Rosie's War

by Rosemary Say

  For some reason they were not satisfied with us. We were taken to a cold shed and strip-searched by two fearsome women. One of the customs officers came over to the shed. He leant against the wall, languidly smoking as he watched. When the women were finally satisfied that we were not carrying any secret coded messages or military plans (or whatever it was they were looking for), they ushered us back onto the train bound for Barcelona. Just what would have happened to both of us if they had discovered the cigarette messages for the Free French in London, I don’t know.

  Frida was unusually silent and morose throughout the whole journey into Spain. For her this was a terrible return. She had last been here in 1937 when she had fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, driving an ambulance presented by the Scottish miners to the Frente Popular and working in a radio station. She now had to confront the new Spain of Franco. I know that she was worried in case the authorities somehow checked up on her past activities. She might be detained here indefinitely as an undesirable.

  I had not been to Spain before and did not know what to expect but I was still shocked at what I found as we came into Barcelona. The city was in ruins, with bombed buildings everywhere. As soon as we got off the train we were accosted by ragged, hungry people with fear in their eyes as they quietly begged for money.

  Mr Randall had told us in Marseille to make our way immediately to the British Consulate. He had assured us that they would arrange everything for our return to England. It was on our arrival at the Consulate, however, that the trouble started. Admittedly, we didn’t quite have the look of guests at a garden party. I, in particular, must have been a real sight: dressed in a headscarf and shabby clothes, I was struggling with my two large suitcases and matching hatbox. But we certainly did not expect to be blocked by the porter at the entrance and ushered brusquely like tradesmen around to the side, despite a large notice quite visible behind him directing people through the hall to the British Repatriation Office.

  After a short wait we were shown into a small office and met by a pompous consular official who neither smiled at nor greeted us. Dressed in a gentlemanly pin-stripe suit, he listened to our story in undisguised distaste and examined our passports carefully. He was out of the room for quite a while, presumably conferring with a colleague, and he returned with an official-looking form and a wad of pesetas.

  ‘Well, young ladies, I have the names of a couple of good hotels here. You shouldn’t have a problem in getting a room for the night.’ He wrote the details of two hotels on a scrap of paper and handed it to us.

  ‘We’d like to get you to Madrid as soon as possible,’ he continued, without looking up. ‘On tomorrow night’s train, preferably. You’re both bona fide British citizens, so our people there can arrange your onward travel to England. Now, if you would just sign here to say that you have received money from us.’

  We signed his form without bothering to read it. He ushered us to the door as if hurrying to be rid of us.

  ‘The sleeper to Madrid has very good first-class couchettes, I think you’ll find. Oh, as for refunding the money, that will be arranged by HMG as soon as you reach London. Goodbye.’

  Perhaps these parting remarks about London were his supercilious way of comforting us. If this was their intention, then they had the opposite effect upon Frida. I could see her trembling with anger, her pent-up distress at being back in Spain barely under the surface. She turned to the official with an icy stare.

  ‘We’ve managed to get this far travelling third class. That’s how we mean to continue. Goodbye.’

  We both burst out laughing when we got outside. At the station we found that we would, in fact, have to wait a couple of days before we could get tickets for the Madrid train. Ignoring the recommendations of the dreadful official, we booked in at the Hotel Internacional, an old and noisy place in the middle of the city.

  We deposited our luggage there and went out to see Barcelona. La Rambla, the wide street running down the centre to the port, was crowded and colourful, with the first spring flowers on sale. The shops were full of food. If a visitor could ignore the bomb damage that was all around, they might easily think that life here was not nearly as depressing as in France. We soon realized, however, that the prices were exorbitant. It was difficult to imagine how the ordinary citizen could afford to buy anything.

  We had a meal in a large restaurant down by the port. It was delicious and cost the earth. Still, we were saving money by staying in a cheap hotel and not travelling first class. But by the end of the meal we were both uncomfortable and wanted to leave: people were constantly coming to the window of the restaurant and simply staring at what we were eating.

  We had to wait around in the city for two days. We were both quite subdued in our moods. I think that Frida was finding it very disturbing being back in Spain. While for my part, I simply wanted to be on the move again homewards. We stayed quietly at the hotel for most of the time, sitting on our beds reading. On the second day we made an excursion to a park on a hill from where you could look down on the whole city.

  That night we had a long and very uncomfortable journey to Madrid. Our reception on arrival at the British Embassy the following morning was as frosty as the one in Barcelona. Again the porter looked somewhat aghast at our bedraggled clothes and luggage as we tried to enter the main door. He seemed reluctant to allow us inside the building at all.

  At least this time, however, the official dealing with us was friendlier than the pompous ass in Barcelona. She was a young woman who could not have been much older than I. We were again given a daily allowance by the embassy on the promise that we would repay every penny on our return to England. They arranged for us to stay at a rather fine place called the Hotel Mora. We decided not to raise any objections to their choice.

  I hoped against hope that we could leave this sad country as quickly as possible. We knew from the embassy that we would have to wait a few days before we could get a train to Portugal. But how many? Train tickets were precious because of the shortage of coal and the damage to rolling stock as a result of the Civil War.

