The Real Band of Brothers: First-hand accounts from the last British survivors of the Spanish Civil War
Max Arthur
Personal stories from the men and women who volunteered to fight for a cause they passionately believed in.The Spanish Civil War, which raged from 1936-9, was a brutal and intense war which claimed well over 500,000 lives. Rightly predicting that the rise of Fascism in Spain could develop into a more global conflict, almost 2500 British volunteers travelled to Spain under the banner of the International Brigade to fight for the Spanish Republic in an attempt to stem the tide.Acclaimed oral historian Max Arthur has tracked down the last eight survivors of this conflict, and interviewed them for their unique perspective, their memories of their time fighting and the motives which compelled them to fight.Theirs is a unique story, of men and women volunteering to lay down their lives for a cause, believing passionately that the Spanish Republic's fight was their fight too.From Union leader to nurse, Egyptologist to IRA activist, these survivors have incredible, compelling and sometimes harrowing tales to tell of their experiences, revealing their ideologies, pride, regrets, and feelings about the legacy of the actions they took."For most young people there was a feeling of frustration, but some were determined to do anything that seemed possible, even if it meant death, to try to stop the spread of Fascism. It was real, and it had to be stopped."Jack Jones - who fought at the Battle of the Ebro, now aged 96
THE REAL BAND
OF BROTHERS
First-hand accounts from the last British survivors of the Spanish Civil War
MAX ARTHUR
This book is dedicated to the 2,500 British and Irish
volunteers who fought alongside the Spanish people in
their heroic struggle against Fascism from 1936 to 1939.
And, in particular, to the 526 who lost their lives.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page (#u70903c5f-c1e0-52c7-9ec3-62f78b7a999a)
Dedication (#u54361c2c-a5e5-58c3-bf33-5b19d7768788)
Map (#u7d75e41a-0874-5e54-ab3f-301117edc668)
PREFACE (#u2f98e225-ced1-5a62-97ae-19fbf0373fe7)
LOU KENTON (#uc59eb252-d3c4-5f8d-9f38-c06638d8dad0)
PENNY FEIWEL (#uc81f7284-c4af-50ea-a699-6afdc8724602)
JACK JONES (#litres_trial_promo)
JACK EDWARDS (#litres_trial_promo)
BOB DOYLE (#litres_trial_promo)
SAM LESSER (#litres_trial_promo)
LES GIBSON (#litres_trial_promo)
PADDY COCHRANE (#litres_trial_promo)
TIMELINE OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR (#litres_trial_promo)
LA PASIONARIAS SPEECH (#litres_trial_promo)
INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PREFACE (#ulink_aa73d3aa-d380-5a31-8bd5-a4ce34644e57)
The Real Band of Brothers stems from a chance meeting with the actor Alison Steadman in 2003 at the launch of my book Forgotten Voices of the Great War, where she read the moving words of Kitty Eckersley, whose husband had died on the Western Front. I met Alison again five years later and she introduced me to her friend, Marlene Sidaway, also an actor. Marlene lived for many years with David Marshall, one of the earliest British volunteers in the International Brigades, and was also the Secretary of the International Brigade Memorial Trust. In this role, she told me, she was in close touch with the last British survivors of the Brigade—and, from that meeting, the book began to take shape.
To many people in the UK today, the Spanish Civil War remains something of a grey area—a conflict in which British troops were not engaged, and one that was eclipsed in the public perception by the Second World War. But the Spanish Civil War was a vicious and prolonged battle, the repercussions of which still reverberate through that country today. Many towns were destroyed and their populations massacred; the lives of half a million men, women and children were lost. Furthermore, while the British Government did not support the democratically elected Republican regime in Spain, individuals from the UK and other nations across Europe, incensed by the injustice of the Spanish struggle, volunteered their services to fight for democracy.
In July 1936, the army generals including General Franco led a savage military coup to depose Spain’s elected government—a left-wing coalition of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), the Republican left, the Communists and various regional nationalist groups. This Fascist aggression was not isolated in Spain; in the early 1930s, extreme right-wing movements were also growing under Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany and, to the alarm of left-wing parties there, under Oswald Mosley in Britain.
Supported by his Blackshirts, Mosley tried to impose his authoritarian philosophies on the working-class population of London’s East End, and his political meetings often ended in violence. Eventually, in a well-orchestrated show of strength, groups of trade unionists, Communists and Jews joined forces to denounce Mosley’s racist ideology and prevent his jackbooted thugs from marching through their streets—it was a stand-off that became known as the infamous Battle of Cable Street.
Some of the men and women who had seen off Mosley on that fateful day later volunteered to fight in Spain in what became known as the International Brigades. Much to the fury of these volunteers, the British Government of the day had adopted a policy of non-intervention. Not only would there be no British military support for the Spanish against Franco’s forces, there would be no official medical or material aid either. Although news from the Spanish war was sparse in any but the left-wing press, a growing number of people travelled to London to sign up with the Communist Party, and, in defiance of French laws against partisan military groups, made their way across the Channel, through France and over the Pyrenees to support the Spanish Republican army. Some were motivated by their political beliefs; others by their horror at the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Spain. The working people, already poor and living from hand to mouth, were facing starvation and disease, and many British doctors and nurses set out for Spain to offer their skills in order to alleviate the suffering their consciences could not ignore.
In the three-year conflict—which has been dubbed the first battle of the Second World War—many of those volunteers lost their lives. To all who freely offered their services, for whom the cause was indeed just and one they were prepared to die for, the war was a life-changing experience—and one that none would regret, despite the consequences.
As I started working on The Real Band of Brothers, just eight veterans of the International Brigades remained in Britain and, together with the award-winning documentary maker Matt Richards, I travelled across the country to interview and film these remarkable characters. The oldest, Lou Kenton, turned 100 in September 2008, and former nurse Penny Feiwel’s hundredth birthday is in April 2009. She is still full of vigour—and still cursing Franco for inflicting the terrible injuries on innocent children that she witnessed. Archaeology student Sam Lesser fought for two years to hold the City University of Madrid. Paddy Cochrane, who at seven had seen his father shot by the Black and Tans in Dublin, believed that he himself would suffer a violent death in Spain. Bob Doyle, who, after being held prisoner by the Fascists, returned years later to stamp and swear on Franco’s grave. Jack Jones would later become leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, and fought fearlessly at the Ebro in the last battle of the war. Les Gibson, a founder of the Young Communist League in west London, fought through Jarama, Brunete and the Ebro, and survived life-threatening colitis to return to the action. Jack Edwards, at home a very active union member and political activist, returned from the war with his determination to fight Fascism undiminished; within months he joined the RAF to continue the battle against Hitler.
Over a number of weeks I had the great pleasure of interviewing these eight extraordinary survivors in their own homes. Matt Richards recorded their testimonies on film and tape, and has subsequently written a script based on the interviews, which was commissioned as a two-part documentary for the History Channel—The Brits Who Fought for Spain.
All these old ‘Brigaders’ had endured an extremely tough Edwardian childhood, but retained an extraordinary vitality and a clear perspective on how the war had changed their lives forever. I am in awe of their still-vibrant sense of anger and defiance. Now, as I write this preface, I have just learned with great sadness of the passing of Bob Doyle—he was an indomitable spirit to the last and I was privileged to have visited him again just days before his death.
Some had told their story before, but others were opening up after a lifetime in which they had avoided talking about the war. Their testimonies are in their own words but allowance must be made for the age and frailty of their memories. Wherever possible I have checked the historical details, but sometimes the facts are buried in time. Bob Doyle and Jack Jones kindly gave me permission to use additional extracts from their respective books, Brigadista and Union Man.
It is now 70 years since the end of the Spanish Civil War, in which over 500 of the 2,500 British volunteers for the International Brigades were killed. All the survivors, however, were united in the one belief—that they were fighting against the evil of Fascism, and that it was no less than their duty to do their bit. As more than one speculated, if other European governments had supported the Spanish Republic and quashed the Fascist threat in its infancy, the course of history might have been different, and perhaps there would even have been no Second World War.
Whatever their sense of the role of the Spanish Civil War in a historical context, all are personally bound by the values of comradeship and deep loyalty. They fought for a cause, asked for no payment, and saw many friends die. But every one agreed that they would do it all again.
These are their words—I have been but a catalyst.
Max Arthur
London
January 2009
LOU KENTON (#ulink_548e9458-e4f3-5497-a977-b8f83707add9)
Born 1 September 1908 in Stepney, east London
I was born in a block of flats—a tenement—in the East End, in Stepney, in Adler Street, which doesn’t exist any more. I had eight brothers altogether, but some died. I was the first one to be born in England (my family was originally from Ukraine). My father died of TB when I was fourteen—he was working in a sweatshop for a tailor. I missed my bar mitzvah because he’d just died.
I joined the Communist Party in 1929, because it was the only party that was fighting Fascism. I met my first wife, who came from Austria, and together we were both in the Communist Party, although she wasn’t very active—she was a masseuse and spent her lifetime working.
We all had a political dislike for the Fascists. Mosley was the leader of the Fascists in Britain and he was anti-Labour—and anti-Communist, of course—and we often had fights when they tried to break up our meetings—and we did the same to them. We hated Mosley and there were always battles going on in the East End. The headquarters of the Fascists were in Bethnal Green, and we, the Communist Party, were mostly in Stepney.
