Not Just a Soldier’s War

by Betty Burton

‘I saw her speak to you at that conference. I was in the visitors’ gallery, opposite where the reporters were seated.’

  ‘Doesn’t that mean anything at all?’

  ‘You surely don’t mean Fate, David.’

  ‘Maybe not, but we have constantly been lost and found. Don’t let us lose one another this time. Believe what you like about me, the one true thing is that I do love you.’

  ‘All that I was saying is that I wish that I could be part of it.’

  Anything else they might have said was stopped when a couple of women Eve knew came into the room and sank gratefully into low chairs. ‘Hi, Eve. Have you seen Ozz? He wants you to go to that Marx Brothers film, I think.’

  ‘Oh, right. I’ll try to catch him before he goes out again.’ She could see from David’s expression that he expected her to say something about Ozz. Why should she?

  David stood up, his face as rigid as his back. ‘I’d better leave, then.’

  * * *

  It was all so easy with Ozz. Their relationship uncomplicated by sex, they were free to get close to one another and be honest. She told him the whole story.

  ‘He would never be able to understand that even though I hated the surroundings in which I was born and bred, I’m not trying to rise above them.’

  Ozz said, ‘You are touchy about it, though.’

  ‘Of course I’m touchy about it. I’m touchy because I had to leave home to be me.’

  ‘Same reason I had to, sweetheart. The world’s not ready for us yet.’ He passed her his cigarette. ‘I see you’ve got the old yellow finger again.’

  She drew on the cigarette and didn’t hand it back. ‘Blame Alex. I’ve decided it has to be cigs or vino, and vino sends me to sleep.’

  ‘Are you going to see him again?’

  ‘No. One thing I’ve always been able to decide – and that’s when something is over, it’s over.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t mind him for the odd roll in the hay?’

  ‘He’s not the sort, Ozz.’

  ‘Sweetheart, there’s times when I wonder if you should be let out alone. Everybody’s the sort.’

  ‘Good old Ozz. What will I do if you ever take a hair-pin bend too fast?’

  ‘I ain’t one of them slick bastards in black leather and riding britches – saving your presence, ma’am – I come from the boots and corduroy bags school of driving.’

  ‘Good. I thought, if I have to leave this place, I might like to try Australia.’

  He paused before responding. ‘And we are going to have to leave this place, Andy. You know that as well as I do.’

  ‘That’s defeatist talk.’

  ‘That’s realism, sweetheart, and you know it as well as I do. Don’t mean we shouldn’t keep on keeping on.’

  She did know. It wasn’t hard to see that, with all of northern Spain in Nationalist hands, a shipping blockade and no aid from any government except Russia, it would be hard for the Republic to survive.

  * * *

  Ozz Lavender thought about Andy as he negotiated the hair-pin bend with a full load of ammunition.

  She was fantastic. If he hadn’t been given this letch for athletic bodies that were like his own, she’d be just the sort of a girl Mam would have taken to her heart. He missed his mam, really missed her. Life’d be OK if he could take Andy home and say, Hey, look, no sex attached, but she’s the big potato in my life. He hadn’t heard from the Old Man lately. What had he made of the bull’s ear? Would he believe that his school-teacher boy took it off himself, or would he think it had been a fix?

  Another heart-stopping bend in the road took all his concentration. It was all right joking about these bastards, but a drop like that wasn’t a joke. He kept as far over as he dared without actually scuffing sparks off the wheel-hubs. These narrow passes scared him shitless. The road widened a bit. He made a thumbs-up sign to the driver of the following lorry – he’d be scared shitless too. Awesome country, spectacular views if only you dared to look down at the plains far below. Back home he’d done a bit of driving into the outback, but back home you weren’t carrying a bloody great load of ammo.

