Part 55 (1/2)

and Anarchists all putting their feuds first and the fight against Fascism second. Food started to run short around the same time. Franco's noose began to tighten round Catalonia's neck. A cold winter and blanket bombing finished the job.

”That is how my mother said it was and the history books tell the same story. When the army rose, the working cla.s.ses of Barcelona united to defend themselves-and to change society. But they succeeded in neither. Germany and Italy were funding and equipping the Nationalists. To combat them, the Republican government had to seek help from Russia. And Russia's price was the suppression of revolutionary socialism. The Anarchists were one of the groups they moved against. So, my father ended by fighting for a different cause from the one he had volunteered to defend.

”I knew nothing of any of this. My recollections of Barcelona are a jumble of hooting cars and waving flags, whining bombs and derelict buildings, food queues and rats and ragged clothes and my hands going blue with the cold of the last winter we spent there. My father came to see us just before Christmas. By then he had been transferred to the remnants of the British Battalion of the International Brigade. I cried all night when he went back to the army. And so did my mother. We never saw him again. News came in March that he had been captured and probably killed during the retreat from Teruel. It was the sort of news a lot of wives and daughters were receiving. The whole Republic was in retreat. And it was not only at the front that people were dying.

The Italians began bombing Barcelona in February of 1938. I remember the sheer terror of those raids, of seeing dead bodies lying on the pavement, of witnessing what no nine-year-old girl should ever have to. It was the beginning of the end. But the end was a long time coming. And, meanwhile, a strange thing happened. My mother received a letter. From a woman in England she had never heard of.”

”From Beatrix?”

”Yes. From Beatrix. It arrived about two months after the news about my father, although it was only much later that I was told what was in it. Beatrix wrote to say her brother had served with my father and in his last letter to her before dying had asked her to find out whether his old comrade was still alive.”

”Which is exactly what Tristram did ask her to do-in the only one of his letters to Beatrix I've read, sent from Tarragona in mid-March 1938.” Charlotte frowned. ”But hold on. How did Beatrix know your address?”

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”She said Tristram had told her.”

”No, no,” Charlotte objected. ”He didn't. It wasn't mentioned in his letter.”

”It was in the doc.u.ment accompanying the letter. As you will see.” Isabel Va.s.soir smiled. ”Let me finish my story. Then you will understand how all the pieces fit together. My mother wrote back to Beatrix, telling her my father was almost certainly dead. She expected to hear no more. But Beatrix wrote again, offering her sympathy-and her help, if we needed it. Well, we certainly needed it. Catalonia was cut off from the rest of the Republic by then and slowly being strangled to death. But what could an Englishwoman we had never met do for us? My mother did not reply. She told me later she could not see the point of such correspondence. And I suspect also she did not want to be reminded of my father. So, she let the matter drop.

”In the autumn, my grandfather died, worn out by the struggle for survival. Then, just after Christmas, the Nationalists launched their final offensive against Catalonia. By the middle of January, 1939, they were within reach of Barcelona. The bombing intensified and panic began to spread. Anybody linked with the Republican cause would be in peril of their life under the Fascists. Franco's ruthlessness was legendary.

So, the only thought was how to escape. As the widow of a known Anarchist, my mother had to get away. France had opened its border to refugees and people began streaming north towards it. We joined them, my mother, my grandmother and I, pus.h.i.+ng our few belongings in a hand-cart. The journey must have been a torment for them, though for me it was a merciful chaos of trudging along muddy roads, of running for shelter from German fighter planes, of waking in the cart caked with snow while my mother and grandmother strained at the shafts.

”When we reached France, we were put in a crowded camp with no shelter. It was, in fact, the clearing centre at Le Boulou, but n.o.body had any idea then where we were or where we were going. After a few days, we were taken to a camp for women and children north of Perpignan, where there was food and shelter, although not enough of either. My grandmother fell ill and there were times when my mother said we should have stayed in Barcelona. She could see no end to the squalor and harshness of life in the camp. Then, in her desperation, she remembered Beatrix's offer. She wrote a letter to her, asking her to help us in any way she could. She persuaded a Red Cross representative to send it on. She did not know if it would reach Beatrix, of course, nor whether she would respond even if it did.”

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”But it did reach her?”

”Yes. And she responded, though too late to save my grandmother, who died just before Easter. A few weeks later, Beatrix arrived at the camp and took us away.”

”Just like that?”

”For my mother it was a prayer answered, for me like dreaming of paradise and waking to find I was there already. A tall and smartly dressed Englishwoman took my hand and put me in a chauffeur-driven car and, suddenly, after three months of confinement behind barbed-wire fences, we were driving away, through the barrier and down the lanes thick and bright with the leaves and flowers of spring.

I cried and laughed and stared and could not believe it was happening. But it was.”

Into Charlotte's mind came what Uncle Jack had said concerning Beatrix's whereabouts in the spring of 1939. ”She'd been to the French Riviera-or it could have been the Swiss Alps-or it could have been both-for a good couple of months.” She knew now it had been neither. Isabel Va.s.soir was right. All the pieces were beginning to fit together.

