Not Just a Soldier’s War Read online

  Not Just a Soldier’s War

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements and Thanks

  Copyright

  Not Just a Soldier’s War

  Betty Burton

  For my father, Leon Archer of Romsey, in his eighty-eighth year and for my new grandson, Joseph Burton of Hayling Island, in his first.

  Prologue

  England, 1937

  ‘I say, have these. I feel a real Charlie carrying flowers.’

  The golden-haired woman, the youngest of the group, took the flowers from a young man wearing a blazer and found herself, now holding a second bunch of flowers, pushed to the front to face the journalists and a battery of cine-cameras and photographers. ‘Everybody smile.’

  They smiled.

  ‘A nice big wave.’

  They waved.

  A nurse said, ‘I wish I’d known that there was going to be such a to-do, I’d have given it a miss.’ Her accent seemed to be rather too ‘cut-glass’ for a nurse. With a hunch of her shoulders, she went on, ‘My mother doesn’t know yet that I’m going back to Spain. Fait accompli. Best way with mothers who fuss, eh?’

  The young woman agreed. ‘I thought it would be just a photograph with the mayor.’

  A man with a handsome Jewish face, wearing baggy corduroys and a tweed jacket and looking nothing like the popular image of the surgeon he was, said genially, ‘Come along, you nurses, let’s give these press chaps what they want,’ and he put his left arm round the nurse’s waist and the other round the woman with the golden hair.

  The Real Charlie said, ‘Right! Let’s give them what they want and get the cause of the Spanish Republic in all the newsreels.’ Holding aloft the hand of the woman who now clutched the embarrassing flowers, he shouted, ‘¡No pasarán!’

  ‘Lord save us,’ said the nurse, rolling her eyes. ‘A patriot before he’s even there.’

  When the newsreel film of the Aid to Spain send-off was shown in cinemas, the belief of the group that they were part of a great and idealistic movement intent on saving the world from fascism showed clearly in their youthful eyes.

  * * *

  On the journey between Victoria Station and the Gare du Nord there was a gradual emergence of individuals. The nurse was called Crane, the Real Charlie was Phil Martin, a medical aide, the doctor was David Goldring, and the very young, golden-haired woman said her name was Eve Anders.

  On that leg of the journey, Eve, although not unfriendly, kept to the fringes of the group, secretly revelling in her marvellous new freedom. These people were what she had hoped for. Not to be found in her own environment, they were radicals with revolutionary ideals and, she decided, they probably also believed in equality for women and free love. They seemed very red; she had never heard such left-of-left views expressed before.

  What would Ray think of them? Ray was the elder of her two brothers, committed to working for his union; he would think she had better watch out, these were dangerous people. Ken, her other brother, had declared himself a Republican and was already in Spain, fighting with the International Brigade. So it was of Ken she thought when Dina Vandeck, one of the doctors, moved the talk on to Marx and then to the royal family.

  ‘This is my second stint at the barricades,’ Dina said, boasting, but maybe sending herself up a bit. ‘I had intended travelling weeks ago, but my mother got herself so upset over the abdication that she made herself ill.’

  Phil Martin hooted. ‘Upset about those two parasites? Not a great chum of Harry Pollitt is she, then, your mother?’

  Crane said, ‘I have heard that they intend making their home in Germany.’

  Goldring said, ‘Hitler’s welcome to them.’

  ‘For my money,’ Phil Martin said, ‘they should all be cleared off to Germany, the whole bang shoot of them, back where they came from. Monarchy is just fascism with knobs on, right?’

  ‘Right!’ Goldring said. ‘Very far right,’ and everybody laughed.

  Eve Anders, who had thought her own views were quite advanced, was stimulated by the easy way they threw comments at one another, and wondered whether she happened to be travelling with an unusually leftist-thinking group. They were all in agreement that class consciousness was the bugbear of Britain, and that inherited privilege sprang from the top and the top was the king. She felt quite ashamed that she had seen the Silver Jubilee procession and had danced at a Coronation celebration party. But the shame soon dissolved into a kind of euphoria when, as they were speeding through France, she was occasionally drawn in to the conversation.

