Writers are either morning people who start work with the day’s second cup of coffee or night people who sip iced whisky in the moonlight. I’m the morning type and have always envied the more quixotic lunar scribblers with their absinthe eyes and knowing expressions.
When I moved to Barcelona in 1984, I kept my mornings free for my literary endeavours and worked part-time for a company called Interlog as an English teacher. I set off in the late afternoon across the grid of parallel streets to various banks and corporate offices that offered English classes to their staff.
English was the lingua franca of what was being called the global world and Brits maintained a reputation for courtesy and noblesse oblige – privilege that embodies responsibility, a concept that seemed vaguely colonial. Football hooligans, illegal wars and Perfidious Albion would peel the scales from European eyes and I was lucky to arrive in Spain at the tail end of the myth.
Learning a language is a serious business, but people retain more when you add a dash of humour. I printed out political cartoons by JAK – Raymond Allen Jackson, and Steve Bell’s regular strip ‘Maggie’s Farm.’ The comedy had to be explained, but that didn’t stop it being funny. Students would then leave the class with a smile for our ten-minute break in the nearest bar – never more than a block away in Barcelona and always more than ten minutes.
After a caña served cold from the barrel, the atmosphere lightened and students who had sat stiff and silent in the classroom found the words to discuss their lives, their reasons for learning English and, most important, their dreams for Barça. Futbol Club Barcelona was the religion replacing religion and it was assumed that I had inside knowledge seeing how the new man at the helm that year was Terry Venables, the dynamic English coach who ended up winning La Liga that season by a 10-point margin.
Barça was the life blood of the body Catalan, the key to the Chinese puzzle that united the city and its people. Chief executives when they arrived for work at the new glass palaces on the Diagonal would stop to chat with the doorman about their grandchildren, the traffic jams, the news that Antoni Gaudí’s unfinished cathedral, the Sagrada Família, had been made a World Heritage Site. All Catalans appeared to have insights and opinions on art. Shaking their heads, faces growing tense, they would then discuss the callous injuries and golden goals of team Barça.
The Spanish Civil War
The doorman in his peaked cap and the exec in his grey suit shared the same loyalties, the same aversions, and would have suffered or had families who had suffered in and since the Spanish Civil War – that long black cloud that in 1984 still loomed over Spain. The English need little excuse to look back on the Second World War with a sense of nostalgia and national pride, a rare moment when the iron grip of the class system appeared to relax its grip. For most Spaniards, the civil war had the opposite effect and touched the raw nerve of national shame.
Spain’s Second Republic – the first lasted briefly from 1873-1874 – had come into existence in 1931. A coalition of socialists, liberals and a handful of communists won two general elections, in 1933 and again, after three years of turbulence and insurrection, in February 1936. The alliance had stood on a platform of land reform, female emancipation, a minimum wage and the creation of a national health service. It was the most advanced social agenda in the developed world and was viewed as a profanity by the Church, military and monarchists.
The government had been in office for four months when General Francisco Franco led the July coup that resulted in the three-year civil war in which more than a million Spaniards died or disappeared. The bloodletting came to an end on 1 April 1939 and Franco ruled Spain as the self-anointed Caudillo – the Leader – until his death thirty-six years later on 20 November 1975.
Catalonia had broadly supported the Republic in the civil war and was the last region to fall to Franco’s Nationalists. The Republic’s ultimate headquarters was at Castell Ferran, the military fort on the hill above Figueres. On the days before the surrender, the town was bombed to rubble before Panzer tanks commanded by Germans mopped up the last meagre flares of resistance.
As thousands of militiamen, members of the International al Brigade who had hung on in Spain afraid to return to their own countries and Catalan families fled the 25 kilometres to the French border at La Jonquera, they were strafed by Italian fighter planes who had set up base in Majorca. The refugees had no food nor medicines. Those injured by bullets and shrapnel bled out and their dead bodies remained on the road side for months.
Mussolini and Hitler had supplied arms and manpower to Franco from the outbreak of war. Germany’s Luftwaffe was given a free hand to practise bombing techniques and infamously in April 1937 obliterated the Basque town of Guernica in an aerial attack that lasted two hours and killed 1,500 people, the first blitzkrieg of the modern era. Picasso’s masterpiece ‘Guernica,’ unveiled at the Paris Exhibition in November 1937, was described by critics as the most powerful anti-war painting of all time. Legend has it that a German official visiting the pavilion where the painting was on display asked Picasso:
‘Did you do this?’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘You did.’
Franco on Every Wall
While Germany and Italy had backed the mutinous Generals, Britain, France and the United States remained officially neutral and starved the Republic of arms, food and medical supplies. They made innumerable concessions to the fascist states and only as German storm troopers goose-stepped across Europe in 1939 did they acknowledge that the war on democracy in Spain was merely the dress rehearsal for the Second World War, concentration camps, the Holocaust and the Iron Curtain descending over Europe.
King Alfonso had died of heart disease in 1941. After Franco’s death, the late king’s grandson, King Juan Carlos I, was restored to the throne and the new Spanish Constitution of 1978 established a parliamentary democracy. After a series of weak coalitions, the threat of military rebellion and rising unemployment, Felipe González in 1982 led the PSOE, the Spanish Workers Socialist Party, to power with a centrist agenda remarkably similar to that set out by the self-same political party in 1936.
Spain had been holding its breath for more than 40 years. When I arrived in Barcelona two years after Felipe González came to power, Franco’s portrait in uniform still peered down from the walls of almost every bar and most people still didn’t quite believe he was dead.
But life was tilting cautiously forward. When I walked to the banks and office buildings for my classes, the cafés would be full of murmured conversations — some about football, some about art, and some, in quieter tones, about the past. The civil war was never far away, but neither was the scent of fresh coffee or the sound of a street sweeper’s broom on the tiled pavements.
oOo
You may enjoy my novel We Shall Pass –
“Young idealistic British volunteers to the Spanish Civil War find themselves in a Guernica-like nightmare, an ever-rising body-count. Add a love triangle stretched across the extremes of the English 1930s class system and you have something very powerful.” PETER YORK
“We Shall Pass passes on every level. As a story of friendship, adversity and political commitment. A timely reminder, if we ever need one.” NEIL JORDAN
WE SHALL PASS is available from indy publisher Luath Press – click HERE.
And all the Amazons ay £9.95 – click HERE.