'I suppose I am half Welsh, half Spanish or half Basque…'

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1937, Alvaro was twelve years old and living happily with his family in San Sebastián. But life became ‘very rough’ and his parents eventually decided to send him to Britain for his safety. He left Spain in May 1937 with nearly four thousand other Basque refugee children.

‘I just looked back and see them waving and crying, then something came over me, I thought good God, you know that sort of thing, I felt myself empty and alone.’
    
Alvaro was first sent to Stoneham camp in Eastleigh, Hampshire. He then lived in several children’s ‘colonies’, or camps, in Britain where living conditions were basic and uncomfortable. At the Brechfa colony in Wales the refugee children got into trouble with the local people when some of the boys were chased out of the village for touching a car parked in the street. The boys took revenge and ‘in the night, not all of us, but most of us, went to the village and we smashed all the windows.’
Some local people visited the children who were living in the colony and realised they had no family to look after them. Alvaro became close to a family from the local area.