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Pip’s Spanish progressed quickly. Nevertheless, while she tried, in a desultory fashion, to find out more about going to Spain, she began to see a lot of ‘the most gorgeous tall hero called John Geddes’, a fashionable young man-about-town. They danced together, got drunk together and talked about their respective broken hearts, she about Touffles and he about a girl named Ann Hamilton Grace who had ditched him. They walked their dogs and within a couple of weeks of knowing him, she could write: ‘I dote on him and hope I will see him again soon.’
(#litres_trial_promo) By 13 April, they were lovers. She found the experience physically painful ‘but it was fun’. ‘I still don’t feel even a twinge of conscience or remorse. And oddly I don’t like him any more or less.’ After sleeping with him a second time, she wrote: ‘He is an absolute darling although definitely rather a cad.’ She was taken entirely by surprise, at the end of April, when he asked her to marry him. She was emboldened to refuse after being told by her cousin, Charmian van Raalte, that she had had a letter from Touffles ‘who is livid because I have not written for ages’.
(#litres_trial_promo) She was also distracted by Gaenor’s coming-out dance at Seaford House which was to be attended by 650 people including the Duke and Duchess of Kent. At dinner beforehand, she was delegated to look after the then seventeen-year-old King Faroukh of Egypt whom she thought ‘a dear and we got on like billyoh’. Rather alone in London, he was taken by Pip to Regent’s Park Zoo, the Tower of London, St Paul’s Cathedral and several theatres.
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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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
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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.
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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Complete with trunks and hatboxes containing the accumulated fruits of her last months’ shopping trips, Pip left England in some style in Princess Bea’s chauffeur-driven limousine on 21 September 1937. At Dover, they were met by the station master in his top hat and were swept into a private compartment on the boat train.
(#litres_trial_promo) Then it was on to Paris for some more shopping and a visit to the World’s Fair. This was the great exhibition for which Picasso’s Guernica was commissioned by the Spanish Republican Government.
(#litres_trial_promo) Interestingly, for someone just off to the Spanish Civil War, Pip did not see it, instead spending her time at the German and English pavilions. On one side of the Pont d’Iéna on the Rive Droite of the Seine, the German pavilion, designed by Albert Speer, glaring at its equally pugnacious Soviet rival, was an architectural representation of Nazi aggression. Huge, thirty-three-feet-high statues of muscle-bound Soviet heroes strode triumphantly forward, their way apparently blocked by the naked Teutonic heroes guarding the German design, a huge cubic mass, erected on stout pillars, and crowned by a gigantic eagle with the swastika in its claws. For Pip, this was ‘the best’. The British pavilion symbolised the tired gentility of appeasement. The British displays were of golf balls, pipes, fishing rods, equestrian equipment and tennis rackets while the German and the Italian were of military might. Pip thought the British pavilion ‘very bad’.
(#litres_trial_promo) She and Princess Bea were then driven on 23 September to Biarritz where Pip was delighted to discover that she could understand most of the Spanish that she began to hear. They were received by Sir Henry Chilton, the British Ambassador to Republican Spain. The pro-Nationalist Chilton had been on holiday in San Sebastián when the Civil War broke out and had refused to return to Madrid. With the aid of the French Ambassador to Spain, they managed to get across the frontier to San Sebastián on the following day. With the beautiful resort bathed in sunshine, it was like being on holiday.
The unwarlike nature of the trip continued when she and Princess Bea were joined for dinner by one of General Alfredo Kindelán’s sons, Ultano. Pip went to the cinema with him, then for a long walk and a mild flirtation – ‘If it had not been for the fact that he has known Ataúlfo and Alvaro all his life and would certainly have told them I would have had a spot of fun but I would have been ragged for the rest of my life so I refrained and bade him a polite goodbye at the hotel.’ Pip saw her first sign of the war when they drove to Santander along the route that the Nationalists had taken on their campaign in the north earlier in 1937. They met Touffles, ‘much thinner and very sunburnt … Madly attractive.’ He went out of his way to talk to her and she admitted that ‘alas I still like him more than I want to’. He told her about the capture of Santander and took her to the German airbase from which he flew as a navigator. ‘They fly huge Junkers. His is a beauty with two engines and a retractable undercarriage.’ This means that he must have been flying in the experimental Junkers Ju 86D-I. It was a curious time for Pip, a mixture of tourism and initiation into the war. They visited the beautiful medieval village of Santillana del Mar and La Magdalena, the great English-style royal country residence on a hill overlooking the bay of Santander. ‘It had been ruined inside by the Reds and is still being cleaned up by Red prisoners who are camped in the park. They all looked well and happy.’
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Sad to leave Touffles, she continued her journey on 28 September, moving on to Burgos where she toured the great cathedral, then onto Valladolid and to Salamanca. Pip was entranced by Spain, the only drawback being the fleas awaiting her in every hotel bedroom. She and Princess Bea stayed with General Kindelán. Kindelán was a man of great rectitude and austerity. Nevertheless, to Pip’s young eyes, oblivious to his moral and political merits, he was just ‘rather fat and sloppy’. At the Grand Hotel in Salamanca, she caught a glimpse of the ‘stunning looking’ Peter Kemp, whom she knew vaguely from London. In a Carlist regiment, he was one of the very few English volunteers on the Nationalist side. On 1 October, the first anniversary of Franco’s elevation to the headship of state saw a major display of pageantry. Pip was elated by being able to witness history being made – ‘a parade of soldiers led by the Moors in their wonderful coloured cloaks on Arab horses with golden trappings. The leaders rode white Arabs with silver hooves and gold-embroidered medieval trappings which looked beautiful with the men’s white and orange cloaks, behind them were men in green cloaks on black horses got up the same but with golden hooves.’ Her concern that the Nationalist forces might be antiquated was redressed when Álvaro, Princess Bea’s eldest son, took her to inspect the Italian Savoia Marchetti tri-motored bombers at his air base. This was the Base Aéreo de Matacán, built in October-November 1936. Afterwards Álvaro took her to see the fierce fighting bulls at the estate of Antonio Pérez Tabernero, a bull-breeder friend of the Kindelán family.
