Doves of War: Four Women of Spain. Paul Preston
href="#litres_trial_promo">75 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.76
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.’77
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 1938.78 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.79
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.’80
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