The Girl from Station X (39 page)

Despite her initial homesickness, Anne, I read, threw herself wholeheartedly into her new life. She admitted in the diary to feeling
an awful ass
not knowing Spanish,
and started taking lessons. She could not get into any of her clothes worn
before Elisa
and Norman Hartnell, the royal dress designer, sent two outfits. I suppose that, as
the wife of the British naval attaché, Anne was expected to be well dressed.

My mother loved the diplomatic life and told many anecdotes about its personalities in later years. There was the femme fatale,
an old girlfriend of Willy’s
and
a very pretty woman
,
rumoured to be having an affair with another Brit in Madrid. There were the Oswalds – Adolf Oswald, the American military attaché, and
his wife Dorothy became lifelong friends of my parents, as did the Blake-Tylers; Harry Blake-Tyler worked for Shell. My mother enjoyed all these characters and encounters – the home movie
show of a British couple which went on into the small hours sent her, retrospectively, into fits of giggles:

they are very Anglo-Indian and the shots were interspersed with subtitles such as ‘The Queen of the Valley’ followed by an enormous lotus flower on the
screen and a picture of Tory Murray wearing some shoes made of grass for fishing entitled ‘Not Quite Bond Street but –!’ . . . We progressed onto the Norfolk Broads and
tobogganing at Egham! The Marquesa de Civia was yawning openly and I was exhausted.

A major part of my father’s job involved this constant socialising, at Embassy parties and dinners, and at functions outside Madrid specifically to do with the navy.

My mother, in this respect, must have been an ideal wife. She was charming, a good listener and eager to reach out to all manner of people. She had joie de vivre – indeed, my memories of
her in Spain are of her always smiling. She must have complemented my father, who could be uncouth and frighten people with his loud voice; after all, he had spent much of his life on a ship. She
accompanied him to the many parties, getting on particularly well with the Spaniards, and they soon became a popular couple.

Although, in the diary, she does not express towards my father the passionate feelings she had had for some of her earlier loves, she seems to have depended on him and respected him. Despite her
private income, at this early stage in their marriage he was the dominant one; his job took precedence. And I remember a very domestic, cosy atmosphere in their shared bedroom in that house in
Madrid – my mother suggesting one morning: ‘Go and ask Dad if he wants to go to the mountains today!’ I had rushed into the bathroom to find my father sitting on the lavatory.
‘Get out! Get out!’ he’d yelled, and I’d run back to my mother, hiding my face in my parents’ sheets. Our Sunday trips to the mountains – I recall the car
breaking down, leaving us waiting in the parched landscape – were family outings almost certainly instigated by my mother who soon, I saw, did
not
perceive it her duty to be always at
her husband’s side. She took advantage of being situated in the centre of Spain to go to wilder, more remote parts, and was often away, just with the chauffeur, for several days, simply
exploring.

In early March 1950, she visited Avila,
surrounded by a mediaeval wall
, and fell in love with it:
Spain seems at its most beautiful at sunset when the hills
are blue and the old walls are golden against the sky
. Paco (Don Francisco Maroto y Pérez del Pulgar, Marques of Santo Domingo), whom she had met first in Madrid, had a house
there, and it was to Avila that she would take me, a year and a half after Raymond’s death, to visit him and Miss Ettie, his English governess, who had allegedly saved his life in the Civil
War. Paco, my mother found to her delight, was descended from a sister of the renowned mystic Santa Teresa of Avila, whom she admired.

These entries about our first months in Madrid ended on 1 April 1950, the day of Franco’s annual victory parade to celebrate his winning the Civil War; my parents had to attend, my mother
taking her place with my father in the diplomatic stand. That was the end of that thick diary, which had contained her post-war travels, her wedding day and her honeymoon.

It was time now for me to hunt again for the sequels, the ‘Spain’ diaries leading up to Diary 6, which started in mid-sentence: . . .
flowers that smelled exactly like
heather honey
. I was almost beginning to despair of ever finding these missing four, and even wondered if my mother had destroyed them – reading about Raymond later might have
been too painful.