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On 2 October, she was thrilled when Touffles unexpectedly showed up in Salamanca although her delight was tempered when he spent their brief time together teasing her about her figure. She also wrote to her father and asked him to buy her a Ford 10 and have it sent to Gibraltar. ‘I hope you do as I must have a car if I am here alone.’ On 4 October, they left Salamanca and, after a spectacular journey south through the harsh and arid hills of Extremadura, they reached Sanlúcar de Barrameda – the family’s Palacio de Montpensier having been returned to Prince Alfonso by Franco. Pip found its crazy mixture of styles hideously ugly but fascinating. Prince Ali, now a lieutenant colonel in the Nationalist airforce, was stationed at Seville and so was often able to visit his home. Inevitably, she imbibed the family’s views on the Reds.
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By mid-October, everything had been arranged for her to go and stay with the Duquesa de Montemar in Jérez while attending a nursing course at a hospital there. Lord Howard de Walden cabled that her car would be sent to Gibraltar in a few days. When it arrived at the end of the month, she thought it ‘heaven. Black with green leather inside and a dream of beauty.’ At first she found the hospital ‘splendid fun’ and ‘not in the least disgusting’. The bulk of the patients were Moorish mercenaries whom she found ‘perfectly sweet but like a lot of children and rather dirty’. When her course proper began, she was shocked by the appalling wounds that had to be treated. ‘I did not feel sick at all but afterwards when I left the hospital I kept seeing the wounds all day and hearing the screams of agony.’ She was fully aware that she would see far worse sights at the front. ‘I understand now why nurses are so often hard and inhuman.’ While in Jérez, she got gathered up in the local social whirl. She was mortified when it was suggested to her by her hostess, the Duquesa, among others, that it was obvious that she was in love with Ataúlfo and ought to marry him. This was not because the idea displeased her. Quite the contrary, but she was embarrassed that her infatuation should be so obvious. Despite her emotional preoccupations, she made good progress with her nursing skills. She loved the work and was beginning to be able to witness without distress the most hair-raising wounds being treated.
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There were now two parallel strands in her life. One was training to be a nurse at the front and the other was her deepening passion for Touffles. When he returned to Sanlúcar and telephoned to invite her over, she skipped her classes to go and see him, ‘hopping with life and merriment’. When she got back to the Orléans household, her happiness knew no bounds. The life of the well-to-do in the Nationalist zone had no equivalent in the Republican ranks. Touffles arrived with nine Luftwaffe pilots for a bout of entertainment and relaxation that included swimming, a flamenco fiesta at one of the Jérez bodegas and a visit to a stud farm for Arab steeds. There was then a trip to Gibraltar to collect Pip’s car and to do shopping, during which she bought a white kimono embroidered with golden dragons. She spent a lot of time with Touffles drinking and dancing. After one late night, she wrote: ‘I adore Touffles more every day and only wish I could just stay with him for ever.’ He bought her a radio in anticipation of her imminent twenty-first birthday. It was to accompany her throughout the Spanish Civil War. Loaded with shopping, including 3,000 cigarettes, she drove her new car back into Spain. Her social position ensured that she had no difficulty getting through the border control. ‘They had been warned to expect us and refused to let us declare anything. So we just sailed through with no trouble at all. It was very nice of them to be so kind as it saved a packet of trouble as my car has no triptyque [a document permitting the transit of a car from one country to another] or insurance, and I have no licence.’
Ecstatically happy to be spending time with Touffles, she had no desire to return to the hospital at Jérez. However, her views were somewhat altered when she came face to face with the arrogantly sexist mentality of the Andalusian aristocratic señorito. Pip and the family went to Seville to stay at the Hotel Cristina, which was ‘crammed full of Germans on leave’. Touffles met up with his Luftwaffe comrades and announced that they were off to a brothel. ‘Of course it is damn stupid of me to mind as it won’t be the first or last time he sleeps with a tart but if he liked me the weeniest bit the way I want him to, he could not have told me he was going to without a qualm. However, who cares. I’m damned if I’m going to. I knew he was not in the least in love with me before so it does not make any difference. Oh hell and damn.’ When he and his German cronies did the same on the following night, she decided that she would rather be at the front nursing. She did not know, of course, whether he did anything more than play the piano and dance.
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Feeling rejected by Ataúlfo, she began to get involved in her hospital work. On 10 November, she attended her first operations which she found enthralling. Touffles went back to his unit on the next day, leaving her ‘with that grim feeling of emptiness and the awful wartime pessimism of wondering at the back of my mind whether I will ever see him again’. One and all continued to enquire as to when she would marry him. She wrote in her diary: ‘But why bother, at this very moment he is almost certainly tootling around Seville with a tart but why should I care. Of course I do but it is very stupid.’ She was finding some consolation in nursing. She loved the work although ‘I am beginning to loathe the Moors. They are so tiresome always quarrelling and yelling at one. It makes me mad to have a lot of filthy smelly Moors ordering me about.’ On the eve of her twenty-first birthday, she wrote: ‘I feel awfully small and young tonight. In a new country talking a strange language and only understanding half of what is said to me, doing a new kind of work amongst new people and about to prance off on my own to the middle of the war. Sometimes I feel an awful long way from home but who cares. It is the first adventure I have ever undertaken and so far I love it.’ When Princess Bea returned to England on 20 November, Pip went back to Jérez where she waited anxiously for her nursing examination. She was keen to get to the front – ‘I am tired of waiting around doing nothing much. I want action.’ Every day, her diary recorded her anxiety to be off to war. However, this required the permission of Mercedes Milá, the head of the Nationalist nursing services. The ordeal of the examination on 1 December passed off less traumatically than she had feared. In fact, she was amazed by how much she was left to do in the hospital without supervision.
