the ears of children visiting his ship, arm-wrestle a dockside bruiser into submission, summon delicate fevers when threatened with onerous duties and tune the Welsh lilt in his voice on to a wavelength that could cajole girls from Portsmouth to Perth into committing perilous indiscretions.
But midwifery was not one of his accomplishments. When Martine Ruiz emerged from a cabin on HMS Esk, swathed in a sheet, hand supporting her considerable belly, and said, ‘Please help me, I’m having a baby,’ he was unnerved.
He had watched her board the destroyer with the other refugees at the palm-fringed port of Alicante at dusk and she had reminded him of a galleon in full sail, so stately in her bearing that nothing untoward could possibly happen in the immediate future. Now here she was, alarm bells sounding.
His first instinct was to run on his bandy miner’s legs to the sickbay to get help but the Esk had paused north of Alicante to pick up wounded refugees from a moonlit beach, and the ship’s surgeon and his assistants were busily and bloodily engaged. In any case the woman wouldn’t let go of him.
Pulling him into the cabin, she lay on the bunk and said, ‘It is happening,’ as indeed it seemed to be, belly convulsing, body heaving, hands white-knuckled.
Hot water and towels: those, Taffy Jones remembered, were the essentials. He had observed them being taken into the bedroom in the dark and crouching cottage in the Rhondda Valley when his exhausted mother was giving birth to one of his sisters; he had heard the doctor calling for them in the sort of movie where the heroine collapses in a snowstorm and gives birth to twins.
The woman on the bunk screamed.
He turned on the hot water in the wash-basin and grabbed the towels from the rack.
‘There, there, lovey,’ he said, ‘everything will be all right, just you see.’ He held her hand and she gripped it with a fearful strength.
What now? ‘Push,’ he said as the midwife, who smelled of gin, had said to his mother. ‘Push, that’s it, lovey, you just help her on her way,’ because he had no doubt in his mind that a lady was about to be added to the passenger list.
He bathed her sweating face with a towel, not too hot, and laid another across her labouring belly. Observing her agony, hearing her cry, he determined that in future he would be more considerate towards women. No more buns in the oven for Taffy Jones.
The sheet slipped away and a head emerged from between her wide-flung thighs. ‘Push,’ he said gently, ‘push,’ although whether he was addressing mother or child he couldn’t say. What did you do when the baby finally made it? All you heard in the movies was a plaintive squawk from behind closed doors.
‘There, there, lovey, she’s on her way.’
The fingers of Martine Ruiz gripped his hand like talons. She said, ‘You will have to help.’
He stared at the baby; it seemed to have given up the struggle. Perhaps it didn’t like what it saw. He placed two paws round the tiny shoulders and pulled very gently; when he got back to Cardiff he would marry the girl who worked in the newsagents and they would take out a mortgage on a £600 semi and have two kids.
The baby, creased and slippery with mucus and blood, swam forward. Taffy Jones, aware of unplumbed emotions stirring within him, sighed. ‘She’s almost there,’ he said softly. ‘Almost there.’
‘In my bag,’ Martine Ruiz whispered in her accented English that he found difficult to understand. ‘A pair of … scissors.’
He opened her expensive-looking handbag and took them out. The cord had to be cut and knotted; that was it. The prospect didn’t alarm him: authority had settled comfortably upon him.
He dipped the blades of the scissors into the hot water, snipped the cord with one deft cut and tied it. Then he examined the baby.
‘It’s a girl,’ he told Martine Ruiz.
But it was making no sound. Was it breathing? He picked it up in his big hands and anxiously held it aloft. A smack followed by a squawk, he remembered.
‘Come on, you little bugger,’ Taffy Jones pleaded.
Still holding the baby in one paw, he ran the fingers of the other down its flimsy ribs.
And the baby laughed. Taffy Jones swore to it then and many times later in dockside bars where normally midwifery doesn’t rate high in conversational priorities. Some might have mistaken that first utterance for a whimper but Taffy knew better. He was there, wasn’t he? ‘Made a contribution to medical science, perhaps. To mankind, maybe,’ and, if it was his round, his drinking friends would nod sagely.
At the time Taffy Jones merely smiled at the baby who was now making noise that could, perhaps, be mistaken for crying and cooed, ‘Oh, you little bugger you.’
He gently washed the baby and handed it to its mother.
Ana Gomez worried. Not at this moment about her husband who was fighting at Jarama but about the future he was fighting for.
In the Plaza de España in Madrid, close to the front line, she watched Pablo kicking a scuffed football near the waterless fountains and Rosana making a sketch of the statue of Don Quixote.
Pablo intended one day to play for Real Madrid; Rosana to have her pictures hung in the Prado. Or would he, perhaps, play for Moscow Dynamo while Rosana exhibited in the Pushkin Museum?
This was what worried Ana as she paused in the hesitant sunshine on her way to hear her cousin Diego, an orator if ever there was one, speak in a bombed-out church off the Gran Via.
At first the different factions within the crusade hadn’t bothered her. They were all fighting for the same cause, weren’t they, so what did it matter if you were FAI or CNT or UGT or a regional separatist? She herself had favoured Anarchism because the belief that ‘Every man should be his own government, his own law, his own church’ seemed to be the purest form of revolution.
But what she believed in even more passionately was Spain – a wide, free country where equality settled evenly with the dust in the plains and the snow in the mountains – and she now believed that this vision was endangered. By the Russians. True, they were providing planes and tanks and guns but do we have to pay with our pride? Everywhere the Communists seemed to be taking over – there was Stalin smiling at her benignly from a banner on the other side of the square. And in Barcelona, so she had heard, the Communists who took their orders from the Kremlin were poised to crush the Communists in POUM who were independent of the Kremlin.
What has it come to, Ana Gomez asked herself, when not only are we divided but the divisions themselves are split? Where was the single blade of revolution that had flashed so brightly at the beginning?
A breeze rippled the banner of Stalin making a deceit of his smile.
Ana called the children. Outside the Gran Via cinema she met Carmen Torres who was taking the children to see the Marx Brothers. She gave them five pesetas and, skirting a bomb crater, made her way through the debris and broken glass to the church.
It was open to the sky and naked and, when she arrived, Diego was about to speak from the stone pulpit. Watching him from the back of the nave, Ana felt uneasy. Although she despised the priests who had defiled religion she still believed in the God they had betrayed and she didn’t like to hear politics instead of prayers in his house. But there was more to her unease than that: there was slyness abroad in the roofless church, a sulking defiance, and at the sides of the congregation stood several men with zealots’ faces.
Diego offered his congregation the clenched fist salute. ‘No pasarán!’ he shouted and they hurled it back at him. He spread his arms. We are one, his arms said. Then, with a plea and sally, he beckoned them into his embrace and when they were there he told them what they had to do.
Diego, with his myopic eyes peering from smoked glasses and his small, button-bursting stomach, did not have a prepossessing appearance, and this was perhaps the secret of his oratory: no one could believe that such fire could issue from