Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  Apart from Marañón himself, ‘powerfully built with head suggestive of a noble Roman’, according to Burns’s first sight of him, and Gregorio junior – with whom Burns had had brief dealings over the issue of British support for Spanish journalists – only one member of the family came into proper focus that afternoon. That was Mabel. Aged twenty-five, the youngest and prettiest of Marañón’s two unmarried daughters, petite, like her mother, with smiling brown eyes, full mouth, fresh olive skin, and short, dark brown hair, she displayed a disarming mix of innocence and alert self-confidence. Burns’s memory of this first brief encounter with Mabel – twelve years his junior – is all that remains on record of his first visit to the legendary Cigarral de Menores. From the outset Burns was struck by the fact that Mabel seemed the only member of her family who spoke almost flawless English. She said she had learnt it from her longest serving nanny Miss Burns (a namesake but no relation of their visitor), a Liverpudlian Catholic of Irish descent. Mabel confided that she was going away until Christmas to stay at Gómez Cardeña, a bull ranch in Andalusia, at the invitation of its owner, the bullfighter Belmonte, as it happened one of Burns’s Spanish friends. Winter was the season for identifying and rounding up bulls that were suitable for the fight and, having ridden horses from childhood, and developed her father’s love of bullfighting, Mabel was looking forward to a working holiday on the ranch.

  By chance Burns met Mabel a week later in Madrid, on the eve of her journey south. They had both been invited to a cocktail party given by the Marqueses de Quintanar and Miraflores, well-known members of the Spanish political right before the war who had shifted their allegiance away from the Axis towards the Allies after the success of the joint British and American landings in North Africa.

  Parties thrown by the Quintanars were popular and offered the perfect opportunity in wartime Madrid for the exchange of gossip, and above all to be seen in the company of the rich and powerful. And yet Burns was less motivated on this occasion by his professional calling than by a stirring of the heart as he and Mabel spotted each other in the social mêlée: ‘It seemed natural that we should gravitate towards each other across the crowded room and that it would seem empty apart from her presence,’ he later recalled. Burns felt that his love life was taking a profound turn for the better for the first time in years. From that autumn of 1943, Mabel Marañón became the sole target of Burns’s wartime affections as he gradually discovered the extent to which her youth belied a depth of experience he, now thirty-seven, had never imagined could be possessed by a Spanish woman of her age and social upbringing.

  Mabel’s early memories were of a strict childhood largely dominated by a series of English governesses, none of whom lasted as long or exercised such influence as Miss Burns. The young governess arrived in Madrid in 1926, when Mabel was eight, and stayed in the Marañón household for the next seven years.

  Miss Burns was a strict Victorian in attitude, who believed in limiting Mabel’s access to her parents, and imposed a regime of lessons and formal meals which included five o’clock tea laid out with milk and cakes. She was blue-eyed and red-headed and extremely prim. She was therefore horrified by the wolf whistles of workers as she walked through the streets of Madrid. Her idea of intimacy was the rare occasions she allowed Mabel to give her a manicure while she read Dickens.

  Every month copies of the Illustrated London News arrived at the house and Mabel’s mother would cut out and frame the photographs of the royal princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. Despite Marañón’s Republican leanings, he and his wife had maintained cordial relations with the Spanish King Alfonso XIII and his wife, who was a first cousin of Queen Victoria. They shared a common affinity with the British royal family.

  Far from stifling the young Mabel, such tutelage and privileged upbringing merely fuelled a fascination for the world that was apparently out of bounds but which she sensed from an early age to be a great deal more exciting and engaging that the repressed environment in which Miss Burns sought comfort.

  The year Miss Burns arrived in Madrid was also the year Gregorio Marañón was thrown into prison for a month after being accused, along with a group of liberal military officers and intellectuals, of plotting the overthrow of the dictator Primo de Rivera. Marañón’s subsequent release on payment of a 100,000-peseta fine served as a reminder of his popularity and influence. Throughout his imprisonment his cell was garlanded with flowers sent by well-wishers and he received a constant stream of visitors, from ordinary workers to establishment figures campaigning for his liberty.