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Her social life was hectic; late nights consisting of cinema, dinner, protracted dancing and drinking. On 6 and 7 December, she was given a tour around the German battleship Deutschland which she thought ‘a lovely boat’. On 20 December, Touffles and one of his German friends took her for a spin in a Junkers 52 bomber. Despite the distractions, she was becoming deeply impatient with Mercedes Milá’s failure to respond to her request to go to the front. She was all the more unsettled because of rumours about major action on the Aragón front – an echo of the Republican offensive against Teruel. As her Spanish improved and she got to know more people, her social life was coming to resemble her life in London albeit on a narrower scale. She had a couple of superficial flirtations, her blonde hair and blue eyes – and probably her plumpness too – making her very attractive to Spanish men. Finally, knowing that Princess Bea was in Burgos, she decided to leave the hospital at Jérez and make the hazardous eleven-hour 1000-kilometre car journey to join her for Christmas. It was a courageous – or irresponsible – initiative since attractive young women travelling alone in Spain were usually at risk from sexually frustrated soldiers. With typical self-reliance, she coped with running out of petrol on remote roads and the car’s sump springing a leak.
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When, after driving for two days, she finally arrived at Burgos on 23 December, she could not find Princess Bea and was desperate to have come so far only to be all alone. Princess Bea had moved on to the Palacio de Ventosilla at Aranda de Duero where her family would be staying. This was because the front-line units of the Nationalist air force were being regrouped as the Primera Brigada Aérea Hispana at Aranda, alongside the Italian Aviazione Legionaria in Zaragoza and the German Condor Legion in Almazán, the walled medieval town due south of Soria. General Alfredo Kindelán, with overall command over all three forces, had established his headquarters at Burgos. It was Pip’s good fortune to get a room in the hotel where General Kindelán’s family were staying. They told her that Mercedes Milá planned to send her to a front-line hospital. There was a terrible scare when word was brought to the hotel that Álvaro de Orléans had crashed. His Italian wife Carla Parodi-Delfino was hysterical and Pip had to calm her down. She then went on to the Palacio de Ventosilla. To the relief of Álvaro’s escape, there was added the dual pleasure of resolving her future as a nurse at the front and of seeing Ataúlfo. Touffles told her that she was much thinner and very beautiful. However, that delight was dampened by Princess Bea, who knew that Pip was in love with him. The Infanta told her the first of a series of slightly conflicting stories by way of breaking to her gently that Ataúlfo would never marry her. She said, rather implausibly, that he would never recover from having his heart broken by the daughter of Alfonso XIII, Beatriz. The romantic in Pip was both intrigued and devastated to be told by Princess Bea that Touffles was so affected by this that she was ‘afraid he will never fall in love or get married and will just get more and more the young man about town and have mistresses’.
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Meanwhile, the men of the family were flying bombing missions against the Republican forces that were closing in on Teruel. The proximity to the war was beginning to affect Pip. ‘It really is an awful life when you know your friends are risking their lives every single day and every time you say goodbye or just goodnight you think you may never see them again.’ Her diaries reflected her links with senior officers of the Nationalist air force. She felt an ever closer identification with the cause: ‘Today [28 December] we lost one machine and shot down seven reds.’ Today [30 December] they brought down eight Reds, four Curtis, two Martin bombers and two others and we did not lose one. Good work!’ ‘We shot down eleven Reds today [4 January 1938].’ ‘We shot down eight Reds today. The right spirit. [5 January 1938].’ The strain of seeing Touffles only fleetingly as he often popped in between flights was trying her nerves and increased her determination to get to the front line. Her wish was granted, in mid-January, by a telegram instructing her to go to the hospital at Alhama de Aragón, southwest of Zaragoza on the road to Guadalajara. She was reluctant to leave the Orléans family but a move was inevitable because of a reorganisation of the Nationalist air force. Prince Ali’s air force unit (escuadra) of Savoia-Marcchetti 79s was moving to Castejón while Ataúlfo’s Condor Legion bomber unit was moving to Corella. Both Castejón and Corella were between Alfaro and Tudela in Navarre and Princess Bea was going to Castejon in order to set up a house for her husband and son.
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In fact, when the orders came, the entire household was plunged into various forms of colds and influenza. The worst hit was Ataúlfo and Pip decided to stay on and nurse him. However, proximity to her loved one did not bring happiness.
I am in the depths of depression and so nervous that I don’t know what to do with myself. I can’t sleep and have not done so for three nights which is not surprising when I have to spend my whole day keeping a firm grip on myself not to appear to be in love with Ataúlfo. I don’t know whether I am getting less controlled, more frustrated or more alone but it is pure hell whatever it is and leaves me in a state of being unable to sleep, unable to eat and feeling miserable.
The imminent upheaval meant that Pip would have to leave anyway. The malicious gossip about her relationship with him made it impossible for her to stay and nurse Ataúlfo without Princess Bea in the house as chaperone. Pip’s misery was dissipated by a meeting with Bella Kindelán, the general’s daughter, who was a nurse at Alhama. When Bella told her that it would be possible to go from Alhama with a mobile unit right up to the front, she cast off her melancholia and threw herself into nursing.
