Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (67 page)

I’d been hungry before, and had also known the simple, voluptuous appetite of youth when taste was never jaded. I remember as a boy being so in love with bread and butter and the cloudy meat of a new-boiled egg that I could hardly wait to go to sleep at night so that morning breakfast should come again. So it seemed now, that long moment of delayed consummation, as we sat round the table while the sisters fussed and quarrelled by the stove and carried us at last the stew in a great earthen dish. We had brought our slabs of grey bread, our metal knives and spoons, and the plates we had were of curved polished wood. The farmer’s three birds, who must have been survivors of at least two long winters, now swam brokenly in a thick soup of beans and sausage, splendidly recharged with succulence. Dona Anselm guarded the dish while her sister spooned out our portions, one squashed steamy limb to each plate.

A jar of thin reedy wine was passed around, a brew strangely flavoured with sage and cinnamon – a lacy, fastidious old woman’s drink which hinted at secluded and secret comforts.

‘Eat!’ snapped Dona Anselm, and we broke our grey bread with solemn ritual under her scaring eyes. Six young strangers at their private table, for whom they had cooked three old and irreplaceable hens; we were guests, visitors, but also the enemy in possession. The sisters clearly took no sides in this war, which had occupied their land and must be endured. They served but did not join us as we plunged into our food, while the old man by the stove stared at the floor and waited.

Lopez, a late arrival, and the only Spaniard among the six of us, set himself up as a surrogate host.

‘Three in one pot,’ he said, beaming round at us proudly. ‘Few of you could have eaten better.’

Carried away by the majesty of the moment, he began to pick out pieces from the dish with his stubby fingers and hand them to us with a bow. Dona Anselm hit him with a spoon.

‘What are you doing?’ she cried. ‘Have some culture, man.’

‘At my brother’s wedding,’ said Lopez, ‘we had two birds and a rabbit – stewed in wine. I have never forgotten.’

Dona Luisa sniggered. ‘Yes. The bride, the bride’s mother and the groom.’

Lopez lowered his face to his plate. We others were now deep in our meal, skewering, spooning, using our fingers, awash with flavours and greed. Few of us, I think, had been long from home; none of us, except perhaps Lopez, were married. Instead of great chunks of swede and donkey thrown into a rusty bucket and boiled by some lout in the barrack bath-house, we were now eating food prepared by the hands of women, especially and particularly for us.

In reality, it must have been a poor and scratch-me-down meal. But it was a memorable banquet in that winter of war. In the end it cost each of us several weeks’ pay. We were bullied, cursed, perhaps even despised by the sisters, but we were not cheated. There was enough on the stove for all of us. Sprawled at the table, feet up, near repletion, chasing the pimply chicken skins through the thinning soup, digging out the last bits of sausage with our bread, we wallowed now, wheedled more wine, sipped it slowly and grew sentimental. As the afternoon passed, even the sisters softened a little, and found us some beech nuts and raisins.

We gave them the rest of our money, and the old man in the corner said, ‘Now you’ll be able to buy that clock.’

When we’d finished all there was, we sang, sleepy-eyed, while the sisters cleared the table and put all the chicken bones on a plate and set them down on the old man’s lap. Slowly, one by one, he picked them up and passed them between his naked gums, dwelling on each with a delicate bliss as though he was sucking asparagus. He had waited five hours for this moment and now his time had come. He tasted his portion of bones with the absorbed grace of a prince.

Christmas was on us, and the wind blew from the north with a cutting edge of pain. The gritty snow was pretty and pitiless. We fetched cartloads of wood from out of the countryside, chopping down century-old olives to build up our fires. In our state of mind, I don’t think there was one among us who wouldn’t have burned a rare church carving, relic of a thousand years’ piety, to have gained himself five minutes’ warmth.

Gradually news from the front was ferried down from the Sierras, news we could scarcely believe. Launched in one of the worst winters in Spanish memory, in one of Spain’s coldest, remotest mountains, our army, without artillery and at the height of a blizzard, had attacked and surrounded the city of Teruel, and was even said to be fighting in the streets. After the remorseless decline and atrocious defeats of the summer, we had at last a hope to believe in. Slowly, bloodily, month after month, Franco’s forces had been sopping up Spain, pushing our lines back towards the eastern coast. Now we were aimed at a forward city, at a point of greatest threat and danger. People talked now of tides turning, and paths to victory reopening at last.

Yet in Tarazona, in the silence, the cold idleness of our lives, crouched around in our ponchos, cleaning and re-cleaning our guns, we thought of the hundred thousand fighting our war in those mountains, and wondered what this training camp was for.

In this silence, Christmas came, muted, inglorious, and small Red Cross parcels were passed among us, some from Britain and some from France. On Christmas Day I tasted, with almost erotic excitement, a twopenny bar of Cadbury’s Milk Chocolate, and smoked a shilling packet of Players. I was as affected as much by the piercing familiarity of their flavours as by the homely reassurance of their wrappings.

Then I remember the see-saw of news, reports and rumours. A van-driver arrived seeking a supply of blankets. It had taken him three days to cover the hundred miles from the front. Here was no hero or victorious eagle but a shivering and ragged man. He told us of pain and snow-blindness, panic and exposure on the road, while his eyes jumped like beans in his head. Oh, yes, we were winning in Teruel. He’d seen the dead stacked like faggots of wood round the walls. Frozen barricades of flesh you could shelter behind, protected from the wind and bullets. He’d seen mules drop dead in the cold, then set stiff and rigid in the road so that they held up the traffic and had to be sawn up in solid blocks and removed. His tales were of a reversal of hell, and he seemed as astonished by them as were his hearers; that he, a Spaniard, had seen such weather in his own country, such acts of slaughter in death’s own climate, and the young soldiers, even alive, dressed in sheeted white.

