If my father, Gustavo Durán, were still alive, he would be 117 years old. Born in Barcelona in 1906, his story reads like five novels. He studied music at conservatoires in Madrid and Paris, became a composer, toured Europe at the age of 21 with his ballet for orchestra, El Fandango del Candil fought in the Republican Army against Franco in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), escaped on a British boat from Spain on the day the Republicans were defeated, met and married my mother at Dartington Hall, Devon, and reinvented himself in exile working for the US State Department and then, from 1946, for the UN Development Programme. He was heavily persecuted by Senator McCarthy’s ‘witch hunt,’ accused of being a communist because he had fought in the Republican…