  In what seemed like a very short time, they were drawing into the Gare du Nord. After brief farewells and wishing Eve good luck, the medical unit hurried off to catch another train to Barcelona.

  One

  Eve’s contact was waiting for her. ‘You are a driver?’ Eve nodded. ‘That’s good news, you’re an absolute godsend.’ She shook hands firmly but briefly. ‘I’m from Aid to Spain, of course. A friend of Charlotte Haldane. Charlotte is our inspiration.’ Her distinct, cultured accent was the kind Eve longed for. ‘I was beginning to think I should have to drive to Albacete myself, but I’ve hardly driven anything heavier than a shooting brake.’

  Eve, a practised chameleon and mimic, slipped easily into the other woman’s speech patterns as they left the concourse. ‘I have an absolute passion for driving heavy vehicles,’ she declared. ‘Absolute passion’ was an exaggeration, but she had learned to drive on heavy gears. She owned a Light Goods licence and was hoping that ambulances, which she expected to be driving, would be so classified. She was confident of her own ability. ‘Is it right- or left-hand drive?’

  ‘One of ours. Looks as though it might have been a Harvey Nichols delivery vehicle in a past life. All fitted out with seats now, used for ferrying men to the battle zones.’

  ‘What is it doing here in Paris?’

  ‘The driver dropped out – fatigue. So many volunteers try to do too much. He carried up a bunch of people going home for a spell of rest and recuperation, and was forced to join them. I suggest you put up here for tonight and set out in the morning. We have a place for you to stay.’

  ‘Fine,’ Eve said. ‘Fine.’ It was what she had hoped for: time to go over the maps once more and to memorize another list of useful Spanish words, then to start off first thing before too much traffic was about so that she could get used to driving on the right-hand side of the road.

  As she walked through the streets with her guide, Eve gave only half of her mind to the inconsequential conversation.

  ‘Do you know Paris?’

  ‘Hardly at all. I did stay in a hotel quite close to the Ile de la Cité on one occasion. I still have a lovely dinner gown I took home from Lascelles’.’ The couture gown of fine concertina silk was squashed into her sponge-bag because she hadn’t been able to leave it behind.

  ‘Wonderful! Beautiful things at Lascelles’. Awfully expensive.’

  Eve briefly considered not showing off, then she thought: What the hell! Why shouldn’t I?

  It was the clichés that were the most exciting; there really were pavement cafés with parasols, and flower-sellers, and an old man wearing a black beret.

  Again she remind
ed herself: I’ve got away. I’m free. Travelling light. She carried a few suitable clothes and shoes in a good, leather bag, as well as a canvas tote containing a camera, some maps, pencils, notebooks, rolls of film, money and cheques. Despite having volunteered to be a driver, she felt that she still had many choices: I can please myself. I don’t actually have to go to Spain, nobody can make me. Briefly she wondered how her brother had coped with his own sudden freedom.

  Her guide said something that Eve didn’t catch, and laughed, showing teeth that were fine and well-cared-for. If there is one thing, Eve thought, more than any other, that sets the English lower and upper classes apart, it is our teeth. Not that Eve’s teeth were any less fine.

  The vehicle, with its bull-nose and oval windows in the back doors, did look like a shop delivery van. It was in the care of Francis and Frances O’Dell, a married couple known as Frankie and Fran, who were putting her up for the night.

  The O’Dells made her welcome. It was obvious that they were used to providing for visitors who were passing through on their way to Spain, for they kept a couple of small rooms with single beds always ready. Although Eve was in Paris for only a few hours, she had intended to take another look at the Lascelles store, but having eaten ravenously her first-ever cassoulet, she was content to sit with Fran sorting through bags of clothing and supplies which were part of the aid she was to deliver, and window-shopping lost its appeal. She now saw she had a small part to play in the great drama being staged in Europe, an image inspired by Fran’s suggestion that the German and Italian leaders were using Spain as a dress-rehearsal for an even greater show.

