Idle thoughts about chronology, and when one learnt A Thing

[oursin]

Among chapters I am currently giving the benefit of my editorial Thinkinz, is one set in the relatively early years of the Franco regime in Spain -

- which led me into considering issues of contextualisation -

- and then that when I went to uni, I was closer to the Spanish Civil War than we are now to Thatcher becoming PM and the early years of the HIV/AIDs epidemic -

- and then I thought, can it really be that I first encountered the fact that it had happened via the Mitfords?! - in Nancy's The Pursuit of Love Linda goes with her Communist second husband to aid refugees in the South of France, and of course Decca in Hons and Rebels recounts running off with Esmond Romilly to join the conflict.

I'm pretty sure I had already read TPoL by the time we were doing Auden and MacNeice in that collection of Twentieth-Century Poets for O-level.

It certainly would not have cropped up in formal History lessons, which dealt with rather earlier periods.

On other hands, I read omnivorously including all sorts of periodicals and newspapers that came into the house and might have osmosed the information therefrom.

Comments

[em_h]

I first learned about the Spanish Civil War because I randomly picked Homage to Catalonia off the shelves of my high school library.

[oursin]

I don't think I'd read any Orwell besides Animal Farm and maybe 1984 in adolescence, but it occurs that by that time biographies/memoirs of various individuals who had gone to Spain to fight or observe were coming out and I probably read reviews. So maybe that as well.

[azara1]

I think I first came across it in The Pursuit of Love as well. An odd side effect is that this somehow left it with rather trivialised associations in my mind, and it is only since I began to visit Spain maybe 15 years ago that I started to understand the sheer scale of the horrors involved. Our Civil War of 1922-1923 had a death toll of maybe 2,000 people, but when I was a child in the 60s there was still huge bitterness between the successor parties to the pro-Treaty forces (Fine Gael) and anti-Treaty forces (Fianna Fail). The legacy of a civil war that killed half a million people is mind-boggling.

[flemmings]

I think I knew about the Spanish Civil War before I read Hons and Rebels. From Picasso's Guernica, maybe.