Doves of War: Four Women of Spain. Paul Preston
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of his German fellow aviators, named Koch. She and Consuelo were invited to accompany them. Pip wrote in her diary: ‘I really must marry that man but my luck does not seem quite to run to that as yet, but as I have waited four years now I suppose I can wait longer.’ She had a wonderful time on the trip, driving over dusty roads through villages of white houses shimmering in the blazing sun passing donkeys laden with panniers overflowing with grapes. ‘I am so pleased with life that I don’t know what to do with myself. It is fun to feel like this. It must be years since I last felt such an untroubled confidence in Life. I love every moment of it.’ The idyll was nearly interrupted when Koch was summoned to Zaragoza because of the simmering Munich crisis. It seemed that Ataúlfo would have to drive him there. However, a return to Épila would mean that Pip and Consuelo would need to seek a new medical unit and return to front-line duty. The danger was averted when Koch flew back to Zaragoza and Pip was able to go on falling deeper in love with Ataúlfo. Unfortunately, when driving from Seville to Malaga, things came to a head. He told her that her mother had tried to get him to marry her sister Elisabeth and called him a pansy when he demurred. He then said, ‘After Alonso died, I promised Mama that I would only marry a Princess.’ She was devastated – ‘Such a simple sentence and it just sent all my hopes and the foundations of my life crashing. I had not realised until he said that, just how much I had been building on the chance of my marrying him one day.’ Ataúlfo’s was a noticeably different version of the story about the Infanta Beatriz told to Pip by Princess Bea and was probably an equally feeble subterfuge to avoid telling her that he just had no inclination to marriage.98
Pip went through agonies trying to pluck up the courage to ask Ataúlfo if he would have married her if he had not made the vow. If he said ‘yes’, then she would try to get Princess Bea to release him from the promise and, if ‘no’, then try to get on with the rest of her life. They had moved on to Torremolinos, then a tiny and beautiful fishing village. On the following day, driving to Malaga to go shopping, she asked the fateful question and he replied in the negative. Deeply embarrassed, he told her that he was not in love with her. She answered, ‘I knew that. I just wanted to know exactly how things stood. Please forget I ever asked you.’ Then their aristocratic training came to the rescue and they reverted to amiable small talk. ‘And thus ended all my hopes and longings and ambitions.’ On their return to the hotel in Torremolinos, she broke down and cried ‘with a feeling as if there was no world left’. Pip then spent the day with their friends putting on a brave face. She determined to use every resource of self-control to hide her despair and avoid jeopardising her friendship with Ataúlfo. By the end of the day, she wrote: ‘Today has been the longest and most miserable day I have ever spent. Never again in my life am I going to give life such another chance of kicking me.’ Nevertheless, by the following day, her irrepressible optimism had reasserted itself and she was determined to keep on hoping as long as Ataúlfo remained single. ‘I won’t be depressed or take life seriously and tragically,’ she wrote. ‘Life can kick me all it likes but I shall go on laughing and pretending whatever happens.99 In fact, this was bravado. She showed no sign of being able to relinquish the agonising bliss of her unrequited love.