  Eve asked the O’Dells if they had been to Spain.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Fran. ‘I came here after I got pregnant because Frankie thought I should see my own doctor. It’s as well I did, because I lost the baby.’

  Eve felt that to say she was sorry wasn’t enough, but what else could she say?

  ‘I’m sorry too, but had I miscarried in Madrid, Frankie would have blamed the bombing. In fact, I have a prolapsed womb, so I doubt if I shall ever be able to carry to term.’

  It was peaceful in the comfortable apartment. Delicious scents of wine, garlic and tomato, reminders of the good meal, wafted across the room to the windows open to the summer evening.

  ‘I like it here,’ Eve said.

  The older woman smiled. ‘So do I. I wonder where you will be by this time tomorrow.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ Frankie said, ‘but you are very young to be driving ambulances.’

  ‘Trucks. I’m not an ambulance-driver.’

  ‘I say, look at this, isn’t it splendid?’ Fran O’Dell held up a fancy waistcoat of peacock-blue brocade piped in silk cord. ‘Very extravagant, just look at the buttons.’

  Eve took the beautiful garment and felt the softness of its lining and the texture of the brocade. The buttons were little discs of porcelain rimmed in gold. ‘Oh, they’re little willow-pattern plates! They remind me of a doll’s teaset my cousin Mary had.’ Mary’s teaset had not been of porcelain, however, but of mass-produced pottery splodged with a blue pattern and stamped ‘Made in China’ on every piece. Crude and cheap as it was, Mary had been the envy of every little girl who saw it.

  Eve folded the waistcoat and wondered whether to pack it in the men’s or the women’s bundle. Women’s. She loved extravagant and beautiful things; even as she scorned herself for doing so, she coveted the garment with its exquisite buttons.

  ‘I think I remember seeing this before,’ Fran said.

  Eve smiled. ‘It is memorable. I shan’t forget it in a hurry.’

  ‘Lord Lovecraft turned up at a fund-raising in just such a waistcoat.’

  ‘There can hardly be two.’

  Fran chuckled. ‘You can be sure of that. Sweetheart as he is when it comes to worthy causes, Lovecraft would never appear in anything less than exclusive.’

  Eve realized that this was one of those moments that she would always remember. Before the day was over she would write it up in her journal and was already anticipating what she would say about the contradictions of people like Lord Lovecraft and herself: he giving generously to charity while indulging himself with beautiful clothes, she, the idealist and supporter of equality, coveting the buttons and the fine fabric. ‘Perhaps that’s why he gave it away,’ she suggested. ‘He found that it wasn’t exclusive.’

  ‘I doubt if its exclusiveness will bother its recipient; it’s more likely to be whether they dare to be seen wearing it.’

  As she sat there sorting and chatting, it suddenly struck her that until now she had only ever known two socialists who were middle-class, but here she was sitting with a woman with a good accent deciding what to do with Lord Lovecraft’s waistcoat. Momentarily she longed for someone from her own class with whom she could share what she was thinking. Then she dismissed the idea. ‘I think if I were in need of a waistcoat, Fran, that would cheer me up no end.’

  Oh, the things Eve remembered that she had worn when she was in need: the skirts and tops ‘run up’ out of remnants, the hand-me-down hats and shoes. She refused to let those memories come crashing in like this. She was no longer that girl. At last she was doing what she had once only dreamed about: she had left home for good, leaving behind her mistakes, her old loves, and old guilts and embarrassments. She had abandoned her childish resentment of such unalterables as accidents of birth and environment, and, in cutting and running from people who loved her, she had freed herself of the conventional expectations they had of her. Above all else, she was throwing off the baggage of her class and from here on she knew that she could be anyone she chose to be.

