by Betty Burton
Concha nodded vigorously. ‘Si, La Pasionaria.’ She spread her hands, resting her case.
‘If she lives, I’ll be satisfied for now. A seat in the Cortez can come later. What do you think?’
Margarita felt the stick-like legs encased in thick woollen socks. ‘This child will live. Tomorrow you give her a little fish, is easy digest.’ Although fish was still being landed here, it disappeared in a flash. Eve, who now knew several fishermen by name, was always waiting with a small van, or a boy with a handcart, when a catch was about to be landed. Fish, plus the dried milk supplies that were still getting through in a variety of ways, were the main items of diet for the children suffering from malnutrition. The rest got bread, and an unchanging diet of tomato, onion and bell-pepper soup, and a small amount of beans for protein as well as oranges, most of which had to be brought in by sea from the south. Not an ideal diet, but in a city where there was not much food it kept them free of the scurvy-like symptoms with which many of them had arrived. Its reputation meant that the accommodation was bursting at its seams.
Margarita and Concha were the experts on malnutrition. When two-thirds of their home city of Malaga fled before the German and Italian contingents of the Nationalist army, they fled with them. Ignoring the doctors who had ordered the usual treatment of injections into the wasted muscle, Margarita had started the child on vitaminized fluid a few days ago. ‘She is responding?’
‘She is. Look, she is beginning to take notice.’
‘These city doctors, they all know hunger, but they have not experienced malnutrition.’ Concha, not being a trained nurse, was not in awe of doctors.
Margarita, who was a most dedicated nurse, did not like going against orthodox treatment, but it was obvious that if a child had no muscles, then to try and inject fluid was to create a problem, which was why her limbs were ulcerated. ‘Is best treatment, for sure. Return to vitamin injections when she more fit.’
This was siesta, and once the two Spanish women had gone to continue their rounds of the nurseries, the whole place was silent. Eve continued cuddling the little bag of skin nicknamed Posa, whose name had stuck after someone had commented that she weighed no more than una mariposa, a butterfly.
Although she had still as yet not seen two complete cycles of seasons, she was familiar enough with them to know that they were predictable. When warm weather started in springtime it kept going and never returned to winter as it often did in England; when the sun rose in summer it was pretty certain to be visible throughout the day. Strawberry season back on her aunt’s farm, you might pick in baking heat one day, and see the fruits spoiled by rain the next.
These days, she scarcely gave a thought to anyone or anything outside her work with the refugees. There was never time; the flood of people trying to escape the oncoming enemy grew so huge that it seemed impossible to imagine that it could continue for much longer.
People escaped by various means. If little Posa could be got back to a reasonable state of health, then Eve hoped that she would be accepted as one of the orphans going to Mexico. The Mexican government had been considerably more generous in giving asylum to refugees than Eve’s own. To Eve, who had become almost obsessed with getting Posa back to health, the fate of this one child was a kind of talisman for all the others. Bar Barney would understand. You imbued one thing with a good spirit, which affected everything around it. In the ‘sacred grove and sacred pool’ of their childhood, Bar had cast a spell which had purified the whole place. In her saner moments she was aware that any good spirit that may once have lived in Barcelona was being bombed out of existence. But, as she had said to Alex with whom she kept in touch, a little madness is what keeps us all sane.
Alex’s experience with her Children’s House was no different from the Friends Refuge in Barcelona. It was as if the whole landscape of the Republic was on the move. People were fleeing from the rumours of the atrocities being committed as the Republic shrank daily; nobody wanted to discover whether there was truth in the rumours. Better to die from strafing in a refugee column than in the streets of your hometown. Thousand upon thousand of them took what they could carry and left.
Inevitably there were lost, abandoned and orphaned children. Nobody could estimate how many there were. Many children were too young or disturbed to know who they were, or where they came from. Many died before a refuge could be found. Many, like the Chacolatti Children, were maimed. It seemed to women like Eve and Alex and Margarita and Concha, and Leah, who ran the place, and the hundreds of Spanish people who tried to cope with the sea of unclaimed children, that they all ended up on their particular doorstep.