In September 1938, the Munich crisis gave rise to talk of a European war. British reinforcements were arriving at Gibraltar, down the coast, and Ataúlfo’s German comrades were being recalled to Germany. In such company, Pip’s inclination was to blame Britain. Together with her emotional setback, the ambiguity of her political position left her feeling confused and miserable. The holiday in Torremolinos over, she and Consuelo returned to Zaragoza and Épila in an eventful journey accompanied by two flatulent priests. Continued news of Hitler’s determination to take the Sudetenland did nothing to cheer up the company. Pip’s particular unhappiness was not helped when she was bluntly urged by Juan Antonio Ansaldo to marry Ataúlfo as soon as possible. Despite her efforts to remain stoical, she was deeply miserable. Perhaps in an effort to justify telling Pip that he did not love her, Ataúlfo was giving vent to his viperous tongue. His thoughtless mocking shrivelled her and brought out all her insecurity. ‘God how I hate Ataúlfo sometimes. Why in heaven’s name did I have to fall in love with a louse like him. Now I want to get married and I can’t because I just could not marry anyone else. I want to have lots of children and I can’t. I can’t even have an affair to relieve my feelings.’ The situation became so intolerable for her that she was desperate to get back to the front despite what she took to be hints from Princess Bea that she actually favoured her marrying Ataúlfo.100
A return to the front was rendered more difficult by a requirement for certificates of qualifications and proof of previous service. Nevertheless, she and Consuelo went on to Castellón which was near the Valencia front. There they made contact with Roldán and got certificates of their service in his unit. They then found an opening at a hospital at Calaceite on the Ebro front. They returned to Épila where they participated in a big party given by Princess Bea for the German aviators. Pip got pleasantly drunk but then was made to feel bad by vain flirting with Ataúlfo. On the following day, 26 September, they listened to a speech by Hitler giving the Czechs until 1 October to capitulate. It lasted two hours and Pip found it ‘good and moderately disturbing’. Again, her situation made her miserable. She was in the company of Francoists who were fighting alongside German and Italian units. ‘If there is a big war I am completely sunk. I can’t stay here and I won’t fight with France against Germany.’ Contemplating the possibility of war, she wrote: ‘God only knows what I shall do if there is a war. I suppose I shall have to go home but what hell it will be to have to be on the wrong side and with no news of Ataúlfo and the rest of the people out here.’
Starting to work at Calaceite on 29 September did little to animate her. There was little activity in the hospital and, at first, she did not like the other nurses, ‘a pretty gloomy lot’. The ‘wounded’ seemed to be suffering mainly from stubbed toes and scratched fingers. Pip was desperate to prove herself and to be useful. In fact, despite her self-deprecating remarks, describing herself at one point as feeling ‘like a lunatic worm’, reading between the lines of her diary makes it clear that she was extremely competent and hard-working. She rather liked the director of the unit, a lieutenant Magallón, but basically she moped for Ataúlfo. Gradually, she bucked up as the hospital got busier. Twenty-nine-hour stints were not unusual. As before, some of what she had to cope with was deeply distressing – most horrifically, a four-year-old boy who had been playing with a hand grenade that exploded in his face. She and the diminutive magallón were often thrown together on night duty. ‘I would rather listen to the radio with one man than gossip with eleven women.’ She liked him because he gave her interesting work and explained things in a way that improved her nursing skills. He began to groom her as his theatre assistant. She also began to get along with the nurses with whom there were some riotous meals. In reaction to the horrors of the operating table, they drank, sang and danced noisily. One moonlit night, after a hard day, she set up her gramophone and danced the rumba alone on the veranda while open-mouthed patients and colleagues gawked from the windows. Pip was regularly teased about her weight. ‘I am the size of a house now and can hardly do up my uniform.’ ‘I am as fat as six pigs.’ She was working on trying to forget Ataúlfo without great success. She attended a number of bullfights in Zaragoza which she did not much enjoy. She was also distressed to discover that some of her patients who had wounds in the hand were suspected of shooting themselves to get away from the front and would thus be executed.102
At one point, Pip accompanied Dr magallón on his rounds in the village. Walking around the cobbled streets of Calaceite, she was fascinated by her introduction to village life about which she wrote amusingly. Their patients ranged from an ‘adorable baby’ to a grandmother in bed in the midst of piles of stored fruit – ‘one of those tough, bald, scraggy old hags of about a hundred’. At one house, ‘I could not make out if the patient was male or female as it had a large, black moustache.’ The patient was, in fact, a woman. The interlude was brief. Pip now picked up a liver infection and was soon extremely ill. Just as she was recovering, after passing ten wretched days, she discovered that another nurse, Maruja, was spreading gossip about her relationship with magallón in order to promote