  Lost in her own thoughts she folded garments and gazed out into the warm summer evening sky.

  Fran O’Dell, puzzled, glanced at the young woman from time to time. Eve seemed somehow to be both calm and energized. There was something deep and fascinating about her and Fran would have liked to know her better. Still, there was always a chance that they would meet again somewhere.

  Eve, not noticing that she was being observed, continued to sort through her thoughts: I am travelling light, not even carrying my real name. This side of the English Channel, I am Eve Anders, a volunteer in the fight against fascism.

  Well read and well spoken, she knew that she had a face and figure that, if she chose, could open doors and smooth her way. From the day that she had watched her home town receding she had been accepted for who she was. She was never going to say Lor, luv a duck, me bleedin’ beads, or whatever it was Eliza Doolittle had said. She had been stepping over the class barrier for long enough now to know that she could stay over it. She knew that the trick was to be enigmatic, or, as some of her old friends would have said, to ‘Keep your bloody mouth shut’.

  Bringing her thoughts back to the room, Eve said, ‘One could always sell them.’

  ‘Sell what?’

  ‘Lord Lovecraft’s buttons, they look quite valuable.’

  ‘Bartering would be the better course. One never knows with currency when there’s a war going on.’

  Later that night Eve lay in bed taking stock of her progress since leaving London. There seemed to be so much she didn’t know, and she wanted to know it all.

  * * *

  Eve’s first official stop was Perpignan, where she was due to pick up supplies to be dropped off in Barcelona. Even with the windows down, the inside of the cab became sweltering. Sweat dampened her hairline and trickled between her breasts, but oh she was happy, confident, independent and, most important, she was in control. The road signs were unfamiliar, but it did not take her long to adjust to the feel of the road. The van was no problem to drive, except that from time to time she was forced to stop to top-up the radiator which she suspected of leaking. Good luck was with her when, stopping at a petrol pump not far from the border, her phrase-book French was recognized at once by the elderly ex-patriate English proprietor.

  ‘I still call it home,’ he said, from under the bonnet, ‘though I�
�ve been here nearly twenty years – since the war.’ As he tinkered with the radiator he bombarded her with questions, about unemployment, the abdication, the new king, and why England had taken against Spain: ‘May as well be against as be neutral.’ When Eve told him that she wasn’t neutral and that she was going there to drive trucks, he emerged grinning from under the bonnet, fisted the air and said, ‘¡No pasarán!’ He called for his wife to come and meet a compatriot. The woman insisted that Eve wait while she made fresh coffee, which she served with cold pork and bread.

  ‘Might as well let me give her a quick once-over while you eat that,’ the old man said. Anxious as she was to get on, Eve was touched by the couple’s kindness.

  ‘I got a reputation at Mons for being able to get anything with four wheels and an engine working,’ he continued. ‘“Never fear, Townsend’s here,” they’d say. I’ll not let you out of here with anything dodgy.’

  He talked to her constantly as he worked. ‘After I was invalided out after Mons, I vowed I would be a pacifist, tried to tell them back home, but nobody wanted to know. But I’ve had to change my views since Franco. I would never go to war over a bit of land same as we did in 1914… us and the Bosch were killing each other in thousands over a bit of land hardly bigger than my orchard there, land that’s been changing hands since Adam was a lad. But if I was young and healthy there’s one thing I’d go to war over, and that’s fascism. Look at this, your front off-side is losing air, and your spare needs repairing.’ He looked quite gratified. ‘You see – you could have been in trouble. France and England’s both as bad as the other. They should come out against fascism. Fascism is a bad idea, terrible bad. If Franco isn’t put down, we shall all be in it again, up to our necks. It’s what the Blackshirts want, of course, nice little war in Spain to practise for the big one. It’s criminal really, staying neutral when Hitler and Mussolini are pouring arms and men into Spain on Franco’s side. You know why? If it’s a choice between Russia and Germany, the British will side with Hitler… the French are no better.’