Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (69 page)

I went to seek out my old landlord and his wife, and found them freezing in the kitchen trying to heat some water over a smouldering brazier of oily rags. Coughing and weeping, they rose to embrace me, bidding the saints witness their surprise and delight. The thick smoky fumes made us grope for each other. There was much calling on the heavens in amazement. Eighteen months had transformed me, the young passing stranger of that summer, into a returned son, a reminder of tranquillity and the riches of peace. They gabbled eccentric endearments, and inquiries as to my health. Had I all my limbs sound? had I good boots? had I the gripe? did I want something to eat?

I insisted I wasn’t hungry, but I let the landlord take me to an underground tavern across the road, once a roaring kind of whorehouse, now shuttered and dark and used only by a few neighbours and soldiers. The innkeeper had changed much in the last two years, not an ageing of time but of things happening around him. This was not the towering man I’d known who used to throw the carters about and who once, when I was playing the violin in the courtyard, struck a chiming-clock with a brandy bottle for daring to interrupt. Thin now, and bent, shuffling and shaking, one of his magnificent dark eyes was half-closed and blind.

In the tavern he took me to join some of his friends, all old men dressed in black velvet suits.

‘This is Lorenzo,’ he said. ‘Violinista, muy amigo. English or French – but it is not significant.’ The old men showed no surprise, or much interest, in this information; but one of them poured me some wine, thin as the blood of a gnat.

A couple of militiamen came in and sat with their rifles across their knees. One was swearing and the other trying to quieten him. The old men watched them in silence, but sharpened their eyes.

The soldiers were Spanish, about my age, lean-faced and nervy.

‘If I see another light in a window, I’ll give it a blast with this,’ said the younger one.

‘But there were children there – you heard them.’

The young one leapt to his feet.

‘Yes, and there were children killed last night.’

It had happened before, when night-shelling was heavy and precise – someone, some ‘Franco agent’, would have been flashing a torch from a rooftop or an upper window, and then, when the bombardment was heaviest, would toss a few grenades down into the street to confuse the fire-trucks and rescue parties.

After two winters of siege, the inside war was still active, and not everyone, even in this poor bare tavern, as he talked and moved his eyes about, could be absolutely sure of the man who sat beside him.

‘We caught one of them, anyway,’ the younger soldier said fiercely. ‘Running across the tiles with a cart lamp.’

‘Could have been trying to save his skin,’ said someone.

‘Did you arrest him?’

‘Hell, no. We just threw him off the roof. He’d done enough. His body’s outside in a barrow.’

Someone drew back the shutters on the cold grey street. A boy sat on the shafts of a hand-barrow, smoking. Stretched out on sacks between the high wooden wheels lay the crumpled body of a thin, old man. It was smartly dressed, and the head which hung down from the tailboard still wore a whitehaired look of distinction.

‘Know him?’ asked a soldier.

‘Yes,’ someone said. ‘You threw off the wrong one. That’s Dr Cardenas. He has two sons in the Air Force…’

The two soldiers left; but there was no awkward silence, nor was the conversation changed too abruptly. First there was praise for the hero-pilots of the Republic – young eagles tackling the German vultures. Then in tones I was to remember – a mixture of death-bed reminiscence, shock, a reassurance of survival – the old men of Madrid drew together round their bare, bitter tables, and began to talk of the air war over the city; the black Junkers and Condors and snapping little German fighters, and the long night raids during the first winter of siege. ‘There had never been such a sound before. The Devil’s hand tearing holes in the sky. I was crossing the street. I saw a house come down before me. Like a man dropping a dusty cloak. Then there came a hot rushing wind which lifted me up and blew me into a fountain.’ ‘Soltero, down by the market. His house was cut in two. He woke to find half his bed and his wife had gone.’ Then there were the fire-bombs, calculated, dropped on the old town and the poor. The Luftwaffe was clinical.

Franco had said that he was willing to wipe Madrid from the earth rather than let it remain ‘in the hands of the Marxists’. So he gave it up to the Luftwaffe, who were interested to see what mass-bombing could do to a major European city. Inhabitants in their thousands were splintered, broken, pulped or incinerated; survivors driven by fire from one district to another, forced to camp in the streets, in cellars, or the country. But the effect on the victims of that bombing – as it was often to prove in other cities later – was never the major cause of a people’s defeat.

It was about midday now, and soon I would have to leave the tavern and report back to Captain Sam. Suddenly the street door broke open and a hunched shape crawled in, a huge cripple with withered legs. He’d opened the door with his head and now scampered around the room on all fours, with bits of motor tyre strapped to his hands and knees. I recalled him from earlier days – that fine, classical face, the powerful shoulders and thick arms of a boxer. ‘Ay, Lorenzo!’ he said with his deep-throated growl, as though he’d seen me but yesterday.

