Doves of War: Four Women of Spain. Paul Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ slowly into the centre, starving children jumped for joy as they handed out chocolate. There were emotional scenes as right-wingers who had been in hiding since the beginning of the war staggered out into the light from the embassies and legations where they had been buried alive. Pip was distressed by the damage to the magnificent Orléans Palacio in Madrid. Much of the façade had been damaged by shell-fire. A tabor (battalion) of Moorish mercenaries had been billeted there and filled the patio with sheep, goats and bullocks. However, the upstairs apartments and most of the furniture was intact.¹¹⁹

      On the following day, they drove northeast out of Madrid past Guadalajara to inspect Princess Bea’s estate at Castillejo. In the course of a drive of one hundred kilometres between Guadalajara and Tarancón, they saw no Nationalist troops yet passed without incident through 40,000 demoralised Republicans. ‘All along the road, some going one way, some the other, in groups of twos and threes, or tens and twelves. They all looked dead tired, pale and exhausted, but quite cheerful. Lots were limping and hardly able to walk. All carrying their rugs and packages on their backs, but no arms at all.’ The estate at Riba de Saelices which Bea had not seen since the family’s departure from Spain in April 1931 was a ruin, its miles of woodland cut down, the house turned into a stable. On her return to Madrid, Pip accompanied the Infanta on an endless round of visits to hospitals, emergency stations and canteens. The weather was cold and wet and in the aftermath of the war, most people seemed to be suffering from colds or flu. Boredom briefly set in and, like others, Pip began to ‘think of the filthy war which we loathed as “the good old days”’. Ataúlfo was similarly affected and was surly and bad-tempered with both Pip and his mother. The entire air force was depressed by the death, in an exhibition flight, of Joaquín García Morato, the Nationalists’ great air ace.

      Pip was at least cheered by moving into the new quarters of the Orléans family, a magnificent house that had been the Turkish Legation. She was busy establishing the canteen at the air base of Barajas, on the Guadalajara road out of Madrid.

      She wrote of her relief work with Frentes y Hospitales: ‘Always the same rows and bothers. Oh my kingdom never to see a hungry person or a tin of milk or Bovril again.’ She was suffering the common letdown of the soldier’s return to a squalid normality in a war-ravaged country. The end of hostilities meant no longer living on adrenaline. For Ataúlfo and Prince Ali and others, it meant the space to think about dead comrades. The atmosphere was not helped by the fact that there was little food. Pip was still losing weight but, unusually, not pleased by the fact. The relief work was certainly tedious – ‘I am so sick of all this fussing and bothering and wearing uniform and never doing anything amusing.’ The emergency stations provided horrendous sights and smells. Yet there was nothing to stop Pip returning to London to the glittering social life she had left behind eighteen months earlier. ‘I can’t bear the thought of leaving this, because after all I not only could but should go home, but it will be so hard to have to start life again.’ She meant ‘life far from Ataúlfo’. On the dark afternoon of Easter Saturday, he played the piano to her and the thought of eventually being separated from him left her tearful.¹²⁰

      Despite a telegram from her mother ordering her to return home, Pip lingered on doing ever-more relief work. Prince Ali was involved in organising various triumphal parades of the Condor Legion and the Italian Regia Aeronautica. On 20 April, Pedro Chicote, owner of Madrid’s most fashionable bar, gave a cocktail party for Frentes y Hospitales. The hostess was Pilar Franco Bahamonde, the Caudillo’s sister. Pip met her daughter, Pilar Jaraiz-Franco, who had spent much of the war in Republican prisons. She thought that ‘she looks the silliest, most uninteresting girl, who has never done anything but amuse herself. Pip could hardly have been more mistaken. Pilar Jaraiz would later become a Socialist and write a cuttingly acute critique of the Franco family and regime. Other days involved visits to hospitals and desperate efforts to get supplies for them. Pip found a cancer hospital ‘too dreadful for words. All dying and pale green and half-mad.’ Tuberculosis was rife in Madrid. With 70,000 cases, the hospitals could not cope. Despite serious risk of infection, Pip was occupied making regular house calls to the seriously ill, distributing food and dressing ulcers and sores. In the working-class quarter of Vallecas, she came across scenes from a medieval plague.

      We found a married couple of fifty-six and sixty years old in bed, black with dirt and just like skeletons. Their hands and legs were covered with ulcers and blisters, pouring blood, pus and water, tied in dirty rags. For two months they have lived on orange peel and a few onions they found fermenting in a manure heap. A woman of forty-eight looking about seventy, a skeleton with scabs all over her hands and face and the pus running into her eyes so that she could not open them.

      Starving consumptives and people deranged by hiding for years became common sights for her. After hours of visits, she would work long into the evening typing reports for the hospitals.¹²¹

      Princess Bea wrote to Margot Howard de Walden of her admiration for

      Pip’s character and work … Here now in Madrid we found the population in a deplorable condition, sights like in an Indian famine. We had to visit separately as there was so much work. Pip nursed these people and gave them injections and took food to them. In the evenings she typed reports for the Hospitals all on her own and in perfect Spanish … Where there was no doctor to hand, she did the diagnosis … got the cancer patients into the Cancer Hospital, the tuberculosis patients into the Sanatorium … She never made a mistake … Her intelligence and patience have been astounding. All this without an audience, or a single day off for fun. She is known from one end of Spain to the other … never flurried or impatient. I want you to know all this as in tidy England you may never have seen her tackle a burden of work single-handed like she has in Madrid.¹²²

      Occasional visits from Ataúlfo merely left Pip – and indeed his mother – feeling tense. Not being involved in their frenetic relief work, he moped around the house and picked quarrels with Princess Bea who would take out on Pip her consequent distress. Pip wrote in her diary: ‘Life is so hopeless anyhow. I almost wish Ataúlfo had not come at all. I am just about at the last gasp as it is. I don’t want to see Ataúlfo. I want to be left in peace with no more work and no more emotions.’ In early May, Pip was awarded her military cross for her bravery at Escatrón. She also served drinks at the Barajas aerodrome when Franco came to preside at a fly-past of the Nationalist air force, including Germans and Italians. She was not impressed by the Caudillo: ‘Franco is a weeny little man, the size and shape of a tennis ball and looked too funny beside huge stooping lanky old Kindelán and even taller, lankier Queipo de Llano.’ In fact, the round of victory parades and march-pasts, of celebratory dinners and cocktail parties, heralded the inexorable approach of Pip’s return home. At a dinner at the Ritz, she sat disconsolately watching others dance, longing for Ataúlfo and reflecting ‘it is going to be one hell of an effort to get used to enjoying dancing with anyone else again’. After a visit to Philip II’s palace at the Escorial on Sunday 14 May, she wrote: ‘Everyday I love Spain more and hate more having to leave it. I will visit it again but it will never be my country like now.’ On the following day, she was even more down. Ataúlfo was going to Germany with the Condor Legion. She was anything but resigned as she wrote:

      I can’t bear the thought that this is all over. I can never be of the family here again. I will stay with them and them with us but it won’t ever be the same. God knows how, when and where Ataúlfo and I will meet again once I leave Spain. And I must go. How I hate life for doing this to me. I want to be married and have lots of children and lots of fun. And I can’t do it and can’t even be happy.¹²³

      On 17 May, Pip was exhilarated when Prince Ali took her flying in a Savoia Marchetti 79 bomber and let her take over the controls for ten minutes. On the same day she had dinner with Peter Kemp, who introduced her to Major СКАЧАТЬ