Valentine Ackland, page 14
On their first visit to the hospital, Valentine reported the aftermath of a hand grenade accident; they heard the munitions truck explode, and shortly afterwards two lorries full of dead and wounded soldiers appeared, ‘all young lads … most of them with damaged faces and heads’ 45 (just like Robert’s plastic-surgery patients). Although Valentine wrote of this incident as an example of Republican bravery and medical efficiency, it was a distressing introduction to Barcelona.
The first days were spent in mundane tasks; food finding, shopping for the medical unit, shepherding new arrivals and looking after Hugh O’Donnell, their boss, who was seriously ill. Then their unit was allotted a villa in Sarria, an affluent suburb ‘like a fantastic Hampstead’. 46 86 Paseo Bonanova had been abandoned by a wealthy industrialist; it was large enough to become a hospital. Valentine and Sylvia’s task was to search and cleanse the house, and as they surveyed the ‘nightmare of bad taste’ 47 still full of its erstwhile owner’s personal possessions, they felt ill-at-ease. The place had been requisitioned for the people but – until the wounded arrived to justify the situation – it seemed awkward to be poking about in the cupboards; rather like looting Ruth’s house.
Preparing the villa was a herculean task; trying to stock and provision it, move hospital equipment in and furniture out, then find two ambulances (with brakes, ideally), occupied Valentine and Sylvia completely. In an account not intended for publication, Valentine admitted that they were miserable, sometimes frightened, sorely tried by their colleagues, often in a frenzy of impatience. The entire male contingent was drunk for much of the time – and Valentine was not holding back herself. Asunción Lan, their cook-interpreter and minder, was distracted from her tasks by playing billiards all day, ‘so for that day, at least, the flat was not cleaned.’ 48 The ambulances which finally appeared were filthy and decrepit.
The worst incident occurred when they were fetched urgently to the Hotel Lloret because one of the English contingent had drunkenly emptied a chamber-pot out of the window onto the people sitting outside in the cafe below, and an angry mob had gathered to avenge the insult. Their colleague was shouting at the militia guard, but subsided when Valentine told him to ‘Shut up, you fool – you’ll be shot if you aren’t careful!’ 49 A hostile crowd waited silently outside the hotel, and Valentine and Sylvia were jostled and threatened by people inside the building until they barricaded themselves into a room with their compatriots. The situation was eventually defused by negotiation and the perpetrator deported unharmed, but it had been both ludicrous and unpleasant, like so much else in Barcelona.
In contrast, there was Asunción with her shrewd, cheerful affection for them, and Ramona Siles Garcia, a young miliciana who prided herself on her machine-gun skills and had been an ice-cream seller before the war. These two women exemplified the new Spain. A group of Ramona’s fellow-soldiers from the Tom Mann Centuria of the International Brigade were important friends to Valentine and Sylvia in the confused socialising of the city. (The field postcards which reached Dorset from the Aragon Front told of the death or wounding in action of several of these comrades.) 50 Another fellow-volunteer, their comrade the Quaker Stephen Clark, remained a friend for life. The sheer chaos of a revolutionary government was difficult to bear for orderly English folk, but it was impossible not to admire the spirit
13.Comrades in Spain – Sylvia, Asunción and Valentine.