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By 24 January 1938, Pip’s prolonged Christmas holidays were over and she was ensconced along with the other nurses in the grim hotel in Alhama de Aragón which partly served as the local hospital. It was bitterly cold and depressing. The winter of 1937–8 was one of the cruellest Spain had ever suffered, the bitter cold at its worst in the barren and rocky terrain of Aragón with temperatures as low as –20° centigrade. Pip was missing Ataúlfo and there was nothing for her to do. She had been joined by Consuelo Osorio de Moscoso, the daughter of the Duqesa de Montemar. Alarmed at the prospect of spending time in their tiny unheated room, they impetuously decided to take matters into their own hands and go to Sigüenza where Consuelo knew some doctors. They hoped thereby to get to the front. However, when they reached the emergency hospital there, they were told that the front-line mobile units were fully staffed and had very few wounded. On their return to Aragón, they fell into an even worse gloom. ‘There is nothing to do anywhere. The war seems to have paused and no one wants nurses.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This was far from true. The battle for Teruel was still raging. Within ten days of the city falling into the hands of the Republic, the advancing Nationalist forces became the besiegers. The scale of the fighting can be deduced from Franco’s remark on 29 January to the Italian Ambassador that he was delighted because the Republic was destroying its reserves by throwing them into ‘the witches’ cauldron of Teruel’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Astonishingly, this was not reflected in the traffic through the hospital at Alhama where Pip was now assigned to a ward.
Much of her work was routine and unpleasant. One of her patients had a spinal injury – ‘as he has lost all sense of feeling, he pees in his bed and we have to change the sheets which is both difficult and messy as he can’t move at all, also he has no pyjamas and boils all over his bottom which is most unappetising. As for the other part of him, it is definitely an unpleasing spectacle which somehow always manages to be just where I want to take hold of a sheet.’ However, the routine was short-lived. On 28 January, Mercedes Mila arrived to assign nurses to other hospitals. Consuelo and Pip pestered her to be sent to the front. At first, their pleas fell on deaf ears and the head of the Nationalist nursing services said that Pip was too young to be given responsibility in a dangerous position. However, with more senior nurses reluctant to go to the front, they were picked with three others to go to Cella, eight kilometres from Teruel, the nearest hospital to the front. Pip was excited and immediately thought of Ataúlfo, ‘I shall see them all going over to bomb everyday perhaps. I can’t wait to go, my spirit of adventure is aroused.’ Although she was aware the hospital might be shelled and bombarded, her principal concern was whether her nursing skills would be adequate when the lives of the seriously wounded were at stake.
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After a perilous journey on mountain roads, Pip and Consuelo reached the bombed-out village of Cella. Their welcome was muted since there was neither food nor accommodation to spare. The officers refused to believe them when they said they would willingly sleep on the bare floor. They were eventually put in a room with three others, without proper bedding or window panes and only the most minimal sanitation. Pip’s spirit of adventure and her country background helped her make light of the situation: ‘The town itself is crammed with soldiers and mules, and ambulances come and go in a continuous stream. I am so enchanted with the place that I long to stay but we are terribly afraid that they will send us back when the others come as they have precedence over us. It is a shame as they will hate the discomfort and dirt and all and we don’t mind it.’ Indeed, she was anxious to join a mobile unit leaving for a position at Villaquemada, even nearer to the front line. Just when Pip thought that she would have to go back to Alhama, a need arose for two nurses so she and Consuelo were able to stay. They also found accommodation in a peasant farmhouse. Possessing a car made a colossal difference, since she could drive to nearby towns to shop for household necessities to make their room more comfortable and also for food. In the operating theatre itself, Pip was shocked by the doctor’s ignorance of basic procedures of hygiene, ‘His ideas of antisepsia were very shaky and it gave me the creeps to see the casual way they picked up sterilised compresses with their fingers.’ She was equally alarmed to see their peasant hostess dipping into their food fingers ‘black with years of grime’.
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The Nationalists were mounting a major attack on Republican lines at Teruel and Pip’s medical unit was moved nearer the front. On 5 February, she was in attendance for ‘one elbow shrapnel wound, three amputations, two arms and one leg, two stomach wounds, one head and one man who had shrapnel wounds in both legs, groin, stomach, arm and head. They were vile operations. The stomach ones were foul. One had to be cut right down the middle and his stomach came out like a balloon and most of his intestines; the other had a perforated intestine so had all his guts out, looking revolting.’ Things were made more difficult by the fact that the doctor for whom she worked was both incompetent and perpetually irritable. ‘It is perfectly grim having to work as operation sister to a man one does not trust, who is brutal and shouts at one all the time. It is nerve-wracking and leaves me all of a flop.’ Pip discovered that she had type O blood and therefore could give blood for transfusions. At massive cost to both sides, the battle swayed back and forth until finally, on 7 February 1938, the Nationalists broke through and the Republic lost a huge swathe of territory and several thousand prisoners as well as tons of valuable equipment. Pip was delighted: ‘The news of the war last night was stupendous. We have advanced to Alfambra, twenty kilometres in two days, taking fifteen villages, 2,5000 prisoners and 3,000 dead, not to mention lots of war material.’ It was the beginning of an inexorable advance which in two weeks would lead to the recapture of Teruel on 22 February, the capture of nearly fifteen thousand prisoners and the loss of more equipment.
