These are the books I have read during 2019
The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane
This was a
65th birthday present from Max and I found it quite a hard book to
read (which is why it took me almost six months). I kept reading it and putting
it down for a month until I finally finished it in early January.
Macfarlane
poses the question: are there any truly wild places left in the British Isles?
I guess that depends upon your definition of “wild”. There are some wild places
in Thorney – my allotment until I took it over and the patch of land next door
hasn’t been disturbed for 15 years.
So my
definition of wild is probably much less rigorous than Macfarlane’s. He sets
off to visit a list of places he has identified as fitting his definition and
they include remote islands, coastal strips, bogs and mountains. The usual
suspects are there – Rannoch Moor gets a chapter – and I found his writing in
the first part of the book a little unconvincing. There didn’t seem to be a
connection, he didn’t seem comfortable or happy in the places he wanted to
experience.
He did seem
to visit them during periods of extreme weather and there was a piece about
spending the night on the summit of Ben Hope in the middle of winter, which
sounded quite reckless (unless he was exaggerating his predicament). In the
latter part of the book, he seemed more at ease with the “wild” environment he
was visiting, but it was a lot less wild Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex coasts,
lost holloways in the south-west … These were the more interesting bits, but
then he’s off again trying to find an arctic hare in Derbyshire in the middle
of a November storm.
I’m going
to pass the book on to Sam who has been watching and enjoying the YouTube
channel of a chap in North America who goes wild camping in the woods.
The Spanish Civil War by Antony Beevor
I knew very
little about the Spanish Civil War, except that when I was little Franco was
still something of a bogeyman. Spain (and Portugal too) was a place you didn’t
want to visit – run by a fascist dictator, backward, dominated by the Catholic
Church (and don’t forget what they did in 1588). My knowledge of Spain was
limited to what we read in the Daily Herald – they killed bulls for fun, they
threw donkeys off church towers, you could be arrested for wearing a bikini.
Later, I
read Ernest Hemmingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and then Laurie Lee’s As I
Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and A Moment of War. Later still, I read a
little about the Anarchist movement in Catalonia and I have been referring to
events in the civil war during my Spanish lessons. Poets, composers and artists
we may look at during lessons (such as Manuel de Falla) were greatly affected
by the war. Falla, the greatest Spanish composer of the 20th
century, lived in exile after the war and refused to return to Spain despite
being offered a generous pension by Franco. The Gipsy Kings were descendants of
Basque gipsies, who were forced to flee to France after the Republicans lost
the war.
Beevor’s
writing is pretty much a factual, chronological narrative, and is easy to read;
although the complicated pre-war politics and multitude of unfamiliar names do
make you pause quite often and say: “who the heck is he and what side was he
on?”
The
background to the war is one of immense poverty in Spain, with industry
(generally) and land (absolutely) in the ownership of a small, wealthy class.
There was dissatisfaction with the monarchy, including a dispute over rightful
succession, and dissatisfaction among the poorer classes with the Catholic
church. A strong left-wing movement - including socialists, communists and
anarchists – had arisen (especially in the Basque and Catalan industrial areas)
and to complicate things further, there was a desire for Catalan independence,
while the Basque country largely was a semi-independent entity.
The Spanish
‘left’ was an unhappy coalition. The communists (some way from Stalinism) were
the smaller party and not happy bedfellows with the socialists, while the
anarchists, by definition, were not going to fit in anywhere. They wanted
collectivism, no government, no money, no army … The fear of anarchy (it’s
still a loaded word) led to a campaign of fake news against the movement across
Europe. Catalonia in Spain was its strongest place and when allowed to, during
the civil war, anarchists did run factories and farming in a pragmatic,
efficient way. The RNLI, rightly held up as a shining example by many, is (you
could argue) an anarchist organisation.
The war
started when the left won democratic elections in 1936. Leaders of the armed
forces led a coup, which was only partly successful. The navy remained largely
loyal and parts of the army also remained loyal. Franco emerged as the leader
of the Nationalists and, helped by German and Italian military support, he
finally won a bloody war that lasted three years.
Russia supported
the Republicans, but did them no favours. Stalin basically took all the
country’s gold reserves and gave them a few (no enough) weapons, but lots of
communist advisors. His aim was to make the relatively small Spanish communist
party the leader in government.
The role of
Britain, France and the USA was shameful. The British maintained neutrality,
while providing Franco with considerable support; France wished to be more
helpful but deferred to British policy for fear of upsetting its ally and the
USA, led by a strong Catholic pressure group (including the Kennedy dynasty)
also thwarted democratic government.
Had we
supported the Republicans, some argue Hitler may have thought twice about
launching the Second World War. At least, we would have had an ally against
Fascism had WW2 still started.
The most
shocking thing about the Spanish Civil War was its brutality. Franco said he’d
reunite Spain even if he had to shoot half the Spaniards (and that’s pretty
much what happened). His Moroccan mercenaries were ruthless murderers, rapists
and pillagers of conquered territory, while Hitler and Mussolini used the war
as a testing ground for weapons and tactics that would be employed during WW2
against France and Britain.
The bombing
of Guernica is well documented, but Madrid and Barcelona (and many other
cities) were carpet-bombed against the Geneva convention, civilian refugees
were machine gunned by aeroplanes and weapons such a napalm were developed by
the Germans. The causes of Basque and Catalan separatism were ruthlessly
supressed, the ‘national’’ language, Castellano, was imposed across Spain and
church attendance made more or less compulsory.
It’s
extraordinary that all this happened only 80 years ago – one lifetime. What a
mess Europe was in so recently and what a blessing that Spain, Portugal, Italy
and Germany are now democratic governments working together within the EU. What
a shame that some elements, especially within the UK, have now pulled us out of
this movement for peace, co-operation and unity.