  One important thing that the British officials here and in Barcelona failed to do was to inform their superiors in London that we had arrived in Spain. We didn’t know this at the time. The result of this failure in communication had alarming results for our parents. During our stay in Marseille we had tried to stagger our weekly letters or telegrams home so that one set of parents would receive news every few days. They were regularly on the telephone to one another to swap the latest details. All communications from us ceased in late February, of course, when we left Marseille.

  Our parents were desperately worried at the sudden silence on our part. We had told them that we were leaving to go home via Spain but for an anxious couple of weeks they had no idea if we were safe. Nobody in Whitehall seemed to know where we were. Many years later I found my father’s frantic letters from this time to every official contact he could think of, trying to find out what had happened.

  Our brief stay in Madrid was as sad as I had feared that morning when we arrived. We spent one day squashed in a crowded train going to Toledo. It was an extraordinary contrast to step out of the poverty all around us and see the sheer beauty of the cathedral with its wonderful El Grecos and fabulous treasures. The sacristan who showed us round explained how careful everyone had been during the fighting not to damage the treasures which had been buried underground in safe hiding places. He was a small, unhappy man who kept shaking our hands and bemoaning the state of Spain.

  ‘There is so much misery, so much cruelty, so much intrigue. Even here in Toledo there are spies and people denouncing one another. Una tragedia, señoritas.’ We could only agree, especially when we saw the ruins of the Alcázar. This had once been the finest Moorish building in Spain and was now rubble.

  To our great relief the train tickets for Lisbon came through the next day. We chose to go third class and pocketed for other purposes the first-class trai
n money again supplied by HMG, reasoning that we were borrowing the money and could therefore do whatever we wanted with it. We made our journey to the border jammed tight on wooden slat seats. The windows were firmly shut against the cold evening air. There was an overpowering smell of garlic and rancid oil building up in this unventilated atmosphere.

  ‘Frida, for once no more tragic war stories on this journey, if you don’t mind.’

  She nodded vaguely in agreement. We had made our introductions to our fellow passengers and were by now all sharing food and drink. But I could see that Frida was itching to get away and talk to other passengers about the Civil War, bringing the harrowing stories back to me.

  ‘Why don’t we have some music,’ I quickly suggested, trying to forestall her.

  She agreed and we asked our companions to sing some songs. They did this with great gusto and much handclapping and finger-clicking for the flamenco tunes. A rather wizened old man in the corner seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of cold red wine for the compartment. It was all rather jolly. At last the large woman sitting opposite (who didn’t seem to have a tooth in her head) beckoned to me to sing: ‘Canción inglesa, canción inglesa.’

  I tried to think of something suitable and gave a rather feeble rendition of ‘Early One Morning’. Frida followed with ‘Drink To Me Only’. While we were both good violinists we had rather weak voices. Our efforts were met with polite and muted applause. We seemed to have succeeded in deflating the febrile atmosphere of the carriage in about five minutes flat.

  ‘A sea shanty,’ I whispered to Frida. ‘That’ll restore English prestige!’ I was right. We started with ‘What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor?’ and carried on with ‘Blow the Man Down’. I was by now inspired and launched into ‘Spanish Ladies’. Soon even the old man with the wine was humming away with us.

  At the border we said our goodbyes. We were pleased that after the sadness of our journey through Spain we were leaving that country laughing and singing with our Spanish fellow travellers. We then had more lengthy immigration and customs formalities to face, including another strip-search, but at last we boarded a train bound for Lisbon. We journeyed through a land that seemed to have stopped in time. Peasants in colourful clothes went barefoot in the fields. Muleteers ambled along wearing capes of a deep blue. The villages were bright, clean and toy-like in the sunshine.

  Once in Lisbon we again went to the British Consulate with its ubiquitous British Repatriation Office. A nervous man attended to us. He had a sheaf of official papers in front of him.

  ‘We’ve been expecting you. And in fact, Miss Say, your father has already arranged payment for your air fares to the United Kingdom.’

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ I said with a broad smile. ‘When do we go?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m afraid that payment doesn’t guarantee you a definite seat.’

  ‘But you’ll surely be able to get us on a plane soon?’

  ‘Hopefully,’ he said, looking rather uncomfortable. ‘Now, I’ll advance you some money. And we have arranged for you to stay at this hotel.’ He handed me a small card with the name ‘Nova Pensão Camoes’ printed on it.

  I was rather taken aback by the whole interview. I had half-guessed that my father had been beavering away on my behalf, probably since war had been declared over two years before. I recalled that he had contacted the British Consul in Marseille back in 1940 just before the Germans had overrun France, in an effort to get me out of the country. But I had hardly expected to arrive in Lisbon to find the last leg of our journey already sewn up by him courtesy of BOAC!