I searched again among the clutter from her old house. At last, under a pile of old photograph frames, I found the missing ‘Spain’ diaries, all together in a box. On the cover of
each my mother had written ‘SPAIN’, then the number in Roman numerals. At last! I felt joy, relief and gratitude to my mother for having not only written them but kept them for all
those years. Now, unknowingly, she was giving back to me my very early childhood, the time when she loved me; when she, my father, I and then Raymond were happy.

10th April 1950: Cute Things looking too sweet for words and with a wide smile. She is ‘so good’ and is quite enchanting and growing
prettier.

Yes, my mother loved me, but her love for travel had also taken hold. She was becoming entranced by Spain’s unspoiled, often dramatic, landscape. In the new ‘Spain’ diary,
Diary 1, I read that, on her way from Madrid to Seville in early April, she had passed
the reddest earth I have ever seen
and
the half-eclipse of the moon, with
the moon reflected in the sky and looking like a cross.
On that journey she and my father lunched in Cordoba with new Spanish friends, the Viernas, in their
palacio
with
fourteen patios – the family had owned it since 1430. Fausto Vierna’s sister, the Duchesse de Rochefoucauld, had left her husband to live with a gypsy woman in the caves below the
Alhambra; the gypsy’s husband lived with them and the duchess was said to wait on them both like a servant. Anne was fascinated; I recalled her pictures of that gypsy and of his wife, and how
in Spain she would talk excitedly of
los gitanos
, encouraging me and Raymond to clap hands with her and chant:

Although the implicit lesson was to warn a child off disobedience, the message that I took from the chant, and that I am sure my mother intended us to take, was the opposite: she wanted us to be
bold and daring, and when Raymond and I got overexcited, shrieking and dancing about, she would call us admiringly: ‘Wild Things!’

My mother was seduced yet repelled by Spain’s old-fashioned, often grim Catholicism; she was shocked to discover that a Spanish wife could not cross a border without her husband’s
permission and that a man had the right to go in front of a woman in the queue for Confession. The Catholic Church, she wrote, encouraged this submission.

My father, though, may have found it easier being in a Catholic country, since in England Catholics were still considered outsiders. There were references in these new diaries to his
determinedly going to Mass even when he was travelling round Spain for naval duties and it was inconvenient.

My mother, however, was disgusted, after being taken to the birthplace of St Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, by her Basque chauffeur Julian, by the Church’s
worship
of outward form, forgetting entirely the humility which Christ taught . . . and all these awful relics (bones blood etc) which to my mind would be better on a rubbish heap and the almost idolatrous
worship of which shocks me terribly, as does the utter worldliness of this, the seat of the Jesuits.

Julian, who also showed my mother the plaza where his father and 108 others were killed by a bomb during the Civil War, told her that the Jesuits were
the real rulers of
Spain
and had money in all the best business enterprises. He added, though, that he admired
the hardness of their training.

I was struck by my mother’s criticism of the inimical aspects of Catholicism. She had a religious nature and used to pray on her knees by her bed every night. As a child in Sussex, I had
envied her Protestant hymns and what appeared to be the softer, less disciplined nature of her religion – we Catholics had to fast then before taking Holy Communion. I occasionally went with
her to St Margaret’s, the little church across the fields from our house. In Franco’s Spain, Protestant Bibles were not allowed, and the British consul was put in jail for four days
after being found in possession of one.

However, my mother, I saw, in her travels around that still-poor country, could not help but fall in love with its very primitiveness, and with many of its Catholic practices. On 8 June, she
took my grandmother and Gig to a Corpus Christi parade in Toledo –
in the streets thyme had been strewn . . . it smelt divine and from all the balconies were hung Spanish silk
shawls with colours of every kind and beautifully embroidered. Girls in mantillas (small ones) stood waiting on these balconies to watch the procession pass.