At that time London was a much-divided place—in the east there were lots of trade unions, factories and the tailoring was mostly Communist. The first big encounter was when Mosley announced that he was going to march through the East End of London on 4 October 1936. His main slogan was ‘down with the Jews’. We had enough notice to run a campaign against the march. Until then Mosley had had setbacks, but was going from strength to strength. The point we tried to bring to public attention was that this was not just a provocation of the Jews: this march was an attack on the people of Britain as a whole. We tried to win the support of all sections of the population, which indeed we did. Not only the local trade council, but trade union branches from all over London and other parts of the country, supported the campaign to stop Mosley marching through east London. Of course, the Jewish population was on our side, although the official view of the Jewish Board of Deputies was ‘Don’t make trouble—just be quiet’. But we were able to get the majority of the Jewish population of east London on our side, as well as the dockers—they were the main big sections. Every grouping also had a job to do in the organisation of the whole of what has now become known as the Battle of Cable Street. My job was to organise my own Party branch of Holborn, which included the print workers, to occupy the ground around Aldgate Station. Mosley was going to march from the Minories (around Tower Hill), where he had assembled with the help of the police, through Aldgate, along Whitechapel Road, into Bethnal Green, where he had a certain amount of support. I had two jobs, firstly for my branch to be the first line of defence in Aldgate. What we were supposed to do I don’t know—there were only about thirty or forty of us and we didn’t know how big the crowd would be. We imagined that we would hold the Mosley crowd for even a few minutes, while the rest of the crowd would rally. In the event, the crowd was great: it stretched right along the Whitechapel Road, Commercial Road, Gardiner’s Corner, right up towards Aldgate Station itself. The crowd was so thick that you couldn’t move. There were a number of trams in the area and they were stuck in the middle of the crowd. You can imagine the sight—something like half a million people with these trams stuck all over the place. Of course, the word got to Mosley, and to the police, that they couldn’t possibly go through Aldgate.
They tried to redirect the march the other way, down Leman Street from the Minories into Cable Street, making a detour of Whitechapel Road. I had a motorbike at the time and was able to whizz around the periphery of the crowd, going from section to section to warn them what was going on. We had a number of people watching the Fascists and quickly telling the crowd what was happening. We were able to get word to the majority of the crowd in Commercial Road, which was some way from Cable Street, of what was happening. The dockers themselves were manning Cable Street and had thrown up barricades. As soon as the word got around that Mosley was on the way towards Cable Street, within minutes thousands of people were there. Although hundreds of police and the Mosley crowd tried to break through, they were stopped. Mosley then had to go back to the Minories and finally the police chief said there was no possibility of them going through the East End. They turned round and went the other way, towards the City, to the Embankment, and dispersed. That was really the great Battle of Cable Street: a major historic event and the first real defeat of Mosley.
Can you imagine the celebration throughout the East End that day? People were dancing in the streets, hugging each other. They had defeated Mosley—defeated Fascism. And although people had not yet fully realised what Fascism was, they could see what the Fascists’ intentions were.
I was married to Lilian at the time and we were living in Holborn and we were both very active. I was in Holborn at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and the branch, being more or less in the centre of London, helped to steward the big meetings taking place in Conway Hall, Farringdon Hall and Kingsway Hall. Appeals were made for money, food and support—they were very enthusiastic meetings.
I remember clearly, when the revolt started, how immediately the whole of the left-wing movement rallied in support of Spain. The majority of the people, however, didn’t take much interest and a good many were influenced by the press of the time, which condemned it as a Bolshevik, anti-Christian revolution. On our side we got to know early on about the real issues in Spain. The formation of the International Brigades gave it a personal interest, as people we knew began to make their way there. Very quickly we began to know the background to the Spanish struggle and the campaign in support of the Spanish Government grew in strength. Soon after the start of the civil war, Mussolini and Hitler sent Italian and German armies and air force over to help Franco. The Spanish Government, the legitimate government of the day, tried to buy arms. Britain and France were able to win the support of the League of Nations on a policy of so-called ‘non-intervention’. The reality of non-intervention meant that the Spanish Government was unable to buy arms, while the Fascists were free to buy what they wanted. The Spaniards were only able to get arms from Russia in a limited quantity, and from Mexico. Right through the war the army of the Spanish Government was far worse equipped than the Fascist side.
In Britain the movement grew in a number of ways. An organisation called British Medical Aid had been set up to raise money for ambulances. Very soon they opened first one and then another hospital in Spain. British doctors and nurses went to service these and other front-line hospitals. There was a great campaign to raise money and whole lorryloads of food were sent. There were also the youth food ships for Spain, which brought regular supplies. The British navy blockaded the coast and tried to stop the food ships, but several got through the blockade. Then, very soon, the refugees from the Basque country came over—we had several hundred Basque children in Britain who were looked after mostly in and around London. I think hardly a week went by without demonstrations and meetings taking place. Gradually the movement grew and became a very powerful crusade.
While this was happening individuals were going to Spain, isolated from each other, and joining one of the Republican units when they got there. Then the call went out throughout the whole world for volunteers to form the International Brigades.
One evening myself and Lilian and my dear friend Ben Glazer walked along the Embankment. We walked—stopped at many coffee stalls—talking, wondering what it would be like in Spain. We didn’t finally decide until we reached a coffee stall at Westminster Bridge, opposite the House of Commons. I think we had already decided to go, but didn’t say so in as many words. I think we were deeply fearful in our hearts, but none of us wanted to show our fears. What would it be like? Would we ever come back? What if we were captured? And when we decided—how we embraced! Lilian kissed us both. We linked arms and walked almost cheerfully down Whitehall to the all-night Lyons Corner House just off Trafalgar Square for more coffee and eggs and bacon. From there we decided that tomorrow morning we would go and volunteer.
Lilian and Ben both went off the next day. It was the last time I was to see Ben.
I was accepted, but the Party asked me to hold fire for three or four weeks while I cleared up the work that I was involved in as secretary. When I got to work next day I handed in my notice, and the Father of Chapel in charge of the print said, ‘What do you think you’re doing? You can’t just walk out, jobs are very precious.’ But I said, ‘I’m going to Spain.’ In those days an apprenticeship was so important—if you got a job you’d got it for life.
While Lilian went with the British Medical Aid Committee, Ben and the others had to make their own way to Paris, then through the Pyrenees. If you went through the British Medical Aid you could get your passport and the visa for Spain—but you also had to sign a document at the Foreign Office saying that if you were in trouble you wouldn’t call on the British Ambassador. That was fine. Lilian and I sold our home and gave our stuff away. I went to live in a room with Phil Piratin in east London, pending the time when I was ready to go. When I went along, blow me, they had changed the arrangements and they no longer, at least at that particular time, accepted anybody without military experience.
What to do? I went to the British Medical Aid and they said, ‘Yes, we will have you, if you can drive a lorry and service it.’ Again, what to do? So I went along to a garage in Walworth Road, offered my services free if I could be taught how to change wheels, change tyres, drive a lorry, etc. I went every evening after work and worked there for seven or eight hours. After about three or four weeks I felt competent enough to drive a lorry, went back to the Medical Aid and said I was ready to go on my motorbike but could also drive an ambulance or a lorry. I went off three or four days later.
My mother knew that Lilian had gone and kept asking, ‘Are you going?’ and ‘Must you go?’ and all the things a mother would say. I was anxious not to upset her, and, in the clumsy way most young people deal with these matters, I said that, if she was going to cry every time I came round before leaving, I wouldn’t come again—just go off. An awful thing to say!
I asked a friend to be present when I said goodbye. There was I, all packed, equipped with a new pair of leather leggings, leather gloves, leather jacket—which I had never had before. I kissed my mother goodbye, turned around the top of the road and waved. Later I was told she didn’t cry until I had gone, and then she broke down.
Came the day when I was going, word got round. I belonged to a club, the YCL (Young Communist League), and some dockers all came to the top of the street, Adler Street, between Whitechapel and Commercial Road, to see me off. There must have been several hundred, because I was still one of the first. I got on my bike, waved to them and started off. You won’t believe this: I didn’t have a map. I had no idea which way to go. All I knew was to get to the Elephant and Castle and head for Dover. I had my passport, visa and signed documents from the Foreign Office and knew I had to make my way to Barcelona. I can’t remember how I ever got there. I vaguely remember going right across France, making my way to the south.
I used to sleep by the roadside every night—I didn’t have money for lodgings. I had to get to Perpignan [to enter Spain] and how on earth I got there I don’t know. I had just a little money the crowd in London had collected for me so I could eat on the road. When I got to Perpignan I thought, ‘at last, Spain’. I looked and I couldn’t see any signs but I saw a crowd of workers having a cup of tea in a café. I went up to them and asked which was the way to Spain. They couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak Spanish, so I said, ‘Me, Spain, “Boom Boom!”.’ So when they stopped laughing they gathered round me, gave me a meal, and showed me the road to España, the first time I’d ever seen the sign for España.
My first real recollection of Spain was arriving at a great castle at Figueres—an enormous place—and outside the gates were two men on sentry duty. I stopped and asked them where to go. They spoke a little English and opened the gate. I rode in through this gate and the square of the castle was like a fort—as big as Trafalgar Square—hundreds if not thousands of men sitting around talking. I later learnt that was the first staging post for the people who had climbed the Pyrenees. I was the first one who had arrived on a motorbike. I think it was an American who first said to me, ‘If you want to keep that bike, never leave it, even to go to the bog—because there are so many people who would like to have your bike.’
There were literally hundreds who had found their way to the castle at Figueres. They’d walked over the mountains and they had their feet seen to and were given food. Each group from the different countries gathered together. There was a group from Britain and I went and joined them, and they were very keen to see a bloke with a motorbike. Several asked me if they could travel with me on the bike, but I said no—I was going to pick my wife up.
I went to Barcelona where the offices of the Brigade were. Remembering what the American had said, I saw a policeman and tried to explain to him—though of course he didn’t speak a word of English. I somehow managed to persuade him to look after my bike while I was in the office and he nodded. He straddled the bike and with his hand on his revolver he was going to shoot anybody who’d try and pinch it. I got my instructions to go to a little town called Benicasim. I slept in the office that night. The next morning I went by bike from Barcelona to the HQ in Valencia, where there was a convalescent home for the British Battalion. I didn’t know at the time, but, looking back later, I realise that I had arrived in Spain at the end of the Battle of Jarama in February 1937, which was the great turning point of the war. Until then the Fascists were advancing very rapidly; they were right in front of Madrid. If Madrid had fallen in those days, less than a year after the start of the war, it would have been the end. And the call went out, ‘Everything for Madrid—save Madrid’. The British Battalion had been building up and training as a unit. They hadn’t yet quite had their full training, but, because of the urgency of the situation, were thrown into the front line.
