It was September 1968, and I’d been away from Canada for exactly a year. That previous winter, I’d studied French in Paris at L’Alliance Francaise, while living with a family and working as their au pair, or nanny.  Now, Paris was my base for exploring Europe on five dollars a day which meant hitchhiking, youth hostels and occasional meals consisting of the contents of cookie packets.

This time, my friend Luci and I made a snap decision to thumb our way to Spain for a couple of weeks. And, yes, that’s a suitcase I’m sitting on: I hitched all over Europe with it.

We left the next day and passed through the border crossing at Perpignan. I had no inkling that my father, Jim Higgins, had been through this border twice. I knew that he’d been in the “Spanish Civil War,” but he had barely talked about it: It didn’t even cross my mind as I spent the next two weeks travelling around Spain.

Now that I have published his book, Fighting for Democracy: A Canadian Activist in Spain’s Civil War, I know that Jim Higgins’s first time in Perpignan was in late October 1937; the day he and twenty other international volunteers snuck into Spain by making the dangerous climb over the Pyrenees at night.  When dawn broke, he was awed by his first sight of Spain. The sparkling Mediterranean from the top of the mountains was as peaceful as it was spectacular.

His second time was in late January 1939 as Barcelona was falling and he and other volunteers were leaving Spain in a sealed train. As it passed across the border into Perpignan, his last sight would have been of thousands of desperate Spanish refugees streaming north into France, where they were herded into fenced camps on the cold wet beaches.

He says in his book, “A wealth of experience, of love and hate, passed between that first glimpse and the last.”  Hate was not a word he used lightly. For the rest of his life, he reserved it for the fascists who were responsible for the killing and dislocation of hundreds of thousands of Spanish civilians.

Luci and I made our way to Barcelona, a city where I now know my father spent a pleasant three days on leave in late September 1938. The postcard I sent from Barcelona featured paella, the saffron-scented rice dish topped with seafood.

Luci and I had eaten paella in a candlelit cellar restaurant whilst being serenaded by Tunas; wandering groups of costumed university students. Even on my five dollars a day, I was eating far better than did the soldiers in Spain’s Civil War. (My diet consisted of more than cookies, honest.)

I wonder what my father thought when he saw that postcard paella. Was he reminded of garbanzo beans cooked in olive oil; or mule meat, if one had been killed by an enemy attack. Or, of the many times he went hungry. When I wrote home about the café con leche I enjoyed every morning, did memories surface of the “so-called coffee” he and his comrades drank made from burnt chicory root.

The day we left Barcelona, Luci and I got a ride all the way to Murcia; close to six hundred kilometres south. The next morning, we hitched across the Sierra Nevada; it was the hottest I’d ever been, there were no trees, and the people lived in caves because it was the only way to keep cool.

We were lucky. Our ride took us all the way through that fascinating landscape and the car was air conditioned. In the treacherous mountains further north, my father and his comrades endured searing heat and brutal cold—there was nothing to mitigate their misery.

Luci and I spent the next few nights in Granada and Seville where we delighted in flamenco and Moorish architecture. Little did I know that the sadistic General Queipo de Llano, one of the rebel generals, wielded a reign of terror in Seville. In his daily radio broadcasts, he incited the rebel nationalists to kill, loot, rape, and torture. Three thousand civilians were killed in Seville during the first weeks of the coup.

We went on to Lisbon for a few days, before circling back to Madrid, where I gawked at the modern buildings and ate my first gazpacho. I wrote to my father, “A very modern city, I was impressed with Madrid, just as I was impressed with the character and atmosphere of the other Spanish towns.”  

Madrid held out until the end of the war. Though it was bombed regularly (hence all those new buildings), and food was scarce, the Loyalists kept Franco’s troops at bay on the city’s western outskirts. Writers, journalists and photographers including Virginia Cowles, Martha Gelhorn and Ernest Hemingway, based themselves at the Hotel Florida where they wrote dispatches for the outside world.

Luci and I returned to Barcelona for a few more days of tapas and beach lounging, before making our way back to Paris.

That carefree September of 1968, I had no idea that Franco was a dictator, that in 1936 he had led the revolt of army generals against the elected government of Spain and only won with significant support from Hitler, Mussolini, and capitalists like the chair of Texaco in the United States. Nor did I know that he was responsible for killing, imprisoning, and repressing tens of thousands of Spaniards up until he died in 1975.

No. By the time I toured around in 1968, Franco had hired an American PR firm to clean up his image and the country was going after tourist dollars. I saw the burnished surface of a fascinating country with a rich history, unaware of its dark past or of my father’s role in fighting for democracy in Spain.

I wonder: What did Jim Higgins think of his daughter being in Franco’s Spain when, without warning, that first postcard from Barcelona bearing Franco’s image turned up in his mailbox? Did buried memories begin to burble. Was he upset that I was there when Franco was still dictator; or did his love of the Spanish people trump his hatred for the fascists.

One thing is certain—neither he nor I had any idea that fifty-two years later, I would be humbled and honoured to bring his story to the world.

© Janette Higgins

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Fighting for Democracy by Jim Higgins is the latest book about the Mac-Paps, Canadians in the Mackenzie Papineau Battalion, which was part of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.

Other books about Canadians in the Spanish Civil War include Not For King or Country by Tyler Wentzell , Mac-Pap by Ronald Liversedge with David Yorke and Renegades by Michael Petrou.