DOVES OF WAR

Four Women of Spain

PAUL PRESTON

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

PROLOGUE: Fears and Fantasies

PRISCILLA SCOTT-ELLIS: All for Love

NAN GREEN: A Great Deal of Loneliness

MERCEDES SANZ-BACHILLER: So Easy to Judge

MARGARITA NELKEN: A Full Measure of Pain

EPILOGUE

NOTES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PROLOGUE Fears and Fantasies

IN LATE SEPTEMBER 1937, two English women arrived in Paris. One, a penniless housewife and Communist Party militant from London, had travelled on the crowded boat train from Calais. Despite being exhausted after her trip, she left her luggage at the station and got a bus straight to the recently inaugurated Great Exhibition. The other, the daughter of one of the richest aristocrats in England, accompanied by a princess, the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, arrived in a gleaming limousine. After checking in at their luxurious hotel in the Rue de la Paix, she dined out. The next day, after a little shopping, she too visited the exhibition. So great was the bewildering cornucopia spilling out of the two hundred and forty pavilions jostling along the banks of the Seine that only a small part of their wonders could be seen in a few hours. The two women had to make choices. What they decided revealed much about where they had come from and about where they were going.

The Communist made a beeline for the pavilion of the Spanish Republican Government and ‘stood spellbound at Picasso’s Guernica’. She was repelled by ‘the competitive vulgarity’ of the German and Soviet pavilions which glared aggressively at each other at the end of the Pont d’Iéna on the Rive Droite of the Seine. In contrast, the society girl was captivated by the great German cubic construction, designed by Albert Speer, over which flew a huge eagle bearing a swastika in its claws. Although, like her poorer compatriot, she was en route to the Civil War raging to the south, she did not bother to visit the pavilion of the Spanish Republic. They did both share utter contempt for the British display. The Communist ‘snorted in disdain at the British contribution – mostly tweeds, pipes, walking sticks and sports gear’. The aristocrat considered the British pavilion’s displays of golf balls, marmalade and bowler hats to be ‘very bad’.

The two English women never knew that they had coincided at the Paris exhibition any more than that their paths had crossed before. Three and a half months earlier, the aristocrat had emerged from a cinema in Leicester Square and watched a Communist demonstration protesting about the German navy’s artillery bombardment of Almería in South Eastern Spain. Amongst those chanting ‘Stop Hitler’s War on Children!’ was the left-wing housewife. For both women, Paris was just one stop on a longer journey to Spain. Their preparations in August 1937 could hardly have been more different. The Communist had thought long and hard about leaving England and her son and daughter to volunteer for the Spanish Republic. With trepidation, she sold what she could of her books and household chattels and deposited the rest in a theatrical skip. At Liverpool Street Station in London, she bade a painful farewell to her two children and then put them on a train to a boarding school paid for by a wealthy Party comrade. A month before her thirty-third birthday, the petite brunette leftist had little by way of possessions. She had hardly any packing to do for herself, just a few clothes – her two battered suitcases were crammed with medical supplies for the Spanish Republican hospital unit that she hoped to join. Clutching her burdens, she took a bus to Waterloo Station to catch the train to Dover.

Her counterpart’s preparations were altogether more elaborate. For more than six months, she had dreamed of nothing else. She was in love and hoped that by going to Spain she would win the attention of her beloved, a Spanish prince serving with the German Condor Legion. During the summer of 1937, in the intervals between riding, playing tennis and learning golf, she took Spanish lessons with a private tutor. In London’s West End, her punishing schedule of shopping was interspersed with inoculations, and visits to persons likely to be useful for her time in Spain. These included one of the four men with principal responsibility for British policy on Spanish affairs at the Foreign Office and the ex-Queen Victoria Eugenia of Spain. Not yet twenty-one, the blonde socialite, rather gawky and deeply self-conscious about her weight, desperately haunted the beauty salons in preparation for her Spanish adventure. She left England in the chauffeur-driven limousine belonging to Victoria Eugenia’s cousin, Princess Beatrice of Saxe-Coburg. The car was overloaded with trunks and hatboxes containing the trophies of the previous four weeks’ shopping safaris. After being ushered by the station master at Dover into a private compartment on the boat train, they crossed the channel then motored on to Paris – to their hotel, more shopping and the visit to the Great Exhibition. On the following morning, she set off on the remainder of her journey south to the Spanish border, enjoying an extremely pleasant tour through the peaceful French countryside.

After seeing the Picasso, her left-wing compatriot hastened to collect her heavy cases and catch the night train to Spain. Crushed into a third-class carriage, she was able to reflect on the horrors that awaited her on the other side of the Pyrenees. She was an avid reader of the left-wing press and had received painfully eloquent letters from her husband. He was already in Spain, serving as an ambulance driver with the International Brigades. By contrast, the young occupant of the limousine bowling along the long, straight, tree-lined French roads was blithely insouciant. Her knowledge of the Spanish Civil War was based on her reading of a couple of right-wing accounts which portrayed the conflict in terms of ‘Red atrocities’ and the knightly exploits of Franco’s officers. She sped towards Biarritz like a tourist, in a spirit of anticipation of wonders and curiosities to come. Her mind was on the object of her romantic aspirations, and she was thinking hardly at all of the terrors that might lie before her.

Both women were sustained by their fantasy of what their participation in the Spanish war might mean. For the aristocrat, it was about love and a chivalric notion of helping to crush the dragon of Communism. The Communist’s hopes were more prosaic. She wanted to help the Spanish people stop the rise of fascism and, deep down, vaguely hoped that doing so might be the first step to world revolution. Neither the aristocrat setting out to join the forces of General Franco nor the Communist could have anticipated the suffering that awaited them. Even the gruesome picture of the bloodshed at the front provided by the graphic letters from her husband had not fully prepared the left-winger en route to serve the Spanish Republic for the reality of war. By that late summer of 1937, however, the women of Spain had already been coming to terms with the horrors of war for over a year. For most of them, there had been no question of volunteering to serve. They had little choice – the war enveloped them and their families in a bloody struggle for survival. For two Spanish mothers, in particular, the war would have the most wildly unexpected consequences in terms of both their personal lives and the way in which they were dragged into the public sphere. Both were of widely differing social origins and political inclinations and had different hopes for what victory for their side might mean for them and their families. Their lives – and their fantasies – would be irrevocably changed by the war.

In the first days of the military uprising of 18 July 1936, one, a young mother of three, who had just turned twenty-five, had every reason to expect dramatic disruption in her life as a consequence of the war. She lived in Valladolid in Old Castile, at the heart of the insurgent Nationalist zone, and her husband was a prominent leader of the ultra-rightist Falange. Already, as a result of his political beliefs, she had experienced exile and political persecution. She knew what it was like to be on the run and to keep a family with a husband in jail. Because of his political activities, she had endured one childbirth completely alone and, in exile, had undergone a forceps delivery without anaesthetic. Nevertheless, she had stifled whatever resentment she might have felt as a result of her husband’s political adventures and supported him unreservedly. Now four months pregnant, the outbreak of war brought all kinds of possibilities and dangers. She rejoiced at his release from prison as a result of the military uprising and shared his conviction that everything for which they had both made so many sacrifices might come to fruition within a matter of weeks, if not days. Not without anxiety about the final outcome, she could now hope that her husband’s days as a political outlaw were over, that they could build a home together and that they and their children would be able to live in the kind of Nationalist Spain to which he had devoted his political career.

Within less than a week of their passionate reunion, both her husband and her unborn child would be dead. The reality of the war had smashed its way into her world and shattered her every hope and expectation. In an atmosphere charged with hatred, calls for revenge for her husband’s death intensified the savage repression being carried out in Valladolid. Confined to bed, she found little consolation in the bloodthirsty assurances of his comrades. She faced a bleak future as a widow with three children. Her own parents were long since dead and the best that her in-laws could suggest was that she earn a comfortable living by getting a licence to run an outlet for the state tobacco monopoly (un estanco). To their astonishment, after a relatively short period of mourning, she renounced both thoughts of vengeance and of a quiet life in widow’s weeds. She dug deep into her remarkable reserves of energy and embarked on a massive task of relief work among the many children and women whose lives had been shattered by the loss of fathers and husbands through death at the front, political execution or imprisonment. By the time that the two English women were packing their cases for Spain, she had fifty thousand women at her orders and was being feted in Nazi Germany by, among others, Hermann Göring and Dr Robert Ley, the head of the German Workers’ Front. By the end of the war, she would be – albeit briefly – one of the most powerful women in Franco’s Spain. Such triumphs, at best poor consolation for her personal losses, would see her embroiled in an unwanted rivalry with the leader of the Francoist women’s organisation, Pilar Primo de Rivera, and in the ruthless power struggles that bedevilled both sides in the Civil War.

In Republican Madrid, another mother, a distinguished Jewish writer and art critic, and a Socialist member of parliament for a southern agrarian province, was beset by a tumultuous kaleidoscope of feelings as a result of the outbreak of war. On the one hand, she hoped that the military uprising would be defeated and that a revolution would alleviate the crippling poverty of the rural labourers that she represented. On the other, she felt both pride and paralysing anxiety as a result of the wartime activities of her children. As soon as the military rebellion had been launched, militiamen had raced to the sierras to the North of Madrid to repel the insurgent forces of General Mola. Among them was the woman’s fifteen-year-old son. Despite her desperate pleas, he lied about his age and enlisted in the Republican Army. After three months training, he received a commission as the Republic’s youngest lieutenant. She tried to use her influence to keep him out of danger, but he successfully insisted on a posting in the firing line and took part in the most ferocious battles of the war. Her twenty-two-year-old daughter was a nurse at the front. Conquering her worries, their mother threw herself into war work, collecting clothes and food for the front, giving morale-raising speeches, organising the evacuation of children, and welfare work behind the lines. Like her Nationalist counterpart, she too would travel to raise support for her side in the war. And she too would find herself in an inadvertent rivalry – in her case, with the most charismatic woman of the Republican zone, Dolores Ibárruri – Pasionaria. Unlike the mother from Valladolid, for her there would be no victory, even a tainted one. The defeat of the Republic meant, for her, as for the many thousands who trudged across the Pyrenees into exile, incalculable personal loss and the crushing of the hopes which had underpinned her political labours. With the end of the war, her troubles were just beginning.

These four women, despite their different nationalities, social origins and ideologies, had much in common. They were brave, determined, intelligent, independent and compassionate. To differing degrees, all were damaged by the Spanish Civil War and its immediate and long-term consequences. As a direct result of the war, two would be widowed, two would lose children. Two would be deeply traumatised by their experiences in the front line. The shadow of the Spanish Civil War would hang over the rest of all their lives.

This book has no theoretical pretensions. Its objective is quite simple – to tell the unknown stories of four remarkable women whose lives were starkly altered by their experiences in the Spanish Civil War. All of them are relatively unknown. Neither of the two English women who served in the medical services of each zone had any political prominence at all. The two Spanish women who did have a notable public presence, the one in the Republican zone, the other in Nationalist Spain, were involved in tasks at some remove from the decision-making of the great war leaders of the two sides in conflict. Moreover, both at the time and subsequently, they functioned in the shadow of more famous rivals. None the less, for the purposes of this book, that is an advantage. Political detail takes a back seat, or is at least considered in the context of other personal relationships – with lovers, husbands and children. In that sense, this is a work of emotional history. It follows them from birth to death, in an attempt to show how, as women, wives and mothers, their lives were altered forever by the political conflicts of the 1930s, how their lives were altered for ever by the political conflicts of the 1930s, by the Spanish Civil War and by its consequences. It is hoped thereby to cast light into some unfamiliar corners of the conflict.

Writing the book has been a singularly emotional experience as well as a major effort of detective work. It is not the first time that I have written biography but my previous efforts have focused on more politically important figures. National prominence provided a chronological framework lacking from the material left behind by the four women whose lives are reconstructed here. The diaries and letters written by women tend to be much more intimate than those left by men. Accordingly, in the lives of all four of the women portrayed in this book, the personal has considerable priority over the public. Deeply aware of the problems of being a man writing about women, in the course of writing them, I asked many friends to read drafts of the different chapters. One of these readers is well-versed in both feminist and postmodernist theory. I was much heartened when she remarked encouragingly about one of my chapters that ‘even the theoretically illiterate can occasionally arrive at important insights by the use of antiquated empirical methods’. The implication is that it could all have been worked out by theory without all the messy biographical details. Even had I known how to do so, I fear that I would have thereby missed out on a moving experience and the reader would have missed the opportunity to know about four remarkable lives.

PRISCILLA SCOTT-ELLIS All for Love

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR has given rise to a gigantic bibliography running into more than fifteen thousand books. In 1995, a remarkably original addition to the literary legacy of the conflict passed almost unnoticed. Its importance was obscured by the fact that it appeared on the list of a small English publishing house in Norfolk. The Chances of Death consisted of an edited selection from a voluminous diary written between the autumn of 1937 and the end of the war by Priscilla Scott-Ellis.¹ The author, who had died twelve years earlier, was one of only two British women volunteers who served with Franco’s Nationalist forces during the war. Her vibrantly written and transparently honest account of her experiences is a mine of original insights into life behind the lines of the Francoist zone. Gut-wrenching descriptions of the front-line medical services alternate with accounts of the luxury still enjoyed in the rearguard by the Spanish aristocracy. Although highly readable, and deserving of a wider audience, there was every chance that this remarkable book would be a reference only for scholars.

However, an appreciative article published in the Madrid daily El País by the British historian Hugh Thomas provoked an astonishing polemic which in turn guaranteed that the book would be translated and published in Spain. Once at the centre of the ensuing scandal, the book, taken up by one of the country’s most prestigious publishers, achieved considerable popular success. Hugh Thomas’s glowing review, entitled ‘Sangre y agallas’ (blood and guts), gave an entirely accurate picture of the book’s merits. He praised its vivid portrayal of life in an emergency medical unit and its equally fascinating account of high society behind the lines. He also commented rightly that the diary presented an image of a brave, self-sacrificing but fun-loving girl, tirelessly driven by curiosity and enthusiasm.² Nine days later, a disputatious reply was published in the pages of El País’s Barcelona rival, La Vanguardia. Entitled ‘Un enigma’, its author was José Luis de Vilallonga y Cabeza de Vaca, the Marqués de Castellvell, a playboy and journalist, known for his appearance in several Spanish and French films, for several successful novels published in France and for a semi-official biography of the King of Spain, Juan Carlos, with whom he claimed friendship.³

Vilallonga attacked the editor of Priscilla Scott-Ellis’s diary, Raymond Carr, claiming that it was a forgery ‘written by God knows who and with what sinister intentions’. Accordingly, he dismissed Hugh Thomas’s remarks as the fruit of ignorance. Vilallonga justified these assertions by the fact that he had been married to Priscilla Scott-Ellis for seventeen years, from 1945 to 1961. He found it incredible that she had never mentioned such a diary to him. He now demanded to know the identities of ‘the real author of this diary’ and of the beneficiary of the book’s profits. Along the way, he presented a cruelly dismissive account of Priscilla Scott-Ellis and her family. He asserted that the author was incapable of writing a diary, claiming that her prose was ‘infantile’. He described her father, the Lord Howard de Walden, as a whisky-sodden alcoholic. He alleged that Priscilla Scott-Ellis was in fact illegitimate and really the fruit of an adulterous affair between her mother and Prince Alfonso de Orléans Borbón, a cousin of Alfonso XIII and a close friend of her parents. He further insinuated that the great love of her life, Ataúlfo de Orléans Borbón, who was in some ways inadvertently responsible for her decision to go to Spain, was a homosexual. His own marriage to her was thus presented as a way out of an embarrassing situation for Prince Alfonso. He stated that his own parents never approved of the marriage ‘to a foreigner through whose veins there coursed Jewish blood’.

Some weeks later, Vilallonga’s diatribe brought forth a dignified reply from Sir Raymond Carr.⁴ He pointed out that Vilallonga’s questions about the authorship and the royalties constituted an accusation that, for money, he had knowingly undertaken to prepare an edition of a forgery. Carr gave an account of the genesis of the diary and an explanation of the circumstances whereby it had lain unpublished for half a century. In fact, it had been on the point of publication in the autumn of 1939 but the project was aborted because of the outbreak of the Second World War. Carr also published in facsimile a section of the diary. He then went on to underline some of the inaccuracies of Vilallonga’s account of Priscilla Scott-Ellis’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War. Finally, in a spirit more of sadness than of anger, he expressed his surprise that ‘a Spanish gentleman should assert in a newspaper that his wife, deceased and unable to defend herself, was a bastard and her father a drunk’. He found it tragic that Vilallonga’s article should thus ‘defame the memory of a valiant and indomitable woman’.

Who then was this remarkable woman? Esyllt Priscilla Scott-Ellis – known as ‘Pip’ – was the daughter of two remarkably creative and eccentric parents, Margherita (Margot) van Raalte and Thomas Evelyn Scott-Ellis, the eighth Lord Howard de Walden and fourth Lord Seaford. Margot was born in 1890, the daughter of an extremely wealthy banker of Dutch origins, Charles van Raalte, and Florence Clow, an English women with some talent as an amateur painter. Florence van Raalte was such a snob that she was known in the family as Mrs van Royalty. From her parents, Margot had inherited money and both musical and artistic talent. She was a good painter and an accomplished musician. Her singing voice was good enough for her to be trained for the opera with Olga Lynn and she often gave concerts, even being conducted – in Debussy’s La Demoiselle Élue – by Sir Thomas Beecham. These interests would provide a formative influence in Pip’s childhood. Margot’s family lived at Aldenham Abbey near Watford in Hertfordshire, where they were often joined by members of the Spanish royal family. The Infanta Eulalia, Alfonso XIII’s aunt and a woman of scandalous reputation, was a friend of Margot’s parents. Princess Eulalia’s two sons, Prince Alfonso and Prince Luis de Orléans Borbón, were being educated at English boarding schools and often spent summer holidays with the family. In the late 1890s, the Van Raalte family bought the paradisical Brownsea Island in Poole harbour. With its medieval castle, two fresh-water lakes and dykes and streams, it was a wonderful place for children. Margot spent many idyllic summers there with other children including Prince Ali and Prince Luis. It was on Brownsea Island that Lieutenant-General Baden-Powell, a friend of Margot’s father, launched his Boy Scout Movement in 1907.⁵

Tommy Scott-Ellis was born in 1880. A soldier and a great sportsman, he was educated at Eton and Sandhurst. He was commissioned into the 10th Hussars in 1899 and fought in the Boer War. The man presented by Vilallonga as a helpless sot was actually a good cricketer and boxer and was the English amateur fencing champion. In 1901, he became an immensely rich man at the age of twenty-one when he inherited his father’s title and the fortune of his grandmother, Lady Lucy Cavendish-Bentinck. He then bought a racing motorboat and competed in highly perilous cross-Channel races. He also bought a yacht and was a member of the British Olympic Team in 1906. He then acquired racing stables. In his childhood, he too had spent happy summers at Brownsea Island which was then owned by the Cavendish-Bentinck family. Having had a bitterly miserable time at various boarding schools, Brownsea became a haven for him. He now tried unsuccessfully to buy it. Deeply disappointed, he was consoled when the new owners, Charles and Florence van Raalte, turned out to be friends of his mother, Blanche. He was thus invited to Brownsea to sail in summer and to shoot in winter.⁶

Shortly after marrying Margot van Raalte, Tommy, anxious to keep a link with the Army, joined the Westminster Dragoons. Their first children, twin sister and brother, Bronwen and John Osmael, were born on 27 November 1912. When the First World War broke out, Tommy left for Egypt as second-in-command of his regiment. At the time Margot was pregnant with their third child, Elizabeth, who was born on 5 December 1914. At the first opportunity, however, she arranged to join Tommy in Egypt. As was commonplace among the upper classes at the time, Margot thought it normal to leave her three children with a nurse. At Chirk Castle, the family’s country seat near Llangollen in North Wales, they were neglected to the extent of contracting rickets.⁷ At first Margot was rather bored in Egypt but after Tommy volunteered to go with the British invasion forces to Gallipoli, and casualties began to arrive from Turkey, she joined a friend, Mary Herbert, the wife of Aubrey Herbert, a contemporary of Tommy’s at Eton, in setting up a hospital. One of the Herberts’ daughters, Gabriel, was also to work with Franco’s medical services during the Spanish Civil War; the other, Laura, was to be the second wife of the novelist Evelyn Waugh. At the end of 1915, Tommy was posted back to Egypt and Margot was able to live with him there until in May 1916, they returned to England. She was by then pregnant once more. In November 1916, Tommy got himself transferred to the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in order to serve in France. Two days after he left, Priscilla was born in London on 15 November 1916. The real sequence of events undermines Vilallonga’s accusation that her father was Prince Alfonso de Orléans Borbón.⁸ Margot and Tommy would have two further daughters, Gaenor, born on 2 June 1919 and Rosemary on 28 October 1922.