I wasn’t there, but I have heard stories of how they marched through Madrid. People in their thousands were ready to fight and build barricades in front of Madrid. Here, for the first time, an organised unit marched into action, and the emotion that it aroused among the people of Madrid can only be imagined.
Before I got to Valencia I found the place where wounded Brigaders were convalescing after the Battle of Jarama and that was where Lilian had been sent. It was wonderful to see her. We lost more than half of our battalion, killed and wounded, in that battle. It wasn’t just a convalescent home—it was also being used as a hospital. There were a number of wounded; several nurses had been in Jarama and they told me that it was very, very serious, very tense. One nurse from the north had had a nervous breakdown and said to me, ‘You mustn’t come out here, young man. You should go back home. We don’t stand a chance.’ Another nurse who had been with her tried to calm her and said to me, ‘It is tough, but you knew what you were coming to, anyway.’ Very soon, those who were well enough to travel went to a proper convalescent home which was run by British-speaking volunteers, at Benicasim. The others either went back to the front, or to one of the hospitals for further treatment. I was told to report to one of the British hospitals in a place called Valdeganga. We had two hospitals—one in Valdeganga and one in a place called Cuenca. I reported and I spent the rest of my time in Spain based in Valdeganga. I took Lilian with me on the bike.
Every day I was either on my motorcycle or driving an ambulance, picking up wounded from the base camps. Often I would go to different units of the battalion scattered around Spain with messages or parcels of medical equipment, where they were in short supply.
We knew the Fascists were killing and murdering all the trade unionists they could find, and I had an unhappy time out there for the first few months because I was on my own, going from hospital to hospital.
Everywhere I went, my memory of the warmth and friendship of the Spanish people is still very vivid. I didn’t speak any Spanish—well, very little. I could ask the way to a place, but I could never understand the answer. After a while I got into a habit that, if I came to a village, I would stop in the centre and people would look at me curiously from all around the square. After a while somebody would come and try and talk to me in Spanish, and I would explain that I was English, in the International Brigade. When they heard I was in the International Brigade, their hearts opened and I was taken in, often given food, though they had very little of it. There I first had a drink of anise—which nearly knocked my head off. This happened almost everywhere I went, in every village. From the hospital in Valdeganga I went to Madrid and several times to Barcelona, Valencia and Albacete, which was the base of the International Brigades. Generally, if I had to spend more than one night, I would stop and find the military controller of the area, and I was allowed to sleep there—but I never left my bike. I always made a point of bedding down beside the bike and resting my head on the wheel. They all thought it was very curious and very strange, but it was the only way I kept that bike. I lived on grapes growing by the roadside, for days on end.
I have one feeling of unease—whether I did the right thing or not I don’t know. On one occasion when I was at Albacete I met Wally Tapsall, who was the political commissar of the battalion, and Fred Copeman, who was a commander. When they saw me with the bike, they said, ‘Hey, we want you in the battalion—we could use you.’
I said, ‘OK—by all means. You just get in touch with the hospital.’
They said, ‘Oh no, it would take too long. You just come along and we will straighten it out later.’
I said I wasn’t prepared to do that, because I was attached to the hospital. I often wonder whether I did right. It is one of those things—you never know.
I remember when Harry Pollitt, who was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, came to speak to the battalion. He took a number of the wounded and members of the staff to hear him. It was a wonderful experience, because Harry was a well-known speaker. He had the art of speaking about what you felt in your own heart and on this occasion he spoke with such pride of the men who were there and pride in the fact that it was the Communist Party that inspired the formation of the Brigade.
I used to go to the village every day where the bakery woman had a young child of about ten or eleven, and she took to me. She would wait for my lorry to arrive, she would take me by the hand, lead me into the bakery and always insisted that I had something to eat or drink. Occasionally I would take her and her mother for a trip into the nearest town or to the hospital, and she loved it. Sometimes she would get all her friends to come for a trip on the lorry.
Occasionally in the hospital things were quiet, and then an ambulance would arrive with either wounded or people who had come from other hospitals for convalescence. Everybody would jump to action. The whole place was a hive of activity, getting their beds ready, looking after them, helping them to wash, finding new clothes for them, feeding them.
I don’t know how long I had been there before I had heard that Ben Glazer, my friend who went to Spain three or four weeks ahead of me, had been killed. Somehow I accepted it. Every time we heard of a friend or somebody in the Brigade who had been killed, somebody who we knew either by name or personally, there was never any—I won’t say sadness—but there wasn’t any great shock—almost as though we had always expected it. Looking back on my own feelings when I came to Spain, it was almost as though I was saying goodbye—almost as though I was expecting to be killed. After Jarama, and then later the Ebro [July-November 1938], when many of our people were killed, we almost began to accept it as inevitable. I don’t think we were callous—it was just part of life. We knew something of the murders and tortures, and the killings of the Republicans when the Franco forces overran a village or town, and we expected that to happen if the Fascists won.
When I had the lorry it was always a feature that, wherever you went, you would see somebody sitting on the roadside thumbing a lift. Of course we always did what we could, unless we happened to be in a hurry. The moment you stopped to pick up someone, within a matter of seconds ten or fifteen would appear with their goats, hens and chickens. This was a feature of any journey we made in an open lorry. On the ambulance, of course, it was different. Nobody ever tried to stop an ambulance, and with the motorbike it was altogether quite different because I was alone. I did have a pillion and there were occasions when I took passengers. On a long journey—I didn’t have a speedometer on the motorbike—to kill time I would either sing all the songs I knew, or try to count the telephone posts and guess how far I had gone, and work out the speed. I had a map then, but it wasn’t very clear.
It was always very exciting to go to Albacete, the base of the International Brigades. Brigaders were arriving from all over the world and in the canteen you would hear every language imaginable. Again, I was always in the position where, if I wanted to go to the canteen, I would never do so unless I got my bike looked after by one of the guards or policemen. I wasn’t a good mechanic but I knew how to service the bike. There was one occasion—the bike was a twin Douglas—when one of the gaskets blew and there were some flames coming from one part. I must have been twenty or thirty miles away from the nearest town and I drove along with one leg in the air so it didn’t get burnt. I managed to limp into this place, and of course they didn’t have a gasket head or whatever it was and we had to improvise. Improvising was a very important part of the whole transport problem. I knew little but managed to service the lorry, the ambulance and the bike, and we kept them on the road all the time I was there.
I had one accident on the bike going round a sharp bend. I came off. There was a fairly deep drop the other side and I went rolling down with the bike on top of me. I managed to clear the bike, but my arm was badly hurt. I didn’t know whether it was broken or not—I didn’t have any feeling in it. I must have stayed there for two or three hours before somebody came along to help me. In the event I was OK—they managed to get the bike onto a lorry and get me back to the hospital, and I think it was two or three weeks before I could use it fully, and was able to drive again.
There was one woman in the hospital named Winifred Bates, the wife of Ralph Bates, the famous author of The Olive Field, 1936, among others. She used to do some reporting, and occasionally I would take her to different parts of Spain, Barcelona particularly, where she had to link up with people she was working for. She wrote a pamphlet about the British Medical Unit. Things were quiet at the time, and they asked me if I would go back to England with the pamphlet to get it printed and also to take part in the campaign in Fleet Street for the sending of a further ambulance from Fleet Street.
What always struck me was that, when men came into the hospital wounded, I can’t ever remember anybody feeling despair or wishing they hadn’t come. There was a feeling of confidence. We never thought we would ever lose the war because there was such massive support among the people of Spain. We all did our best to keep in touch with whatever organisations we were from, and letters from Britain were very widely circulated. We also got copies of the Daily Worker.
The roads in Spain were full of holes and one night we took some wounded to the hospital. I remember the men lying there, very badly wounded, screaming that I was a Fascist and trying to kill them by going over the ruts in the road. On that particular occasion we didn’t have any nurse or staff to accompany the wounded. I had to do what I could myself—but there was very little I could do. Anyway, we got them back safely and they all not only survived, but, within a matter of months, and sometimes weeks, they were back in the line.
I wrote fairly regularly to the Party branch and to individual members. I remember once writing to NATSOPA [National Society of Operative Printers and Assistants] and saying that we had certain shortages, like chocolate, soap, toilet rolls and cigarettes. Cigarettes were the thing we wanted most. One day a great big tea chest arrived for me. It was customary when anybody received a parcel that everybody gathered around because, whatever it was, we shared it. We were all agog—what could be in this big tea chest? When I opened it up, it was toilet rolls and soap—but a week or two later we got parcels of cigarettes and chocolate. The food we had through the whole of the period was inadequate, but we expected that. We lived on beans, I think more than anything else. I didn’t mind—I have always liked beans. But they were usually cooked in garlic and olive oil and there were some from the British Battalion who just couldn’t stomach it. There was one bloke who went for days on bread only. There were others like him who couldn’t manage the food. Lots of them were very inadequately fed and you could see it in their faces at times, but it never depressed them—it didn’t affect our morale. As I said, we never thought we would ever lose the war.
I remember how some of the members of the Brigade, as soon as they were fit enough to walk and get about, were always eager to go back to the unit—to the battalion. I remember the feeling of pride among the staff in the hospital when patients were able to walk and be mobile. Lilian, who worked as a masseuse and nurse, was faced with the problem of trying to help the soldiers to walk again. She designed a gadget that had three sides to it: people could lean on it and it would help them to stagger along.