  Five years later, the Spanish Republic Marañón helped proclaim brought the social and political tensions that had been simmering for decades to the boil; there were agrarian revolts, strikes, and churches were attacked. The left pressed for greater freedoms and root and branch constitutional reform. The bastions of privilege and political reaction – the landed aristocracy, right-wing politicians, sectors of the military and the Church – plotted and conspired. In the midst of the ferment, Mabel felt drawn to a new generation of Spanish women who, rather than marry young or join a convent, took advantage of the educational reforms to emancipate themselves. She volunteered as a nurse in her father’s hospital and prepared to apply for university.

  Then Mabel’s life was brutally interrupted by the outbreak of civil war. Her father initially reacted to the military uprising by signing a manifesto with other leading intellectuals in defence of democracy. He also volunteered to go on working as a doctor in Madrid while the capital remained in Republican hands. Mabel decided to continue as a nurse in order to stay close to her father.

  The Marañóns stuck together in Madrid, only to find themselves, like so many other Spaniards, swept up by events which seemed rapidly to run out of control. In the following weeks, Marañón became increasingly horrified by the violence and intolerance that engulfed Spain and tried with limited success to intercede on behalf of those persecuted by one side or the other. But before the year was out he himself was under threat, his liberal politics challenged by the increasingly fanatical elements on the left and the right that were determining the course of the war.

  One night he received a summons to appear at a barracks held by Republican militias in the Casa de Campo, the large woodland park on the outskirts of Madrid where hundreds of prisoners were held and interrogated, the majority prior to summary execution. Fearful of what might await him, he asked Mabel to accompany him in his chauffeurdriven car as a witness. As they approached the barracks Marañón told the chauffeur to stop and warned his daughter to stay in the car. ‘If I am not out of here in one hour, I want you to get to Madrid and raise the alarm,’ he told Mabel before embracing her and leaving her with the fear that she might never see him again.

  Mabel would remember that wait for the rest of her life. Time passed neither quickly nor slowly. It was suspended while the best and most valued moments of her life so far – those spent in her father’s presence – filled her thoughts, and she struggled with a sense of despair and panic. She desperately wanted to believe he was still alive against the look of hate in the eyes of the sentries, the creeping darkness that enveloped the park and the staccato machine-gun fire which periodically shattered the claustrophobic silence.

  Almost an hour later Marañón emerged from the barracks, his face pale and drawn with exhaustion, his suit dishevelled and smudged with dirt after he’d been interrogated about his political leanings by an ad hoc workers’ committee. All the way back to Madrid, Marañón held his daughter’s hand in silence, squeezing it gently every now and then as a way of reassuring her, a habit Mabel would replicate with her own children in later years. But he had decided that, for the sake of his family and his own survival, he had no option but to go into exile. Two countries had offered him asylum – Mexico and France. He chose the latter in order to stay closer to Spain and to friends who were already in exile north of the Pyrenees. He also had with him an invitation from the French consulate in Madrid to give a lecture at the
Sorbonne in Paris where he had been made an honorary fellow in 1932. This helped him secure safe-conduct papers from the Republican government.

  Less than a month later, Marañón and his family left Madrid in a small convoy of cars. They were accompanied by another well-known Spanish intellectual, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, and his family and by a young captain of the anarchist militias, a nephew of Angel Ganivet whose seminal essays on the character of Spain and its history hugely influenced the so-called generation of ’14 to which Marañón and others belonged. The captain suspected from the outset that the Sorbonne invitation was a cover to help Marañón escape from the execution squads in Madrid, but took it upon himself to help save his uncle’s friend and disciple.

  Under Captain Ganivet’s protection, the convoy drove south-east through territory occupied by anti-Franco forces. They reached the Republican-held port of Alicante where HMS Active, a Royal Navy frigate that was helping transport refugees out of Spain under the auspices of the International Red Cross, was anchored off the coast.

  The small family convoy made its way to the harbour and there found a young English officer with a team of ratings in a small boat waiting to take the latest contingent of refugees out to the ship. The Marañón and Menéndez Pidal families were just stepping aboard when two local militiamen broke into an argument with Captain Ganivet, insisting that the two youngest male members of the party – Mabel’s brother Gregorio and Gonzalo, the son of Menéndez Pidal – should stay behind and enlist in the Republican army.

