Untold love story from the Spanish Civil War

Nan Green followed her husband to fight in the Spanish Civil War but she had already dedicated her life righting wrongs, says her son Martin Green

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WAS born in Stockport, but spent the first five years of my life in Heathcote Street, off the Gray’s Inn Road.My father George was a cellist, and he moved to London from Stockport, because previously he had been able to find employment in the Manchester area. When he couldn’t play in concerts, he could always get a job in the cinema, to accompany the film. With the introduction of the talkies, live music was no longer needed. Coming to London enabled him to get work in Lyons Corner House, dressed as a gypsy and playing the cello.
The early 1930s was the time of the depression, and both my parents were politically active, initially in the Labour Party, but later became members of the Communist Party. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, my father volunteered to drive an ambulance to Spain, to help the Republican cause. He was accompanied by Wogan Phillips, later the first declared Communist to sit in the House of Lords.
When Wogan was wounded, and had to return to England, he asked my mother, Nan, if she could go out to Spain and work Untold love story from the Spanish Civil War Nan Green followed her husband to fight in the Spanish Civil War but she had already dedicated her life righting wrongs, says her son Martin Green in a hospital, as they were desperately short of staff. Nan told him that she had two young children, myself and my sister Frances.
Wogan, who came from a wealthy family, said he would pay for both of us to go to boarding school. She agreed, and Grandpa Green was appointed our guardian. Nan had read about A S Neill’s co-educational boarding school, Summer Hill, and it was here that Frances and I were boarded. On arriving at a hospital in Huete in Spain, my mother found that George was one of the patients, he having suffered a minor wound to his arm.They saw a little of each other after that, when George joined the British Battalion to the International Brigade and returned to the front line. In order to try and get foreign Fascist troops, Mussolini’s soldiers and Hitler’s airmen out the Republican Government offered to withdraw the International Brigades. George took part in the last skirmish, the Battle of Ebro, and was killed on September 23 1938. It wasn’t until some months later that Nan learned that he’d been killed, hoping meanwhile that he might still be alive, possibly captured. She then threw herself into the cause of the Republican Spain, accompanying a interparty of Spanish refugee children to Mexico, where they’d been offered refuge.
When World War II broke out, Summer Hill School was evacuated to north Wales, and Nan returned to London, where she was bombed out twice. Living in Clapham with an ex- Brigadier and his Spanish wife, she met someone she agreed to marry, thinking my sister Frances and I needed a father figure.
After the war, Nan joined the peace movement, helping to organise a peace conference in Sheffield, which was attended by Pablo Picasso, whose Peace Dove was prominently displayed, although Major Atlee’s
Labour Government told him he was “persona non grata,” being a member of the Communist Party. Later, Nan was invited to Peking as a Spanish translator in an international peace conference. There she was then offered a job helping to run an English-language magazine.
Eventually in the early 1960s, she returned to London, having separated from her husband Ted, and got an editorial job in the communist publishing house of Lawrence and Wishart. I only really got to know my mother in those later years. Before she died, I did say to her that because of the interesting life she’d led – and because she was an accomplished writer – that she should write her memoirs, to which she agreed.
After she died, I approached a number of publishing houses hoping that they would agree to publish them, though chapters from the memoirs appeared in three anthologies about the Spanish Civil War. Later, she appeared as one of the four female profiles in Paul Preston’s Doves of War – two on each side of the conflict.
Last year, I finally succeeded in finding a publisher, Trent Editions, the Nottingham University Press, and A Chronicle of Small Beer appeared. The birth of a book is often long and painful progress, as in this case.
Dolores Ibárruri, ‘La Pasionaria’ – chief propagandist for the Republicans – in her farewell address to the International Brigades in Barcelona in 1938, said: “You are history, you are legend. You will return.” Nan fulfilled this prophecy fully, when I took her ashes back to Spain to scatter them on the soil where George has his unknown grave.