‘Hsst, Señorita Eve, is…’ Eugenia, who spent as many waking hours as possible as Eve’s shadow, gabbled an excited and unintelligible message. Two words, ‘come pronto’, were enough to indicate that visitors were waiting.
Still wearing an old rubber surgical apron she wore when feeding the babies, and carrying a bundle of ragged muslin used for mopping faces, and a pap basin, she put her head round the door. It was her brother. She flung herself at him.
‘Kenny… oh, Kenny… I thought you must be dead. I’m sorry, oh God, I don’t want to cry.’
By now she was hugging him and burying her wet face into the side of his unshaven neck. The feel of his hard, strong arms was wonderful, the rancid smell of sweat and stale tobacco made her want to laugh.
‘Come on, let’s have a look at you. I’ve come all the way from France to see you.’
She pulled back and looked through tears. ‘From France?’
‘Yeah. We got away in a posh yacht, belongs to a friend of Dave’s.’
She sensed him there, handsome and desirable as ever. Wiping her nose and eyes on the bundle of soiled muslin, she looked round and saw David Hatton and a large, smiling, black man she had never seen before. David held out a hand and shook it formally.
‘Great to see you again, Eve.’
The black man snapped to attention and held out a hand that was warm and dry when Eve took it.
‘Enro Peters, Captain, late Abraham Lincoln Brigade, ma’am.’ Eve had seen Sanders of the River three times because Paul Robeson spoke with that same quality in his voice.
‘I’m proud to meet you, Captain. I’ve got several friends in the Lincolns.’ She smiled. ‘If I accepted every invitation to visit America, I would need five years.’
‘You should try it, ma’am. One day we goin’ to have our own revolution.’
‘I thought you already had.’
‘That was white breakin’ away from white. Next one will be my folk doin’ the breakin’ away.’
‘I’ll drive a truck for you, it’s something I’m quite good at now.’
‘Eugenia, coffee, por favor?’ Eugenia, wide-eyed at what must have been a puzzling drama, rushed out, offering David Hatton a big smile.
‘You don’t have to, Eve. But we couldn’t leave until we had seen that you were OK.’
‘Leave? Where are you going, Ken? What were you doing in France?’
‘It’s a long story, and I’ll write to you all about it. Now that the brigade’s stood down, the three of us are going to join the Republican army.’
There ought to be something that she could say, but she could not think what. ‘I saw the parade, I wondered if you would be there.’
‘No, I went straight to St Cyprien.’
‘You’ve been a prisoner?’
‘We all have.’
Enro Peters said, ‘An’ we didn’t think it was too hot, so we going back to get even.’ He smiled, suggesting that it was just a bit of a playground fight.
At last she had pulled herself together sufficiently to turn to David and ask, ‘You too, David? I thought you were no good with firearms.’
‘I’m not. I’ve always been a decent bowler, so I dare say I can lob a few grenades.’
Eve could have hit them for their machismo. If they had been at St Cyprien, then they had been almost home and dry, yet they had decide
d to come back and fight on. The feeling passed. Now she wanted to hug them.
Eugenia came in with a tray she had obviously taken some trouble over; there was even a tin of condensed milk and a spoon which she offered round like a hostess.
Although David had taken a seat a little away from the table where Eugenia had placed the tray, Eve was aware that he hardly seemed to take his eyes from her. Suddenly conscious of her rubber apron, she slipped it off and pushed it under her chair, and could have kicked herself for caring how she looked. She said, ‘I should have thought the last thing the army wants now is a left-handed cricketer.’
Ken said, ‘You a left-hander, Dave?’
Suddenly, Eve started to laugh, one of those inexplicable fits that is difficult to stop. The three men and Eugenia looked at her. ‘I’m sorry… but you men are so strange. You are going off to this dreadful war and you talk about your cricketing techniques.’
‘Yeah, well. Listen, what are you going to do? You’re going to have to leave before long.’
‘Have to?’
