Snapshot: My father at the dawn of Spain’s civil war

My father is standing in a photographer’s studio. He is just 13 but he is looking straight into the camera like a grown man. This is Barcelona, in 1936; the Spanish civil war has just started and he is wearing the typical outfit of the Republican militias: dark dungarees and beret.

The Spanish civil war lasted for three years and has scarred generations of Spaniards. Right up to the present day, families define themselves by their allegiance to either side.

When the war started in 1936, my father was living on the outskirts of Barcelona. His family had come from Castile a few years earlier to work in the Catalan factories, like thousands of other poverty-stricken peasants. Hunger was part of everyday life and my grandfather had joined the CNT, one of the major anarchist organisations, because their ideology suited his hatred of rules and bosses.

My father never said much about the war except for this paradoxical comment: “Had the war not come, I would have died of hunger.”

The brutal conflict for him started as a miraculous feast, because in the aftermath of the military coup, my grandfather was turned overnight from indigent to armed member of one of the anarchist militias that effectively ruled Barcelona.

The convents’ doors were opened, the nuns’ provisions ransacked and that is how my father, along with crowds of hungry children, ate chicken for the first time in his life. This faded photograph is the only tangible memory my family keeps of the civil war: a young boy dressed as one of the fighters that he never was.

In the same way, today, some fathers let their boys have a sip of their beer as an initiation to male adulthood. But the days of camaraderie never materialised for the boy in the picture. His father had to flee Spain in a hurry when the Republicans lost the war and he died in exile after 20 years, far from his children. He was one of the lucky ones. Lots of others died. As for the Republican fighters’ wives and children, they were made to pay by the victors – one of my great-uncles lost a lung in prison.

When I was born, Spain was still under the rule of General Franco who, unlike his fellow German and Italian dictators, managed to die in his bed, officially mourned by the whole nation. Meanwhile, many Spanish families still don’t know in which graves their lost relatives lie.

Marguerite Carrasco

Playlist: Mum’s favourite and her deep love of Dad

Please Mr Postman by the Beatles

Please Mr Postman look and see / If there’s a letter, a letter for me / I’ve been standing here waiting Mr Postman / So-o-o-o patiently …”

In 1964, I was six years old with a mum who was Beatles mad, dashing off to buy their records as soon as they were released; playing their music endlessly on her record player in the front parlour.

We lived in Liverpool and that hot summer, the sash windows were all pushed up to let in a breeze and the music blasted out into the street, where we kids played hopscotch, or skipped, or chased each other on the patch of bare ground opposite (a cleared bombsite).

Dad was away in the Territorial Army, on a short break from his job as a train driver. For the whole fortnight, Mum wrote to him three times a day, unaware of how much ribbing this earned him from the other lads. In between Mum’s trips to the post box, she hovered by the front door, keeping a lookout for the postman, playing Please Mr Postman over and over again. If a letter from Dad arrived, I’d run indoors and we would sit together in the parlour where she would read the letter out loud.

Dad died last year aged 81 and Mum says she still misses him every day. Sometimes when I visit her, she puts Please Mr Postman on her CD player, and gets his letters out from that time, now soft and ripping along the creases. Her voice trembling a little, she reads them out. They all begin “My Darling Do …”.

Caroline Dearden

We love to eat: Wet pizza, a favourite for five generations

Ingredients

1 onion, chopped

1 tomato, chopped

2 mushrooms, chopped

Mixed herbs and pepper to taste

150g cheese, sliced

2 rashers of bacon, chopped

150ml milk

Take an oven proof plate, spread the onion, mushroom and tomato on it and sprinkle on the mixed herbs and pepper. Place the cheese on top and then the bacon. The bacon should be last so that it will crisp. Pour on the milk. Transfer to the oven and cook at 220C for about 45 minutes.

The cheese will melt, spread over the onion and go brown. The bacon will crisp and the onion will simmer slowly in the milk, which will clarify in the process.

Take the plate from the oven and place it on top of another plate to save the table from damage. The meal is eaten with bread and butter which you cut up with a knife and fork so that you can soak up the delicious juices. It’s also a meal that has many advantages: it is very tasty, can be prepared in advance and leaves almost no washing up.

Within my family we sometimes call it “Irish Pizza” because we suspect that it came over from Ireland with one of my maternal great-grandparents. It has been passed down five generation to my knowledge. Because of its simplicity it is a good activity to share with kids in the kitchen. It consists mainly of slicing cheese, chopping onion, tomato, mushrooms and bacon, pouring on milk and then transferring it to an oven for 45 minutes.

You can put your own spin on it by adding any other ingredients that would be found topping a pizza – such as olives, peppers, chillies, etc. You can leave out the bacon to make it vegetarian and you can easily vary what you put on each plate depending on your guests’ preferences, so it is a meal that allows “individualisation”.

My younger son is visiting me today and two plates of “wet pizza” are sitting in the oven waiting for me to turn it on when he arrives. He is home from a cycle trip to China (yes, really) and has been away for a year and a half.

Roger Ley

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