Пол Престон – Doves of War: Four Women of Spain (страница 20)
The unit left Alsace for the south on 7 June. Pip found it all a great adventure until Mussolini’s entry into the war on 10 June once again provoked her worries that Franco would not be far behind. The unit was to set up as a
On 22 June, with wounded British soldiers and a motley group of refugees, they were taken out to sea. There they were picked up by the British light cruiser, HMS
Chirk and London were equally depressing. On arrival in the capital, she was told that a young man, James Cassell, who had written to her in France and proposed to her, had committed suicide, leaving a note which read simply ‘Goodbye, Pip.’ When she made enquiries about the Orléans family, she was devastated to be told that they were so pro-German that the British Royal family was livid with them and that Ataúlfo had not been allowed into the country as assistant air attaché to Juan Antonio Ansaldo. Such gossip was wildly exaggerated but it was true that the Civil War had left enormous admiration for the Third Reich on the Spanish Right. The men of the Orléans family had flown with German and Italian aviators throughout the war. Although upset by these rumours, Pip’s reaction was not without shrewdness.
Why do I have to go on being nuts about a man who has always behaved like a prize shit to me and is now violently pro-German. I ought to be furious but it is exactly what I expected of him, the great spineless sod. He is led by his parents wherever they fancy. And to think that we have all been brought up together for two generations and that they are monarchists and Catholics and yet pro-German. They deserve all they would get if the Nazi regime spreads to Spain.142
The mental turmoil occasioned by the Catholic royalist Orléanses’ pro-German stance helped Pip to see Ataúlfo in a slightly harsher light – ‘I still like him better than anyone else in the world which is probably why I mind so terribly his upholding the other side. I hope I never have to see him again, the filthy bastard.’143 Her mind was taken off Ataúlfo by an encounter with ‘Dodo’ Annesley and Marjorie Fielden who had been with her in the nursing unit in France. Dodo intended to organise a hospital for the Poles in Scotland and wanted Pip to take charge of the nursing staff. In fact, she had to do everything – find suitable premises, raise the necessary funds, purchase surgical equipment. Having committed herself to Dodo, she was then offered a job in Spain by a man called Hugh Smyth. He told her, implausibly, that it would be with the British diplomatic corps. Other evidence suggests that this was a tentative approach by the intelligence services. She felt relieved that the Polish undertaking saved her from making a fool of herself with Ataúlfo. By 3 August, she was on her way to Glasgow where it was arranged that there would be a mobile field hospital, half surgical and general medical complete with operating theatre, laundry and fumigating plant. It was eventually to accompany the Polish units into battle in Italy but by then Pip would have moved on. The entire enterprise was going to be extraordinarily expensive and the initial costs were readily met by Margot Howard de Walden. Pip looked for locations, continued further fund-raising and started learning Polish.144
It was sufficiently hectic to keep thoughts of Ataúlfo at bay. However, at the beginning of September 1940, she recalled the German invasion of Poland one year earlier when she had been at Sanlúcar. ‘How miserable I was and how justified I was. I have not enjoyed myself for a single day since, and don’t see that I shall again for a long time.’ A year had passed but she was still not cured of her longing for him – ‘I still feel just the same cold, empty feeling without the sod as I always did.’ Life was made thoroughly difficult throughout the German bombing offensive on London during the autumn of 1940. Although inevitably appalled by the damage done by the Blitz, Pip’s sense of humour did not desert her. She found it ‘rather exhilarating being frightened like this all the time, it peps me up, but I do wish it would not give me diarrhoea. However, that at least is slimming.’ She moved around between the homes of various friends and relatives after being forced out of her father’s studio in Cadogan Lane by an unexploded bomb in the garden. Later, after she had got back into the studio, it was badly damaged by another bomb while she was sleeping. In the same air raid, across Belgrave Square, the façade was blown off Seaford House.145
A letter from Princess Bea expressing her anxiety that Franco might join the war alongside Hitler left Pip wondering if Ataúlfo would end up dropping bombs on London. The mid-September visit to Berlin of Franco’s brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Suñer, was assumed to herald Spanish belligerence. Her analysis of the strategic consequences if Spain went to war, in terms of the loss of Gibraltar and the closing of the Straits, was extremely acute. Her rhetorical question as to why Britain did not try to keep Spain neutral by offering to return Gibraltar after the war exactly echoed Churchill’s own thinking. Her personal anguish at the implications of Spain at war with Britain could hardly have been more intense.
I can’t imagine a greater hell than knowing that Ataúlfo is fighting against me and is bombing day after day. He will never live through a whole other war. It just isn’t possible. And I shan’t even know if he is alive or not. I can’t fight against a country I have fought with for two years, and I would rather die than fight against Ataúlfo. But still women don’t fight and anyhow it is no good feeling that way because we have to win this war and if all the people I love best have to be my enemies meanwhile I will just have to put up with it … For a year I have been miserable because I can’t go back to Spain or see Ataúlfo, but at least I was happy to know that he was safe and enjoying himself and now even that consolation looks like being taken away.146
In the midst of her distress, she received an insouciant letter from Consuelo asking ‘is London as destroyed as they say? What a shame, such a nice town, it is a great pity.’ A philosophic Pip pondered, ‘how very far we are from our fellow human beings, even great friends. It is funny to think how I worry about Spain joining in this war and how little they worry about us. And we are supposed to be the unfeeling, unemotional ones.’ However, news of Franco’s historic meeting with Hitler at Hendaye on 23 October 1940 renewed all of her anxieties. On that day, she had a terrifying attack of depression, – ‘all of a sudden I began to feel utterly lonely and futile and within about two minutes was lying on the floor sobbing my heart out at the misery and beastliness of life … I felt imprisoned by an impenetrable barrier of wickedness and pettiness and knew that I should never get out. I just lay in the middle of a circle of evil, wicked, mean things sobbing and exhausted with despair.’ No doubt this was a delayed reaction to the terror that she was experiencing during the night-time bombing attacks. And further considerable anxiety was provoked by the fact that Franco, in whose cause she had given so much, was toadying up to Hitler, who was in the process of destroying London.147
Her reaction to another letter from Consuelo revealed a Pip who was growing up fast. Consuelo wrote that Ataúlfo was behaving very badly, was constantly drunk and deliberately provoking rows with his mother and father. He had told her that ‘he did not care a damn any longer about pleasing his parents as they had ruined his life by not letting him marry the person he wanted to’. Pip’s reaction was extraordinarily mature and wise. ‘What a fat head he is. Too weak to defy his parents in anything important so he just drives them crazy in small ways and no doubt makes himself miserable in the attempt.’ Her romantic longings of old seemed to be replaced, consciously at least, by sadness that Ataúlfo was squandering his talents. Some days later, she awoke in tears after a dream about him: ‘We were in a crowd of panic-stricken women and swarms of babies. He kept trying to reach me and getting swept away. I was terrified of something. At last he reached me and just as he stretched out his hand to catch mine I woke up simultaneously as he was swept away right out of sight.’148