I remember how we coped with the cold. They say of the plain of Madrid that the wind is not strong enough to blow out a candle, yet strong enough to kill a man. Two or three times, when we went to Madrid or Albacete in the height of the winter period, it was so cold, unbelievably cold; I had never experienced anything like it. On one occasion we were on a lorry, going down a very steep hill. The wind was icy, and a whole number of lorries and ambulances had gone into a ditch. I had a spare driver with me, he drove in bottom gear and four of us tied a rope to the back of the lorry—walked down behind it, trying to keep the back of the lorry from sliding into the ditch, and we succeeded.
I remember the trip we had around Spain, trying to deliver the parcels which had been collected in England for Christmas of 1937, and the joy of people who were in isolated parts of the battlefront to get some goodies. Wherever we went, they were delighted to see us. The whole trip left a vague memory of various places, because, whenever we stopped, we had to see the mayor of the village or the town, and their kindness was always overwhelming. They were having a hard time themselves and yet they always tried to help us and feed us—although we avoided it as much as we could, knowing how short they were themselves.
It was September 1938 when I came back to raise funds for an ambulance—back to the East End. The Brigade had contacted the printers—they had an organisation, the Printers’ Anti-Fascist Movement, and raised money for an ambulance. To do that they went to all the Chapels—we even got some money from [press baron Lord] Beaverbrook. We had regular meetings with several wounded who had been returned.
We raised the money but by that time the war had changed and they wired us that they didn’t want an ambulance; they wanted a lorry, with as much medical equipment as we could get. So we gathered all the money we had and made another appeal to all the Chapels and got quite a lot more. Two other printers and I were going to take it over to Benicasim, to the headquarters of Medical Aid. But we were stuck at the border for a while, and that’s when we saw all these people flooding towards us. We arrived back at about the time the first refugees reached the Spanish border. They increased in numbers and, when they got to the French border, the French gendarmes made them lay down their arms, so they had great piles of arms—and they didn’t give them any help, any water or any food. They were near starving—there were hundreds and thousands of refugees with no food—so the reporters Bill Forrest and Tom Driberg telephoned London and reported about the way French authorities were treating refugees—which got front-page stories in the Daily Express and the News Chronicle.
They let them into France, but there were no facilities for them at all. The first wave were people who had been in hospital so we took them to nearby hospitals. We did two or three trips. We saw the wounded and children being carried. We saw photos used in the propaganda of women carrying babies that were already dead. We never saw that ourselves, but what we did see, and we stopped to photograph her, was a woman helping the Spanish women whose babies had died. By that time they were near starvation, and they’d been three or four days on the frontier without any food. The articles by Bill Forrest and Tom Driberg created quite a sensation. They reported that refugees needed food quickly, but the French sent the gendarmes to keep them down and wouldn’t allow any food to be brought in. We’d been given £50 each to live on while we were out there, and we went and bought loads of bread and chocolate—but they wouldn’t take any money. We started sharing out the chocolate—and we’d bought about five hundred loaves and we cut them in half and started giving them out. There was nearly a riot.
After the civil war there were all these Basque children who had been evacuated to the UK. I’d taken thirty to Hammersmith and the Committee arranged to put the children up in homes of the volunteers. After Barcelona and Madrid fell, the Fascists were cock-a-hoop—Franco got in touch with the United Nations demanding that the Basque children be returned. The Party said they’d send the first lot back and I was to take them. I took thirty of them back to the border, across the river. I was in charge with some Red Cross officials. I sent messages across the river to them about the children. They wanted to know when we’d be sending the children across. I took the decision that we weren’t going to unless we had a letter from each of their parents. All the children were talking and there was terrible sadness among them. These were the children who’d left when they were ten and eleven year olds and now were thirteen and fourteen and had come from peaceful England to a Fascist state. We absolutely refused to send them back unless we got a letter from their parents. They arrived back late in the day with the letters. Sometimes I cry when I think of it, the children hanging onto me, not wanting to go. It took all day. They all went back and we never saw any of them again.
When the last members of the battalion arrived at Victoria, there was such joy, the celebration, the tremendous enthusiasm of the crowd. Later on we went to a meeting somewhere in central London. It was after that that the depression set in for me, the realisation that we had lost the war—that Fascism had been victorious—and I thought of all the losses, the thousands of Brigaders and, of course, I thought of Spanish Republicans and what they were going through, the imprisonment, the torture and the killings.
After all these sacrifices, did we achieve anything? I think we did! I am proud of having gone and I would do it all again.
PENNY FEIWEL (#ulink_b2e607d6-ff28-5d4e-ba87-9b21b96b6c96)
Born 24 April 1909 in Tottenham, north London
My father was known in the neighbourhood as ‘Punch’ Phelps. He was an unskilled labourer, like most of the men in our street—a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. He was in and out of jobs, as a navvy on the roads, on buildings or in the railway yards. He was a chirpy, kindly man, always optimistic and full of backchat, never harbouring a grudge—but he had to work terribly hard, and in some jobs, I remember, he was driven so hard that after leaving the house at four in the morning he would come back in the afternoon drenched in sweat and dead tired, throw himself on his bed and fall asleep.
He was a rough diamond, but he wasn’t spiteful. He had a hard life, and he worked very, very hard, too—but he was always good to us children. He used to get up early in the morning before he went to his job as a navvy, and he’d clean all our shoes before we went to school. He never hit us—he used to say, ‘I’ll aim half a crown at you.’ We’d laugh at that—but his attitude would be threatening. My mother was very short-tempered. I had many a black eye from her—but she had a hard life. She was one girl among thirteen brothers, so she had to learn to look after herself. Her family were shopkeepers—they used to deliver coal on carts and they had a greengrocery shop as well. Right until I grew up, they kept that shop—amazing. My mother had stamina—but, my goodness, she had a temper. In my mind’s eye I carry a picture of her with jet-black hair covered by a man’s cloth cap, a white blouse and a long black ragged skirt, a piece of coarse sacking tied round her waist in place of an apron, and wearing boots done up with side buttons and with a broom in her hand.
There were a lot of us, but my mother adopted a boy; her friend who had a child died in the workhouse, and my mother took the baby and brought him up. He lived with us, but my eldest sister, Violet didn’t get on with him. In Edith Road—and it was usually the same in the other places we lived (because several times we had to leave after falling into arrears with the rent)—we had three rooms: a kitchen/living room with the grate and sink where the lot of us had our meals, washed and sat about, and two bedrooms. A gas meter was laid on, but such a thing as a bathroom was unheard of. Most of our neighbours lived in the same way.
I have a picture of women, wearing their husbands’ caps, talking across the road from their front doors, some of them leaning on their brooms, others scrubbing their front steps with buckets of water. The houses just could not be kept clean, because the children were always rushing in and out, and there were no street cleaners in those days—at least not in our area. The dust and dirt from the streets outside and smoke from the railway and the factories blew in so much that in summer our windows were often kept tightly closed. In winter there was the damp, against which one could do nothing. Whenever possible, us kids were sent into the street so that we swarmed around the pavements.
To us the pawnshop was important—on the Saturday our best clothes were taken out to wear on Sunday, then they were back in again on Monday. My mother even used to pawn her wedding ring and her Sunday clothes; thankfully those days have gone now, but we were always in the pawnshop. I hated it. To make a few pennies we sold bunches of mint in West Green Road by the kerb, at a penny a bunch. We had a garden and my father used to grow mint and carrots. When the carrots got so high, my brother and I would dig them up, take the tops off and wash them in the butt outside, and stick the stalks back again in the soil—and take the carrots to school. One day I got caught going underneath my desk to eat a piece of carrot. The teacher caught me and said, ‘Bring out what you’re eating.’ I emptied all these carrots onto the floor. She said, ‘I never knew we had a donkey in the class.’
Dad went into the army in 1914. I remember my mother hanging out the washing in the garden at the time, when my pa came to go, and I don’t know what he said, but I saw her wiping her eyes with her apron. From then on my mother had to carry the whole burden, so, soon after he was gone, she went to work in a munitions factory. In a brown overall and with a mob cap covering her jet-black hair, she’d go off early in the morning, coming home dead tired in the evening. It was a trying time for her because, before setting off for work, she had to get the five of us ready for school before the first factory whistle. Bill, the eldest, was in the top form, while I, at five or so, was sent along with the others, and a neighbour looked after Rosie, the baby. War at first seemed quite exciting to us children in Tottenham, with talk of heroes and our British navy, and the enemy Hun, but soon there were food cards and, before going to school, we had to queue up outside food shops, which I hated. There were free meals at school—usually pea soup or stew dumpling—but it wasn’t sufficient, and by evening we were hungry. Often my mother hadn’t enough food for us, and I can remember many nights when my brother and I stood outside the factories, especially the Harris Lebus furniture factory in Ferry Lane, waiting for the people to come out from various shifts, holding out our hands for any bits of their lunch they had left over. Often we were in luck, getting half a sandwich or a piece of bread and cheese.
I had to go into hospital, because I had a fall. It was a severe winter—one of the worst winters we’d ever known—and my mother was working in Leavis’s factory. For this she needed hairpins, as she had long hair. It was early in the morning, she was going to work and the factory hooter was going—and she hadn’t any hairpins—so she got my young brother and said, ‘You go and get me some hairpins. And mind how you go—it’s very slippery.’
He got as far as the iron gate and he fell and came back. So she got me and said, ‘You go now and see if you can keep your feet properly.’ So I went. I didn’t slip, but I knocked my elbow very badly. But I carried on, got her hairpins and came back, but the elbow was very bad. My mother went off to work, but when I was at school there was the teacher doing the PE exercises, and she pulled my arm up and I winced. She said, ‘What are you wincing for? What’s the matter with you?’
And I said, ‘I banged it on my way out.’
She looked at it and said, ‘I’d better write a letter to your mother to take you to the doctor.’
