Doves of War: Four Women of Spain. Paul Preston
will be so hard to have to start life again.’ She meant ‘life far from Ataúlfo’. On the dark afternoon of Easter Saturday, he played the piano to her and the thought of eventually being separated from him left her tearful.120
Despite a telegram from her mother ordering her to return home, Pip lingered on doing ever-more relief work. Prince Ali was involved in organising various triumphal parades of the Condor Legion and the Italian Regia Aeronautica. On 20 April, Pedro Chicote, owner of Madrid’s most fashionable bar, gave a cocktail party for Frentes y Hospitales. The hostess was Pilar Franco Bahamonde, the Caudillo’s sister. Pip met her daughter, Pilar Jaraiz-Franco, who had spent much of the war in Republican prisons. She thought that ‘she looks the silliest, most uninteresting girl, who has never done anything but amuse herself. Pip could hardly have been more mistaken. Pilar Jaraiz would later become a Socialist and write a cuttingly acute critique of the Franco family and regime. Other days involved visits to hospitals and desperate efforts to get supplies for them. Pip found a cancer hospital ‘too dreadful for words. All dying and pale green and half-mad.’ Tuberculosis was rife in Madrid. With 70,000 cases, the hospitals could not cope. Despite serious risk of infection, Pip was occupied making regular house calls to the seriously ill, distributing food and dressing ulcers and sores. In the working-class quarter of Vallecas, she came across scenes from a medieval plague.
We found a married couple of fifty-six and sixty years old in bed, black with dirt and just like skeletons. Their hands and legs were covered with ulcers and blisters, pouring blood, pus and water, tied in dirty rags. For two months they have lived on orange peel and a few onions they found fermenting in a manure heap. A woman of forty-eight looking about seventy, a skeleton with scabs all over her hands and face and the pus running into her eyes so that she could not open them.
Starving consumptives and people deranged by hiding for years became common sights for her. After hours of visits, she would work long into the evening typing reports for the hospitals.121
Princess Bea wrote to Margot Howard de Walden of her admiration for
Pip’s character and work … Here now in Madrid we found the population in a deplorable condition, sights like in an Indian famine. We had to visit separately as there was so much work. Pip nursed these people and gave them injections and took food to them. In the evenings she typed reports for the Hospitals all on her own and in perfect Spanish … Where there was no doctor to hand, she did the diagnosis … got the cancer patients into the Cancer Hospital, the tuberculosis patients into the Sanatorium … She never made a mistake … Her intelligence and patience have been astounding. All this without an audience, or a single day off for fun. She is known from one end of Spain to the other … never flurried or impatient. I want you to know all this as in tidy England you may never have seen her tackle a burden of work single-handed like she has in Madrid.122
Occasional visits from Ataúlfo merely left Pip – and indeed his mother – feeling tense. Not being involved in their frenetic relief work, he moped around the house and picked quarrels with Princess Bea who would take out on Pip her consequent distress. Pip wrote in her diary: ‘Life is so hopeless anyhow. I almost wish Ataúlfo had not come at all. I am just about at the last gasp as it is. I don’t want to see Ataúlfo. I want to be left in peace with no more work and no more emotions.’ In early May, Pip was awarded her military cross for her bravery at Escatrón. She also served drinks at the Barajas aerodrome when Franco came to preside at a fly-past of the Nationalist air force, including Germans and Italians. She was not impressed by the Caudillo: ‘Franco is a weeny little man, the size and shape of a tennis ball and looked too funny beside huge stooping lanky old Kindelán and even taller, lankier Queipo de Llano.’ In fact, the round of victory parades and march-pasts, of celebratory dinners and cocktail parties, heralded the inexorable approach of Pip’s return home. At a dinner at the Ritz, she sat disconsolately watching others dance, longing for Ataúlfo and reflecting ‘it is going to be one hell of an effort to get used to enjoying dancing with anyone else again’. After a visit to Philip II’s palace at the Escorial on Sunday 14 May, she wrote: ‘Everyday I love Spain more and hate more having to leave it. I will visit it again but it will never be my country like now.’ On the following day, she was even more down. Ataúlfo was going to Germany with the Condor Legion. She was anything but resigned as she wrote:
I can’t bear the thought that this is all over. I can never be of the family here again. I will stay with them and them with us but it won’t ever be the same. God knows how, when and where Ataúlfo and I will meet again once I leave Spain. And I must go. How I hate life for doing this to me. I want to be married and have lots of children and lots of fun. And I can’t do it and can’t even be happy.123
On 17 May, Pip was exhilarated when Prince Ali took her flying in a Savoia Marchetti 79 bomber and let her take over the controls for ten minutes. On the same day she had dinner with Peter Kemp, who introduced her to Major Hugh Pollard. Pollard was a retired army officer, secret-service agent and sexual adventurer. He had helped make the arrangements for the Dragon Rapide that flew from Croydon on 11 July 1936 to collect Franco in the Canary Islands and take him to Morocco to join the military uprising.124 He lived up to his image by making indecent advances to Pip. Kemp was rather more romantic and declared his love for her. This provided her with an opportunity to make Ataúlfo jealous although it backfired, souring things between them. Her last days in Madrid were beginning to resemble her life in London before she came to Spain – a wild round of cocktail parties, dinners and her ongoing flirtation with Peter Kemp. That ended when she was outraged by his persistent attempts to prise bits of military information out of her friends in order to pass it on to the British military attaché. When she said farewell to Ataúlfo on the eve of his departure for Germany, they spoke of their next meeting. Pip said that it would be in the air in the next war and he replied that he would shoot her down. ‘And so endeth both the happiest, unhappiest and most eventful chapter in my life up to date.’125
Frentes y Hospitales was dissolved in late May and there was nothing left for Pip to do. On Monday 5 June, she took ship for England and was back in Seaford House four days later on Friday. One of her first tasks was to report on the situation in Spain to the exiled Queen Victoria Eugenia, Princess Bea’s cousin. Reflecting the patrician prejudices of the Orléanses, she told her ‘how Red the Falange is and that Serrano Suñer is ambitious, self-seeking and not to be trusted’. She busied herself but felt desperately lonely. She wrote of the contrast between her armies of friends and the fact that ‘inside of me there is nothing more than just a lonely emptiness’. It was all to do with Ataúlfo and now there was no war or relief work to distract her. ‘I wish to God I could get him out of my head for five minutes of the day. If I buy clothes it is because he might see them, if I hear jazz I want to be dancing with him; if I hear a joke I want to tell it him; if I see something nice I wish he was there to see it too.’126
Certainly, after her experiences both in the war and in the Orléans household, life in London would never be the same again. There could be no going back. Pip felt completely lost. Gaenor, her sister, compared it to those who returned from France after the First World War. Many years later, Pip’s son concluded from conversations with her that she had been burned out. It was certainly not uncommon for those who had been in Spain to find their contemporaries incapable of understanding what had happened there during the Civil War. Even her sister, with whom she had been very close, now seemed a stranger, having grown up and married. After the rigours of Spain, Pip busied herself with the usual distractions – the races, cocktail parties, dances, and pampered herself with visits to hairdressers, dressmakers and shopping. For all that it was infinitely more pleasant than life in a front-line hospital, she found it meaningless. On 19 June, she met the great theatrical stars, Flora Robson and John Gielgud. She acquired a new car but her thoughts were really set on a possible visit from Ataúlfo.
She worked on censoring her diary for publication.