THERE WAS SOMETHING IN the atmosphere that forbade all reference to our recent experience on the drive back to London, although the conversation was lively enough upon other topics. I suspected with Ernestina that this was an occasion as with a young child when calamity is dismissed without comment. A little to my surprise she seemed anxious to get home. The journey to Wales was to have been part of a larger sight-seeing excursion. She had seen nothing of the country, and I suggested we might make a good start with Bath. But the projected side-trip seemed to have been forgotten. England was failing to live up to her expectations and, if not the English, almost certainly the Welsh too.
This small misadventure had happened at a time when Ernestina gave the impression of wishing to move further and further out of her father’s orbit, and as a first step we had left London and rented a cottage in a wood at Iver in Buckinghamshire. It was the property of a noblewoman we never met who had filled it with majestic, decrepit beds, with imperial eagles embroidered on their silk counterpanes, and with drinking vessels of all shapes and colours, more than fifty varieties of them, designed to contain every known alcoholic liquor. Here we had lived in the deep shade of the pines for some weeks before Ernestina decided that the countryside no longer held any attraction for her and we found ourselves back in Gordon Street once more.
The day after our return from Wales Ernestina went through what I was now beginning to recognize as a recurrent phase. She was a girl who needed to laugh, and there were times when she would commit herself to an orgy of laughter, provoked in any way she could find. She had found that the easiest way out was to visit one or more of the so-called news cinemas that had recently opened in London to provide a short programme of news-reels interspersed with cartoons and knockabout comedy items. The first day back in London was spent in entertainments of this kind to which I did not accompany her. Apart from that she settled to reread old favourites from a collection of humorous writings she possessed, including much of Wodehouse, Jerome K. Jerome, and a prized hoard of excellent comic papers sent to her from America. After two days of this treatment she had quite recovered from whatever it was she had suffered, her giggles subsided and she could cope with the normal solemnity of the world.
Now suddenly she announced that she had given up the idea of living anywhere in England, and made the suggestion that we should emigrate to Spain, where she had spent the happiest times of her life. It was an idea that seemed attractive enough to me if only a way could be found of making a living there. In the early summer of 1936 we made a trip by car to Spain to investigate the possibility of such a move.
We drove to Seville and stayed there with the Estradas, friends of Ernestina, a young couple who lived in a tiny Moorish palace with an unimposing entrance next to a shoeshop in the celebrated Calle Sierpes — thus named from the serpentine fashion in which it twists through the heart of the old town. We found the city in a state of turmoil, and were told and could read for ourselves in the newspapers that the rest of the country was no better off. What we had no way of knowing was that the outbreak of the Civil War lay only a few weeks ahead.
Like most of Spain’s upper and middle classes of their day the Estradas were staunch fascists. It would have been hard to imagine a man milder in appearance and manner than young Juan Estrada, but he was a landowner in an area where the peasantry lived in the harshest conditions in Europe, employed as seasonal labourers on vast estates for extremely low wages. The newspapers reported almost daily cases of peasants dying of starvation in nearby villages, and some three years before the police had carried out a massacre in the village of Casas Viejas where the peasantry had attempted to occupy uncultivated land.
On the first evening of our stay with them the Estradas took us for dinner to a fashionable restaurant some three miles out of town, an ancient coaching inn of great charm in a setting of featureless prairies of ripening wheat. On each of the tables placed in the shade of the vines a small pile of copper coins had been placed. Peasants — largely women and children — emaciated and in rags, lurked by a hedge surrounding the restaurant, and from time to time one of them would make a cautious advance to a table and, at a signal from a diner, pick up one of the coins — a half-peseta piece known as a perro chico. At intervals one of the restaurant staff would run out screaming abuse to slash at the beggars with a whip and drive them off. Within minutes they were back again and the mute submissive collection of these coins of minuscule value went on, virtually unnoticed by the diners, as before.
Juan Estrada very quietly and calmly explained to us that the time had come to put these people in their place. He and a number of friends, all of them landowners and all excellent riders, had formed a band — well, almost a private army, he said — and in a matter possibly of days they would make the rounds of the villages and deal with the Reds in their own fashion. One of our fellow guests was a rejoneador who had been spearing bulls in the ring in Seville only the Sunday before, and laughingly he referred to this as valuable practice.
