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11
^th
June

Walked up to the Ritz hotel this morning for a meeting with Hillgarth and Sir Hoare, the new ambassador to the British Embassy. He's only just arrived in Madrid and Hillgarth wants me to help fill him in a bit on this and that. As it is, Hoare's convinced he'll be shot at any moment and has apparently asked to keep a pistol about him at all times. And he won't let the embassy plane go back to London in case he needs to jump on it and get out of here. Needs his nerves calming somewhat. Of course, all that's over now in Madrid. All the skullduggery here goes on behind closed doors in a very civilised fashion.

It's beginning to get awfully hot here in the afternoons, with none of the sea breezes that you get in Valencia, but this morning the air was still pleasingly cool, the cedars and the palms along the paseo de Prado blowing under the bluest
sky as I walked up to meet Hillgarth and Hoare. People about on errands as if the war had never happened.

And funny to think I was walking along the same stretch of the paseo we'd seen in a newsreel in Valencia of Franco's victory parade only a few weeks before. He does like to put on a good show, Franco, his guard of Moorish troops very dashing, all white cloaks and veils like a little regiment of Valentinos. Dapper as a film star – and getting a little plump Lily thought. Bed sheets hanging from all the balconies, ‘Viva Franco' painted on them in big black letters, crowds bristling with everyone saluting madly.

And right behind Franco a fleet of very expensive-looking cars – the German Condor Regiment – the very same men who bombed Madrid into submission on Franco's behalf. Of course, the Nazis think they have Franco in their pocket now. But we'll have to see about that.

Of course, we know now that Spain was merely the Luftwaffe's target practice for what was to come: Poland, Holland, Norway and Denmark, Belgium and France, and now our boys on Dunkirk beach. Hard to believe, our British troops driven to the very edge of the sea. And of course, only thanks to our men back home they got back safely. (It's not being shouted about in the papers, but a hell of a lot of the men fighting the vanguard have been left stranded in France, huge numbers in German prison camps.)

So many unknowns now. If Spain decides to go into the war on the side of Germany? If Britain falls? Nothing to do but wait it out and see.

One thing certain is that Spain hasn't got any money left after the wretched civil war, not a bean. So if we want Spain to stay out of the war then it's going to be about keeping a squeeze on her coffers – a financial war, as Hillgarth terms it.

So I met up with Hoare and Hillgarth in the palm court at the Ritz. The whole place all newly painted, white and gold. You'd never guess that a few months ago it was a military hospital. They've had to billet Hoare there since there's nowhere else up to Lady Hoare's requirements in this war-damaged city but I doubt that anyone's pointed out to her that the Ritz is also the favourite
watering hole for all the Abwehr spies crawling over Franco's government offices, mostly with his permission.

Shook hands with Hoare and then we took him for a stroll to the Retiro Park. Gangs of men in aprons there restoring the park to its former glory on Franco's orders, and gangs of skinny children in bare feet playing in the dust, asking for pennies, not looking well fed one bit.

We walked up to the ballustrades around the lake where there was no one around to eavesdrop. Do you remember that lake? I took you there once when we visited Madrid. You sailed your boat. One hears the splashes of carp snapping at flies but never quite sees them.

Hillgarth wanted to know what I thought of a chap called Juan March. I told him what I knew: he's a stunningly wealthy shipping magnate who used to come into the bank in Valencia flanked by two of his henchmen. Known as The Pirate since he looks the part, dark and swarthy, and because he practically runs the seas around Spain. Very keen not to have the Nazis seizing control of the Mediterranean.

You see, now that France has fallen, it's critical Franco doesn't let the Germans take their troops down through Spain and cut off the Med completely. So March has contacted Churchill with a plan. He's offering to bribe some of Franco's generals to make sure that Spain stays neutral – using British money, but fronting the deal as if the money comes solely from him. The British government can't be seen trying to bribe the Spanish generals directly or that will shatter Spain's so-called neutrality and give the Nazis every reason to simply invade Spain.

Anyway, Hoare didn't like it. He suspects that March will simply keep the cash, a small matter of some ten million pounds, and scarper with it. And it is true that there's nothing we can do about it if he does.

I told Hoare that I thought March would most likely pass the money on as bribes as promised if it was going to help keep Nazi fingers out of his business. It's certainly an open secret that March doesn't like Franco very much, a lot in fact.

