IN JULY 1936 the Spanish army rose against the Popular Front government and the Civil War began. In the autumn the Communists started appealing for volunteers and he went to King Street and signed up.

He had to wait. The formation of the International Brigades, the routes and meeting points, was taking time. He became impatient. Then, after another fruitless visit to party headquarters, he disobeyed the party for the first and only time. He packed his bags and without a word to anybody he went to Victoria and caught the boat-train.

He arrived in Madrid in November; Franco had reached the Casa de Campo but so far he was being held, the citizenry of Madrid keeping back the Spanish army. The weather was cold and raw but the citizens, who five years before had appeared gloomy and listless, seemed to have sprung to life; there was revolutionary fervour and fierce enthusiasm everywhere. Trams and lorries full of workers in blue boiler suits and red kerchiefs passed by on the way to the front, ¡Abajo fascismo! chalked on the sides.

He should have reported to party HQ but it was late in the day when his train arrived and he headed straight for Carabanchel. A group of women and children were building a barricade at one corner of the Meras’ square, tearing up the cobbles. Seeing a foreigner, they lifted their hands in the clenched-fist salute. ‘¡Salud, compadre!’

‘¡Salud! ¡Unios hermanos proletarios!’ One day, Bernie thought, this will happen in England.

He had written to Pedro and they knew he was coming, though not when. Inés opened the door of the flat; she looked tired and weary, greying hair straggling round her face. Her face lit up when she saw him. ‘Pedro! Antonio!’ she called. ‘He’s here!’

There was a rifle in pieces on the salón table, an ancient-looking thing with an enormous muzzle. Pedro and Antonio stood turning parts over in their hands. They were dusty and unshaven, their boiler suits streaked with earth. Francisco, the consumptive son, sat watching in a chair, looking barely older after five years, thin and pale as ever. Little Carmela, eight now, sat on his knee.

Pedro wiped his hands on a piece of newspaper and rushed to embrace him. ‘Bernardo! My God, what a day to arrive.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Antonio is going to the front tomorrow.’

‘I’m trying to clean this old rifle they gave me,’ Antonio said proudly.

Inés frowned. ‘He doesn’t know how to put it back together!’

‘Maybe I can help.’ Bernie had been in the OTC at Rookwood. He remembered annoying the other pupils by saying military knowledge might be useful when the revolution came. He helped them put the rifle together. Then they cleared the table and Inés brought a cocido.

‘Have you come to help kill the Fascists?’ Carmela asked. She was wide-eyed with excitement and curiosity.

‘Yes,’ Bernie said, putting a hand on her head. He turned to Pedro. ‘I should report to Party HQ tomorrow.’

‘The Communists?’ Pedro shook his head. ‘We are beholden to them now. If only the British and French had agreed to sell us arms.’

‘Stalin knows how to fight a revolutionary war.’

‘Father and I have been digging trenches all afternoon,’ Antonio said seriously. ‘Then they gave me this rifle and told me to get a night’s sleep and report for action tomorrow.’

Bernie looked at Antonio’s thin boyish face. He took a deep breath.

‘Do you think there might be a rifle for me?’

Antonio looked at him seriously. ‘Yes. They want as many fit men as can hold one.’

‘When do you have to report?’

‘At dawn.’

‘I’ll come with you.’ Bernie experienced a strange leaping sensation, excitement and fear together. He gripped Antonio’s hand, found himself laughing; they were both laughing hysterically.

BUT HE WAS frightened when he rose with Pedro and Antonio at dawn. When they went outside Bernie could hear shell-fire in the distance. He shivered in the cold grey morning. Antonio had given him a red scarf; he wore the jacket and slacks he had arrived in with the scarf round his neck.

In the Puerta del Sol officers in khaki called the men into lines, leading them into the trams that were lined up one behind the other. As they rattled out of the centre the men were tense, gripping their rifles between their knees. At first it was like a normal journey, but as they travelled east there were fewer people, more militiamen and army lorries. When the tram jangled to a halt at the gates of the Casa de Campo, Bernie could hear ragged gunfire. His heart was thumping wildly as the sergeant shouted to them to disembark.

Then Bernie saw the bodies, half a dozen dead men laid in a row on the pavement, still wearing their red kerchiefs. It wasn’t the first time he had seen a body – his grandmother had been laid out in the room behind the shop before her funeral – but these men, whose faces were as still and grey as hers had been, were young. One boy had a round black hole in the middle of his forehead with a tiny drop of blood underneath, like a teardrop. His heart banged like a hammer and he felt a cold sweat on his brow as he followed Pedro and Antonio into a disorganized crowd of militiamen.

Pedro was led off to a digging detail and Bernie and Antonio and twenty others, some with rifles and others without, were ordered to follow a sergeant into a half-dug trench, men with spades pausing to let them by. Sandbags had been piled high on the side facing the Casa de Campo, from where sporadic gunfire was audible. Things were chaotic: men running to and fro, lorries sliding and slithering in the mud. The men leaned back uncertainly against the sandbags.

‘Jesus,’ Bernie said to Antonio. ‘This isn’t an army.’

‘It’s all we’ve got,’ Antonio said. ‘Here, hold this, I’m going to take a look.’ There was a ladder next to Antonio and before Bernie could stop him he had started climbing up it.

‘Stop it, you crazy bastard, you’ll get hit.’ Bernie remembered Pa saying that was how thousands of new recruits had died on the Western Front: taking a look over the top.

Antonio rested his arms on top of the sandbags. ‘It’s all right, they can’t see me. Christ, they’ve got field-guns and everything out there. Nothing’s moving—’

Bernie swore, put down the rifle and climbed up the ladder, grabbing at Antonio’s waist. ‘Get down!’

‘It’s all right.’

Bernie took another step up and grabbed Antonio’s shoulder, and that was when the sniper fired. The bullet missed Antonio’s head but hit Bernie’s arm. He gave a cry and the two of them tumbled together down the ladder into the trench. Bernie saw the blood welling up through his jacket and passed out.

A SPANISH commissar came to visit him in the field hospital.

‘You’re a fool,’ he told him. ‘You should have reported to Party HQ first; you’d have had some training.’

‘My friends said they needed every man in the Casa de Campo. I’m sorry.’

The commissar grunted. ‘You’ll be out of it for weeks now. And we will have to billet you somewhere when you get out of here.’

‘My friends in Carabanchel will look after me.’

The man looked at him askance. ‘Are they party?’

‘Socialists.’

The man grunted.

‘How’s the fighting?’ asked Bernie.

‘We’re holding them. We’re forming a Communist brigade, bringing in some discipline.’

BERNIE SHIFTED in his bunk, trying to warm his legs. In the next bed Vicente was making a horrible gurgling sound in his sleep. He remembered his weeks of convalescence in Carabanchel. His attempts to convert the Meras to communism were unsuccessful. They said the Russians were destroying the Republic, talking of cooperation with the progressive bourgeoisie while bringing in their secret police and spies. Bernie said the tales of Russian brutality were exaggerated, and you had to be hard in war. But it wasn’t easy to argue with a veteran of thirty years of class struggle like Pedro. Sometimes he began to doubt whether what they said about the Russians could all be lies, but he put those thoughts from his mind; they were a distraction and in the midst of this struggle he must stay focused.