I had thought it a town
where class distinctions and great differences of wealth hardly existed.
Certainly that was what it looked like. 'Smart' clothes were an
abnormality, nobody cringed or took tips,
waiters and flower-women and
bootblacks looked you in the eye and called you 'comrade'. I had not grasped that this was mainly a mixture of hope and camouflage. The working class believed in a revolution that had been begun but never consolidated, and the bourgeoisie were scared and temporarily disguising themselves as workers. In the first months of revolution there must have been many thousands of people who deliberately put on overalls and shouted revolutionary slogans as a way of saving their skins. Now things were returning to normal. The smart restaurants and hotels were full of rich people wolfing expensive meals, while for the working-class population food-prices had jumped enormously without any corresponding rise in wages. Apart from the expensiveness of everything, there were recurrent shortages of this and that, which, of course, always hit the poor rather than the rich. The restaurants and hotels seemed to have little difficulty in getting whatever they wanted, but in the working-class quarters the queues for bread, olive oil, and other necessaries were hundreds of yards long. Previously in Barcelona I had been struck by the absence of beggars; now there were quantities of them. Outside the delicatessen shop at the top of the Ramblas gangs of barefooted children were always waiting to swarm round anyone who came out and clamour for scraps of food. The 'revolutionary' forms of speech were dropping out of use. Strangers seldom addressed you as _tú_ and _camarada_ nowadays; it was usually _señor_ and _usted_. _Buenos días_ was beginning to replace _salud_. The waiters were back in their boiled shirts and the shop-walkers were cringing in the familiar manner. My wife and I went into a hosiery shop on the Ramblas to buy some stockings. The shopman bowed and rubbed his hands as they do not do even in England nowadays, though they used to do it twenty or thirty years ago. In a furtive indirect way the practice of tipping was coming back. The workers' patrols had been ordered to dissolve and the pre-war police forces were back on the streets. One result of this was that the cabaret show and high-class brothels, many of which had been closed by the workers' patrols, had promptly reopened.*
A small but significant instance of the way in which everything was now
orientated in favour of the wealthier classes could be seen in the
tobacco shortage. For the mass of the people the shortage of tobacco was
so desperate that cigarettes filled with sliced liquorice-root were
being sold in the streets. I tried some of these once. (A lot of people
tried them once.) Franco held the Canaries, where all the Spanish
tobacco is grown; consequently the only stocks of tobacco left on the
Government side were those that had been in existence before the war.
These were running so low that the tobacconists' shops only opened once
a week; after waiting for a couple of hours in a queue you might, if you
were lucky, get a three-quarter-ounce packet of tobacco. Theoretically
the Government would not allow tobacco to be purchased from abroad,
because this meant reducing the gold-reserves, which had got to be kept
for arms and other necessities. Actually there was a steady supply of
smuggled foreign cigarettes of the more expensive kinds, Lucky Strikes
and so forth, which gave a grand opportunity for profiteering. You could
buy the smuggled cigarettes openly in the smart hotels and hardly less
openly in the streets, provided that you could pay ten pesetas (a
militiaman's daily wage) for a packet. The smuggling was for the benefit
of wealthy people, and was therefore connived at. If you had enough
money there was nothing that you could not get in any quantity, with the
possible exception of bread, which was rationed fairly strictly. This
open contrast of wealth and poverty would have been impossible a few
months earlier, when the working class still were or seemed to be in
control. But it would not be fair to attribute it solely to the shift of
political power. Partly it was a result of the safety of life in
Barcelona, where there was little to remind one of the war except an
occasional air-raid. Everyone who had been in Madrid said that it was
completely different there. In Madrid the common danger forced people of
almost all kinds into some sense of comradeship. A fat man eating quails
while children are begging for bread is a disgusting sight, but you are
less likely to see it when you are within sound of the guns