Indeed, some of the beautiful aspects of Spain were inextricably bound up with its bigoted and savage history; she admired the glamorous pro-Franco Moorish Guard, known for their ruthlessness
and fierce fighting. But in keeping with Franco’s intransigence towards ‘Reds’ and other ‘heretics’, a Spanish Protestant soldier was put on trial for not kneeling at
the correct moment during Mass; my mother was gratified that the British Embassy was asked to intercede.

She also detested the Spanish Catholic attitude to women. Visiting San Pedro el Viejo, one of the oldest churches in Spain, originally a Cistercian monastery, she saw
a hideous
statue of the Virgin recumbent, looking like a demented corpse – hideous colours, a monstrosity . . . around which were devout peasant women.
She added:
I only hope
that the Catholic cult of the Virgin helps the women to bear the burden which they undoubtedly have and which is forced upon them by the relentlessness and rigidity of the Roman Church, controlled
of course entirely by men who have no conception of women’s minds and feelings.
I was impressed here by my mother’s forcefully expressed feminism.

One of my early memories is of hearing the name ‘Franco’ often on my parents’ lips, and assuming that he was one of their friends. (I even mixed him up in my mind with
Frank, the Knowle chauffeur, whom my grandmother would sometimes address affectionately as ‘Franko’.) Of course I did not have a clue who this Spanish Franco really was but had picked
up that he was important to my parents – and, indeed, to everyone in Spain.

My mother, with her habitual curiosity, at once took an interest in Spanish national politics and tried to glean what she could of the current state of affairs. She wrote that the monarchists
(many of the Spaniards she met socially) owed their position to Franco
despite abusing him continually. None of them though want the king back as he would be forced to be more liberal
than Franco.

At the time of my father’s arrival in Madrid in October 1949, Spain was ostracised by Britain and the other countries who were members of NATO – established in Washington that April.
Franco was running a brutal, nationalist regime, fuelled by his hatred and mistrust of Communists and other dissidents. Democrat President Truman was anti-Franco but was also conscious of the
threat of communism, both from Soviet Russia – which had blockaded Berlin between June 1948 and May 1949 – and from China, where, on 1 October 1949, Mao had founded the People’s
Republic. A third world war was feared and, as a military ally on Europe’s southern flank, Franco could be useful. But the British Prime Minister, Labour’s Clement Attlee, sided with
the other NATO countries rather than with the US, arguing that it was better to support a post-fascist, newly constructed Germany than a currently fascist Spain.

Naturally, because of my father’s job, my parents often had to attend functions involving Franco. In March 1950, my parents had gone to a procession in honour of the Brazilian Ambassador,
who was presenting his credentials to Franco; an old lady with tears in her eyes spoke to her of the days of the King, when such an occasion
had really meant
something.

In July 1950 my parents went to the royal palace at La Granja, to celebrate Franco’s victory and the end of the Civil War; this was considered
muy especial
, wrote
my mother:

The gardens all lit up . . . the road was lined by young Falange in blue shirts and red caps. Inside the palace gardens the Moorish guard was lined up with their lances, they wore
white turbans and magenta and white uniforms and had on white kummerbunds. They are very dignified and impressive and are always tall men . . . The music started to play and Franco and his wife
came out and shook hands with all the Diplomats lined up – the men bowing over his hand, which, apparently is done by the service people here because of his army rank. After this, Franco
mixed among the crowd, followed by Artajo (the minister of foreign affairs) and he shook hands with all of us. Franco is v. young looking for his age and a tiny little man – I never realised
how small, until I stood beside him.

My mother’s justified excitement at meeting Franco reminded me of her triumph of getting so close to Mussolini at the Excelsior Hotel in Rome in April 1932, when she was
seventeen – she was always fascinated to glimpse these political figures in the flesh. I also noted that she enjoyed my father’s status as a ‘Diplomat’, giving the word a
capital letter.