Not Just a Soldier’s War

by Betty Burton

  As soon as the old man had finished, Eve lost no time in getting back on the road again. The medics she had travelled with were miles ahead of her now. Had she known the route, she would have put her foot down in her eagerness to get going. The Paris stop-over had been a delay, the time spent fixing the engine had been another. But now, at last, Spain was just a few kilometres further along the road she was travelling. Kilometres, not miles; she had made the transition unconsciously. She smiled.

  Just before she reached the border, she stopped her vehicle to eat by the roadside, savouring the moment when she would show her papers and drive into the Republic of Spain.

  This is the beginning, she thought.

  This was where she would part company with her slum childhood and her factory job, guiding miles of firm fabric beneath flying needles, millions of stitches, year in year out. This was where she would leave behind her past as Lu Wilmott; leave behind Ray who had been more father than elder brother, and Bar Barney, who had been her innocent first love and who was now Ray’s wife.

  This was where idealism would not lead to dismissal from a no-hope factory job. From here on she would declare her ideals, a red flag if she so chose.

  This, she was sure, was the beginning of a life in which beautiful, urbane David Hatton, who could have had her virginity a long time before she gave it to Duke Barney, would play no part. David had given her a taste of the high life; he had found her magical and mysterious, but she was leaving him behind still not knowing her true identity.

  This was also to be the beginning of a life in which Duke Barney had no place. He had been secretive, passionate, ambitious. Even when they were lovers, neither of them had thought of anything as mundane as love. Theirs was – still was – a powerful passion. Although he was out of her life, Duke Barney was not a man to be easily dismissed.

  And this was where, no longer Louise Wilmott, she would start her new life as Eve Anders.

  Her papers must have been unexceptional, for she had no trouble crossing the border.

  Two

  Eve longed to see something of Barcelona, but her instructions were to pick up a lorry and take some young Spanish men and one woman to Albacete, as well as a soldier, Perez, who was going to Lerida and wanted a lift only as far as Tarragona. A tenth passenger she had to pick up outside the railway station: a French-Canadian in civilian clothes carrying a military kit-bag, François Le Bon.

  Perez, who had been sitting up front, handed over the route map and relinquished the passenger seat to the bilingual Le Bon. As they made their way further south, so the landscape changed. In the heat of the afternoon, Eve drew off the road into the shade of some trees and gave in to the necessity of siesta. When the sun was lower they set out again, but the air was still hotter than Eve had ever known. Her passengers, catching the through breeze, sang songs with stirring tunes, while Perez pored attentively over newspapers or snoozed.

  They stopped at Tarragona where Perez arranged for Eve to stay the night at his sister’s house. She had spoken very little to him on the journey, but in Tarragona he turned out to be a courteous man with a school-teacherish manner, or perhaps it was that he reminded her of a teacher at the night-school she had attended for several years. Perez’s sister, Señora Portillo, a teacher who spoke some English, ran a small hostal providing little more than accommodation, but Eve welcomed the atmosphere. Her husband Eduardo and son Paulo were away fighting.

  Eve was up at dawn the next day to give the lorry a check before setting out on the long journey. The Señora pressed upon them a parting gift of some home-made oaty biscuits and bottles of fizzy drink, la gaseosa, a new word for Eve’s rapidly expanding vocabulary. Knowing that they were headed south she asked them to enquire for Eduardo and Paulo, whom she had not heard from for weeks. They had been in the military barracks in Albacete, so perhaps they had not received her letters. ‘I ask everyone,’ she said. ‘It may happen that your paths cross; these things happen in war.’

  While the others were making themselves as comfortable as their rifles, gear and the wooden bed of the lorry would allow, François Le Bon spent a few minutes studying the map, as he had done the day before, then relaxed into the upright passenger seat. In minutes they were away, Señora Portillo standing forlornly in her yard, then returning the clenched-fist salute of the young people who were setting out as full of spirit as had the missing Eduardo and Paulo.

