My Spanish Year

by Ellen M. Whishaw

“It was nothing—there were many such incidents. I was in bed. Tired? Well, perhaps; we do not sleep much just now. Suddenly I heard pistol shots, several, fired quickly one after the other, so I knew the danger was imminent. I ran to my window to call the boatman, who was supposed to be at my service day and night, but the poor fellow was tired out, and a long way off, at the far end of this long street. I could make out his boat, tied to a balcony. I guessed he had fallen asleep, or perhaps, for we are all human, was inside the house getting a drink. Do not blame him. Those who had stayed out all day in the cold wind and soaking rain knew well how pardonable was his lapse from duty. If there had been a cart or even a donkey I should have taken it without asking permission. But it was the middle of the night. I dared not wade; I am not tall, and the water was over three feet deep in my street. And then one of my neighbours, excellent fellow, roused like myself by the shots, offered to take me on his back. He is a fisherman, strong in the legs and much taller than I. Understand that he asked no reward; indeed, he refused payment from the funds that I hold for relief. He carried me on his shoulders to the boat, and the boatman came out quickly, very much ashamed. My fisherman began to rate him, but I said, ‘Save your breath to help row, for I fear we may arrive too late.’ We all three rowed very hard, and the current seemed like a giant’s hand dragging back our boat. You see the embankment of the railway to Huelva causes the flood water to eddy in our streets. I do not understand engineering, but every one in Triana knows that the embankment is our ruin. It was planned by engineers in Madrid, and the protest of those who knew the river was not attended to. The poor people of Triana curse the embankment every time there is a flood, and this time they would have gone and torn it down with their own hands if they could have got to it without being drowned on the way. Well, we reached the Calle Evangelio at last. The shots were fired from a house with two storeys, and all the inhabitants had been living on the upper one since the flood began. The water was six feet deep in the street, and it was quite dark. We got them all into the boat from a balcony, except one man. He had to jump, for just as he was ready to climb over the rail the whole front of the house seemed to melt away. It had been undermined by the water, and fell in all at once. Yes, I suppose the poor people might all have been drowned, had the good God not woke the fisherman in time to go to their rescue. I was responsible in a certain sense, but I could not have got there in time but for him. Therefore, such credit as there was, should have been given by the papers to him, not to me.”

On the last and worst day of the floods the King came to Seville with the Minister of Public Works; and then the poor Trianeros were glad they had not pulled down the railway embankment, for the first thing His Majesty did was to steam off along that line, across the waste of waters, to visit a village which lay with little more than its roofs above the flood. I watched the engine with its single carriage crawl over the bridge and along the embankment, very slowly, for there was no knowing what unseen damage might have been done by the turbid yellow flood below the rails and sleepers.

Everybody thought that as the King and the Minister had now seen for themselves the intolerable injury that the piece of bad engineering was inflicting on Seville, the necessary authority for the work on the old river bed would be given immediately. That was a year and nine months ago, and Don Bernardo and his colleagues have been making ceaseless efforts ever since to get the matter attended to. But we have had three different Ministries in power during these twenty-one months, and none of them has had time to think of such trifles as protecting the third most important port in Spain from devastating inundations. During November 1913 the port had twice to be closed to navigation, owing to the height of the flood water, and it would not be difficult to calculate how much money has thus been lost to the town, though no one who has not seen Triana flooded can estimate the cost in fear and anxiety to the fathers who cannot earn bread for their children, and the mothers who watch in hourly dread of the irremediable ruin of their homes.

But no one blames the King. They know it is no fault of his, for they saw him in Triana that February day in 1912, going from house to house in a cart or a boat and hoisting up provisions with his own hands, in baskets slung down from the balconies, and they watched him standing ankle deep in water at the rise of the bridge, insisting on visiting the streets that had suffered most.

“God knows no one street had suffered more than another,” said the journeyman potter who told me this, “for all were under water alike. ‘What a terrible disaster!’ said the King. His gentlemen tried to hold him back, for they had to follow where he led, and they did not want to get their feet wet. But they might as well have tried to hold the river back. He is a King! He gave two thousand pesetas then and there, and he sent twenty thousand more from Madrid as soon as he got back. But the best thing of all was the King’s Kitchen. He ordered free hot meals to be served at his expense every day and all day as long as the flood lasted, to every Trianero who chose to ask for them—no recommendations required, no religious conditions. The King said no one was to be asked a question: everybody who was hungry was to have a meal in his kitchen. It saved many lives. True, we all had bread from the Town Council, but we fathers could not take our share while the children were hungry, and we were weak from long fasting, for you must understand that many of us had been out of work for a month, owing to bad weather, before the river overflowed. What a bad time God gave us this winter! But, thank God, there is work for all Triana now, for there are so many houses to be repaired and rebuilt that we cannot make bricks fast enough, and the masters have had to raise our wages.”

Soup kitchens, or as the Sevillians call them, “Economical kitchens” (cocinas economicas), are little used here in times of public distress. It never seems to occur to the wealthy Sevillian ladies that with a very little trouble and organisation they could easily start private soup kitchens in their own houses, if only for the friends and relations of their numerous ménages. Of course, when the floods came, a soup kitchen was the first idea that occurred to some members of the English colony, and within twenty-four hours of the inundation of Triana, Mr. Keyser, our Consul, together with myself and a few other ladies, had collected enough money among our personal friends to supply two hundred rations a day for a fortnight.

The distribution took place in our house, because our patio happened to be the most convenient for the purpose, and all our servants, like those at the Consulate, worked double tides throughout the fortnight, so that none of the Relief Fund should be spent on extra hands. At first we only intended to feed families connected with the English business houses, but we soon found that it was impossible to lay down hard-and-fast rules. One afternoon a man who had been waiting an hour for what might remain after the privileged people were fed, dropped in a dead faint on the floor, and it took half an hour to bring him round. After that we ladled out our soup as fast as we could to every white-faced shivering creature that presented himself, without asking for his subscriber’s card, not wishing for a repetition of the fright that seized us when the man fainted, for on that occasion it looked for a while as if our very small amount of red tape was to cost a life.

We got up to five hundred rations a day before we closed our soup kitchen, and even then had money left to buy the hundred mattresses and pillows that were so useful to the Triana priest—and all for a little over £60 in English money. True, the mattresses were very cheap, for a maker of them contributed to the relief by selling us all that we asked for considerably below cost price—a practical form of charity that greatly appealed to the people. But if we had spent £6000 instead of £60 we could not have met with more gratitude. It was not so much the quantity or the quality of the soup, our parish priest explained. It was having it ready at the precise moment when it was wanted, for the thing was put in hand very promptly, and we got in ahead even of the King’s Kitchen. Strange though it may seem to English people, accustomed to organised charity, no other private individual or private association in Seville adopted this simple means of providing hot meals at a minimum of cost.

But we had no idea of the fame we were acquiring—indeed, we had no time to think of how our modest effort might strike the public. So we were surprised and amused when the editor of a local weekly paper sent round his photographer to get an illustration for an article on the “noble initiative of the English ladies.” We told him we preferred to remain in retirement with our kettles. But he pointed out that a photograph of our truly “economical” kitchen would encourage the ladies of Seville to go and do likewise when another occasion should arise; and after that we could not of course refuse to be immortalised with our tin pots about us, if only to show how easily five hundred people could be fed from a dozen petroleum tins boiled on gas rings. And having got his photograph and published his little article, our philanthropic editor proceeded to offer each of our helpers a copy of the photograph at three times the market price!