When I told my then fiancée about my family heritage, she replied, “Oh, your family is Spanish?”  I loved her, she wasn’t to know, so I sat her down and educated her on the subtleties of Iberian politics, before she repeated her gaffe with a less forgiving member of my family.

My family were Basques.  They lived surrounded by Spanish and French foreigners, but their language and traditions were totally different.  After he was released from prison, my Grandfather sought political asylum in Britain, but he was always a Basque, and never, ever a Spaniard.

Prison?  Oh yes.  Franco had no time for devolution, and his police and army stamped down hard on the neck of the noble Basque (according to my Grandfather).  Any Basque gathering, whether political or social, legal or illegal, good, bad or indifferent, was at risk of being raided.

Grandfather, in his youth, was a bit of a firebrand.  He and his young friends would read Marx, speak Basque (a forbidden language in those days), and look longingly at more democratic regimes where differences were celebrated.  Unfortunately, the local (Spanish) police chief knew him and his cronies only too well.  Where to meet was the big question.  They would gather in forest clearings, churches with sympathetic priests, sports fields.  It didn’t matter, providing it was different every time, and that there were multiple avenues of escape if needed.

The fateful afternoon of my Grandfather’s arrest, they had decided to meet in the local cinema.  Here was the perfect excuse for a group of men to meet, and as well as the main entrance, it had a fire exit in the rear.

Unfortunately, the police chief had caught wind of the conspiracy.  There was probably an informer in the ranks, although no-one ever found out who.  In any case, thirty minutes after the meeting had begun the police stormed the theatre.  In a panic, the young men bolted for the fire escape.  In their haste they all piled into the narrow doorway at the same time.  The lead man tripped, the next stumbled over his prone comrade, and the men bringing up the rear merely added to the pile.

The police had all the time they needed to round them up, and not one escaped the deadly trap.  And to this day we have a family saying:

Don’t put all your Basques in one exit