My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleysource of happiness to us in subsequent years. Chief among them were the SerranoSuners, whom we had not known before but who welcomed us with warm hospitality.He had recently been Foreign Minister of Spain, and she was the sister of GeneralFranco's wife. He combined high intelligence with a bright gaiety of nature andfirmness of character which had survived many sorrows and vicissitudes of the CivilWar, and she united outstanding beauty and charm with an exquisite sweetness andgentleness of disposition. Soon after our arrival, they gave us a fascinatingintroduction to Spanish life. Ramon Serrano Suner said that he would come at 11p.m.to our hotel to fetch us for dinner. We thought it was rather late, but manfullysustained the wait without a preliminary snack. When he arrived he said that thedinner was at their house in the country, and we wondered how long the journeywould take.However, all mundane things were forgotten when, on the way, we arrived at theEscurial which he had caused to be opened around midnight. We stood alone in theawe of that sombre splendour. The purpose of the visit was to stand for a fewmoments by the tomb of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange. I hadseen him only once, when in the thirties he had visited me in London at ourheadquarters in Chelsea. He had made a deep impression on me, and his assassinationseemed to me always one of the saddest of the individual tragedies of Europe. I wasdeeply moved as we stood beside the sepulchre of this young and glittering presence Iremembered so vividly, and was reminded of the initial line of Macaulay's memorabletribute to Byron: 'When the grave closed over the thirty-seventh year of so muchsorrow, so much glory'.We continued our journey in a subdued mood to Suner's country house in the hillsnear Madrid. There we found a brilliant and lively throng ready for dinner at anincredibly late hour by English standards, and their gaiety and good humour graduallydispersed the dark reveries of the Escurial. There were some twenty guests, amongthem the niece of our hostess, General Franco's beautiful daughter, who was justengaged to be married and had come with her fiance; time flies, they now have a largefamily. The party lasted into the early hours of the morning and was the prelude to anumber of happy occasions when the cares of our war years were dissolved in thewarmth, charm and distinction of Spanish hospitality. We were just getting used totheir late afternoon lunches and near-midnight dinner parties, when the time came toleave; I remember one lady saying to me at what was called a morning gathering thatshe must hurry home as it was after three o'clock and her parents, like all old people,wanted to lunch early.Meantime, our boat had sailed with the boys through the relative calm of theMediterranean to meet us in the Balearic Isles. We went by train to Valencia and onby boat to Majorca on one of the hottest journeys of our lives. These isles are aparadise now familiar to many of our countrymen, but we were there before theirdevelopment and the arrival of the cinema world. At a small seaside house nearFormentor, Filippo Anfuso and his lovely Hungarian wife were living; her remarkablefirmness and resolution of character had done much to save his life in the final turmoilof the war. He was a professional diplomat who had been loyal to the last in his dutyas the final Foreign Secretary of Mussolini's government. For this he was condemnedto death and was therefore in exile at the time we met him. He was later amnestiedand promptly elected as a deputy to the Italian parliament for his native Sicily;352 of 424