Clifford Thurlow's Journey to We Shall Pass
Welcome to day five of our Book Week Scotland series! Today, we feature a guest blog by Clifford Thurlow, author of We Shall Pass. In this piece, Thurlow reflects on the origins of his novel, capturing fragmented memories from post-Franco Spain.
Bob Dylan once remarked that he didn’t so much write his songs as catch them – phrases drifting overhead like contrails in the upper air, waiting for someone with a net. The beginnings of my novel We Shall Pass arrived that way. Not as a plot, nor even an idea, but as fragments: the corner piece of a jigsaw with the middle missing; a move in a chess game whose rules no one had bothered to explain.
I was teaching English in Barcelona then, in the uneasy years after the Transition – from Franco into the Unknown. People lived in the present tense, as if history were a bad memory they preferred not to talk about. In certain bars you still found Franco’s portrait – yellowing, fly-specked, defiantly nailed to the wall. In others there remained only the rectangle of unfaded paint where the generalísimo had once glowered. Silence settled over the subject like dust.
In my off-hours I read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. I visited the Zurich Bar where he had smoked cheap cigarettes with his POUM comrades, men who were meant to be on the same side but spent half their days shooting at each other over competing blueprints for a better world. I went to Jarama, that scorched valley where the British Battalion of the International Brigades had held the line in 1937. Something spectral hung in the air there, a residue of shouted slogans and last breaths. “¡No pasarán!” “¡Pasaremos!” They Shall Not Pass. We Shall Pass. The title arrived before I knew the story.
Back in Barcelona, a student told me her grandfather’s tale. He had been imprisoned by the Nationalists in the dying days of the war, condemned to hang at dawn. His only rebellion was a voice – a pure, choral tenor that rose each morning with the sun and drifted down the corridors like incense. On the day appointed for his execution, the prison governor listened, then disobeyed his own orders. “How can I hang a man to whom God has given the voice of an angel?” he said. The singer remained behind bars until 1950, long after the guns had fallen silent. Spain has always preferred its miracles to be half-hidden.
I learned, too, that more Scots volunteered for the Brigades, proportionally, than any other nationality. Something about that caught. Perhaps it connected, in the secret way memory does, to the Glasgow hunger marchers of 1936, cut down in Whitehall by mounted police. Official history barely footnotes them. But the dead have a way of insisting.
And then – another drifting fragment – a character stepped through the smoke. A young Scottish dockworker, jobless, furious, his best mate Jimmy lying on a morgue slab after the police charge. I called him Robbie Gillan, borrowing a friend’s name because it felt honest. Beside him, a young nurse, Alice Sheridan, watched this battered boy curse the world that had produced him. Robbie swears he’d go to Spain if he had the money. Alice quietly places £5 in his palm. And there it was: an impossible romance, the kind history tries but never quite manages to extinguish.
Years later I stood in the trenches at Jarama, the same ground where Robbie and his comrades would have crouched under fire. The olive trees whispered in the wind. The story was already there. I had only to reach up and catch it.
