PROLOGUE

This is how I found out my grandfather was killed in the Spanish Civil War.

One morning when I was about eight years old there was an exciting announcement in school assembly: our class teacher was going to show us her sides. I turned to stare at her. What did this mean? Was she going to undress? Later that day we were herded into an unfamiliar room. Our class teacher, fully clothed, hung up a white screen, drew the curtains to make everything dark and switched on an electric hum. A wobbly square of light appeared.

I had never seen anything like it. There were palm trees, blue sea and vivid sunshine, laughing grown-ups and children playing with an outsize beach ball in segments of red, green and yellow, silver fishes on a plate. This magic place, where all the colours were brighter, was where our teacher went for her holidays.

'Mrs Jackson showed us her sides,' I reported to my parents, as we sat around the tea-table that evening.

'Her what?'

'Her sides of Spain. Can we go there?'

My mother flinched. 'No,' she said, 'we won't be going to Spain.' My father said someone called General Franco had taken over in Spain twenty years earlier. Since then he had stopped the Spanish people voting for anyone else. It might look good in Mrs Jackson's slideshow, but for Spanish people who didn't want General Franco it was a cruel place.

And that's when my mother said, 'My father was killed there.'

Later she tucked me up for the night and switched off the light, but instead of leaving she sat on my bed with her arm round my shoulders. My younger sisters were already asleep. The thin curtains let the moonlight through, and it fell across part of the wall and a corner of the room. Feeling safe in the curve of my mother's arm, I said, 'Tell me about your father who was killed in Spain.'

'He went to fight in the Spanish Civil War.'

I didn't know what that was, but the sadness in her voice made things I couldn't understand lodge in my memory.

'He was shot in the neck and died a few days later.'

I had seen people shot in cowboy programmes like The Lone Ranger, throwing up their hands and falling off their horses in instant black-and-white deaths. But this was real.

'He fought in the International Brigades,' she went on. 'People talk as if they were rebels, but General Franco was the rebel.'

'How old were you?'

'Eight.'

My age. 'So who looked after you?'

'My mother. Your granny. She looked after Uncle Tim and me and Auntie Davnet and Uncle Kit.' I had hardly ever met Uncle Kit, but playful, jokey Uncle Tim was a familiar figure. Auntie Davnet had died of polio when I was five; she was a remembered whirl of fair hair and smiling teeth and a crisp cotton dress that smelled of soap. Strange to think of these mighty figures as children. Now I knew their father had been killed in Spain.

I had also learned there was nothing I could say or do to comfort my mother.

My grandfather's name was Robert Martin Hilliard and there has always been a Robert Martin Hilliard-shaped gap in our family. As time passed my sisters and I heard more about him. It seemed he had a bewildering series of occupations. At one stage he was a Church of Ireland priest, so when our atheist father joked about marrying a vicar's daughter I clothed my mind's-eye grandfather in a white dog collar, like the local vicar. My mother said he was also a journalist and a boxer. Boxing was not his job, though - when boxing was on TV she would say, proudly, that he had been an amateur who boxed in the Olympic Games. In her opinion, amateur boxing was more sporting than professional, because amateurs wore thicker gloves and won by displaying skill rather than damaging their opponents.

Our grandfather was Irish, and our mother told tales of her own childhood in Northern Ireland, where he was sent after being ordained. The ugly part of his story was that he walked out on our grandmother and his four children to go to London; the sad part was that he died in Spain. Eventually I learned the name of the battle where he was shot, Jarama, and the year, 1937.

Tim and Deirdre (our mother), Robert Hilliard's eldest children, were shattered by his death. They had always thought he would come back. Long into adulthood, Deirdre was tormented by dreams that she was running to catch up with him in the street, only to find she was following a stranger - or worse, that he looked at her with no sign of love or recognition. Their mother transmitted a sense to her children that their father had dealt the whole family a crushing betrayal. Deirdre was left with irreconcilable contradictions. How could the affectionate, playful father she remembered walk away from her and her brothers and sister? How could he leave them so unprovided for that they had to do moonlight flits to escape unpaid bills, and often went short of food? On the one hand the International Brigades were a heroic undertaking; her father's readiness to fight Francoism was therefore heroic. On the other he had left his own children, and what kind of hero did that?