  The little hostal was about halfway to their destination, so they were prepared for the best part of another day on the road. Again François Le Bon took on the role of tourist guide and interpreter for their inexperienced driver. Although Eve was quite content with her own company, she enjoyed his comments on the passing scene, as he recorded items of interest in a loose-leaf notebook.

  ‘Zaragoza, the Balearics, Sierra Nevada, Andalucia, Granada,’ she said. ‘When I was a schoolgirl and geography was boring, I used to flip through the atlas looking for romantic names and Spain had such a lot of them. My imagination would be set on fire by them, especially the ones that ended with A: Yecla, Villena, Cieza, La Mancha, Andalucia, Granada.’

  The militia woman known as Marguerite, the leader, leaned into the cab and said something too fast for Eve to understand, except for ‘La Mancha’.

  Eve turned her head briefly. ‘No comprendo,’ she said, adding, with a smile, ‘Don Quixote was from La Mancha.’

  Marguerite shook Le Bon’s shoulder, indicating that he should interpret, then repeated her eager message.

  Le Bon understood. ‘She asks if you have been to La Mancha.’ Eve shook her head. ‘It’s where she’s from, from the town of Consuela. She says… extranjeros… ? foreigners? Yes… she’s saying foreigners always know about Don Quixote but they don’t know about the beautiful plains of La Mancha where the saffron crocuses grow.’

  Eve nodded. ‘Saffron… I understand.’ She took her eyes off the road long enough to smile at Marguerite and grasp her hand briefly.

  ‘Gracias.’ To Le Bon she said, ‘I wish I’d had the good sense to have read languages.’

  Le Bon tilted his head and took a long look at her. ‘What did you read?’

  She paused before answering, realizing that he was bound to think that she had been to university and that she half hoped he would, otherwise why had she said ‘read’ instead of ‘learned’? She felt irritated by her own crassness. ‘Nothing noteworthy.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said shortly, and closed his notebook. The silence that followed seemed all the more marked because the men in the back were all dozing.

  Eventually, she said, ‘Don’t stop writing, I didn’t mean noteworthy in that way. Sorry if I sounded prickly.’

  ‘It’s OK. It’s just me, I’ve got the curiosity of a cat. When I’m back home I write a column for my hometown paper. That’s what this is about,’ he indicated his notebook.

  ‘Oh. You’re reporting on the war for a local paper?’

  ‘No. Well, yes and no. I just send stuff back.’

  ‘And you write about the war?’

  ‘Not about the war; more about people, I guess.’

  ‘What they call human interest stories?’

  He smiled, ‘Yeah, they do, they do. Which is why I was so curious about how a young English beauty comes to be driving a truck to Albacete with such an assorted bunch as we are.’

  ‘Because about the only thing she could offer that was of any use, was to drive.’

  ‘Why on the side of the Republic?’

  She was taken aback. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’

  ‘To me yes, but not every English lady is on the side of the Republic. I heard one recently, doing a radio broadcast in English, describing how she felt about Spain, about life carrying on bravely with battles raging within ear-shot, how the fiestas and market-days carried on regardless, about the shining light – meaning Franco – that was guiding the youth of Spain.’

  ‘That’s just how they feel,’ she indicated Marguerite and the others dozing in the back, ‘from those s
ongs they were singing: pretty inspirational, guided by a shining light.’

  ‘She was Florence Farmborough, ever heard of her? A British fascist. On Sunday evenings she does radio talks from Salamanca, to English-speaking countries. She dedicates her account of her experiences in Spain “with pride and humility to Generalissimo Franco”.’

  ‘When I see a Western, I’m never on the side of the cowboys. The Indians were only fighting to keep their own land. So I would want to help Republican Spain, wouldn’t I?’

  By now they had almost reached Valencia, and started on that part of the journey on which Perez had said they would probably hear shelling. Battles were raging between the Nationalist and Republican forces just to the east of the road on which they were driving. At the beginning of the year, the Nationalists had held Madrid, then the Republicans had taken it back, but now the two sides were preparing to fight for the city once again.

  ‘Will we hear the guns from here?’

  ‘We might—’ François Le Bon didn’t finish his sentence.