As we listened to this pop-eyed, half-demented man, something of our secure camp Christmas went away. It was as if he’d opened a door and admitted a blast of arctic and charnel house, wiped the frost from our cabin window and shown us the wolves.

A few days later, a quite different messenger turned up: Bill Rust, the editor of the
Daily Worker –
a dapper, soft-spoken, rather chummy man, wearing a dark London overcoat and a warm felt hat. I remember having seen him a few weeks earlier, on his way through Albacete, his face tense with anxiety and exhaustion. Now he had a pink glowing look of half-suppressed triumph, like a football manager whose team had just won the cup.

Teruel had fallen, he told us; the mountain fortress was ours, and he’d walked in the liberated streets of the city. To prove it, he showed us the inside of his hat. On the sweat-band it said: Sombreros de Teruel.

It was, it seemed, his only loot. Modest as ever, he’d picked it out of a broken shop window. There was some rejoicing that night. Rust’s tale of that victory was perhaps our most hopeful moment of the winter – for most even the best in the war.

Then, in the beginning of the new year, all news of victory ceased. In fact, there was suddenly no news at all. Our soldiers, first one or two, and then in companies, began silently to disappear from the town. One morning I woke to find that more than half my friends had gone. I never saw them again.

Early in January I was ordered to go to Madrid, which rather surprised me as I’d been expecting to be sent elsewhere. The order was passed on from the Political Commissar, and came from Captain Sam of Albacete, who apparently had not forgotten me.

He wanted me to go, together with himself and some others, to make a few broadcasts from Madrid Radio to America. This was the capital’s second winter of front-line war, beleaguered, half-besieged, and stuck like a fist in Franco’s mouth and crammed fast against his teeth.

A dozen of us took off just after dawn, packed in an open truck. We were a mixed lot, and I couldn’t believe all of us were going to make short-wave broadcasts; some, by the look of them, were on more solemn errands. We sat on wooden boxes at the back of the truck, and waited for the dawn landscape to lighten. It was flat, frosty, with umbrella pines on the horizon, like dirty paper fastened down with pins.

We had a hundred and fifty miles of this vacant country to cross, a straight melancholy road scoring the sterile La Mancha, with no mark of man save a few broken windmills. As we bumped slowly along, I thought again of the huge emptiness of this country, where, apart from cramped slums of the still medieval cities, raised on crusts of imperial and religious splendour, there remained little more than the untenable plains and vertical deserts of the Sierras, yielding to and supporting no one.

The road was bare save for a few sleepy road-blocks; though one was less sleepy than the others and was manned by a heavily armed anarchist who stopped our truck and objected to Captain Sam’s cap, saying it wasn’t sufficiently democratic. But Sam, with a few key phrases and his cold clear smile, sent the vigilante scurrying off with apologies.

Passing through Mola de Cuervo we had a burst tyre, but this caused us no difficulty either. Our driver simply went up to another truck, parked unattended by the church, walked round it slowly, removed the wheel he wanted, and left a receipt, signed by Sam, on the windscreen.

For the rest of the journey Harry and Bill, two Glaswegian veterans of the Aragon front, played cards on a board and quarrelled dramatically in a slurred incomprehensible accent. A couple of Spanish comrades, with long Cordobese faces, dozed sitting upright like Easter Island gods. Another soldier, I think he was Dutch, played for several hours a series of monotonous airs on the harmonica – that tinned exhalation of all the boredom of war.

Captain Sam had been busy scribbling notes on his knee. We went over them together, suspicious and watchful. I added a few bits of my own, and smiling Sam cut them out. This was to be the script for our broadcast tonight.

As the afternoon darkened we entered the suburbs of the city, threading close to the enemy lines. There was little to be seen: rotting sandbags, broken roads, barricades of brick and bedsteads, shuttered windows, closed shops and bars.

I’d known Madrid briefly in the summer before the war, when it had a light air of penurious, unassuming fiesta. Now with siege and winter, the skies had come down, and as we neared the centre of the city, passing through the cloaked guards of the road-blocks, the streets seemed empty save for bent hurrying figures, wrapped in blankets, making their way home.

We found, however, a quite cushy spot for the night. We were billeted in a small gypsy hotel just off the Calle Echegarry, near to the Puerta del Sol. Ramon, our Asturian driver, camped out on the cobbles under his truck – just to keep it in the family, he said.

The hotel was run by a committee, who welcomed us at a table in the hall, and gave out meal tickets accompanied by clenched raised salutes. We sat round the dining-room, at first cowed and prim, like orphan children awaiting our institutional soup. But the meal, when it came, though poor, was ribald, and served by rollicking militia-girls. They had the dark physical power that Spanish girls are conscious of early, with small jungly bodies, split olive eyes, and voices like laser beams. They wore blue baggy overalls, but so tightly belted at the waist, and deeply slashed at the throat, they appeared to have arisen half-naked from tumbled beds.

Only Captain Sam seemed unaware of the erotic atmosphere of the place, as he sat head down, dashing off manifestos on the table-top, a bent cheroot in his mouth. He, and a couple of black-smocked old men, probably delegates from some distant village commune, who remained in stiff formal silence, skin tightly wrapping their cheekbones, rough hands gripping their knees.

Otherwise I remember the noise, the near frenzy, in that basement dining-room, that winter night, in the heart of besieged Madrid; the war posters on the walls with their flat, cut-out heroes and their slogans of arousal, defiance, hope; the plates of ordinary steamed potatoes, many of them black with frost; the cheeky militia-girls twisting nimbly among the groping hands of the soldiers; and the soldiers, foul-mouthed, grabbing at girls and food, and grinning around them with vacuous pleasure.