‘The only way you can mount an attack,’ Laporta said, with an air of remarkable calm, ‘is to kill me, comrade, but I shall see you in hell with me.’

‘Hell?’ Cal asked in a soft voice. ‘I thought you lot didn’t believe in God?’

‘Every Spaniard believes in God, querido. It is priests and the church they don’t believe in.’

‘We are here to kill fascists, brother,’ the miner replied, his eyes swivelling to try and see the muzzle of the gun, ‘not each other.’

‘The Commission of Public Order—’

That was interrupted by a low growl; the aforesaid committee, hastily set up to seek to coordinate local resistance to the coup, contained politicians of every hue, including social democrats and Catalan Nationalists, as well as the regional government – naturally it was treated with deep suspicion.

‘The committee has given me the task of taking this building, which we will do, but when and how it will be done is a decision I will make. So, friend, you obey me or we will both die.’

‘If you pray, Cal,’ Florencia said, when she had completed her translation, ‘do it now.’

Pride makes fools of us all and it was obvious Xavier was unwilling to lose face by a quick submission, so it was a tense several seconds till he allowed himself the very slightest of nods. Of course, when he spoke, he took care to include a caveat designed to protect his honour, one that barely required conversion to English.

‘Let us beat the fascists, brother,’ Florencia whispered, as Xavier spoke. ‘Then perhaps you and I may have a talk alone.’

‘Can’t beat brotherly love, can you, guv?’

Said really loudly and not understood by the majority, it still turned every eye on Vince, which gave Laporta a chance to lower his pistol and take a step backwards. Try as he might, the miner could not help but release the pent-up breath from his body.

‘Good thinking, Vince,’ Cal said softly, knowing what his friend had done to be deliberate, a way to break down the tension.

‘Any idea how many fights I’ve had to break up in my time?’

Several shots from the exchange broke what stress remained and had everyone hunching their shoulders and making sure they were behind cover again; the dispute had broken up that concern. They were not aimed at the assault group, but at a messenger dodging from doorway to doorway and heading in their direction.

His final dash brought him to Laporta, who passed on the message that the army HQ had surrendered and General Goded had been taken into custody, the radio station was firmly in Republican hands and the cannon were on the way.

The continuing bulletins from loudspeakers had been like a background buzz throughout all that had previously occurred, and now, if you listened hard, the name of Goded was just audible. News of his surrender was being broadcast and it had to be the case that those defending the telephone exchange had a radio and thus knowledge of that fact.

Would they believe it to be true, would they realise their position was hopeless and ask for safe passage; would Laporta grant that to save lives? No one was crazy enough to walk out into the open with a white flag and ask, which was just as well; waved from behind a thick tree trunk and in full view of the building, it was shredded by rifle fire within seconds. It was going to be a fight to the finish and it seemed the defenders had ammunition to spare!

The two 75 mm Schneiders arrived, drawn by horse teams now under the control of local carters. The man in charge of loading and firing them, a dock worker by trade, had been an artilleryman at one time, so he knew not to bring them too close, to a point where the gunners would be at risk from concentrated rifle fire, just as he knew to warn those along the avenue to get out of the way. Given the angle from which he was required to fire, shells could very well ricochet off the stone frontage and bring more destruction further on.

The first target was the parapet, yet even blasted – and some of the shot went right over – it was impossible to utterly destroy that, which still left good fire positions for the men occupying the roof, who, under bombardment, had been safe from anything other than flying stone by a mere withdrawal, protected by an angle of fire that could not directly do them harm.

Next it was the nearest set of windows, a row rising to the sixth storey; a shell entering through one of those would do massive interior damage, both in terms of destruction and noise, but his first efforts proved the wisdom of his earlier precautions. Hitting the front of the building the shell bounced off and within seconds had reduced to splinters one of the large trees a good hundred yards further on. Aim adjusted, the next shell hit the joint between the window and the surround, smashing through in a cacophony of tearing wood and shattering glass, followed by audible screams.

Laporta had been standing by, or to be more precise, reinforcing his restraint, given the mere sound of the shot and the long-flamed muzzle flashes were acting on his already excited cohorts to make the task ten times harder. The safe option was to fire at the rooftop and windows from cover, to keep the heads of the defenders down while not exposing yourself. It was a testimony to the level of excitement that both Vince and Cal had to yell at their own party of eager young athletes to stay still and not do as was being demonstrated to them by the others – stepping out into the open to blast off full magazines.

Even with shellfire hitting the building, and at least half the shot doing serious internal and external damage, the amount of returned fire was lethal, and several of the workers paid the price, this just as the cannon fire shifted to the main target, the double doors, which were well pounded. Yet they, being bronze, seemed like a sort of malleable armour plate, buckling but not cracking, despite taking several hits. It became increasingly clear they would need to be blown; from the angle at which the shells were striking they could not break open the part that mattered, the point at which the doors joined.

Charges were sent for while the windows of the telephone exchange building were systematically blown in until not one remained intact. Parts of the frontage, knocked off, now sat as a layer of disordered rubble before the building, yet still the defenders returned fire and inflicted casualties on anyone foolish enough to overexpose themselves, which they did regularly, leading to a steady stream of wounded and dying being borne away to the hospitals under covering fire.

When the dynamite did arrive, brought by a runner, Vince nearly had a fit as he saw the amount it had sweated. Like a father with a new baby, he held it and wiped each stick clean, careful with the cloth as well, so unstable was the nitroglycerine, before he bound the sticks into one tenfold charge, inserting a short length of fuse, while others were made ready singly and with even less fuse, to be thrown through the now-destroyed first-storey windows.

The problem, exacerbated by the fact that they were still being observed from the rooftop, was now twofold: the charge had to be laid by the doors and that meant crossing open ground under the eyes of the men on the roof; even coming from the sides, if they exposed themselves for short periods, those defenders could see what was being executed. Then, with the possibility of dropping grenades, the fuses had to be lit, and the man doing that, who must be the last to run and therefore a lone target, had to get far enough away to be safe.

Again, Cal experienced a sea change in attitude; Xavier, hitherto seen as a noisy and argumentative pest, was now transformed into a hero who would not countenance that anyone else but a miner should undertake the task, not that he had too much opposition to that stand. Laporta, who had barely spoken to Cal since the confrontation with Xavier, called to him and, with the aid of Florencia, sought his views. They were given freely, but the primary recommendation was to take time and to comprehensively explain to each person taking part, in proper detail, their individual task.