LIFE IN MADRID

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 October 1939, Page 8

LIFE IN MADRID

CITY AFTER THE WAR The other day there was a big bull'fight in the Madrid arena, writes the special correspondent of the “Daily Mail.” I had been dying to see a bullfight, as there was none during the Republican regime in the war. I am sorry I went, because the Toreador was killed and two Picadors were badly hurt. Their feet seemed to have lead weights on them. It became an agony watching them. We shouted warnings. The Toreador had been famous for his nimble feet, cool head. That was before the war. He joined up with Franco and fought in the trenches just outside Madrid for two years. Death came to him in the afternoon because his feet had lost their nimbleness, his head its coolness. Since before the war I have been in Madrid. I saw the war start. I watched Madrid, ever courageous, get hungrier and hungrier —getting hungrier and hungrier myself. I saw.the war finish. It was rather an inglorious end to a glorious siege. Madrid, then, was perhaps the gloomiest city in the world. Now, four months after Franco’s troops came in on the underground railway, it is more than half-way back to being its old gay self.

The big hotels, holed by shells, desterted for two years, have been reconditioned. Thick carpets are down in the Ritz again, and lounges and dining halls, long choked with dust, sparkle with life. It costs a small fortune to dine at the Ritz now, but it is always crowded. During the war it used to give me the creeps to go past there. The war has brought big changes to the women —more than to the men. In the early days of the struggle, no woman or girl dared to appear in the street wearing a mantilla, or* even a hat. It became the fashion. And now even the smartest of Madrid’s women go about hatless —an unheard-of-thing in pre-war days. Another fashion that has stayed on is the wearing of short skirts. Women and girls of the Republican era were encouraged to wear short skirts, much to the horror of their sisters living under Franco rule across the barricades. Well, to-day short skirts are fashionable. And with short skirts go cocktails and cigarettes. Against these “Republican vices,” Madrid’s priests are preaching. But the women of Madrid, and in many other places in Spain, are not the great stay-at-homes they were ten years ago.

Spain is in for a big “revolution,” socially. Food is short in Madrid, and very expensive. Ordinary meals cost three times as much as they did before the war. There are fixed prices for the restaurants, but no one pays any heed to them. Bread is plentiful and cheap, but tea, coffee, and sugar are almost unobtainable. Theatres and cinemas, which kept going throughout the entire siege, are booming again. But the Madrilenos would prefer American and British talkies to the '•German and Italian ones that are thrust on the movie theatre proprietors. There is a clamouring for the return of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and Clark Gable and Norma Shearer.

Public services are being slowly rehabilitated. If you want a ride in a tram you have to hang on by your teeth. One-third of the pre-war rolling stock is useless. Men and women occupying seats must give them up at once for limbless soldiers —that is, limbless Franco soldiers. Hundreds of limbless Republican soldiers are still in hiding, fearful for their lives. If I were in the glass business I think I could have made a fortune. In Madrid alone it is estimated that 1,000,000 panes of glass are needed to mend windows of public buildings and private houses that were shattered by Franco shells and bombs. In towns and villages that were wiped out, and in cities like Valencia and Barcelona, glass will be in demand for years. There are going to be some “glass” millionaires in the new Spain. Most of the people who were able to flee from Madrid have now returned to their homes —or what is left of them. And there are still queues at the mortuary, where photographs of 30,000 people “found dead” in the first few weeks of the war are kept. Given a chance, Madrid will soon rise again. Old wounds will heal, scars will fade. We’ve had a terrible war, but now that it’s over Spaniards want to forget it. We want to forgive and forget. And we want Spain to be for Spaniards. And please believe me —Spaniards think England is “Bueno.”