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The appalling conditions in the operating theatre could be mitigated by the trips in the car. Only with considerable resourcefulness had she kept it on the road, changing wheels, repairing punctures and getting it started in sub-zero temperatures. She drove to Alhama to collect her belongings which had been sent there from Aranda. Having a gramophone and lots of new records sent out by her family made life all the more tolerable. She also was able to see some beautiful countryside. Buying presents for the family with which she was billeted, she was surprised at their reaction – ‘Unlike English poor class they were so proud they would hardly accept them.’ The gruesome sights that she was seeing each day in the operating theatre were so distressing that she needed every possible distraction. Her diary faithfully recorded the details of horrendous surgical interventions often carried out without anaesthetic. After an operation on a young boy wounded in the stomach only three days after being conscripted, she broke down and cried. ‘He was so white and pathetic with an expression of such pain and sorrow and he never made a sound.’ The accumulated horrors were beginning to get to her and she began to question the wisdom of coming to Spain. However, by the following day she had recovered her usual good spirits. A lunch which would have been the envy of the entire Republican zone helped. It consisted of ‘poached eggs, tinned salmon with mayonnaise, albóndigas (meatballs in rich gravy) and fried potatoes, cheese and chocolate pudding, not to mention foie gras and oporto as an aperitif and coffee and coñac to finish with’. Even better was an unexpected – and poignantly short – visit from Touffles. Despite the cold, in a room with no panes in the windows, having to sleep fully dressed in tweeds, she sewed and ironed and maintained her essential cheerfulness. Inevitably she faced many of the same problems as Nan Green and the front-line nurses on the Republican side. ‘The thought of a hot bath, a comfortable bed, a good meal that we did not have to cook ourselves or watch cooking and a w.c. instead of a pot seemed distinctly pleasant.’
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On 17 February, there was a big Nationalist push and Pip went to watch the battle from a German anti-aircraft battery. ‘The noise was incredible, a continual roar like thunder with intermittent different-toned bands. The sky was full of aeroplanes shooting up and down the Red trenches and the whole landscape all around was covered with pillars of smoke.’ ‘At about 11.30 the bombers began to arrive and came in a continual stream for hour after hour till the Red lines were black with the smoke of the bombs.’ Pip thought it was ‘the most thrilling thing I have ever seen’. The counterpart to the exhilarating sights was an increase in traffic in the operating theatre. Her compassion for the wounded and dying was unrelated to any analysis of the reasons for the war. Indeed, by 20 February, she was exhilarated by the possibility of going to see Nationalist troops entering Teruel. Although not allowed to enter the city, she and her fellow nurses found a vantage point from which, ‘to our great joy’, they watched Nationalist aircraft bombing the Republicans retreating towards Valencia.
Yet on the next day, after ten hours’ non-stop effort in the operating theatre, she could write that ‘it is demoralising to live in an eternal whorl of blood, pain and death’. Reflecting on the daily deaths of casualties in the operating room, she wrote: ‘I don’t know how there is anyone left.’ There was still house-to-house fighting in Teruel. On 22 February, awakened by bells ringing for the Nationalist capture of the city, she walked through the battered remains of the city. ‘I didn’t see a single whole house, they are all covered in bullet holes and shot to bits by cannons with great gaping holes from air bombardments.’ In the midst of the rubble, she found an undamaged grand piano in a bar and played tunes while the soldiers stopped looting in order to dance. She rejoiced at the Nationalist advance that was chasing the retreating Republicans to the south. Three thousand prisoners were taken and two thousand dead according to the official radio. The next day, back in the hospital, she was covered in blood from the operations and, on the day after that, back in Teruel. She was flushed with excitement by a Republican artillery bombardment – ‘I admit I was terrified myself but I like being frightened.’ Her emotional highs and lows were intense.
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Unsurprisingly given the daily horrors that she was facing, Pip was outraged to learn from her cousin Charmian that her brother John disapproved of her being in Spain and was determined to get her back home. ‘Bloody interfering nonsense. I should like to see him try anyhow.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In mid-February, John did come to Spain in search of Pip. Since she was on duty in the midst of the Battle of Teruel, he did not get to see her. He was rather shocked by this since, as he recalled later, ‘I don’t think that my parents had visualised anything more than her being in some base camp, helping a bit with bandages.’ John Scott-Ellis did meet Peter Kemp who gave him news of Pip. He also met Ataúlfo and struck up a friendship with the German pilots of his unit. Shortly afterwards he continued his journey on to Munich. When John spoke to his wife’s family there, they categorically refused to believe that he had met German pilots in Spain because, after all, Hitler had declared that there were none.
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Pip’s diary is remarkable for the wealth of detail with which she described her days. It is therefore all the more puzzling that her future husband, José Luis de Vilallonga, claimed to have bumped into her in Teruel, some hours after the recapture of the town by the Francoist forces. No such incident is mentioned by Pip in her diary, in which there are no gaps during this period. Nevertheless, the ‘meeting’ is described with a wealth of salacious detail in his memoirs. Entertainingly written, like all his work, this account is full of the most unlikely particulars. After one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, fought in sub-zero temperatures, the Republicans had to give up their costly defence of the provincial capital captured on 8 January. They retreated on 21 February 1938, when Teruel was on the point of being encircled. According to Vilallonga, at the time, just eighteen,
(#litres_trial_promo) he was wandering around the recently captured city in search of his father, the Barón de Segur, a staff officer with the great cavalryman General José Monasterio Ituarte. ‘And suddenly, as I turned a corner, I saw her. It was like an advertisement torn from Harper’s Bazaar. A tall, blonde woman, in an immaculate white nurse’s uniform with a great blue cape that reached down to her feet. Around her neck, curled with studied negligence, she wore a Hermés foulard that brought out the clear blue of her eyes.’ José Luis recalled being entranced by this vision of loveliness. Allegedly, she was smoking while leaning nonchalantly on the bonnet of a new ambulance with a London number plate. All around, the aftermath of the battle in the streets could be seen. A woman knelt next to the still-warm corpse of a man whose throat had been cut by one of the Moorish mercenaries. While excited Moors were looting houses, carrying out the most bizarre objects from mattresses to bidets, Pip is described as simulating total indifference to what was going on around her, an oasis – or perhaps a mirage – of calm in the midst of chaotic slaughter and mayhem.
