Daughter of Catalonia

by Jane MacKenzie

  She looked across at the little sofa and the chair beside it. ‘My father always sat on the sofa,’ she said, matter-of-factly and completely sure of her memories. ‘And Maman always sat in the chair. She would knit there in the evenings. Papa would be reading, or maybe at the table if he was writing. I don’t remember where we children sat. On the floor, maybe?’

  ‘You were always hemmed in for space here,’ Philippe acknowledged. ‘It is a perfect space for me, but with you children around, I was always amazed you didn’t get stepped on.’ He looked at her curiously. ‘I didn’t think you would remember so much.’

  ‘I didn’t until we came in here. Since I entered the café this morning it has been as though nothing has ever changed. It’s almost unreal, to return to Vermeilla and find things so unaltered.’

  Philippe’s face was very serious, his eyes almost painful as he replied. ‘Yes, but a lot has changed really, my child. Rooms and buildings can stay the same, but so much else has changed.’

  ‘You mean my father? Do you miss him?’

  ‘Every day – and your mother. Nothing has ever been the same in this village since the war.’

  Madeleine sat down on one of the old wooden chairs, and crossed her arms on the table. Her next question was so simple and obvious, and yet her throat constricted as she spoke.

  ‘Serge said to ask you about my father. I don’t know what he did in the war. Or how he died. Can you tell me?’

  There was a silence. Philippe’s eyes were fixed on the wall, but after a moment he nodded.

  ‘Yes, I can tell you. Or at least I can begin to tell you, Madalena. None of us know everything.’

  He squeezed his limbs into the chair opposite her, stretched his legs in an obviously familiar manoeuvre between the table legs, and brought his hands together almost as if in prayer.

  ‘We’d better begin before the war,’ he started. ‘You must know already that your father came down here from Paris to be closer to his homeland.’

  ‘Yes, and to elope with my mother.’

  Philippe’s rather anxious face softened into a reminiscent smile. ‘Yes, indeed. I met them both as soon as they arrived in Vermeilla, and I was a witness at that wedding. They were so passionate about everything, Luis and Elise. Luis and Elise …’ His voice trailed off, and his eyes dreamt privately for a moment, then he shook himself and continued.

  ‘Luis began writing as soon as he came down here, for a local paper in Perpignan. Nothing like the national papers he wrote for in Paris, but it was an income, and the paper here was glad to get hold of him. It gave him access to other journalists, of course, and to a political network which extended down into Spain. He would have gone back to Spain to fight, I think, when the Civil War broke out a few months later, but you had just been born, and he felt he should stay with your mother, so he carried on writing and fund-raising for the whole terrible years of the Civil War, and despairing as he watched his Spain and his Catalonia fall to Franco. And then he found real work, as he said, when Barcelona fell and Catalonia was overrun by Franco’s troops, the last part of Spain to fall.’

  The world was in trouble, this spring of 1939. Germany had withdrawn from its non-aggression pact, Mussolini had invaded Albania, and Europe was watching and waiting and arming its spirit. But more immediately in Elise’s kitchen, Barcelona had fallen, the Republic was lost, and shattered, terrified civilians had fled in hundreds of thousands across the border to France.

  ‘Nobody wants them,’ Luis railed at Philippe. ‘The villagers here call them troublemakers, spongers, illiterates, and if you could see where they’ve been incarcerated – the camps – right there on the beach, exposed to the wind, no shelter, children dying of cold, and families forced to separate. All we do is what we can, and it saves nobody, but maybe we can change a few minds.’

  Philippe ate less often at the house now. It was always full, he complained, and nobody spoke French any more. But he gave Luis a room behind the school where they put makeshift beds, and he drove endless kilometres as chauffeur without complaining. He was one of the very few people in the village to have a car. He and Luis. Luis’s car was never still these days.

