Our road runs across a flat, dry plain. Though it is autumn, the sun is hot and some fields shine bright green. Crops grow well here because of the sunshine and the water flowing down from the Pyrenees in the rivers and diverted into canals and aqueducts to irrigate the bone-dry soil. It is easy to see how water, or the lack of it, became a weapon in the Civil War. The flat-lands are punctuated by steep eroded hills, stony on the top, with columns of sand and gravel spilling down their sides.  There is not much vegetation up there: sparse  spiny aromatic scrub: broom, rosemary, gorse and other plants that I can’t name.

We have arrived at  Santa Quiteria to see the trenches.  At nearby Tardienta, we picked up Almudena Cros, President of the Asociación de Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales (AABI), who is to be our translator, tour guide and passionate advocate of the restoration of historical memory. She is an Art Historian by training and makes her living running tours of the Prado in Madrid. I would love to go on one some time. I find it easy to imagine her  chivvying groups of tourists through the crowded streets. Naturally she would be waving a purple yellow and red Republican umbrella above her head.

Ramon Hernando, a local Historian and the Alcadesa (Mayor) of Tardienta join us at the trenches on the hilltop.

Trenches. For readers in the UK, the word evokes an image of Flanders fields: muddy ditches half filled with water and body parts, glimpsed across a foggy desert of barbed wire and broken trees. These trenches also represent the horror of war but they are nothing like those WW1 photographs, though there is some barbed wire. These are more like the walls and ditches of a hill-fort, made not in the iron age, but in 1936 when the front line ran through here. They are gouged into the solid rock round the summit of each little dry hill, commanding a terrific view of the plains below.

Ramon  sweeps his hand across the view to show us the front line. Behind us, towards Barcelona and the sea, Republican: looking North, the forces of Franco, supplemented by those of Hitler and Mussolini. He points out the villages on either side of the line. Here was the villagers were sympathetic to the Republic, here to the fascists. The Republic sent militias from Barcelona to reinforce the village militias. In August 1936 there were no International Brigades. The early British volunteers, like Felicia Browne, John Cornford and George Orwell, attatched themselves to one militia or another in Barcelona, and were posted to the Aragon front, each in a different unit and with no knowledge of one another.

Yesterday at Segur de Calafell the members of the party gradually drifted into the hotel. We did without formal introductions but made ourselves known to one another one to one, two to two. We are a bit of an international brigade ourselves. People have come from Australia, from Puerto Rico, the Netherlands, the United States, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. There is even a Dutchman from France, who makes wine. We are all here to honour the Brigaders. Some have a personal connection to a particular volunteer, others were brought here by a love of Spain,  an interest in the art or literature of the civil war, in military history,  a shared politics. The Republic plays an important part in the history & mythology of both socialist and anarchist movements in the UK. There are retired teachers, artists, a window cleaner, a social worker. Mysteriously two men seem to be in cycling gear, though they have no bikes.

I feel like a bit of an impostor among the relatives of the volunteers. I am not John Cornford’s daughter. Indeed I suppose that if he had not been killed in Spain I would not exist at all, though I have admired him all my life. My reason for being here is my mother, Margot Heinemann, and I am writing her biography partly to show that she did something with the 78 years of her life as well as inspiring that wonderful poem. I realise that I probably know as much about John Cornford as anyone in the party but I am just beginning the research for the chapter on 1935 to 36. There is an awful lot to try to learn.

One old comrade refused to be drawn when I asked if he was here to remember a particular person.  He had come to pay his respects to ALL the Brigaders, he told me sternly, and he was quite right. The International Brigades themselves came from many countries to defend an elected Popular Front government that contained many political tendencies.  But, at the same time, it is the individual stories, jokes, songs, poems that make the figures come alive. I do not want to invent dead celebrities, but I want to make sure the next generation has a chance to learn this history.