  If his Old Man didn’t believe his story, at least none of his brothers had ever given him a bull’s ear as a keepsake. But they gave him grandchildren. Perhaps he should marry a widow out here and take her back to the Lavender place. It was a great life for kids and, Christ knew, there were enough of the poor little bastards here. That was quite an idea. An older woman with three or four kids, one who wouldn’t much care if they didn’t share a bed so long as he took care of them. It could be nice. He’d go back to teaching, have his own kids in the schoolhouse. He’d take up coaching. He’d bring some promising kid along and get him ready for the 1940 Olympics, no, there wouldn’t be enough time. Train up a kid about fourteen now, he’d be in the Aussie Juniors at sixteen, international hurdler by twenty, and ready for the ’44 Olympics.

  He had never before let himself speculate about his future. It wasn’t worth it. You might disappear in a cloud of smoke tomorrow.

  Neither Ozz nor any of the other five drivers in that convoy heard the sound of the bombers of the Trechuelo squadron above the noise of their own labouring engines. The detonations were heard ten kilometres across the valley as the trucks exploded their way down the sheer drop, taking a huge section of the road with them.

  Fourteen

  Ken Wilmott and his men were now part of the force preparing to hold a strong point at Gandesa. On a halt on the journey to the front he again met up with David Hatton. They were both waiting for drinking water from the same tanker.

  ‘Captain, we do keep bumping into one another. Nice to see you. Are you OK?’

  For a moment Ken Wilmott was nonplussed by the likeness to Richard Hatton. ‘Hey, Dave Hatton.’

  ‘Always turn up like a bad penny.’

  ‘I heard about your brother. I was sorry to hear… blinking shame, he was a good chap.’

  ‘He said pretty much the same about you. Said you and your sister braved a blizzard to get through to the hospital. Saved his life and then he went and…’

  ‘Don’t blame him. Don’t even try to understand. I thought about it when I heard. Look how fair-skinned he was, like you. You have to take care with sunburn and snowburn. There were some Swedish volunteers with us for a while – God, you should have seen them, blisters all over. Your brother was at Belchite, wasn’t he? Well, there you are, the heat there was beyond belief. I sometimes think a lot of us went off our rockers for a while.’

  ‘Yeah, could be. Like you said, he was a good chap.’

  ‘Still taking pictures, then?’

  ‘I’ve got leave to come along with you chaps. I’m doing some factual films, rather like the Voice of America. Short pieces, you know the kind of thing. I did have some notion about enlisting. You know, take on Rich’s place kind of style, but I’d make a bloody terrible soldier. This stuff helps swell the coffers.’

  ‘Trouble is, our side doesn’t appeal to the supporters with the biggest penny.’

  ‘We make up for it in numbers.’

  ‘That’s a fact.’

  They were whistling in the dark. It was evident at every turn that the enemy was supported by every machine of war, and seemingly endless thousands of men. Even so, there was always the knowledge that the volunteers of the International Brigade were fighting for a cause, and not for the money.

  Ken liked the chap. He’d probably been to Eton and all that, yet he always stood around with the blokes and mucked in. He didn’t realize that he was a fish out of water – the blokes did, but they liked and respected him for working on their own newspaper, The Volunteer. ‘My brother Ray used to believe that if you looked after the pennies the pounds would take care of themselves. I hated his blinking ideas then, because we were so bloody poor I could never wait to spend every penny I could lay my hands on. I was a bugger for clothes – liked dancing you see.’

  For a second, David had a vivid image of Lu and her brot
her in that little back-street house, transforming themselves to go dancing. They were the two younger ones, he knew that, and the elder brother had been like a father to them. He needed to know everything about her if he was going to understand her. She was quite right, he really didn’t understand people like her. Before he found her in Spain, he had thought about meeting her, courting her, perhaps marrying her, but finding her had killed off those fantasies because she did not want him. Yet, now that he knew who she was, he was more entranced than ever. He did not want to accept that she would always reject him.

  ‘I heard this story about an extremely small mining village in Wales – no work, no hope of it, kids half-starved, no money for food – yet, apparently, they made a collection and raised two pounds. That’s a lot of money in farthings and ha’pennies. I think about that when I wonder whether I should take up a rifle.’

  ‘Somebody has to let people know what it’s like out here.’

  They paid close attention to securing the caps of their flasks. This might be all the water they would get until after dark, and the Aragon plain would be searing hot.

