by Betty Burton
So, having recently scrubbed and cleaned Santa Magdalena, the advance party started to convert the railway tunnel at Flix into an enormous ward lit by candles. Three operating tables were lit by electric light generated by ambulance and truck engines, but fuel was in short supply so some operations were performed by oil-lamp light.
Since the truck’s original driver was in no position to argue, Eve drove back across the river at one of the constantly shattered and rebuilt crossing points, and started once again to ferry supplies to the front.
* * *
On a morning after she had come across the Ebro under cover of darkness, Eve was in Madrid signing herself out for the two days’ rest-leave due to her, when the duty clerk said, ‘A man is waiting,’ adding confidentially, ‘GPU. An officer.’
‘How do you know he’s secret service?’
‘You think I don’t know? My home is Ukraine. For sure he is GPU.’
He sat on a low wall waiting for her. Impressive in his uniform, he was good-looking and appeared very desirable to a young woman whose libido could easily get the better of her good sense.
‘There is entertainment at taberna, you come, Eve?’ Taking her elbow he guided her to a nice-looking car painted camouflage green.
‘I was on my way to the cantina, I haven’t eaten all day.’
He helped her in and said something in Russian to the driver, who started the engine. ‘What is English to say pig leg, smoke pig-meat, is slice thin?’ Actions accompanied his struggle for the word.
‘Bacon? Ham?’
‘Is ham, yes. Is ham at taberna. I know… I take ham there. We eat there. You again teach some dances.’
‘Dancing in these clothes?’
‘These clothes I like. Women in pants, I like.’ He pursed his lips in a provocatively fake kiss.
She smiled at him, it was easy to smile at such an easy-going and persuasive man and pleasant to let somebody else take over for a short while. ‘I thought you liked women in silk dinner gowns.’
He grinned and put his arm about her shoulders, lightly, friendly, making no advances. ‘I like this woman many ways.’
Good as his word, they ate the most amazing tinned ham served by the proprietor of the small restaurant herself. There was only bread, fruit and wine to accompany it, but it seemed to be one of the best meals Eve had had in a long time. It was such a pleasure to be out with him, and an indulgence to spend the night with him at his hotel where there was soap and shampoo.
After such daily deprivation, breakfast consisting of a small amount of toasted bread and olive oil and plenty of orange juice became a kind of orgy when he produced a packet of Swiss chocolate and offered it to her a square at a time between his teeth. She lay back against the headboard, taking in his nice face with its alien features and noticing again how often he smiled. ‘Dimitri? Can I ask you something?’
‘Of course.’
‘Are you GPU?’
‘GPU? I am Dimitri, is all that I am. And happy lover. You want to do some more now?’ He broke off more chocolate, teasing her with it. ‘What for you ask about GPU?’
She snatched the chocolate, bit it in two and pushed the other half into his mouth. ‘I heard a rumour that you were and I wondered whether you had any pull. Pull? Influence? A friend of mine. I was going to ask whether you would be able to find out what has happened. GPU are reputed to know all the right people.’
He paused before responding, perhaps trying to decide whether the question was as casual as it sounded. ‘Most people like to make mystery. Your friend is English? Is volunteer brigade?’
‘An aid-worker. Driver like me.’
‘Is possible I could discover something. Maybe. I could try. Is she missing?’
‘Not she. He’s a man. An Australian. I haven’t heard from him in ages. I’ve tried all sorts of people. Last thing anyone seems to know is that he was taking ammunition up to the front just before it was overrun by the Moors. I just wondered… perhaps he has been taken prisoner, but they say the Moors take no prisoners.’
He did not respond to that speculation, as it was well-known that the Moorish mercenaries took no prisoners and treated no wounded. ‘Perhaps is not possible, but I try.’ Dismissing the subject, he said, ‘Now eat. I like for you to have fat here, and here, and also here.’