  Elise moved among the refugees with a serene smile and made soup – ‘I hadn’t realised before that making soup was a humanitarian act,’ she told Philippe. It amused Philippe to see how they all muddled around the little apartment. Little Madeleine, a toddler still but tall, slender and poised beyond her years, moving effortlessly around the Spaniards who now occupied her space, always with something to show them, a small toy she treasured, or a little picture she had drawn. She prattled in a mix of French and Catalan which they seemed to understand, and gave her hand into theirs with a smile which reflected her mother’s.

  Elise, her Catalan still weak, made herself understood with gestures and wrote down what she didn’t understand for Luis to translate later. Her second pregnancy was a little complicated, Philippe knew, but she refused to complain.

  ‘Look at the faces of the people who find their way here,’ she would say to him. ‘How weary, how physically beaten! We’re so lucky, Philippe, and the baby is fine.’

  She smiled again and Philippe was lost. He could never withstand that smile of hers, and the light in her sky-blue eyes. The apartment was peaceful this morning, and Elise was alone, except for Madeleine, who was washing a doll in a bucket in the corner of the kitchen.

  ‘At least there’s no one here this morning, for once. Where is that husband of yours?’ he said.

  ‘Away with Henri to the camp.’

  ‘You know there’s dysentery in the camp now?’

  ‘Yes, we heard. And with this cold spell people are dying – they’ve got no rations, and they’re just so weak. How can we do this to people, Philippe?’

  ‘We? You mean the authorities?’

  ‘No, I mean the French. We’re all doing it. If ordinary French people were all at the gates demanding entry, the camps would open up.’

  ‘I know. It’s all political appeasement on the government’s part, and the worst kind of fear here in the village. And now that the word is out that there’s disease in the camp, people will close their minds and their doors even more.’

  ‘Not ours, it seems.’ Elise smiled as the door of the apartment burst open and banged shut behind Luis, stalking in like a fury.

  ‘Miguel’s wife has fallen ill in the camp, and they won’t let me bring her out! They say she’s infectious and a danger to the community. Hah! I’ll give them danger to the community! Anyway, I got their two children out, by telling the guard their grandmother was waiting for them in Collioure, and tomorrow I’ll get the mother out as well. The guard Pierre’s on duty tomorrow, and he’ll help me.’

  He flung himself onto the sofa by the kitchen, his legs dangling over the arm at one end, chafing his fingers together.

  ‘By God, it’s cold out there!’ He reached a hand out to Elise.

  She took it and rubbed it between hers. ‘You need some soup. I know it’s not lunchtime yet but some soup would do you good. Or would you prefer coffee?’

  ‘Soup sounds wonderful, and it smells wonderful too. Philippe, my friend, how are you, and what have you been doing with my wife while my back was turned?’

  ‘Planning her escape from your desertion, of course.’

  ‘You can’t escape from someone who has already deserted you, idiot. It’s an oxymoron. And you a teacher! Come down and teach those guards something at the camp, will you? They’re the most ignorant bunch of gorillas you ever set eyes on.’

  ‘Tell me about Miguel’s family,’ Elise asked. ‘Where did you leave the children? Do they need us? Is their grandmother really here?’

  ‘Not the grandmother, but a cousin or something like who lives near Collioure. That’s what makes the situation so stupid. Amongst all the people in the camps, Miguel and his family have no need to be there. They have a place to stay if they can get out. It’s all because they suspect Miguel of having fought in the w
ar. Well, what if he did? What’s he going to do here now? The French have gone mad with suspicion.’

  Madeleine appeared at his knee, holding out a wet doll which dripped on his trousers. He lifted her onto his lap, and helped her to dry the doll with a kitchen cloth.

  ‘We need practice at this, angel. When our baby comes out of Mummy’s tummy you’ll have to help us bath her too.’

  ‘It’s not a girl, it’s a boy,’ Madeleine declared. ‘Maman said he was kicking her this morning.’

  ‘Is that what boys do?’ Luis smiled into her eyes, stroking her hair back from her face.

