Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (72 page)

I stayed in that cell for about three weeks. No guard or authority came near me. There was a heavy damp staleness about the air as though the walls were hung with sour blankets. After a few days I began to understand what it meant to rot in jail. Daylight moved slowly across a distant skylight. No food or drink was provided. We sipped water from the metal cup chained near the spout in the corner, and each day, about noon, a nun would bring us a small flat sandwich and pass it through the bars in silence.

In twenty-four hours it was all we got, and how we longed for noon. But that sandwich, even whiter, smaller than the nun’s quiet hand, flavoured on the inside by a thin scraping of mincemeat and on the outside by her ineffable fragrance of touch, what a feast it was to our shackled appetites and hungers. And how voluptuously remembered since.

Meanwhile, apart from these wisplike visits, we were left alone. Nobody came and nothing happened. There were no shouting inspections or calling out for exercise or punishment. We seemed to have been abandoned. This was hard to believe in a huge military jail like this, but to begin with I was glad of it.

Then after the second week, lying in the twilit vacancy of my cell, I gradually grew concerned by the silence. My companion had disappeared. What fate, I wondered, were they storing up for me? And when would they come to declare it? After the third week I began scheming to smuggle out messages for help, to Jaime, or anyone at all. Three weeks, without threat or sentence or even occasional persecution seemed thoughtless indeed.

I was sick now, shivering on the concrete floor, scraping the mould from the walls with my finger-nails. An escalating series of panics broke away from each other and led nowhere except back to my head. Only night, the black skylight, and the noon-whispering nun bearing the half sandwich in her small lace-lined basket, looped the empty silence of the sprawling jail.

Deliverance came, suddenly, unexpectedly, and with a casual lack of drama. A shabby old porter was unlocking my door, and I saw that he had no gun. ‘Go away,’ he said, ‘out!’; and he gave me a daft grandfatherly smile that was a thin red slit in his face. ‘What a surprise,’ he said, ‘eh?’ And he thumped me in the ribs, then fumblingly unlocked the outer grille. We walked through a network of passages to the ground floor, through half-light and darkness, through whispers of sound and the smell of unwashed men drawing their body heat from one another.

Back again in the huge open hall of the jail, still crowded with women and barefoot children, I picked my way through the waiting, watchful, ragged groups, and followed where the old trusty led me.

‘There’s your friend,’ he said at last, nodding towards the door. It was a surprise indeed.

Leaning against a pillar near the entrance was a short tubby man wearing a smart overcoat and trilby hat. He gave me a shy warm smile, slightly tinged with embarrassment. It was Bill Rust, editor of the
Daily Worker.

‘You should be in London,’ he said. ‘How d’you manage to end up here?’

I told him I’d been following instructions.

‘Ah, Jaime – yes.’ He shifted uncomfortably. ‘Well, come on. I’ve got a car outside.’

And so he had, with all my bags piled in the back of it. I was free, sprung suddenly from my mildewed cell into the clear air of the Barcelona night. Rust had been having a drink that evening with the Chief of Police, who mentioned he’d an unexplained Englishman down in the jail. Rust guessed it was me. Vouch for him, you can have him, said the Chief.

I was glad, but a bit sore at the mess I’d been in.

‘So you came as soon as you heard?’ I said.

‘You were lucky. I don’t drink with police every night.’

‘But I’ve been stuck down here for over three weeks.’

‘You could have been stuck here for the rest of your life.’

Rust drove me to his flat, high up in one of the boulevards, and said I should stay there till things got untangled. He lit a geyser for a bath, gave me a tumblerful of whisky, then cooked me a piled plateful of corned-beef hash. He was a quiet, gentle man, tough with bureaucrat bullies, but a kindly uncle to such strays as myself. I stayed in his flat for two or three days, not over-eager to return to the streets in case I got picked up again. To keep me occupied he asked me to sort out his filing cards, which were in shoe-boxes and needed putting in alphabetical order. Cards with the names and addresses of British and Irish volunteers; next of kin (if any); dates of enlistment; Brigade postings; brief histories, comments. There must have been five or six hundred of them. Many – more than half – were marked ‘killed in action’ or ‘missing’, at such fronts as Brunete, Jarama and Guadalajara. Public schoolboys, undergraduates, men from coal mines and mills, they were the ill-armed advance scouts in the, as yet, unsanctified Second World War. Here were the names of dead heroes, piled into little cardboard boxes, never to be inscribed later in official Halls of Remembrance. Without recognition, often ridiculed, they saw what was coming, jumped the gun, and went into battle too soon.

