MANY books, films, documentaries and lectures have done a great job focusing on the dedication and sacrifice of the men and women who served in and cared for the international brigades, including the forensic work of academics dedicated to this complex and instructive period of history.
 
Yet for any newcomer to this bloody and romantic arena, what’s needed is a reporter, one who doesn’t indulge in purple prose but who nevertheless pens poetry which captures the heights and depths of human emotion.

Step forward Jimmy Jump who as a  young man of 21 went to Spain to the very heat of battle. There he wrote — even while terrified — under fire, sipping wine in a village bar or seriously ill in a hospital bed.

Already in love, he was engaged to Spanish refugee Cayetana Lozano Diaz, who’d escaped her homeland as Generalissimo Franco took it in his stranglehold and this memoir has been edited by his son Jim Jump, also a journalist and current chair of the International Brigade Memorial Trust.
 
His father was a reporter on the Worthing Herald when he resolved to join the fight against fascism in November 1937 when the death toll was already terrifying, especially at the Battle of Jarama nine months earlier.