On 22nd May 1937, Herminio Martínez said goodbye to his father and got onto the deck of the Habana boat in the port of Santurtzi (Biscay), together with other 4,000 Basque children, 95 teachers, 129 volunteer women helpers and 15 priests. They set off for England, leaving behind the atrocious Spanish Civil War. At least this seven-year-old boy wasn´t alone: his elder brother Victoriano, aged eleven, was with him. They were told that this trip was going to last for only three months. Most children returned a few months later, others once the warfare had finished, but for 400 of them, such as for Herminio, those three months became almost seventy years.

"It was a horrific crossing -says Herminio, now 76-, with all the children sleeping on the crowded floor of the deck and feeling sick". 36 hours later, the Habana arrived in Southampton and they were taken to the Stoneham Camp. "Volunteers had put up the camp in a couple of weeks, in three fields provided by a farmer. Each ten children lived in a tent, the latrines were ditches dug in the ground and it rained a lote -he describes-. I remember that some children fell into the ditch. I´ll never forget the image of a little boy falling into the latrine".

In spite of the poor facilities, English people welcomed the children warmly and a lot of volunteers worked in the camp. As Herminio admits, "the camp had been organised so quickly that at the beginning it seemed a mess, but after a few days, thanks to the help of the volunteers, it started to get better".

A necessary escape

Herminio Martínez´s father was a poor worker in the industrial town of Baracaldo (Biscay). He and his wife were Catholic but, as Herminio says, his father used to go to church only at Christmas and Easter, whereas his mother never went to Mass: "She thought that she didn´t need any priest to speak to God". Unfortunately, Herminio´s teacher, who was extremely devout, is believed to have reported his father to the police because of his heterodox religious practices.

On 26th April 1937, Guernica was bombed by the Nazi air forces, allied with Franco, and the republican city of Bilbao was about to fall. The republican parents´ children evacuation (among them, Herminio and his brother) was pressing. "The English government didn´t want the children to come, but the pressure of a number of associations (quakers, socialists, communists, liberalse) forced them to take the refugees", he says. The British deputy Leah Manning was sent to Bilbao to be in charge of the evacuation.

"It´s curious, but there were more children evacuated to England (about 4,000) than to the Soviet Union (nearly 3,000) and, however, the evacuation to Russia is much better known than to the UK", remarks Herminio. "Nevertheless, the English government laid down that the children had to be fed only by voluntary donations. It was the opposite in Russia, where the refugee children were treated as "government guests".

Once in England, and according to Herminio, the Stoneham Camp only lasted for two or three months, despite the willingness of the English people to help. From there, the Basque Children's Committee (formed to evacuate and accept the children) sent them to different colonies in England, Scotland and Wales. "It was an extremely difficult situation for the Committee -explains Herminio-: on the one hand, Franco, the English Right and the Catholic Church in England were putting pressure on them to repatriate the children. On the other hand, the Second World War had broken out in September of 1939 and the funds that they used to raise for the children before were then used to help the English soldiers".

"In my case -he says-, I was sent with my brother and two other couples of brothers to a house near Newcastle and from there, once the colony closed, to Carlisle, in Northwest England. After that, we lived with a teacher in a farm. I didn´t know why I was taken from one place to another".

From one place to another

At the same time, like thousands of people, Herminio´s father was sent to prison, beaten and sentenced to death. Luckily, that sentence was reprieved and changed to thirty years of hard labour. "And all that was only because my mother didn´t go to Mass. Also, Franco supporters called the Civil War the ´crusade´, as if that war was the Christians´ fight against the infidel. It´s incredible", complains Herminio. "Even the priests who went with us in the Habana were believed to be traitors to Spain: Franco´s government said that those priests had taken part in the "kidnapping" of the children", he says.