In later life, when she had become addicted to drama and excitement, Pip would attribute her taste for adventure to having been born during an air raid; more likely it was inherited from her parents. According to her brother, when she was a toddler, the family called her ‘Chatterbox’. Ensconced in her high chair, she would chunter away irrespective of anyone listening or understanding. As a child, she used her Welsh name of Esyllt (the equivalent of Iseult or Isolde). However, she quickly became irritated when people twisted this to Ethel, so she switched to Priscilla, which in turn became reduced to Pip. Her mother remembered how useful she always made herself with her younger sisters: Rosemary was a rascal, ‘Pip alone could manage her with loving ease.’ Pip was an affectionate child, always desperate to please and to be liked – and thus hurt by the coldness of her parents. Gaenor recalled that Pip was ‘a very pretty girl with golden curls and blue eyes, and bitterly resented the disappearance of the curls and her entry into the comparative drabness of schoolroom life’. She was brought up in the splendour of Seaford House in Belgrave Square until she was nine, attending a London day school – Queen’s College in Harley Street. While still a child in London, she suffered a distressing riding accident in Rotten Row in Hyde Park. She was thrown from her horse and when her foot was caught in a stirrup she was dragged some distance. She was nervous about riding for a while but, according to her sister, ‘she grew up to become an extremely brave horsewoman, and to show courage in all sorts of difficult and dangerous situations’.⁹

Withal, it was a privileged existence. Margot was concerned that her children be independent and resourceful which was difficult given the legions of servants whose job it was to make life easy for the family. With a great imaginative leap, considering her own station in life, Margot supposed that ‘some, if not all, of the girls might have to cope and ‘‘manage’’ in later life’. To create a contrast with the world of housemaids who cleared up books and toys and grooms who saddled and rubbed down horses and ponies, a little house was built at Chirk called the Lake Hut. There, the girls made do on their own, cooking, washing-up, and looking after themselves. Pip took to this very well. When their parents took the children on trips on their sixty-foot motor launch, Etheldreda, Pip and Gaenor would do the cooking. In her mother’s recollection, ‘when it was rough it was Pip who managed to produce food for us all. She was gallant and highly efficient at ten and twelve years old.’ Holidays at Brownsea were enlivened by days camping at nearby Furzy Island. Indeed, Chirk, Brownsea and Furzy provided the basis of blissful fun for the children. They had considerable independence to wander the fields, the woods and streams. When they were required for meals, if Margot was present, she would unleash the power of her soprano in Brünnhilde’s call from Die Walküre and they would come scampering home.¹⁰

All in all, there were idyllic elements but there remains a question mark about the impact on the children of the lengthy separations from both Margot and Tommy. The Scott-Ellis girls saw relatively little of their parents, particularly of their father. When they did, emotional warmth was in short supply. Tommy and Margot were, according to their son, incapable of showing emotion. They both seemed totally remote, capable of impersonal kindness but not of understanding. Pip’s cousin Charmian van Raalte, who was brought up with the Scott-Ellis girls, having been abandoned by her own mother, recalled that ‘neither Tommy nor Margot ever showed a grain of affection to any of the children’. Indeed, when Thomas Howard de Walden returned from France, where he had fought in the mass slaughter of Passchendaele, he was dourly taciturn, in shock from the shelling and the butchery. In his own description, part of him had died in the war and the part that survived was ‘no more than a husk, living out a life that he finds infinitely wearisome’.¹¹ However, on the rare occasions when their parents did acknowledge the existence of the children, they seemed, fleetingly, to have fun together. Lord Howard de Walden had a burning interest in the theatre as well as being a musician of some talent. At Chirk, he would often delight guests with his playing in the music room. He wrote the libretto for three operas by Joseph Holbrooke. He ran the Haymarket Theatre for several years. He often organised theatrical events involving his children and their friends, writing six plays for them. With professionally produced costumes and scenery, these were exciting enterprises. In one, a part was taken by Brian Johnston, later famous as a broadcaster. Moreover, baskets of costumes from old productions at the Haymarket, with armour and helmets, ended up in the family home, swelled the dressing-up basket and transformed many childhood games.

Although he seemed always to have more of a bond with Pip, Tommy did not, in general, have much time for girls. He once wrote of his granddaughters: ‘The girls are alright but they are girls and there is no more to be said about that.’ He rarely spoke to his daughters and Pip was the only one not to regard him as a complete stranger. His conversation was too erudite and dismissive, his interests too varied. When in England, Tommy and Margot had an astonishing array of friends and acquaintances that included G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, George Bernard Shaw, Diaghilev, Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, Thomas Beecham, Rudyard Kipling, Cole Porter, Ivor Novello, Alicia Markova, Arturo Toscanini, Richard Tauber, James Barrie, P. G. Wodehouse, Arthur Rubinstein and Somerset Maugham. He was President of the London Symphony Orchestra. In Wales, he was an especially generous patron of the arts and was made a Bard at the Eisteddfod. With his wife, he shared a passion for opera and they had their own box at Covent Garden.¹²

Tommy was a major expert in medieval weaponry and heraldry about which he wrote a number of important reference works. He even had his own suit of armour made in order to assess the difficulty of swordplay. On one occasion, the painter Augustus John, while staying at Chirk Castle, was quite taken aback to find his host reading The Times, dressed in a suit of armour. The reason for this eccentricity was that Lord Howard de Walden wished to ascertain how easily an armour-clad man could get up from a prostrate position. To avoid spending hours helplessly trapped on the floor, he was awaiting a companion before beginning the experiment. Tommy was deeply interested in falconry and regularly went hawking. He had farming interests in East Africa including a coffee farm in Kenya and he was often away for long periods on safari. In 1926, however, he took Pip with him for several months. Her bravery during brushes with wild animals in Kenya reinforced his pride in her. She would later describe to Gaenor her terror on the walk in the dark to the outside lavatory. On another occasion, he took her on a lengthy sailing trip to the north of Scotland. In contrast, Margot got on less well with Pip because, as her sister recalled, they were so alike in their energy, practicality and impetuousness that they irritated each other.¹³

While Margot and Tommy enjoyed the London season or were travelling abroad, Pip, Bronwen, Elizabeth and Gaenor spent much of their childhood in the grandeur of Chirk Castle. Chirk had been an old border castle on Offa’s Dyke. There, they were educated by a series of governesses, usually two at a time. The life in the castle fed Pip’s taste for adventure. An ancient castle full of armour and swords and shields inspired games of make-believe involving knights and dragons, fairies and damsels in distress. The fact of having ponies and vast tracts of Welsh hillside on which to roam also encouraged her imagination. The governesses were easily typecast as ogres and giants. These different women each had to stand in for the girls’ frequently absent mother whose social commitments were extraordinarily time-consuming. Moreover, their regular replacement added an element of insecurity into Pip’s early life. At least she had avoided the worst childhood wounds of the repeated separations of boarding school. Only in early 1932 when she was fifteen, and Gaenor twelve, was Pip – to her delight – sent away to Benenden.¹⁴ Pip was a sensitive girl and the consequence of this upbringing was that, for all the protection provided by money and class, not to mention her indisputable bravery, she was always rather insecure and eager to please. She could be easily humiliated by the verbal cruelty, or simple thoughtlessness, of others. Nevertheless, as her voluminous diaries show, she was an indefatigable optimist. Her brother remembered her as always ‘of a cheerful and jolly disposition’.¹⁵

The patrician atmosphere in which Pip was brought up was characterised by a degree of paternalism towards the less privileged. Both Tommy and Margot were active patrons of hospitals. Tommy, however, was, outside the arts, a considerable snob. He once reprimanded Margot after a visit by the Prime Minister, the Conservative Stanley Baldwin, and his wife. Tommy commented to Margot: ‘You really should not ask those sort of people.’ That was an indication of his snobbery rather than of his political orientation which was inevitably very right-wing. In early May 1926, during the nine days of the General Strike, the ballroom of Seaford House was home to about two hundred undergraduates from Oxford and Cambridge who had volunteered to join a special police force. Effectively, they were engaged in strikebreaking. From 4 to 12 May, for twenty-four hours every day, they were on call. Telephoned news of a demonstration or clashes with pickets would see lorry engines roar to life. The enthusiastic scions of middle-class families, armed with truncheons and well fed by Margot’s caterers, would set off for some sport.¹⁶ Similar attitudes underlay Pip’s later involvement in the Spanish Civil War.

In 1932, during holidays from Benenden, Pip had learned to fly in a Gypsy Moth bought by her mother. Nervous because Pip was already showing signs of the wanderlust that would characterise her later life, Margot prevented her taking her pilot’s certificate.¹⁷ She remained at Benenden for a year and two terms before going on to a finishing school in Paris in the autumn of 1933. When Pip left Paris in early 1934, her already good French was much improved. After skiing at Mürren in Switzerland, she spent time with an Austrian aristocratic – and anti-Nazi – family, the Harrachs, in Munich. In 1931, before going up to Oxford, John had gone to Munich to learn German. On his first day, driving his car, he ran over a man who turned out to be Adolf Hitler. The future Führer was, unfortunately, unhurt. Shortly afterwards John met, and fell in love with Irene ‘Nucci’ Harrach and in 1934, they were married. Elizabeth, Pip, Gaenor and Rosemary were all bridesmaids at the wedding.¹⁸ Pip’s first interest in boys was focused on a handsome young flyer called William Rhodes Moorhouse. They went out together a few times but her adolescent crush on him was not reciprocated. In any case, Pip was about to become involved in a relationship with the Orléans Borbón family that would erase thoughts of William and dramatically affect the remainder of her life.

Alfonso de Orléans, who had established a friendship with Margot van Raalte during the summers that they spent at Brownsea, was married to a beautiful German princess, Beatrice Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Prince Ali, as he was known in the family, was an intrepid aviator and also a cousin of the King of Spain, Alfonso XIII. His wife was a cousin of Alfonso XIII’s consort, Queen Victoria Eugenia. Prince Ali was a fitness fanatic and an enthusiastic military man who was determined to prove that being of royal blood imposed an iron duty to be useful to his country.¹⁹ From 1909 until 1914, and then again from 1917, he and Princess Bea – as the family knew her – spent their summers at Brownsea Island with the Van Raalte family. After Margot married Tommy Scott-Ellis, the children of the Orléans and the Scott-Ellis families spent summers together at Brownsea.²⁰ Prince Ali and Princess Bea had three sons, Álvaro (b. Coburg, 1910), Alfonso (b. Madrid, 28 May 1912) – known always as Alonso to distinguish him from the several other Alfonsos in the Royal Family, and Ataúlfo (b. Madrid, 1913). When in Spain in 1924, they lived in their palace at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, in the province of Cádiz. The Palacio de Montpensier consisted of three different buildings combined in the mid-nineteenth century into a pseudo-Moorish palace. About half a mile away, the family also had a huge English garden called ‘El Botánico’ within which there were two houses.²¹ Alfredo Kindelán, the head of the Spanish air force and a close friend of Alfonso de Orléans, was a frequent visitor.

After the flight of Alfonso XIII on 14 April 1931, Alfonso de Orléans Borbón regarded it as his duty to resign his commission and accompany the King on his painful journey from Madrid, via Cartagena, into exile in France.²² Prince Ali’s properties having been confiscated by the Republican Government, his family settled in Switzerland. He reconciled himself to living on his wits – and his not inconsiderable talents as an aeronautical engineer and a linguist (he spoke fluent English, French, German and Italian as well as Spanish). For Alfonso de Orléans, it was always a matter of principle to demonstrate that royal personages were not all effete and useless. Energetic and resourceful, remembering that he had once met Henry Ford, he wrote and asked him for a job. While awaiting a reply, he worked sweeping up in bars. The American magnate replied quickly and instructed him to report for work at the Ford factory at Asnière, outside Paris. He did so first as a cleaner, then as a salesman. Then he was soon transferred to the Ford headquarters at Dagenham in England where he worked variously, under the pseudonym Mr Dorleans, in stock control, accountancy and public relations. Within four years, his dynamism and initiative saw him made director of the company’s European operations. Princess Bea had moved from Zurich to London and kept in close touch with the Howard de Walden family. During this time, the Howard de Waldens commissioned Augustus John – who had set himself up as a kind of artist-in-residence at Chirk – to paint a portrait of Princess Bea.²³

Pip had inherited from her mother a passion for the opera although her own violin studies had not borne great fruit. Wherever she went, she was always accompanied by a gramophone and a box of records. That Pip was a cultured and witty girl is amply illustrated by her diary. The extant part dates back to August 1934. She describes a stay in Salzburg with her mother and her sisters Gaenor and Elizabeth who, at the time, was being wooed by the great cellist Grigor Piatigorski. There Pip revelled in a performance of Don Giovanni conducted by Bruno Walter in which the Don was sung in Italian by Ezio Pinza. She was also entranced by the playing of Piatigorski when he serenaded Elizabeth. The family was en route to Munich for the wedding of Pip’s brother John to Nucci Harrach.²⁴ In 1934, Princess Bea and her son Prince Ataúlfo stayed at Seaford House when they came over for the marriage of the Duke of Kent to Princess Marina. Pip also made her début in 1934. It was probably at this time that she began to notice Ataúlfo – or Touffles as he was known in the family, seeing him not as the child with whom she had played at Brownsea but as a charming young man. Both Gaenor and Pip’s cousin Charmian van Raalte recalled Ataúlfo as ‘definitely not goodlooking’. He had a round and podgy face but women liked him for his gentle manner and his amusing conversation. He played the piano and danced with extraordinary delicacy. If to some this denoted effeminacy, Pip did not notice.²⁵ At this time, Pip was gawky and unattractive. She was worried about her weight – nearing thirteen stones (83 kilos). A photograph of her at a ball in May 1935 shows her looking frumpy, nervous and ill-at-ease.

When the military rebellion of 18 July 1936 precipitated the Spanish Civil War, Prince Alfonso de Orléans Borbón was in Bucharest on Ford business. He hastened to Burgos where he arrived on 2 August 1936. He offered his own and his sons’ services as pilots and was bitterly disappointed to be told that General Mola wished to avoid the uprising having a monarchist character. He was ordered to leave Spain. He then wrote to his friend, General Alfredo Kindelán, who had been named head of the rebel air force, and to Franco himself, pointing out that his two elder sons, Álvaro and Alfonso Orléans y Coburgo, had earned pilots’ licences in England in the Officers’ Training Corps. In consequence, at the beginning of November, they were able to join the Nationalist forces. However, Franco considered that Prince Ali himself was more useful to his cause in London. There he was able to facilitate the delivery of Ford trucks to the Nationalists. Moreover, Princess Bea was carrying on effective propaganda on behalf of Franco in establishment circles in Britain. She was also raising significant sums of money for food and hospital supplies for the Nationalist cause. Alfonso Orléans y Coburgo was killed on 18 November 1936. Flying as observer, his Italian Romeo Ro37bis biplane crashed while flying from Seville to Talavera de la Reina. The aircraft flew into a mountain at Ventas de Culebrín near Monesterio in the south of the province of Badajoz. In consequence, his younger brother Ataúlfo immediately volunteered.²⁶ Pip was devastated when, at a dance in New York in January 1937, she had been told of Alonso’s death.²⁷

In November 1936, Pip had sailed with her father for New York to stay with friends, a Mrs Wagner and her daughter Peggy. The trip would expand her horizons considerably. ‘I wonder what this year will bring me. I have a feeling lots. I hope so. I do wish Touffles would write.’²⁸ He was constantly on her mind. ‘Last night’, she wrote on 3 January 1937, ‘I dreamed Touffles was terribly ill and all tied up in bandages and as white as a sheet. Oh dear oh dear. I wish he was not out in Spain in the war. God how foul wars are. Every time I think of Alonso it makes me feel sick and think of the cruel futility of it all. What a mess human nature is.’ The ‘divine’ Tyrone Power in a movie reminded her of Touffles. ‘I don’t suppose even if Touffles gets back from Spain alright he would ever want to marry an unattractive fool like me so I might as well stop wishing.’ Letters from him merely left her miserable and worried.²⁹ She wrote on 22 January, ‘I have put my new photo of Touffles up on my bed table and simply adore it. I am silly to let myself go on pretending he might love me one day because I know he won’t but I can’t stop myself being nuts over him so I might as well enjoy it as much as I can.’ New York was a regular round of cinema, theatre and nightclubs, punctuated by having her fortune told at the Gypsy Tearooms. As always, she maintained her interest in music, attending a concert by the violinist Josef Szigeti. Among several historic performances at the New York Metropolitan, she attended Rigoletto with Lawrence Tibbett in the title role, Die Walküre with Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior, and Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila with Gertrud Wettergren, as well as a Cavalleria Rusticana and Le Coq d’Or.30 Nevertheless, she was restless. ‘Life here is so idle and pointless that I am pining to have some work or something to occupy me. We just do nothing.’ She managed to persuade the Wagners that she had to leave in case Touffles returned from Spain.³¹ While waiting for her passage home, she worried about her weight, and danced and flirted with an eligible young Cuban called Alvaro García.

Her passion for Touffles was boosted by the flirtation with García whom she had met at the Wagners’ home in New York. On 26 January 1937, the twenty-year-old Pip wrote in her diary:

I am so shocked at myself by my behaviour tonight and so bewildered by it all that I don’t even know if I enjoyed it. I went out with Alvaro to a Cuban place where we danced mambas (sic) until 4 o’clock in the morning. He dances divinely and it was grand fun. He made violent love to me the whole time and kissed me and I kissed him in the taxi home. But then he saw me up to the apartment and made such passionate love to me I was scared stiff. He even pulled down my dress and kissed my bosom which horrified me but I could not stop him. He did everything under the sun and I let him. I am certainly gaining experience but I don’t know if I like it.

By the next day, reflecting on the incident, she wrote: ‘The trouble with my flirtation is that all it has done is to wake me up and make me want Touffles to make love to me even more than I did before. Oh hell and damnation.’³² ‘Make love’, of course, meant rather less then, as this passage illustrates, than it does now.

Day after day, she wrote of missing Touffles. On 2 February, she wrote perceptively: ‘I think the trouble with all of us is our age and suppressed sex. I would like to have a hectic affair with someone but of course never will.’ The next night, however, she came very near. After a cocktail party and dancing into the early hours, ‘Alvaro took me home and came into the apartment where he made love to me on the sofa too divinely for words. It was heaven and again I behaved outrageously and let him do even worse things than before.’ She refused to have sex with him and was amused by the fact that he clearly believed her to be much more experienced than was actually the case.³³

On her return passage on the SS Paris, she wrote: ‘I hate to be all alone, I feel scared and depressed.’ Her essential insecurity was revealed in other diary entries. ‘Everyone on board is sweet to me and they all seem to like me so much. It is so lovely to know people like you. If only I have changed enough to make Touffles like me too.’ The round of cocktail parties and dancing terminated on the last night on board in a dramatic encounter with a French diplomat. ‘God knows why but this evening I went off the rails and was mildly raped. I can’t think why I let Mr Brugere do such a thing, I must have been crazy.’ Having been assaulted by the man on deck, she later went to his cabin, ‘so now I don’t know whether I am still a virgin or not. I think not. It was heavenly but frightening.’ She left his cabin ‘feeling very ashamed and yet all excited and happy in a way’. The event seemed to unleash a hitherto repressed passion. After a ‘hot’ encounter in a taxi with a film director ‘Frenche’ whom she met on the ship from New York, she wrote: ‘I seem to have become so damn oversexed that I just can’t stop myself. I don’t know whether it is suppressed sex bursting forth or my thyroid pills or what, but the effect is incredible for the erstwhile priggish me.’ On returning to Chirk, she took up riding with a vengeance. She started to dream about Touffles again. Life in London was an endless kaleidoscopic social round in which she occasionally bumped into ‘that filthy fucking Frenche’. She took singing and piano lessons, fenced most days, regularly went to the theatre and the cinema, often visited the hairdresser and fashion shows and consulted more fortune-tellers. Despite her sexual progress, she was still young enough to sit with friends and be scared by talk of ghosts.³⁴

In early March, Prince Ali appeared in London. Revealingly, Pip refused his dinner invitation to spend time with her father. ‘Papa and I get on so well. We talk for hours every evening. He knows so much about every subject. I wish I had his brains.’ When she did go to see Princess Bea, she found her heartbroken by the death of her son Alonso. Pip got news of her beloved Touffles who, as befitted the son of a German princess, had joined Hitler’s Condor Legion and was now flying as an observer in German bombers. As always, being reminded of Touffles provoked her into a flirtation. At a society hostess’s dance, she ‘spent most of the evening dancing with crazy Francis Cochrane to whom I got engaged just for fun. He is great fun and dances quite well. So now I have a fiancé for a change. I shall break it off again soon.’ Nothing more was heard of him thereafter. Her social life was more of a whirlwind than a roundabout. When she was not in the country, at the races or at Brooklands, she took every advantage of what London had to offer. A typical day would see her rise late, and after breakfast, practise fencing or do some work in relation to the small stud farm at Chirk. She would then lunch at the Ritz or the Savoy with friends. Lunch would be followed by shopping, a dress fitting, the hairdresser and then tea with some family friend. In the evening, she would attend one or more cocktail parties, a dance in the home of some society hostess or the theatre, the ballet or the opera, then dinner, perhaps at Quaglino’s or the Savoy Grill, then on to the Café de Paris or a nightclub. She attended a number of legendary operatic occasions, including Eva Turner and Giovanni Martinelli singing Puccini’s Turandot at Covent Garden. Dancing until the early hours of most mornings, she met lots of attractive men but nothing came of her flirtations with them.³⁵ When, on 24 March, she finally got a letter from Touffles requesting her photograph, she pranced down the passage ‘singing at the top of my voice’. Already thinking of going to Spain, she started Spanish lessons.³⁶