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The Pip of this account has nothing of the girlish spontaneity and good-hearted sincerity that speaks out from every page of her diary. When José Luis de Vilallonga walked up and began to speak to her, in English he later claimed, she offered him a cigarette then slid a silver hip flask from under her cape and invited him to take a swig of Beefeater gin. She then said peremptorily, ‘Have lunch with me’ and introduced herself. ‘I’m Priscilla Scott-Ellis, but all my friends call me Pip. I’m half-Welsh, half-Scottish, but of course I was born in London.’ After a short pause, she announced, ‘My mother is Jewish.’ It is highly questionable that she would say any such thing but José Luis, who seems to be transferring many of his attitudes onto her, repeatedly makes reference in his works to her Jewish blood. She then opened the chest on the side of the ambulance, rummaged around in a pile of packages and emerged clutching a tin of foie gras and a bottle of excellent claret. For pudding, she managed to come up with a packet of Fortnum and Mason chocolate liqueurs. She explained how she came to be involved in the Spanish Civil War, commenting: ‘Most of my friends and some of my relatives have joined the Republicans and the Communists.’ Just as she was assuring him that the British Government would never help the Republic on the grounds that the British always support the forces of order, they heard the sound of shots from behind a nearby church. ‘They’re shooting people. That means that the Falangists have arrived. They are always the ones who come to shoot the reds left alive in the cities occupied by the Army.’ ‘The forces of order,’ commented Vilallonga sarcastically. ‘No,’ she replied with devastating insight, ‘just people who like killing. They’re just loud-mouthed rich kids who say they are fighting for the workers but, as soon as they find one alive, they put him up against a wall and shoot him.’
By this time, a bottle of Johnny Walker had both appeared and as quickly half-disappeared. Apparently, this sumptuous lunch had been taken over the bonnet of the ambulance despite the presence all around of starving desperados. According to Vilallonga, whose memoirs are replete with assertions of his sexual magnetism, his new acquaintance informed him that there were bunks inside the ambulance. On repairing within, he discovered couchettes of roughly the size of a first-class cabin on a transatlantic liner. This facilitated an afternoon of ecstatic lovemaking. On dressing, he asked her, ‘Do you do this kind of thing often?’ With an uncharacteristically dismissive tone, the Pip of this account replied, ‘Only when I feel I need it and not always for pleasure. But it’s good for my physical and mental health.’ That was the last time that he saw her until the end of the Second World War. He often thought of her. With his wonderfully snobbish and sexist hauteur, he wrote: ‘I kept the memory of someone out of the ordinary who had provoked my curiosity. She was a long way from being beautiful, but she had the unmistakable style of certain women, especially in England, who immediately attract the attention of those of us who are great enthusiasts for horses, creatures that, along with the bull, I regard as being among the most splendid products of nature. I have never made a mistake whenever I have judged a woman by comparing her with a pure blood mare.’
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The account is certainly untrue. Vilallonga claims that Pip was driving an ambulance sent out by her father and describes it as having been specially constructed by Daimler to the most luxurious standards. Elsewhere, he describes the ambulance as a Bentley. On other occasions, José Luis de Vilallonga claimed that his first meeting with Pip took place during the battle of the Ebro in the summer and autumn of 1938.
(#litres_trial_promo) It is possible that the entire story is a fictional amalgamation of the experiences of both Pip and Gabriel Herbert. Pip’s only vehicle in Spain up to this time was her by-now battered Ford. There is no record of Pip ever owning or driving an ambulance in Spain.
Her hesitant sexual behaviour at the time had nothing in common with the cold-hearted and voracious siren depicted in his account. It is a regular lament in her diary that she was rarely able to wash, invariably slept in her crumpled clothes and that her nurse’s uniforms were spattered with blood and mud. It is therefore not plausible that she could have been seen in the streets of Teruel looking like a model from the pages of a fashion magazine. Moreover, at this time, the conditions in which she lived and worked had left her with a chronic throat infection which left her completely run down. In any case, her otherwise copiously detailed diary makes no mention of the incident. Her days were usually occupied fully either in the operating theatre, in her billet or else travelling in her car. Such an erotic encounter might have been expected to be mentioned. She describes in full her constant efforts to fend off the frequent approaches of amorous, or more aggressively predatory, soldiers in the streets and once, by drunken intruders into the room she shared with Consuelo. For this reason, she had been given by Álvaro de Orléans a pistol with which to defend her virtue.
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After Teruel, Pip’s unit was ordered to move on to Cariñena. After the recapture of the city, Franco lost little time in seizing advantage of the massive superiority in men, aircraft, artillery and equipment that the Nationalists now enjoyed over the depleted Republicans. He assembled an army of two hundred thousand men for an offensive across a 260-kilometrewide front through Aragón following the eastwards direction of the Ebro valley. Loading up the car with her gramophone, records and radio, Pip set off in a convoy after the rapidly advancing Nationalist troops. Thereafter, they were sent northwards to Belchite which had been recaptured by the Nationalists on 10 March. The town was virtually destroyed. There, she and Consuelo cleared rubble and scrubbed floors to make one of the less damaged buildings usable for the unit. Queuing for water at a fountain, she was told that there were eighty-five prisoners of the International Brigades nearby, mostly Americans but also some English. ‘They will all be shot as foreigners always are.’ It is an indication of her identification with the Francoist cause, the brutalising effects of the war and, perhaps, her basic class prejudices, that she could seem so unaffected by the atrocity about to be committed. At the end of the day, she merely commented, ‘I have never enjoyed a day more but I have never been dirtier.’ Her good spirits were shattered on the following day. While she was working in the operating theatre, looting soldiers stole a case of records, 1000 cigarettes, her pistol and, the worst blow of all, the radio that Ataúlfo had given her in Gibraltar for her twenty-first birthday. She then had to spend a day kneeling at the riverside scrubbing bloodstained operation sheets in the icy water. Her distress was compounded by news of the German advance into Austria. It provoked agonies about her understandable identification with the Nationalist cause, which was, at the time, also the cause of the Axis. ‘Oh God, I hope there won’t be another war. What can I do if there is, as all my sympathies will be against England. What hell life is.’
