Пол Престон – Doves of War: Four Women of Spain (страница 7)

The big event was the coronation of George VI on 12 May. Pip was as bedazzled by its magnificent pageantry as the rest of the world. She attended the first court ball of the new reign which she found ‘heaven’. On returning home ‘I put on Mama’s tiara and earrings and looked too regal for words. How I wish I had one.’⁴² She had started writing to Touffles again and, on the strength of hearing that he might come to London on leave, had begun to diet. Her diary at this time began to have increasing references to her hating ‘that filthy smelly town London’ and even ‘I hate social life.’⁴³ Frantically hopeful of seeing Touffles, Pip was further reminded of the ongoing Civil War on 1 June. Two days before, the German navy had mounted a large-scale artillery bombardment of the Mediterranean city of Almería in southeastern Spain. Coming out of a newsreel with some friends, Pip ran into a Communist demonstration chanting ‘Stop Hitler’s War on Children!’ Nan Green was among the demonstrators. However, she was discouraged when, accompanying her mother to lunch at the Herberts’, she met Gabriel who ‘was very interesting but convinced me more that there is no point in my going out there as a nurse or anything else. Damn it.’⁴⁴

Just when she was on the verge of abandoning thoughts of Spain, Touffles turned up unexpectedly in London. On Wednesday 23 June, she wrote: ‘He rang me up this morning and we lunched out together at San Marco and spent the afternoon buying records and talking. He is exactly the same as he always was and I like him as much as I always did.’ The next day he broke a date to take her to an air show. She now admitted to herself what had been obvious for some time. ‘I can’t pretend to myself any longer. I know I am just as much in love with him as I always have been for the last three years. Oh God what hell it is, all so pointless, just lack of control.’ On 29 June, he flew back to Spain from Croydon. After seeing him off, Pip was desperately miserable.⁴⁵

However, for all her distress at seeing him go back to the war, his visit had reawakened her interest in Spain. Her notions of what was going on there derived almost entirely from Princess Bea ‘who really knows what she is talking about. I simply adore her and admire her enormously for her courage about everything.’ Her new-found determination to go to Spain roused her from her misery. Her hopes were raised on 6 July when she heard that she had passed her first aid and nursing exams with high grades. Nevertheless, bored with her social life in London and still unsure how to get to Spain, she fell into a limbo. ‘I am in a very odd sort of numb way. I don’t mind much what I do or where I go as long as it is more or less peaceful.’ She was concentrating on her Spanish lessons with some dedication. On 22 July, without much expectation of a helpful reply, she wrote a long letter to Touffles asking him how to go about getting a posting in Spain.⁴⁶ Her interest in Spain was further fired by a book by an aviation journalist, Nigel Tangye, Red, White and Spain. Tangye had got into Nationalist Spain on the basis of letters attesting to his pro-Nazi sympathies. His entirely pro-Nationalist account probably confirmed for her things that she had already been told by Princess Bea. After lurid tales of Red atrocities, it related that, if the ‘Reds’ won, there would be a ‘Communist State, complete suppression of the Church, mass-murder of landowners and employers, officers and priests, and abolition of all freedom’. Tangye asserted that ‘The Government, or Red, forces are entirely controlled and supplied by Russia.’ Coincidentally, Tangye travelled for part of his time in Spain with a cavalry officer, the Barón de Segur, whose son was that same José Luis de Vilallonga who would later denigrate Pip’s diaries.⁴⁷

Things began to move a little faster when Prince Ali returned briefly to London. At dinner, Pip told Princess Bea of her firm intention to go to Spain and asked for her help. Pip’s new-found determination and recently acquired nursing qualifications impressed the Infanta that she was serious. Accordingly, she concluded that Pip could be useful and undertook to find out where she should go as well as getting someone with whom to practise her Spanish. Pip was so heartened that she determined once more to ‘get thin and fit and learn more Spanish’. She went up to Chirk in her Super Swallow Jaguar. She found her mother was making plans for her twenty-first birthday party on 16 November. Accordingly, Pip reminded her of her Spanish project and Margot van Raalte was far less insouciant than she had been three months earlier. Now, she was concerned about her daughter’s safety in the midst of so many men and decided to write to Princess Bea. Pip, confident that she could bring her mother around, had begun to read another blood-curdling account of Nationalist heroism, Major McNeill-Moss’s The Epic of the Alcazar, which she found ‘very interesting and exciting’. McNeill-Moss’s book consisted of a romantically heroic account of the Republican siege of the Nationalist garrison in the Alcázar of Toledo from July to September and a notoriously mendacious whitewash of the Nationalist massacre of the civilian defenders of the town of Badajoz on 14 August 1936.⁴⁸