So the money will be sent from London and through a series of international transfers and various bank account switches. I'll have to make it appear as if the bribes are really all March's own money.

So there you have it, that's really why I'm staying here and not coming back to England with you. I can't tell you this now, dear Ralph, as I write this, but am hoping you'll read it and understand – one day.

Lily so desperately wants to be with you, dear boy, but bless her she's decided to stay on here with yours truly. She is such a wonderful person. I do love your mother awfully, you know. And to be honest there's little chance of her getting on a plane back to England the way things stand. But if she really can't bear it, if it all gets too much, I'm going to ask Hillgarth to get her home on one of the embassy flights. God knows he owes me one.

Your mama and I talked about you for a long time today. You see, Ralph, we did ask ourselves if we shouldn't tell you certain things at this point. Of course, if you are reading this, Ralph dear, then the war will be over and – if all goes well – I will have had a chance to sit down and talk with you, tell you face to face certain things – explain why we never told you outright that I am your father. And so very proud to be so. Perhaps by then I'll have taken you out for your first English pint, walking home with you in an English spring. And I hope you will have forgiven me all those shabby little reasons why we couldn't tell you the truth before – that must seem so pathetic now. You see they loomed so impossibly large when you were born.

I only hope that one day you will forgive us, forgive me, and always know how very much I do care for you, dear Ralph, as your father.

13
^th
June

Hillgarth dropped by today. He came to ask a favour of course. And I must say, when we heard what's going on, we were only too glad to do any thing that we could.

It's not only the servicemen stranded after Dunkirk who are trying to escape from France down through Spain. According to Hillgarth, Churchill's been getting some dreadful reports through from the Poles. Unspeakable things happening to Jews in Wehrmacht countries. Hard to believe, in this day and age, quite frankly. The upshot is, Churchill's asked the embassy to quietly expand its newly created special evacuations operations to including any Jewish refugees. Now that the Swiss border's closed, we'll be their only route out.

But you see it's all going to have to be done directly under the noses of Franco and his Jerry friends here, who are going to mind awfully if they find out. Churchill's suggestion is that Hillgarth use people one would never suspect, such as ordinary people like Lily and me!

I have to say it was all a bit of a shock, hearing how desperate things are for Jewish families. Even for the children. I felt frozen, as Hillgarth talked, chilled to the bone.

My mother was a Jewess from Pinsk – your grandmother, Ralph, though of course you never knew her. I wonder if you recall me telling you about her once. She was a remarkable lady. I didn't even know she was Jewish for many years. She converted. Never admitted that she was Jewish to anyone. It was her secret.

But once, at Christmas, when Mother had had more sherry than was wise she began to tell me very strange stories about her home in Pinsk. Sitting by the fire, it sounded too frightening to be true, a Grimm's fairy tale of bears and wolves that came out of the forest. She told me about Cossacks on horses, who rode into town at night with sticks and clubs and left behind bodies wrapped in sheets, lined up on the cobblestones – entire Jewish families dead.

She was the only one from her family who survived that night, hiding away in a cupboard. She left for England, taken into a neighbour's family.

The next morning, the effects of the sherry gone, my mother denied she'd ever told me any such story. I asked my father and he told me to put it out of my mind, for her sake. So I did. After all, in modern times in Finchley, we slept safe in our beds. But it still left me with some dreadful nightmares.

So you see, after Hillgarth left, I must say I sat in utter shock. I couldn't believe the things he'd told us. It felt as though time had moved backwards, as if the wolves have come out of the forest again; bodies lined up on the cobblestones. Children even. It's simply too dreadful what men can do.

I thought of my mother then, and for the first time I think I understood just why she had always been so insistent on our Englishness, the English public school she sent us to, as if she were weaving a magic cloak that would protect us from harm.

And I understood this: it won't serve you well if I tell you outright that you are that valiant lady's grandson right now, not till all this madness is over. My dear boy, if this wretched war drags on you could be sent over to France in a year or so's time. Much better if you don't have the burden of hiding the knowledge that you're partly Jewish, not until some kind of sanity returns to Europe. Which pray God it will soon.

When war is over, one afternoon, sitting over a good lunch in a restaurant in Piccadilly, we'll talk. If you knew how the thought of that time to come does my heart good, dear boy. Until then, I am sending all a father's love and I will read and reread the letters that you send, dear Ralph.