  Madeleine nodded vigorously. ‘Daniel kicked me once. But then I hit him with Julie.’ She waved her doll triumphantly.

  ‘Amazon!’ crowed her father, and kissed the top of her head.

  ‘Soup, my love? Come to the table. Philippe? You’re sure? But you’ll stay to lunch! I got fresh fish from the market today.’

  Luis rose from the sofa, carrying Madeleine, and kissed Elise as he passed her.

  ‘Have we enough food for Philippe? He eats so much! Can we afford to feed him?’

  Elise laughed. ‘Since for once we don’t seem to have anybody else, I think we can just about manage.’

  ‘You hear that, Madalena? Tonton Philippe is staying for lunch. In that case we definitely need to eat soup first for there won’t be much else for us!’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Listening to Philippe, Madeleine could almost see her parents in this room, and feel the heat of the little stove warming her father’s hands. She watched him closely and waited for him to continue. He seemed to drift in and out of his private reverie, and then would emerge to take up his tale.

  ‘The work became very serious for your parents,’ he continued. ‘They became part of an unofficial campaign group, and your mother learnt how to forge documents, identity papers to get people out of the camps, and they provided money, organised travel, and Luis wrote tracts and newspaper articles. When you came up the stairs to this apartment, if you didn’t hear Spanish voices, you would be sure to hear Luis’s typewriter rattling away.

  ‘It all meant that in 1940, when France fell to Germany, your parents were already politically involved. You will hear a lot of rubbish about the war years, my dear, or maybe not, since nobody talks about it now if they can avoid it. But the truth was really quite simple. People were stunned and humiliated at the way France was just overrun by Germany. We’d all been led to believe our defences were impregnable. Well they weren’t, and our “war” with Germany only lasted a few weeks, and then we were completely defeated, and humiliated, and scared, and at the mercy of the Germans. Then Maréchal Pétain stepped in as our leader and promised us a new France, new dignity, independence under Germany.

  ‘Have you heard of Pétain? Yes, of course you have. Well, most people thought he was a saviour. No one knew what to do and he seemed to have the answers, and everyone assumed that Germany was going to defeat England in months as well, and just thanked their stars that our part of France had escaped occupation, thanks to Pétain. And of course all our news was censored and controlled. I must have heard a hundred people in this village saying well now at least the war was over, and this part of France was still free, and now we could start trying to rebuild France. All rubbish, of course, but no one had the heart, the faith or the information to believe anything else. That’s what that sense of utter defeat and despair does to you.

  ‘Only those who were already politicised had any notion of resisting. There wasn’t any organised resistance, of course, not in the beginning, but people like your father were in action in any way they could be. Luis and Elise just seemed to carry on the same activities, with no change except that as well as helping Spaniards, they gradually began producing documents for people fleeing the Germans, trying to get over the border to Spain, where ironically they would be safe. Elise became a real expert.’

  He paused. ‘Would you like to see some of their old tools?’

  Madeleine had been lost in his story, and the sudden question startled her.

  ‘Tools for forging documents?’

  ‘Yes indeed. Look!’

  He manoeuvred himself out from the table and pulled down a tin from the top shelf in the corner of the room. Dust covered the lid of the tin, and he sneezed, then blew the dust on to the floor. It was an old, faded biscuit tin, and he brought it over to Madeleine.

  ‘Take a look,’ he invited.

  Madeleine stared at the box. Then she gently lifted off the lid, which was only lightly pushed down. Inside were four wooden ink stamps, two round and the others rectangular. She picked them up and handled them reverently, and saw they were official police stamps, two marked Ville de Montpellier and two marked Ville de Marseille.

  ‘Are these real?’ she asked in an awed voice.

  ‘Copies,’ replied Philippe. ‘But good ones. If you smudged the ink a little when making the stamp it would pass for the real thing. They used towns some distance from here because the local police would be less familiar with the style of documents they produced. They would type letters authorising travel, and stamp them, and of course, most important were the identity cards. See, there are some cards below.’