The big leap forward in Pip’s plans came when Princess Bea replied to Margot Howard de Walden’s letter. Her enquiries had revealed that the level of confusion in Nationalist Spain was such that nothing for Pip could be organised from London. However, a change in her own circumstances opened the way for Pip. Prince Ali had been bombarding Franco with pleas for an active role in the fighting. Through the intercession of General Kindelán, the head of the Nationalist air force and the most prominent monarchist among the Nationalist generals, his wish had finally been granted. Accordingly, Princess Bea was going to return to Spain in the autumn to be near her husband’s air base in the south. To Pip’s intense delight, the Infanta proposed that she accompany her, assuring Margot that she would look after Pip ‘as if she were her own daughter’. Under these circumstances, her parents did not object. Half a century later, her brother was still perplexed by their lack of anxiety.⁴⁹

Pip’s girlish joy was all too understandable since she was not only going to Spain but proximity to Touffles was virtually guaranteed. ‘Princess B really is a saint,’ she wrote on 8 August. ‘It will be so nice to go with her.’ She had little notion of the horrors that she would encounter. On 26 August, she wrote: ‘What an adventure though a gruesome one.’ With her Spanish future apparently resolved, she devoted much of the summer at Chirk to riding, playing tennis and learning golf. Princess Bea arranged a Spanish teacher, named Evelina Calvert, and Pip set herself a tough schedule in preparation for the journey. She was ecstatic when she learned that Princess Bea planned to take her to Sanlúcar by car on 22 September, via Paris, San Sebastián, Salamanca and Seville.⁵⁰

Her preparations became frantic – increased efforts to improve her Spanish and some half-hearted dieting which got her weight down to 12 stone 3 pounds. A daily round of shopping, visits to the hairdresser (on one occasion to have her eyelashes dyed), inoculations, arrangements for her passport and visa for Spain. This included a visit to the Foreign Office where she was interviewed by William H. Montagu-Pollock, one of the four men with principal responsibility for British policy on Spanish affairs. That she was received by a functionary of such eminence was an indication of her social, if not her political, importance. On 18 September, she went with Princess Bea to Portsmouth to meet ex-Queen Victoria Eugenia of Spain. As the day for her departure drew near, she began to worry – ‘I am almost frightened of going to Spain now’ (19th); ‘Somehow now the great moment has come, I feel almost scared and rather depressed’ (20th); ‘I wish I knew exactly what I was going to and where … I still can’t really believe that this time next week I shall be in the middle of war. A strange and exciting life.’⁵¹ What a contrast with Nan Green who knew rather more, from her husband’s letters, about the hell into which she was going.

Pip’s reasons for going to Spain had little to do with the real issues being fought out there. She lacked the ideological conviction of either Nan Green or even Gabriel Herbert who was a devout Catholic and believed that Franco’s war effort was a crusade to save Christian civilisation. According to her sister Gaenor, Pip’s views were ‘a simple expression of support for her friends, and therefore pro-monarchy and anti-Communist’. In the case of one friend, Ataúlfo de Orléans Borbón (Touffles), much more than friendship was at stake. There can be no doubting that Pip went to war for love. It helped that her parents had been much taken by Prince Ali’s repetition of the canard that the military had rebelled in July 1936 because a Communist takeover in Spain had been imminent. However, her plans would probably have come to nothing if her adored Princess Bea had not taken a hand. Pip’s eventual placement as a nurse would owe much to the Infanta’s prominent position in the Nationalist organisation known as La Delegación Nacional de Asistencia a Frentes y Hospitales, a patrician welfare operation headed by the Carlist María Rosa Urraca Pastor and largely run by monarchists.⁵²