My mother took me to the Tottenham hospital, and they kept me in and operated on me. They discovered a diseased bone, which was operated on twice, and I was in hospital for quite a long time with osteomyelitis. I’ve still got the scars.
When I came out, my father, who had been ill with pneumonia, was invalided home from France and sent to a Redhill convalescent home. He was a very good cook in the army and they allowed me to go and help him during the daytime. He had a landlady who looked after him and me of a night and I had a wonderful time there in Redhill. We used to go blackberrying with his chums and the landlady. When I came home, the nurse used to come and dress my wound. My father stayed there, cooking for the Redhill barracks, until he was invalided out of the army, and my time there was an interval of freedom I never forgot.
It was during a Zeppelin air raid that my brother Georgie was born. There were now two babies instead of one. For some reason, my older brother and sister were always scrapping with each other, and, besides, Jim was a boy, so that I had most of the responsibility for looking after my young sister, Rosie, and Georgie, the baby. Oh Lord, what a burden it was! What I remember now of the war years is not the excitement, and not even standing in the food queues, but always being saddled with these two unfortunate kids wherever I went. Soon after Georgie was born, I began missing days at school. I now slept with two others in one small bed and got so little sleep that I often dropped off during class. In this way I was soon the dunce at school and, because I lost my temper when the teachers spoke sharply to me, I became sullen and obstinate—even though I didn’t want to be.
On 14 July 1919 an election was held in our district, and voting cars with huge posters were touring the streets, telling people like my parents—who knew nothing of politics or social conditions—who they were to vote for. We children were playing out in the streets and somebody dared me to jump on the back of one of the voting cars, which was moving pretty fast. Because I was always game for a dare, I did, and hung on and turned my head back triumphantly. But, just as I did so, I looked straight at an enormous policeman standing on the kerb not six feet away, who gave me such a glare that in my terror I let go, falling flat on the paving stones and grazing my arms and knees so badly that once again I was taken off to hospital to have my cuts and grazes dressed. This took time, and when I came home late, creeping quietly through the door for fear of the hiding I thought was in store for me, I had a new surprise. My mother’s room was locked again, the house was full of neighbours and I was told I had just been presented with twin brothers! My mother had been told I’d been run over, and the shock had precipitated the birth. I don’t know why I hadn’t realised she was pregnant—somehow lots of children never did. But when I heard the news—not only one new baby but two—everything seemed to go black before my eyes, and in my mind, too. Now I would never be free. It would always be like this. I just went out and sat on the doorstep, though my cuts and bruises were still sore, and I wept and wept. Now, instead of having two youngsters to look after, I had four.
Nearly all my memories are connected with the pram my mother bought on the never-never [a system of hire purchase], pushing the old thing up and down the street with two kids inside and a third one hanging onto the crossbar below, and a fourth one perhaps hanging onto my frock; if ever I tried to park them and sneak off on my own, there would be loud yells and I would have to dash back to them.
I had got interested in my schoolwork, but now it was goodbye to any hopes I had of catching up with my lessons so that school hours shouldn’t be such a misery to me. With so many kids at home, I felt I hadn’t a chance, and the least thing made me feel bitter and resentful. Everything was against me.
At school I could never make up for the days I had missed. When figures were on the blackboard I didn’t know whether to go upwards or downwards, or start at the pounds end or the farthings. I was usually tired and my mind used to go quite blank, as though I wasn’t seeing anything on the blackboard, and when asked a question I just became sullen. Certain teachers disliked me because I seemed dull and backward.
One teacher was always making me a laughing stock. She used to stand me up before all the class and ask me questions I couldn’t answer, so I just remained dumb, or said I had forgotten—which angered her so that she often caned me. One day, when I didn’t answer she said, ‘Come up here, Phelps,’ as she advanced towards me with her cane.
At that, rage seized me, and I picked up an inkpot. The whole room gasped, including the teacher.
Then she said, ‘How dare you, Phelps? Put that down.’
I said, ‘I’ll dare anything if you touch me with that stick again.’
She still advanced towards me with the cane, so I shied the ink bottle straight at her. The bottle didn’t hit her, but all the ink did. My goodness: what a mess, all over her dress and the room. I got caned for this—but by the headmistress herself—and I was given a letter to take home to my father.
When the twins were born I was much older; we were a large family, always quarrelling—but we always made up afterwards. We used to play rounders, skipping, and the boys used to join in the skipping. And we played hide-and-seek and touch. I was always a daredevil—with all my brothers I was up to scratch with them. All the same, I used to be scared stiff of my own shadow. In those days they used to keep the dead at home in their coffin and put them on the table in the parlour—and shut the door. My brothers knew I was scared of shadows and the dark, and I would never go into the parlour on my own. I had a feeling that there was something in that end room and that I mustn’t go in. I think it was a thing between me and my sister, little Emily, who died. I knew there was something in that room that I didn’t understand—and I used to toddle to the door and get just up to the handle, then I’d be pulled away sharply. That was a shock to me. I didn’t know what I was doing—just turning the handle—but as I opened the door it was very dark, then someone pulled me aside. From that time on I was afraid of the dark, until I was quite old—even until going up to nursing. It was only night nursing that cured me.
I left school at thirteen. When you left school you were supposed to produce your birth certificate, and the teacher said to me, ‘I haven’t got your birth certificate—I must have it.’
So I said to my mother, ‘I want my birth certificate.’
She said, ‘I’ll have to go and get it.’ Everything was always, ‘I’ll get it.’
Days and weeks went by and still she was ‘going to get it’. She never got it—so at the end of term I just left and never went back.
When I was a kid of just thirteen, my mother made me put my hair up and sent me into service. It was in Orpington, and to me it was like being on the other side of the world. I was scared of my own shadow even then. I used to write to her, ‘Please take me out of here.’ I would get up in the early hours of the morning to whitewash the steps and blacklead the kitchen ovens. It was cheap slave labour. But eventually my mother did come and bring me home—and then I started going into factories.
The Eagle Pencil factory was one of the first ones, but my mother took me away from there. Getting work for children was easy—it was the grown-ups who found it difficult. So I would join another factory making pencils or furniture. I went on to Leavis’s furniture, where I used to push heavy furniture—plane it—then go over it, fill up the cracks, and then push it on further, through all the stages of polishing. It was very hard work but I quite enjoyed it because I was making contact with other girls. Always being new at a job was hateful. I couldn’t settle down, and in between there was so much housework and looking after the children that I was glad to be off again. But all the jobs were blind alleys leading me nowhere, and when I discovered I had left school a year too soon I felt really bitter towards my parents.
I loved crochet and needlework. I used to make loads of lace and tray cloths for neighbours—they’d buy the cotton and I’d make it for a few pence. Even up until recently I was still doing cloths for people. I’ve still got some of the little bits of lace and tray cloths. I did wide lace for the church, too. I used to go to the park opposite the Prince of Wales Hospital, Tottenham, and I’d sit there with the twins and crochet, while my mother was doing her washing. I used to see the nurses come out and walk round to their home.
There was a lady in the road who used to do dressmaking, and take her stuff to the West End in London. She would employ a few girls like me and my neighbour to sew at her house. It was slave labour, really—a sweatshop. She was a very good dressmaker and she did all the D’Oyly Carte Company’s dresses—beautiful costumes—and she taught me how to do fly-running stitch. After I went into the hospital at Charing Cross as a student, I used to get theatre tickets from Theatreland, and I’d see the D’Oyly Carte and wonder if those costumes were stitched by me.
Of a Sunday, all us crowd were at home. My mother and father used to like to have a sleep after dinner—and we used to be sent off. I was a bit of a rebel—no angel—and I could fight as well as my brothers. It was nothing for me to be in a fight with one of my brothers and him getting the worst of it. Not far from us, in Broad Lane, stood the corrugated tin chapel of the Plymouth Brethren—I suppose the strictest Christian sect in England—bearing a board on which was written, ‘How shall I be saved? Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou SHALT be saved’.
I had always been sent to Sunday School, chiefly because my mother didn’t know what to do with us on Sunday afternoons after the midday meal. At Sunday School we sang hymns and learnt Bible lessons, and finally I became converted to the Plymouth Brethren. For three years I kept every rule and belief of what I was told was the only Christian religion that could help me be saved. I never went to the pictures, nor to dances, never went walking with boys, stopped swearing and even thought I ought to change my job because it was sinful to be working on stage clothes. In a way, this religion and denying myself all worldly pleasures, as even cinemas were called, was a passive rebellion against my environment, and gave me a sense of virtue and satisfaction. At home I acted superior, and was sneered at and laughed at, and was nicknamed ‘the Bible-Puncher’. Looking back, I think I must have been an awful prig, but I still have a soft spot for the Plymouth Brethren. In a poor and ignorant district like ours they did a tremendous amount of good.
Through religion I taught myself self-control, which was all to the good. I came to mix with people who spoke better English than I did, and I learnt to imitate them. I was also encouraged to better my education and go to evening classes. On the other hand, I was among a lot of pretty badly repressed women, with no outlet for their emotions, leading monotonous lives, and apt to turn queer and bitter, making me in some ways even more repressed and unnatural than I was before.
One of the teachers befriended me and took me under her wing. She used to invite me to her house after Sunday School for tea, and in the evening she would take me home. There was another one who was very motherly, and who had a daughter, and I used to try to imitate her. She went to the Tottenham High School and, me being a cockney, I used anything but the right words, so she always used to correct me. I always remember learning my first words of French with her, which were ‘Fermez la porte, s’il vous plaît’—she was just a young kid, but she taught me.
That stayed with me—and so did the Scriptures. I can still quote the Bible—but I never felt right into it, although I used to go to Bible-preaching meetings, and it did have an influence on me. I got very attached to the people, so even when I went into nursing I stayed in touch with them. I have a lot to thank those outside influences for. Somehow I always came under the influence of the right type of people. There was one Sunday School teacher who worked in a good position in a factory, and I asked her if I could join—but she said no, I shouldn’t go into factory work.
