Пол Престон – Doves of War: Four Women of Spain (страница 21)
That Pip’s heart remained in Spain was revealed when Juan Antonio Ansaldo made a visit to London prior to taking up his duties as Air Attaché. When she was invited to have a drink with him and some friends, she assumed that they would have forgotten all about her ‘the same as all my friends here did while I was in Spain’. ‘The only reason they were ever so friendly was because they thought I was engaged to Ataúlfo, but by now they will have forgotten that and I am just another dim English girl who once went to Spain … Now maybe I will wake up to the fact that I don’t belong in Spain and no one there cares two damns about me any longer outside of Sanlúcar.’ Her anxieties were totally misplaced. When they met at the Dorchester, Ansaldo fell upon her effusively. She was so moved by his affectionate response to her that she wrote later: ‘It was a feeling like coming home again after a long exile. I felt as if someone had removed a ton weight off me. Despite all my longing for Spain, I had not realised till then just how much I loved it.’ Her delight at being able to reminisce in Spanish was short-lived. As dawn was breaking on her way home from an extremely alcoholic dinner, she witnessed rescue squads trying to retrieve people trapped in the cellars of bombed houses. When she saw her Spanish friends again on the eve of their return to Madrid, she wept uncontrollably. ‘I know this is my country but it does not feel like it. I feel like an exile from home and I can’t go back.149
Nostalgia for Spain made it all the more difficult for Pip to throw herself into her Polish project. Having got embroiled in it so as not to be tempted to run back to Spain, she was now regretting the decision. She even began to wonder if she should not have accepted one of the several offers that she had had to go to Spain to work for British Intelligence. The visit of Ansaldo had left her feeling that her love for Spain was not just about Ataúlfo. ‘I love that country and anything to do with it.’150 Nevertheless, she put aside her distress and knuckled down to making a success of the Polish Hospital. In late October and early November 1940, all the preparatory work began to come together. Pip forged an alliance with Diana Napier, a minor film star and wife of the great Austrian tenor, Richard Tauber, who was in charge of organising ambulances for the Polish Army. A base was found at Dupplin Castle, between Perth and Dundee on the Firth of Tay. At first, Pip faced considerable difficulties in getting the hospital up and running: ‘More and more I hate this Hospital and all the Poles … Loathe the Poles, loathe the Hospital and want to be back in Spain. Even without Spain I should still loathe the Poles.’ Inevitably, as always happened, the more she threw herself into her work, the more engrossed and therefore the less unhappy she became.151 The hospital was called SEFA – from the initials of Scott-Ellis, Marjorie Fielden and Dorothy Annesley.
There were occasional flashes of news from Ataúlfo, mainly when he was in Madrid, which convinced Pip that he was frightened of showing his feelings for her when he was at his parents’ home. At the end of November, a brief stay in London was prolonged after a car crash in the blackout. She was recovering from minor facial surgery when she was visited by Peter Kemp. Her old comrade from the Nationalist ranks told her that he had seen Ataúlfo in Madrid just after he had received news of her flight from France. Pip was amused to be told that he had been furious to hear of her French adventure. He had said that he wished that she had been taken prisoner so that his family could have arranged for the Germans to send her to Spain. She was even more delighted to hear that while in Madrid liaising with the German military representatives, Ataúlfo had ‘received a delegation from all the brothels of Madrid to ask him to ask the Germans to take their boots off!’152
In December 1940, Pip was given the title of honorary colonel in the Polish Army. She found it ‘rather fun’ being called ‘
The next years are difficult to reconstruct. Her diary comes to an abrupt end in January 1941. Pressure of work is a possible explanation for the silence although she had managed to write daily under far more trying circumstances in Spain. The survival of a later fragment suggests that the diary was simply lost. Nevertheless, the value of her work can be deduced from the fact that, in 1943, she was awarded the Polish Golden Cross of Merit with the approval of the Foreign Office.155 What is known is that the cold and damp of the Scottish climate intensified her tendency to very poor circulation. The chief surgeon at the hospital told her that smoking and drinking so much was exacerbating the problem. She seems to have tried sporadically to cut down but the daily stress of life at the hospital made abstention impossible for her. Life became unbearably difficult and she was diagnosed as having circulatory difficulties, known as Raynaud’s disease. It was recommended that she go to live in a warm climate. Throughout her time at Dupplin Castle, she longed for the day when she would return to Spain although a lengthy affair with a Polish surgeon, Colonel Henryk Masarek, had helped her finally to put aside hopes of marrying Ataúlfo.
As a result of her experiences in Spain during the Civil War, the various informal approaches from the Secret Services in 1939 and 1940 were entirely understandable. Keeping Spain neutral was a major preoccupation and an upper-class English woman with Pip’s impeccable political connections was an obvious target for recruitment. She was close to both the Orléans and Kindelán families, the two most important centres of the monarchist opposition to Franco within Spain itself. In mid-July 1941, the Special Operations Executive ran a security trace on her. The trace request to MI5 stated: ‘It is our intention that the Honourable Miss Scott-Ellis should be employed in the investigation of the possibility of evacuating Polish prisoners-of-war from Spain. We would be glad to know, if you have any reason from the security point of view why this person should not be so employed.’ The reply from MI5 cast doubt on her discretion citing a report that, at a dinner held at the Savoy for the Spanish Aid Mission in December 1940, she had blurted out that she had been asked to go to Spain as a spy, as she knew so many people there. She proudly stated that she had refused this request – probably the repeated approaches by Hugh Smyth made in the course of 1939. She had said that she would never work against Spain.156 The reported remarks were entirely consistent with the heartfelt declarations in her diary.
Finally, in February 1943, the Continental Action Force of the Polish Government-in-Exile in Britain requested that Pip be sent to Spain to help in the evacuation of escaping prisoners-of-war. In the light of the earlier security report, the proposal was accepted only after some hesitation. It is difficult to reconstruct her work in Barcelona with the Special Operations Executive from the exiguous surviving files. However, she later hinted at what she did to her mother, her sister, to José Luis de Vilallonga and to her son, John. Her official position, or cover, was as a secretary working in the dissemination of pro-Allied information to counteract the domination of the Spanish media by the Third Reich. However, the Consulate in Barcelona was the main conduit for Allied personnel escaping across the Eastern Pyrenees. It would seem, therefore, that her role was to help in the safe passage of British and Polish pilots shot down over France and other escapees through Spain and into Portugal. Her language skills and her connections with the most prominent and influential pro-Allied monarchists make it eminently plausible that she was indeed organising their transit on to Lisbon.157
She had the perfect excuse for trips from Barcelona across Spain to a point relatively near the Portuguese border in her friendship with the Orléans Borbón family. In any case, her first port of call in Spain was the family’s Montpensier Palace at Sanlúcar de Barrameda where she went to convalesce from the illness exacerbated by the Scottish climate. Thereafter, her visits to the family were as frequent and as lengthy as they had been during the Civil War. There is plentiful photographic evidence of Pip, looking thin but happy, riding with Ataúlfo in April at the Feria de Sevilla, helping Ataúlfo with his animals at the Botánico at Sanlúcar de Barrameda in May, then again riding with Ataúlfo at the Rocío in June, and then at a party at Sanlúcar de Barrameda in August 1943. In the autumn of 1943, she went to Estoril to spend some time with her mother who was there returning from Canada with her four granddaughters. She travelled to Estoril again in late January 1944 to see Gaenor who was returning from America with her children. She had been with her husband Richard who had been working in the economic warfare section of the British Embassy in Washington.158 By late 1944, with Allied forces controlling the south of France, Pip’s role was coming to an end.