He was such fun, such a good lover, this was such a wonderful break from the ever-growing tension and stress of daily life as it now was. She had heard stories of soldiers, in the zone of a ferocious battle, without food for days, retreating and dispirited, eating the leaves of a tree reputed to lift the spirits and curb hunger pangs. As she returned to duty she felt that the effect of such a narcotic could never equal last night. In a world that wasn’t so set on curbing natural pleasures, she thought, people would be able to spend their lives enjoying one another. As things are now, people don’t value one another. If children were seen as the wealth of the next generation, which is what they are, how different everything would be. She imagined herself with a child of her own, perhaps living within an extended family. She smiled to herself – maybe not such a good idea with some of her grim-faced, censorious aunts and uncles.
As she drove out of Madrid, her mind slipped into thinking about home. How had those aunts and uncles who had despised her mother for having airs and graces, and who would have called Eve a ‘tart’ for sleeping with Dimitri, how had they managed to hold up their heads after the Mary ‘trouble’? The Good Name of the Family was their icon; it was what gave them the assurance that they were better than the rest. Perhaps they were, and it was her own values that were impoverished. Certainly, she had been an embarrassment to them the year before she left home. Mary, her cousin, Eve’s own age, had Gone off the Rails, with a marine who had a wife in the North of England. (Any man from the North was a bit of a foreigner; it was a hard and unknown country.) This must have happened before Eve had left home, as in Ray’s last letter he had said that Mary had ‘nice little twins, but nothing near as pretty as our little Bonnie. Mary’s gone back to the factory, and her mother is looking after the babies and cleans Barclays Bank in the morning for a bit of extra money now she can’t work herself.’ In that situation, it was always the grandmothers who stopped work, the nimble fingers of the daughters being able to turn out much more work which was paid by the piece.
How remote that life was now.
Her conscience prompted her to use her turnaround time to write home.
My Dears, all,
It did not matter that I forgot my own birthday, but to have missed the first birthday of my one and only niece does. At the moment, life is so hectic that, even with my pocket diary, I cannot remember where I was on that day in August. Not that I imagine she is wanting for yet another adoring female telling her how wonderful she is. I should like to send her something significant, but of course there is very little of anything. I had thought of sending her a box of the dusty dry Republican soil that follows the tyres of my truck on many of my journeys, but the Republic has lost enough already. So, I send her this beautiful set of buttons as a keepsake. Not Spanish, yet they tell a story, which I will tell now, and hope one day to tell you in person.
When I was in Paris on my way to Spain, I helped sort and pack some clothes sent out from England as comforts for refugees. Among these was a splendid waistcoat which the aid-worker recognized as once having been Lord Lovecraft’s. We were amused that such an exotic item should appear among the mounds of practical clothes. However, it happened that on a journey when I was transporting some young volunteers we stopped at an orange plantation – oh, so different from the strawberry fields which loomed so large in my young life. To me an orange grove is a wonderful place, blossom, dark-green glossy foliage and perfume. This was my first real encounter with a Spanish family, my Spanish almost non-existent and my ignorance of the country appalling, but they shared their meagre stew with us and were happy to do so even though their entire crop was rotting on the roadside for want of transport.
All that we could give was some of the clothes I was taking to the depot. The young mother appropriated Lord Lovecraft’s waistcoat – it was more suited to her anyhow.
Now to the buttons. They are, as you see, more like miniature works of art than mere waistcoat buttons. Also, they turn out to be currency in the market where everything has its barter price. I don’t know what the Spanish woman from the orange groves got for them, or who had exchanged them before I saw them, but there they were again, on a stall that had a greater assortment of items than the church bazaar. I must say that my heart leapt when I recognized them.
It’s a strange thing, but for the first time in my life I have a surplus of money. Plenty, in fact, for I get paid a decent wage but have little upon which to spend it. You see, it’s all barter, barter, and I have to confess that I do occasionally exchange one of your homemade cakes, perhaps for a supply of toilet paper, or some marvellous delousing shampoo. I can say that to get Lord Lovecraft’s buttons for Bonnie, I literally greased the stall-holder’s palm as I had a packet of butter that I had only that morning acquired in exchange for a toothbrush and half a lipstick.