  Madeleine lifted out the stamps, and below were some blank cards with Carte d’Identité printed on the top, the identity cards which had never existed in France before 1940, but which the Germans had imposed. There were sections for writing in all the relevant personal information, such as height and hair colour, and, despite the obligatory photo, more detailed information like shape of nose and face.

  ‘These are real, I think,’ said Philippe. ‘I wasn’t party to what they were doing, but by 1942 the Resistance had a good system going for “acquiring” – stealing – what they needed. The cards needed to be genuine, because by then the controls were getting tighter and tighter. But the Resistance had cooperation by then. The people had learnt to hate the Vichy regime, and all that old love of Pétain was dead.’

  Madeleine placed the tools of her mother’s resistance work carefully back in the box.

  ‘You found these still in the flat after the war? Nobody lived here meantime?’

  ‘As it happened, no. But the only reason they got left behind was because the stamps had changed, and these were old ones. There was a lot of other stuff, special inks and all sorts, but everything that could be important in creating more documents was passed on to another cell.’

  Madeleine sat for a moment, visualising her mother sitting at this table, reproducing documents with painstaking delicacy, perhaps while she was at school. Presumably she had gone to school? She asked Philippe.

  ‘Oh yes, you were in my school, one of my pupils! I taught you to read and write, although your mother had already taught you a great deal before you came, so you were the star of my class. You used to tell all the other children what you heard on Radio London. I used to come here to listen to the BBC broadcasts with your parents, because I didn’t have a radio set, and you were often allowed to stay up to listen as well. I used to wonder whether you should really be telling the other children what you heard, but Luis used to say most of the village was listening in secret anyway, so what did it matter. By then the tide had changed – people were mostly only paying lip service to the Vichy regime, and waiting, hoping for things to change. The proudest man in the village was an old fisherman whose son was fighting with the Free French under de Gaulle in North Africa. The boy was actually a merchant seaman who had landed up in Morocco, and no one was actually sure he was really fighting, but we’d got to the stage where people wanted to believe it, at least!

  ‘So there we were just surviving, but your father was coming increasingly under suspicion by the authorities. He protected himself by continuing to do work for the same newspaper he’d worked for before the war in Perpignan, which was now a Vichy mouthpiece. Then came the news in November 1942 that the Germans were moving in to take over from the Vichy government. They were scared by now of the
possibility of an invasion from North Africa, and wanted to secure this coast. We all knew things were going to get much tougher, and that’s when things really did get much tougher between your parents.’

  ‘I won’t go, Luis! I won’t go!’

  ‘Elise, my love, you know you have to! This village is going to be overrun by German militia, and our work is too well known. And you’re English!’

  ‘Half English!’

  ‘Semantics! Everyone here knows you were brought up in England. It’s bad enough being Spanish, but there are so many of us here now that I can probably pass. But you – you would be arrested straight away. We have to think of the children, Elise. If we get you over the border then you can go to the British Embassy in Barcelona. God knows, we’ve helped enough other people to do it! And they’ll get you home.’

  ‘And you? What are you going to do?’

  ‘Well I can’t go into Spain, that’s for sure!’ Luis’s smile was grim. ‘I’ll stay here, and keep on working. Enric or one of the others will find me a safe house, I know.’

  ‘Luis, no! You never fought Franco! I know you’ve felt you can’t go back into Spain, but they’re not actually looking for you. Your battles in Spain happened so long ago, two years before the Civil War even started. Why should they be looking for you now? Surely you could come with us to Barcelona!’

  ‘No, Elise. It’s the same people running Catalonia now who were running it in 1935. Then they had been elected, and we could get rid of them the same way, but now Franco has given them all positions of power, and they’ve been told to keep us damned Catalonians under control. I can’t run the risk of going into Barcelona. There are too many of them who would recognise me, and my name is on file.’ He paused, and reached out to touch Elise’s cheek.