He was born into a very poor family, the son actually of a washerwoman, but with uncles and aunts who were slightly richer than his mother. In Catholic countries the clever boy of a peasant family finds his easiest escape from manual labour in the priesthood, but Señor Barea, who had anticlerical relatives and was an early unbeliever himself, after winning a scholarship at a Church school, went to work at thirteen in a draper’s shop, and afterwards in a bank. All his good memories are of country places, especially of the forge belonging to his uncle in Mentrida, a magnificent independent peasant of the type now extinct in the industrialized countries. On the other hand his memories of Madrid are low and squalid, a tale of poverty and overwork far more extreme than anything to be found in England. And here, perhaps, in his descriptions of the Madrid slums, of hordes of naked children with their heads full of lice and lecherous priests playing cards for the contents of the poor-boxes, he gives half-consciously the clue to the Spanish Civil War: it is that Spain is a country too poor to have ever known the meaning of decent government. In England we could not have a civil war, not because tyranny and injustice do not exist, but because they are not obvious enough to stir the common people to action. Everything is toned down, padded, as it were, by ancient habits of compromise, by representative institutions, by liberal aristocrats and incorruptible officials, by a ‘superstructure’ that has existed so long that it is only partly a sham. There are no half-tones in the Spain that Señor Barea is describing. Everything is happening in the open, in the ferocious Spanish sunlight. It is the straightforward corruption of a primitive country, where the capitalist is openly a sweater, the official always a crook, the priest an ignorant bigot or a comic rascal, the brothel a necessary pillar of society. The nature of all problems is obvious, even to a boy of fifteen. Sex, for example:

My cousin is taking advantage of my being a boy. But she is right. She would be a whore if she were to go to bed with anyone… I’d like to go to bed with the girls, and they would like to come with me, but it is impossible. Men have whores for that; women have to wait until the priest marries them, or they become whores themselves. And, naturally, meantime they get excited. Those who get too excited have to become whores.

Or politics: