More about old José.
José was a character, and often a pain in the arse. He was 99 when he died, so it’s not surprising he was stubborn and set in his ways. He continually repeated the same stories to us, but he was a generous man. When we had friends staying on the Island, he’d invite us all out to lunch. His favourite place was a typical Mallorcan restaurant, Can Pedro, in Cala Murada. Sometimes there could be up to ten people, and he always picked up the tab. He enjoyed having a captive audience.
To be honest, I enjoyed watching my friends, novices off the beaten track in the Mediterranean, being entertained with José’s fascinating stories. It was always a special holiday event for them.
We didn’t take advantage, it was reciprocal. Whenever José had to go to the hospital, the doctors, the tax office, or to buy something in Palma, we always took him.
José, had the same thing to eat every time we went out, ‘lenguado a la plancha’ (grilled sole with chips and salad). He was very fussy about what he ate. I only remember him eating meat once when he was anaemic. The doctor ordered him to, and he ate sirloin steak every day for a month. I’d heard his stories a hundred times before, but now and again you would get a new fragment and another insight into his life. My favourite, was how he ended up in England during the Dunkirk evacuation. I already covered that in a story where I first introduced José. The ones that evoked an image of old Spain were those about the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 39.
At the start of the war, José was living in Barcelona and had a girlfriend called Milagro (Miracle).
Like most parts of Spain at that time, Barcelona was split between the Republican Government and the Franco Nationalists. José was for the Government and was part of the CNT anarchist trade union militia. At that time, the Government didn’t have its own army. For the first months of the war, the anarchists held the line against Franco, strange considering the anarchists had no officer class. Orwell’s book ‘Homage to Catalonia’ provides a fascinating insight into that period.
Milagro was pregnant when the war started and had to find her way through the warring factions waving a white handkerchief. By the time she found José, she had begun to miscarry, and they lost the baby. Such permissiveness might seem inconsistent to those who visited Spain during Franco’s era, but this was the time of Spain’s liberal Second Republic. The church and aristocracy disapproved of new democratic and anarchist ideas, and this precipitated the horrors of the Civil War.
Milagro must have really loved José. When he was transferred 250 km west with the anarchist army to Belchite, she travelled there to bring him food. The war worsened for the Republic. José and Milagro lost contact in the chaos. They were never reunited, just another forgotten love story destroyed in that storm.
José wrote down many stories from that time and from his early life in Mallorca. When my sister Ellen came to visit us on the Island she and José became friends. She typed out the contents of his notebooks and put the text onto disk. The history is quite fragmented and difficult to follow in José’s mix of Spanish and English. Still, one day I hope to put them into some sort of order.
One story I never got tired of hearing was José’s encounter with the Russian Colonel. Here I recount the story roughly in José’s own words.
“I was a sergeant at the time before I was selected for officer training in Valencia. We’d spent the day trying to dislodge the rebels from Belchite, but it was too well defended, so we withdrew to re-group.
I was standing in an olive grove having a smoke when a line of tanks rolled up. The lead tank stopped, the turret lid clanked open and a Russian colonel jumped down from the machine and approached me. He spoke good Spanish.
He inquired ‘Good evening, sergeant. Are you a good communist?’. I told him I wasn’t, I was just there to fight rebels. None-the-less, he stayed to talk to me. Probably because I was not a good communist and he might get the truth about the situation rather than the party line. I told him we had been trying to retake the village, but it was too well defended. We smoked and chatted for some time. He told me to wait a while and then to follow his tanks to the village with my men. He wished me luck. After a short time, there was a maelstrom of gunfire. When we arrived the tanks had gone, the defences were in ruins, and we moved into the village.
In 1947, I was settled in England with a job as the cloakroom attendant in Le Cerf restaurant in the Fulham Road. One evening a delegation from the Russian Military Attache came in for a meal. There was a Russian woman with them who I knew because she was a customer. When she returned from a visit to the Ladies, I pointed out one of the Russian officers. I asked her to ask him if he was ever on the road to Belchite during the Spanish War. He walked over and looked at me intently, then he smiled. ‘Well, sergeant, we both survived then’.
After that second meeting, I never did see the Russian colonel again”.
End of José’s dialogue.
Another story José told was of his last days in Spain at the end of the Civil War. By then he was a Republican Army captain. He and his men were holed-up in an ice-covered cave high in the Pyrenees. They had run out of food and decided that they would have to fight their way out. It was a lost cause, but José decided he was going to take some of Franco’s men with him. With a hand-grenade in each hand, he ran out of the cave. There was no one there, Gerona had fallen, and the fighting had moved down to Barcelona. Unfortunately, he’d pulled the pins out of the grenades with his teeth and spat them over the precipice. The hand grenades were safe while he was holding down the safety levers. The leavers would fly off when he threw the bombs, and the detonation fuse would ignite. The problem was he couldn’t get rid of the things because they were frozen to his hands. José had to blow warm breath onto his fingers until the grenades were free and he could drop them over the cliff, where they bounced down off the rock face and exploded in their fall.
José and his men had been abandoned. They escaped down the mountain, crossed the border into France and were interned, in concentration camps, with others from the international brigades. As internees, they were moved around France and used as cheap labour.
Sometime in the 1990s, José phoned us to say he had a letter from the French Consulate in Palma asking him to pay them a visit. He had no idea how they found his address and was worried because he couldn’t think what they might want. We suggested he possibly may have left a little José somewhere in France before escaping to Britain and that his past had finally caught up with him. That was a possibility having heard about some of his liaisons. When we arrived at the Consulate in Carrer de Caro, José identified himself with his British passport. An official took us to an interview room, went off and returned with a folder.
“Monsieur Ferrer, we have been looking for you for some time. You were in France from March 1939 until June 1940?”.
“Yes! I was used as slave labour” replied José with special belligerence he reserved for such occasions.
“Quite so.” replied the French official “But you were issued with a National Insurance Number. Under current EU regulations, you are entitled to a pension for your service to France”.
José filled in and signed a bank transfer form. We left the Consulate, and he treated Sandy and me to lunch at Can Eduardo restaurant above the fish market by the sea close to the Cathedral. José already had a government pension from the UK, one from Spain and now one from France.
Soon, with the realisation that the side defeated in the Spanish Civil war was actually the elected Government, José would also receive his long-overdue Spanish army pension.