Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (54 page)

It had been a cheap, florid building, pseudo-Moorish in style, but nevertheless a symbol of civic pride. Now the villagers had set upon it and savagely torn it to pieces, in spite of their love of its gaudy grandeur. By the time I arrived, it was already a littered ruin, a black and degraded mess. Men and women stood around it, sniffing the curling smoke and kicking at broken pieces of furniture: out in the street a grand piano lay with its legs in the air, smouldering gently like a roasted ox; and an air of orgiastic gloom pervaded the scene, a sour and desolate sadness.

The militia were utterly demoralized. There was no more talk of returning to the offensive or of making another attack on Altofaro. The lorries baked in the sun, and throughout the long afternoon the men squabbled or simply slept.

Later that night Manolo returned, having made his way back along the coast on foot. He walked quietly into the bar like an apparition, his face drawn, his clothes dripping with sea-water.

El Gato, who had been drinking and dozing all evening, rose to his feet with a grunt and embraced him.

They stood, the two leaders, the big and the small, holding on to each other stiffly.

‘Where were you?’ asked El Gato. ‘We didn’t mean to leave you, man. We had to get out, you understand.’

Manolo nodded.

‘I saw you go,’ he said. ‘I buried myself. Isidro was lying just across the alley. He was still alive when they found him and they cut his throat. When it got quiet, I went into the sea.’

‘Is the bridge down?’

‘Yes. I swam to the Faro – then I came on over the cliff.’

‘What about the ships?’

‘You saw them. You saw what they did.’

‘Can we get back?’

‘Not with this gang, never.’

El Gato gave Manolo some brandy, then stripped off his cartridge belt and tossed it into a corner. An air of absolute exhaustion settled down on the bar. ‘We’re finished before we started,’said Manolo. His companions sat round in silence staring at the blank bare walls. El Gato went to sleep again.

About midnight, we got through to Radio Sevilla, and heard Queipo de Llano exulting in the fall of the city. The rebel general was drunk, and each slurred, belching phrase was a slap in the face of the militia. Christ had triumphed, he ranted, through God’s army in Spain, of which Generalissimo Franco was the sainted leader. The criminal forces of socialism, which had drawn their slime across the country, were being routed by the soldiers of righteousness. He ordered the workers to submit and to return to work, otherwise they and their families would be shot. God’s army was merciful, but Spain would be emptied if necessary. ‘Viva Esparia! Viva la Virgen!’

‘It’s true,’ said Manolo, shivering with fever and struggling to keep awake. The rebels were steadily building up their forces from Africa, he said; flying in thousands of Moorish troops each day. ‘The Catholic kings were the first to drive the Moors from Spain. Now the Catholic generals are bringing them back. What can we do? There’s nothing to stop them. The war is over, I think.’

Walking home that night, I was not to know that Manolo was wrong, and that the long war was only just beginning. Nor did I know, as I went to bed, that I had only a few hours left in Spain.

When I awoke next morning there was yet another warship in the bay, swinging gently at anchor in the sunshine. It rode sleepily on the water, deck-awnings in place and with its guns reassuringly covered. Taking breakfast on the terrace with my English friend, we watched it idly over the tops of the palm trees. There seemed to be no movement on board, and the village itself lay hazed in a silence which promised another hot and hooded day.

Then we heard a rush of footsteps in the street, a loud hammering on the door, and the house was invaded by women and children, who came stumbling up the stairs, excitedly calling our names and led by a flushed and dishevelled Emilia.

‘Hurry!’ she cried. ‘Leave everything – you are saved! Your king has sent you a ship. They are waiting for you on the beach and have come to take you home. Before God, who more fortunate than you?’

They dragged me out of the house and hurried me down to the shore, urging me on with impatient shouts. ‘Run, run, Lorenzo! Your friend the admiral is waiting!’ The women were skipping around me like frogs.

Sure enough, a ship’s cutter was drawn up on the sand, guarded by pink-cheeked British sailors. A smart officer in white, who had been making inquiries at the hotel, strolled down the steps and introduced himself.

No panic, he said, but the Navy had sent out a destroyer from Gibraltar to pick up any British subjects who might be marooned on the coast. Could we be ready in an hour? The situation was edgy. Alas, personal baggage only…

So it had come – the sudden end to my year’s adventure, with the long arm reaching from home, the destroyer bobbing in the bay like an aproned nanny, the officer like a patient elder brother. Responsible, tolerant, but slightly bored, he was here to snatch us from alien perils, to honour the birthright inscribed in our passports, and to stop us making fools of ourselves.

Naturally, he said, it was up to us. We could stay and sweat it out if we wished. But he couldn’t guarantee they’d be back, and the Civil War was spreading. His captain advised us to get out now.

I knew I would have to go. I couldn’t resist the flattery of the occasion – all the paraphernalia of official rescue, so lavishly gathered and waiting, and the villagers’ expectations as they crowded around us. As much as anything else it was their faces which decided me, faces already set for a huge farewell. The king of England had sent a ship for the hotel fiddler and his friend, and our departure was a dramatic necessity.

