Michael Portillo’s Great Railway Journeys: Granada to Salamanca (1999)

Abstract

Abstract This chapter follows Michael Portillo’s pilgrimage to his late father’s native Spain as part of the BBC television series Great Railway Journeys. Luis Gabriel Portillo was a poet and law professor who stayed loyal to the Republican government when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936. A liberal intellectual and a Catholic idealist, he refused to carry a rifle at the front for fear of killing one of his brothers, five of whom were enlisted on the Nationalist side. Instead he ran messages as a courier and acted as a political instructor to the troops. In January 1939, shortly before Madrid fell to Franco, he escaped across the Pyrenees, reaching England as an asylum-seeker. For two decades he was unable to set foot in Spain. Michael’s moving Telemachan odyssey took him back to the land of his father’s heroes, to the village of his formative years, to the front line of the civil war, and to the ancient university city of Salamanca, the Ithaca of which Luis dreamt during his long years in exile. The chapter also looks at examples of Luis Portillo’s deeply nostalgic poetry of exile, from his published volume Ruiseñor del destierro.