As I got older I got fed up with the job I was doing—it was no good. I didn’t make friends very easily. There were two other girls—and there was always an odd one out, and that was me. I used to pass these roads to the factory and see the girls working in the offices, and I used to think, ‘I’d like to do that—do some typing’. I went round to the school and they said I could join for shorthand and typing—and I was very keen and worked really hard. I was determined to make up for the schooling I had not made use of or missed altogether, and at the chapel I was encouraged to do this. I was fifteen when I first went to evening classes. I was one of the keenest attendees. We had no exams, but weekly tests, and to my surprise I found I often came out top.
There was a Mr Turner, and, at the end of the period, he would give away free theatre tickets to the one who came top. I always seemed to be getting the theatre tickets—but I never went to the theatre because I was a Plymouth Brethren and you didn’t go to theatres and you didn’t go with boys—so I used to give them away.
One day Mr Turner said, while he was marking our notes: ‘Tell me, Miss Phelps, I’m very curious—you don’t use your theatre tickets, do you?’
I thought I’d been caught out, but I said, ‘No sir.’
He asked ‘Why not?’
I said, ‘Because I’m a Plymouth Brethren, and we don’t go to the theatre.’
‘Oh, I see.’
So he left it at that for the time being, but another time he said, ‘Miss Phelps, would you like to come home to lunch with us? I’ll give you an address to meet you on a Sunday.’ It was some station in central London.
So I went home, and my elder sister was very suspicious of young girls and young men, and she said to my mother, ‘You’re not going to let her go at her age—to meet a man at a station, who’ll pretend he’s going to take her home for lunch?’
I said, ‘But he is.’
But she said, ‘Don’t you believe her.’ And my mother took her side and wouldn’t let me go.
I didn’t quite know what to do. I couldn’t go back to school in the evening for quite a while, but eventually I plucked up courage. I knew I was going to tell a lie—and I met Mr Turner, and he said, ‘Miss Phelps, I’m sorry we missed you.’
And I said, ‘I didn’t know your address or where you lived, so I couldn’t tell you that I wasn’t well.’ That was the only excuse I could make.
He said, ‘Oh, well, perhaps another time,’ but, from that time on, when he mentioned the wife, that made me mad—because I had a very quick temper.
When I got home I went for my sister. I said, ‘He wasn’t trying it on—he was married and had a nice wife—and they went there to meet me, and you spoilt it all.’ But still he took an interest in me, and so did his wife—they were the first people who really encouraged me.
During the next two years I visited the Turners frequently, and both Mr and Mrs Turner continued to take a real interest in my career, helping with all possible advice. Mrs Turner helped me to become more human by getting me to moderate my religious tendencies. I had always said cinemas were sinful, but Mrs Turner said she could see I was not happy—that I oughtn’t to go on leading a dull and uninteresting life. I denied this, saying that I was perfectly happy—but without conviction. Then, one day, I broke the rule and went with the Turners to the cinema, feeling frightfully guilty about it, but very soon this sense of guilt passed. Once I had broken through this one restriction, others went too, though it was still some years before I went to the theatre.
One day Mr Turner said to me ‘Miss Phelps, wouldn’t you like to change your job from working in factories?’
I said, ‘What can I do?’
He said, ‘You could do an office job.’
I said, ‘But I’m not trained to do it—the arithmetic.’ But he and his wife helped me quite a lot.
Then, one evening, with the Turners’ advice, I made the decision to try to become a nurse. I was of an age now to do nursing, and I applied to the Homerton Hospital to do that because they took people a bit younger. I was too young for general nursing training, but not too young to do fever nursing. Following my application, I received a letter telling me I had been accepted on trial as a probationer nurse. This was January 1928. Living inside a big hospital, being part of its life and wearing its uniform, opened quite a new world for me. Now I had at last done what I wanted, and I seemed at once cut off from the life of our home and our street. At home the family doubted my chances, and said I was suffering with a swollen head if I thought I could go through with it—and I thought so myself—but I worked hard at the hospital and kept very quiet. The work was tiring, but I found it interesting and made good progress, particularly on the practical side. In the qualifying examinations at the end of the year I managed to come out top.
I got on very well. I only missed getting a medal by four marks for being half an hour late—and I’ll tell you what made me late. We didn’t have buses or taxis in those days—it was trams from Hackney down to Seven Sisters Road and down to Amhurst Road. I was playing tennis that morning in the grounds of the hospital at Homerton, and the sister passed by and I was representing the nurses, being the one picked out to compete with other nurses at the hospital. She saw me and said, ‘Nurse Phelps, don’t you be late!’
And I said, ‘I won’t, Sister.’
I was enjoying my game of tennis—but when I went I didn’t realise that buses didn’t run and it was just trams, and I was a bit late and I started to run. I never ran so much in my whole life as I did then but I arrived half an hour late—and when I went in I was sweating because I’d run all the way. The matron used to say I was a good runner, and I got to the hospital and found the room. The sister was sitting there, supervising the nurses, and she pointed to the first chair, so I went in—boiling—and sat down. She never even came and gave me a drink of water. I started reading, and the first words I caught were ‘oculogyral spasms’, which I knew about, and I was writing and I went all through that paper, and I was bang on time. It was over and the bell went to stop, and, instead of going to the top, she came to me first to collect my paper. I was just on the last sentence, and she wouldn’t let me finish—she was really a nasty bit of work—because I could have completed that last one. I knew about oculogyral spasms. But she took it away and so I lost out on the medal by four marks, for being half an hour late. I got higher marks than the medallist in the practical and oral—but I still didn’t get the medal.
For nearly five years I worked as staff nurse at different hospitals, but I was never altogether content because, after a while, hospital routine didn’t satisfy me. It was the social conditions attached to nursing that got me down. In my early years, a nurse’s pay was ridiculously small and the hours terribly long, and worst of all was the snobbish and hypocritical discipline, which I thought an insult to any intelligent woman. It was just exploitation. Nurses were often spoken to by members of the senior staff in a tone no factory girl would have put up with. What irritated me most of all was that, on duty, a nurse was supposed to be a woman with enough brains to carry responsibility, but off duty we were treated like children. We were given hardly any free time and made to keep absurd rules, particularly about seeing men friends, and all because of the Victorian tradition that nursing wasn’t work—it was a noble sacrifice—so we could dispense with decent hours and pay.
I finished my hospital training—I came top in the hospital—then I went on to apply to voluntary hospitals. I applied to one of the best hospitals in London but I hadn’t had the secondary education for it. It didn’t matter what my hospital experience was, even though I nearly always came out top. Eventually I applied to Charing Cross, and they did take me. I asked to have a talk with the matron before the interview. She was a motherly sort, and I was candid with her. She said she could quite understand how I felt—and she said she would give me a chance. ‘You can go to the hospital training school and see how you go—but if you’re no good, you’ll have to leave.’ And that was it. I went to Charing Cross for my training, which was a wonderful experience, and that was the beginning.
I was getting on well, but then I became very, very ill and my mother was called. I’d been to see a friend in Brentwood and was coming home late—you had to get in by twelve o’clock at the nurses’ home from your day off. I realised it was late and I was going to miss my bus to take me to Hackney, and I ran when I saw the bus coming. It slowed down and then went on again, and I ran after it, and, as I ran, I missed it and slipped. I had a big gash on my leg. Nobody had seen me fall, and I knew it was my own fault. Then a motorist came along and said he’d take me to the hospital, but I said ‘no’—with my nurse’s discipline, I was afraid not to get back in time—so he said he’d take me to the house where I could get something to clean my leg and put some iodine and a bandage on it. He took me as far as Hackney and I met one of my night nurses and I explained to her. She said, ‘Come on, Phelps,’—they always called you by your surname—‘that needs proper dressing and stitches.’ The night sister came along, bound my leg, ticked me off and put me in the sickbay.
I didn’t think much of the injury, but after a while my temperature went up, and I thought my neck and face felt queer. When the doctor came, I told him I felt a queer stiffness at the back of my neck. He asked me if I was sickening for mumps, but when I told him I’d had mumps he left it at that. But that night the stiff pain got worse—at times I felt as if the muscles of my face were being pulled out of their sockets—and I couldn’t breathe. Early in the morning I had some kind of convulsion. Another nurse who had served during the war was also in the sick ward. Immediately she saw my condition she ran to the telephone, calling the night nurse, ‘My God, the girl’s got tetanus! I saw it during the war and you can never forget it!’
The night nurse came just as I had a second convulsion. The doctor came rushing in and there was a lot of telephoning for serum. Suddenly they were charging around like mad, sending to the lab to get tetanus antitoxin. They even sent an ambulance to collect it. There was talk of desensitising me, and I was given chloroform and morphine to ease the convulsions, but all the time I was conscious and in worse pain than I had ever imagined possible. While I was given a spinal serum injection, I had such a convulsion that my hands and feet felt as if they were being torn off.
I suppose this should have been the end of me, because the survival rate for tetanus, if not treated in time, is pretty small. For a week I was critically ill, but I don’t remember much about it. My mother was called and the matron said, ‘You don’t know what tetanus is, do you? Well, it’s lockjaw’, and the next thing [my mother] knew she was being given some brandy. I was very ill, but they got to me in time. Tetanus was very rampant in those days.
I returned from convalescing and told the matron that hospital routine had become empty for me. She was sympathetic and suggested I take a whole year’s rest from nursing. She also knew of my home circumstances and that we had no money, and thought I shouldn’t return home but look for other work. I didn’t know how to set about it, but when staying with my elder sister Violet, long since married, I was lucky enough to meet Mr Turner again. He thought I should try to study and suggested I apply for a bursary at Hillcroft College for Women in Surbiton.