The ceaseless round of fun was beginning to pall when her life was changed by a chance conversation with her mother – ‘so nice the way she leaves me to myself, no advice, no orders, just perfectly sweet’. On Easter Sunday, 28 March 1937, she wrote: ‘This evening after dinner we began to talk about Spain and Mama suddenly said that Gabriel Herbert was out there doing nursing and smuggling medicines etc. I said, ‘‘God I wish I was’’ so Moke (Monica FitzClarence, a friend of Margot’s) said ‘‘Why don’t you?’’ I explained I would have long ago if I had thought for a moment Mama would let me.’ To her astonishment, her mother said that she would give Pip permission if she produced proper plans mapped out and aimed to do important work out there – ‘but I must find out and arrange it myself and she can’t help me. So now I must see Mrs Herbert and Princess Bea and see what I can do to help. My chance at last I hope!’ Margot had not expected such a burst of focused energy and was horrified. She regarded Pip as ‘both frivolous and pretty. She loved hairdressers, young men and cream buns. She would go to several cinemas in one afternoon and I deplored that she would not face up to anything serious.’ The Spanish Civil War was rather too serious even for Margot. Pip herself was enthused by the idea of going to Spain and determined to overcome all obstacles. She was desperate to be of some use. ‘It is a bore to look so young and silly, it will be very difficult to make anyone think I really mean it and am capable of doing it.’ She now asked her mother to let her take first-aid classes as well as Spanish lessons. She also spoke to Mrs Herbert and her daughter Laura, who was soon to be married to Evelyn Waugh. Presumably on the basis of communication with her sister, Gabriel, Laura told Pip that ‘it was awfully difficult to get in now.³⁷

Perhaps she was inspired by her mother’s earlier example running a hospital in Egypt. It is an extraordinary coincidence that the mother of the only other British woman to volunteer to work for Franco, Gabriel Herbert, had also worked in that Egyptian hospital. Gabriel Herbert herself was a competent and energetic young woman. In September 1936, she had gone to Burgos and returned to London with a list of medical supplies requested by the Junta. She then returned to Spain with an ambulance. With a second vehicle sent in November, it became the Equipo Anglo-Español Móvil de Servicio al Frente. Gabriel Herbert herself acted as an intermediary between the medical team in Spain and the London committee of the Catholic Bishops’ Fund for the Relief of Spanish Distress. Pip’s reference to her ‘nursing and smuggling medicines’ was a misunderstanding of Gabriel’s activities in taking supplies into Spain.³⁸

Pip’s Spanish progressed quickly. Nevertheless, while she tried, in a desultory fashion, to find out more about going to Spain, she began to see a lot of ‘the most gorgeous tall hero called John Geddes’, a fashionable young man-about-town. They danced together, got drunk together and talked about their respective broken hearts, she about Touffles and he about a girl named Ann Hamilton Grace who had ditched him. They walked their dogs and within a couple of weeks of knowing him, she could write: ‘I dote on him and hope I will see him again soon.’³⁹ By 13 April, they were lovers. She found the experience physically painful ‘but it was fun’. ‘I still don’t feel even a twinge of conscience or remorse. And oddly I don’t like him any more or less.’ After sleeping with him a second time, she wrote: ‘He is an absolute darling although definitely rather a cad.’ She was taken entirely by surprise, at the end of April, when he asked her to marry him. She was emboldened to refuse after being told by her cousin, Charmian van Raalte, that she had had a letter from Touffles ‘who is livid because I have not written for ages’.⁴⁰ She was also distracted by Gaenor’s coming-out dance at Seaford House which was to be attended by 650 people including the Duke and Duchess of Kent. At dinner beforehand, she was delegated to look after the then seventeen-year-old King Faroukh of Egypt whom she thought ‘a dear and we got on like billyoh’. Rather alone in London, he was taken by Pip to Regent’s Park Zoo, the Tower of London, St Paul’s Cathedral and several theatres.⁴¹

The big event was the coronation of George VI on 12 May. Pip was as bedazzled by its magnificent pageantry as the rest of the world. She attended the first court ball of the new reign which she found ‘heaven’. On returning home ‘I put on Mama’s tiara and earrings and looked too regal for words. How I wish I had one.’⁴² She had started writing to Touffles again and, on the strength of hearing that he might come to London on leave, had begun to diet. Her diary at this time began to have increasing references to her hating ‘that filthy smelly town London’ and even ‘I hate social life.’⁴³ Frantically hopeful of seeing Touffles, Pip was further reminded of the ongoing Civil War on 1 June. Two days before, the German navy had mounted a large-scale artillery bombardment of the Mediterranean city of Almería in southeastern Spain. Coming out of a newsreel with some friends, Pip ran into a Communist demonstration chanting ‘Stop Hitler’s War on Children!’ Nan Green was among the demonstrators. However, she was discouraged when, accompanying her mother to lunch at the Herberts’, she met Gabriel who ‘was very interesting but convinced me more that there is no point in my going out there as a nurse or anything else. Damn it.’⁴⁴

Just when she was on the verge of abandoning thoughts of Spain, Touffles turned up unexpectedly in London. On Wednesday 23 June, she wrote: ‘He rang me up this morning and we lunched out together at San Marco and spent the afternoon buying records and talking. He is exactly the same as he always was and I like him as much as I always did.’ The next day he broke a date to take her to an air show. She now admitted to herself what had been obvious for some time. ‘I can’t pretend to myself any longer. I know I am just as much in love with him as I always have been for the last three years. Oh God what hell it is, all so pointless, just lack of control.’ On 29 June, he flew back to Spain from Croydon. After seeing him off, Pip was desperately miserable.⁴⁵

However, for all her distress at seeing him go back to the war, his visit had reawakened her interest in Spain. Her notions of what was going on there derived almost entirely from Princess Bea ‘who really knows what she is talking about. I simply adore her and admire her enormously for her courage about everything.’ Her new-found determination to go to Spain roused her from her misery. Her hopes were raised on 6 July when she heard that she had passed her first aid and nursing exams with high grades. Nevertheless, bored with her social life in London and still unsure how to get to Spain, she fell into a limbo. ‘I am in a very odd sort of numb way. I don’t mind much what I do or where I go as long as it is more or less peaceful.’ She was concentrating on her Spanish lessons with some dedication. On 22 July, without much expectation of a helpful reply, she wrote a long letter to Touffles asking him how to go about getting a posting in Spain.⁴⁶ Her interest in Spain was further fired by a book by an aviation journalist, Nigel Tangye, Red, White and Spain. Tangye had got into Nationalist Spain on the basis of letters attesting to his pro-Nazi sympathies. His entirely pro-Nationalist account probably confirmed for her things that she had already been told by Princess Bea. After lurid tales of Red atrocities, it related that, if the ‘Reds’ won, there would be a ‘Communist State, complete suppression of the Church, mass-murder of landowners and employers, officers and priests, and abolition of all freedom’. Tangye asserted that ‘The Government, or Red, forces are entirely controlled and supplied by Russia.’ Coincidentally, Tangye travelled for part of his time in Spain with a cavalry officer, the Barón de Segur, whose son was that same José Luis de Vilallonga who would later denigrate Pip’s diaries.⁴⁷

Things began to move a little faster when Prince Ali returned briefly to London. At dinner, Pip told Princess Bea of her firm intention to go to Spain and asked for her help. Pip’s new-found determination and recently acquired nursing qualifications impressed the Infanta that she was serious. Accordingly, she concluded that Pip could be useful and undertook to find out where she should go as well as getting someone with whom to practise her Spanish. Pip was so heartened that she determined once more to ‘get thin and fit and learn more Spanish’. She went up to Chirk in her Super Swallow Jaguar. She found her mother was making plans for her twenty-first birthday party on 16 November. Accordingly, Pip reminded her of her Spanish project and Margot van Raalte was far less insouciant than she had been three months earlier. Now, she was concerned about her daughter’s safety in the midst of so many men and decided to write to Princess Bea. Pip, confident that she could bring her mother around, had begun to read another blood-curdling account of Nationalist heroism, Major McNeill-Moss’s The Epic of the Alcazar, which she found ‘very interesting and exciting’. McNeill-Moss’s book consisted of a romantically heroic account of the Republican siege of the Nationalist garrison in the Alcázar of Toledo from July to September and a notoriously mendacious whitewash of the Nationalist massacre of the civilian defenders of the town of Badajoz on 14 August 1936.⁴⁸

The big leap forward in Pip’s plans came when Princess Bea replied to Margot Howard de Walden’s letter. Her enquiries had revealed that the level of confusion in Nationalist Spain was such that nothing for Pip could be organised from London. However, a change in her own circumstances opened the way for Pip. Prince Ali had been bombarding Franco with pleas for an active role in the fighting. Through the intercession of General Kindelán, the head of the Nationalist air force and the most prominent monarchist among the Nationalist generals, his wish had finally been granted. Accordingly, Princess Bea was going to return to Spain in the autumn to be near her husband’s air base in the south. To Pip’s intense delight, the Infanta proposed that she accompany her, assuring Margot that she would look after Pip ‘as if she were her own daughter’. Under these circumstances, her parents did not object. Half a century later, her brother was still perplexed by their lack of anxiety.⁴⁹

Pip’s girlish joy was all too understandable since she was not only going to Spain but proximity to Touffles was virtually guaranteed. ‘Princess B really is a saint,’ she wrote on 8 August. ‘It will be so nice to go with her.’ She had little notion of the horrors that she would encounter. On 26 August, she wrote: ‘What an adventure though a gruesome one.’ With her Spanish future apparently resolved, she devoted much of the summer at Chirk to riding, playing tennis and learning golf. Princess Bea arranged a Spanish teacher, named Evelina Calvert, and Pip set herself a tough schedule in preparation for the journey. She was ecstatic when she learned that Princess Bea planned to take her to Sanlúcar by car on 22 September, via Paris, San Sebastián, Salamanca and Seville.⁵⁰

Her preparations became frantic – increased efforts to improve her Spanish and some half-hearted dieting which got her weight down to 12 stone 3 pounds. A daily round of shopping, visits to the hairdresser (on one occasion to have her eyelashes dyed), inoculations, arrangements for her passport and visa for Spain. This included a visit to the Foreign Office where she was interviewed by William H. Montagu-Pollock, one of the four men with principal responsibility for British policy on Spanish affairs. That she was received by a functionary of such eminence was an indication of her social, if not her political, importance. On 18 September, she went with Princess Bea to Portsmouth to meet ex-Queen Victoria Eugenia of Spain. As the day for her departure drew near, she began to worry – ‘I am almost frightened of going to Spain now’ (19th); ‘Somehow now the great moment has come, I feel almost scared and rather depressed’ (20th); ‘I wish I knew exactly what I was going to and where … I still can’t really believe that this time next week I shall be in the middle of war. A strange and exciting life.’⁵¹ What a contrast with Nan Green who knew rather more, from her husband’s letters, about the hell into which she was going.

Pip’s reasons for going to Spain had little to do with the real issues being fought out there. She lacked the ideological conviction of either Nan Green or even Gabriel Herbert who was a devout Catholic and believed that Franco’s war effort was a crusade to save Christian civilisation. According to her sister Gaenor, Pip’s views were ‘a simple expression of support for her friends, and therefore pro-monarchy and anti-Communist’. In the case of one friend, Ataúlfo de Orléans Borbón (Touffles), much more than friendship was at stake. There can be no doubting that Pip went to war for love. It helped that her parents had been much taken by Prince Ali’s repetition of the canard that the military had rebelled in July 1936 because a Communist takeover in Spain had been imminent. However, her plans would probably have come to nothing if her adored Princess Bea had not taken a hand. Pip’s eventual placement as a nurse would owe much to the Infanta’s prominent position in the Nationalist organisation known as La Delegación Nacional de Asistencia a Frentes y Hospitales, a patrician welfare operation headed by the Carlist María Rosa Urraca Pastor and largely run by monarchists.⁵²

Complete with trunks and hatboxes containing the accumulated fruits of her last months’ shopping trips, Pip left England in some style in Princess Bea’s chauffeur-driven limousine on 21 September 1937. At Dover, they were met by the station master in his top hat and were swept into a private compartment on the boat train.⁵³ Then it was on to Paris for some more shopping and a visit to the World’s Fair. This was the great exhibition for which Picasso’s Guernica was commissioned by the Spanish Republican Government.⁵⁴ Interestingly, for someone just off to the Spanish Civil War, Pip did not see it, instead spending her time at the German and English pavilions. On one side of the Pont d’Iéna on the Rive Droite of the Seine, the German pavilion, designed by Albert Speer, glaring at its equally pugnacious Soviet rival, was an architectural representation of Nazi aggression. Huge, thirty-three-feet-high statues of muscle-bound Soviet heroes strode triumphantly forward, their way apparently blocked by the naked Teutonic heroes guarding the German design, a huge cubic mass, erected on stout pillars, and crowned by a gigantic eagle with the swastika in its claws. For Pip, this was ‘the best’. The British pavilion symbolised the tired gentility of appeasement. The British displays were of golf balls, pipes, fishing rods, equestrian equipment and tennis rackets while the German and the Italian were of military might. Pip thought the British pavilion ‘very bad’.⁵⁵ She and Princess Bea were then driven on 23 September to Biarritz where Pip was delighted to discover that she could understand most of the Spanish that she began to hear. They were received by Sir Henry Chilton, the British Ambassador to Republican Spain. The pro-Nationalist Chilton had been on holiday in San Sebastián when the Civil War broke out and had refused to return to Madrid. With the aid of the French Ambassador to Spain, they managed to get across the frontier to San Sebastián on the following day. With the beautiful resort bathed in sunshine, it was like being on holiday.

The unwarlike nature of the trip continued when she and Princess Bea were joined for dinner by one of General Alfredo Kindelán’s sons, Ultano. Pip went to the cinema with him, then for a long walk and a mild flirtation – ‘If it had not been for the fact that he has known Ataúlfo and Alvaro all his life and would certainly have told them I would have had a spot of fun but I would have been ragged for the rest of my life so I refrained and bade him a polite goodbye at the hotel.’ Pip saw her first sign of the war when they drove to Santander along the route that the Nationalists had taken on their campaign in the north earlier in 1937. They met Touffles, ‘much thinner and very sunburnt … Madly attractive.’ He went out of his way to talk to her and she admitted that ‘alas I still like him more than I want to’. He told her about the capture of Santander and took her to the German airbase from which he flew as a navigator. ‘They fly huge Junkers. His is a beauty with two engines and a retractable undercarriage.’ This means that he must have been flying in the experimental Junkers Ju 86D-I. It was a curious time for Pip, a mixture of tourism and initiation into the war. They visited the beautiful medieval village of Santillana del Mar and La Magdalena, the great English-style royal country residence on a hill overlooking the bay of Santander. ‘It had been ruined inside by the Reds and is still being cleaned up by Red prisoners who are camped in the park. They all looked well and happy.’⁵⁶

Sad to leave Touffles, she continued her journey on 28 September, moving on to Burgos where she toured the great cathedral, then onto Valladolid and to Salamanca. Pip was entranced by Spain, the only drawback being the fleas awaiting her in every hotel bedroom. She and Princess Bea stayed with General Kindelán. Kindelán was a man of great rectitude and austerity. Nevertheless, to Pip’s young eyes, oblivious to his moral and political merits, he was just ‘rather fat and sloppy’. At the Grand Hotel in Salamanca, she caught a glimpse of the ‘stunning looking’ Peter Kemp, whom she knew vaguely from London. In a Carlist regiment, he was one of the very few English volunteers on the Nationalist side. On 1 October, the first anniversary of Franco’s elevation to the headship of state saw a major display of pageantry. Pip was elated by being able to witness history being made – ‘a parade of soldiers led by the Moors in their wonderful coloured cloaks on Arab horses with golden trappings. The leaders rode white Arabs with silver hooves and gold-embroidered medieval trappings which looked beautiful with the men’s white and orange cloaks, behind them were men in green cloaks on black horses got up the same but with golden hooves.’ Her concern that the Nationalist forces might be antiquated was redressed when Álvaro, Princess Bea’s eldest son, took her to inspect the Italian Savoia Marchetti tri-motored bombers at his air base. This was the Base Aéreo de Matacán, built in October-November 1936. Afterwards Álvaro took her to see the fierce fighting bulls at the estate of Antonio Pérez Tabernero, a bull-breeder friend of the Kindelán family.⁵⁷

On 2 October, she was thrilled when Touffles unexpectedly showed up in Salamanca although her delight was tempered when he spent their brief time together teasing her about her figure. She also wrote to her father and asked him to buy her a Ford 10 and have it sent to Gibraltar. ‘I hope you do as I must have a car if I am here alone.’ On 4 October, they left Salamanca and, after a spectacular journey south through the harsh and arid hills of Extremadura, they reached Sanlúcar de Barrameda – the family’s Palacio de Montpensier having been returned to Prince Alfonso by Franco. Pip found its crazy mixture of styles hideously ugly but fascinating. Prince Ali, now a lieutenant colonel in the Nationalist airforce, was stationed at Seville and so was often able to visit his home. Inevitably, she imbibed the family’s views on the Reds.⁵⁸

By mid-October, everything had been arranged for her to go and stay with the Duquesa de Montemar in Jérez while attending a nursing course at a hospital there. Lord Howard de Walden cabled that her car would be sent to Gibraltar in a few days. When it arrived at the end of the month, she thought it ‘heaven. Black with green leather inside and a dream of beauty.’ At first she found the hospital ‘splendid fun’ and ‘not in the least disgusting’. The bulk of the patients were Moorish mercenaries whom she found ‘perfectly sweet but like a lot of children and rather dirty’. When her course proper began, she was shocked by the appalling wounds that had to be treated. ‘I did not feel sick at all but afterwards when I left the hospital I kept seeing the wounds all day and hearing the screams of agony.’ She was fully aware that she would see far worse sights at the front. ‘I understand now why nurses are so often hard and inhuman.’ While in Jérez, she got gathered up in the local social whirl. She was mortified when it was suggested to her by her hostess, the Duquesa, among others, that it was obvious that she was in love with Ataúlfo and ought to marry him. This was not because the idea displeased her. Quite the contrary, but she was embarrassed that her infatuation should be so obvious. Despite her emotional preoccupations, she made good progress with her nursing skills. She loved the work and was beginning to be able to witness without distress the most hair-raising wounds being treated.⁵⁹

There were now two parallel strands in her life. One was training to be a nurse at the front and the other was her deepening passion for Touffles. When he returned to Sanlúcar and telephoned to invite her over, she skipped her classes to go and see him, ‘hopping with life and merriment’. When she got back to the Orléans household, her happiness knew no bounds. The life of the well-to-do in the Nationalist zone had no equivalent in the Republican ranks. Touffles arrived with nine Luftwaffe pilots for a bout of entertainment and relaxation that included swimming, a flamenco fiesta at one of the Jérez bodegas and a visit to a stud farm for Arab steeds. There was then a trip to Gibraltar to collect Pip’s car and to do shopping, during which she bought a white kimono embroidered with golden dragons. She spent a lot of time with Touffles drinking and dancing. After one late night, she wrote: ‘I adore Touffles more every day and only wish I could just stay with him for ever.’ He bought her a radio in anticipation of her imminent twenty-first birthday. It was to accompany her throughout the Spanish Civil War. Loaded with shopping, including 3,000 cigarettes, she drove her new car back into Spain. Her social position ensured that she had no difficulty getting through the border control. ‘They had been warned to expect us and refused to let us declare anything. So we just sailed through with no trouble at all. It was very nice of them to be so kind as it saved a packet of trouble as my car has no triptyque [a document permitting the transit of a car from one country to another] or insurance, and I have no licence.’