Rust was in and out of the flat most of the day, and in the evening we drank whisky and talked. He never spoke of his newspaper, or the war or his connection with it, but told mild stories of childhood atrocities. He asked me no questions, except about my health, which seemed to concern him closely. There was, indeed, something almost nannyish about his care of me, even to the extent of giving me his card-index to play with.

On the third day, taking no chances, Rust drove me round to the French Consulate and the city Police Headquarters, and got me my exit visas. The officer, who had already swiped my Chanel-scented pound notes, crisply stamped my passport: sale sin dinero – departed without money. ‘Farewell, brother,’ he said. ‘I think you’ve not been defrauded.’

Jaime came to the station to give me last-minute instructions, together with coded addresses in Paris and London. Also apologies and excuses which didn’t matter now and were unearned anyway. Already in my mind I’d left this doomed city and country, where women queued hopelessly outside shops, hospitals and prisons, waiting in the rain for miracles.

The night train to the frontier was waiting – crowded, murmuring, without lights, unheated, and smelling of unwashed wounds. I found a space in a tiny wood-slatted compartment already dotted with the red stubs of cigarettes. At first we stumbled slowly through the shiny black suburbs of the city while searchlights moved over the sea. Nothing could be heard but half-stifled coughing, heavy breathing, and the faint, frightened moan of a woman. Reaching the open country we picked up speed, in a steady slouching way, and my companions suddenly found their voices with a carefree release of bravado. Two of them were obviously from the same village up the coast. They were reunited and returning home.

‘You remember Don Anselmo – the fish-factor?’

‘Of course I remember him.’

‘A thief and a robber he was.’

‘A peseta a day he paid us – before they shot him.’

‘Who shot him?’

‘Well, the Committee shot him, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, the Committee, they shot him. They shot a lot of them.’

‘A little peseta a day – God shame him.’

It was a shaking out of justice, hoarse agreement all round, then with prolonged coughing and shuffling everybody settled to sleep. Cigarettes went out, and there was silence, except for the distant moan of the woman.

We arrived at Port Bou in the dirty light of dawn. On the platform stood a bunch of grey-faced men. Their hands were manacled and they were dressed in rags of uniform and guarded by a couple of old veterans with muskets. Deserters, someone said, trying to scramble out over the mountains. When I came in, I remembered, coming the other way, something like this had also happened to me.

Now I was on my way back, with official papers to help me, sale sin dinero, and little else. The two mountain boulders I’d walked between, on my way into Spain, had seemed almost too simple a way to enter a war. In reverse, it was even simpler; our train took a gulping breath, left the underworld behind it, and screwed through the short tunnel between Port Bou and Cerebere. Curtains were lifted, we saw fresh morning skies, neon-lit cafes, and smelt the hot fat butter of France…

At dawn the next day I arrived at Victoria station and saw the cloud of her breath where she waited. She looked at my hands, then my face, and gave her short jackal laugh. I sniffed the cold misty fur of her hair.

As we drove north she watched me as much as she watched the road. ‘Well, I hope you’re pleased with yourself,’ she said. ‘Didn’t give me a thought, did you? I’ve been through absolute hell – you know that? I even went to a call-box one night, a public phone-box – can you imagine? – and I got right through to Socorro Rojo, Albacete. Just think – across France, and those frontiers – and all Spain and that war… It took me three hours, and I was crying all the time. I just wanted to talk to you,
talk
to you, can you understand? A man was watching me from a car, and kept giving me money for the phone. No wonder you look so smug.’

Then I was back in her flat. In high wealthy Hampstead. She drew me in with her blue steady gaze. I remember the flowers on the piano, the white sheets on her bed, her deep mouth, and love without honour. Without honour, but at least with salvation.