behind it. And there was one certainty which inspired Valentine, and which she never lost. ‘Whatever wild stories are told me of these people’s courage, I shall believe them always,’ she wrote. ‘It’s easy to see that they are true.’ 51
Valentine understood that she was seeing theory in action, and if some of it was disquieting, much was inspiring. She knew that the carnage was not one-sided (although the Republicans were certainly getting the worst of it) and that there were Communists who tortured and murdered their enemies. But she and Sylvia had a large collection of official photographs, still hard to look at, showing the terrible injuries of air-raid casualties; women and children who were early victims of the Luftwaffe’s new system of warfare on civilians. (In Three Guineas Virginia Woolf describes her own similar photographs, sombrely noting ‘They are not pleasant photographs to look upon.’) 52
In Republican Spain, one response from these citizens of the front line was an outpouring of popular art – they sang Lorca’s poetry in the streets, protested with music and painting, printed posters and leaflets of unsurpassed style and impact, and proclaimed their resistance even in the badges they wore on their hats. No wonder that, writing many years later about their contribution in Spain, Sylvia called it ‘the proudest time of my life’. She remembered Valentine’s ‘impetuous chivalry … her most glorious days, our highest demonstration of love spreading out to our fellows.’ 53
On this first trip Valentine and Sylvia were in Spain for less than a month; by 22 October 1936 they were back in Chaldon. Their experiences had made the time seem far longer, but although they’d been homesick in Spain they longed to return. Valentine’s poem ‘Badajoz to Chaldon, August 1936’ expresses this tension memorably:
Telephone wires cry in the wind
and make song there. I stand in the misty night
and listen. Hear voices from a far distance;
hear sounds from further, outside the wires,
than ever inside. Hear sounds from Spain.
The mist muffles all but these, blankets, perhaps, the reply –
But the wind plays the wires still, and the wires cry. 54
As well as the poetry she was writing with such commitment, Valentine produced prose for the Party. She wrote regularly for Left Review, Time and Tide, the Daily Worker and other less overtly Left-wing journals, and also contributed to American publications and wrote frequent letters to mainstream newspapers – a public relations job she took seriously. Writing in the Daily Worker on ‘Agricultural Workers’ Plight’ as ‘Our Worker Correspondent’ her tone is confident, easy, lightly ironical, man-to-man – and angry. This was the voice she developed to speak convincingly of the shame and despair many people felt about a government which did nothing effective to relieve the desperate condition of the unemployed while prevaricating over the threat of Fascism, in a weak attempt to preserve the status quo. Valentine wrote a series of articles on the dire situation of rural workers, emphasising the particular difficulties faced by women, with obvious empathy and authenticity. She was then commissioned to re-cast the articles as a book.
Country Conditions was published by Lawrence & Wishart in November 1936, the only prose book Valentine published during her lifetime. In the rush and excitement of the time she paid it scant attention, and because she was primarily a poet, the book did little to enhance her self-esteem. Yet it was a sustained piece of investigative journalism of which any professional could have been proud. Even today, it retains the power to move the reader, and although its specific details are social history now, the basic problem of rural poverty has not yet disappeared. It had a gratifyingly irritant effect on the establishment; Country Life, among others, printed a long review denying that the problem really existed – in most areas. More sympathetic critics praised it as a well-written polemic and a book that would do immense good. 55 (What Joan thought of this incursion into her territory can only be imagined.)
This publicity brought Valentine to the attention of the Party and another job followed. She was summoned to London on 24 November to drive a lorry to Spain, leading a convoy of two supply lorries since she knew the route. She was to carry important letters. The journey itself was an illegal act, the difficult drive over the mountain passes of the Pyrenees was now snowy and crossing the border – as they knew from experience – could be dangerous. Sylvia was forbidden to go too, and she was frantic. Valentine had been unwell with colitis; only a few days before Sylvia had written to the young enthusiast ‘Let your love be, for once, a BRAKE on your actions.’ 56 But now Valentine could not resist the opportunity to prove herself, even if Sylvia was excluded. Although the ‘apparently very vital letters’, Valentine reckoned, ‘could really go with anyone,’ 57 she felt her loyalty (and possibly her manhood?) was being tested. In a farewell letter, she told Sylvia she loved her more than anything, which made her a traitor to the Party – but in fact she passed the Party’s test of her readiness to leave Sylvia behind. Sylvia wrote in reply ‘If love could do it, you should not be cold, even on the worst of the Pyrenees.’ She added ‘How I can write these things and keep my reason, I don’t know.’ 58
At the last minute, they were reprieved. Valentine became seriously ill, her temperature reached 103˚ and her bosses replaced her before she collapsed. Many years later she said that she was incapacitated at this inopportune moment because of her drinking, and there may be some truth in this. In Spain, she’d eaten little and drunk litres of strong black coffee with brandy, despite bleeding gastric ulcers. The diagnosis was ‘colitis’, a vague term covering various bowel disorders, any of which would have exacerbated by this diet, together with stress. Heavy drinking, combined with the trauma of parting from Sylvia and the prospect of the dangerous journey, could well have triggered a crisis. (Aside from the alcohol, Valentine’s fear of the job could have manifested itself in physical form to get her out of it.) If Valentine felt any embarrassment, she did not show it, but was briskly matter-of-fact about her unreliable health. The cancellation was a disappointment but also a relief; her courage was part-proved. Sylvia was proud of her, but perhaps did not relish the alacrity she’d shown for solo heroics.
