The Family on Paradise Pier by Dermot Bolger

Author:Dermot Bolger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

PART THREE

1937–1946

TWENTY

The Volunteer

Barcelona, January 1937

‘You speak English, comrade? Where are you from?’ The young man with an unmistakably Dublin accent took a seat at Brendan’s table outside the café on the Ramblas. His khaki beret was too big but otherwise he had scavenged well in the scramble by new arrivals in the barracks storeroom. His wafer-thin corduroy jacket buttoned up to the neck was a different shade of brown to the equally inadequate trousers, making it hard to regard his outfit as a uniform. But such little sense of military precision existed among the volunteers from across the world who kept arriving in Barcelona that their ill-fitting garb merely fitted into the euphoric anarchy on the streets.

‘I’m from Donegal,’ Brendan replied carefully. The Dubliner scrutinised him in that half-suspicious way of all working-class people and Brendan lost the sense of freedom he had known here amongst foreigners who could not distinguish his caste.

‘You sound like no bogman,’ the Dubliner said.

‘I’m a volunteer, the same as you.’

‘Then why aren’t you in with the rest of us Irish lads where you belong? I’ll have a natter with Frank Ryan, our responsable, see if he can squeeze you into our column.’

‘I don’t think that would be possible.’

‘Needless to say.’

Brendan resented the Dubliner’s smirk. He had spent his lunchtime with Yuri, an elderly Soviet radio technician, discussing a problem with Yuri’s ship’s transmitter. Yuri had returned to the Soviet ship tied up in the harbour and now Brendan wanted simply to be left alone or at least as alone as a man could feel who knew that his movements were being watched. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘Keep your hair on, comrade. It’s just that you university intellectuals make me laugh. I see it when the new arrivals are being sorted out in the bullring. The ordinary English lads refuse to be separated while you toffs bugger off to join the Spaniards in POUM to avoid needing to mix with your own lower orders.’

‘I’m not an English toff and I’m still among the volunteers I travelled with,’ Brendan replied tersely. ‘I’m with the Russian contingent.’

‘Holy shit! Did they invade Killybegs?’ He stopped laughing, seeing that Brendan did not intend to reply, and stuck out his hand. ‘Liam Hennessy. From Dorset Street in Dublin.’

‘Brendan.’

Hennessy managed to summon one of the waiters running the café which was now a collective enterprise since the owners fled. ‘Two mud coffees with a dose of brandy, entiende?’

The waiter shrugged uncomprehendingly, dressed in a brown boilersuit with an anarchist neckerchief. This outfit was so common that it was hard to tell who were civilians and who were volunteers.

It had been part of Barcelona’s exhilaration that initially touched Brendan, the sense of being in a true revolutionary city. But the free spirit evident here had made him realise how claustrophobic Moscow always felt. These Catalans had already withstood a major battle and knew that the untrained volunteers they greeted like heroes each day at the station were no match against the warplanes sent by Hitler.

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