  Eve didn’t know which registered first, the clean hole in the shattered windscreen, the sense of movement of air by her cheek or the crack of rifle fire. She jumped on the brakes. The vehicle slewed, turned round, tyres squealing to a sliding halt. Her heart was pumping twenty to the dozen, and her fingers were locked to the steering wheel like the claws of a perching bird. Le Bon flung open the passenger door and rolled out. In a second he had gone round to the back of the van. Marguerite was there before him.

  Eve crawled out of the passenger-side door and dropped to the ground. She had never felt so scared in her life. As she lay under the lorry, her pulse thumping in her ears, she became aware of the soldiers who were all silent and looking perplexed. Marguerite, her face red with anger, snatched a rifle from a very young soldier. The boy, looking stricken, suddenly rushed to some boulders and was sick. Le Bon helped Eve out from under the lorry. ‘OK?’

  ‘Yes. Is anyone hurt?’

  Franpois Le Bon rolled his eyes. ‘Not that you’d notice. Some of these youngsters think these things are toys. He was cleaning his rifle, had a bullet up the spout and he didn’t know… didn’t know. Didn’t know the bloody thing was loaded!’

  The boy soldier was humiliated before his comrades, the worst of punishments. Having bawled him out, Marguerite gave him a brief brush on his peachy cheek with her knuckles and told them all to get back into the truck.

  They continued on to Valencia, with hot air and the smell of oil coming in through the hole in the windscreen. Occasionally they caught a whiff of oranges, passing a pile of the bright fruits by the roadside, then another and another. Some piles were great mountains from which came the very pungent smell of orange oil and rotting fruits.

  ‘Why is all this fruit going to waste?’ Eve asked. Le Bon shrugged but turned to ask Marguerite.

  ‘They say they are no good.’

  They passed more and yet more oranges. When they saw a woman upending a cart and adding to an already enormous pile, Eve announced, ‘I’m going to stop. Can somebody ask?’

  Marguerite and Le Bon quizzed a woman. Yes, she said, the oranges were useless, rotting. Yes, there had been a very good crop, but there was no transport. The crop was for the juicing factory, and the juicing factory was waiting for the oranges, but the trucks did not come last season. There was no petrol… perhaps no trucks… perhaps no drivers. The woman knew only that the oranges had ripened and the trucks had not come. She said that she had orange concentrate for barter.

  They offered her half a bar of soap, five cigarettes and the rest of Señora Portillo’s oat biscuits. As an afterthought Eve climbed on to the van’s roof and dragged out some of the clothes.

  The woman, who had offered them the shade of the family grove for their siesta, went ahead of the van, leading her donkey, the square of carbolic soap slipped into the pocket of Lord Lovecraft’s flamboyant brocade waistcoat.

  Eve lay on her back resting but not sleeping, and in the sweltering heat, a little less powerful under the stumpy trees, she thought how strange it was that she had arrived with a medical team, was designated an ambulance-driver, yet here she was taking a siesta in an orange grove with members of the Spanish militia and a Canadian who wrote for a newspaper.

  She looked through the pattern of strong, shiny leaves which scarcely moved. Of all places – an orange grove. A place she would have imagined to be full of mystery, full of the kind of energy and magnetism she had discovered in the depths of a woodland in England. There, she had once been as close to perfect happiness as she ever expected to get. There, she had seen ecstasy personified. There she had taken part in a ritual in which she and Bar – the girl who had been her heart-bound friend – had wound a spell for themselves. As she watched the leaves and smelled the sweet perfume of the orange blossom, she visualized the two of them as they had been on her twelfth birthday, two naked girls winding themselves like silkworms inside a cocoon of their own virginal spells, then, face to face and clutching one another, they leaped into a deep pool of cool green water.

  When Bar had left their enchanted place and come to live in the city, she had wound another cocoon, but this time around herself and Ray and Ray’s baby. A cocoon for three. The baby was due soon, and its aunt was lying flat on her back in an orange grove. This suddenly seemed so significant that Eve needed to record it lest she forget the essence of this, her first truly deep thoughts about things she had left behind, or run away from.

