Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

belonged to a curious realm where the images of revolution, war and defeat in arid landscapes were superimposed on the images of exoticism – flamenco, castanets, bullfights, Carmen, Don Jose, Escamillo – and those of a generic ‘Spanishness’ – Don Quixote, honour, pride and silence. My uncle had been there and had got to know people there in his time with Universal Films. The relics of his visits filled odd corners of our house: a banderilla soaked in dry blood, a book on bullfighting, a signed photo of an elderly, military-looking Catalan autonomist leader and the like. After the 1934 insurrection in Asturias, a friend sent him copies of the Spanish illustrated papers, I imagine the monarchist ABC with dramatic pictures. And then, in the summer of 1936, in the first weeks after the generals’ rising, thanks to a curious combination of historical circumstances, for a brief moment I saw it myself.

I was then living in Paris for three months before going up to Cambridge, on a grant from the London County Council to improve my French. One day at the end of July I discovered to my agreeable surprise that I had bought a winning lottery ticket. It did not amount to much – I remember it as 165 Francs or about ?2–3. Fortunately the new Popular Front government of France had shortly before introduced one of its rare lasting innovations, les conges payes (holidays with pay) and – thanks to another innovation, an undersecretaryship of sports and leisure – ultra- cheap rail travel to enable the population to enjoy them. I therefore used my lottery winnings to take the train from Orsay station – still half a century away from being turned into a museum of nineteenth-century French art – to the Pyrenees for a fortnight of walking, youth hostelling and camping. Halfway through this superb excursion I was introduced to a more expeditious form of cheap movement by one of those peripatetic young central Europeans who in those days pioneered hitchhiking (‘Tippeln’, ‘Autostop’) on this side of the Atlantic. And so I found myself, carried from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean side of the Pyrenees, in a youth hostel close to the Spanish border near the town of Puigcerda. The occasion was too tempting. I went to the frontier, and was turned back by the young militia man who guarded it. I did not have the right papers. I walked a mile or so to the next crossing, where they let me pass without problems and I spent the day looking round Puigcerda, then for all practical purposes an independent revolutionary commune, dominated by the anarchists, with an admixture of members of POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification). (I could see no sign of the communists or the socialists, merged by then into a single party, the PSUC [Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia].) I don’t remember how exactly I communicated with the locals, who were naturally interested in an unannounced, indeed in any, stranger, but this is a corner where Spain and France are very mixed up, and Catalan is in any case as close to one language as to the other. I recall no problems. My most lasting image of this memorable day is of a few trucks parked on the main square. Whenever someone felt like going to the war, he went to the trucks, and whenever one filled up with enough volunteers, I was told, it went off to the front. As I wrote about this experience many years later:

The phrase c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre should have been invented for such a situation. It was marvellous, but the main effect of this experience on me was, that it took me twenty years before I was prepared to see Spanish anarchism as anything but a tragic farce. ²

In fact, Puigcerda did not give the impression of a community geared for war, nor do I recall it as a place full of armed young men in militia outfits, in the manner of later revolutions. (No sign in the Spanish provinces of 1936, for example, of uniformed young women.) If anything, it seemed a town full of politics, talk and arguments, of people standing in groups or sitting at cafe stables with newspapers.

Unfortunately, the day ended badly. The young anarchist frontier-guard who had turned me back at my first crossing-point came off duty that evening, saw me eating and chatting on the plaza, and immediately reported me to his commissar. I was interrogated, politely enough but firmly, by an unsmiling man in something like military gear. I am sure that he did not know what to make of my presence there – I did not know what to make of it myself – but clearly, the power of the workers could not be treated so lightly, even if the young Englishman who crossed the frontier not only irregularly, but in flat defiance of the decision to keep him out, had shown no signs of wanting to be a danger to the revolution. To be grilled by trigger-happy amateurs on the lookout for counter-revolutionaries is never relaxing. I confess that I was nervous, late that evening, when I was told to walk along the dark road back to the French frontier, the gun-barrel of an armed militiaman aimed at my back. So my fleeting contact with the Spanish Civil War ended with expulsion from the Spanish Republic.

What was I doing that day in Puigcerda? This is where the historian throws up his hands, faced with the autobiographer. It is not simply that my memory of that day has almost certainly been corrupted by sixty-odd years of mental redrafting, but that even on the day itself my purpose, if that is the right word, in crossing the frontier, cannot have been clear. What would I have done, if my stay there had not been cut short so suddenly? Given the common memory of the Spanish Civil War I should have been considering joining the forces of the Republic in the war against fascism, as several other young English people did in the first weeks of the Civil War. Almost certainly nothing like this was in my mind as I went to have a look at what a revolution was like, in spite of the passionate identification I, like others of my generation on the left, immediately felt with the fight of the Spanish Popular Front government. Did it enter my mind during that day? I cannot say, or if I could reconstruct my feelings perhaps I would want to take refuge behind the 5th Amendment of the US Constitution, because in the light of the subsequent establishment of International Brigades¹³ any answer might be discreditable. If I did not consider it, then why not? And if I did, why did I nevertheless not join up? Supposing there were any sources other than my personal memory, what conclusion might another historian, less personally biased in the matter, come to about the strange case of young EJH in the Spanish revolution? Such are the problems of writing history as biography, or perhaps the wider problems of understanding human nature. At all events, my day in Puigcerda demonstrates the pointlessness of the ‘what if’ exercises in history which now carry the jargon title of ‘counterfactuals’. There is no way we can choose between the countless hypotheses about how my subsequent life might or might not have been affected, if that young anarchist border guard had not refused me entry at that first frontier crossing. And it also demonstrates that nothing serves the historian better than keeping his eyes and ears open, especially if he or she has the luck to be in the right place at the right time. Puigcerda gave me my first introduction to, and a permanent fascination with, that quintessential breeding ground for ‘Primitive Rebels’, namely Spanish anarchism. In the 1950s I found myself pursuing it ‘in the field’, largely inspired by that remarkable work of Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth, which I must have read soon after its second edition came out in 1950. I can no longer remember whether I read it before or, more likely, after my first real acquaintance with Spain, which left behind ‘the deep and lasting impression which Spain makes on those who know her’.³ At least two of my visits to Spain were essentially explorations of the anarchist tradition: in 1956, when I found my way to Casas Viejas, the village which had once upon a time (in 1933) tried to make the world revolution on its own, and in 1960, when, deeply moved, I followed the traces of a recently fallen anarchist guerrillero Francisco Sabate. ⁴

I am no longer sure why I decided in the Easter vacation of 1951 to travel to Spain. It was a country of whose language I was ignorant, give or take the texts of Civil War slogans and songs and the ideological vocabulary which was international anyway. As later in Italy, I had to pick it up in conversation, with occasional reference to a small pocket dictionary – easier in Italy, where talk was mainly in educated Italian, than in Spain, where my informants were hardly ever intellectuals. (If they had been, we would probably have communicated in French.) One way or another, I was to pick up some spoken if ungrammatical fluency in both languages fairly quickly, beginning immediately after my arrival in Barcelona with an evening at the Cafe sNuevo on the Paralelo (coffee and show, five pesetas) where my neighbour, a mason just arrived from Murcia looking for work, taught me the words for ‘beautiful’, ‘ugly’, ‘fat’, ‘thin’, ‘blonde’, ‘brunette’, and other relevant terms by pointing to the corresponding features of the (mediocre) artistes on the tiny stage.

My contemporary notes⁵ suggest I was attracted by the news of the great and successful tramway boycott against higher fares of early March in Barcelona, followed by a general strike, about which I wrote