When Peter Stansky and Billy Abrahams were writing ‘Journey to the Frontier’, their 1966 book about John Cornford and Julian Bell, they came to see Margot. She agreed to be interviewed. She gave them material. But she was not sure that the book should be written at all. Most people killed in the Spanish Civil War were Spanish, she used to remind me. There were about 2,500 British volunteers in the International Brigades, about 500 were killed, most were workers. It was not really a war of young poets exploding like bombs. Does my class make me an impostor? In that case Margot Heinemann and John Cornford are impostors too, at this gathering. Do I need to explain that I attended a state school, that I am not really posh? Suddenly I hear Margot’s voice, the ringing cut glass tones, borrowed from Noreen, that she only used when middle-class people were being pretentious, or just plain silly, “Even in my day we talked about workers by hand and brain.” Everyone here has come to remember the brigaders, or a particular brigader, that is enough.

We stand in the bright sunlight, watching the flags stream above us. There is a noticeboard describing the site but it has been defaced. The graffiti have been scoured off but most of what is written is indecipherable.  We listen to Amudena  as she translates Ramon’s account of the bloody history of the plain below us.

He is a good story-teller – even before the translation I am fascinated by his face and voice. As he starts to talk about his own family, he becomes more animated. He recounts an epic of heroism, resistance, cunning and survival. His father fought here and when the republic fell, escaped with others into France. Later he led Resistance groups in France and made sorties back into Spain. I  cannot remember the whole story but it reached to its climax at his father’s funeral when everyone sang the Internationale, “Even the priest!”

“Innocence?”, you ask me.” What kind of innocent are you? Do you not realise that the Spanish Civil War was a terrible, if heroic, defeat for the Left. Don’t you know how many people were killed in the fighting or lost their only lives in the cross-fire? Haven’t you heard of the systematic Fascist repression and executions that went on long after the end of the war? Don’t you know how many still lie in unmarked graves? Haven’t you read Paul Preston’s sickening accounts in The Spanish Holocaust? Don’t you realise that in a Civil war atrocities are committed by both sides? It cannot possibly be true that all the Republicans were the guys in white hats, shooting clean & pardoning their enemies. Why don’t you tell them that down there in Almudevar the Fascists captured all the leading left wingers and sent them to Huesca to be shot? Why don’t you tell us what happened in Tardienta where, admittedly after two attempts by the fascists to take the town, the militia took five Right wing prisoners from the town jail late at night and executed them. Why don’t you name the industrialist Mariano Gavin Pradell, his chaplain Alejandro Aguillo or the one with whom you share a name, though he is no relation, Francisco Bernal Ruiz? What happened to the sons of the ailing Mariano Gavin who decided to stay with their father?”

I  answer that am telling the story of a journey along the Aragon Front in my own way. For the full history of the war you need a book by a proper historian, not a blog. Try Paul Preston or Helen Graham

I came to the Aragon Front front to remember all the brigaders but it was John Cornford’s poems and writings that led me here. He does not romanticise the war, though after his death people have tried to romanticise him. His poem ‘Letter from Aragon’ begins

“This is a quiet sector of a quiet front.

We buried Ruiz in a new pine coffin,

But the shroud was too small and his washed feet stuck out.

The stink of his corpse came through the clean pine boards….”

Tomorrow we will have coffee in Huesca and then I will visit the trenches above Tierz.

( Both Ruiz and Bernal are common names in Spain, no relationship is implied with the former Mayor of Tardienta)

You can read and hear the whole poem on http://www.pbs.org/newshour/poetry/weekly-poem-poetry-witness-co-editor-carolyn-forche-reads-letter-aragon/

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/419372.article

http://pure.rhul.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/helen-graham(8fc507aa-5638-40be-ada7-b3865d4689b5)/publications.html

http://www.lse.ac.uk/researchandexpertise/experts/profile.aspx?KeyValue=p.preston%40lse.ac.uk

En el frente de Tardienta 1936-1938 is a beautifully illustrated book of local history  http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/En_el_frente_de_Tardienta_1936_1938.html?id=YkvznQEACAAJ&redir_esc=y

Thanks to Pauline Fraser for her translating the relevant sections for the IBMT

Events 17th October and 1936-80

“Ay Manuela, Ay Manuela,” they chanted. Hy Wallach was horrified. He had just arrived in Spain from New York to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. As instructed he had told nobody at home where he was going. Now he heard a crowd of strangers calling out what sounded like his name. Were his family searching for him already? It was not until later he realised that it was a song and nothing to do with him. He used to tell the story as a joke against himself.  He talked a lot about Spain but when he talked about his own emotions he usually made it into a funny story.

