Petals and Bullets by Mark Derby

Author:Mark Derby [Derby, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Women, History, Australia & New Zealand, Europe, Spain & Portugal
ISBN: 9781845196844
Google: _yReswEACAAJ
Publisher: Sussex Academic Press
Published: 2015-01-15T05:44:28+00:00

Chapter 4

With Horsebox and Lie-Low

“This country and its people has for me such a fascination that it will be a hard day when I have to leave it.”1

Dorothy sent this declaration to her family from Murcia in April 1938, when her work at the children’s hospital was all-consuming yet deeply satisfying, and when the outcome of the civil war remained quite uncertain. The day she feared arrived less than a year later, in February 1939. Her employers at Friends House in London sent terse instructions to return to Britain within weeks, before the Republican surrender that by then appeared imminent.

She opposed the order to evacuate with characteristic determination and vigor. “I left only because I had to! It was considered that my life and liberty were in danger owing to the probable change of regime. Franco and his fellow murderers hated the International Brigade – because they were such fine soldiers and blocked him for so long – so that anyone connected with them has been threatened with much ferocity. And I of course 2 years ago did a lot of work for the Brigade. As the German secret police – the Gestapo – are expected to start work right away on Nazi models, the Quakers became alarmed for my safety in case I should be arrested! Imagine – for nursing sick men!”2

By her own account, Dorothy finally agreed to leave Spain to ensure greater safety for colleagues who intended to remain working there such as Mary Elmes. Elmes had worked only with children and other non-combatants and so was less vulnerable to persecution, and her services were likely to be needed even more desperately in the aftermath of Franco’s victory. “It was very bitter indeed to go” wrote Dorothy, “to leave that country I love so much and all the people who, I think, had liked and trusted me, and worked with me, just in their worst hour: and knowing too, as I said goodbye, that death or Africa or torture or a concentration camp lies before so many of my friends. Their blood will be on English hands always – that ruling section that prevented them defending themselves and their freedom.”3

The firm instruction to leave the country arrived when Dorothy was in Alicante, a short distance along the coast from Murcia to the north. There, as she had agreed with the International Commission for Refugee Children, she had just begun working in a somewhat unfamiliar field. She was no longer a health professional but an aid worker, forming and running temporary canteens to distribute food and milk to communities faced with starvation.4 This work had formed a central part of the Quaker relief effort in Spain since the outbreak of the civil war, but Dorothy had seldom taken part in it while her medical training remained in great demand. It appears that her high reputation among the Quaker administration, and an evident capacity for organisation and resourcefulness, meant she was selected to head the distribution of aid in Alicante.

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