In 1937 Valentine was busier than ever on Party business, writing and reviewing for newspapers frequently but still finding time for poetry. She wrote several poems a week and sent them out within days of composition, noting publications tersely (‘Life and Letters Today 3 poems at a guinea each.’) 59 Her ‘personal’ poems had a more authoritative tone now:
Mirror
One portrait only that I would not part from
(in wreckage of house-move, rack of rent, and ruin),
one only gilt-framed master I admit
as ancestor and sacred ikon,
this, the joint throne where Time and I can sit. 60
She could also be humorously self-deprecating, starting one poem ‘What am I at, who cannot write about spring …?’ – she lists all the gloomy topics for poetry which she favours, and concludes ‘What am I at / To write such lies, when fierce midsummer days / Are the weather of my mind, and suns are my days?’ 61
Yet, despite knowing herself blessed and happy, Valentine’s joy in life, her ecstatic response to beauty and pleasure, alternated with a deep melancholy which could not be combated, the long shadow from childhood which always haunted her. She was thirty, and disappointed in herself. ‘I have had for so long such a fine idea of myself …’ she wrote apologetically to Sylvia, ‘that when I come to look at it now, at my age, I feel as though I must be laughed at for having ever hoped and intended so much.’ 62 This is Valentine’s sad inner voice speaking; there was nothing anyone could say to comfort her, no personal happiness or success could assuage her sense of loneliness and failure.
The chance of a return to Spain came later that year, with an invitation to attend the Writers’ International Congress for the Defence of Culture, an event staged by the beleaguered Republican government. Since several of the cities to be visited in the proposed itinerary were under bombardment or in danger of being besieged, acceptance levels were not high. Valentine and Sylvia left on 1 July, travelling to Spain via Paris. As official British Delegates, their reception was very different from the previous chaos; wherever they went there were ceremonies of greeting, feasts and speeches in honour of these foreign guests who were brave enough to show their support for Spain. They were driven all over the Republican area, from Barcelona to Valencia and on to Madrid, to the front line at Guadalajara, then back to Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona.
Valentine’s programme for the Congress is marked with ticks beside the names of friendly delegates. Valentine was listed first of the British delegation, next to WH Auden (who didn’t turn up); the list is not otherwise alphabetical. Their allies included ‘writers in uniform’ Ludwig Renn and André Malraux, poets Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz and Langston Hughes (representing the important contribution of African-Americans). Aside from Sylvia, the best-known of what she called ‘a depressingly puny and undistinguished British delegation’ 63 was probably Stephen Spender, who took a violent dislike to Valentine and Sylvia, which was entirely reciprocated. He was offended by their zealous commitment to the Party, their love of Spain, their creativity, their femaleness and – worst of all – their indifference to his charm, and in his memoirs he caricatured them as a ‘Lady Novelist’ and ‘Poetess’ affectedly addressing each other as ‘Comrade, darling’. 64 They loathed him for his contemptuous attitude to the whole event, exemplified by the suggestion (in his autobiography) that the Spaniards were deluded in imagining the Congress actually meant anything.
