Doves of War: Four Women of Spain. Paul Preston
ensure that nothing said about Prince Ali, Princess Bea or the rest of the Orléans-Borbón family could embarrass them. On the eve of war, she also eliminated references to the Luftwaffe pilots she had known through Ataúlfo and to her distress at the prospect of going to war against people she considered to be her friends. The outbreak of the Second World War led to the prospective publishers pulling back. Thereafter, she said that she could not bear to look at the diary. It was her edited text that was published in 1995.127
Ataúlfo arrived in London at the beginning of July, ‘looking very handsome and sunburned and healthy’. However, since his German comrades had been asking him why he had not married Pip, he had become careful not to spend too much time with her lest ‘people should start talking here too’. Pip realised once more that he had no intention of marrying her: ‘Firstly, he is not in love with me, secondly he has no money so can’t marry anyone, thirdly he has promised P. Bea only to marry a Princess.’ With the brilliant sophistry of the self-deceiver, she consoled herself that ‘if he was sure he really did not want to, he would not have to make his mind up about it so often’. In fact, they had such a good time together that she was emboldened to raise the subject of their future. She was devastated again when he told her what she already knew – that he didn’t love her and would not marry her. She thought of travelling to get him out of her mind. Bizarrely, on 19 July, she drove to Sanlúcar with Consuelo.128
In fact, the warmth of her friendship with Ataúlfo was undiminished. They were together in Sanlúcar when the Danzig crisis broke. She mistakenly believed that the Nazi-Soviet pact made war less likely. Things went well enough until Ataúlfo had to leave for Yugoslavia on 30 August. On the following day, Germany declared war on Poland. Taking her cue from Prince Ali, Pip was inclined to blame Poland for the entire crisis. When war was declared on Germany, she felt she had to return to Britain. She was distraught at the prospect of another war. ‘I am sick to death of hospitals, of uniforms, of corpses, of everything to do with it. I loathe it all.’ She bravely set off to drive across Spain and a now belligerent France, reaching London on 9 September. The family home at Seaford House had become the Red Cross headquarters.129
Pip took the war badly. It definitively separated her from Ataúlfo and she felt suicidal – ‘I’d die tomorrow with pleasure if I had not been brought up to think it cowardly to commit suicide. I never thought I should really want to. But what on earth is there worth living for? I have lost the one person I love and always will love. I may get used to the hurt but I will never forget or lose it.’130 She rejected out of hand any possibility that Ataúlfo’s behaviour might have been occasioned by homosexuality. She was still fuming because, four years earlier, Moke FitzClarence had put round a story that Ataúlfo was ‘a pansy’ because he had not taken the opportunity to kiss her in a taxi.131 To break out of her black mood, Pip threw herself into socialising and drank too much. At one point, she met a man called Christopher Hobhouse who asked her to consider working for British Intelligence in Spain, a suggestion she rejected indignantly as snooping on her friends. She had a perpetual hangover, alcohol being increasingly her response to the emptiness of life after Spain. She wrote: ‘I wish I could stop myself bounding into these fits of hectic gaiety when I am sick of life.’ Her gloom was intensified by news that a decline in the family fortunes might mean the loss of Seaford House and maybe also Chirk Castle.132
Pip found the phoney war unbearable. Ataúlfo remained foremost in her thoughts. She was obliged to attend lectures about the war and longed to interrupt and tell the ignorant lecturers about the real effects of being shelled. A visit from her ex-lover John Geddes did nothing for her and she found herself becoming hard and bitter. ‘I can’t stick this continual ache much longer. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, food just makes me feel sick and every time I shut my eyes I think I see Ataúlfo.’ Brief telegrams and letters from him did reach her but merely set her off weeping and aching when she considered that it might be years before they could meet again. She continued to drink far too much – whisky and brandy by night alternating with Bromo-Seltzer by day. The men that she met just bored her.133
At the beginning of November, she started to train formally as a nurse at St Thomas’s Hospital. After her experience in Spain, she was mortified to be treated as a total novice. She wrote on 8 November, ‘no one can stand getting up at 7.30, spending the day in a hospital, dancing till 6 in the morning, sleeping one hour, eating one meal only and drinking too much, for long. I shall have to sober up or I will crack up. I already look like the wrath of God.’ After virtually running a hospital at the front, to be prevented from doing anything more complex than making beds severely dented her morale: ‘I have lost everything in the world I wanted since then [the last time that she had seen Ataúlfo], most depressing of all, my optimism. A year ago today, Consuelo and I were running single-handed a hospital of eighty-two beds and we had thirty-six new patients. This year I went to St Thomas’s Hospital and made two beds in an empty ward and was taught a few things I have already done hundreds of times.’ The next day was her twenty-third birthday, enlivened by telegrams from Princess Bea, Prince Ali and Ataúlfo. Suggestions that she return to Sanlúcar cheered her up as did a stint on the men’s surgical ward at the hospital. ‘There is something very funny about scrubbing the bottom of a London policeman.’
Her dejection finally began to dissolve after an invitation by a social acquaintance, Maureen Schreiber, to join a field hospital leaving for France in January 1940. Presented to the French by Lord and Lady Hadfield and organised by Mary, the wife of Brigadier-General Spears, it was large and well-equipped, with thirteen doctors, x-ray facilities, one hundred beds, trucks and tents. Pip agreed – with no illusions. There was no excitement, just a sense of duty and a desperate need for something to distract her from the endless longing for Ataúlfo. ‘I must do something and that will be about the best. I would far rather go to Spain and ignore the whole thing for evermore, but I can’t do that so I had better work … Am I going to spend all my life drifting about in wars from one hospital to another with no aim and no ambition … I am tired out from war already and I know what it is going to be like so it is no adventure any longer.’ She really wanted to go to Sanlúcar but dared not, knowing she could spend only a finite period there and that the pain of separation would be ever more unbearable. It was thus with dread in her heart that she accepted the invitation to join the Hadfield-Spears ambulance unit.134 Burnt-out by her front-line experience, she wrote: ‘I suppose I ought to be glad to have had six months rest since I left Madrid, but it has not been a very happy one and soon I must go back to the sickening smell and sound of it again.’135
To say that she had left her heart in Spain was an understatement. In mid-December, she received a visit from Últano Kindelán and his English wife Doreen. Most of her diary entries recount a lively social life that left her deeply miserable and a sense of alienation. Now ‘a breath of my beloved Spain’ filled her with joy. ‘The realisation that Spain is not all a dream, that they all exist and want me back and that one day I can go. It was wonderful and I felt alive and interested in life again for a moment.’ She wished she could accept their invitation to go back to Spain with them. As it was, she had to meet her colleagues from the medical unit: ‘hard-faced wispy old hags except one pop-eyed nit-wit’. She was gratified by a telegram on 16 December from Ataúlfo: ‘Thanks letters. Can’t see why you shouldn’t come here for next five years.’ On the following day, it was backed up by another from Consuelo which read: ‘For the Lord’s sake do what Ataúlfo says in his telegram. You will regret it all your life if you don’t come.’ Her reaction – that, despite her longing, to go without a prospect of fulfilment would just be to condemn herself to unhappiness – was both courageous and momentous. ‘For five years I have chased after Ataúlfo like a fool. Now if he wants to, he can come and fetch me but if he does not want me I won’t go back.’ She began sporadically to get angry with