Ecstatically happy to be spending time with Touffles, she had no desire to return to the hospital at Jérez. However, her views were somewhat altered when she came face to face with the arrogantly sexist mentality of the Andalusian aristocratic señorito. Pip and the family went to Seville to stay at the Hotel Cristina, which was ‘crammed full of Germans on leave’. Touffles met up with his Luftwaffe comrades and announced that they were off to a brothel. ‘Of course it is damn stupid of me to mind as it won’t be the first or last time he sleeps with a tart but if he liked me the weeniest bit the way I want him to, he could not have told me he was going to without a qualm. However, who cares. I’m damned if I’m going to. I knew he was not in the least in love with me before so it does not make any difference. Oh hell and damn.’ When he and his German cronies did the same on the following night, she decided that she would rather be at the front nursing. She did not know, of course, whether he did anything more than play the piano and dance.⁶⁰

Feeling rejected by Ataúlfo, she began to get involved in her hospital work. On 10 November, she attended her first operations which she found enthralling. Touffles went back to his unit on the next day, leaving her ‘with that grim feeling of emptiness and the awful wartime pessimism of wondering at the back of my mind whether I will ever see him again’. One and all continued to enquire as to when she would marry him. She wrote in her diary: ‘But why bother, at this very moment he is almost certainly tootling around Seville with a tart but why should I care. Of course I do but it is very stupid.’ She was finding some consolation in nursing. She loved the work although ‘I am beginning to loathe the Moors. They are so tiresome always quarrelling and yelling at one. It makes me mad to have a lot of filthy smelly Moors ordering me about.’ On the eve of her twenty-first birthday, she wrote: ‘I feel awfully small and young tonight. In a new country talking a strange language and only understanding half of what is said to me, doing a new kind of work amongst new people and about to prance off on my own to the middle of the war. Sometimes I feel an awful long way from home but who cares. It is the first adventure I have ever undertaken and so far I love it.’ When Princess Bea returned to England on 20 November, Pip went back to Jérez where she waited anxiously for her nursing examination. She was keen to get to the front – ‘I am tired of waiting around doing nothing much. I want action.’ Every day, her diary recorded her anxiety to be off to war. However, this required the permission of Mercedes Milá, the head of the Nationalist nursing services. The ordeal of the examination on 1 December passed off less traumatically than she had feared. In fact, she was amazed by how much she was left to do in the hospital without supervision.⁶¹

Her social life was hectic; late nights consisting of cinema, dinner, protracted dancing and drinking. On 6 and 7 December, she was given a tour around the German battleship Deutschland which she thought ‘a lovely boat’. On 20 December, Touffles and one of his German friends took her for a spin in a Junkers 52 bomber. Despite the distractions, she was becoming deeply impatient with Mercedes Milá’s failure to respond to her request to go to the front. She was all the more unsettled because of rumours about major action on the Aragón front – an echo of the Republican offensive against Teruel. As her Spanish improved and she got to know more people, her social life was coming to resemble her life in London albeit on a narrower scale. She had a couple of superficial flirtations, her blonde hair and blue eyes – and probably her plumpness too – making her very attractive to Spanish men. Finally, knowing that Princess Bea was in Burgos, she decided to leave the hospital at Jérez and make the hazardous eleven-hour 1000-kilometre car journey to join her for Christmas. It was a courageous – or irresponsible – initiative since attractive young women travelling alone in Spain were usually at risk from sexually frustrated soldiers. With typical self-reliance, she coped with running out of petrol on remote roads and the car’s sump springing a leak.⁶²

When, after driving for two days, she finally arrived at Burgos on 23 December, she could not find Princess Bea and was desperate to have come so far only to be all alone. Princess Bea had moved on to the Palacio de Ventosilla at Aranda de Duero where her family would be staying. This was because the front-line units of the Nationalist air force were being regrouped as the Primera Brigada Aérea Hispana at Aranda, alongside the Italian Aviazione Legionaria in Zaragoza and the German Condor Legion in Almazán, the walled medieval town due south of Soria. General Alfredo Kindelán, with overall command over all three forces, had established his headquarters at Burgos. It was Pip’s good fortune to get a room in the hotel where General Kindelán’s family were staying. They told her that Mercedes Milá planned to send her to a front-line hospital. There was a terrible scare when word was brought to the hotel that Álvaro de Orléans had crashed. His Italian wife Carla Parodi-Delfino was hysterical and Pip had to calm her down. She then went on to the Palacio de Ventosilla. To the relief of Álvaro’s escape, there was added the dual pleasure of resolving her future as a nurse at the front and of seeing Ataúlfo. Touffles told her that she was much thinner and very beautiful. However, that delight was dampened by Princess Bea, who knew that Pip was in love with him. The Infanta told her the first of a series of slightly conflicting stories by way of breaking to her gently that Ataúlfo would never marry her. She said, rather implausibly, that he would never recover from having his heart broken by the daughter of Alfonso XIII, Beatriz. The romantic in Pip was both intrigued and devastated to be told by Princess Bea that Touffles was so affected by this that she was ‘afraid he will never fall in love or get married and will just get more and more the young man about town and have mistresses’.⁶³

Meanwhile, the men of the family were flying bombing missions against the Republican forces that were closing in on Teruel. The proximity to the war was beginning to affect Pip. ‘It really is an awful life when you know your friends are risking their lives every single day and every time you say goodbye or just goodnight you think you may never see them again.’ Her diaries reflected her links with senior officers of the Nationalist air force. She felt an ever closer identification with the cause: ‘Today [28 December] we lost one machine and shot down seven reds.’ Today [30 December] they brought down eight Reds, four Curtis, two Martin bombers and two others and we did not lose one. Good work!’ ‘We shot down eleven Reds today [4 January 1938].’ ‘We shot down eight Reds today. The right spirit. [5 January 1938].’ The strain of seeing Touffles only fleetingly as he often popped in between flights was trying her nerves and increased her determination to get to the front line. Her wish was granted, in mid-January, by a telegram instructing her to go to the hospital at Alhama de Aragón, southwest of Zaragoza on the road to Guadalajara. She was reluctant to leave the Orléans family but a move was inevitable because of a reorganisation of the Nationalist air force. Prince Ali’s air force unit (escuadra) of Savoia-Marcchetti 79s was moving to Castejón while Ataúlfo’s Condor Legion bomber unit was moving to Corella. Both Castejón and Corella were between Alfaro and Tudela in Navarre and Princess Bea was going to Castejon in order to set up a house for her husband and son.⁶⁴

In fact, when the orders came, the entire household was plunged into various forms of colds and influenza. The worst hit was Ataúlfo and Pip decided to stay on and nurse him. However, proximity to her loved one did not bring happiness.

I am in the depths of depression and so nervous that I don’t know what to do with myself. I can’t sleep and have not done so for three nights which is not surprising when I have to spend my whole day keeping a firm grip on myself not to appear to be in love with Ataúlfo. I don’t know whether I am getting less controlled, more frustrated or more alone but it is pure hell whatever it is and leaves me in a state of being unable to sleep, unable to eat and feeling miserable.

The imminent upheaval meant that Pip would have to leave anyway. The malicious gossip about her relationship with him made it impossible for her to stay and nurse Ataúlfo without Princess Bea in the house as chaperone. Pip’s misery was dissipated by a meeting with Bella Kindelán, the general’s daughter, who was a nurse at Alhama. When Bella told her that it would be possible to go from Alhama with a mobile unit right up to the front, she cast off her melancholia and threw herself into nursing.⁶⁵

By 24 January 1938, Pip’s prolonged Christmas holidays were over and she was ensconced along with the other nurses in the grim hotel in Alhama de Aragón which partly served as the local hospital. It was bitterly cold and depressing. The winter of 1937–8 was one of the cruellest Spain had ever suffered, the bitter cold at its worst in the barren and rocky terrain of Aragón with temperatures as low as –20° centigrade. Pip was missing Ataúlfo and there was nothing for her to do. She had been joined by Consuelo Osorio de Moscoso, the daughter of the Duqesa de Montemar. Alarmed at the prospect of spending time in their tiny unheated room, they impetuously decided to take matters into their own hands and go to Sigüenza where Consuelo knew some doctors. They hoped thereby to get to the front. However, when they reached the emergency hospital there, they were told that the front-line mobile units were fully staffed and had very few wounded. On their return to Aragón, they fell into an even worse gloom. ‘There is nothing to do anywhere. The war seems to have paused and no one wants nurses.’⁶⁶ This was far from true. The battle for Teruel was still raging. Within ten days of the city falling into the hands of the Republic, the advancing Nationalist forces became the besiegers. The scale of the fighting can be deduced from Franco’s remark on 29 January to the Italian Ambassador that he was delighted because the Republic was destroying its reserves by throwing them into ‘the witches’ cauldron of Teruel’.⁶⁷ Astonishingly, this was not reflected in the traffic through the hospital at Alhama where Pip was now assigned to a ward.

Much of her work was routine and unpleasant. One of her patients had a spinal injury – ‘as he has lost all sense of feeling, he pees in his bed and we have to change the sheets which is both difficult and messy as he can’t move at all, also he has no pyjamas and boils all over his bottom which is most unappetising. As for the other part of him, it is definitely an unpleasing spectacle which somehow always manages to be just where I want to take hold of a sheet.’ However, the routine was short-lived. On 28 January, Mercedes Mila arrived to assign nurses to other hospitals. Consuelo and Pip pestered her to be sent to the front. At first, their pleas fell on deaf ears and the head of the Nationalist nursing services said that Pip was too young to be given responsibility in a dangerous position. However, with more senior nurses reluctant to go to the front, they were picked with three others to go to Cella, eight kilometres from Teruel, the nearest hospital to the front. Pip was excited and immediately thought of Ataúlfo, ‘I shall see them all going over to bomb everyday perhaps. I can’t wait to go, my spirit of adventure is aroused.’ Although she was aware the hospital might be shelled and bombarded, her principal concern was whether her nursing skills would be adequate when the lives of the seriously wounded were at stake.⁶⁸

After a perilous journey on mountain roads, Pip and Consuelo reached the bombed-out village of Cella. Their welcome was muted since there was neither food nor accommodation to spare. The officers refused to believe them when they said they would willingly sleep on the bare floor. They were eventually put in a room with three others, without proper bedding or window panes and only the most minimal sanitation. Pip’s spirit of adventure and her country background helped her make light of the situation: ‘The town itself is crammed with soldiers and mules, and ambulances come and go in a continuous stream. I am so enchanted with the place that I long to stay but we are terribly afraid that they will send us back when the others come as they have precedence over us. It is a shame as they will hate the discomfort and dirt and all and we don’t mind it.’ Indeed, she was anxious to join a mobile unit leaving for a position at Villaquemada, even nearer to the front line. Just when Pip thought that she would have to go back to Alhama, a need arose for two nurses so she and Consuelo were able to stay. They also found accommodation in a peasant farmhouse. Possessing a car made a colossal difference, since she could drive to nearby towns to shop for household necessities to make their room more comfortable and also for food. In the operating theatre itself, Pip was shocked by the doctor’s ignorance of basic procedures of hygiene, ‘His ideas of antisepsia were very shaky and it gave me the creeps to see the casual way they picked up sterilised compresses with their fingers.’ She was equally alarmed to see their peasant hostess dipping into their food fingers ‘black with years of grime’.⁶⁹

The Nationalists were mounting a major attack on Republican lines at Teruel and Pip’s medical unit was moved nearer the front. On 5 February, she was in attendance for ‘one elbow shrapnel wound, three amputations, two arms and one leg, two stomach wounds, one head and one man who had shrapnel wounds in both legs, groin, stomach, arm and head. They were vile operations. The stomach ones were foul. One had to be cut right down the middle and his stomach came out like a balloon and most of his intestines; the other had a perforated intestine so had all his guts out, looking revolting.’ Things were made more difficult by the fact that the doctor for whom she worked was both incompetent and perpetually irritable. ‘It is perfectly grim having to work as operation sister to a man one does not trust, who is brutal and shouts at one all the time. It is nerve-wracking and leaves me all of a flop.’ Pip discovered that she had type O blood and therefore could give blood for transfusions. At massive cost to both sides, the battle swayed back and forth until finally, on 7 February 1938, the Nationalists broke through and the Republic lost a huge swathe of territory and several thousand prisoners as well as tons of valuable equipment. Pip was delighted: ‘The news of the war last night was stupendous. We have advanced to Alfambra, twenty kilometres in two days, taking fifteen villages, 2,5000 prisoners and 3,000 dead, not to mention lots of war material.’ It was the beginning of an inexorable advance which in two weeks would lead to the recapture of Teruel on 22 February, the capture of nearly fifteen thousand prisoners and the loss of more equipment.⁷⁰

The appalling conditions in the operating theatre could be mitigated by the trips in the car. Only with considerable resourcefulness had she kept it on the road, changing wheels, repairing punctures and getting it started in sub-zero temperatures. She drove to Alhama to collect her belongings which had been sent there from Aranda. Having a gramophone and lots of new records sent out by her family made life all the more tolerable. She also was able to see some beautiful countryside. Buying presents for the family with which she was billeted, she was surprised at their reaction – ‘Unlike English poor class they were so proud they would hardly accept them.’ The gruesome sights that she was seeing each day in the operating theatre were so distressing that she needed every possible distraction. Her diary faithfully recorded the details of horrendous surgical interventions often carried out without anaesthetic. After an operation on a young boy wounded in the stomach only three days after being conscripted, she broke down and cried. ‘He was so white and pathetic with an expression of such pain and sorrow and he never made a sound.’ The accumulated horrors were beginning to get to her and she began to question the wisdom of coming to Spain. However, by the following day she had recovered her usual good spirits. A lunch which would have been the envy of the entire Republican zone helped. It consisted of ‘poached eggs, tinned salmon with mayonnaise, albóndigas (meatballs in rich gravy) and fried potatoes, cheese and chocolate pudding, not to mention foie gras and oporto as an aperitif and coffee and coñac to finish with’. Even better was an unexpected – and poignantly short – visit from Touffles. Despite the cold, in a room with no panes in the windows, having to sleep fully dressed in tweeds, she sewed and ironed and maintained her essential cheerfulness. Inevitably she faced many of the same problems as Nan Green and the front-line nurses on the Republican side. ‘The thought of a hot bath, a comfortable bed, a good meal that we did not have to cook ourselves or watch cooking and a w.c. instead of a pot seemed distinctly pleasant.’⁷¹

On 17 February, there was a big Nationalist push and Pip went to watch the battle from a German anti-aircraft battery. ‘The noise was incredible, a continual roar like thunder with intermittent different-toned bands. The sky was full of aeroplanes shooting up and down the Red trenches and the whole landscape all around was covered with pillars of smoke.’ ‘At about 11.30 the bombers began to arrive and came in a continual stream for hour after hour till the Red lines were black with the smoke of the bombs.’ Pip thought it was ‘the most thrilling thing I have ever seen’. The counterpart to the exhilarating sights was an increase in traffic in the operating theatre. Her compassion for the wounded and dying was unrelated to any analysis of the reasons for the war. Indeed, by 20 February, she was exhilarated by the possibility of going to see Nationalist troops entering Teruel. Although not allowed to enter the city, she and her fellow nurses found a vantage point from which, ‘to our great joy’, they watched Nationalist aircraft bombing the Republicans retreating towards Valencia.

Yet on the next day, after ten hours’ non-stop effort in the operating theatre, she could write that ‘it is demoralising to live in an eternal whorl of blood, pain and death’. Reflecting on the daily deaths of casualties in the operating room, she wrote: ‘I don’t know how there is anyone left.’ There was still house-to-house fighting in Teruel. On 22 February, awakened by bells ringing for the Nationalist capture of the city, she walked through the battered remains of the city. ‘I didn’t see a single whole house, they are all covered in bullet holes and shot to bits by cannons with great gaping holes from air bombardments.’ In the midst of the rubble, she found an undamaged grand piano in a bar and played tunes while the soldiers stopped looting in order to dance. She rejoiced at the Nationalist advance that was chasing the retreating Republicans to the south. Three thousand prisoners were taken and two thousand dead according to the official radio. The next day, back in the hospital, she was covered in blood from the operations and, on the day after that, back in Teruel. She was flushed with excitement by a Republican artillery bombardment – ‘I admit I was terrified myself but I like being frightened.’ Her emotional highs and lows were intense.⁷²

Unsurprisingly given the daily horrors that she was facing, Pip was outraged to learn from her cousin Charmian that her brother John disapproved of her being in Spain and was determined to get her back home. ‘Bloody interfering nonsense. I should like to see him try anyhow.’⁷³ In mid-February, John did come to Spain in search of Pip. Since she was on duty in the midst of the Battle of Teruel, he did not get to see her. He was rather shocked by this since, as he recalled later, ‘I don’t think that my parents had visualised anything more than her being in some base camp, helping a bit with bandages.’ John Scott-Ellis did meet Peter Kemp who gave him news of Pip. He also met Ataúlfo and struck up a friendship with the German pilots of his unit. Shortly afterwards he continued his journey on to Munich. When John spoke to his wife’s family there, they categorically refused to believe that he had met German pilots in Spain because, after all, Hitler had declared that there were none.⁷⁴

Pip’s diary is remarkable for the wealth of detail with which she described her days. It is therefore all the more puzzling that her future husband, José Luis de Vilallonga, claimed to have bumped into her in Teruel, some hours after the recapture of the town by the Francoist forces. No such incident is mentioned by Pip in her diary, in which there are no gaps during this period. Nevertheless, the ‘meeting’ is described with a wealth of salacious detail in his memoirs. Entertainingly written, like all his work, this account is full of the most unlikely particulars. After one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, fought in sub-zero temperatures, the Republicans had to give up their costly defence of the provincial capital captured on 8 January. They retreated on 21 February 1938, when Teruel was on the point of being encircled. According to Vilallonga, at the time, just eighteen,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 hands too, as well as swollen and rough, my face dusty and unpainted and my hair all dirty and tangled’. Unlike the dirty soldiers by whom she was normally surrounded, Ataúlfo ‘was looking very clean and smart’ and Pip thought him ‘devastatingly attractive and goodlooking despite the fact that he is really quite ugly’. Escatrón was near enough to the front to be within artillery range. Pip found the bombardments enthralling. ‘I was scared pink, but of course did not say so.’ She was about to experience several days’ carnage that would see her remarkable powers of endurance pushed to the limit. Badly wounded casualties began to pour in. Illuminated by oil lamps, she and her unit worked incessantly throughout the daily bombardments. Since most of her fellow nurses were terrified and took shelter, she stayed up entire nights at a time to be with the patients, sleeping in her uniform in the ward. There was little food for either the staff or the wounded. ‘It is awful being here bombarded all day in a ward of wounded begging to be moved, and so petrified that they pretty well die of fright.’ Her indefatigability was remarkable: ‘Well, everything stops sooner or later one way or another, though I hope this won’t stop by us all being killed, which is quite probable if they go on bombarding every day.’⁸¹

Despite the appalling existence in a virtual hecatomb, Pip was alarmed by suggestions that her unit should be withdrawn further away from the front. She was delighted to have to advance, in the middle of the night, to Caspe which had been captured by the Nationalists on 16 March. Driving in pitch darkness over boulder-strewn tracks, her car hit a huge rock and was badly damaged. On the verge of nervous as well as physical exhaustion, at Caspe they had to create a new hospital. As more casualties flooded in, she learnt that her car (which she called Fiona) had been stolen. She had hardly slept for a week: ‘I finally got to bed semi-conscious at about eleven after more casualties had arrived. If life goes on like this much longer we will all die. It is more than any one can stand.’ Yet, after a night’s sleep, she was back in the fray. Ataúlfo appeared with biscuits, chocolate, shortbread and wine and a message from Princess Bea that it was time for Pip to stop risking her life. Yet, far from taking the opportunity to leave, she was determined to stay at the front.