By contrast, Valentine was deeply struck by the people’s conviction that the pen could be mightier than the sword. Wherever they went, the delegates were greeted by crowds of refugee women, who kissed their hands and begged them to tell their countries that the Spaniards were ‘loyal forever to the Republic.’ 65 Valentine wrote an account, Invitation to Madrid, which captures her response to the experience:
‘Viva los Intellectuales!’ was the greeting that astounded our ears from even the smallest, most isolated village we passed through on our long caravan of cars. It was profoundly moving, to be greeted so by these poor and ignorant and ruined people. It could not happen in my country … But these people realise seriously that writers and artists can fight for them, and will fight, and that the sixty or so delegates could, if they would, wage a war that would literally shake the world towards their dearest dream of peace. They believed, too, that our coming was a pledge that we would fight. And it was a pledge! 66
Valentine kept this pledge for the rest of her life and never forgot meeting these refugees who believed in the power of the word. ‘Viva los Intellectuales!’ was, Sylvia observed, ‘a strange sentiment to English ears’ 67 and it inspired them both for their work to be considered a necessity of everyone’s life, rather than an elite minority pastime.
The first night in Valencia there was an air-raid; a new experience for most of the delegates. They were all exhausted by the journey, by the opening meeting (at which Sylvia spoke) and the lengthy dinner at the hotel. Valentine was not ashamed to record that some of them were ‘badly scared by the shock of bombardment and horror, the sight of destruction and death.’ 68 They were all to see plenty more of it. In Madrid ‘the darkness burst into flames again’; 69 there were bombing raids by night and aerial battles in the sky by day, with rifle and grenade street-fighting on the outskirts of the city. The front line at Guadalajara, where the trees were stripped by machine-gun fire, was not unlike the First World War battlefields Valentine had once seen in France, except that the conflict was still going on. This sight, and the ruined villages and homeless refugees, provided a bitter foretaste of the next world war which was about to engulf them all.
But, as Sylvia remembered it, Spain did Valentine good, ‘replaced her in herself’. The ‘tall Englishwoman’ was approved by the foreign delegates; ‘the group of exiles, grave and sophisticated, accepted her as though she were one of themselves.’ 70 Pablo Neruda gave her a lemon. Stephen Spender’s caricature of ‘literary ladies’ (who make themselves ridiculous by taking the Spanish people seriously) appears somewhat mean-spirited beside the open-hearted sincerity of these other writers.
At the closing event of the Congress they heard La Pasionaria speak, and Pablo Casals played the Catalan national anthem (as he did after every concert he gave in exile through the long years of Franco’s dictatorship). He asked the delegates if they believed Republican Spain was a civilised country? Considering this question, Valentine concluded that:
the attitude of the working masses of Spain to the intellectual workers of all countries … prove[s] conclusively where is the real future of culture and, by sharp and undeniable contrast, where is barbarism and gross intellectual darkness [by which she meant at home in Britain]. 71
On the way back through Paris they marched in the Bastille Day procession, and reached Chaldon on 16 July. They had been away less than three weeks.
Chapter Six: Dark Entry
Shortly after their return from Spain, Valentine and Sylvia set about house-hunting. The damp and dilapidation of 24 West Chaldon were making their health, as well as their possessions, deteriorate. The well was contaminated (by dead rats) and the remote situation inconvenient, but not far enough from the frequently-rehearsed dramas of Chaldon. They just wanted something more comfortable. On 24 August 1937 they moved to a house within walking distance of Maiden Newton, an inland village on the other side of Dorchester which is bigger than Chaldon, with a railway station, post office and choice of shops (and pubs).
The house they chose is, of course, unusual; it stands alone, in the water-meadows between Maiden Newton and the next hamlet, Frome Vauchurch. It’s built rising straight out of the River Frome, with a narrow deck cantilevered out over the water along the side of the house; light-ripples dance on the indoor ceilings. The garden is bordered all along one side by the river, with a fishing-place on the bank. Opposite, their view across the river was then open downland in a low curve up to the sky, uninhabited. (Later, a row of new bungalows would invade this horizon-line.) The river meanders towards the village in one direction, with a footpath leading there across the fields on the far bank. Their drive led – and still leads – to a narrow lane which crosses the river on a plain iron bridge.