His daughter Nancy and I are walking along the edge of the Mediterranean at Segur de Calafell.  The water is warm but there is quite a sea running, sometimes my trousers are splashed and I have to step back. Nancy was the first person I met from our party. She is very senior in the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Association. We get on at once, laughing as we recognise our common culture,  though her family came to New York from a shtetl and my mother’s from the highly assimilated Jewish community in Frankfurt. It seems that there are certain ways of being a left wing secular Jewish family and that ours adopted similar styles. She asks if I remember that scene in Annie Hall where he contrast the two families, one shouting and interrupting all the time, the other polite and dour. By this time she and I are talking through one another like long lost cousins, raising our voices, waving our arms. She tells me I look like her friend, Helen; she reminds me of the best people I grew up with.  . She tells me about the arts focussed primary school where she used to work, it sounds terrific.  These days she is a fine artist, working in batik.

Her father was captured in the Battle of the Ebro and sent to the notorious San Pedro prison.  I ask if she knew about Clive Branson, who was there as well. My mother’s best friend was his wife, Noreen. We talk about how they survived, mentally as well as physically, in that prison, or should it be called a concentration camp?  They were kept alive for exchange with Italian prisoners, but the US prisoners did not know how long they would have to wait. Hy became a gambling man. He hoped it would increase morale. He  predicted that someone would be released on a particular day. They had little money, few possessions, but the stakes were high. If he guessed wrong, he promised to push a coin across the floor of the filthy latrine – with his nose. The day was drawing to a close and he was getting ready to pay up, when at the last minute, the orders came for the man to be released.

The prisoners ran an underground newspaper there. They even had the University of San Pedro she says. “Of course,” she says “it was all led by Communists.”  “Of course,” I agree. We establish that both our parents were in the Party. “Red nappy baby.” I say. She immediately comes back with “Red diaper”, the US equivalent.

Other prisoners have educated one another in captivity. On Robben Island  tour guides point out the quarry where the men studied for their O’ Levels when the guards weren’t watching. I also think about Midge Gillies book about British POWs in the Second World War that she called ” Barbed Wire University”. We wondered if it just happen spontaneously in each place, and how the later groups might have learned about the earlier ones.

We talk about Clive’s paintings and his daughter’s. One of Clive’s hung on the sitting room wall  in the house I grew up in. Nancy has seen them at the Tate. I describe some of Rosa’s pictures and her earlier embroideries. There was a fabric collage of enormous red and orange birds. I have not seen or thought about them for thirty years but I remember them clearly, or think I do.

It feels as though Nancy and I have friends in common, though Clive died before she or I were born.  Neither of us believes in a supernatural after-life. The secular atheist ghosts of her father, my mother and Noreen walk comfortably with us along the sea-shore.

http://www.alba-valb.org/volunteers/david-hyman-hy-Wallach

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/clive-branson-3094

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/12/barbed-wire-university-midge-gillies-review

(The blog will be in chronological order but the trip was so busy that the events I describe here actually happened on 15th October, except of course those that ocurred in 1938)

This blog is about my visit to Aragon with the International Brigades Memorial Trust. We will be visiting the towns, trenches and mountain-sides that were the Aragon Front in the Spanish Civil War.

In Spain memories are still contested. When Franco was alive, memorials to the Republican dead were forbidden. Then came the era of “Don’t mention the war”, the Pacto de Silencio. And now though memorials can be erected, they are often vandalised in the night so that it is safer to have them inside buildings.

I am Jane Bernal and I am working on a biography of my mother Margot Heinemann. I’m visiting Aragon to see where her lover, fiancé, companero, John Cornford fought when he was first in Spain in September 1936.  Writing this blog allows me to practice writing, to try out different ideas, even it does make me sound like Dodie Smith at the beginning of I Capture the Castle.

