Winter in Madrid (74 page)

I have tried to be scrupulous in tying the pattern of events in the novel in with historical dates. Twice, however, I have altered these slightly to meet the demands of the plot: I have postdated Himmler’s visit to Madrid by a couple of days, and antedated the founding of
La Barraca
by a year to 1931. I have also invented Franco’s attendance at the first performance of Rodrigo’s
Concierto de Aranjuez
, which was actually in Barcelona.

I am very grateful indeed to a number of friends who read the manuscript of
Winter in Madrid
, and who grappled with me over the thorny issues of political, historical and cultural perspective which the book raised from a refreshingly wide variety of viewpoints. My thanks to Roz Brody, Emily Furman, Mike Holmes, Caroline Hume, Jan King, Tony Macaulay, Charles Penny, Mari Roberts for her copy-editing, and William Shaw; and to my agent Antony Topping and my editor Maria Rejt at Macmillan. Thanks also to Will Stone for his help with research at a crucial juncture. As ever, I am grateful to Frankie Lawrence for her typing and for spotting the occasional howler.

There are many books in English on the Spanish Civil War and its origins. After more than sixty years I think Gerald Brenan’s
The Spanish Labyrinth
(Cambridge 1943) is still the best on the origins of the war. Antony Beever’s
The Spanish Civil War
(Cassell 1982) is the most accessible introduction to the war itself.

Denis Smyth’s
Diplomacy and the Strategy of Survival: British policy and Franco’s Spain
1940–41 (Cambridge UP 1986) is the main academic account of the period, though I think it underestimates the importance of the cultural affinities between the Spanish Monarchists and the British ruling classes. Paul Preston’s monumental biography
Franco
(HarperCollins 1993) is also very useful on the regime’s wartime foreign policy, although discussion of domestic conditions in those years is curiously absent. Hoare’s account of his ambassadorship, written after he became Viscount Templewood,
Ambassador on Special Mission
(London 1947), is
self-serving and unreliable in its account of events in 1940–1 (although many aspects, such as the bribery of ministers, could not be revealed when it was written), but shows the evolution of his thought to a strongly anti-Franco position by the war’s end. Richard Wigg’s
Churchill and Spain
(Routledge 2005) throws interesting new light on the evolution of both Churchill’s and Hoare’s perspectives on Spain as the war progressed. Phillip Knightley’s
Philby, KGB Masterspy
(London 1978) opened the world of wartime espionage for me. Miss Maxse was real; she interviewed Philby for the SIS in St Ermin’s Hotel. Caroline Moorhead’s
Dunant’s Dream
(HarperCollins 1998) is a history of the Red Cross that manages to be both vivid and fair. The article by J. Bandrés and R. Llavona, ‘Psychology in Franco’s Concentration Camps’ (
Psychology in Spain
, 1997, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 3–9) is a chilling account of the abuse of psychiatry. For details of the goldmine fraud I have drawn on the story of an even more remarkable modern fraud told in V. Danielson and J. White’s
Bre-X: Gold Today, Gone Tomorrow
(Canada 1997).

For contemporary accounts of the Battle of the Jarama, Tom Wintringham’s
English Captain
(London 1939) tells the story from the icy viewpoint of an upper-class Stalinist; Jason Gurney’s
Crusade in Spain
(London 1974) from that of a committed, and later disillusioned, volunteer.

For details of life in Madrid during the early Franco years I have relied mainly on works by British and American journalists and diplomats who were there at the time. Even allowing for their mainly anti-Franco viewpoints, the picture they paint is a horrifying one. T. Hamilton,
Appeasement’s Child
(London 1943), E. J. Hughes,
Report from Spain
(New York 1948) and C. Foltz,
Masquerade in Spain
(London 1948) were particularly useful. The letters of David Eccles, economic attaché at the British Embassy in 1940,
By Safe Hand, Letters of Sybil and David Eccles, 1939–42
(London, Bodley Head, 1983), provide a vivid and enthralling account of diplomacy and everyday life by a man who, however odd some of his political ideas may seem today, was clearly moved by the condition of the Spanish people. The story of the woman arrested when her dress blew over her head is based on an incident he recounts, as is the story of Hoare hiding under a table to avoid a bat. The Café Rocinante owes a debt to Doña Rosa’s café in Camilo José Cela’s
The Hive
(USA 1953).