Almufiecar was a trap in any case, and I’d been looking for other ways out, plotting to join a fishing boat to Malaga or Africa. But fantasies of private action were now swamped by the benevolent presence of the Navy. I went back to the house and began to collect my things.

The novelist was already packed, with a crate of books and papers, some roots of asphodel and a barrel of coiiac. Emilia and her neighbours were engaged in fighting their way through the house, helping themselves to the sheets and furniture, weeping as they did so and occasionally throwing their arms around us and saying what a hole we should leave in their lives.

Finally a large happy crowd, loudly bewailing our departure, escorted the pair of us down to the beach, dumped our goods in the water, begged us not to leave them, and lifted us bodily into the boat. The sailors jumped in after us, not a moment too soon, and we were off, launched by a hundred hands. A young friend of the novelist, with a desperate cry, flung himself into the sea behind us, swam a few wild strokes in sobbing pursuit, and then allowed his companions to drag him back to shore.

It was over, finished – the hoarse echoes of Spain slowly dying away in the distance. We headed for the destroyer, which loomed gradually larger, a new and dominating presence; but looking back at Almuiiecar receding in the hard blue sunlight we saw its outlines transformed. The white houses, grey sands, silver and orange rocks were blackened with a multitude of watchers. The whole village had turned out to witness our departure and stood in a long dark frieze round the bay, waving and calling across the water, some of them running up and down the sands. There was also something desperate, almost sinister, in the way they packed the edge of the sea, as though in dread of the land behind them.

We reached the waiting destroyer, and were piped briskly aboard to a line-up of saluting officers – an engaging, solemn, and unexpected little ritual which gracefully ignored our down-at-heel appearance. I saw my small bits of baggage passed hand-to-hand up the gangway and piled politely on the quarter deck. The captain welcomed us with a handshake like a squire at a picnic. Room was made for us in the junior officers’ cabins.

Once we were safely aboard, the ship leapt into life and sliced in a fast sharp curve out to sea – a multi-million pound vessel, throbbing with power, manned by a hundred and thirty crew, its engines burning up fuel at
£X
a minute, and all for a couple of English tramps. It was midday now, with the deck-awnings flapping and the starch-blue sea racing by, the officers wandering below for their pre-lunch drinks, and the novelist already typing .. .

But I stayed on deck, watching Almunecar grow small and Spain folding itself away – all its clamour gone, wrenched so abruptly from me, a year’s life in a few hours ended. I saw the long hard coast, which I’d trodden inch by inch, become a clinker of bronze on the skyline. Behind it the peaks of the Sierras crawling jaggedly into view, hung there suspended, then fell away – and in that instant of leaving them I felt them as never before, clutching at my senses like hands of bone. From that seaborne distance, cut off and secure, I seemed only then to begin to know that country; could smell its runnels of dust, the dead ash of its fields, whiffs of sour wine, rotting offal, and incense, the rank hide of its animals, the peppery skin of its men, the sickly tang of its fevered children.

I saw again, as I lost them, the great gold plains, the arid and mystical distances, where the sun rose up like a butcher each morning and left curtains of blood each night. I could hear the talk, the cries, the Spanish-Arabic voices pitched to carry from Sierra to Sierra; the trickling sound of guitars dropping like water on water, eroding the long boredom of afternoons; and the songs, metallic, hatcheting the ear, honed with forlorn and unattainable lusts; the strangled poetry of the boys, the choked chastity of the girls, and the orgasmic outbursts of tethered beasts.

All I’d known in that country – or had felt without knowing it – seemed to come upon me then; lost now, and too late to have any meaning, my twelve months’ journey gone. Spain drifted away from me, thunder-bright on the horizon, and I left it there beneath its copper clouds.

An officer came up on deck and handed me a drink. ‘Shame to break up your holiday like this,’ he said. Later, a German airship passed above us, nosing inquisitively along the coast, the swastika black on its gleaming hull. To Spain, so backward and so long ignored, the nations of Europe were quietly gathering.

Back in England it was August, bank holiday time, with the country deep in the grip of a characteristic mid-Thirties withdrawal, snoozing under old newspapers and knotted handkerchiefs.

I returned to my Gloucestershire village, amazed to see once more the depth of the grass and the weight of the leaves on the trees. But the pleasure of being home again, and receiving the traditional cosseting of the prodigal, was quickly replaced by misgivings. I’d been away two years, but was little the wiser for it. I was twenty-two, woolly-minded, and still naive in everything, but I began to realize I’d come home too soon.

The Spanish War, seen close to within the local limits of an Andalusian village, was not what it had seemed to me at the time. As I learnt more about it from the newspapers – its scale and implications – I couldn’t help feeling a private sense of betrayal.

Unlike so many of my age, for whom Spain in the Thirties represented one of the last theatres of political romanticism, I hadn’t consciously chosen it as a Cause but had stumbled on it by accident, simply by happening to be there. Now I began to feel shameful doubts at having turned my back on events so easily, just when they were about to affect us all. I thought the least I could do was to give myself a second chance by returning to Spain as soon as I could.