A stroll around Pinoso

I've always liked cinema so, when I began to take an interest in Spain, I made an effort to see Spanish films. For years and years it seemed that every Spanish film ever made was about the Spanish Civil War. They were almost all dull and drear. I also read Hugh Thomas's book about the war and I found it hard going. Paul Preston's more recent history of the same event persuaded me that he was one of the most boring writers that has ever put pen to paper. Years later, I thought I should give him a second chance, he seemed to be well regarded by everyone else, so I read his book about Franco. I have never been tempted to try him again.

The Spanish Civil War ran from 1936 to 1939. That's a long time ago. As I mentioned in a post a few days ago there are two schools of thought amongst Spaniards about the war and more particularly about the dictatorship that resulted from it. That it should be forgotten or that it should be given a thorough airing so that it can be finally laid to rest. Unlike Britons, a little older than me, who talk incessantly about "The War", the Second World War that is, I don't think that I've ever heard a Spaniard start a conversation about the Civil War. The majority of young people know about the Civil War from their school syllabus in exactly the same way as young Britons do topics on The Blitz. Our Town Hall had obviously decided which side it was on with the second in a series of annual week long events around a Civil War theme.

The war started because a group of army officers didn't much care for the result of the 1936 General Election. They organised a coup and botched the job so that it turned into a bloody civil war. The area where we live was the last redoubt of the Republican Government and, indeed, the last tatters of the defeated Government flew out of Spain to exile from an airfield about 5 km down the road from Culebrón.

Last Sunday we went for a walk around Pinoso led by the town archivist and a chap from Alicante University. The idea was to show us sites that had been important in the Spanish Civil War. I enjoyed standing on a street corner having to imagine the scene but, to be honest, the visit could equally well have been a lecture because there was very little to see in situ. The Archivist told us that the idea came from one of the local councillors. That's the same team that brought us a journey through the town archives and a tour of the local cemetery both of which have been among my favourite events here in Pinoso.

Anyway. so we're strolling around in the bitingly cold wind. We get told about the checkpoints to control traffic in and out of the town, we hear about the Pioneers, the socialist equivalent of a movement like the Hitler Youth, we hear about a lynching (and the dispute from the participants about whether that was a true story or not), we hear about paseos and about sacking the local church and the burning of all the religious statues. Paseo by the way is usually best translated as a stroll. Here though it's the euphemistic term used to describe the last walk to the firing squad during the Civil War years. At one point Maggie checked with me, as we walked from the site of an air raid shelter towards the clock tower used as a look-out post, that Pinoso had been in the area controlled by the Republic. I think that she was having some difficulty in squaring summary firing squads with the idea of the "good guys".

Just one little snippet from the talk that struck home with me amongst all the detail of colony schools and union activity. There has been a bit of a fuss in Spain recently about removing reminders of the dictatorship enshrined in street names. Lots of the ostentatiously named streets, like Avenida del Generalissimo, changed soon after Franco's death in 1975 but, in towns and cities the length and breadth of Spain less obvious Francoist street names and symbols live on. In Pinoso there were 12 of these streets with names like Capitán Haya, a Nationalist air ace, Sánchez Mazas, a writer, responsible for the "Arriba España" slogan and others of a similar ilk. Fair enough, I thought, change the names and there you go. What was pointed out though, by the guide, was that this was part of a systematic method of obliterating older social and cultural aspects from Spanish streets and replacing them with a "Francoist" history.  It reminded me of George Orwell's 1984 hero Winston Smith writing a piece for The Times about an air ace. In reality the pilot never existed but, in a fake news sort of way, he would become important as soon as his story was in print.

It takes all sorts

A Facebook group that I'm a member of, Spanish International Alicante, advertised a bilingual history evening in the nearby village of la Romana some 16 or 17 km down the hill towards Elche. The title, or at least one of the titles, was Spain's Transition to Democracy.

I turned up. It looked to me as though the room for the meeting had only recently been finished because it was all a bit sparse. There was a decent enough crowd, mainly Spanish and British. A couple of people made a point of greeting me so the welcome was warm enough even if the room was a bit chilly.

We started pretty much on time, maybe fifteen to twenty minutes late, with a welcome from the Deputy Mayor of La Romana. He was young and dressed in a sort of modern teddy boy style. We went to a very strange parade in la Romana once. Maybe alternative is something they cultivate.

The woman who gave the talk was called Anabel Sánchez. She'd given herself quite a task, to cover the years from the proclamation of the Second Republic, in 1931, through to the stable democracy in Spain in 1981. She had an hour and she did everything in English and in Spanish. Fifty years in sixty minutes or thirty minutes for each language. It could never be anything other than a quick and superficial overview but she did a good job in my opinion.

A lot of the talk centred on the Spanish Civil War and the resulting dictatorship because that's the period from 1936 through to 1975. Anabel's viewpoint was openly anti Franco and pro woman. She poked fun at the Francoist view of women's roles. She stressed the repression and the misery of rationing in Francoist Spain which caused some bubbling amongst a couple of members of the audience who pointed out that Britain had also suffered rationing during and after the Second World War.

At the end of the talk people were doing that milling around thing. I heard one of the organisers of the event ask one of the audience what she had thought. I expected the usual sort of "very interesting" answer but, instead, the attendee said she thought that it had been a terrible talk and that the speaker was obviously biased, that her views should be balanced by inviting a more conservative speaker to the group and that the root cause of the turmoil in Spain for all those years was the destruction of political order wrought by the Republic.

Even now it makes me laugh. It's fair enough that people have a range of political views but the idea that someone could even vaguely defend an incompetent and bloodthirsty dictatorship forty years after its demise is so ridiculous that it didn't cross my mind to be angry or repelled.

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The photo by the way is a house that was code named Posición Yuste and was the last headquarters of the Republican Government in Spain in the nearby town of Elda