I hope that one of you will make Bonnie a party frock and sew the buttons all down the front. How I would love to make the little dress myself. Do you remember how good I became at sewing fine fabrics? I couldn’t do it now, my hands are in a terrible state.
But this is my job. The ingrained oil, callouses and nails broken from all the loading and unloading, remind me that, however little my contribution is, I do it because it is perhaps the most important thing I may ever do. I don’t know how you view it from where you are, but you must surely see that Spain is being used as a practice ground. This war is a dress-rehearsal. If the fascists are not turned back in Spain, then they will not be turned. And those nations – our own being one – who refused to help the Republic, will regret that they behaved with such indifference to the future. Everybody goes to the pictures, so everybody must have seen Hitler who is surely mad as a hatter. He intends to take over the world. Most of my friends here believe that he could. Spain could still be our salvation, but time’s running out.
There are people trying to get this message over and I think if I were back home I would have to get on a soap-box in Hyde Park. What use would that be? So I stay here and drive my supplies trucks or transport injured men from the field-hospitals whenever there is a shortage of ambulance-drivers.
I have to chance whether this letter will be selected for examination and then arrive with you heavily censored. But I feel a need to say these things to you who are dearest to me so that you will understand why Ken and I will cling on to the bitter end. Disillusioned we may be, but we have seen the planes of the German Condor Legion raining bombs on civilians and know that huge numbers of Italian fascist soldiers have been brought in on the side of the Nationalists. Then there is Russia, pitting its tanks and guns against them.
Here in the city, we have seen the killing machines turned on schools and hospitals. They can wreak as much destruction and spill as much blood in a city as they may in a battle on some bare mountainside.
I may not send you these last few sheets, but I must write and if you do not get them now, then I shall send them from a place where you are sure to receive them. The dress-rehearsal is almost over, three big nations have tried out their weapons, their armies and air-raid plans.
* * *
Dimitri had not been able to discover where Ozz Lavender was. It was well into autumn before she heard that he had been killed. She overheard the news as just another item of gruesome gossip offered over a mug of coffee and a cigarette.
‘…they found that Australian driver, Ozz Lavender, well what was left of him, Ozz and a whole lot of others… they were carrying explosives. Direct hit on a mountain pass… couldn’t have known anything about it. Not enough left to bring back. I heard that they put what was left of the whole convoy into a single grave. Well, that’s what I heard…’
Eve was devastated by the news. She would miss him very much.
In total, their time together was not that much, yet they had packed so much into odd days and hours. She had come to understand something of what it must be like to live as two people, one the manly athlete, the other a pariah. When they didn’t see one another for long stretches at a time, she would often talk to him in her head, using his image as a sounding-board for ideas, or as a confessor for her guilts and ambitions. Ozz never judged.
For months now, she had lived with the starving and the dead and dying and it had been Ozz who had helped her keep her nerve by talking about the unspeakable sights and the gross misery instead of denying them. When she had said, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ he had given her a big bear-hug and said, ‘Ah, come on, sweetheart, you’re same as me – tough as old boots.’ But that was just what Ozz was not. Within the self-assured, bronzed and beautiful athlete, Ozz had been tender and vulnerable and alone.
Haskell was a pillar of strength in her stiff-upper-lip way. Unlike Ozz, Haskell never made sympathetic noises, her advice was, ‘Pull yourself together… Keep on keeping on… Swim for the shore.’ In her case the shore was alcohol. When Eve told her about Ozz, she said, ‘I’ve got the evening off. Go out and find some decent cognac and we’ll send a message home in the empty bottle.’ They had holed up in the nurses’ quarters. Eve had cried for Ozz, they had drunk the cognac and Eve slept like the dead until next morning and it was time to go back on duty. It was one way of coping.
Eve was on her way now to a children’s house that Helan Alexander was setting up in Murcia. Alex refused to call it an orphanage.