‘Look, Eve, if this goes on another six months it will be a miracle.’
‘OK, then pray for a miracle. Damn it, Kenny, pray for a thousand miracles. You should see the state of the kids we have here.’ She put an arm about Eugenia’s waist. ‘When I was Eugenia’s age, I spent the summer with Bar Barney, traipsing the country lanes, and swimming in that lovely green pool in the birch woods, you know the place.’ David Hatton was obviously taking in every word, but so what! He knew everything else about her life. It was mortifying to think of him poking around on the streets of her childhood, the factory. Her pride had been hurt, she had felt herself as very shallow and foolish. ‘You remember that summer, Kenny?’
‘You’d had diphtheria and went away to get better.’
‘When Eugenia was twelve, she was on that great exodus from Malaga. She got separated from her mother and grandfather, the only people of her family left alive. Somewhere along the road she was molested… she was raped, damn it! At twelve years of age she was raped by a youth from her own street.’
The men were silent. Here was something beyond their experience, a casualty of war who could not be comforted by a show of comradeship and a shared smoke. It was the American who asked, ‘How did she get this far?’
‘Women. They took her under their care and,’ Eve smiled affectionately at the girl who blushed, ‘here she is, all ready to grow up and do what we all did. What I want to do, is to try to see that she gets her chance.’ Eve was aware that Eugenia had done her growing up, but that didn’t mean that she should not still experience something that would compensate for the innocence she had lost.
This was an awkward meeting. Nobody appeared to know what their role was, so they took cover in a kind of cheerful formality that was posing as naturalness.
David said, ‘Does that mean that you will stay on here?’
‘Where would I go?’
Her brother said, ‘You could take Eugenia back home.’
‘And leave my baby?’
Three male minds seemed to spring to attention. Ken said, ‘Not actually your baby?’
‘She is now, but whose she was, Kenny, God only knows.’
Ken was puzzled by the tension there was between her and Dave Hatton; she didn’t really want him there. In the awkward atmosphere, they all seemed to be waiting for somebody else to say something. It fell to David.
‘I read a piece about the Chacolatti Children. It was impressive.’
‘You did? I thought no one would publish it.’
‘It’s out in a little pamphlet. Somebody sent me a copy. I’m surprised you haven’t received one yourself, but so many mail trains are…’
‘It doesn’t matter, I know what I wrote. It only matters that people back home will be reading it. Come and see our children here.’
Eugenia led the way into one of the big nurseries, empty of almost everything except mattresses and assorted cribs and the babies who were asleep, but filled with the smell of milk-fed babies wearing well-washed woollen clothes.
Eve lifted Posa from her mattress and, having taken a moment to decide, placed her in David Hatton’s arms. ‘This is Posa, David. I want you to remember her when you get back to London. Maybe you could tell your grandmother about her.’
He didn’t appear to have been thrown off balance by Eve. ‘There’s not much of her.’
‘The doctors say she is probably two years old.’
Enro said, ‘She minds me of a new-hatched bird with big eyes and all, always seem too big for their heads, you know what I mean? Kin I hold her?’
Eve was surprised. She had supposed that the men would have been repelled by the unattractive little creature, which was why she had chosen David as the recipient of a lesson in yet another kind of war casualty. She felt that they must understand that war wasn’t just between soldiers; they must understand that because they were soldiers, at least Kenny and the American were. ‘Have you got children, Captain?’
‘Enro, ma’am. No, not so far as I know.’ He grinned, ducking his head and raising his shoulders. To Eve, he seemed to exude warmth and geniality. And he was honest and open, not afraid to show that he had a gentle side to him. There was something almost feminine in his attention to the baby. She had seen Kenny handle a shotgun, she could visualize David with a rifle, yet she could not imagine the big, black American in his soldier’s role. But then, neither her brother nor the man who said that he loved her could have imagined the girl they had known before she came to Spain pouring everything she had into a houseful of sick children.
