Farmer turned English teacher, head teacher turned writer
Just missed -
Too late to meet a man who had fascinated me
In my desk I keep a small wooden box, light in colour and highly polished. It contains
small souvenirs, a Benfica cigarette lighter, a few sepia photographs and a set of
old hotel keys. My grandfather, killed six years before I was born, used these keys,
handled these keys. Now they are mine and, occasionally, I handle them, but I cannot
use them. They were given him in the summer of 1939 when his ship delivered supplies
to the Republican forces in Barcelona. Franco and his Nationalists were about to
enter the city and the captain was given twenty-
Three years before this, in January 1936, my friend Benigno was born in the Asturias, in the mountains of northern Spain. By the time he was six months old, his father had left home and gone into hiding in his mountains. He was a landowner, a forester, a bourgeois, and the red miners of the Asturias had put a price on his head. It was a further six months before he could return home. Now, fifty years on, I was going to meet this old man.
Our progress across France was slow, travelling on alternate days then setting up camp and letting the children play and the car rest. We travelled on back roads, long and straight and shaded by lines of poplar trees. We watched the sunflowers and sang along with the children’s tapes. After a week, a long grey shadow replaced the horizon in front of us. All day long it rose slowly, and came to dominate the land around us. Quietly, we were drawn steadily towards the peaks and high valleys which appeared as a warm sun cleared the haze. Gradually we approached the Pyrennees and Spain.
Two days later, after a day of rest in the town at the foot of this towering mass,
we left St. Jean Pied de Port and started the long haul over the mountains. As we
climbed, the mountain road imposed a discipline on our progress. At times it impressed
us, and at times alarmed us as we fought the zig-
From the border, we drove along winding roads, free of traffic. Behind us lay the
orderliness of French camp-
As the plains below the mountains enveloped us we felt the Spanish day impose itself.
Despite it, despite the heat and the glare, we travelled on, through Pamplona with
its high buildings and long, straight streets, then onto a motor-
No, we were not tourists. The children were on holiday with Mum and Dad and contented themselves with whatever beach or swimming pool came to hand. My wife was part parent, part navigator, part companion. And me, my business lay to the north with this elderly gentleman about whom I had had heard so much, a man who was going to tell me about an important part of his country’s recent past.
I had first learned about the Spanish civil war from the left, from sources that remained passionately sure of their particular views. Now there was a chance to hear something different, from a man who had felt that suffering at first hand, whose family had shown me more of Spain’s fascinating reconciliation with itself. His son, my friend, had married a woman whose family had fled with many others, once it became clear that they would not be able to live in a Spain dominated by Franco. For years, Maria’s aunts and uncles had had to remain outside Spain, trying to maintain family links from faraway Mexico. It was Benigno, the son of a hunted bourgeois, who had taken me to Franco’s grave in the Valley of the Fallen and explained calmly and patiently, in his engineer’s dispassionate and objective way, the significance of totalitarian architecture and the enormity of this project for which the Caudillo had used prisoners of war as slave labour.
At the end of out first day in Spain we sought a campsite up on the coast near Santander.
We welcomed the early cool of the evening and relaxed up on Spain’s wonderful green
coast, La Costa Verde. There was no hurry to do anything, and the children were
happy to escape from captivity in the car. They played around us. We watched, fascinated,
while a Dutch family pulled up near us and unravelled a trailer tent, the first which
we had encountered. We leant against our car, feeling the heat draining out of the
sun; we felt relaxed, despite the stickiness and stiffness of the day’s travel. The
site owner had carefully put us with other families at the back of the site, in a
walled garden. We were away form the back-
We did not contact our friends again during this stop and there was to be no unseemly
rush to their home. No, one more day would make little difference. The next morning
we turned our back on the site and found the beach, clean, wide and almost un-
And it was. When we were hungry a nearby shop provided bread, cheese and salami.
I watched the children and read a book. From somewhere else two bottles of beer
put in an appearance. There was ice cream when we needed it and space around us
still as later people arrived and settled down. After lunch, a vague uncertain time
here, we swept across the smooth sand, hunting treasure, and unearthed a brightly
striped t-
Later, tired and cheered by their day on the beach, the children had succumbed quickly and were sleeping soundly long before it got dark. From time to time the sound of the unwashed campers next door reached us with the distinctive aroma of their particular cigarettes. On our side of the wall, we sat around our tent, eating, then reading quietly as the sun reached round to the west and prepared to die.
We slept well – our holiday was meeting expectations. Next morning we were all up
early; our daughter sat sleepily in the back of the car and buried herself in a book.
Our son found a wall and kicked his football back and forth against, it, time and
time again. Soon we had packed the tent onto the roof-
Would they want visitors with a death in the family? We had already arranged to stay in a campsite two hundred yards from their holiday home and knew that they would insist on offering hospitality. We turned off the main road and drove down towards the sea and the village. We found their house and parked outside. Their children swarmed over ours – they had met before – and took them off outside.
I cannot remember just how it all started, but we suddenly found ourselves involved with this family. In the family home, the old man lay where he had lain for so many years and the wives and daughters of neighbours lined the stairs and said their rosaries. Cautiously, we picked out way past them until somewhere, in the upper stories of the house, we found Benigno’s sisters with their mother. It was the first time that I had seen just how the simple, physical presence of those we love can absorb shock and pain. It was so clear, so understated, so effective, like a silent weight pressing out the pain. The physical closeness, the gentle touching conveyed so much that it could be felt by an outsider, a visitor, immediately. And it allowed an outsider a role, a very modest one, allowed as an intruder to contribute something to this tangible holding together of a family. We spoke a few words to the widow then joined the silent supporters outside.
Two days later, there was the funeral of this man we had missed. I remember the acres of cars that brought some five hundred people to the funeral, not to the funeral of a political notable or the head of some huge corporation, but to the funeral of a very old man who was loved and respected. After the service and the formalities, we returned to our tent and the children and resumed our holiday.
The next Sunday, Benigno led us up a mountain to mass. It was a stiff climb and
I watched his tall frame, upright and straight as a ram-
That was it. The funeral, the obvious sadness over, the children played for a week
and we spent time with our friends. My wife discovered an antipathy to Spanish bean
soup that endures and we decided that an orreyo, a small barn-
We did manage a trip back up into the Pyrenees, to Covadongo from where Spaniards
undertook the Reconquista, the centuries-
We travelled back to England on the ferry from Santander to Plymouth. I watched from the top deck of the boat as the coast of northern Spain receded. The disappointment of not meeting the old man was left behind and the sense of something bigger and more important grew. What would he have been able to tell me about his country, that his family had not already revealed or that I had seen now for myself?