It was an environment in which Ernestina and I found ourselves out of our depths. Next day we started off on our way back, making for France. We took the direct route through Cáceres and Salamanca, to avoid Madrid, but just short of Plasencia we were stopped by a police roadblock and directed, with no reason given, to a diversion through the small town of Ciudad Rodrigo. The Sierra de Gata had to be crossed. It was the Europe of the Dark Ages, ghostly and skin-and-bone poor, with weasels sunning themselves in the dirt road, macabre trees, and once in a while a grey, wall-eyed shack with no glass in the windows and the slates sliding off the roof. For hours on end there were no signs of human presence.
Ciudad Rodrigo, grimed, sullen and silent, was closed up from end to end, doors bolted and windows shuttered. There was no one to ask the way, and when we stopped to study a road sign we heard the sound of shots terribly close and resonant in the narrow canyons of the streets. At the far end of the town we found the main hard-surfaced road to Salamanca, but a few miles further on two carts barred the road, and men carrying firearms of all descriptions came out from behind them. They had the underdog’s face of the Spanish countryside, fleshless, displaying all the details of the skull, and they would have been interchangeable with the wretched peasants begging for ha’pence at the smart restaurant outside Seville, but for the dignity conferred by hunting rifles and fowling pieces.
They were quite happy to explain, almost in a childish way, what was going on, and to provide acceptable reasons for their interference with traffic. They pointed proudly to their red armbands, explaining that they were milicianos del pueblo, and that their village had been under attack by a fascist band which they had beaten off, leaving one dead. An unshaven, wild-eyed man, looking like a bandit but describing himself as the schoolmaster, had pushed to the front, and began a short pedantic lecture on the political situation, before being cut short by a heavy burst of firing from the far end of the village. At this we all lay down in the road behind the carts for perhaps ten minutes, after which, following the example of the milicianos, we began to crawl on hands and knees for the shelter of the nearest houses. We found ourselves in a small, dark, earthen-floored room with a mother and her two small children under the table and, resisting an impulse to join them, remained standing with our backs to the wall as far as possible from the small window, for about an hour, while sporadic firing went on — some from the roof above.
After that the schoolmaster was back, happy and excited by some new triumph. A mopping-up operation — he savoured the expression affectionately — and we would be obliged to go back to Ciudad Rodrigo to spend the night. The inn was for people who brought their sheep with them, he said, but at the other end of the scale, the Parador Nacional was highly to be recommended, and as this was closed for the emergency he proposed to go there with us and open it up.
A stop was made on the way to pick up a cook. The schoolmaster hammered on the great feudal door, and the caretaker let us in. He was happy to welcome us, he said. There was a hint of a suggestion by the cook, in her recommendation to us not to worry if we found there was too much to eat, as she had a large family at home who would help out.
In the morning the schoolmaster joined us for breakfast, so changed in his appearance as to be almost unrecognizable. He had had a close shave and was wearing a clean shirt, buttoned at the neck, and polished shoes, and the wild eyes of the night before were calm and confident. The gun slung over his shoulder seemed out of place in the sumptuous and orderly environment. He caressed it like a child before propping it against the leg of the enormous table and sitting down.
‘Were you disturbed during the night?’ he asked.
‘I thought I heard shooting.’
‘You did,’ he said. ‘The last of it. Now we are at peace again.’ He gestured in a regal manner at the dark, grandiose furniture, the paintings, the tapestry. ‘All this belongs to the people,’ he said. ‘Stay as long as you like, and tell them to send the bill to me.’
The cook, beaming and nodding, came in bearing a lordly dish on which tiny eggs with bright red yolks that might have been laid by a thrush floated in greenish olive oil. A separate platter held rashers of black mountain ham. It was clear that she had served English guests before, and understood their breakfast requirements. She was followed by the caretaker who opened shutters and windows, and we listened reassured to the slow exchange of neighbourly pleasantries, and the chiming of a bell.
‘In Italy and Germany the fascists overthrew the people,’ the schoolmaster said. ‘What they did not understand was it could never happen here. When they struck we were ready for them. It was all over in a few hours. From now on you can go where you like, and no one will bother you.’
Four days later we were back in England, and a week later the Civil War broke out. The whole province of Salamanca was instantly occupied by Nationalist rebel troops, and there were few towns such as Ciudad Rodrigo where massacres did not take place; it is virtually certain that the schoolmaster would have been killed in one of these.