The strain remained intense. Just when she thought that she could go to bed, a large number of wounded were brought in. ‘The floor was covered in stretchers, blood everywhere, everyone shouting, the poor patients moaning and screaming, and so instead of going to bed it started all over again.’ The experience was, not surprisingly, changing Pip. She wrote on 21 March: ‘Six months today since I left home and it seems like six years! Home seems so far away, and such a completely different world that I cannot imagine ever going back.’ Two days later, she wrote: ‘How any nurse can look at a man, let alone touch him, I don’t know after all the unattractive things one has to do with them.’ As she became more skilled as a nurse, she got more exasperated with the village girls who came in to help. In the light of the tribulations that she had undergone, she was mortified when, on an unannounced inspection, Mercedes Milá raged that the hospital was untidy and the nurses were wearing make-up. ‘After all the weeks of filth we have been through, the very first time we have time to make ourselves respectable she has to come and tell us we are too painted.’ Milá’s reprimand was outrageously unfair. The endless stream of casualties meant that the nurses were going for days on end without sleep. Pip described herself as looking ‘like a dead cat’. On some nights, she could find no time to write up her diary.⁸²

The attrition took its toll. Already shocked and still reeling from the shelling at Escatrón, in the last six days of March, Pip got to bed twice, for six hours on each occasion. She was working shifts of forty-two hours with six-hour breaks that were often interrupted by the unexpected arrival of horrendous casualties. In the midst of this, she was invited to dine with some of Consuelo’s friends on the staff of General José Monasterio Ituarte. Monasterio was the head of the Nationalist cavalry. At the battle of Teruel, he had led the last major cavalry charge in Western Europe. During the current Aragón offensive, his mounted brigades, supported by the Condor Legion, were running ahead of the main advance. Pip found him charming, ‘although very quiet and serious’. She was particularly delighted when he announced that her car had been found abandoned by a roadside. The occasion recharged her batteries for the unit’s next move behind the rapidly advancing Nationalists. They were sent on to Gandesa to the southeast, in the province of Lérida in Catalonia.⁸³

Yet again miracles of improvisation were required to pack up the entire unit, including making arrangements for the twenty-seven seriously wounded men who had to be left behind. In Gandesa, Pip’s group had to share an abandoned school building with an Italian unit. It was a startling change of personnel and of scenery, as spring took over from the ferocious winter conditions in which she had worked. She found the Catalans in Gandesa irritating and, along with virtually everyone in the unit, was frustrated by an inability to understand the Catalan language. The Italians in the other part of the hospital seemed to confirm everything that is said about their presence in Spain – ‘very amiable and fearfully smart, but over-amorous’. A lull in the endless arrival of casualties allowed her to come to terms with the attrition of the previous month. ‘I was in the depths of despair, sick of life and all I am doing, and wondering what has happened at home. I decided I was either going to go crazy or get tight.’ She opted for the latter and drank herself sick on sherry and brandy. When she came to, she wrote: ‘What I am turning into I don’t like to think, getting so tight that I am sick at 6 o’clock in the evening. I went through half an hour of pure hell, being sick at intervals, with the world spinning round me.’ That episode had to be put immediately behind her. A massive influx of casualties saw her drawing on astonishing resources of stamina and competence.⁸⁴

Finally, she got a weekend’s leave. Princess Bea had moved into a requisitioned palace at Épila, thirty kilometres to the southwest of Zaragoza, in order to be near the men in her family who were posted nearby. Ataúlfo was now a pilot. Pip arrived at Zaragoza too late to travel on to Épila, so she stayed at the Grand Hotel. She lamented: ‘I was very ashamed of turning up to dinner at the Grand Hotel in my filthy uniform, with burst shoes and torn stockings, my face unpainted and my hair on end.’ Nonetheless, to get away from the front in such circumstances was something rarely vouchsafed to her counterparts in the Republican nursing services. Pip had dinner with the prominent British Conservative, Arnold Lunn, a Catholic and an old Harrovian, who was in Spain writing articles about ‘Red horrors’. Lunn was one of the English pro-Nationalist propagandists who had been involved in supporting the cover-up of the bombing of Guernica. For Pip, the main thing about being with him was to be able to eat ‘good food with the right amount of knives and forks’. When Pip got to Épila, she luxuriated in her ‘first bath for more than two months’ and in the opportunity to relax in comfort with her friends. Ataúlfo took her to recover her car, which she found minus windows, number plates, tools, papers and her passport. General Kindelán’s driver fixed her car. Of course, what she valued most about this period was to be clean, warm and well fed. She was able to go to the hairdresser and also went shopping with Últano Kindelán. A greater change from the horrors of her unit could hardly be imagined. The combination of uninterrupted nights and cleanliness made for ‘a short piece of heaven’. In the Grand Hotel in Zaragoza, she met two aristocratic acquaintances, Alfonso Domecq and Kiki Mora ‘who were both tight as usual and had just bought a large white rabbit and a white duck’. After chasing the two animals around the hall, Últano caught the duck and tied string around its neck and wings so that he could take it for walks. The sense of wild release after the tribulations of the front left Pip disorientated – ‘I have never hated anything more in my life than the idea of going back to the equipo. I don’t want ever to see a hospital again in my life.’⁸⁵

Nevertheless, she did return to her unit, which had now moved south to Morella in the harsh and arid hills of the Maestrazgo between Aragón and Castellón. The return was a rude shock: ‘How I hated the jerk back to this life, stretchers being carried in dripping blood all over the front doorstep, the smell of anaesthetic, the moans and shouts. I have gone all squeamish in my few days away.’ Her depression was perhaps linked with the fact that she was laid low by an illness which saw her confined to bed with a raging fever. She was finally diagnosed with the beginnings of paratyphoid – a fever resembling typhoid but caused by different bacteria.⁸⁶ In consequence, she was allowed a few days’ convalescence in Épila. She drove there in her car and it was severely damaged along the way by unmade roads. Princess Bea was back from the recently captured Lérida. As part of her work with Frentes y Hospitales, the relief organisation which provided welfare for the old, women and children, she would enter occupied areas with the Nationalist forces.⁸⁷ Still very weak, Pip was able to stay because her car was not ready for the return journey. She managed some relaxation, gossiping with Princess Bea, playing cards and ping pong with visiting German and Italian aviators. She even had an evening out in Zaragoza with Ataúlfo. They went to a sleazy cabaret in ‘an old theatre with semi-naked women who came out on stage and who could neither dance nor sing. A fair smattering of peroxided tarts and swarms of dirty, tight and noisy soldiers all singing and shouting lewd remarks at everyone.’⁸⁸

During her stay at Épila, Pip met Juan Antonio Ansaldo, one of Spain’s most famous aviators. Ansaldo was a monarchist air ace and playboy who had once organised Falangist terror squads. He had piloted the small De Havilland Puss Moth in which General Sanjurjo had perished on 20 July 1936 when leaving Portugal to take charge of the military uprising.⁸⁹ Ansaldo now commanded one of the two Savoia Marchetti 79 squadrons of the First Brigade of the Nationalist Air Force (Primera Brigada Aérea Hispana) while Prince Alí commanded the other. Ansaldo’s wife Pilarón was both a flyer and a nurse who had just been asked to work in the Ciudad Universitaria on the outskirts of Madrid. On the very edge of the besieged capital, it was the most dangerous area and women were not usually allowed to work there. Pip hoped to find out how to volunteer to go too.⁹⁰

Inevitably, after the pleasures of Épila – ping pong, music, decent food, whisky and even a flight in a Luftwaffe aircraft – the return to hospital duty was depressing: ‘Morella is the lousiest, most boring place in the world, and not a thing to do all day.’ She felt low because she was still suffering from paratyphoid. She was pleased, however, by the possibility that she and Consuelo, for their gallantry under fire, would both be proposed for the Cruz del Mérito Militar con Distintivo Rojo, the highest award for bravery that could be awarded to a woman. It was eventually awarded in May 1939.⁹¹ She was also cheered by a letter on 5 May from her mother who was delighted by some articles about Pip in the British press. Margot promised her a new car and a full bank account when she returned home and announced an imminent visit to Spain. In fact, Pip, always her best when the going was most difficult, perked up when the hospital got busy again about a week later. A stream of wounded saw her attend fourteen operations in thirteen hours. She was irritated by the petty jealousies among the nurses and felt put upon by the hostility of Captain Ramón Roldán, the hospital chief surgeon. As a Falangist, he deeply resented the aristocratic origins and monarchist connections of both Pip and Consuelo. Just as she got the news that her mother was arriving on 19 May, the entire hospital had to move with the advancing Nationalist forces nearer to the province of Castellón, to the village of La Iglesuela del Cid. When her martyred car got there, she and Consuelo were billeted by Ráldan in the most dingy dungeon just off the operating theatre. However, on the following day, 23 May, she was able to go on leave to see her mother who had arrived with her brother John at Princess Bea’s home in Épila.⁹²

Margot was obliged to wait until Pip was ‘disinfected and de-loused’ before she could see her. When she remonstrated with Princess Bea about the horrors being experienced by Pip, the Infanta replied, ‘I promised you, dear Margot, that I would look after her as my own daughter; and if I had a daughter she would surely be at the front.’⁹³ Pip spent ten days with her mother in Zaragoza with daily visits to Épila. One evening, she met Peter Kemp, the Englishman who had volunteered for Franco and was now a lieutenant in the Spanish Foreign Legion. He told her a gruesome tale about the sadism of his colonel. An Englishman had crossed the lines claiming plausibly to be a sailor who had ended up at the front after getting drunk in Valencia. When Peter Kemp requested permission to set him free, the colonel ordered him to shoot the sailor. When Kemp stared unbelievingly, the colonel shrieked, ‘What is more, shoot him yourself or I will have you shot.’ He duly took the man into the countryside, they shook hands and he was shot. Pip commented, ‘A nasty thing to have to do.’ Her account implies that Kemp shot the man himself⁹⁴ There was a standing order from Franco that all captured foreigners be shot. This was rescinded on 1 April 1938 when he needed prisoners to exchange for the 497 Italians captured at Guadalajara.

On her return to her unit, still weak from the paratyphoid, Pip was driven by the constant humiliations to which Captain Roldán subjected her and Consuelo to contemplate leaving. Once more, her mind was taken off the problem by her work. She took part in an operation on a twelve-year-old girl who had been playing with a hand grenade that had exploded –

I think I minded seeing her being treated and operated on more than anything else I have seen so far. I can’t bear to see children hurt. She was blood from head to toe, her whole body one mass of burns and superficial wounds, both her knees had to be operated, one arm amputated above the wrist as her hand had been blown clean off, the thumb of the other hand (or what was left of it) amputated and two holes in her forehead and all one side of her face sewn up. Apart from which she is temporarily blind in one eye and permanently in the other. She is getting on quite well now but moans and shouts all day as she is in awful pain. I had a terrible quarrel with Roldán yesterday evening to get him to allow her aunt to stay with her all night.

To Pip’s horror, Roldán planned to leave Consuelo behind when the unit made its next move. However, Pip was prostrated with a fierce attack of the paratyphoid that had afflicted her for the previous two months. Left behind, she and Consuelo found refuge in another hospital and volunteered to work at an emergency clearing station right at the front. However, Pip’s delight at this opportunity was short-lived. With her temperature at 39.8°, she was sent to rest at Épila. She stayed there for a month and then, on 7 July, she returned to England for five weeks of convalescence. Exhaustion, the trauma of her front-line experiences and serious illness had at last brought her down.⁹⁵

Pip reached England completely drained. She spent six weeks recuperating mainly at Chirk and more briefly in London. In the capital, she attended the lavish society wedding of her sister Gaenor and Richard Heathcoat-Amory on 18 July. She was the first of eight bridesmaids attired in ‘picture dresses of white chiffon, the bodices made with heart-shaped necklines and short, puffed sleeves, with narrow waist-belts of silver ribbon and headdresses of stephanotis with bows of blue ribbon’.⁹⁶ With her health restored, Pip set off back for Spain on 19 August 1938, accompanied by Consuelo, who had joined her in London. They travelled by sea with sixteen pieces of luggage ‘including two packing cases’. Pip was heartened to have been told by a fortune-teller that, within six weeks, she would be engaged to be married. ‘I hope she is right because that is exactly what I intend.’ It was a slow and boring trip to Gibraltar where she was cheered by the prospect of seeing Princess Bea and even more delighted to collect a new car, ‘very large and impressive, black with pale brown leather inside and all its gadgets attached’. Her old car, already without wheels, had met an untimely end in Épila when the garage roof had collapsed on it. Spending time with Princess Bea and anticipating seeing Ataúlfo, her spirits soared. En route to Épila, they stayed at the ancient Roman town of Mérida in Badajoz. It was crammed with aviators who had been moved down because of the minor Republican counteroffensive in Extremadura. ‘I do love being back here. I adore seeing everyone in uniform and a vague atmosphere of war.’ In her absence, Prince Ali had been promoted to full colonel and was now in charge of the newly created Segunda Brigada Aérea Hispana, which was about to go into action on the Ebro front.⁹⁷

Once at Épila, Pip was overjoyed to discover that Ataúlfo had fourteen days’ leave which he planned to spend driving around southern Spain with one of his German fellow aviators, named Koch. She and Consuelo were invited to accompany them. Pip wrote in her diary: ‘I really must marry that man but my luck does not seem quite to run to that as yet, but as I have waited four years now I suppose I can wait longer.’ She had a wonderful time on the trip, driving over dusty roads through villages of white houses shimmering in the blazing sun passing donkeys laden with panniers overflowing with grapes. ‘I am so pleased with life that I don’t know what to do with myself. It is fun to feel like this. It must be years since I last felt such an untroubled confidence in Life. I love every moment of it.’ The idyll was nearly interrupted when Koch was summoned to Zaragoza because of the simmering Munich crisis. It seemed that Ataúlfo would have to drive him there. However, a return to Épila would mean that Pip and Consuelo would need to seek a new medical unit and return to front-line duty. The danger was averted when Koch flew back to Zaragoza and Pip was able to go on falling deeper in love with Ataúlfo. Unfortunately, when driving from Seville to Malaga, things came to a head. He told her that her mother had tried to get him to marry her sister Elisabeth and called him a pansy when he demurred. He then said, ‘After Alonso died, I promised Mama that I would only marry a Princess.’ She was devastated – ‘Such a simple sentence and it just sent all my hopes and the foundations of my life crashing. I had not realised until he said that, just how much I had been building on the chance of my marrying him one day.’ Ataúlfo’s was a noticeably different version of the story about the Infanta Beatriz told to Pip by Princess Bea and was probably an equally feeble subterfuge to avoid telling her that he just had no inclination to marriage.⁹⁸

Pip went through agonies trying to pluck up the courage to ask Ataúlfo if he would have married her if he had not made the vow. If he said ‘yes’, then she would try to get Princess Bea to release him from the promise and, if ‘no’, then try to get on with the rest of her life. They had moved on to Torremolinos, then a tiny and beautiful fishing village. On the following day, driving to Malaga to go shopping, she asked the fateful question and he replied in the negative. Deeply embarrassed, he told her that he was not in love with her. She answered, ‘I knew that. I just wanted to know exactly how things stood. Please forget I ever asked you.’ Then their aristocratic training came to the rescue and they reverted to amiable small talk. ‘And thus ended all my hopes and longings and ambitions.’ On their return to the hotel in Torremolinos, she broke down and cried ‘with a feeling as if there was no world left’. Pip then spent the day with their friends putting on a brave face. She determined to use every resource of self-control to hide her despair and avoid jeopardising her friendship with Ataúlfo. By the end of the day, she wrote: ‘Today has been the longest and most miserable day I have ever spent. Never again in my life am I going to give life such another chance of kicking me.’ Nevertheless, by the following day, her irrepressible optimism had reasserted itself and she was determined to keep on hoping as long as Ataúlfo remained single. ‘I won’t be depressed or take life seriously and tragically,’ she wrote. ‘Life can kick me all it likes but I shall go on laughing and pretending whatever happens.⁹⁹ In fact, this was bravado. She showed no sign of being able to relinquish the agonising bliss of her unrequited love.

In September 1938, the Munich crisis gave rise to talk of a European war. British reinforcements were arriving at Gibraltar, down the coast, and Ataúlfo’s German comrades were being recalled to Germany. In such company, Pip’s inclination was to blame Britain. Together with her emotional setback, the ambiguity of her political position left her feeling confused and miserable. The holiday in Torremolinos over, she and Consuelo returned to Zaragoza and Épila in an eventful journey accompanied by two flatulent priests. Continued news of Hitler’s determination to take the Sudetenland did nothing to cheer up the company. Pip’s particular unhappiness was not helped when she was bluntly urged by Juan Antonio Ansaldo to marry Ataúlfo as soon as possible. Despite her efforts to remain stoical, she was deeply miserable. Perhaps in an effort to justify telling Pip that he did not love her, Ataúlfo was giving vent to his viperous tongue. His thoughtless mocking shrivelled her and brought out all her insecurity. ‘God how I hate Ataúlfo sometimes. Why in heaven’s name did I have to fall in love with a louse like him. Now I want to get married and I can’t because I just could not marry anyone else. I want to have lots of children and I can’t. I can’t even have an affair to relieve my feelings.’ The situation became so intolerable for her that she was desperate to get back to the front despite what she took to be hints from Princess Bea that she actually favoured her marrying Ataúlfo.¹⁰⁰

A return to the front was rendered more difficult by a requirement for certificates of qualifications and proof of previous service. Nevertheless, she and Consuelo went on to Castellón which was near the Valencia front. There they made contact with Roldán and got certificates of their service in his unit. They then found an opening at a hospital at Calaceite on the Ebro front. They returned to Épila where they participated in a big party given by Princess Bea for the German aviators. Pip got pleasantly drunk but then was made to feel bad by vain flirting with Ataúlfo. On the following day, 26 September, they listened to a speech by Hitler giving the Czechs until 1 October to capitulate. It lasted two hours and Pip found it ‘good and moderately disturbing’. Again, her situation made her miserable. She was in the company of Francoists who were fighting alongside German and Italian units. ‘If there is a big war I am completely sunk. I can’t stay here and I won’t fight with France against Germany.’ Contemplating the possibility of war, she wrote: ‘God only knows what I shall do if there is a war. I suppose I shall have to go home but what hell it will be to have to be on the wrong side and with no news of Ataúlfo and the rest of the people out here.’

Starting to work at Calaceite on 29 September did little to animate her. There was little activity in the hospital and, at first, she did not like the other nurses, ‘a pretty gloomy lot’. The ‘wounded’ seemed to be suffering mainly from stubbed toes and scratched fingers. Pip was desperate to prove herself and to be useful. In fact, despite her self-deprecating remarks, describing herself at one point as feeling ‘like a lunatic worm’, reading between the lines of her diary makes it clear that she was extremely competent and hard-working. She rather liked the director of the unit, a lieutenant Magallón, but basically she moped for Ataúlfo. Gradually, she bucked up as the hospital got busier. Twenty-nine-hour stints were not unusual. As before, some of what she had to cope with was deeply distressing – most horrifically, a four-year-old boy who had been playing with a hand grenade that exploded in his face. She and the diminutive magallón were often thrown together on night duty. ‘I would rather listen to the radio with one man than gossip with eleven women.’ She liked him because he gave her interesting work and explained things in a way that improved her nursing skills. He began to groom her as his theatre assistant. She also began to get along with the nurses with whom there were some riotous meals. In reaction to the horrors of the operating table, they drank, sang and danced noisily. One moonlit night, after a hard day, she set up her gramophone and danced the rumba alone on the veranda while open-mouthed patients and colleagues gawked from the windows. Pip was regularly teased about her weight. ‘I am the size of a house now and can hardly do up my uniform.’ ‘I am as fat as six pigs.’ She was working on trying to forget Ataúlfo without great success. She attended a number of bullfights in Zaragoza which she did not much enjoy. She was also distressed to discover that some of her patients who had wounds in the hand were suspected of shooting themselves to get away from the front and would thus be executed.¹⁰²

At one point, Pip accompanied Dr magallón on his rounds in the village. Walking around the cobbled streets of Calaceite, she was fascinated by her introduction to village life about which she wrote amusingly. Their patients ranged from an ‘adorable baby’ to a grandmother in bed in the midst of piles of stored fruit – ‘one of those tough, bald, scraggy old hags of about a hundred’. At one house, ‘I could not make out if the patient was male or female as it had a large, black moustache.’ The patient was, in fact, a woman. The interlude was brief. Pip now picked up a liver infection and was soon extremely ill. Just as she was recovering, after passing ten wretched days, she discovered that another nurse, Maruja, was spreading gossip about her relationship with magallón in order to promote the career of her own beloved, a Dr Torrijos. On Pip’s side, the relationship was entirely innocent but she was aware that magallón was deeply smitten by her. During her illness, he took personal charge of her care and would sit by her bedside stroking her face and hair. Then the front moved. Franco passed through Calaceite to direct the decisive Nationalist counteroffensive at the Battle of the Ebro which was launched on 30 October 1938. Within twenty-four hours, Pip was installed in a new hospital. She was thrilled when, while out with magallón and another nurse looking for a place on the river bank for the hospital linen to be washed, the Caudillo’s cavalcade roared by and Franco himself saluted them.¹⁰³ On other days, magallón led fishing expeditions using hand grenades to stun the fish. Her health continued to give cause for concern. In addition to liver problems and dysentery, she had a persistent cough that led magallón to believe she might be tubercular. She also had abscesses on her legs and bottom. Consuelo was threatening to write to Margot to come and collect her daughter.¹⁰⁴

The continuing relationship between Maruja and Torrijos led to Pip writing cattily in her diary: ‘Romance in a hospital between a jellified skeleton and a prize sow’. She continued to flirt mildly with magallón. ‘magallón seems to spend his life tickling me which I admit he does well and with a uniform and starched apron he can’t go too far if he wants to, which he does.’ That was as far as it went at first, but the gossips in the hospital enjoyed making up more scurrilous stories. Maruja, in particular, was determined to get both Pip and Consuelo out of the hospital and to cause trouble for magallón. Maruja had reported Consuelo as a drunkard and drug addict. This led to Mercedes Milá visiting the hospital and threatening to throw them both out. Eventually, after considerable humiliation, they managed to persuade her of the truth. To be assailed by such nonsense when all she wanted to do was nurse was deeply frustrating for Pip. ‘Why, oh why did I ever come here? Won’t life ever be fun again, however hard one tries to enjoy it. God I hate wars and all they entail.’ As she reflected on the gratuitous malice of Maruja, she was briefly gladdened by a letter from Ataúlfo asking her to come to Épila. However, as she contemplated how pointless it was to go and see him, depression descended again. She had a fight with the deeply jealous magallón and wrote bitterly of Ataúlfo: ‘Why did I ever have to fall in love with a red nosed, begoggled, mother-ridden poop?’ Feeling frustrated, and suffering even more from boils and abscesses, she wrote with characteristic self-deprecation: ‘I expect I will soon have to flirt with magallón. It would be so enjoyable to have a spot of mild sex once more only I am not so sure it would stay mild for long. Only no one can come to much harm with the knowledge that they have their bottom covered with growths!’¹⁰⁵

At last, the guerrilla war with Maruja was ended by the arrival of a new head nurse named Isabel. A close friend of Consuelo’s mother, she turned out to be very experienced but puritanically strict. Pip gave in to her frustration and she spent the afternoon of 14 November, her last day of being twenty-one, ‘having an enjoyable spot of slap and tickle with magallón, mostly tickle but a nice bit of slap too. His technique is hot even though he is teeny, and one must admit doctors know their way about.’ Her twenty-second birthday was miserable since there was no post other than a telegram from her mother. Her life was rendered more gloomy by a reprimand from Isabel who ordered her not to smoke, drink, swear, sing or fraternise with the doctors. ‘I might just as well be a nun, and it is not my form. I can’t help having been brought up to a lot of liberty and it drives me mad to be spied on and followed about and treated like either a child or a bloody tart who must be reformed. I am quite willing to behave like a nun in the hospital from eight in the morning till nine at night, but at least I might have some enjoyment afterwards.’ In despair at the pettiness around her, she was invigorated by a visit from Ataúlfo and Princess Bea who came loaded with ham, cheese, chocolates, vermouth, brandy, magazines and some correspondence. Ataúlfo was sufficiently nice to her to start her longing for him again. That, plus news from home that her sister Gaenor was pregnant made her sorry for herself. ‘Why oh why can’t the goop realise he is as much in love with me as he is ever likely to be with anybody. My younger sister is married and having a baby, why in hell can’t I do the same. But I can’t and that is that and I shall just have to put up with it.’¹⁰⁶

By the third week of November, the Nationalists had pushed the Republicans out of the territory captured in July. The Republicans retreated back across the Ebro into Catalonia. Pip’s hospital was to be moved again. As she thought about leaving the hospital, a drunken Legionario told her that he regarded her as his mother. The Pip who was always eager to please was moved to reflect on the consolations of her work.