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The speed of the Nationalist advance required them to move on to Escatrón, forty kilometres further east, in a bend in the River Ebro. This involved a journey over stony roads through scenes of desolation littered with corpses, dead horses, barbed wire and abandoned trenches. It was rendered somewhat more tolerable for Pip by the recovery of her radio and the news that Ataúlfo was not far away. She was thrilled when he visited despite it being so long since she had been able to have a bath: ‘my uniform was black, and my hands too, as well as swollen and rough, my face dusty and unpainted and my hair all dirty and tangled’. Unlike the dirty soldiers by whom she was normally surrounded, Ataúlfo ‘was looking very clean and smart’ and Pip thought him ‘devastatingly attractive and goodlooking despite the fact that he is really quite ugly’. Escatrón was near enough to the front to be within artillery range. Pip found the bombardments enthralling. ‘I was scared pink, but of course did not say so.’ She was about to experience several days’ carnage that would see her remarkable powers of endurance pushed to the limit. Badly wounded casualties began to pour in. Illuminated by oil lamps, she and her unit worked incessantly throughout the daily bombardments. Since most of her fellow nurses were terrified and took shelter, she stayed up entire nights at a time to be with the patients, sleeping in her uniform in the ward. There was little food for either the staff or the wounded. ‘It is awful being here bombarded all day in a ward of wounded begging to be moved, and so petrified that they pretty well die of fright.’ Her indefatigability was remarkable: ‘Well, everything stops sooner or later one way or another, though I hope this won’t stop by us all being killed, which is quite probable if they go on bombarding every day.’
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Despite the appalling existence in a virtual hecatomb, Pip was alarmed by suggestions that her unit should be withdrawn further away from the front. She was delighted to have to advance, in the middle of the night, to Caspe which had been captured by the Nationalists on 16 March. Driving in pitch darkness over boulder-strewn tracks, her car hit a huge rock and was badly damaged. On the verge of nervous as well as physical exhaustion, at Caspe they had to create a new hospital. As more casualties flooded in, she learnt that her car (which she called Fiona) had been stolen. She had hardly slept for a week: ‘I finally got to bed semi-conscious at about eleven after more casualties had arrived. If life goes on like this much longer we will all die. It is more than any one can stand.’ Yet, after a night’s sleep, she was back in the fray. Ataúlfo appeared with biscuits, chocolate, shortbread and wine and a message from Princess Bea that it was time for Pip to stop risking her life. Yet, far from taking the opportunity to leave, she was determined to stay at the front.
The strain remained intense. Just when she thought that she could go to bed, a large number of wounded were brought in. ‘The floor was covered in stretchers, blood everywhere, everyone shouting, the poor patients moaning and screaming, and so instead of going to bed it started all over again.’ The experience was, not surprisingly, changing Pip. She wrote on 21 March: ‘Six months today since I left home and it seems like six years! Home seems so far away, and such a completely different world that I cannot imagine ever going back.’ Two days later, she wrote: ‘How any nurse can look at a man, let alone touch him, I don’t know after all the unattractive things one has to do with them.’ As she became more skilled as a nurse, she got more exasperated with the village girls who came in to help. In the light of the tribulations that she had undergone, she was mortified when, on an unannounced inspection, Mercedes Milá raged that the hospital was untidy and the nurses were wearing make-up. ‘After all the weeks of filth we have been through, the very first time we have time to make ourselves respectable she has to come and tell us we are too painted.’ Milá’s reprimand was outrageously unfair. The endless stream of casualties meant that the nurses were going for days on end without sleep. Pip described herself as looking ‘like a dead cat’. On some nights, she could find no time to write up her diary.
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The attrition took its toll. Already shocked and still reeling from the shelling at Escatrón, in the last six days of March, Pip got to bed twice, for six hours on each occasion. She was working shifts of forty-two hours with six-hour breaks that were often interrupted by the unexpected arrival of horrendous casualties. In the midst of this, she was invited to dine with some of Consuelo’s friends on the staff of General José Monasterio Ituarte. Monasterio was the head of the Nationalist cavalry. At the battle of Teruel, he had led the last major cavalry charge in Western Europe. During the current Aragón offensive, his mounted brigades, supported by the Condor Legion, were running ahead of the main advance. Pip found him charming, ‘although very quiet and serious’. She was particularly delighted when he announced that her car had been found abandoned by a roadside. The occasion recharged her batteries for the unit’s next move behind the rapidly advancing Nationalists. They were sent on to Gandesa to the southeast, in the province of Lérida in Catalonia.
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Yet again miracles of improvisation were required to pack up the entire unit, including making arrangements for the twenty-seven seriously wounded men who had to be left behind. In Gandesa, Pip’s group had to share an abandoned school building with an Italian unit. It was a startling change of personnel and of scenery, as spring took over from the ferocious winter conditions in which she had worked. She found the Catalans in Gandesa irritating and, along with virtually everyone in the unit, was frustrated by an inability to understand the Catalan language. The Italians in the other part of the hospital seemed to confirm everything that is said about their presence in Spain – ‘very amiable and fearfully smart, but over-amorous’. A lull in the endless arrival of casualties allowed her to come to terms with the attrition of the previous month. ‘I was in the depths of despair, sick of life and all I am doing, and wondering what has happened at home. I decided I was either going to go crazy or get tight.’ She opted for the latter and drank herself sick on sherry and brandy. When she came to, she wrote: ‘What I am turning into I don’t like to think, getting so tight that I am sick at 6 o’clock in the evening. I went through half an hour of pure hell, being sick at intervals, with the world spinning round me.’ That episode had to be put immediately behind her. A massive influx of casualties saw her drawing on astonishing resources of stamina and competence.