‘Peters family is a big one. I got five sisters and four brothers older than me, and they all got kids. Guess they miss good Ol’ Uncle Enro. I always been a fool where kids is concerned. Would you like to see the first aid kit one of my little nieces made? Saved Dave’s arm, I reckon. She’ll be no end pleased when I write and tell her.’ He handled Posa with the assurance of a man who revelled in being Ol’ Uncle Enro. ‘Say, you goin’ a be a pretty little thing, when you get them muscles filled out.’
Eve could have kissed the American for his praise. ‘I think so.’
They made their way back through the house, Eugenia hanging on one arm and the baby cradled in the other. Eve turned to David. ‘You see why I can’t take you up on your offer to get out of Barcelona, David?’
He nodded. ‘I’d say you have your hands full here, Eve. However, I’d like it if you’d…’ He tore a scrap of paper from an envelope. ‘Here’s a number to ring, in Tarragona, just say you’re one of Hatton’s friends.’ He looked straight at her and smiled.
Ken said, ‘You can rely on Hatton’s friends.’ He grinned. ‘They seem to have boats and things just when you need them. Being in the know isn’t at all bad.’ Strings had tightened again, she looked ready to twang. What had he said?
She said, ‘Well, that’s nice. I’ll use anybody and anything these days if it will help these kids. When you write home, tell your friends we need things. Does your grandmother knit, David?’
He looked perplexed. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Most grandmothers love to knit baby socks, maybe you could ask her if she could make us some.’ To Ken, ‘I think they must have got a real knitting circle going back home, we’ve had quite a lot of baby clothes.’ She smiled. ‘You can tell which are Bar’s, unintentionally lacy from dropped stitches.’
Posa picked up the tension in the arms holding her, and gave a cat-like wail. ‘I’m sorry, Kenny, but I have to… Ah well, you wouldn’t know about such things, but milk has to be scalded and feeding bottles sterilized. Will I see you again before you go?’
Ken wasn’t sure whether she was asking himself or David. ‘I’ll try to come again, but, you know…’
‘I know.’ She kissed him and held on. ‘I want you back when…’
‘Come on. I’ve got a hide like a rhino. Two wounds and frost-bite didn’t stop me. You take care. And, listen. You do as Dave says, get out before it
’s too late.’
She smiled, but made no promise. He didn’t expect one. She kissed Enro Peters’ cheek. ‘You just make sure that you get Uncle Enro safely back, children need their uncles. Goodbye, David. I feel sure that you will get a book out of all this. Kenny, what I said to Enro goes for you too, the only uncles Bonnie has got are you and Duke.’ Her voice cracked. Brother and sister held each other tightly for a few seconds and then let go.
* * *
It was not long after that visit that the last of the Republic began to crumble before the onslaught of the combined forces of the Right.
In posters that had been pasted up in the early months of the conflict, the enemies of democracy were shown as ridiculous figures afloat in a toy-like boat with a gallows for a main-mast on which dangled Spain, and over which a vulture had settled in the crow’s-nest. There were five passengers – a fat capitalist with his bag of gold and wearing a swastika on his lapel; a priest in a biretta; a haughty soldier with a ceremonial cannon; a white-turbanned Arab; and an armed Moorish mercenary. The monarchy was not represented, as it had already fled. Below decks, pinched, anonymous faces peered from portholes.
That was then. This was now. The five were on their way back to rid that part of Spain that was still free of its freedom. The five of the Right were safeguarded and upheld by planes and tanks and a great army of foreign mercenaries swelling the ranks of the haughty soldier. The five were no longer comic. The imminent return of the old oppressors sent hundreds of thousands of people looking for a means of escape. Those who had proudly acclaimed ‘They shall not pass!’ were now under threat of death, torture and years of imprisonment.
Dimitri Vladim saw how few options he now had. He had seen his once great hero, Stalin, from outside the USSR and had come to the conclusion that his country had used Spain as cynically as the right-wing nations. Soviet armaments and supplies and men had not been given without forfeit. On several occasions he had hinted to Eve how disillusioned he was becoming. She neither encouraged nor discouraged him in his dilemma.