It really is awfully nice to be able to do things for people and them be grateful even if I do have to lose my temper with them often. I like being relied on for everything. Whatever bothers them, they ask me. Sometimes it is to do with their wound or illness, sometimes clothes, sometimes a quarrel which I automatically have to decide for them, sometimes I am a go-between to get them leave to visit relations or friends. I pretty nearly am their mother, though God forbid I ever have forty-seven children.

These satisfactions were little enough consolation for the petty jealousies that surrounded her. ‘Everyone thinks I am so calm and unemotional; that I don’t mind all the rows and muddles there are but it is driving me potty. Only seeing everyone else in such a state makes me pretend to be even calmer than I would normally appear.’

By the end of November, she was in a country house called Monte Julia in the deserted hills near Tremp in the north of Lérida. She threw herself into converting it into a hospital, rounding up charladies in nearby villages and requisitioning furniture from deserted houses. Her ownership of a car put her right at the heart of the operation. ‘I am going to buy myself a chauffeur’s uniform and give up being a nurse. All I seem to do is drive my car.’ She was also, as a result of her various ailments, getting a lot thinner. Moreover, shrugging off the injunctions of the head nurse, Isabel, she was now flirting very heavily with magallón who claimed to be in love with her. Although Isabel rightly suspected the relationship, she said nothing to Pip who regarded her as ‘that damn, filthy-minded, frustrated, cackling old hen’. ‘It makes me livid because I know that even if I had sat all night on duty in complete silence knitting the matter would be exactly the same. And what right has she to think the worst of me?’¹⁰⁷

Pip was disgusted by the strange combination of spiteful gossip and reformatory school atmosphere at the hospital. She found it difficult to relate the petty jealousy behind the denunciations to

the pretty illusions of heroism and justice with which I came to this filthy country. Everyday I think more of giving up the whole thing and going home. Why should I go on helping such a set of swine at the cost of feeling continually ill and tired and being covered in boils and lice. And yet I know that if I go home and have no worries, I shall worry so much about Ataúlfo that it will be worse, and I am too much in all this war to be able to walk out and leave it flat for good.

Pip continued to get thin since everything she ate nauseated her. Much as she delighted in weight-loss, she was concerned by the fact that she got palpitations just from walking up stairs. She infinitely regretted her flirtation with magallón and tried to break it off gently. Even though his wife came to join him, he continued to importune Pip.

Driving to Prince Ali’s base at Fraga, twenty-five kilometres to the south east of Lérida, she saw convoys of lorries. Franco was preparing the final offensive of the war, against Barcelona, which suggested that the hospital would be moved again.¹⁰⁸ On 22 December, she drove to Épila and immediately began to feel better. She went to a hairdresser in Zaragoza, lounged around with Ataúlfo and briefly put the horrors of the hospital behind her. Christmas Day was organised on totally English lines, complete with turkey and plum pudding and a tree with lights. However, it did not feel like Christmas – partly because, despite the Orléanses’ hospitality, she was depressed to be an outsider at another family’s festivities. ‘The only thing that makes me realise it really is Christmas Day is that I have eaten too much and feel sick.’ In fact, she was also downcast by a letter from her mother. Recounting a conversation that she had had with the Infanta in London, Margherita van Raalte relayed yet another version of the Orléans family explanation for Ataúlfo’s disinclination to marry Pip: ‘she says that Princess Bea is terribly fond of me but Prince Ali is set on royalty and that Ataúlfo is not in love with me as he knows me too well, but is fonder of me than anyone else.’ Despite again being told that it was futile to hope, her interminable optimism came to the fore again. ‘I can’t help my feelings and unless something unexpected happens I shall just go on waiting until the day he marries someone else. I have bloody little hope but still a lot of patience and no other desire in life to fix myself to.’ At least she had the brief consolation that, at midnight on 31 December 1938, Ataúlfo kissed her for the first time in all the years that she had known him. They danced until dawn on New Year’s Day.¹⁰⁹

By 2 January 1939, Pip and Consuelo were back at Monte Julia where there were no wounded since the Nationalist advance had moved on so rapidly towards Barcelona. The food was almost as poisonous as the atmosphere among staff with little else to do but gossip. The love-sick magallón had boasted to his wife Mercedes that he had slept with Pip. Mercedes, in turn, had discovered from Consuelo that this was untrue. Consuelo wanted Pip to confront him but she could not see the point of having a row. She wrote phlegmatically in her diary:

I would get him slung out willingly if it was not that I am fond of his wife and don’t see why I should hurt her for pride’s sake. God, what filthy swine men are. The trouble is the lousy brute is quite capable of getting angry and going to other people with the story. I would like to reassure his wife that I think him an ugly, slimy, oversexed little pimp so she need have no fear. I would also like to tell him just what I think of him and that one more word out of him and I will go straight to the Teniente Coronel.

She decided to sleep on it. In fact, she did nothing. In any case, she was too occupied with the altogether more exciting news that Princess Bea and Prince Ali were moving to Monzón, forty-eight kilometres to the northwest of Lérida, and barely half an hour’s drive away. Princess Bea asked her to help with the move and also to accompany her on an inspection of the front.¹¹⁰

Pip was even more delighted with the war news – ‘our advance is simply shooting along to Tarragona; each day is better than the other’. By the time that she set out with Princess Bea, the Nationalists had already captured Tarragona and Reus. Writing at Mora del Ebro of her satisfaction at the speed of the advance on Catalonia, she noted: ‘The amount of prisoners taken daily is colossal and there is hardly any fighting and very few wounded especially down here.’ They drove to Reus along tranquil lanes through ochre hills dotted with blossoming olive and almond trees. Their idyllic journey belied the fact that they were only a couple of days behind Franco’s forces. As they caught up with the troops marching on Barcelona, Pip began to record fascinating details. At a factory, the returning owner was greeted with pleasure – real or feigned? – by ‘all his workmen and servants’. Outside one of the factory sheds lay the corpses of six Republican soldiers: ‘They were killed yesterday evening so are quite harmless as they don’t smell or anything.’ The roads were packed with troops ‘in groups of about fifty, each with its flag, hundreds and hundreds, dirty, unshaven, carrying guns with their pack and blankets tied round them, all terribly tired, as they had averaged thirty kilometres per day for three days’. Through Pip’s innocently enthusiastic eyes a unique picture emerges.

It is fun to see newly taken big towns. Auxilio Social distributing bread from lorries, men sticking up anti-Red and up-with-Franco posters everywhere, people clearing up debris in the streets, putting down telephone wires, looking for houses for hospitals and offices, and dozens of simple sightseers. Unluckily the fun of a frantically pleased population waving flags and making whoopee was missing as all the Catalans are red so don’t look on us very much as heroic liberators.¹¹¹

Despite the comfort of travelling as Princess Bea’s companion, Pip made the courageous decision to join a unit of Franco’s Moroccan Army Corps. It meant risking the Infanta’s displeasure and giving up the possibility of frequent meetings with Ataúlfo, but ‘after all, I came here to work’. To her chagrin, Mercedes Milá would not permit her friend Consuelo to join the same unit. ‘God knows that I don’t want to go all alone to a new equipo miles from Princess Bea and her family where I know no one and there is no one who can speak a word of English or has anything even distantly to do with my previous life.’ Her decision was all the more plucky given her own war-weariness.

This time last year I was in Ventosilla wildly excited that at last I was off to the front. How much one year can wear out one’s enthusiasm and vitality. It seems at least five years since I left Ventosilla and God how sick I have got of the war in that time … if I have to spend another wartime Christmas here I shall die of depression and worries and illnesses … If only the war could be over so that I could stop worrying about Ataúlfo and go away somewhere and never move, speak or think for a month. I am tired out both morally and physically.

Her new unit was in the agreeable surroundings of the elegant resort of Sitges to the south of the Catalan capital. Billeted in a fashionable hotel, the sun and the beach cheered her as did the news that Barcelona had fallen on 26 January 1939. The prospect of being among the first to enter the city excited her and her morale was further bolstered by the fact that she was the most competent of the nurses in her new unit and was given plenty of responsibility. On 27 January she visited Barcelona with the rest of her unit.

It is a lovely big spacious town and quite unharmed though very dirty. We drove madly all round it. The port is a shambles due to the hard work of aviation. The streets were crowded with people showing considerable enthusiasm. Everyone shouting and cheering and all the girls parading up the streets with flags. The troops marching through were surrounded by cheering crowds and everyone was in splendid form. And yet as soon as one was out of the main streets, where all the fun was going on, the people looked surly.

To her disappointment, her unit was ordered to stay in Sitges as the Moroccan Army Corps was not participating in the rest of the advance. There, with astonishing energy, she singlehandedly created a functioning hospital out of the chaos of broken beds, tangled bed linen and boxes of utensils dumped by a convoy of lorries. There being little military activity she was able to drive to the Orléans house in Monzón and to marvel at Ataúlfo’s brand-new grey Condor Legion uniform. In Barcelona, she was regaled with horror stories of the Communist ‘checas’, the dungeons in which political prisoners were tortured and interrogated. Her hospital was moved to a lunatic asylum at San Baudillo de Llobregat and Pip was delighted to be in sole charge. In fact, the war was virtually over in Catalonia and there was talk of her unit being sent to Extremadura.¹¹²

While awaiting orders, she spent her time ferrying the officers and nurses of her unit to and from Barcelona. Her description of a journey with one of the chaplains is worth repeating.

Matute is a dreadful bore and can’t see a car without getting into it. He always wants to go somewhere. We stopped in Vilanova i la Geltrú for petrol and my car was immediately surrounded by children as always. To my surprise, the priest, who had alighted leaps forward and starts to deal blows all around with his rolled-up newspaper. The little crowd dispersed in a moment. I was furious, as I thought it very unnecessary as they were doing no harm.

When the priest launched himself at the children a second time, Pip remonstrated with him. He skulked off while she entertained the children with a concert on her car radio. ‘They were sweet, all peering in through the windows and hushing each other and dancing and pretending to play the violin.’ On his return, he reaffirmed the marriage of Church and Francoist State by obliging the dumbfounded children to sing the Falangist hymn, ‘Cara al sol’ (face to the sun) and delivering a sermon on the meaning of its words.¹¹³

The extent to which Pip had changed was illustrated on one of her frequent journeys. She had always been intrepid and was not fazed by hair-raising trips alone across mountain tracks in thick fog or through floods. The war had hardened her. On 16 February, she had an accident. Driving into Barcelona, intent on manoeuvring her car through convoys of lorries on narrow roads, she did not notice an old lady wandering into her path and could not brake in time. The woman was scared and bruised but otherwise unharmed. At one level, Pip was horrified but quickly recovered, commenting later, ‘I have gained an instantaneous cold-bloodedness in this war from having to show no feelings in my work when my insides are writhing. And ever since I was shelled at Escatrón I have a complete cold control over myself which is very useful.’¹¹⁴

Pip got her mother to send out 500 bedcovers, lots of white material, cloaks, boots together with some peach brandy and 10,000 cigarettes. She drove for twenty hours to Sanlúcar to spend her leave with Ataúlfo. She finally began to recover from the ravages of the war.

I live in a sort of peaceful haze of pleasure. The continual trouble of having to watch my step with Ataúlfo so as never to appear more than good friends when I really long to be close to him, to touch him and so on is amusing despite its unpleasantness and frustration. It is like a continual game. I let myself go as close to flirting as I dare but without ever going a step too far, not even by so much as a look. I don’t know how long I shall have the self-control and placidity to be able to go on like this but for the moment it hardly disturbs my happiness at all, rather adds a flavour to it if anything. Neither the past nor the future exist and I live gloriously in the present here with Ataúlfo.

They spent idyllic hours gardening in El Botánico. The only cloud on the horizon was the amount that she was drinking – ‘a disgrace. I even take brandy to finish off my breakfast.’ It was an indication of the toll taken on her by the war. On Saturday, 25 February, she spent the night in Seville and got riotously drunk and danced with Ataúlfo in a nightclub until dawn. ‘It was a heavenly evening, nobody existed in the world as far as we were concerned.’ They paid the price the following morning when they set out for the long drive to Épila with the corresponding hangovers. They arrived just as the radio was announcing that Britain and France had recognised Franco. The end of the war was imminent. This elated her immensely but the shadow of a general war soon dampened spirits. It was a reflection of the Germanophile and anti-Semitic ambience of Prince Ali’s household that she could write in her diary: ‘The news from England tonight was once more all about war preparations in view of the imminent crisis. There is no crisis but as the Jews have sworn to have a European war this spring come what may, I suppose there soon will be.’¹¹⁵

With the war effectively over, there was little for Pip to do. Inevitably, away from the chaos of the front, her mind focused on Ataúlfo and she saw him frequently. Her pleasure in this was negated by signs that Princess Bea was starting to worry about their relationship. ‘Somehow a strange feeling seems to have crept into the atmosphere. It is impossible to explain and may be all my imagination but there have been so many tiny probings and pointed remarks and meaning looks.’¹¹⁶ There are various reasons why this might have been the case. If Ataúlfo was getting attached to her, that would challenge Prince Ali’s hopes for his son to marry a royal. It is more likely that Princess Bea knew instinctively that her son had no real interest in women, would never marry and perhaps wanted to avoid Pip being hurt. All this was going on while the Republican zone was disintegrating into a mini civil war between the Government and the anti-Communist forces of Colonel Casado. Her unit had been sent to Don Benito in the province of Badajoz – at the best of times, a drab town. Now, pockmarked by shells and bombs, it was without any charm. To make matters worse, she was worried that she would miss the triumphal Nationalist entry into Madrid. In the event, her time there was made pleasant by sunbathing and horse riding. It was also just about near enough for visits to the Orléanses who were now in Talavera de la Reina. Her peace of mind was briefly disturbed by news of the Germans marching into Slovakia in mid-March.¹¹⁷

On 22 March 1939, her unit moved to Pueblonuevo in Córdoba – ‘a filthy little dump’. She was depressed. ‘God I wish this war would stop. I am fed up to the back teeth and will go raving mad soon.’ The Nationalists were preparing for the final march on Madrid. Conditions in Pip’s new hospital were primitive. ‘It is hell having to start this war again when we all thought it was over and finished. I am sick of it and never want to work again in my life. My worst worry is my terror of there being a European war although things are temporarily quieting down.’ Pip dreaded moving from one bleak village to another although in fact the end was nigh. She was released from her unit and, after a difficult search through the frozen sierras near Ávila, she managed to rejoin Princess Bea. The Infanta was about to enter Madrid with Frentes y Hospitales and Pip became one of her staff preparing food and blankets to take into the starving city that had been besieged for two and a half years.¹¹⁸

On 26 March, a gigantic advance was virtually unopposed across a wide front. Franco’s forces entered an eerily silent Madrid on 27 March. When Pip heard the news, she was exultant: ‘A day no Spaniard will ever forget nor I either. It has been so unbelievable that I don’t know how to begin to describe it. At last, at last I am in Madrid, and I doubt if any other English person has entered it for the first time in their lives under similar conditions.’ On 28 March, the Infanta, with Pip and a convoy of lorries containing supplies, were into Madrid before the main Nationalist forces. They drove through the lunar landscape of the Ciudad Universitaria, the front line marked by huge fortifications and smashed buildings. As they drove slowly into the centre, starving children jumped for joy as they handed out chocolate. There were emotional scenes as right-wingers who had been in hiding since the beginning of the war staggered out into the light from the embassies and legations where they had been buried alive. Pip was distressed by the damage to the magnificent Orléans Palacio in Madrid. Much of the façade had been damaged by shell-fire. A tabor (battalion) of Moorish mercenaries had been billeted there and filled the patio with sheep, goats and bullocks. However, the upstairs apartments and most of the furniture was intact.¹¹⁹

On the following day, they drove northeast out of Madrid past Guadalajara to inspect Princess Bea’s estate at Castillejo. In the course of a drive of one hundred kilometres between Guadalajara and Tarancón, they saw no Nationalist troops yet passed without incident through 40,000 demoralised Republicans. ‘All along the road, some going one way, some the other, in groups of twos and threes, or tens and twelves. They all looked dead tired, pale and exhausted, but quite cheerful. Lots were limping and hardly able to walk. All carrying their rugs and packages on their backs, but no arms at all.’ The estate at Riba de Saelices which Bea had not seen since the family’s departure from Spain in April 1931 was a ruin, its miles of woodland cut down, the house turned into a stable. On her return to Madrid, Pip accompanied the Infanta on an endless round of visits to hospitals, emergency stations and canteens. The weather was cold and wet and in the aftermath of the war, most people seemed to be suffering from colds or flu. Boredom briefly set in and, like others, Pip began to ‘think of the filthy war which we loathed as “the good old days”’. Ataúlfo was similarly affected and was surly and bad-tempered with both Pip and his mother. The entire air force was depressed by the death, in an exhibition flight, of Joaquín García Morato, the Nationalists’ great air ace.

Pip was at least cheered by moving into the new quarters of the Orléans family, a magnificent house that had been the Turkish Legation. She was busy establishing the canteen at the air base of Barajas, on the Guadalajara road out of Madrid.

She wrote of her relief work with Frentes y Hospitales: ‘Always the same rows and bothers. Oh my kingdom never to see a hungry person or a tin of milk or Bovril again.’ She was suffering the common letdown of the soldier’s return to a squalid normality in a war-ravaged country. The end of hostilities meant no longer living on adrenaline. For Ataúlfo and Prince Ali and others, it meant the space to think about dead comrades. The atmosphere was not helped by the fact that there was little food. Pip was still losing weight but, unusually, not pleased by the fact. The relief work was certainly tedious – ‘I am so sick of all this fussing and bothering and wearing uniform and never doing anything amusing.’ The emergency stations provided horrendous sights and smells. Yet there was nothing to stop Pip returning to London to the glittering social life she had left behind eighteen months earlier. ‘I can’t bear the thought of leaving this, because after all I not only could but should go home, but it 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. Pip was persuaded that it was publishable and she set about editing it. Her blue pencil seemed to have had two principal concerns. She was anxious to 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 Ataúlfo by way of reconciling herself to what was likely to be a final break. Her wretchedness was not diminished by the packing-up of Seaford House in advance of it being abandoned by the family for good.¹³⁶

Nineteen-forty started with more telegrams from Ataúlfo, more heartache for Pip and relief that she would soon be off to France. The telegrams provoked tears and intense hurt by forcing her to contemplate her impossible situation. As departure for France beckoned, she began to regret rejecting the invitations to Sanlúcar. In bitterly freezing weather, she left London on 29 January 1940. She spent a pleasant fortnight in Paris, shopping and taking advantage of well-stocked and cheap restaurants. With the war seemingly a long way off, she bought clothes, gramophone records and ‘material for curtains etc for my future rooms’. On 12 February, the unit moved to northeast France, setting up a hospital between Nancy and Sarrebourg in the Moselle. Although the hospital was near the front, there was virtually no military action and the work was inconsequential and tedious. It was enlivened by one daring visit to the Maginot line to peer at the Germans and by occasional concert parties.¹³⁷ Her hopes were raised by a possibility that Ataúlfo would come to London as adjutant to Juan Antonio Ansaldo who had been named Spanish Air Attaché.¹³⁸ She was pleased too when her experience and her good French and English saw her given considerable responsibility. As the work increased, she was moved to write: ‘I am gradually getting happier here and more or less contented. All bothers of life are so far away from one here that one can’t worry so very much.’ She forged a friendship with another English woman in the unit, Dorothy ‘Dodo’ Annesley, and even had a mild flirtation with an American officer called Etienne Gilon.¹³⁹

However, Pip’s version of the phoney war was coming to an end. On 22 April, the hospital was shelled, which stirred unpleasant memories of her ordeal at Escatrón. Her combat experience in Spain singled her out in the unit and gave her a maturity not shared by her older companions. On the other hand, she never entirely escaped from her time and class, writing after one day in the operating theatre, ‘We had two buck niggers today. I hate niggers.’ Rumours of Mussolini joining the war at Hitler’s side led to speculation that Franco would not be far behind. The idea caused her deep disquiet. ‘I can’t imagine anything very much more hellish than fighting against Spain. It was bad enough worrying about Ataúlfo when I was on the same side, but it will be far worse when we are on opposite sides with no news.’ The German assault on the Low Countries provoked an ambiguous reaction – ‘Altogether the Germans have been very spirited. They have bombed masses of French towns last night … Winston Churchill is now Prime Minister of England instead of Chamberlain. I think he is dreadful but perhaps he will do something for a change because so far the Germans seem to be having everything all their own way.’ She was quite blasé about the advancing Wehrmacht. ‘Evidently the Germans have dropped some men in parachutes near here and they have not been caught. So we are all to expect to be murdered in our beds or something.’