I found the principal there sympathetic and understanding and I told her how I felt something was lacking in my present life, and how I knew nothing about social conditions, and above all how I had great difficulties in expressing myself—which I wished to get over. She listened very patiently. I hadn’t much hope, but not long afterwards I had a letter saying that, while no regular bursary was available, an unforeseen vacancy meant they could offer me a place, and with a second bursary from the Middlesex County Council I would be provided for.
They were well equipped for adult education, university and degrees. One tutor was Miss Street—who was very strong—she’d put the fear of God into you if you so much as looked at her. Then there was Miss Ashby, the Principal of Hillcroft College, a loveable, kindly, intellectual person, very gentle. Then Elsie Smith, who was a philosopher. They also took an interest and encouraged me, and they helped and influenced me a lot.
Miss Ashby took a special interest in me. She always called me ‘Penelope’, which wasn’t my name—it was Ada Louise—but it stuck. Elsie Smith also took an interest in me. Hillcroft was a traumatic experience, a place apart where I never knew what was going on in the outside world. In a way I just didn’t know how I was going to adapt myself, but I became great pals with Miss Ashby and her brother, Sir Arthur Ashby. He used to supply me with reading matter that I would never have got elsewhere.
That was 1934. I studied at Hillcroft College for one year, taking courses in English, economics, psychology and history. It was hard work for me but, in between spells of feeling very disheartened, I learnt a lot. At last I was also growing up, shaking off my exaggerated religious views and realising how much I had missed. I made a lot of new friends there, and two of my best friends were Jewish girls. This was one of the things that opened my eyes. As kids in Tottenham we jeered and laughed at Jews, even though we hardly saw any. People were always grumbling about the Jews—they had all the money, they were awful people. I couldn’t imagine having a Jew as a friend. Now I saw how wicked these prejudices were. I was beginning to think for myself, and this made me unsure, because there was so much to know. So much wrong with the world and so much confusion—I didn’t know where to start. At holiday time, I never knew where to go—if I went home it was to a house full of boys so I wasn’t sure what to do at the end of term-time. Miss Ashby said, ‘I have a friend I was at university with—Heron. I’m very fond of her and her husband and children. You’d love it if you went and helped her a bit, because she’s rather overwhelmed in her work, as well as her housework.’ So I went and helped her with the children. I got very attached to Hannah, Patrick [the future painter Patrick Heron], and there was another one who was a Jesuit, very monastic. Then there was Giles, who ran a wonderful farm. I was accepted into the family and they had a great influence on me. Mr Heron had these beautiful shops in London—dressmaking shops—and the family and I became great friends. I even went to Italy with them many years later. They educated me, really. Patrick Heron—I knew all his paintings. Meeting them was a wonderful experience.
Late in 1936, after I left the Herons, I found temporary work in Hertfordshire as a nurse—but I had no security or commitment there. I was friendly with a night nurse and one evening she asked me, ‘Phelps, are you off duty tomorrow?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Would you like to come and help us with the hunger marchers?’
‘Who are the hunger marchers?’
‘Don’t you know? You’re a bit green, aren’t you? The hunger marchers from Wales.’ I think her father was a Labour MP or in politics anyway—and she was very ‘red’.
I asked her what she wanted me to do, and she said, ‘Just some of your skills looking after their feet, and helping to collect food to feed them because they’re walking all the way from Wales.’
I said, ‘OK, I’ll come when I get off duty tonight.’
So I started trying to beg, borrow or steal for the hunger marchers—and it worked very well. Three of us ran round this little town and we got the men a hall, and the local Co-op helped us, particularly with food—and so did a number of local shopkeepers. They were surprisingly sympathetic and generous. We obtained free medical supplies; the Women’s Guild, a local doctor and clergyman all agreed to help in any way they could.
The marchers, when they turned up, were the Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire contingents—about two hundred strong. I never saw such feet in all my life. Shocking. One man’s feet were raw, so I took him through the back door to the most fashionable chiropodist in the town, who at once agreed to treat him for nothing. Another man—you just couldn’t imagine it, his feet were so bad. I knew it was a hospital job, so I rang our ambulance and got the man taken to the hospital. I got hauled over the coals! Who called the ambulance? The porters who drove the ambulance knew me. I had to tell them my name, for them to take this man to casualty, where he was admitted. The matron called me in the morning. She said, ‘Nurse Phelps, we don’t employ nurses who are “red”.’
I said, ‘I’m not “red”, Matron. I have no politics. I just thought it was the humanitarian thing to do. He needed help and he was a sick man.’
She said, ‘You can’t do that here—not in this hospital. There are people here, nurses, whose parents wouldn’t approve of what you were doing—because I assume you are very communistic.’
I said, ‘Not at all, I don’t belong to any communist party. But if that’s the way you feel, Matron, if you think I’m going to infiltrate the nurses, I’ve got no contract with you, so I’ll go. Thank you, Matron.’ And I walked out.
I think she was a bit flabbergasted. I told one of the girls about it and she said, ‘Good. If you leave, would you volunteer for Spain?’
I said I knew nothing about Spain—I didn’t know anything.
She said I wanted educating, so she told me all about Spain—how the nuns were taking Franco’s side, and, of course, it grabbed my heart—I was young and very emotional. She told me, ‘You go to London, go to Tottenham Court Road, and you’ll see the people—the Spanish Medical Aid. Talk to them.’
So that was that, and that was when I first met my boss, I always remember him—Goryan. I think he must have been Yugoslav or similar—I never knew, but you never worried what nationality or political party people belonged to. Goryan was very good. He asked me all about my nursing—did I know anything about theatre work? We used to get amputations in ‘surgical’ from accidents, being in central London—so we had lots of accidents. I’d had wonderful theatre experience at Charing Cross, so I said, ‘Yes, I know a lot about theatre work, I worked at…’ But that was enough.
‘Well, you’re going somewhere where you’ll be very, very busy.’
Despite my theatre experience, the Spanish Medical Aid people still wanted me to do a radiology training course. ‘No, surgery is my calling, that’s what I’m good at because I worked in theatre.’ That seemed to suit them, so they handed me my ticket, and I was off.
On 6 January 1937 I left England as one of a party of four English nurses to report for duty with the Spanish Medical Aid Committee in Barcelona. Setting out was exciting enough for me because I had never been abroad before—not even set foot on board ship.
We went to France, were put up overnight and mooched around the next day—we wasted practically two days in France—but we had to get paperwork filled in. Then we boarded a train for Spain. It was a terrible, terrible journey into Spain to Port-Bou—which was a horrible place.
We arrived at the frontier at one o’clock, and we had our first experience of the war. The carriage next to ours in the train that was to take us to Barcelona was badly smashed and battered, and, while we waited, we saw our first aerial bombardment. It was far out to sea—the ships and planes were almost out of sight, the sound of the guns was faint—but the Spaniards were very excited, running about and pointing, with shouts of ‘Aviones! Aviones!’—all for very little, it seemed to me. While waiting, we sat in the sun outside a little open-air restaurant, where we had a meal of meat, rice, olives, fruit and coffee.
When the train at last arrived it had funny open carriages with wooden benches, and we didn’t have much room for ourselves and our luggage. It was mostly full of soldiers, and at each station on the line the train stopped and more Spanish soldiers got in, with much shouting and waving of handkerchiefs, while peasants and girls along the platform handed out armfuls of oranges to anyone who wanted them.
We were altogether three days in Barcelona. In the shops, food didn’t seem very plentiful, but I thought clothes were cheap, and our taxi was certainly the cheapest we had ever been in. There were hardly any signs of war, but still, as compared to other towns I had known, there was an air of tension about.
We made our way to the station with all our luggage—probably no one had ever gone to Spain as well equipped as we were. We had sleeping bags, leather leggings, boiler suits, blankets, nurses’ overalls, gas masks and various utensils. But, oh dear, when we got to the station! Inexperienced as we were, we didn’t yet know that this was wartime, and that people might already have been waiting the whole day to make sure of getting a place. The train was crammed full, with soldiers occupying every inch of the corridors, and one glance showed there wasn’t an earthly hope of getting all our luggage in. Our temporary organiser, who didn’t strike me as likely to organise anything, was in despair. He said it would be absurd to think we needed so much luggage, and he made us leave behind—of all things—our leggings, boiler suits, sleeping bags and blankets…in fact all the things we would later miss bitterly. He promised to send them after us, but of course we never saw any of it again.
In Valencia we had to change trains, and the train to Albacete was even fuller than the coastal train. As we drew away from the coast, it got colder. We stopped at all kinds of little stations, where crowds of villagers brought offerings of fruit for the soldiers—mostly oranges. I’ve never seen so much fruit in my life.
We pushed on to Albacete, where, after a long, cold wait, a guard came and took us halfway across the town to a place where an official in a badly lit office said a few words in English to us. From there we were taken to a hospital and put into an empty and freezing-cold ward, where we tried to wrap ourselves into blankets and get a little sleep. The smell of the latrines was terrific, everything was filthy and dirty and we were next door to the lavatories. I never slept that night. There was not just one in a bed—there were two or three—and sometimes you found yourself moving around; well, it was so full of people, and you’d say ‘move over—make room, I’m tired’, and you’d find yourself sleeping among a whole load of men. It was amazing to me. Gosh, what a terrible place that was! I think everyone knew Albacete. Shocking. We seemed to be stuck there—we couldn’t move until our papers arrived and it wasn’t just a couple of hours; you could hang around for days. You used to get vouchers for this and vouchers for that.
Albacete was the base of the International Brigades and was a bewildering military camp. We went from one supposed authority in charge to another. No one seemed to know anything about us—where we were supposed to go or stay. The main language in the International Brigades at this time was German, and then French. Scarcely anyone spoke a word of English, and I could sense at once that the English were not particularly liked.