The effects of such an abandonment don't end with one generation. As a teenager I was acutely aware of our mother's unresolved unhappiness. It mingled with the resentments she shared with many women trapped in the role of 1960s housewife. Our house felt full of exploding emotions, making me eager to leave home and for a while putting Robert Hilliard out of my head.

The Killarney department store came as a big surprise, standing out in the street, larger than its neighbouring shops, R HILLIARD AND SONS in impressive lettering across the front. Peering through plate glass, I could see no further than the window display of clothing, footwear and steam irons.

It was 1975 and I was a young teacher on my Easter holidays, hitchhiking and walking with a friend through Kerry and Cork. We had been trudging through Killarney, looking for the Killorglin road, when I saw the unexpected name. Was our family related to the Hilliards in this shop? I didn't go in. Tired and travel-stained after a day on the road, I felt too scruffy to present myself. We pressed on to the youth hostel, but the shop's image lingered.

During another of my 1970s visits to Kerry I wondered aloud to a stranger about the scarcity of people in the sweeping landscape - where was everyone? - and he described the events behind the long-deserted ruins and the haunted feel of empty places where once there had been inhabitants. His words brought back my mother's stories of a terrible Famine, evictions and mass emigration. Fragments of history, some from family members, some from strangers,1 began connecting with my missing grandfather. That Killarney shop was central to his boyhood, I learned. His grandmother had walked hundreds of miles during the Famine to replenish its stock. He had swum in the Killarney lakes, fished in them, rowed boats across them, run wild on their margins with his sister Moll, and carried away from his childhood a lifelong yearning for the ecstatic self-forgetfulness that the lakes and the mountains brought.

After World War II, little was said or written in Ireland about Irish participation in the International Brigades. As this silence lifted, Robert Hilliard's repute grew. In 1984 singer-songwriter Christy Moore released his album Ride On, featuring the song 'Viva la Quinta Brigada', which commemorates the names of many fallen brigadistas. Here's the second verse:

Bob Hilliard was a Church of Ireland pastor

From Killarney across the Pyrenees he came,

From Derry came a brave young Christian brother

Side by side they fought and died in Spain.

And then the stirring chorus:

'Viva La Quinta Brigada!

'No Pasaran' the pledge that made them fight.

'Adelante' was the cry around the hillside.

Let us all remember them tonight.'2

Suddenly every Christy Moore fan knew my grandfather's name and had heard of the anti-fascist cause for which he died.

Then, in 1988, Robert Hilliard's nephew Stephen Hilliard,3 who like his uncle was first a journalist and later a Church of Ireland priest, published a piece about him in a magazine called Resource.4 It dwelt on his exuberant friendliness and the way he made everyone laugh, quoting a fellow International Brigade member who knew him in Spain:'"One of the most amusing characters was . the Reverend R M Hilliard . his friends were of all classes. They liked him for his sense of humour and consistently cheerful attitude."'5

Stephen's article made clear Hilliard's lifelong refusal to conform. While still a schoolboy he'liked to walk on the wild side', discarding the traditional attitudes of his Protestant family and supporting Irish freedom from British rule. Stephen told startling stories about his subsequent activities.6 Even more striking was his effect on other people. Robert Hilliard was only thirty-two when he died, but Stephen was struck by the number of people who still approached him to say how vividly they remembered his uncle: 'He was clearly someone who made his presence felt wherever he went.'

The piece asked questions it couldn't answer. Why had Hilliard abandoned journalism in London to become a Church of Ireland priest in Belfast? Why, though acclaimed for his preaching, had he left his ministry only a few years...