Doves of War: Four Women of Spain. Paul Preston

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ remarks, describing herself at one point as feeling ‘like a lunatic worm’, reading between the lines of her diary makes it clear that she was extremely competent and hard-working. She rather liked the director of the unit, a lieutenant Magallón, but basically she moped for Ataúlfo. Gradually, she bucked up as the hospital got busier. Twenty-nine-hour stints were not unusual. As before, some of what she had to cope with was deeply distressing – most horrifically, a four-year-old boy who had been playing with a hand grenade that exploded in his face. She and the diminutive magallón were often thrown together on night duty. ‘I would rather listen to the radio with one man than gossip with eleven women.’ She liked him because he gave her interesting work and explained things in a way that improved her nursing skills. He began to groom her as his theatre assistant. She also began to get along with the nurses with whom there were some riotous meals. In reaction to the horrors of the operating table, they drank, sang and danced noisily. One moonlit night, after a hard day, she set up her gramophone and danced the rumba alone on the veranda while open-mouthed patients and colleagues gawked from the windows. Pip was regularly teased about her weight. ‘I am the size of a house now and can hardly do up my uniform.’ ‘I am as fat as six pigs.’ She was working on trying to forget Ataúlfo without great success. She attended a number of bullfights in Zaragoza which she did not much enjoy. She was also distressed to discover that some of her patients who had wounds in the hand were suspected of shooting themselves to get away from the front and would thus be executed.¹⁰²

      At one point, Pip accompanied Dr magallón on his rounds in the village. Walking around the cobbled streets of Calaceite, she was fascinated by her introduction to village life about which she wrote amusingly. Their patients ranged from an ‘adorable baby’ to a grandmother in bed in the midst of piles of stored fruit – ‘one of those tough, bald, scraggy old hags of about a hundred’. At one house, ‘I could not make out if the patient was male or female as it had a large, black moustache.’ The patient was, in fact, a woman. The interlude was brief. Pip now picked up a liver infection and was soon extremely ill. Just as she was recovering, after passing ten wretched days, she discovered that another nurse, Maruja, was spreading gossip about her relationship with magallón in order to promote the career of her own beloved, a Dr Torrijos. On Pip’s side, the relationship was entirely innocent but she was aware that magallón was deeply smitten by her. During her illness, he took personal charge of her care and would sit by her bedside stroking her face and hair. Then the front moved. Franco passed through Calaceite to direct the decisive Nationalist counteroffensive at the Battle of the Ebro which was launched on 30 October 1938. Within twenty-four hours, Pip was installed in a new hospital. She was thrilled when, while out with magallón and another nurse looking for a place on the river bank for the hospital linen to be washed, the Caudillo’s cavalcade roared by and Franco himself saluted them.¹⁰³ On other days, magallón led fishing expeditions using hand grenades to stun the fish. Her health continued to give cause for concern. In addition to liver problems and dysentery, she had a persistent cough that led magallón to believe she might be tubercular. She also had abscesses on her legs and bottom. Consuelo was threatening to write to Margot to come and collect her daughter.¹⁰⁴

      The continuing relationship between Maruja and Torrijos led to Pip writing cattily in her diary: ‘Romance in a hospital between a jellified skeleton and a prize sow’. She continued to flirt mildly with magallón. ‘magallón seems to spend his life tickling me which I admit he does well and with a uniform and starched apron he can’t go too far if he wants to, which he does.’ That was as far as it went at first, but the gossips in the hospital enjoyed making up more scurrilous stories. Maruja, in particular, was determined to get both Pip and Consuelo out of the hospital and to cause trouble for magallón. Maruja had reported Consuelo as a drunkard and drug addict. This led to Mercedes Milá visiting the hospital and threatening to throw them both out. Eventually, after considerable humiliation, they managed to persuade her of the truth. To be assailed by such nonsense when all she wanted to do was nurse was deeply frustrating for Pip. ‘Why, oh why did I ever come here? Won’t life ever be fun again, however hard one tries to enjoy it. God I hate wars and all they entail.’ As she reflected on the gratuitous malice of Maruja, she was briefly gladdened by a letter from Ataúlfo asking her to come to Épila. However, as she contemplated how pointless it was to go and see him, depression descended again. She had a fight with the deeply jealous magallón and wrote bitterly of Ataúlfo: ‘Why did I ever have to fall in love with a red nosed, begoggled, mother-ridden poop?’ Feeling frustrated, and suffering even more from boils and abscesses, she wrote with characteristic self-deprecation: ‘I expect I will soon have to flirt with magallón. It would be so enjoyable to have a spot of mild sex once more only I am not so sure it would stay mild for long. Only no one can come to much harm with the knowledge that they have their bottom covered with growths!’¹⁰⁵

      At last, the guerrilla war with Maruja was ended by the arrival of a new head nurse named Isabel. A close friend of Consuelo’s mother, she turned out to be very experienced but puritanically strict. Pip gave in to her frustration and she spent the afternoon of 14 November, her last day of being twenty-one, ‘having an enjoyable spot of slap and tickle with magallón, mostly tickle but a nice bit of slap too. His technique is hot even though he is teeny, and one must admit doctors know their way about.’ Her twenty-second birthday was miserable since there was no post other than a telegram from her mother. Her life was rendered more gloomy by a reprimand from Isabel who ordered her not to smoke, drink, swear, sing or fraternise with the doctors. ‘I might just as well be a nun, and it is not my form. I can’t help having been brought up to a lot of liberty and it drives me mad to be spied on and followed about and treated like either a child or a bloody tart who must be reformed. I am quite willing to behave like a nun in the hospital from eight in the morning till nine at night, but at least I might have some enjoyment afterwards.’ In despair at the pettiness around her, she was invigorated by a visit from Ataúlfo and Princess Bea who came loaded with ham, cheese, chocolates, vermouth, brandy, magazines and some correspondence. Ataúlfo was sufficiently nice to her to start her longing for him again. That, plus news from home that her sister Gaenor was pregnant made her sorry for herself. ‘Why oh why can’t the goop realise he is as much in love with me as he is ever likely to be with anybody. My younger sister is married and having a baby, why in hell can’t I do the same. But I can’t and that is that and I shall just have to put up with it.’¹⁰⁶

      By the third week of November, the Nationalists had pushed the Republicans out of the territory captured in July. The Republicans retreated back across the Ebro into Catalonia. Pip’s hospital was to be moved again. As she thought about leaving the hospital, a drunken Legionario told her that he regarded her as his mother. The Pip who was always eager to please was moved to reflect on the consolations of her work.

      It really is awfully nice to be able to do things for people and them be grateful even if I do have to lose my temper with them often. I like being relied on for everything. Whatever bothers them, they ask me. Sometimes it is to do with their wound or illness, sometimes clothes, sometimes a quarrel which I automatically have to decide for them, sometimes I am a go-between to get them leave to visit relations or friends. I pretty nearly am their mother, though God forbid I ever have forty-seven children.

      These satisfactions were little enough consolation for the petty jealousies that surrounded her. ‘Everyone thinks I am so calm and unemotional; that I don’t mind all the rows and muddles there are but it is driving me potty. Only seeing everyone else in such a state makes me pretend to be even calmer than I would normally appear.’

      By the end of November, she was in a country house called Monte Julia in the deserted hills near Tremp in the north of Lérida. She threw herself into converting it into a hospital, rounding up charladies in nearby villages and requisitioning furniture from deserted houses. Her ownership of a car put her right at the heart of the operation. ‘I am going to buy myself a chauffeur’s uniform and give СКАЧАТЬ