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