  ‘Your sister is doing that; she writes some marvellous stuff.’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘I was with her in Madrid not too long ago.’ He tried to sound as though it was a casual thing, but he needed to talk about her. This opportunity of talking to her brother was God-sent.

  ‘I didn’t realize that you knew her. How is she?’

  ‘As beautiful as ever. We shared a plate of chilli-beans, then she left to go on duty.’

  Ken Wilmott smiled affectionately. What did he mean exactly, ‘as ever’? She hadn’t said anything about knowing the other brother during the time they were at Benicasim. The two Hattons were almost identical, she couldn’t not have noticed, yet she didn’t say. But then, there was a lot that he didn’t know about her. ‘Have you seen her in that bloody great lorry? She’s amazing. I could hardly believe it, she couldn’t drive pram wheels when she was a kid.’

  ‘Was she pretty then?’

  ‘Lu pretty? I wouldn’t know, I used to call her Lanky-legs, that made her mad.’ He trailed off. Damn! He had called her Lu. Taking a last swig of water he said, ‘Sorry, old son. Have to get back to my blokes.’ Sod it! He had let her down. He’d told her that she had no need to make him promise a thing like that. As far as he was concerned, she was Eve Anders, and their life before Spain was nobody’s business but their own. ‘Good luck, Dave.’

  ‘Good luck, Captain.’

  * * *

  At first Eve had taken Alex with her whenever possible because she felt so sorry for her. Alex had become approachable. Eve had grown to like her once she realized that under the self-possession was a woman as uncertain and vulnerable as herself.

  In their new close association, with their earlier positions of responsibility reversed, they talked their way through the thickets of assorted prejudices. A thing that surprised Eve was Alex’s confession: ‘I envy your composure. Confidence like yours must be bred into your bones. Mine was painted on at finishing school when I was seventeen. You were doing real work when you were seventeen.’

  When just the two of them were working together, Eve no longer felt constrained to deny her early life. ‘It was real, all right. My finishing school was the famous one of Hard Knocks.’

  ‘It didn’t do a bad job, you know.’

  ‘Do you know what I was doing about a year ago?’ She smiled at the memory. ‘I was standing in front of my employer’s desk as he told me that I was dismissed for organizing a trades union, and that I should never work in my home town again.’ She laughed outright. ‘How right he was! I told him that he couldn’t dismiss me because I had already handed in my notice.’

  Dissimilar as their upbringing was, it had given them both the conviction that an outward display of deep emotion was embarrassing. But war brings about drastic changes in disposition.

  ‘Did your school of hard knocks teach you how one is supposed to mourn? Mine didn’t, at least I never came across it. I suppose that we girls preparing for our night out in gardenias and white satin were not expected to think of anything that might crease our flawless brows.’

  ‘When my mother died, my grief was mixed with such anger… I was so angry with her. Do you feel that?’

  ‘Yes, yes. It’s so bloody useless too. I want to kill him for leaving me like this. He didn’t have to be a bloody sacrifice for such a bloody useless cause.’

  Wasn’t that what made you fall for him? A man who was everything you were supposed to reject?’

  She smiled faintly. ‘Maybe I was ready for him. But, God knows, I wasn’t ready for this. Are you still angry with your mother? I mean, if you think this is a bloody intrusion, just say so.’

  ‘Give yourself a chance, Alex. If you ask me, when somebody you’re very close to, OK, somebody you love, is suddenly ripped out of your life, it’s a terrible thing. Terrible.’

  Tears moistened Alex’s eyes, and she appeared not to know what to do about them except to bat her eyelids. She nodded.

  Eve avoided looking directly at her. ‘I didn’t stay angry with my mother for very long, but I have stayed angry. She died because she was a woman, because she was a poor woman, because she was a woman who fell in love with an unsuitable man and because women like my mother are expendable. Nobody in the whole country ever cared about women like my mother – only her children, and we didn’t care enough.’