”How Beatrix arranged our release I do not know. But I imagine the authorities were grateful to anybody who was prepared to take a couple of refugees off their hands and a.s.sume responsibility for them. And that is what she did. She rented an apartment for us in Perpignan and bought us food and clothes. She stayed with us for a month while we regained our strength, doing all the cooking and was.h.i.+ng until my mother was fit enough to take over. She was our saviour. She was my fairy G.o.dmother. She paid for my mother to take French lessons and helped her find work as a seamstress with various drapers in the city. She put us back on our feet and made it possible for us to live again. We owed her everything. It was one of the reasons why I was anxious to learn English at school: so that I could tell her in her own language how grateful I would always be.”

Another beneficiary of Beatrix's generosity had emerged from her hidden past and sat now smiling faintly at Charlotte across a French drawing room. Beatrix had rescued Vicente Ortiz's only surviving relatives from the aftermath of a war. She had done what n.o.body could have expected her to do. And she had done it in secret.

”Did she tell you about Frank Griffith?” Charlotte asked after a moment's thought. ”Did she tell you how your father sacrificed himself to save Frank?”

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”Yes. And she also told us she did not know where Frank was. She said she had lost touch with him. So, even if my mother wanted to contact him, there was no-”

”But that wasn't true!”

”Exactly. Beatrix helped us, but she also lied to us. Or perhaps I should say she did not trust us with everything she knew. But, then, who did she trust with everything?”

”n.o.body,” Charlotte replied. ”But . . . Why? Why all the secrecy?”

”When you read what she sent me, Charlotte, you will understand. She gave no hint of its existence during my mother's life. She remained our friend and advisor. She sent money to pay for my education. When I married Henri, she was generous to him too, putting up some of the capital he needed to open a confiserie in Perpignan. And she helped again later when we moved to Paris. So, you see, we owed her far more than an occasional box of chocolates could repay. But they were all she would accept.”

”What did she send you?” Charlotte heard the note of impatience in her voice, but was helpless to restrain it.

”A doc.u.ment my father had given to her brother. In the accompanying letter, Beatrix said it would be sent to me by a friend in the event of her death. She also implored me not to contact her family.

She said she had held the doc.u.ment back for so long because she was afraid it would re-open old wounds for my mother and because she felt sure it was better for us not to know what it contained.”

”And what did it contain?”

”See for yourself. The original is in Catalan, but Tristram translated it into English. I will fetch both versions now and let you read the translation. It is time, I think. High time.”

Madame Va.s.soir rose and walked quietly from the room, patting Charlotte on the shoulder as she pa.s.sed. The door clicked shut behind her and Charlotte listened intently to the ticking of the clock and the rhythmic snoring of the bloodhound. It would not be long now. A fragment of the damp Paris night-a portion of heavy-curtained solitude-stood alone between her and the truth. When the door reopened, Beatrix's last secret would be hers.

CHAPTER.

SIX.

Iam Vicente Timoteo Ortiz, a native of Catalonia: Once I would have said I was also a proponent of the ideals of anarcho-syndicalism. But I am no longer sure enough of anything to embrace a political philosophy when the threat of death is close at hand.

I am writing this at a small farm near Alfambra, about twenty kilometres north of Teruel, the capital of Lower Aragon. I am billeted here with the other members of a platoon of the British Battalion of the Fifteenth International Brigade. It is early January, 1938, and we expect to be called up any day to partic.i.p.ate in the battle for Teruel which is going on to the south of us. I have a presentiment that it will be the last battle of this war for me, the last of too many. Teruel is a cold sad place. To attempt its capture in the middle of winter is madness. But perhaps its capture is not the objective. Some say the government hopes, by attacking it, to force Franco into an armistice. If so, it hopes in vain. Franco will accept nothing but surrender. And then he will execute those who have surrendered.

I have wondered for more than a year whether to tell this story. I have hesitated and delayed, always with good reason. Two weeks ago, when my wife lay in my arms for what may have been the last time, I nearly told her. But I held back. And now I am glad I did. She should be spared the danger of knowing what I know. So should any Spaniard. It is why I am writing this now. Because only a foreigner can decide rationally what to do with such information. And among the foreigners whose ranks I now fight in there is at least one I think I can trust to do that.

All my life I have known no quarter would be given by those who seek to suppress the working cla.s.s of this country. I became an anarchist because I believed only violence would enable us to throw off our shackles. I was born in Barcelona in 1905 and grew to manhood under the governers.h.i.+p of General Martinez Anido, who would pay a bounty to any pistolero who killed an anarchist but would arrest any anarchist who defended himself and then have him shot while trying to escape. I remember the fate of Salvador Segui and the midnight H A N D I N G L O V E.

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knock of the Somaten. I remember the machine-gunning of strikers in the Calle de Mercaders and the burning alive of the besieged anarchists in Casas Viejas. And I remember also Bueneventura Durruti and Francisco Ascaso. I salute their memory. I applaud their deeds. I mourn for no archbishop. I yearn for no king. Yet the black-and-red flag will not be my shroud. At the end I will call for no priest of this country's church. But neither will I cry ”Viva la Anarquia!” for I would choke on the words.

It is less than two years since I heard the factory hooters sound across Barcelona on a Sunday morning and knew the military rising had begun, but 19 July 1936 seems now like a date from pre-history.

For I believed then. I was a man whose faith was still alive. I swapped my CNT card for a rifle and joined the a.s.sault in the Plaa de Catalunya. I was one of those who danced and sang in the streets when the military surrendered. And I was a member of the Durruti column when it marched out to capture Saragossa and spread the revolution throughout Aragon. But Saragossa was never to fall. Nor was the revolution to take root. Ahead lay only death and disillusionment.