiety and saw them sitting with me, she tried to take a few steps further to reach them and fell in a fit at my feet. As I knelt on the floor beside her while she foamed at the mouth and jerked and twisted in convulsions I felt not the slightest trace of repulsion. She was among the poorest of the women: she was dirty, emaciated, ugly, unkempt, ill-smelling – everything that man’s inhumanity daily makes of man, except unloving or unloved. But as I sat there holding the poor creature in my arms as she gradually grew quieter and the fearful upturned eyes closed in unconsciousness, while her daughter sat beside me embracing her mother and sometimes kissing my helping hands, my mind held no tinge or taint of distaste, I felt nothing but love – for them and for the millions like them, the poor, the suffering, the burden bearers of this world.

  One morning not long after the raids began we were awakened as usual by the crash of a bomb: it was just beginning to be light. The bombs seemed fairly distant, so we went up on the balcony to see what was happening. The planes were dropping incendiary bombs, trying to hit the petrol tanks and the standing planes at the airfield: they caught the dry grass where they fell and blazed with much white smoke. Presently black smoke poured up from the airfield, probably one of the standing planes had been hit. Gerald brought out his field-glasses.

  ‘I hope Don Carlos is all right,’ he said, and then a moment later ‘My God! They’ve hit his house!’ Don Carlos was a poor but aristocratic Spanish friend who lived on some land he farmed near the sea, which actually adjoined the airfield. Now his house was hidden by clouds of white smoke.

  ‘Oh! the children!’ I said. I imagined them burnt by the bombs, trapped in their rooms.

  ‘We’d better go at once,’ Gerald said. I seized a basket and put in bandages, iodine, and a bottle of brandy and Enrique said that he would come with us as we might need him, and we set off.

  I have to confess (and I am again ashamed to confess it) that I enjoyed that walk. There was just enough feeling of danger in the air to give me a feeling of heightened life, of using some faculty that generally sleeps. Dawn was coming over the sea and we were walking towards the growing light. And we walked rapidly, seeming almost to fly as one sometimes walks in dreams.

  A patrol hailed us and we stopped to explain where we were going.

  ‘Two boys were killed at the San Fernando farm,’ they told us. ‘A bomb fell right on them as they were standing in the patio drinking some milk the farmer’s wife had given them, the bomb fell and – nada—’ They made a gesture of dispersal – nothing. They just happened to be there. It was chance – and what of those six on whom the Tower of Siloam fell, my mind asked, retreating from the thought of those too near, too recently shattered, bodies. Well, it will be our mala sombra, our ill-shade, if one of these bombs catches us and poor Enrique while we are rushing away across these early morning fields. And yet I could not repress that lift of excitement, of happiness, as if quicker, more ardent life were running through my veins, or as if I had been drinking some wine not meant for me but for creatures of more fiery birth.

  I hate war, I have a perfect horror of it; and what little of it I saw in Spain confirmed me in my fear and hatred. And yet after that early morning walk across the fields I understood, better than Bertrand Russell could ever explain it, Why Men Fight.

  And when we got near Don
Carlos’s house we saw that it was not on fire at all! Two incendiary bombs had fallen near it, one on an empty chicken house in the backyard and the other in some dry grass and both were still burning and sending off great clouds of white smoke. But the house itself was untouched and we could see figures moving calmly about. We went on anyway; we had other reasons besides the danger of bombs to make us anxious about Don Carlos and his family.

  We crossed the main Algeçras road and reached their gateway and Don Carlos and his family came to meet us full of surprise at seeing us there at five o’clock in the morning, and full of gratitude when they found out that we had come to rescue them, however unnecessarily. They were excited but not at all frightened. Don Carlos was tall and florid and slightly bald, and always somehow reminded me of a charming, aristocratic, Spanish Wilkins Micawber (if such a combination can be imagined!); he had spent a lifetime of difficulties but was always full of hope that something was just going to turn up’. He had been in Chile and Tierra del Fuego for years, where he was sheep farming, acting as consul for other South American countries, and in fact doing anything that ‘turned up’. Don Carlos and his family particularly attracted me because they reminded me of my half-brother and his family who lived on the cotton plantation he had inherited from our father (where I was brought up) in a state of extraordinary happiness and improvidence, with half a dozen riding horses and no money to speak of.