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Finally, she got a weekend’s leave. Princess Bea had moved into a requisitioned palace at Épila, thirty kilometres to the southwest of Zaragoza, in order to be near the men in her family who were posted nearby. Ataúlfo was now a pilot. Pip arrived at Zaragoza too late to travel on to Épila, so she stayed at the Grand Hotel. She lamented: ‘I was very ashamed of turning up to dinner at the Grand Hotel in my filthy uniform, with burst shoes and torn stockings, my face unpainted and my hair on end.’ Nonetheless, to get away from the front in such circumstances was something rarely vouchsafed to her counterparts in the Republican nursing services. Pip had dinner with the prominent British Conservative, Arnold Lunn, a Catholic and an old Harrovian, who was in Spain writing articles about ‘Red horrors’. Lunn was one of the English pro-Nationalist propagandists who had been involved in supporting the cover-up of the bombing of Guernica. For Pip, the main thing about being with him was to be able to eat ‘good food with the right amount of knives and forks’. When Pip got to Épila, she luxuriated in her ‘first bath for more than two months’ and in the opportunity to relax in comfort with her friends. Ataúlfo took her to recover her car, which she found minus windows, number plates, tools, papers and her passport. General Kindelán’s driver fixed her car. Of course, what she valued most about this period was to be clean, warm and well fed. She was able to go to the hairdresser and also went shopping with Últano Kindelán. A greater change from the horrors of her unit could hardly be imagined. The combination of uninterrupted nights and cleanliness made for ‘a short piece of heaven’. In the Grand Hotel in Zaragoza, she met two aristocratic acquaintances, Alfonso Domecq and Kiki Mora ‘who were both tight as usual and had just bought a large white rabbit and a white duck’. After chasing the two animals around the hall, Últano caught the duck and tied string around its neck and wings so that he could take it for walks. The sense of wild release after the tribulations of the front left Pip disorientated – ‘I have never hated anything more in my life than the idea of going back to the equipo. I don’t want ever to see a hospital again in my life.’
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Nevertheless, she did return to her unit, which had now moved south to Morella in the harsh and arid hills of the Maestrazgo between Aragón and Castellón. The return was a rude shock: ‘How I hated the jerk back to this life, stretchers being carried in dripping blood all over the front doorstep, the smell of anaesthetic, the moans and shouts. I have gone all squeamish in my few days away.’ Her depression was perhaps linked with the fact that she was laid low by an illness which saw her confined to bed with a raging fever. She was finally diagnosed with the beginnings of paratyphoid – a fever resembling typhoid but caused by different bacteria.
(#litres_trial_promo) In consequence, she was allowed a few days’ convalescence in Épila. She drove there in her car and it was severely damaged along the way by unmade roads. Princess Bea was back from the recently captured Lérida. As part of her work with Frentes y Hospitales, the relief organisation which provided welfare for the old, women and children, she would enter occupied areas with the Nationalist forces.
(#litres_trial_promo) Still very weak, Pip was able to stay because her car was not ready for the return journey. She managed some relaxation, gossiping with Princess Bea, playing cards and ping pong with visiting German and Italian aviators. She even had an evening out in Zaragoza with Ataúlfo. They went to a sleazy cabaret in ‘an old theatre with semi-naked women who came out on stage and who could neither dance nor sing. A fair smattering of peroxided tarts and swarms of dirty, tight and noisy soldiers all singing and shouting lewd remarks at everyone.’
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During her stay at Épila, Pip met Juan Antonio Ansaldo, one of Spain’s most famous aviators. Ansaldo was a monarchist air ace and playboy who had once organised Falangist terror squads. He had piloted the small De Havilland Puss Moth in which General Sanjurjo had perished on 20 July 1936 when leaving Portugal to take charge of the military uprising.
(#litres_trial_promo) Ansaldo now commanded one of the two Savoia Marchetti 79 squadrons of the First Brigade of the Nationalist Air Force (Primera Brigada Aérea Hispana) while Prince Alí commanded the other. Ansaldo’s wife Pilarón was both a flyer and a nurse who had just been asked to work in the Ciudad Universitaria on the outskirts of Madrid. On the very edge of the besieged capital, it was the most dangerous area and women were not usually allowed to work there. Pip hoped to find out how to volunteer to go too.
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Inevitably, after the pleasures of Épila – ping pong, music, decent food, whisky and even a flight in a Luftwaffe aircraft – the return to hospital duty was depressing: ‘Morella is the lousiest, most boring place in the world, and not a thing to do all day.’ She felt low because she was still suffering from paratyphoid. She was pleased, however, by the possibility that she and Consuelo, for their gallantry under fire, would both be proposed for the Cruz del Mérito Militar con Distintivo Rojo, the highest award for bravery that could be awarded to a woman. It was eventually awarded in May 1939.
(#litres_trial_promo) She was also cheered by a letter on 5 May from her mother who was delighted by some articles about Pip in the British press. Margot promised her a new car and a full bank account when she returned home and announced an imminent visit to Spain. In fact, Pip, always her best when the going was most difficult, perked up when the hospital got busy again about a week later. A stream of wounded saw her attend fourteen operations in thirteen hours. She was irritated by the petty jealousies among the nurses and felt put upon by the hostility of Captain Ramón Roldán, the hospital chief surgeon. As a Falangist, he deeply resented the aristocratic origins and monarchist connections of both Pip and Consuelo. Just as she got the news that her mother was arriving on 19 May, the entire hospital had to move with the advancing Nationalist forces nearer to the province of Castellón, to the village of La Iglesuela del Cid. When her martyred car got there, she and Consuelo were billeted by Ráldan in the most dingy dungeon just off the operating theatre. However, on the following day, 23 May, she was able to go on leave to see her mother who had arrived with her brother John at Princess Bea’s home in Épila.
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