was a very sensitive boy, well attuned to the sufferings of his parents, relatives, and neighbours. Like most working-class families, the Peirats moved in search of better or cheaper accommodation. After Poble Sec, they resided for six years in Badalona Street, in Sants, a district which, like much of proletarian Barcelona, had high levels of tuberculosis, glaucoma, and other health problems related to poor diet and bad housing. Peirats was deeply affected by the deaths, in quick succession, of a baby sister and a younger brother.31 He was further shaken by the imprisonment of uncle Nelo, who was detained in a police swoop on Montjuïc as he foraged for snails and firewood on common land. In keeping with the arbitrary practices of the authorities, Nelo was interned for a couple of weeks, first in the Montjuïc military fortress, and later in the Modelo prison, Barcelona’s main incarceration centre, before being released without charge. Members of the Peirats clan, José included, visited him in jail daily, bringing him much-needed food and cheer. The sight of his favourite uncle incarcerated surely nourished his growing awareness of the injustices surrounding him.
The environment within the Peirats household was relatively liberal. The unrestricted parental authoritarianism that stifled the developing spirit of many children at this time was largely missing. While there was a domestic hierarchy, it was not rigidly imposed: the views of the children counted and the parents did not simply impose their will in the domestic sphere, preferring to cultivate supportive and open relationships with their offspring. Despite their lack of formal education, José’s parents encouraged him to nurture and frame his understanding of the world. For instance, his semi-literate father patiently helped him ‘tie syllables together’.32
Despite two adult incomes (Teresa also worked making espadrilles), the family remained poor and their clothing was second hand.33 Significant sacrifices ensured the children received education, the great aspiration of most working-class parents at this time. Teresa especially was convinced of José’s lively intelligence, and in 1913, aged five, he entered a council-run school. This proved to be an inauspicious initiation in the world of learning. The school contrasted sharply with his experiences in two key ways: firstly, teaching was in Castilian rather than his native Catalan;34 secondly, the authoritarian pedagogical creed that ‘words penetrate with blood’, which relied on fear and ‘blows and kicks’ to instil obedience, clashed frontally with the relative freedom at home.35 Several teachers were priests and devotees of a system of punishment that one of Peirats’s contemporaries dubbed ‘the prison-school’.36 Pupils were routinely left thirsty and were denied toilet visits.37 Like others of his generation, José clashed with this repressive authority structure and ‘the despotism of the teachers’ sealed his first rebellion: ‘The abuses of those in control awoke in my rebel soul an overwhelming aversion to the school….38 I didn’t like being hemmed in.’39 He started truanting, spending the daily school fee on sweets and gaining a different education in the streets. Along with other truants and street children, he pilfered fruit and vegetables from goods trains arriving at the nearby Magòria station. These antics earned him a beating from the priests and, on more than one occasion, ‘extreme thrashings’ from his mother, who felt betrayed that he was squandering both his chance to get an education and the family’s scarce economic resources. Despite bearing his punishments stoically, he was hurt most by his mother’s description of him as a ‘bad son’.40 His parents punished his disobedience further, sending him to a convent school in nearby Hostafrancs. This was at variance with the family’s prevailing anti-clerical spirit but, in an age when the clergy enjoyed a de facto monopoly over schooling, there were few secular alternatives. His parents were mistaken if they believed José would benefit from a more disciplined learning environment. Their rebellious progeny refused to bow to the harsher regime and, voting with his feet, he truanted again to free himself from the denigrating humiliations of the clergy, for whom he felt an enduring hostility.41
Around this time, at the age of six, José awoke one morning with intense pain in his left leg. Diagnosed initially by a local doctor as suffering from rheumatic pain, his condition deteriorated and days later he was hospitalised in the Hospital de Santa Cruz.42 His parents were devastated as José became sicker and lost strength. Physicians were incapable of providing an accurate diagnosis regarding his mysterious condition, which José himself later termed, mistakenly, ‘semi-poliomyelitis’.43 It is highly likely he suffered from Legg–Calvé–Perthes disease (commonly known as Perthes), a rare condition that affects annually around 1 in every 100,000 children, generally between five and ten years of age and which can result in the deformation of the femur; over time, the cartilage becomes eroded and a hip replacement operation may be required.44 One doctor proposed amputating José’s leg, although fortunately he was too weak to undergo surgery.45 Equally fortunately, Teresa defied the drastic and, as time would show, wholly unnecessary measures proposed by the physicians, cursing them and removing José from the hospital. Since conventional medicine had apparently failed, Teresa yielded to the weight of popular superstition and sought ‘alternative’ treatment, taking José to a healer (curandero) in La Vall, who applied a poultice of punctured snails to his leg, gave him red wine, and advised him to stay away from the filth of the city.46 Remarkably, José’s condition improved, although this probably owed more to the post-traumatic plateau that precedes the initial onset of Perthes disease. He remained in La Vall with his mother for several months – a stay prolonged by their poverty: having spent their scant savings on hospital bills, they only got money for their passage to Barcelona after José was well enough to work as a hawker, selling rabbit skins.47
José was deeply marked by this illness. Besides being left with a limp and with one leg slightly shorter than the other, he faced intermittent pain that grew more intense from his late twenties onwards.48 As a child, his suffering was also emotional. He was mocked remorselessly by peers and adults alike for his limp:49 ‘I faced degrading comments until I was able to gain respect with my fists, receiving more than I gave.’50 The illness did not, however, limit his height or overall physical strength; although known to family and friends during his early years by the diminutive ‘Little José’ (‘Pepet’), he was average height for his generation. With blond, curly locks, he had an air of gentle innocence but, as he recovered in La Vall, he became an accomplished fighter. Taunted by local children due to his accent, which had assimilated new tones in Barcelona, he challenged his tormentors to physical combat (regardless of age, reputation, and size), taking on all comers and triumphing often with new tactics he had acquired in the streets of his adoptive city. On one occasion, he was confronted by the furious mother of one of his defeated rivals, who called him ‘a worthless Catalan’ and challenged young Peirats to find the courage to hit her. He duly accepted, striking her in the face, much to her horror.51 This youthful disregard for hierarchy reflected what he later described as his ‘disposition given to struggle and rebellion’.52
There is further evidence of this disposition. After his return to Barcelona, he became enraged at the sight of an uncle physically abusing his wife and leapt at the adult aggressor, seizing him by the throat before being subdued by his father.53 He therefore displayed an open resistance to adult, or any other, authority at an early age, especially when he perceived an injustice was being perpetrated. Nevertheless, he remained a sensitive child and the relative isolation occasioned by his illness encouraged a tendency towards introspection and reflection.
In Barcelona, at the time, industry boomed during Spain’s profitable neutrality in World War I. Not only were the benefits of the boom unevenly distributed, but the drive to feed foreign markets led to a subsistence crisis and a rampant inflation. It is estimated that the cost of living in Barcelona increased by 50 per cent between 1914 and 1919.54 Amid growing poverty in the Peirats home, there were no presents at Christmas. The family was in debt with most of the local shopkeepers – a situation aggravated by José’s medical bills. (It is striking that, in the course of his unpublished memoirs, over 1,000 pages, the only direct reference to consumerism was during World War I, when José and his friends collected cards depicting either wartime leaders or scenes from the war that came with chocolate bars.55) Family life was very much bound up with that of the neighbourhood: any holidays were celebrated with friends and neighbours, either with picnics and paellas on Montjuïc or in a local tavern. These were often rowdy gatherings, with alcohol, singing, guitars, castanets, and dancing.