  It was not until after his death in 1958, when we were sorting out his papers, that I realized the full extent of my father’s efforts on our behalf in those months. He was to tell me very little about his activities after my return to London. That was his way. Among his papers I came across a large buff envelope marked ‘Pat’s Journey’. It was full of carbon copies of letters sent to a whole range of organizations – the Red Cross, various US and British government ministries, banks and airlines. From his desk at the Admiralty he had excelled himself in writing to everyone with the tiniest bit of influence asking them to do what they could for me. I discovered that not only had he paid over £72 for our airfares from Lisbon (nearly £3,000 in today’s money), but he had also persuaded the Air Ministry in London to give us some form of priority for our air passages back to the United Kingdom. He and Frida’s father had both given written assurances that we were anxious to get back to Britain in order to join up.

  He had stoical perseverance on my behalf. One letter to a colleague at the Admiralty told of his delight that:

  … you have been able to obtain some firm news of your boy … [that] … means so much to worried wives and mothers in these distressful days. Unfortunately we still have no news of our two girls waiting at Marseilles for repatriation.

  Just a few days later, with the information that we were on our way home, another Admiralty colleague wrote: ‘What grand news and may I soon catch up and find myself able to tell you equally good tidings of my stepson.’ There was an element of gentle one-upmanship in all this correspondence which made me laugh and cry as I read it that evening at my parents’ home.

  Not long after the discovery of all my father’s patient work I spoke to Shula about her father’s activities during her imprisonment. She told me that after her arrest in Paris as a British national, he had gone every day to their local police station to ask for news of his daughter. He had subsequently disappeared to his death in a concentration camp. Both our fathers had cared deeply in their own ways and in their own vastly different circumstances.

  Frida and I had five days in Lisbon and we were able to unwind a little. It was early March and already quite warm. As in Madrid, the shops were full of expensive food and goods which ordinary people couldn’t begin to afford. But apart from that, the contrast with this city was startling: quite simply, there was none of the detritus of war. Even under their dictatorial regime, the people here seemed to be more relaxed than anywhere else we had been.

  We were busy for all five nights. On the Sunday evening we were invited to a dance given by a Galician Club where the members came from the north of Spain. Frida was particularly interested to hear the songs and see the dances of this little-known part of the country. She was doomed to disappointment: the young people, all dressed in their best Europeanized clothes, were only interested in jazz and swing. The other nights we were wined and dined extravagantly by consular officials. For the first time, language was a barrier for us, although Frida seemed to manage by gabbling ‘Spanish like a Cockney with a cold,’ as she put it.

  It was all very pleasant but I began to wonder if this slightly unreal socializing might not begin to wear a bit thin if we had to wait as long for an aeroplane seat as we had done in Marseille for permission to continue our journey. I sent a card to Marek, and Frida and I posted the numerous letters that our friends in Marseille had given us. We also made fruitless enquiries on their behalf at the various relief organizations.

  Up to now my thoughts had been dominated by the desire to get home. I had thought little about actually living again in wartime England. Walking down from the hotel one day I noticed an office marked Distressed British Subjects’ Charity Shop. Half an hour later I came out loaded down with shoes, pyjamas, coats, silk nighties, jumpers and trousers. I had spent just about every penny saved from our third-class travel on luxuries for friends, family and me. Later that day I even bought a pineapple! I was determined to show my father, in particular, that I hadn’t made a mess of things by staying in France after war was declared.

  As it turned out, there was no need to worry about being stuck in Lisbon. At midnight on 9 March we made our way to the airport at Cintra. I thankfully shed my mounds of luggage at the check-in. We walked out in the darkness to the runway, guided by torchlight. As we approached the steps of the camouflaged and blacked-out aeroplane Frida pointed at the next berth. It was a Lu
fthansa. I could make out some German words being shouted.

  This was my first flight and I found the whole experience marvellously glamorous. We tried to find a chink at the windows so that we could see the last of the Lisbon lights before total darkness engulfed us but the blackout precautions were too good. Despite the noise from the engines, I slept soundly for a few hours. It was in a very misty dawn that we finally stepped off the plane and quickly piled into a coach to drive for some time before disembarking at a large and rather ramshackle hotel in a remote Irish village.

  We were treated to a wonderful breakfast: eggs, bacon, sausages, warm brown soda bread and my first taste of black pudding. I was flabbergasted by the food available, although this was perhaps understandable in a neutral country. I wondered idly how long it would be before I saw, let alone ate, some of these things again.

  Frida and I wandered around after breakfast. We were in Adare, a charming model village set in rich agricultural land quite near to Limerick. Leaving Frida, I made straight for the few clothes shops. Their windows were full of good material, including tweeds and woollens. Unlike Madrid and Lisbon, the prices were affordable and all without the dreaded clothing coupons I had heard so much about in letters from my mother. At John Smith’s little drapery store I bought socks, stockings, a jumper, knitting wool (twenty-eight balls), tweed and even darning wool! The receipt read: £3. 13s. 4d.

  Frida and I were half-expecting to be looked on by the local populace with suspicion or even hostility. After all, we were a strange group of English people and Ireland was not on our side in this conflict. Indeed, it had been at war with us just twenty years before. I remembered how the people of Besançon had been told we were spies; and again in Vittel the word had gone round that we were German women staying at the spa for convalescence.