The surrender of the Dutch on 15 May did not affect her good humour. A newly arrived and pompous new nurse, a friend of Lady Hadfield, seemed to Pip to be ‘an awe-inspiring old hag if I ever saw one’. As the Germans reached Amiens and Arras, the stream of casualties increased somewhat. When they took Abbéville and were closing in on Boulogne, she began to get concerned for the British Expeditionary Force – ‘Hopeless pansy performance we are putting up.’ She bitterly regretted not being nearer the front line and felt that her unit, being ‘smart’, would never be put in serious danger. When wounded German prisoners came in, Pip was appalled by the hostility that they provoked. ‘We are nurses. And to a nurse, there is no such thing as nationality. One patient is the same as another whether black or white, a Frenchman or a German.’ The fall of Belgium at the end of May left her worried about the BEF being cut off and massacred. Orders came on 30 May for the unit to be evacuated but nothing happened for a week. With the patients packed off, the nurses spent the time drinking, partying, picnicking, fishing and squabbling, with Pip distributing succour to those who had lost fiancés. With no newspapers and only sporadic news on the radio, it was an idyllic interlude – ‘I have not been so happy since goodness knows when.’¹⁴⁰

The unit left Alsace for the south on 7 June. Pip found it all a great adventure until Mussolini’s entry into the war on 10 June once again provoked her worries that Franco would not be far behind. The unit was to set up as a poste d’embarquement, with two hundred beds in a tent at a railway station near Rosnay. However, the speed of the German advance saw them swept up in the flood of refugees heading south. The German occupation of Paris forced the abandonment of plans to set up a new hospital to back up a French defensive stand. The group moved on, staying in requisitioned chateaux. By 16 June, they were near Vichy. News of Pétain’s request for an armistice left Pip weeping with ‘the sudden feeling of the bottom dropping out of one’s world’. As they neared Bordeaux, there was deep anxiety that their convoy would run out of petrol or be cut off by the vertiginous German advance. In either case, Pip was determined to start walking along with other refugees and head for Spain. Depressed and frightened by the prospect of being captured and sent to a German concentration camp, they pressed on, without food, towards Bordeaux.

On 22 June, with wounded British soldiers and a motley group of refugees, they were taken out to sea. There they were picked up by the British light cruiser, HMS Galatea, which took them to St Jean de Luz to pick up the British Ambassador. By 24 June, the unit was on board a troop carrier, the SS Ettrick, en route to England. Among those on board were a group of Polish troops. Pip was instantly entranced – ‘wonderful tall, dark, strong-looking people’. She nursed the wounded soldiers on board and, since her friend Dorothy was ill, Pip also looked after her. Despite her lack of sleep and the cramped conditions, her irrepressible optimism reasserted itself – ‘the Polish troops on board are heaven and have wonderful singing orgies on deck every evening’. The ship reached Plymouth on 26 June. She reached Chirk only to discover, to her horror, that her mother was in Liverpool on the point of leaving for Canada with her four granddaughters.¹⁴¹

Chirk and London were equally depressing. On arrival in the capital, she was told that a young man, James Cassell, who had written to her in France and proposed to her, had committed suicide, leaving a note which read simply ‘Goodbye, Pip.’ When she made enquiries about the Orléans family, she was devastated to be told that they were so pro-German that the British Royal family was livid with them and that Ataúlfo had not been allowed into the country as assistant air attaché to Juan Antonio Ansaldo. Such gossip was wildly exaggerated but it was true that the Civil War had left enormous admiration for the Third Reich on the Spanish Right. The men of the Orléans family had flown with German and Italian aviators throughout the war. Although upset by these rumours, Pip’s reaction was not without shrewdness.

Why do I have to go on being nuts about a man who has always behaved like a prize shit to me and is now violently pro-German. I ought to be furious but it is exactly what I expected of him, the great spineless sod. He is led by his parents wherever they fancy. And to think that we have all been brought up together for two generations and that they are monarchists and Catholics and yet pro-German. They deserve all they would get if the Nazi regime spreads to Spain.¹⁴²

The mental turmoil occasioned by the Catholic royalist Orléanses’ pro-German stance helped Pip to see Ataúlfo in a slightly harsher light – ‘I still like him better than anyone else in the world which is probably why I mind so terribly his upholding the other side. I hope I never have to see him again, the filthy bastard.’¹⁴³ Her mind was taken off Ataúlfo by an encounter with ‘Dodo’ Annesley and Marjorie Fielden who had been with her in the nursing unit in France. Dodo intended to organise a hospital for the Poles in Scotland and wanted Pip to take charge of the nursing staff. In fact, she had to do everything – find suitable premises, raise the necessary funds, purchase surgical equipment. Having committed herself to Dodo, she was then offered a job in Spain by a man called Hugh Smyth. He told her, implausibly, that it would be with the British diplomatic corps. Other evidence suggests that this was a tentative approach by the intelligence services. She felt relieved that the Polish undertaking saved her from making a fool of herself with Ataúlfo. By 3 August, she was on her way to Glasgow where it was arranged that there would be a mobile field hospital, half surgical and general medical complete with operating theatre, laundry and fumigating plant. It was eventually to accompany the Polish units into battle in Italy but by then Pip would have moved on. The entire enterprise was going to be extraordinarily expensive and the initial costs were readily met by Margot Howard de Walden. Pip looked for locations, continued further fund-raising and started learning Polish.¹⁴⁴

It was sufficiently hectic to keep thoughts of Ataúlfo at bay. However, at the beginning of September 1940, she recalled the German invasion of Poland one year earlier when she had been at Sanlúcar. ‘How miserable I was and how justified I was. I have not enjoyed myself for a single day since, and don’t see that I shall again for a long time.’ A year had passed but she was still not cured of her longing for him – ‘I still feel just the same cold, empty feeling without the sod as I always did.’ Life was made thoroughly difficult throughout the German bombing offensive on London during the autumn of 1940. Although inevitably appalled by the damage done by the Blitz, Pip’s sense of humour did not desert her. She found it ‘rather exhilarating being frightened like this all the time, it peps me up, but I do wish it would not give me diarrhoea. However, that at least is slimming.’ She moved around between the homes of various friends and relatives after being forced out of her father’s studio in Cadogan Lane by an unexploded bomb in the garden. Later, after she had got back into the studio, it was badly damaged by another bomb while she was sleeping. In the same air raid, across Belgrave Square, the façade was blown off Seaford House.¹⁴⁵

A letter from Princess Bea expressing her anxiety that Franco might join the war alongside Hitler left Pip wondering if Ataúlfo would end up dropping bombs on London. The mid-September visit to Berlin of Franco’s brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Suñer, was assumed to herald Spanish belligerence. Her analysis of the strategic consequences if Spain went to war, in terms of the loss of Gibraltar and the closing of the Straits, was extremely acute. Her rhetorical question as to why Britain did not try to keep Spain neutral by offering to return Gibraltar after the war exactly echoed Churchill’s own thinking. Her personal anguish at the implications of Spain at war with Britain could hardly have been more intense.

I can’t imagine a greater hell than knowing that Ataúlfo is fighting against me and is bombing day after day. He will never live through a whole other war. It just isn’t possible. And I shan’t even know if he is alive or not. I can’t fight against a country I have fought with for two years, and I would rather die than fight against Ataúlfo. But still women don’t fight and anyhow it is no good feeling that way because we have to win this war and if all the people I love best have to be my enemies meanwhile I will just have to put up with it … For a year I have been miserable because I can’t go back to Spain or see Ataúlfo, but at least I was happy to know that he was safe and enjoying himself and now even that consolation looks like being taken away.¹⁴⁶

In the midst of her distress, she received an insouciant letter from Consuelo asking ‘is London as destroyed as they say? What a shame, such a nice town, it is a great pity.’ A philosophic Pip pondered, ‘how very far we are from our fellow human beings, even great friends. It is funny to think how I worry about Spain joining in this war and how little they worry about us. And we are supposed to be the unfeeling, unemotional ones.’ However, news of Franco’s historic meeting with Hitler at Hendaye on 23 October 1940 renewed all of her anxieties. On that day, she had a terrifying attack of depression, – ‘all of a sudden I began to feel utterly lonely and futile and within about two minutes was lying on the floor sobbing my heart out at the misery and beastliness of life … I felt imprisoned by an impenetrable barrier of wickedness and pettiness and knew that I should never get out. I just lay in the middle of a circle of evil, wicked, mean things sobbing and exhausted with despair.’ No doubt this was a delayed reaction to the terror that she was experiencing during the night-time bombing attacks. And further considerable anxiety was provoked by the fact that Franco, in whose cause she had given so much, was toadying up to Hitler, who was in the process of destroying London.¹⁴⁷

Her reaction to another letter from Consuelo revealed a Pip who was growing up fast. Consuelo wrote that Ataúlfo was behaving very badly, was constantly drunk and deliberately provoking rows with his mother and father. He had told her that ‘he did not care a damn any longer about pleasing his parents as they had ruined his life by not letting him marry the person he wanted to’. Pip’s reaction was extraordinarily mature and wise. ‘What a fat head he is. Too weak to defy his parents in anything important so he just drives them crazy in small ways and no doubt makes himself miserable in the attempt.’ Her romantic longings of old seemed to be replaced, consciously at least, by sadness that Ataúlfo was squandering his talents. Some days later, she awoke in tears after a dream about him: ‘We were in a crowd of panic-stricken women and swarms of babies. He kept trying to reach me and getting swept away. I was terrified of something. At last he reached me and just as he stretched out his hand to catch mine I woke up simultaneously as he was swept away right out of sight.’¹⁴⁸

That Pip’s heart remained in Spain was revealed when Juan Antonio Ansaldo made a visit to London prior to taking up his duties as Air Attaché. When she was invited to have a drink with him and some friends, she assumed that they would have forgotten all about her ‘the same as all my friends here did while I was in Spain’. ‘The only reason they were ever so friendly was because they thought I was engaged to Ataúlfo, but by now they will have forgotten that and I am just another dim English girl who once went to Spain … Now maybe I will wake up to the fact that I don’t belong in Spain and no one there cares two damns about me any longer outside of Sanlúcar.’ Her anxieties were totally misplaced. When they met at the Dorchester, Ansaldo fell upon her effusively. She was so moved by his affectionate response to her that she wrote later: ‘It was a feeling like coming home again after a long exile. I felt as if someone had removed a ton weight off me. Despite all my longing for Spain, I had not realised till then just how much I loved it.’ Her delight at being able to reminisce in Spanish was short-lived. As dawn was breaking on her way home from an extremely alcoholic dinner, she witnessed rescue squads trying to retrieve people trapped in the cellars of bombed houses. When she saw her Spanish friends again on the eve of their return to Madrid, she wept uncontrollably. ‘I know this is my country but it does not feel like it. I feel like an exile from home and I can’t go back.¹⁴⁹

Nostalgia for Spain made it all the more difficult for Pip to throw herself into her Polish project. Having got embroiled in it so as not to be tempted to run back to Spain, she was now regretting the decision. She even began to wonder if she should not have accepted one of the several offers that she had had to go to Spain to work for British Intelligence. The visit of Ansaldo had left her feeling that her love for Spain was not just about Ataúlfo. ‘I love that country and anything to do with it.’¹⁵⁰ Nevertheless, she put aside her distress and knuckled down to making a success of the Polish Hospital. In late October and early November 1940, all the preparatory work began to come together. Pip forged an alliance with Diana Napier, a minor film star and wife of the great Austrian tenor, Richard Tauber, who was in charge of organising ambulances for the Polish Army. A base was found at Dupplin Castle, between Perth and Dundee on the Firth of Tay. At first, Pip faced considerable difficulties in getting the hospital up and running: ‘More and more I hate this Hospital and all the Poles … Loathe the Poles, loathe the Hospital and want to be back in Spain. Even without Spain I should still loathe the Poles.’ Inevitably, as always happened, the more she threw herself into her work, the more engrossed and therefore the less unhappy she became.¹⁵¹ The hospital was called SEFA – from the initials of Scott-Ellis, Marjorie Fielden and Dorothy Annesley.

There were occasional flashes of news from Ataúlfo, mainly when he was in Madrid, which convinced Pip that he was frightened of showing his feelings for her when he was at his parents’ home. At the end of November, a brief stay in London was prolonged after a car crash in the blackout. She was recovering from minor facial surgery when she was visited by Peter Kemp. Her old comrade from the Nationalist ranks told her that he had seen Ataúlfo in Madrid just after he had received news of her flight from France. Pip was amused to be told that he had been furious to hear of her French adventure. He had said that he wished that she had been taken prisoner so that his family could have arranged for the Germans to send her to Spain. She was even more delighted to hear that while in Madrid liaising with the German military representatives, Ataúlfo had ‘received a delegation from all the brothels of Madrid to ask him to ask the Germans to take their boots off!’¹⁵²

In December 1940, Pip was given the title of honorary colonel in the Polish Army. She found it ‘rather fun’ being called ‘Pani Pulkownik’ (Madame Colonel). Life settled down into a monotonous routine. Pip worked immensely hard and learned a lot of physiology and anatomy.¹⁵³ Her Polish became as fluent as her Spanish. Beyond her work, her main preoccupation regarding the outside world was that Spain did not enter the war on Hitler’s side. She was as distressed as many of her Polish comrades by the idea of alliance with Soviet Russia. Her class prejudices, and her experiences in Spain, shone through in her remark that ‘I should hate to fight with a lot of bloody Communists almost as much, though not quite, as I should hate to fight against Spain.’¹⁵⁴

The next years are difficult to reconstruct. Her diary comes to an abrupt end in January 1941. Pressure of work is a possible explanation for the silence although she had managed to write daily under far more trying circumstances in Spain. The survival of a later fragment suggests that the diary was simply lost. Nevertheless, the value of her work can be deduced from the fact that, in 1943, she was awarded the Polish Golden Cross of Merit with the approval of the Foreign Office.¹⁵⁵ What is known is that the cold and damp of the Scottish climate intensified her tendency to very poor circulation. The chief surgeon at the hospital told her that smoking and drinking so much was exacerbating the problem. She seems to have tried sporadically to cut down but the daily stress of life at the hospital made abstention impossible for her. Life became unbearably difficult and she was diagnosed as having circulatory difficulties, known as Raynaud’s disease. It was recommended that she go to live in a warm climate. Throughout her time at Dupplin Castle, she longed for the day when she would return to Spain although a lengthy affair with a Polish surgeon, Colonel Henryk Masarek, had helped her finally to put aside hopes of marrying Ataúlfo.

As a result of her experiences in Spain during the Civil War, the various informal approaches from the Secret Services in 1939 and 1940 were entirely understandable. Keeping Spain neutral was a major preoccupation and an upper-class English woman with Pip’s impeccable political connections was an obvious target for recruitment. She was close to both the Orléans and Kindelán families, the two most important centres of the monarchist opposition to Franco within Spain itself. In mid-July 1941, the Special Operations Executive ran a security trace on her. The trace request to MI5 stated: ‘It is our intention that the Honourable Miss Scott-Ellis should be employed in the investigation of the possibility of evacuating Polish prisoners-of-war from Spain. We would be glad to know, if you have any reason from the security point of view why this person should not be so employed.’ The reply from MI5 cast doubt on her discretion citing a report that, at a dinner held at the Savoy for the Spanish Aid Mission in December 1940, she had blurted out that she had been asked to go to Spain as a spy, as she knew so many people there. She proudly stated that she had refused this request – probably the repeated approaches by Hugh Smyth made in the course of 1939. She had said that she would never work against Spain.¹⁵⁶ The reported remarks were entirely consistent with the heartfelt declarations in her diary.

Finally, in February 1943, the Continental Action Force of the Polish Government-in-Exile in Britain requested that Pip be sent to Spain to help in the evacuation of escaping prisoners-of-war. In the light of the earlier security report, the proposal was accepted only after some hesitation. It is difficult to reconstruct her work in Barcelona with the Special Operations Executive from the exiguous surviving files. However, she later hinted at what she did to her mother, her sister, to José Luis de Vilallonga and to her son, John. Her official position, or cover, was as a secretary working in the dissemination of pro-Allied information to counteract the domination of the Spanish media by the Third Reich. However, the Consulate in Barcelona was the main conduit for Allied personnel escaping across the Eastern Pyrenees. It would seem, therefore, that her role was to help in the safe passage of British and Polish pilots shot down over France and other escapees through Spain and into Portugal. Her language skills and her connections with the most prominent and influential pro-Allied monarchists make it eminently plausible that she was indeed organising their transit on to Lisbon.¹⁵⁷

She had the perfect excuse for trips from Barcelona across Spain to a point relatively near the Portuguese border in her friendship with the Orléans Borbón family. In any case, her first port of call in Spain was the family’s Montpensier Palace at Sanlúcar de Barrameda where she went to convalesce from the illness exacerbated by the Scottish climate. Thereafter, her visits to the family were as frequent and as lengthy as they had been during the Civil War. There is plentiful photographic evidence of Pip, looking thin but happy, riding with Ataúlfo in April at the Feria de Sevilla, helping Ataúlfo with his animals at the Botánico at Sanlúcar de Barrameda in May, then again riding with Ataúlfo at the Rocío in June, and then at a party at Sanlúcar de Barrameda in August 1943. In the autumn of 1943, she went to Estoril to spend some time with her mother who was there returning from Canada with her four granddaughters. She travelled to Estoril again in late January 1944 to see Gaenor who was returning from America with her children. She had been with her husband Richard who had been working in the economic warfare section of the British Embassy in Washington.¹⁵⁸ By late 1944, with Allied forces controlling the south of France, Pip’s role was coming to an end.