  For a while they sat quietly, staring ahead. Eve was surprised that she could still be so affected by her old grief. Alex’s tears were an embarrassment, and she looked to one side as she blotted them from the corner of her eyes. Eve laid a tentative hand on Alex’s arm. Alex did not move away. ‘Alex, if you can’t cry when somebody you love dies, then when can you cry? People like us will never wail and rend our clothes but…’

  Alex blew her nose and stretched her face. Turning to look directly at Eve, she said with a faint smile, ‘I think that’s all I can manage at this lesson. Could I ask you about your mother?’ Eve nodded. ‘Would it make her unhappy to see you doing what you are doing now?’

  ‘In some ways, yes. She would have liked to see me in mortar-board and gown, receiving a scroll at some famous university – and that still appeals to me. What would have pleased her is that I am not ruining my life over some man. She never said a word against my father, but his neglect of her and us was shameful to her. I think that she thought that she was to blame, that getting pregnant was her fault, nothing to do with him, my father. It’s just bad luck that men are made like that.’

  ‘You sound bitter.’

  ‘Do I? You should live in a street where every other house contains a woman hung about with a huge family – the results of the way men are made. There is contraception, but no one will tell the women. Where I lived, the women abort one another, you know.’

  ‘Where I lived, they went abroad, or to a surgeon in Harley Street, who would remove any kind of cyst from the womb for a three-figure cheque.’

  Eve returned Alex’s wry look. ‘The going rate where I come from is half-a-crown.’

  ‘My father was – is still, I suppose – a paedophile.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Men who gratify their sex urges with children. Perhaps it’s a middle-class male aberration. I know they do funny things at school.’

  ‘You mean child-molesters. I never heard the other word.’

  And so in the enclosed world of the cab, the two women gradually opened up to one another. They saw something unexpected and became closer than they would have imagined possible. They supported one another, and grew to appreciate qualities they had not been aware of for prejudice.

  * * *

  By July the Nationalists, having overrun Teruel, had reached the coast and effectively cut the Republic in two. Barcelona and Madrid were almost cut off from one another.

  The casualties on both sides were high, but in the Republic there were ever fewer replaceme
nts. Conscription could not equal the huge numbers of trained soldiers and airmen flooding in from nations supporting the fascists, and although medical teams, aid and volunteers still arrived in support of the beleaguered Republic, they were not enough. Even so, in July, a confident army began to assemble with military precision and in secret. The plan was a surprise offensive. The river Ebro, broad and fast-flowing, needed to be forded. Then the terrain was rocky, giving waiting ambulances cover whenever enemy planes were spotted. Pontoon bridges were floated under cover of darkness, bombed the next day and refloated again.

  The first troops to ford the great Ebro did so in rubber dinghies. Soon they were followed by more men, equipment, supplies and ammunition, which all went across on a pontoon bridge put in place with amazing speed.

  * * *

  ‘I say, aren’t you the girl who lifted me when I left Albacete last year?’

  Eve, on this journey driving a hospital supplies truck, looked up from her unloading. She connected the voice and face with her early days in Albacete. ‘I think so. Sister Smart, right?’

  ‘Actually, no. Smarty was the other one. I’m Haskell.’

  ‘Of course. Is your friend here?’

  ‘Typhoid. She was being sent back to England, but she didn’t make it. Dear old Smarty, she was a bloody good nurse. Terrible waste. We’d knocked about together for years.’ It wasn’t difficult to see through the off-hand manner, a stiff upper-lip could never distract attention from what was in the eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry. She seemed such a jolly person.’

  ‘Thanks. Yeah.’ Haskell straightened her back purposefully and rubbed her hands. ‘Okey-dokey. I’m told that you’re a pretty good general dogsbody. That right?’

  ‘I don’t like hanging around when I’m not driving. So tell me what to do.’

  ‘Grab some of that stuff and just keep bringing it in. It might look a touch chaotic, setting up shop always does, but it works. Can’t say I’m too keen on a cave, but it’ll be the first bomb-proof hospital I’ve worked in for many a long day.’ She guffawed. ‘If anyone had said two years ago that we’d be setting up an operating theatre in a cave… I ask you, in the twentieth century!’