  Of the two, young Gregorio was most at risk because he had enlisted in the Falange youth movement which the extreme left regarded as criminally fascist. But both he and Gonzalo were saved thanks to the timely intervention of the English officer, and the added distraction caused by Captain Ganivet as he officiously waved safe-conduct papers.

  As Ganivet engaged the militiamen, Gregorio and Gonzalo were bundled on to the waiting boat, and, shielded by their families and the British sailors, were speedily transferred to Active. Only later did the militiamen receive confirmation that the safe-conduct papers did not cover young Gregorio and that he was therefore a fugitive from the Spanish Republic and subject to a military tribunal. By then Active’s anchor had been raised and the vessel was steaming out of port.

  12

  Marriage

  The ship sailed to Marseilles via Barcelona where it picked up more refugees, the week before Christmas 1936, the first winter of the civil war.

  It was sunny but with a blustery north wind. Mabel spent much of the journey on deck, wrapped in a heavy coat and blanket to protect her from the cold, being looked after by Francis Warrington-Strong, the handsome young naval officer who had helped save her brother’s life. The sight of the displaced Spanish families filled Warrington-Strong with a huge sense of sympathy for their plight. But it was Mabel who stirred his emotions most, a young untainted Spanish beauty who seemed to have retained a sense of grace, poise and humour, despite the horrors she had lived through in Madrid.

  For her part the eighteen-year-old Mabel found Warrington-Strong a refreshing contrast to the men she had left behind on Spanish soil. He struck her as calm and considerate, and with a fresh, engaging face that seemed as yet unmarked by the experience of killing another human being. On the final night of the passage, Mabel and Francis spent some time together romantically gazing out at the moonlit Mediterranean. They shared their fears that the war in Spain seemed a prelude to a wider European conflict, one in which his ship would be militarily engaged and no longer commissioned for a humanitarian role. Each was resigned to the likelihood of never seeing the other again once the passage was over. In memory of those precious moments they shared together, Warrington-Strong gave Mabel two keepsakes she had inspired – one a piece of poetry, the other a photograph.

  The poem, mourning a lost innocence, seemed to foretell with a sense of anguish the fate he thought awaited him once the European war had started in earnest.

  Steadfastly he gazed,

  Down at the bottomless abyss.

  To think that life should end like this!

  His mind felt cold and dazed …

  Under the wintry moon

  A lonely night not far on high,

  And murmured to the velvet sky,

  ‘Too soon –Too soon –Too soon

  The photograph showed him as Mabel had met him, smiling and relaxed, in his white naval jacket with his arms crossed. It was dedicated to her: ‘In memory of a trip which was made so much more pleasant for us by the cheery and delightful company of a certain refugee’.

  Two months later, Mabel and her father were at sea again, in a setting that could not have been more different. In February 1937, they boarded the Cap Arcona, the luxury German ocean liner, at Boulogne on its journey from Hamburg to South America. Marañón had spent much of the intervening period since leaving Alicante installing his family at the Hôtel d’Iéna in Paris while establishing professional contacts with local French academics and authors. Politically Marañón kept in contact with a wide circle of friends among fellow exiles and the Spanish diplomatic community in Paris. In London and Oxford he corresponded regularly with the Duke of Alba and separately with the liberal writer and former minister of the Republic, Salvador de Madariaga, who became an increasingly vocal critic of Franco. While in Paris, Marañón’s own Republicanism had given way to a belief that a Franco victory would bring the stability and order he now saw as more important for Spain than any renewed attempt at parliamentary democracy. While he reached out to those he considered reasonable men on both sides of the Spanish political divide, he felt most perturbed by the communist influence on the Republicans and blamed his exile on the intolerable position he had been placed in by Spain’s increasingly radicalised Popular Front government.