In any case, her life, both professional and personal, was about to take a dramatic turn. At some point in late 1943 or early 1944, she ran into José Luis de Vilallonga, the handsome and dissolute playboy son of a rich Catalan aristocrat, the Barón de Segur. There exists a photograph from January 1944 of them together at a party. According to José Luis, they met at a cocktail party at the home of the Catalan publisher Gustavo Gili. Tall, elegant, with the pencil moustache fashionable at the time, she found him irresistibly good-looking. He was also seductively charming, as many other women were to discover to their cost. José Luis wrote later: ‘that evening, she would have done better to have gone to the cinema or stayed at home because I was going to make her miserable and humiliated for the rest of her days … I regret infinitely that I made a good and loyal woman suffer so much for the dreadful error of falling in love with me.’¹⁵⁹

Perhaps José Luis’s cruel treatment of Pip was connected to the fact that she bore an uncanny resemblance to his mother, Carmen Cabeza de Vaca y Carvajal. Pip’s sister Gaenor was once shown a photograph of the Baronesa, whom she had never met, and asked to identify it. She thought it was Pip. José Luis de Vilallonga later wrote of how his childhood was marked by his mother’s coldness and indifference. ‘As a child, I would have given anything for my mother to take me in her arms and kiss me.’ Oddly, in his memoirs, he denied that any of his wives resembled his mother.¹⁶⁰ It is tempting to speculate that, in his systematically appalling treatment of Pip, he was somehow trying to punish his mother for the coldness that so scarred his childhood. He described himself as ‘a hardened alcoholic who, without ever taking precautions of any kind, had slept with more whores than a porcupine has quills’. It is interesting that, when he boasts of his insatiable appetite for prostitutes, he admits always to having asked for women who were tall, blonde and blue-eyed, like Pip and like his mother.¹⁶¹

In his memoirs, Vilallonga portrays Pip as a self-possessed cynic when in reality she was nervously insecure. In his version of their first meeting in Barcelona, she offered to get him a job as a journalist if he would act as a propagandist for the Allies. In fact, as he writes elsewhere, he was already working as a journalist for the magazine Destino and she merely helped him with innocuous articles on English pipes, Virginia Woolf and the childhood of Winston Churchill.¹⁶² They began to go out together and she soon fell in love with him and was to remain so throughout their long and unhappy marriage. That José Luis was utterly fascinated by her is revealed by the fact that, in his books, he romanticises her past in the most wildly colourful fashion. He places her in the Spanish Civil War in August 1936 at the massacre of Badajoz under threat of being shot as a spy by the Nationalist Colonel Juan Yagüe. Her time as a nurse in the Hadfield-Spears ambulance unit becomes a dark period in Paris during which it is insinuated that she was a secret agent. Her organisation of the Polish hospital in Scotland becomes service with General Anders’ forces, despite the fact that Anders was imprisoned in Russia at the time and went into action in Italy only long after Pip had left the Poles. Most fanciful of all is the invention that Pip served as a lieutenant with the Spanish Republicans in the Free French forces that liberated Paris. Even more outrageous is a report of a conversation with Pip about her behaviour during the Spanish Civil War. On learning that José Luis was seeing her, his father, the Barón de Segur, allegedly exploded that she had slept with – in one book, half the Spanish Army, in another, the entire Nationalist forces. It is clear from her diaries that Pip did not sleep with anyone in Spain. However, when asked about her sexual adventures, the fictionalised Pip – in an entirely uncharacteristic tone of pompous self-assurance and insouciance – tells her lover, ‘Yes. I have had my adventures, just like everyone else. When death hovers over your head every day, certain moral values undergo changes about which it is useless to speak in peace-time.’ The hard-nosed Pip of his various later accounts is unrecognisable as the vulnerable romantic of the diaries. Indeed, Vilallonga’s fictionalised Pip has more in common with the coldly domineering Baronesa de Segur of his memoirs and novels.¹⁶³

According to Vilallonga, they married because, with the war coming to an end, she was planning to return to London. It is possible that her position in the Consulate had been rendered difficult because of his indiscreet boasting about her work.¹⁶⁴ In one of his books, he claims that, faced with separation, she asked him to marry her. In another, when she announced that she had to go home, he begged her not to leave him. In one version, he responds by saying that he loved her but was not in love with her, and puts into her mouth the reply ‘So what? That is no reason for us not to live together.’ In another, he attributes virtually the same words to himself. What is absolutely clear is that he saw in Pip a way to facilitate his desire to escape Spain and his family to become a writer. He makes no secret of the fact that he was enticed by the idea. Moreover, Pip’s open-minded and forthright conversation attracted him.¹⁶⁵

It may well be that the idea for turning an affair into a marriage came from neither Pip nor José Luis. The romance caused sufficient gossip to provoke the concern of Princess Bea and Prince Ali who immediately set about rectifying the situation. In the summer of 1945, Pip was summoned to Sanlúcar de Barrameda. The Infantes took charge of the relationship, enveloped Pip in their protection and imposed a Spanish-style engagement. This meant efforts to ensure that the couple never met alone until their marriage and José Luis, to his intense chagrin, was lodged for two weeks in a flea-ridden pensión. On the eve of his wedding, the bridegroom was finally allowed to sleep in the Palacio de Montpensier. However, he claims that, on leaving his room en route to the bathroom, he found Ataúlfo’s elder brother Álvaro seated on the landing with a shotgun to prevent him escaping – a story undermined by José Luis’s frequent remarks about his joy at marrying for money and escape from Spain. To justify the claim that he was being forced into marriage against his will, he alleges that Prince Ali was desperate to see Pip married to anyone but his son because she was really his illegitimate daughter. In fact, it is unlikely that Prince Ali harboured any hopes of Ataúlfo ever marrying at all and Tommy Howard de Walden’s paternity of Pip is not in doubt.

At the Catholic society wedding on 20 September 1945, Pip, in white, was given away by Prince Ali. Photographic evidence does not suggest that the radiantly beaming José Luis was a pressed man. It is Pip who looks assailed by doubts.¹⁶⁶ In the conditions prevailing at the end of the Second World War, it was impossible for any of her family to travel to Spain for the ceremony.¹⁶⁷ Hearing that Vilallonga’s father, the Barón de Segur, was fiercely opposed to the match, Tommy Howard de Walden wrote him a stiff letter of protest and challenged him to a duel. In a conciliatory reply, the Barón said that he was not in any way opposed to Pip but was merely trying to protect her, as he would any decent girl, from the martyrdom of marriage to his wastrel of a son.¹⁶⁸

In his brilliantly written, but otherwise deeply callous memoirs, Vilallonga had the grace to write of Pip as ‘a marvellous person whom, without a second thought, I made deeply unhappy’.¹⁶⁹ The scale of egotistical irresponsibility portrayed in his own book makes it quite clear that Pip’s life had just taken an irrevocably tragic turn. The wedding night was spent in an hotel in Cádiz. José Luis claims, equally revealingly whether it is true or false, that, after Pip fell asleep, he went out to spend the night in a brothel with some French prostitutes. From Cádiz the couple travelled to the Hotel Palace in Estoril in Portugal, where they spent a bizarre honeymoon. They arrived with little money and found that getting visas for London was not easy. Until eventually rescued by an emissary of Margot Howard de Walden, they were trapped in Lisbon for nearly six months. They were living in a luxurious hotel on credit which, given the family connections of both, was not as difficult as for some of the guests. Pip tried to eke out their finances at the casino having been given a system for playing roulette. Her occasional small successes were not enough to prevent her having to pawn her evening dresses. In the circumstances, it is difficult to believe José Luis’s highly entertaining account of a life of high-society extravagance, in the frequent company of the exiled royalty of Europe.

José Luis alleges that he now began a poorly concealed affair with Magda Gabor, the sister of Eva and Zsa Zsa. The affair began with him, ever the gentleman, claiming to have demeaned his wife further by telling Magda that he found himself in the appalling situation of having to sleep with someone for whom he felt not the slightest attraction. At every opportunity, he says, he escaped to see his lover and a disconsolate Pip knew. Just as he was about to tell her that he planned to run away to New York with Magda Gabor, Pip announced that she was pregnant.¹⁷⁰ In José Luis’s colourful account, making much of his great sacrifice in giving up Magda, he told Pip that ‘the affair was over’ but, as he wrote later, ‘What stupidity! Everything had just begun. My alienation from her became ever greater.’ Curiously, this did not deter him from staying with Pip for a further seventeen years. Nevertheless, he did, by his own account, engage in serial infidelities, with, amongst others, the same Magda Gabor he had just undertaken never to see again.¹⁷¹

Pip and José Luis left Lisbon in early April 1946, reaching England a few days later. When she finally reached home, Pip was already noticeably pregnant. The family was in Dean Castle, a small fortification at Kilmarnock in Ayrshire, Scotland, and, according to José Luis, had sent a car to collect them. This is strange given the total lack of petrol for private use in immediate postwar Britain. On the lengthy journey, (an improbable seventy-two hours in his memoirs) José Luis claims to have delighted himself reading about his father-in-law’s properties in a copy of the Almanaque de Gotha which he conveniently found in the car along with other books. Apart from the fact that the properties of English aristocrats are not listed in that volume, the Howard de Walden car did not carry a copy. It may be, however, supposed that he faithfully reflects his feelings at the time when he writes of thinking: ‘Mama could be proud of me. I had set myself up for life. At least so I thought.’ He was enraptured by the magnificence of Dean Castle but astounded by what he perceived as the coldness of his hosts. He claims to have been greeted by Lord Howard de Walden dressed in a full suit of medieval armour, holding The Times with hands clad in iron gauntlets. In his account, an exaggeration of the anecdote told by Augustus John, his host wore different suits of armour all the time, even changing for dinner into an especially shiny one. His grotesquely amusing account presents the entire family frequently communing with ghosts.¹⁷²

He was devastated to discover that, although her father was extremely rich, the bulk of his fortune would be inherited by Pip’s brother John. That Pip was merely to inherit an amount of money that assured her what he bitterly dismissed as ‘a mediocre comfort for life’ led José Luis to comment revealingly in his memoirs that this was ‘not at all part of my plans’. With a quite delicious lack of irony, he follows the bitter statement that ‘it’s one thing to marry a rich woman and quite another to marry the daughter of a rich family’ with the assertion that he did not marry Pip for money. Forgetting his earlier story of the shotgun marriage in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, he asserted that he married her out of snobbery – the hope of annoying his father with photographs of Chirk Castle, alongside which the Barón de Segur’s Palacio Falguera looked like a watchman’s hut.¹⁷³ While at Dean Castle, according to José Luis, Lord Howard de Walden asked him point-blank if he had married Pip just for her money. He writes that, although fully aware that the dignified reply would have been to turn on his heel and leave the castle, ‘the Spanish gentleman was in no position to burn his boats and leave himself on the beach with his feet in the water like any old ship-wrecked man’. He admitted to his father-in-law that he had indeed married his daughter for her money but also because they were good friends and she constituted an opportunity for him to break free from his family and from the asphyxiating atmosphere of the Spanish aristocracy.¹⁷⁴ Lord Howard de Walden was appalled by his son-in-law’s ready admission that he was a gold-digger. He altered his will to prevent Pip, now twenty-nine, getting access to her money before she was forty.¹⁷⁵

José Luis claims that, during a ball given at Dean Castle, while Pip was asleep on a sofa elsewhere, he passed a night of passion with Lady Audrey Fairfax, the wife of Admiral Sir Rupert Fairfax. Pip’s sister Gaenor pointed out that there were no balls held in Dean Castle in 1946. After they left Scotland, the couple spent several weeks in London, staying at the Mandeville Hotel. While there, José Luis maintained the social life to which he was accustomed by accepting large sums of money from Pip. Given that this situation could not be sustained, that José Luis had no way of earning a living in Britain and that Pip’s health required a warm climate, he proposed that they emigrate to Argentina.¹⁷⁶

Tommy Howard de Walden owned a small shipping line, the South America Saint Line. In consequence, his son, Pip’s brother John, was able to arrange a passage for Pip and José Luis to Argentina. He also arranged for there to be two medical men, Dr W. L. Roche and Dr W. D. Mulvey, and a nurse aboard. The ship, the SS Saint-Merriel, set sail from Liverpool for Buenos Aires via Las Palmas and Rio de Janeiro. Pip’s labour started before the ship had reached the Canary Islands. The medical staff turned out to be of little help, since one doctor was in fact a dental specialist and the other an ophthalmologist. The nurse, who bore a remarkable resemblance to the young Margaret Rutherford, managed to break her leg just before Pip went into labour. Her son John was born at sea on 22 June 1946. It was a difficult birth and Pip was in danger of losing her life. An attractive fellow passenger, a fashion designer called Esterre ‘Terry’ Erland, helped with the labour. When the ship reached Las Palmas, there was a christening at which Terry Erland became John’s godmother. His godfather was, thanks to Margot van Raalte and by the proxy of the ship’s captain, Don Juan de Borbón. When the ship reached Bahia in Brazil, while Pip lay still convalescing on board, José Luis claims that he went ashore and slept with Terry Erland. José Luis made no secret of this and, for Pip, suffering a degree of postnatal depression, the effect was devastating. Even if she had not done so in Portugal, before reaching Argentina, she realised that she had made a dreadful mistake and that Prince and Princess Orléans-Borbón had been right about José Luis. However, with her boundless optimism, she determined to make the best of the marriage.¹⁷⁷

During the sea voyage to Argentina, José Luis met a retired Hungarian cavalry officer, Count Laszlo Graffy, who was planning to breed and train horses on the pampas. He persuaded Pip that they should become the Count’s partners in the enterprise. On reaching Argentina, at first their expenses were met by the agent of Lord Howard’s shipping line. They acquired a flat in Buenos Aires, were able to buy land on the pampas for their stables and riding school, install a prefabricated house and buy a car. They suffered considerable privation since Pip could gain no immediate access to either her own funds or the help of her family since money could not be sent out of England until she had established herself as a British resident abroad. She had very little money and José Luis had none, since his family were outraged by the manner of his marriage and had effectively cut him off.

Since José Luis was repelled by the thought of childcare and Pip could not cope with John’s crying, they left him with a series of nurses. Their own experience of parenting hardly prepared them for any other response. Moreover, their own relationship was in increasing difficulty.¹⁷⁸ José Luis, in his memoirs, asserts that when he made love to her, he could not disguise his indifference. Nevertheless, she was soon pregnant again. They hardly spoke to each other. José Luis claimed that he abhorred his son (although photographic evidence suggests otherwise) and spent ever more time in Buenos Aires.¹⁷⁹ Pip’s skill with horses contributed greatly to the initial success of the business at Los Cardales where she worked with Graffy and the various Hungarian and Polish cavalry officers employed at the stables. However, money was so tight that, in an effort to make ends meet, Pip went into partnership with Terry Erland to open a fashion-design business and dress shop under the name Susan Scott Designs.¹⁸⁰

Tommy Howard de Walden died on 6 November 1946. Because he had not made prior arrangements, the amounts that he left to his daughters were severely diminished by death duties.¹⁸¹ Pip was to be left £50,000 – a considerable amount of money in 1946, about £1 million in 2001 terms – but it was tied up in the family estates. In any case, postwar austerity restrictions on capital movements prevented it being taken out of the country. Tommy did, moreover, leave Pip his studio in Cadogan Lane. Because, when the news arrived, Pip was suffering a difficult pregnancy and had been ordered by her gynaecologist to rest, José Luis went to London alone in the early summer of 1947 to wind up the estate. He stayed with Margot Howard de Walden at her house in Welbeck Street and soon established a warm friendship with a bisexual Austrian aristocrat called Count Boisy Rex. Boisy vaguely knew the family because his elder sister, Countess Marie Louise Rex, was married to the father-in-law of Pip’s cousin, Charmian Russell (née van Raalte). José Luis used the impoverished Boisy as a cicerone to the gastronomic, sartorial and erotic delights of postwar London. Needless to say, he did not stint himself. After the reading of Tommy Howard de Walden’s will, the cornucopia that was the studio in Cadogan Lane lay at the mercy of José Luis and Boisy. The house contained a wealth of modern art although some were fakes and the collection may not have included the Max Ernst, Braque, Otto Dix, Rothko and Jackson Pollock canvases, Hogarth and Picasso drawings and Rodin sculptures ‘remembered’ by José Luis. José Luis did not hesitate to move into the house with Count Rex nor, with his help, to sell off paintings in order to finance the rebuilding of his wardrobe. Given his vocation as a dandy, this proved to be a fabulously expensive endeavour.¹⁸²

Since there was no detailed inventory of the contents of the Cadogan Lane house, there was little or no control over what José Luis was able to sell. He lived, as he put it, ‘without restraint’ (‘desenfrenadamente’). Eagerly encouraged by Boisy, he escaped the austerity of postwar London and together they wallowed in delights available only to those with unlimited supplies of ready cash – restaurants supplied by the black market, clandestine gambling dens, nightclubs that never closed, and women. He claims that one of Lord Howard’s drawings went to pay one year’s rent on a furnished flat in Piccadilly for one of his lovers – a famous popular singer. Another paid for him to spend some time in Madrid and Barcelona where he stayed in the best hotels and replicated his London hedonism. While in Barcelona, he received a telegram informing him that Pip had given birth to a daughter. Born on 6 August 1947, she was called Susanna Carmen (for José Luis’s mother), Margarita (for Pip’s mother) and Beatriz (for Princess Bea). He returned to Buenos Aires via London. Before leaving, José Luis claims to have given Boisy Rex a priceless painting by Max Ernst the proceeds from which he used to establish himself in the world of greyhound racing. José Luis did give John Scott Ellis an umbrella which John immediately spotted as having belonged to Tommy. It was a small compensation for the fact that John had to meet the considerable debts left by José Luis.¹⁸³

In José Luis’s absence, Pip had tried to recapture his love by preparing an environment in which he could pursue his dream of writing. This took – he says – the form of three railway carriages – two sleeper cars and a restaurant car. One of the sleepers had two large rooms and a bathroom; the restaurant car became a kitchen and dining-room, the other sleeper was left as it was. To facilitate José Luis’s writing, a magnificent study was prepared and a young Italian woman, Lucy Babacci, contracted to be his secretary. In no time at all, he says, she was his lover. He insinuates that this was with the complicity of Pip who, after her recent labour, had no desire for sexual relations. Little of this coincides with what Pip told her sister.¹⁸⁴ While José Luis philandered and wrote, Pip threw herself into looking after the horses, her dress shop and, to a lesser extent, the upbringing of the children. The dress and fashion business worked well until Terry Erland decided to return to Europe in 1949. The financial difficulties were exacerbated in 1950 by a decree that obliged companies to employ three Argentines for every foreigner. It signalled ruin for the stables. The business was sold to Colonel Graffy and, on the insistence of José Luis, they moved to Paris since neither he nor Pip wanted to live in London or Barcelona.¹⁸⁵

Leaving Pip to wind up the estate, José Luis seized the opportunity to go on ahead to Paris in April 1951. José Luis’s attitude to his children had been at best lukewarm so John and Carmen were sent to England to live with Gaenor while Pip and José Luis tried to rebuild their fortunes, both emotional and financial, in Paris. There he wrote his first novel, Les Ramblas finissent à la mer. He claims that, realising that he did not want to share a life with Pip and their children in a Parisian apartment, he immediately persuaded her to live somewhere where he might visit them occasionally. The facts are that they separated only after seven years of deteriorating relations spent in different Parisian apartments. The relationship was doomed since José Luis was concerned only with establishing himself as an actor and a novelist – yet neither of them seemed prepared to bring it to an end. Along the way, he led a life of epicurean dissolution. According to his own accounts, he was taking money from a series of rich, older women, including someone called Kitty Lillaz and the actress Madeleine Robinson, whom he passed off as his wife. Pip knew but suffered in silence. Finally, on her fortieth birthday in 1956, she got access to her money and she bought a flat for them both in the rue Alsace Lorraine in the Bois de Boulogne. José Luis borrowed much of her remaining money and promised to return it when he inherited from his father. This he never did. To compensate for not seeing her children in school term time, Pip regularly indulged them with extravagant holidays skiing in Switzerland or Austria in winter, swimming at St Tropez or Monte Carlo in summer.¹⁸⁶ When she did have access to her own funds, according to José Luis, Pip frittered them away in acts of absurd generosity, of which he was often a beneficiary himself¹⁸⁷

José Luis also claims to have still possessed a large portfolio of drawings, watercolours and oils taken from his father-in-law’s collection which facilitated his high-society existence. Once he had eventually found success as a novelist and journalist and insinuated himself into the world of cinema, divorce from Pip was inevitable. What is really astonishing – and suggests that there was more to the relationship than he admits – is that it took him so long to seek a divorce. In his memoirs, he depicts Pip’s presence as an intolerable invasion of his privacy. If this is true, for a woman as insecure and as desperate to please as Pip, it must have been unbearable as, in the most adolescent fashion, he flaunted his many lovers. He claims that things reached a peak when, one night in Paris, no doubt driven by his own guilt, he tried to strangle her.¹⁸⁸ Again the truth about the end of the relationship was less dramatic. In 1958, he appeared in a very minor role in Louis Malle’s Les Amants starring Jeanne Moreau. In 1961, he had an equally small role in Blake Edwards’ Breakfast at Tiffany’s.189 José Luis was increasingly away on location or else with one of his many lovers. Pip had long since suggested that, given the needs of her health and the children’s welfare, they should live in the South and there was no way that he would leave the capital.

Eventually, in 1958, Pip bought some land at Auribeau-sur-Siagne near Cannes. In a last effort to hold on to José Luis, and to make a home for her children, she created a splendid house out of two workmen’s cottages knocked into one. The land had the small river Siagne running through it and, on the other side of the small valley from the main house, there were two small houses where the children stayed. José Luis did not live with the family at Auribeau although he visited frequently, having found another rich older woman, Countess Rosemarie Tchaikowska, with a house nearby. When he did visit, he would childishly challenge Pip by often disappearing in search of conquests in Cannes.¹⁹⁰ Increasingly alone with her children, Pip was not happy. There were occasional affairs but nothing could console her for the loss of her husband. Although a very competent mother, her son remembers Pip as sparing in her affections. His abiding memory is of her sitting at a desk and turning towards him, ‘her knees like the double barrels of a shotgun’. He cannot remember her ever kissing him. His daughter recalled ‘she was there, she was fun, but did not take part in the everyday nitty-gritty of life till much later on. All that was taken care of by the nuns at boarding school or the servants at home.’ In that sense, Pip was following in the footsteps of her own mother. She really came into her own as a mother when her children grew older and were able to have a more ‘adult’ relationship. Both her daughter and her niece remember her to be ‘loving and understanding’ and a fount of boundless fun and someone with whom they could always talk about their troubles. The children were sent to boarding school in England and they would meet for spectacularly expensive holidays. Pip drank heavily, although never before 6.30 p.m., and never betraying the effects of alcohol. When she came to England to return the children to school after some holiday jaunt, they would stay at the Mandeville Hotel where she had once stayed with José Luis. She would leave them watching television while she went out in a desperate attempt to recreate the glittering social life of her youth.¹⁹¹

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