On 19 March 1939, my father was forced to flee Spain due to the victory of Franco’s troops. With him went his partner and two children, which was unusual, for the vast majority of fugitives had been forced to set off alone as per instructions from their trade unions or, more rarely, for personal reasons.
I was seven years old at the time. The war that ended in defeat for the anti-Francoists lingered as the backdrop to my childhood. All I can remember of it are a few striking eruptions. On the other hand, I spent the long period of exile that followed surrounded throughout my childhood and early youth by comrades who had themselves also been landed in Oran, then a French colonial port, from a trawler in March 1939.