  Doña Maria Louisa, I might as well say without mincing words, was almost the nicest woman I ever knew anywhere. Tall, fair and handsome, a devoted wife, mother, daughter, friend, very kind, and courteous and friendly with rich man, poor man, beggar or thief. The whole family were gay and amusing, and Don Carlos had the Spanish genius for telling a story and for making gossip and personalities interesting and vivid, and somehow universal in their application. Their children were charming too; there were two nearly grown-up boys and two nearly grown-up girls and little Emilio who was only six.

  ‘Have you been all right here?’ we asked Don Carlos rather anxiously. He was unfortunate in having a famous name, though he had not inherited much besides, except this strip of land along the sea on which he had built a small house and a part share in the family house which we had bought from him and other members of the family. But a famous name at that period brought death to a great many harmless and innocent people. One of Don Carlos’s nephews, a boy of eighteen, was taken away and shot because he had this too well-known name and because only a few weeks before he had got a small place as clerk in Malaga’s principal industry which was managed and partly owned by a distant cousin. The cousin was shot as a matter of course after spending a few weeks in prison. He deserves to be remembered for he was a brave man. He was safe in hiding but gave himself up when some of the men under him were put in prison, and tried to take upon himself the entire responsibility for the conduct of the firm, which had been having trouble with strikers. But I’m afraid they were all shot anyway. I liked his last words, they were: ‘Do you mind if I light a cigarette?’ He lit it and took a few puffs and then gave the signal to fire, himself. Having a feeling even then that famous names were going to be a fatal possession in Malaga we were worried about the C— family (on both sides they had a great deal of English blood and used English names) even apart from their living so unfortunately close to the airfield.

  ‘Come and stay with us,’ we urged them.

  ‘Seven of us!’ said Maria Louisa, ‘and we can’t leave the chickens – but how good you are!’

  ‘Do you really think you’re safe?’ we asked bluntly. ‘What about your name?’

  ‘Oh! but I’ve never done anything; I’ve been in South America half my life, and I’ve never taken any part in politics. Why should they do anything to me?’ said Don Carlos. ‘I’m a poor man too; the boys work as hard as peons, and we always get on well with the country people.’ We knew that that was true, but we were not thinking of the country people but of the gangs in Malaga.

  ‘Well, come any time,’ we said. ‘We’ll always be expecting you. And bring as much as you can in the car. Why not bring the best chickens (they had prize Rhode Island Reds). You could bring a lot of them, you know we’ve got that huge fowl-house with only a few old hens in it. Do come! Fill up the car and come on over this very morning.’

  ‘The car!’ Don Carlos began to laugh. ‘Did you see the burnt remains of something along the road: that was the poor old Buick! The Anarchists came to get it. Well, you know what the poor old car was – Pepe and Carlete and I could just start it all working together. You had to know its ways. Of course the Anarchists couldn’t start it at all. They cranked it and cranked it and pushed it down the road, and finally they got so angry they put a match to the petrol and Poof! there it is! Poor old thing, it was a pity.

  ‘But they gave poor Maria Louisa and the children a dreadful fright when they came for it – two lorries full of pistoleros bristling with rifles and revolvers. All of them got out and came up to the door, poor Maria Louisa was sure that they had come for me. I was in Malaga. But no, everything was politeness, they only wanted the car, they were requisitioning all private cars. The children warned them what a dreadful old crock it was, but they would drag it off.’

  As we stood in the garden saying goodbye, a constant stream of lorries and commandeered cars kept passing by. The house was only fifty yards from the main road: we did not like it at all.