  While his wife and daughters searched for more permanent accommodation, Marañón wasted little time in making contact with Franco’s representative in Paris, Quiñones de León, and interceding on behalf of his son’s wish to return to Spain and fight as a soldier with the nationalists. Marañón subsequently found himself becoming increasingly depressed by the news from Spain at a time when Franco’s victory seemed far from assured – the relentless violence, the apparent breakdown of law and order, the summary executions by both sides of individuals whose only crime was to be judged politically different.

  He found it difficult to concentrate on his work as a doctor, and struggled with his writing. Marañón heeded the advice of friends and fellow doctors and agreed to accept an invitation to go on a lecture tour of South America with his fare and that of his daughter Mabel – enlisted as companion and secretary – paid for by the governments of Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Brazil.

  In that early spring of 1937, the Cap Arcona steamed down to Lisbon before making its two-week crossing to the South American mainland, via Cape Verde and Madeira. Marañón had plenty of time to prepare his lectures while Mabel read, took the sun and generally enjoyed herself in the company of similar aged South Americans and Germans between the elaborate dinners and other entertainment laid on for passengers. One evening Mabel dressed up as a gypsy and danced flamenco; on another, she took on the role of fairy princess in the fancy dress ball that followed the traditional rituals as the ship crossed the Equator.

  Marañón was spared the company of destitute fellow exiles and found his civil war neurosis improving as he shared the dinner table with a group of rich Argentinian estancieros and German entrepreneurs, among them an amiable businessman named Oscar Schindler who would later become famous for his part in saving hundreds of Jews from the Nazi death camps.

  Marañón’s visit to South America proved both cathartic and a huge personal success. He filled lecture halls and theatres as he spoke emotionally about the Spain that was tearing itself apart. He engaged his audience’s sympathy as a true patriot of essentially liberal values, who was suffering the pain of exile because of his refusal to sign formally up to any political dogma. ‘I have always been at t
he service of my country, whether the omens were good or bad. I am now once again at the service of my country, above all else and whatever the consequences might be,’ he said in one lecture entitled ‘I am a Spaniard’.

  In another, entitled the ‘Dictatorship of Ideas’, he lamented the advent of ideologues that justified intolerance and brutality as a means to an end: ‘I never tire of saying that the core of all the ills that afflict this world, or at least this world which is seen from America as an uprising of madmen is the simple fact that men fight each other over ideas rather than conducting themselves as civilized beings.’

  Marañón’s lectures won him plaudits from the local media, nowhere more so than in Buenos Aires, where the Argentinian commentators noted that he had drawn bigger crowds than the Prince of Wales had on a recent visit to the city. For the eighteen-year-old Mabel, South America was one long holiday, riding along the beach of Uruguay’s Punta del Este and across the huge estates of Argentina, on an endless string of horses supplied by the sons and daughters of government ministers and landowners.

  Father and daughter enjoyed the return passage on the Cap Arcona. Marañón had recovered from his depression. Mabel played ping-pong with a new group of Argentinian friends, and attended a masked ball. She felt excited to be on a ship which was universally considered one of the most beautiful of the time, the most impressive commercial liner to be built since the Titanic. Only on 1 May, in mid-Atlantic, did the Cap Arcona show its true colours with a well-drilled exhibition of Nazi loyalty. The Marañóns emerged from their cabin to find the main decks covered in swastika flags, and officers and crew in military uniform parading with Nazi salutes and Heil Hitlers as a tribute to the Third Reich.

  As most of the passengers raised their arms in salute, Marañón put his round his daughter’s and held it there, a discreet act of defiance for which the captain of the ship apparently bore him no ill will. The captain chose to observe what he took simply to be a gesture of the love between father and daughter. Three days later he hosted a dinner in honour of Mabel’s nineteenth birthday, a full-course menu with champagne and cake. Mabel sat on his right in the seat of honour. Later that night, as father and daughter made their way back to their respective cabins, Mabel asked her father if he was concerned that she had not met anyone yet she wanted to marry. She had two suitors at the time – a friend of her brother’s who had enlisted in Franco’s army, and a young doctor she had met in Buenos Aires. While flattered by their attentions, she felt unmoved by either of them. ‘The only thing that matters,’ Marañón advised her, ‘is marrying someone you are in love with.’ To Mabel, her father was still the most romantic man she had ever known.