SPAIN IN REVOLUTION

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3795, 14 August 1936, Page 5

SPAIN IN REVOLUTION

HOW PEOPLE TAKE IT. Perhaps the average Spaniard was brought to the full realisation that he was living in a Revolutionary Period about a fortnight after the last elections (says a writer in the Manchester Guardian). Familiar things (and persons) were suddenly found to have a right to the most unfamiliar titles. Close up one hesitates to do more than register one after another of these novel phenomena, without attempting to add them up and give the total a name; but when the foreign press proposes this operation for one and dubs the sum as a Revolutionary Period, what can one do but agree? Yet for the casual observer mere anecdote, without qualification, is probably safer' ground. Here are a few samples.

1. The scene is a small town close to Seville. The “T’s” are an industrious, pushing family, with a straggling business which includes a publichouse, a small farm, and three or four motor lorries which carry corn, olives, coals, and so on for the local manufacturers and farmers. The sons themselves run these lorries, with the help of one or two “adyudantes,” motely individuals, frequently changing, whose work is regarded rather as an educational privilege than as a subject for recompense: they are fed by the “T.” family and usually part from them on good terms. A few years back “J.” was one of them; he left on reaching the age which qualified him to apply for a driving license. He is amiable, resourceful, in appearance almost a gipsy, as quick in wits as if he were one, and as loath to use them for any use entailing regular physical exertion; his exploits and sayings are much celebrated amongst friends, associates, and victims. For a time he was vaguely a taxi-driver, but it is conversation (including political conversation and its usual stimulants) that his chief work has been done.

Shortly after the election the “T.” family and others like them received a notice to the effect that the services of their “adyudantes” must be duly contracted, and the contract authorised by the proper authority, the President of the Transport Section of . Nobody was aware of the existence of such an entity. But its smiling president turned out to be “J.,” who exercised his more or less self-decreed authority with an admirable understanding of his own and other people’s necessities. His powers have been -sanctioned by the local Sindicato; nobody else is so imprudent as to question them. The Communist Charwoman. 2 “C.” is a charwoman in the same town. Though over fifty and completely rounded, she retains something of what must have been considerable beauty. She remembers, or confusing legend with memory thinks she remembers, the days of the “Black Hand” in Jerez, when her family tasted the rigours of repression. To-day she is accordingly a “Communist"—though the old Iberian anarchy or merely self-respecting independence would be a better name for her opinions. These areyalso complicated, unknown to herself, by a strong tinge of ancestral feudalism, from which we, as her occasional employees and friends, draw considerable benefit. On her visits she brings flowers or a sponge cake: a mixture of placidity and irony and resigned gaiety keeps her seated, arms crossed and frontal like a Maya sculpture, through all the hours that pass. Little by little she unfolds the economic situation of her family. Her husband has been out of work for eight months, her son for close on three years; her daughter is a cripple. The lack of work is not unconnected with “C.’s” habit of being the Stan-

dard bearer in Communist manifestations. Then came the elections. Her husband and son were amongst the labourers allotted —forcibly—to the local landowners. They worked for three weeks without pay. “C.’s” face, when she came (with flowers) to give this news, was grey. An arrangement was made to help her over these days of real hunger. Then she sent news that the landowner’s pigs had been seized and sold, and the allotted labourers’ wages paid with the proceeds. A sponge cake followed a few days later, with the intimation that she needed no further help for the present'.

3. In Seville “R.” leaves his small car outside the hairdresser’s, and on returning to it finds a printed leaflet with the intimation that the Drivers' Syndicate has decided on a monthly levy of 25 pesetas on all cars driven by their owners; of five on those which are driven by a chauffeur. “When paying be careful to obtain a receipt with the stamp of the Drivers’ Syndicate”! As “R.” remarks resignedly, 25 pesetas is, after all, a cheap insurance against—fire.

4. “M.” is a well-known doctor with a clinic on the outskirts of Seville. Near to it, he owns another house, which the tenants recently left empty; they were paying 25 pesetas a day. One evening tho empty house, like countless others in Seville (the Right papers publish a daily list), was occupied by the “proletariat” and converted into a, club. But much singing of the “Internationale” in the small hours of the night did not make the neighbouring clinic more comfortable, so “M.” decided to appeal to a Communist leader whom as a doctor he had befriended in the past. After “M.’s” third application to this deservedly influential person, a deputation waited on him at his clinic, representing the club. They were friendly and polite, assured him that he. would be put to no further inconvenience, and that they were anxious to “regularise the situation”; what should they pay him? “M.” replied that his last tenants paid '25 pesetas a day. The deputation agreed to pay that amount —monthly; also immediately to obliterate the subversive inscriptions painted on the facade of the clinic. “M.” says: “They are not bad fellows! They are only obeying orders.” (And it is true. Nearly all the tenement buildings in the Sevillian slums bear a red flag with this announcement: “Here we pay no rent no gas, no light till the 50 per cent, reductions. Proletarian Brothers, Unite!”) A friends say to “M.”: “And if the orders were to cut off heads ?” 5. In the evenings the roads which cross the Great Sevillian Plains begin to swarm with motor lorries, bristling with clenched fists and often noisy with the “Internationale”; these are the Proletarian Brothers of the distant villages getting to know each other and establishing contact before the Day. The shouts and the singing awaken the Superior, who peeps through the curtains at the forest of clenched fists! Is the end come then? A sister is dispatched to a friendly house to inquire the meaning of the clenched fists. She is told to calm the community—it is only a ritual gesture, to-day’s, “just like so many other ritual gestures of the past!”