He’d always been a bit of a cynical wit and joker. Now, listening to the old men’s tales of the air war, he added a few of his own – how his survival to date, for instance, depended on his God-given ability to scramble down drains quicker than anyone else. And did the honoured company of comrades remember, he asked us, when that lone Fascist plane flew low over the city and released four little boxes attached to four separate parachutes? Wooden boxes, not bombs. Boxes tied with ribbon. People imagined they might be gifts. But when they were opened they were found to contain the carefully quartered body of a young Republican pilot. Ah, yes – very bad. But there’d been one flash of genuine kindness, added the cripple. When that other bomber flew over the city later one afternoon and dropped a fine, fat serrano ham. It was just before Christmas, and people hadn’t seen ham for years. It fell on a man and tore off his arm.

I walked with the landlord back to his smoky kitchen, and we embraced, and his wife gave me some socks. Before leaving I slipped upstairs to see my old room, but found the door nailed up. As I came back down a voice called my name. Concha’s rose cheeks had cooled, but her eyes were deeper than ever, though less assured than they had been. She had guided me the first time, now I was older, stronger. ‘Man,’ she said hesitantly, hanging back in the shadows. Then she put up a trembling hand and gently touched my mouth.

Sam didn’t return with us from Madrid. He stayed in the capital on other business. We found Tarazona half empty, the billets deserted, with most of the men gone to the Teruel front. The high heady news of Christmas victory had all changed since we’d been away. How had we not known what was happening? In Tarazona they knew well enough…

Franco had held Teruel for three years, a vulnerable line towards the coast, and when the Republicans recaptured it that Christmas it was thought that fortune had changed at last, that the days of retreat were over.

The worst was only beginning. The occupation of Teruel had been by Spanish troops only. No International Brigades were called on. Then Franco began his counter-attack with an artillery barrage so heavy, they said, that it clipped off the tops of the hills and completely altered the landscape. Protected by the Condor Legion, and two Generals in a twelve-carriage train, the Army Corps of Castile and Galicia began to advance and the Republicans had to give up their brief-held prize.

As the weather worsened, the International Brigades were at last brought in. Fred Copeman, who commanded the British battalion, fell ill, and Bill Alexander took over. The ‘Major Attlee’ company received its christening, and thirteen men were killed the first day. Slo.wly the Republicans retreated outside the city, when the very war itself was halted by a four-day blizzard, the worst in generations, during which men and their weapons froze together.

Such was the situation as we heard it when we got back from Madrid. A chill pall of wretchedness hung over the town. The chapel where I’d camped out formerly was being turned into a hospital, so I returned to the small house by the plaza, once quarters for black-coated Kassell and his crew, who it seemed had all departed. Instead, it was now occupied by two mysterious brothers from Cartagena, stern ascetics who scarcely spoke. They’d stripped the villa of its decorations, its posters and maps, and left only bare walls across which they’d painted VITORIA! in large red letters.

It was said that they were ex-priests, and they certainly seemed single-minded enough, and had a zealous, passionate hatred for General Franco and his words – and were not all that fond of us either.

They were men of authority, a new power in Tarazona, and I felt that their taking over of this minor headquarters – so long dominated by Kassell, Political Commissars, British Company Commanders, and instructors – may well have marked, in its small way, the beginning of the break-up of the International Brigades. For these men were not internationalists or politicos, but simply Spanish patriots. They seemed to wish this to be understood.

The brothers – both young, perhaps in their early thirties – had sharp, blue-tempered chins, and the eyes of religious assassins. They were self-mortifiers, too, and slept on the floor without covering, and sometimes walked barefoot in the snow.

One morning, soon after my return, they called me into their back room, together with a Portuguese youth named Serrano, and said they were sending us up to Teruel. I remember the interview in the ‘office’ – the brothers wearing single blankets like hairshirts, both squatting on the floor, but making us stand. They looked at handsome young Serrano with lechery and contempt; they looked at me as possible fuel for a burning.

‘Portuguese and Inglese,’ one said to the other. ‘Worse than French. No salt in the bone.’

We left the next morning at dawn. Our orders were few and ambiguous. I gathered the brothers wanted us out of the place. We drove out of Tarazona in brutal weather in a lorry rattling with thick chained wheels. The squat olive trees on the hillside rolled in the cutting wind like bundles of black barbed wire. Serrano had a heavy cold now and was no longer pretty; he was also intensely miserable. We had rations for one day, but the journey was likely to take two. We huddled together against a roll of tarpaulins.

We were the only passengers in the truck; the rest, it seemed, was cargo. I’d been told we were carrying ammunition, but we were bouncing too light for that. Under the tarpaulins there was only donkey harness, the gaily tasselled stuff they wore down in Andalucia. Why were we carrying such rubbish to the front, I wondered?

About noon we reached the hills, but the snow was heavy, so we pulled up under a bridge. Our driver climbed out of his cab and stumbled round to join us, followed by a small and muffled figure. In a cloud of breath they climbed into the back of the truck, and the driver asked for a cigarette. From the snow’s bright glare one saw a flushed, drunkard’s face, darkly sprouting with bristles, a powerful torso, and small bent legs. All that was visible of his crouching companion was a pair of deep slanting eyes peering through a thick wrapping of scarves.