  ‘Do come to us,’ we urged again as we went away. Doña Maria Louisa stood smiling and waving goodbye with the girls and little Emilio while Don Carlos and the boys walked to the road with us. What admirable things courage and self-control are, I thought, especially when combined with cheerfulness and good manners. For that smiling family we left behind must have realised even more clearly than we did, and felt – how much more poignantly – the loneliness and danger of their situation in that isolated house, too far for any help to reach them even if there were any help for them in those days, with the armed lorries rushing by and bombs falling out of the air above them.

  Gamel Woolsey was born in South Carolina in 1895. She moved to New York in 1921 and there in 1927 met Llewelyn Cowper Powys, John’s brother, with whom she began a love affair that lasted until Llewelyn’s death in 1939. In order to be near Llewelyn, Gamel moved to Dorset, where she met Gerald Brenan, with whom she went to Spain in 1931. They lived in Gerald’s house in Malaga through the beginning of the Civil War and on their return to London wrote their respective books: The Spanish Labyrinth, which focused on political and social issues, and Death’s Other Kingdom (from which this extract is taken) on everyday domestic life. After the Second World War, Gerald Brenan and Gamel Woolsey returned to their house in Malaga. Gamel continued to write poetry (rejected for publication by T. S. Eliot) and translate Spanish literature, including Perez Galdos’ wonderful novel The Spendthrifts (La de Bringas). Virtually unknown, she died in Malaga in 1968. Recent reprints of Death’s Other Kingdom and her autobiographical novel One Way of Love, written in the 1930s but not published then because of the publisher’s fear of obscenity, now make possible an appreciation of the work of this fine writer.

  MEDARDO FRAILE

  AN EPISODE FROM

  NATURAL HISTORY

  from Things Look Different in the Night

  translated by Margaret Jull Costa

  I REMEMBER THE THICK LIPS, the hiccoughing laugh and the check scarf of that small, skinny boy with innocent eyes and a man’s gruff voice, who, at only eleven, poor thing, was burdened with the name of Plácido Dornaleteche, and with whom, at that tender age, I was doubtless unwittingly bound by the shared oddity of our names. We would leave school, go round the corner of Mártires de Alcalá and up Santa Cruz de Marcenado, but we took a very long time to reach the corner of Conde-Duque because we were talking and laughing so much, and when we did arrive, we would continue to stand there chatting, with neither ears nor time for clocks, until he crossed the road and walked along by the barracks to Leganitos, while I continued straight on and w
ent in the street door of number four. We were studying for the first year of our bachillerato (a shrill word that set our teeth on edge) with names that were full of bounty and light, like Antonio Machado, Helena Gómez-Moreno and Julia or Carmen Burell, and others that were full of fear and foreboding, like that of the miserly-looking man, unshaven, grizzle-haired and wild-eyed, who was the author of at least one book on mathematics, ours, and who would occasionally spin the class globe and then gleefully, noisily spit on it. Like us, he had been weighed down as a child with a problematic name: Adoración Ruiz Tapiador.

  I remember Plácido trying to instil in me the radiant hope of his beliefs or, rather, those of his older brother, whom I never met, but who apparently wore – for reasons I did not entirely understand – a blue shirt with red arrows embroidered on the breast pocket and who sang a song that my friend would perform with appropriately martial gestures, and of which I remember only – although possibly not exactly – the first two lines: ‘Marching along the white road/comes a strong and gallant lad...’ And he would ask if I knew Marx, Who? Carlos Marx, and I would say No, although he obviously didn’t know him very well either, because he would say, oh, no matter, but what my brother and his comrades want, you see, is the nationalization of that Marx fellow’s doctrine, he was Russian or something, an atheist and a good-for-nothing, but he had some useful ideas about bringing bosses and workers together and uniting them once and for all in fraternity and justice. Plácido was like a small, bright, whitewashed window, full of pots of geraniums, through which I could see Madrid and my mother and grandmother’s village flooded with sunlight and happiness, so much so that my sheer impatience to see this change come about quite overwhelmed me with contentment, because in my mother’s village, there were always a lot of men standing around in the square and in Madrid we were constantly seeing the riot police cordoning off fires or baton-charging students.