27
^th
June

As Hillgarth likes to say, it's always the things under your nose that are hardest to see.

So once again, Lily and I are heading down to the Embassy Tea Rooms to meet with Hillgarth and some of his chums. Lily reckons you could honestly think you were having tea at Simpson's in the middle of London once you are inside: decent English crockery, silver teapots, and proper scones and jam. The owner is a Margaret Taylor, the widow of a Dutch diplomat who opened the tea rooms after she saw the embassy wives had nowhere respectable to go – other than the sort of bar that might end a lady's reputation. She's Irish aristocracy, wears beautifully tailored dresses that are really the thing Lily tells me. And not a bit someone you might suspect of running a safe house for servicemen escaping from France.

She does however have a most alarming gaze, I can tell you. Sees straight into you.

So over the past few days we've joined the embassy crowd and all their hangers-on in the most unlikely operation to assist escaping soldiers and airmen. No one suspects for a minute that such a snobbish and pampered bunch might be risking their skins – for no other reason than they want to do the decent
thing, help out a fellow in a fix. Hillgarth's recruited a whole gang of the embassy wives – butter wouldn't melt in their mouths so you'd think. He's also roped in lots of his contacts among the old Spanish aristocracy, all of them completely irreproachable and supposedly Franco's greatest allies, but they haven't hesitated to donate food stamps and clothes, and even open their mansions to help the tide of truly desperate refugees arriving from Marseilles.

And the whole thing goes on around the tea rooms with its string quartet, and its waiters in white jackets – and I have to say, goes on right under the noses of the Wehrmacht officers who naturally frequent the tea rooms since they prefer only the most upmarket places.

It goes like this: in the early hours of the morning, while it's still dark, the refugees turn up at the back door of the Embassy Tea Rooms, having made their way down one way and another through safe houses in the Pyrenees. They're generally in a pretty sorry state I can tell you, looking like just another little queue of down-at-heel people asking for work as they wait to be let in. Madrid is full of such scenes.

Then once through the door, they're taken upstairs and hidden in Margaret's apartment above the tea rooms, or sometimes down in the cellars. Margaret has heaps of donated clothes ready so Lily tells me – but only the best clothes mind you – the sort of thing you might wear to go out to afternoon tea at the Embassy Tea Rooms.

Then, once they're rested and fed and dressed in the smartest of suits and dresses, they discreetly make their way into the tea rooms – where Margaret shows her elegant guests to their table – and where their dear friends from Madrid are expecting them for afternoon tea.

Perhaps they don't speak much, perhaps you might notice that they watch and follow the way that their Madrid hosts handle afternoon tea a little anxiously. But then no one does notice. What possible subterfuge could be going on around English teapots and scones, and with Spanish and German officers only a few tables away?

They always leave by the front door. Margaret often accompanies them out
onto the street and waves them goodbye. She'll call out, ‘So lovely to see you. Do come again soon, dears. Give my love.'

It's a heart-stopping moment the first time it happens and you walk out with your guests. I thought Lily might well faint, she looked so pale as we headed for the door, both of us trying to appear perfectly calm. But honestly, no one bats an eyelid as we leave.

We walk with our guests for a few streets to where Hillgarth has the embassy car ready, his personal chauffeur waiting to drive them to Vigo or Gibraltar. Or sometimes one might go with them to Atocha station and see them onto a train. If it's getting late, they'll come back to the apartment and then leave the next day.

We've done it several times so far. Two men from the Highlanders regiment who'd escaped via Marseilles. Then a Jewish Austrian couple, who'd been living in France until it fell. A Czech couple. I think they were Czech.

Ralph, I can't tell you how proud I am of your mama. She really is the most amazing person. You know she's always been prone to bouts of poor health, not strong, but she won't let that stop her.

I do ask myself if it's right to be committing these things to paper, but I promise you, I am scrupulously careful. A moment's flick of the hand and the diary is hidden away in the compartment, entirely undetectable. Not even Lily knows. Life in these times is so unpredictable that I have to leave something behind that will let you know what we lived while we were apart from you, how much we thought of you, and how brave your mama has been. Hillgarth's taken a sealed letter from me to keep in the embassy files. I said it was to be passed on to you – should something happen to us.

But I'm counting the days till all this is over, when we'll be back with you in London. My prayer is you never have to read this, that there will be no need. I will tell you all myself, man to man.