UK Book Club discussion

“With the frantic urgings of his parents he packed his belongings and left for Cadiz in the hope of fleeing Spain for a new life abroad. Upon arriving he found the town under nationalist control, with opportunities to leave extremely limited. Determined not to become embroiled in the conflict, he took a number manual labour jobs, kept his head down, and avoided attracting any kind of attention to himself. Within a year he had met my mother, and after the war he opened a tapas bar serving the finest cured chorizo in the city, in which people from across the political and social spectrum, covertly or not, came from far and wide to sample. The bar became a vibrant melting pot that buzzed with hope and optimism for the future on those balmy summer evenings; its small, secluded garden terrace becoming a regular haunt of prominent writers and correspondents from the international brigade, before persecution forced them underground and led to them leaving the country in droves. The bar also became a place of reconciliation, and for this my father was immensely proud, where people recognised their similarities and shared culture, rather than their differences, through their love of good food and sweet sherry.” – Jonathan Stubbs, The Tributary