  Although she had kept a diary since that summer in the birch woods with Bar, she had never felt so compelled to write as she did now. She withdrew from her haversack a leather-bound book of blank sheets as strong and light as air-mail paper. This was the only indulgence she had allowed herself when she was preparing to leave England, apart from the useless silk gown crushed into a sponge-bag. Paper was in very short supply here, so she was teaching herself to write tidily, clearly and minutely. It would not be easy, for it was in her nature to throw her heavy writing down on the page, dashing long crossings on Ts and finishing off with whips any letters that looped below the line.

  After about two hours’ rest they all returned to the lorry which was still uncomfortably hot. Before they set off again, Eve sat on the running-board where she could survey the whole scene: the orange mountain, Marguerite and the young members of the militia, and the valley in which neat orange groves were already growing next year’s crop. About the only thing she had known about the growing of oranges was that the trees could hold fruit and blossom at the same time – and now she had seen that.

  The boy who had fired off the bullet close to her face sat quietly, a little apart, rolling a green orange between his hands. He took off his cap and wiped the rim. He could hardly be out of school, no age to be a soldier. But he was at the age for idealism. Yes. She knew how it was to want to do something.

  François Le Bon came over and offered a cigarette. Eve hesitated. ‘I don’t like taking yours, they’re in short supply, aren’t they?’

  ‘You can say that again. It’s OK, you can give me one next.’ He leaned idly against the side of the hot van, looking across the lines of orange trees. ‘This is how I always imagined Spain must be. Just because of the marmalade. You know, Seville oranges. I just love marmalade, so I know I would love Spain.’

  ‘I think I know what you mean.’

  ‘I saw you writing.’

  Eve nodded. ‘Just for myself. There are things I don’t want to leave to memory in case they fade.’

  ‘Do you write a lot?’

  ‘Most days. I’ve been doing it since I was twelve… almost can’t help it now.’

  ‘Uh-huh, it’s like that. I don’t know what to do when I get near the end of a notebook and I can’t find anywhere to get another. I’ve even taken to turning the book round and writing across that way in red pencil.’

  ‘I suppose there’s a shortage of a lot of things.’

  ‘Quite a lot. Paper especially. I always buy essentials eve
n when I haven’t actually run out.’

  ‘You can tell I’m new to Spain, can’t you?’

  ‘You’re doing OK. None of us foreigners can call ourselves a veteran. The International Brigade wasn’t formed till last October. What gives you away is this.’ He touched the fold of her right arm just below where her shirt-sleeve was rolled up. She winced. ‘Truck-drivers here get one arm browner than the other, right-hand drive truck, right arm suntanned. You want to take care. Takes a while for us fair ones to harden up. Sun gets me on the back of the neck. I guess I could do with one of those caps like they wear in the Foreign Legion. I carry a tin of cooking soda and a little bottle of water. Let me put some on for you?’

  The cooking soda was cool. She liked Le Bon with his taciturn, unshakable manner. She liked Marguerite with her rolled-up sleeves, her neckerchief and tassled military cap. She liked the young soldiers, Jose, Diego, Miguel, Cip, Juan, Andreu and Marco, the careless boy.

  ‘I was writing about the waistcoat, I was told it once belonged to Lord Lovecraft.’

  ‘“Lord Lovecraft’s Waistcoat” – a play in three acts. Is there a story?’

  ‘Not really. I stopped over in Paris on my way here, to pick up a van and some clothes from one of the aid committees. The waistcoat stood out like a parakeet at a barn owl show.’

  Had that happened only days ago? It seemed to be weeks since she had spent the evening sorting clothing in the O’Dells’ Paris flat.

  The soldiers were dropped off at a depot on the outskirts of Albacete. As the men were off-loading their gear and the bottles of concentrate, Marco hurriedly pushed a little package into her hand. ‘Abuela, Abuela,’ he said, and was gone.

  Le Bon examined the little kerchief. ‘Abuela means grandmother… I guess she must have made it for him. You’re not Roman Catholic, then? It’s the Sacred Heart. On a piece of cloth like this, it becomes a kind of talisman, lucky charm, worn close to the breast for protection.’