At last an American doctor telephoned and found a room for us in the Hotel Nacional—a small hotel in a back street—and the front streets weren’t up to much. Our room was small, dark and filthy, with three narrow beds, placed right next to the lavatory, which had ceased to work, and the smell from which was overpowering. We tried to get away from this smell as much as we could, but smells of one kind or another could not be avoided in overcrowded Albacete.
On the third day, at last, we saw two Austrians who were in charge—Dr Neumann and Dr Talger—who spoke fair English. Here we were told we would be separated. Mrs Murphy would go to the Madrid Front and the other girl and I were told to report for duty at the international base hospital just started in Murcia. We were told that some wounded men would be evacuated to Murcia in the afternoon train, and we would be in charge of their evacuation.
When we got to the station we had a shock. Instead of the few wounded I had imagined, there were well over a hundred men: a few quite badly wounded, and some lighter cases—arms, legs and flesh wounds.
It was a terrible journey. It got dark and cold, and the train was so slow I sometimes wanted to get out and push. I tried to give attention to those who needed it, but most of the men were drinking wine and singing, and thought an enfermera [a nurse]—especially an English enfermera—a great joke.
At Murcia I was put in charge of my own general ward, but instead of an ordinary ward I found myself in a huge lecture hall, with endless rows of tightly placed beds. There must have been a good two hundred beds, all occupied and mostly by French patients. Some were badly wounded; others had little the matter with them except mysterious aches and pains. A few of them, I think, were just swinging the lead.
For the first two days, and practically all night, I was on the run, frantically trying to establish order, taking temperatures, bringing water and changing bandages. Those who could walk used to disappear and come back after a while with bottles of wine, and begin to sing, until I lost my temper and hushed them. In the meantime I tried to attend to those patients who really needed care. There was one man who had both arms off—he had to be fed, but he was one of the gentlest and bravest patients I had in Spain.
I had been in Murcia nearly a week when I saw a dark man, who stood for some time at the end of the ward, watching me work. Later a messenger from Albacete arrived and asked how I was getting on. I said I felt rather wasted, because I had good surgical experience, and I had done nothing except introduce a bit of order and discipline—which anybody could have done. He told me that Goryan, the medical chief, was looking for a theatre nurse, and I should go to the Grand Hotel that evening for an interview.
I was shown into a room at the hotel where a middle-aged man with a very high forehead, long, dark hair and a big, dark moustache, wearing a sheepskin coat, was sitting at a table talking to some officers in uniform. This was Goryan, and I recognised him as the man who had watched me in the ward earlier that day—and who had interviewed me in London. He questioned me again about my experience, and at the end he said I would be attached to the 11th Brigade, composed mainly of the Thaelmann Battalion, and I was to get my permit to travel with him at seven sharp the next morning.
Our headquarters were in a big barn, right next to the well, in the shadow of the tall cliff. We had no running water, and large pitchers were passed round from mouth to mouth. All night dispatch riders came with messages for Goryan—then a decisive message came. Goryan looked set, and gave quick orders in French and Spanish. The battle was on. As we moved off towards our station on the front I heard the sound of guns getting louder with the growing light of day.
We travelled till it was bright daylight, but making only slow progress, because every few miles we seemed to have to stop and take shelter to escape the attention of enemy planes. During one of these halts in a small village, my long hair was cut off short, like a boy’s, at the suggestion of one of the doctors, who thought it would get in the way.
Wounded had already been evacuated to Tarancón, and its two hospitals were full. We took charge of an empty school and at once set to, preparing a theatre, unloading our equipment and scrubbing and disinfecting floors and walls.
We had no running water in the building, but we fixed up big chromium containers for boiling water and we fixed up our electricity. Before we were half-ready, the first ambulance drew up outside, unloading its wounded. At the door, a doctor classified and sorted the wounded—only the worst cases were dealt with by us. Already after the first case I realised Doctor Jolly was one of the best surgeons I had ever worked with—and certainly one of the quickest. Long before he had finished with the first case, a second ambulance drew up, and a third, and quite soon they seemed to come in droves, while the faint rumble of guns never left off.
Operating as fast as was possible for a surgeon, Jolly worked the whole afternoon, right through the night, the next day, and most of the following night as well, practically without a break. He never seemed to tire or lose his concentration, and most of the time I worked with him.
It was terrible on the front line—we were right in the midst of it. As they were coming off the ambulance, picking them up and dropping them off, we were taking on laparotomies [abdominal surgery], stomach wounds, amputations and head injuries. All they had to show us what was needed was a cross saying ‘anti-tetanus’ or ‘morphine’—and if they weren’t bad enough to need an immediate operation they were taken down the second line of evacuation. Then they’d go on to the third. But we operated on the most urgent. I could get a tray and table—you could raise or lower them, put a cloth on them, get a box with complete trephines, for head injuries and complete amputations—metal boxes with all the necessary operating instruments. We had three tables going with the other surgeon who helped, and there were Spanish nurses—not that they knew a thing, but they soon learnt how to do things. We showed them how to take things out—‘Don’t touch them with your hands, use this equipment, cover them, give them to the doctor.’ We used morphine and drips, but we were always running out. It was very, very difficult. Most of the cases were too far gone to give them anything to put them out, and there were terrible, terrible losses. People died who should never have died.
All three operating tables had to work together, and our supply of instruments was far too limited. The moment one operation was over, I gathered the instruments, hurried to the girl outside—I’d shown her how they should be washed and put in the steriliser and brought in again for the next case. In the meantime, I was back at the operating table and making it ready for the next case. After a while, I could change over so quickly that, less than five minutes after a case was taken off, the operating table was prepared for the next.
In the intervals we had food brought into the operating theatre—chunks of bread and bully beef, and black coffee, and snatched a few bites when we could. Nor did we bother much about the rule of no smoking in operating theatres—we quickly smoked cigarettes in the doorway while waiting for our instruments. Coffee and cigarettes helped, but, after a time, what with the din and the endless flow of wounded, I thought I would go crazy through lack of sleep and overwork.
Once, just as we were thinking of finishing, but still had several cases to deal with, we heard the loud drone of planes, and at once our lights, including the emergency light, went out. Before we could move, there were shattering crashes quite close, and the sound of falling glass. The next minute there were unearthly shrieks from outside and the sound of people running. Our doors were open, and, before we knew what was going on, there was a wild stampede in the darkness. Civilians were rushing into our hospital, which was already full of our own wounded. The air was full of shrieking and moaning.
A man collided with me and, as I put out my hand to push him off, my fingers touched his hair and came off all sticky. I had pushed him into a chair and, when the lights came on again, I saw that he was an old man, and half the flesh of his face was blown off. Other men and women were in a pitiful state, being helped into the hospital by their friends, some gashed by shrapnel, others with legs and arms half blown off, half-naked and bleeding women who’d been blown out of their clothes.
At this time we were attached to the American unit—nothing to do with the British. I never came into contact with the British, who were supposed to be busy on that front. How busy I don’t know, but they couldn’t have been as busy as we were. We were very, very busy, and we never saw any English in my unit.
We got a wonderful van from the Americans. At the back there was complete sterilising equipment for instruments and one for gowns and sheets, then, on the side, all the instruments for head cases and amputations, and on the other side was all the linen required—it was wonderful. The Americans knew how to do things. The British used to give us things, but in dribs and drabs—but never enough, really.
I sometimes walked across the square and looked at the bomb-wrecked buildings. It made me think of London, with its miles of overcrowded, jerry-built slums. What chance would these overcrowded people have in air raids? The rich in the West End and Kensington would no doubt escape in their cars, but the East End would be a death trap. But then I thought, if the Fascists in Spain were beaten, there wouldn’t be any danger of air raids over London. I never ceased to believe this, all the time I was in Spain. Spain was a warning of what would happen to all of us. If we let Spain go, then it would be our fate, too, to go to war.
On one occasion I came in contact with a doctor in the English unit. I’d had a very tiring time following a really hard bombing, and we’d just finished in the early hours of the morning. The sun was shining and I thought I’d go round to the square—there was a little coffee shop and some English ambulance drivers used to gather there. Further up was another shop where people used to sit outside. I passed the main Madrid-Valencia road and turned into a cobbled square where there was the gasoline station where lorries were refuelling.
As I passed the guard, the doctor called out to me, and, because he could speak English, I went over and sat down near him. It was very hot; there were a number of small children playing near the mules and carts. I had been sitting for about two minutes when, without warning—not even the peal of church bells—there were terrific crashes, my hand automatically flew up to my ears, my chair went from under me and I was on the floor. At once there was another terrific explosion, masonry and bricks were falling everywhere, and clouds of dust swirling so that nothing could be seen for a moment except a blaze of flames. Then came the shrieks. For a moment I didn’t know what was happening, and then realised this was an aerial bombardment, and I dashed across the road, across the bloody mess of bricks, to get to the children. By this time the petrol station was a sheet of flames, and I almost fell on top of a small child lying on the ground, covered with debris. It was awful, and I shall never forget it. As I picked the child up, it seemed to regain consciousness and struggled in my arms, and I had to hold it tightly, which was difficult because one leg was only hanging on by a sinew. For one moment I stood with the child in my arms, horrorstruck. My legs were so weak I couldn’t move. One of the medical people saw me struggling with the child and took it from me and carried it to the hospital. It was sickening. But what happened to all the other people, and the mules and the fuel? It was just a big flash. It must have been a terrific bomb—they were trying to hit the line between Madrid and Valencia. It was that day when I first met the doctor from the English unit, Doctor Alex Tudor-Hart, and he took me to his hospital. He said I couldn’t go back to my hospital, that I’d better stay. He tried to keep me there—but I knew I had to go back.
We had a man come round—a relative of one of the people who was killed when the bomb went off. We used to mother him and see that his things were ready for him after a day’s work. He had had a job at one time as a porter, overseeing the prevention of typhoid, and he used to go round and was very suspicious of the water. We never had typhoid antitoxins—we were never inoculated against it. It should have been done in London really before coming out to Spain.
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