At the start of the Second World War, Herminio and Victoriano were sent to Margate, in the South of England, from where they were going to be repatriated. "With my father in prison and five son and daughters to look after at home (one of them a newborn baby), my mother couldn´t let two of us go back because she could hardly feed us". But, although their mother didn´t want them to come, her signature was forged so that they could go home. Eventually, a few days before the departure, the Red Cross found their mother, interviewed her and confirmed that the parents´ wish was to keep the two sons in England.

From the 3,860 children, and despite all the troubles, about 400 children remained behind in England, such as Herminio and his brother. From the cold and hard colony of Margate, Herminio, then 9, was taken in by an English Methodist family, tutored in loco parentis, that is, in place of his parents. "They were very idealistic people, a Christian family, in the true sense of the word". But the problems arose when the father, who was a conscientious objector, refused to go to war and lost his job. In this difficult situation, they had to take Herminio back with the other children.

"In fact, this was the best thing that could have happened since, though that family was delightful, I was forgetting my language, my culturee", he admits. Then, he was sent to "The Culvers", a colony near London where Pepe Estruch, a theatre director from Alicante, was in charge.

The discovery of culture

Estruch, who had fled from Spain at the end of the Civil War, managed to escape from the concentration camp in Southern France, where he had spent eight months, thanks to the help of an English quaker. From there, and with other Spanish intellectuals, Estruch went to London, where he met the professor at the University of Salamanca, Luis Portillo (the politician Michael Portillo´s father), who was exiled as well.

Pepe Estruch and Luis Portillo helped in the colonies and gave the children classes. Estruch, as far as he´s concerned, used to organise Spanish Golden Age theatre plays with the boys and girls. Those events and other traditional dance festivals performed by the children were the way to raise money for the colonies. "We were really lucky because we were in touch with those Spanish intellectuals, such as Portillo and Estruch. I considered them my friends and I was inspired by them".

Little by little, and once the children were 14 or 15 years old and they could work and fend for themselves, all the colonies closed, except for "The Culvers", which was open until 1945, though most boys and girls were already working. "I spent three years there and that time was fantastic, because under the influence of Pepe I started to be interested in a lot of things", explains Herminio.

In fact, the contact with Estruch and Portillo made him want to study. When Herminio arrived in England, he only knew how to read and write and his parents were illiterate. A few years later, after he started to work on a farm, he decided to join evening classes. As a result, Herminio could get his degree and even finish a master.

The return 23 years later

"We lived in England, we worked in Englande but we weren´t English". In this way Herminio remembers the problems that the children refugees had when they grew up. "Since we didn´t join the Spanish Embassy in the UK, we were "exiled" and we were called "aliens". In fact, if we wanted to travel, we used a United Nations document and we were forced to report any change in our job, address, etc. to the police".

In 1960, the Spanish government allowed the exiled people to come to their homeland for four weeks and, after that, return to exile again. "It was my first opportunity to go home after 23 years", explains Herminio, who was already married to a Swiss woman. He asked for his passport at the Spanish Embassy but, as he had been married by the Protestant Church and not by the Catholic, the marital status that appeared in his passport was "single". "So, for the Spanish governmente my son was a bastard!", he jokes.
"When I went back home, I didn´t know my family" -recognizes Herminio. "I only knew my mother, who had visited us for two months. And Victoriano used to write to one of our brothers, but we received the letters with parts crossed out by the censor". Then their father left prison because of a serious illness contracted there.

"It's a pity -regrets Herminio-: most Spanish people don't know what happened during the Civil War since there was a strong censorship during the postwar period and, after that, a complete silence during the first years of democracy, with presidents Suárez and González. They should have filled this gap. Today there is a movement for the recovery of the historical memory but the Spanish Right isn´t interested in it".

Nowadays, Herminio, a retired teacher and businessman, lives between London and Cambridge. Despite those seventy years, he is still in touch with many boys and girls who left Santurtzi with him on board of the Habana that rainy day of May 1937. After so long in England, Herminio doesn´t feel English but a citizen of the world. "There are good and bad things in all places", he states.