Margot only visited Spain herself  after Franco had gone. The Spain she wrote about was a place she had never seen. She wrote about it, on and off, all her life. We found this poem among her papers when she died in 1992. She must have written it in the last two years of her life. The actor Tilda Swinton read it at her funeral. Ringstead Mill is a house that belonged to the Cornford family where Margot, John and some other friends had a holiday over Christmas 1935. (In 2014 when I wrote this, I believed the poem was written in 1990. It turns out it dates from before 1959, as it is mentioned in some letters between Frances Cornford, John’s mother and Margot at that time. Margot seldom dated letters, which is exasperating for a biographer, but there are some dates in the correspondence. Margot seems to have show the poem to Frances and to no-one else. Frances was not enthusiastic, and perhaps, more importantly, did not understand it. So Margot left it among her papers, where her sister found it over 30 years later).

Ringstead Mill

Stranger whom I once knew well,

Do not haunt this house.

Sorrow’s but a ravelled thread,

To draw back the active dead,

Nor is pleasure mutable

Such as smiled on us.

Stranger whom I once knew well,

Do not haunt this house.

Idle and low spirits can

Take your name and face:

Old green sweater, battered coat,

Coal-black hair and sleeves too short.

Though I know the living man

Finished with this place,

Idle and low spirits can

Take your name and face.

Here we laid foundations where

Never walls were built.

Faded is the fireside glow,

Things we knew or seemed to know

Blown around the empty air,

And the milk is spilt.

Here we laid foundations where

Never walls were built.

And the hard thing to believe

Still is what you said.

With a bullet in the brain,

How can matter think again?

All things that once live and move

Endlessly are dead.

And the hard thing to believe

Still is what you said.

So from these deserted rooms,

Even memory’s past.

As your closely pencilled screed

Grows more faint and hard to read,

So our blueprints and our dreams,

Torn from time are lost.

So from these deserted rooms,

Even memory’s passed.

Mountains that we saw far off,

Sleek with gentle snow,

To the climbers axe reveal

Ice that jars the swinging steel,

Armoured on a holdless cliff

With the clouds below –

Mountains that we saw far off,

Sleek with gentle snow.

Time bears down its heroes all

And the fronts they held.

Yet their charge of change survives

In the changed fight of our lives –

Poisoned fires they never dreamed of

Ring the untended field.

Change is their memorial

Who have changed the world.

Margot Heinemann

1991

© Jane Bernal

As a family we did not do graves much. If people remember us, we said, it should be for our work, our actions, or not at all.  For me John Cornford is what he wrote, what Margot & other people told me about him, not whatever remains of his body.  It is having the small bones of my hands crushed together by old men who tell me, in voices choked with emotion, that I am beautiful but I will never be as beautiful as my mother. She would often be in the room at the time, when we got home we would laugh about it. We both knew that most of the alleged beauty was because of what we represented, not what we looked like. Finding the actual body never seemed important. With a bullet in the brain, how can matter think again?  I have never seen my father’s grave, though it is in Morden, near where I once worked. My cousin and I scattered my mother’s ashes from the summit of Stac Pollaidh. Change is their memorial who have changed the world.

In spite, or because of this, death & dying, commemoration & memorialisation, interest me quite apart from this biography. When I am not being a biographer, I do research into death & dying as they affect people with intellectual disabilities.  Loss can be acknowledged or hidden, disenfranchised. Are parents allowed to mourn the death of a disabled daughter or son? Shouldn’t they celebrate a merciful release? How do you mourn a Communist child or parent in a time of fascism? The Spanish victims of Franco, were, to use the jargon, offending deaths and disenfranchised losses.  Now they are being exhumed from their unmarked mass graves and re-remembered. If finding John Cornford helps living people in Spain now commemorate their dead, because he was British, the grandson of Charles Darwin, a celebrity so that it increases the pressure on the Spanish Government, I suppose it is the right thing to do. I wonder what he would have wanted, or Margot, but there is no accurate way of predicting what dead people want.

I am off now to meet the living…………