Doves of War: Four Women of Spain. Paul Preston
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home. At the end of November, a brief stay in London was prolonged after a car crash in the blackout. She was recovering from minor facial surgery when she was visited by Peter Kemp. Her old comrade from the Nationalist ranks told her that he had seen Ataúlfo in Madrid just after he had received news of her flight from France. Pip was amused to be told that he had been furious to hear of her French adventure. He had said that he wished that she had been taken prisoner so that his family could have arranged for the Germans to send her to Spain. She was even more delighted to hear that while in Madrid liaising with the German military representatives, Ataúlfo had ‘received a delegation from all the brothels of Madrid to ask him to ask the Germans to take their boots off!’152
In December 1940, Pip was given the title of honorary colonel in the Polish Army. She found it ‘rather fun’ being called ‘Pani Pulkownik’ (Madame Colonel). Life settled down into a monotonous routine. Pip worked immensely hard and learned a lot of physiology and anatomy.153 Her Polish became as fluent as her Spanish. Beyond her work, her main preoccupation regarding the outside world was that Spain did not enter the war on Hitler’s side. She was as distressed as many of her Polish comrades by the idea of alliance with Soviet Russia. Her class prejudices, and her experiences in Spain, shone through in her remark that ‘I should hate to fight with a lot of bloody Communists almost as much, though not quite, as I should hate to fight against Spain.’154
The next years are difficult to reconstruct. Her diary comes to an abrupt end in January 1941. Pressure of work is a possible explanation for the silence although she had managed to write daily under far more trying circumstances in Spain. The survival of a later fragment suggests that the diary was simply lost. Nevertheless, the value of her work can be deduced from the fact that, in 1943, she was awarded the Polish Golden Cross of Merit with the approval of the Foreign Office.155 What is known is that the cold and damp of the Scottish climate intensified her tendency to very poor circulation. The chief surgeon at the hospital told her that smoking and drinking so much was exacerbating the problem. She seems to have tried sporadically to cut down but the daily stress of life at the hospital made abstention impossible for her. Life became unbearably difficult and she was diagnosed as having circulatory difficulties, known as Raynaud’s disease. It was recommended that she go to live in a warm climate. Throughout her time at Dupplin Castle, she longed for the day when she would return to Spain although a lengthy affair with a Polish surgeon, Colonel Henryk Masarek, had helped her finally to put aside hopes of marrying Ataúlfo.
As a result of her experiences in Spain during the Civil War, the various informal approaches from the Secret Services in 1939 and 1940 were entirely understandable. Keeping Spain neutral was a major preoccupation and an upper-class English woman with Pip’s impeccable political connections was an obvious target for recruitment. She was close to both the Orléans and Kindelán families, the two most important centres of the monarchist opposition to Franco within Spain itself. In mid-July 1941, the Special Operations Executive ran a security trace on her. The trace request to MI5 stated: ‘It is our intention that the Honourable Miss Scott-Ellis should be employed in the investigation of the possibility of evacuating Polish prisoners-of-war from Spain. We would be glad to know, if you have any reason from the security point of view why this person should not be so employed.’ The reply from MI5 cast doubt on her discretion citing a report that, at a dinner held at the Savoy for the Spanish Aid Mission in December 1940, she had blurted out that she had been asked to go to Spain as a spy, as she knew so many people there. She proudly stated that she had refused this request – probably the repeated approaches by Hugh Smyth made in the course of 1939. She had said that she would never work against Spain.156 The reported remarks were entirely consistent with the heartfelt declarations in her diary.
Finally, in February 1943, the Continental Action Force of the Polish Government-in-Exile in Britain requested that Pip be sent to Spain to help in the evacuation of escaping prisoners-of-war. In the light of the earlier security report, the proposal was accepted only after some hesitation. It is difficult to reconstruct her work in Barcelona with the Special Operations Executive from the exiguous surviving files. However, she later hinted at what she did to her mother, her sister, to José Luis de Vilallonga and to her son, John. Her official position, or cover, was as a secretary working in the dissemination of pro-Allied information to counteract the domination of the Spanish media by the Third Reich. However, the Consulate in Barcelona was the main conduit for Allied personnel escaping across the Eastern Pyrenees. It would seem, therefore, that her role was to help in the safe passage of British and Polish pilots shot down over France and other escapees through Spain and into Portugal. Her language skills and her connections with the most prominent and influential pro-Allied monarchists make it eminently plausible that she was indeed organising their transit on to Lisbon.157
She had the perfect excuse for trips from Barcelona across Spain to a point relatively near the Portuguese border in her friendship with the Orléans Borbón family. In any case, her first port of call in Spain was the family’s Montpensier Palace at Sanlúcar de Barrameda where she went to convalesce from the illness exacerbated by the Scottish climate. Thereafter, her visits to the family were as frequent and as lengthy as they had been during the Civil War. There is plentiful photographic evidence of Pip, looking thin but happy, riding with Ataúlfo in April at the Feria de Sevilla, helping Ataúlfo with his animals at the Botánico at Sanlúcar de Barrameda in May, then again riding with Ataúlfo at the Rocío in June, and then at a party at Sanlúcar de Barrameda in August 1943. In the autumn of 1943, she went to Estoril to spend some time with her mother who was there returning from Canada with her four granddaughters. She travelled to Estoril again in late January 1944 to see Gaenor who was returning from America with her children. She had been with her husband Richard who had been working in the economic warfare section of the British Embassy in Washington.158 By late 1944, with Allied forces controlling the south of France, Pip’s role was coming to an end.
In any case, her life, both professional and personal, was about to take a dramatic turn. At some point in late 1943 or early 1944, she ran into José Luis de Vilallonga, the handsome and dissolute playboy son of a rich Catalan aristocrat, the Barón de Segur. There exists a photograph from January 1944 of them together at a party. According to José Luis, they met at a cocktail party at the home of the Catalan publisher Gustavo Gili. Tall, elegant, with the pencil moustache fashionable at the time, she found him irresistibly good-looking. He was also seductively charming, as many other women were to discover to their cost. José Luis wrote later: ‘that evening, she would have done better to have gone to the cinema or stayed at home because I was going to make her miserable and humiliated for the rest of her days … I regret infinitely that I made a good and loyal woman suffer so much for the dreadful error of falling in love with me.’159
Perhaps José Luis’s cruel treatment of Pip was connected to the fact that she bore an uncanny resemblance to his mother, Carmen Cabeza de Vaca y Carvajal. Pip’s sister Gaenor was once shown a photograph of the Baronesa, whom she had never met, and asked to identify it. She thought it was Pip. José Luis de Vilallonga later wrote of how his childhood was marked by his mother’s coldness and indifference. ‘As a child, I would have given anything for my mother to take me in her arms and kiss me.’ Oddly, in his memoirs, he denied that any of his wives resembled his mother.160 It is tempting to speculate that, in his systematically appalling treatment of Pip, he was somehow trying to punish his mother for the coldness that so scarred his childhood. He described himself as ‘a hardened alcoholic who, without ever taking precautions of any kind, had slept with more whores than a porcupine has quills’. It is interesting that, when he boasts of his insatiable appetite for prostitutes, he admits always to having asked for women who were tall, blonde and blue-eyed, like Pip and like his mother.161
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