The power money gives you, Eve thought when she saw the place. Once Alex had decided on the project, there was nothing to stop her carrying it out. She had money in Switzerland, transferred it to Barcelona and bought the house, some distance north of Alicante.
‘Come and see.’ Alex seemed to be back on form, but she had changed. Perhaps she was not so arrogant, or perhaps it was that now she no longer had to take orders from her, Eve had lost her prejudices.
The house was large, with a great deal of white plaster and tiles, built round a rear courtyard with a glass roof. An iron-railed gallery ran round the first floor overlooking the courtyard which seemed to be filled with babies. ‘There!’
‘Christ, Alex! I never knew that you meant it to be on such a large scale.’
Down in the well of the courtyard, Eve looked into a score of makeshift cots containing little bags of bones. She had been born and bred among children who were dreadfully undernourished, often hungry, but she had never seen anything like these babies. It seemed impossible that they could live.
‘There is only so much one can do,’ Alex said. ‘We do it.’ There were cages of canaries and finches, and baskets of profusely flowering plants hanging by ropes overhead. ‘Stimulation,’ Alex explained. ‘I believe that seeing and listening to pretty things can only do good. These are all orphaned or abandoned.’
‘Are there older children as well?’
‘Oh, yes, I want you to meet them too. Did you manage to get leave to stay over a couple of days?’
‘I have the weekend, but I must be back in Madrid by Monday afternoon.’
In the kitchen three Spanish women chattered as they worked. Alex touched and hugged them briefly as they showed Eve the stove and the charcoal fire and the plate-rack as though these were modern conveniences. The perfection of the tiled surfaces attracted Eve as she thought of the dreadful draining-board and partition walls of her old home. How much easier it must be to keep sweet and clean, no scrubbing down with hot soda water in the constant battle against infestation.
‘Well? What do you think? You hold yourself so close, Eve, one can never tell.’
‘It’s a small miracle, Alex. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘You mean that? You can see that it’s working, can’t you?’
Eve thought how strange it was that a woman who, back in En
gland, had lived in the world of the rich and powerful Poveys, idle and pampered, remote and unapproachable to Eve’s kind, how strange that such a woman hung on her approval.
‘Of course it’s working, Alex. If you saved a child from drowning, you would get praised to high heaven. You are saving them by the dozen. Alex, you are amazing.’
Alex grinned, a rare sight. ‘I know, bloody amazing.’
‘Your husband would be pleased.’
‘Wouldn’t he just. Odd thing that, if they hadn’t murdered him, then this would not have entered my mind. There’s something about saving the lives of children, do you know what I mean?’
For a moment, Eve wondered just what the lives of these pathetic little babies were being saved for, but Alex was right; any human life was valuable, but a child’s life was an unknowable part of the future.
‘I want to set this place up so that, whatever happens to this country, the children’s house will survive. No politics, no race, no religion. Any sort and kind of kid can come – even if its name is Baby Franco. Now come and see the chickens – we keep them upstairs on the roof and a few on various balconies. It’s terribly sensible, no fear of them being taken by wild animals.’
Eve admired the nesting boxes and was at once transported by the smell of warm straw and feathers to the first time she saw live chickens. ‘Can I look in the nests?’ She slid her hand under a sitting hen and withdrew a warm egg.
‘How do you do that? They scare the pants off me with their beady eyes, and pecky beaks. You look as pleased as if you had laid the thing yourself.’
‘I was remembering.’
‘Of course, don’t I remember you being brought up on a farm?’
They strolled outside to inspect the goats.
‘We don’t keep them in the house, but I wonder whether we ought, they are so vital for those poor little stomachs. They shrink, you know, it’s terribly difficult to get the digestion going again. The body feeds upon itself, did you know that? That’s why their little limbs are down to skin and bone. I’ll tell you something, when I’m trying to get one to start taking an interest in the bottle, I look down at my tits and wonder what in hell’s name is the use of us women having to carry the bloody things around empty most of our lives. Fault in our design, don’t you think?’ She patted a kid as though it were a dog. ‘I suppose that you know about milking goats too?’
