It was now the middle of May. The year 1935. Tension increased in the village as the news from Madrid grew more threatening and vague. To the peasants of Castillo, the visionary promises of February seemed to have dried up in the heat. There were strikes, parades, shows of proletarian force, boys and girls marching in coloured shirts, arms raised in salute, clenched fists and slogans, painted banners and challenging speeches.

When there was a strike it was total, enforced by the police and the fishermen picketed the sea. Rich old women dragged their laundry to the river, or queued up at the village wells. At the hotel the chambermaids sat gossiping in the sun while the chef stayed home with his wife; the guests slept in unmade beds.

Each day more peasants came in from the country, massing in the square to be on hand for trouble. Many of them brought guns slung over their shoulder, sticking out of their waistbands, or tied to the saddles of donkeys...flintlocks, pistols, and old rusty muskets which might have been saved from the Peninsular War.

The split village now emerged in clearer focus and its two factions declared themselves, confronting each other at last in black and white...labelled for convenience Fascist or Communist. The Fascists seemed ready to accept the name, this being what they aspired to, with the Falange already organized as a fighting group, a swaggering spearhead of upper-class vengeance, whose crude fascist symbols...Italian-inspired...were now appearing on walls and doorways.

The Communist label on the other hand was too rough and ready, a clumsy reach-me-down which properly fitted no one. The farm labourers, fishermen and handful of industrial workers all had local but separate interests. Each considered his struggle to be far older than Communism, to be something exclusively Spanish, part of a social perversion which he alone could put right by reason of his roots in this particular landscape.

In fact I don’t remember meeting an official Communist in Castillo...though communism was a word in the bars. Manolo, who was a leader, had no political status at all, but was a Romantic Anarchist of his own invention. The local flag of revolution was the republican flag, the flag of the elected government. The peasants strung it like a banner across the Town Hall balcony and painted their allegiance beneath it in red: ‘We swear to defend this bandera with the last drop of our blood.’ Sombre and ominous words.

Yet the government they supported must have seemed remote to many, composed entirely of middle-class politicians...without a Communist, Anarchist, or a Socialist anywhere in its cabinet. The peasants looked to this government because their hopes lay with it, hopes they thought to realize for the first time in centuries, an opportunity to shift some of the balances which had so long weighed against them, more than anyone else in Europe.

Spain was a wasted country of neglected land...much of it held by a handful of men whose vast estates had scarcely been reduced or reshuffled since the days of the Roman Empire. Peasants could work this land for a shilling a day for a third of the year then go hungry. It was this simple incongruity they hoped to correct; this and a clearing of the air, perhaps some return of dignity, some razing of the barriers of ignorance which still stood as high as the Pyrenees.

A Spanish schoolmaster in 1935 knew less of the outside world than many a shepherd in the days of Columbus. Now it was hoped that there might be some lifting of this intolerable darkness, some freedom to read and write and talk.

Men hoped that their wives might be freed of the triple trivialities of the Church...credulity, guilt and confession; that their sons might be craftsmen rather than serfs, their daughters citizens rather than domestic whores, and that they might hear the children in the evening coming home from fresh-built schools to astonish them with new facts of learning. All this could be brought about now by an act of their government and the peaceful process of law. There was nothing to stop it. Except for the powerful minority who would rather the country first bled to death.

June came in full blast, with the heat bouncing off the sea as from a buckled sheet of tin. All day in the bars the radios spat and crackled...violence in Valencia, strikes and riots in Barcelona. That morning a group of Falangists in the neighbouring village walked into a bar and shot five fishermen. The murderers, wearing arm-bands, escaped in a car to Granada. Castillo lay silent, like a shuttered camp.

In the afternoon I walked out into the country with Jacobo. Daylight nightingales were singing by the river. The air was brassy, thunderous, and only a thread of brown water ran trickling down the river bed. Some girls we knew had been gathering poppies in the field, and now they came down the path towards us, walking slowly in the heat, the red flowers wilting at their breasts, looking as though their bodies had been raked by knives.

An hour or so later we returned by another path and found two children standing under the bridge. They stood stiffly, holding hands, staring at the figure of a man who lay sprawled on the river bank. We recognised him as a local Falangist, a boy of about twenty, whose father had once been mayor. he had been shot through the head, and lay staring back at the children, flies gathering around his mouth.