While England Sleeps Read Online Free PDF Page B

place him. Of course! He was John Northrop, with whom I’d gone to school. We had even wanked together once! (As I recalled, his cock was enormous.) Having identified himself as the chairman of the local Communist cell, he gave us first an update on the situation in Aragon, then a history of the long and fractious relationship between the Castilians, in Madrid, and the Catalans, in Barcelona. Apparently there existed between these two groups an intense, deeply buried animosity. Language was at its core; Spain as a country, it seemed, existed only as the result of wars, its borders a testament to battles lost or won, depending on whom you asked. Within its technical frontiers, in the meantime, discrete localities, clinging fiercely to their own tongues and cultures, continued to play out these antique resentments, in the process creating a current of antagonism that undercut the Republican front in ways too baroque for non-Mediterraneans to understand. This idea fascinated me. In my own imagination Spain existed so vividly as an idea—fan dances, castanets—that I had trouble accepting the fact of its national arbitrariness. In truth, however, most countries come into being solely as the result of war. Island nations such as my own are the exception.
    In the Pyrenees, Northrop told us, was a tiny bubble of Spain preserved whole a few miles inside the body of France. This cartographical aberration had come about as the result of a treaty written sometime in the fifteenth century. And it had lasted.
    With a piece of chalk, Northrop mapped the war’s complex political geography. I had trouble keeping track of all the acronyms but was able to grasp that blankets were needed most desperately; also, ambulance drivers, medics, medical supplies; above all, soldiers, men willing to risk their lives defending the Spanish workers against the brutalities of the Fascists and Falangists. He called for volunteers. Emma Leland announced cheerfully that she would drive down in her little roadster and do whatever she could, an offer Northrop greeted with a benign smile and thanked her for, which was really the only way to deal with Emma. If I am to trust histories of the period more than my own memory, the rousing calls to action made at that meeting must have moved us to tears. What lingers, however, is the hollowed-out voice of Emma Leland offering to “pop down” to Barcelona as if Barcelona were the local farmers’ market.
    The meeting broke up. The would-be soldiers gathered in a corner to find out what to do next. Meanwhile a group of Oxbridge types mulled, drinking tea out of paper cups and discussing various rumors from the Continent. Someone said Franco had been shot, someone else insisted that this was unsubstantiated rot. A vulgar joke was made about the Foreign Secretary.
    I noticed an attractive boy of nineteen or so standing alone at a slight distance from the chatting crowd. He was wearing a cap, a worn sweater and a jacket with patches on the elbows, and had propped against his leg a ravaged leather satchel, which looked as if it had been carrying his books since childhood. In his hands he held a paper cup of tea, which he periodically tasted, found too hot and blew on. His hair was dark blond, shaggy and haphazardly cut, and he had a bracingly clean face and green eyes, which according to Mediterraneans are supposed to connote treachery. Near him the crowd buzzed, a young woman threw back her head and laughed, Emma Leland started telling the same story about Daisy Parker’s wedding that Rupert had told to relieve the tension of the lost umbrella. Everyone had gone to school with someone’s brother or known each other up at Cambridge. These were serious young leftist intellectuals, many of them Communists devoted to the idea of a classless society, but they were also upper class and English and so almost unconsciously sought out others of their kind and mixed with them, while the working-class youth stood alone just