So it was with a spring in my step and barely an inkling of the momentous events that were to unfold over the next days and weeks that I set off for my holiday staying alone at my mother’s rented windmill in Palmela before setting out for the south.

I’d just spent a few days in Madrid with friends of rich friends and when, over a late and luxurious meal the question of revolution in Franco’s Spain came up it was discussed with seriousness but dismissed.

“But what about in Portugal?” said I.

Laughter, the lighting of cigarettes, the pouring of drinks.

“Oh never, never. The Portuguese love their dictatorship!”.

And that was that, although I think it did give me pause for thought. But yes, it was surely not really on the cards despite the horrors of four-year conscription, colonial war, rural poverty, and a silenced press. The Portuguese had been isolated and fed with internal propaganda for so long that revolution, a real revolution, was pretty much unthinkable.

So when I woke up alone in the windmill in Palmela a couple of days later on the morning of April 25th, 1974 to be told by incredulous neighbours, the miller, Sr. António and his excited daughter Isaura, that there had been a military coup and that everyone had to stay at home it was with a certain amount of disbelief, mixed with excitement, that I received the news. If true, was it a coup of the left or the right? After all, there were people who thought that Salazar’s successor Marcello Caetano was moving in a dangerously leftwards and internationalist direction!

My mother had no television or radio. The limit of her technological advancement was a telephone that worked most of the time. But not now.

I rushed down the hill to the town hoping that the shops would still be open and was lucky enough to find an electrical supplier who weren’t able to enlighten me much as to what was going on but sold me a radio and batteries.


Glued to the radio

For the next 48 hours, I was glued to this radio, gleaning in my extremely limited but rapidly expanding Portuguese from the light-lipped but excited announcements, (interspersed with jaunty martial music) of the Movimento das Forças Armadas, and the even terser bulletins of the BBC World Service how the revolution was progressing. I was hooked on the story and, being on the spot, wanted to squeeze the last drop out of what was going on. I bought the Lisbon newspapers every day, I was at the airport when Álvaro Cunhal the secretary-general of the hitherto banned Communist Party came back and at Santa Apolónia station when the Socialist party leader Mário Soares was welcomed back from exile in Paris by adoring crowds.

The story of how the revolution occurred and progressed in its first flush has been told by those who know more and were there as events unfolded. My take is oblique – that of a foreigner with some first-hand knowledge, but very much that of an observant and interested outsider looking in.

It later transpired that my mother – who had a Brazilian passport, had been called to the PIDE headquarters in Setúbal on…the 25th of April, 1974! Presumably to account for her “dangerous” contacts amongst whom were Zélia Afonso, the wife of Zeca, (José Afonso, singer/songwriter, author of Grândola, Vila Morena, a banned song that was one of the broadcast signals for the start of the revolution).


Amazing day

Two young Portuguese were my companions and information-givers and accompanied me to Lisbon on that amazing day, just six days after the coup, the first of May, 1974. We left from the thronged and chaotic bus station in Setúbal. All journeys on public transport were now free and the hitherto uniformed and clean-shaven all-male employees were showing their revolutionary credentials by wearing their own clothes and sprouting facial hair. The bus journey from Setúbal to Lisbon I remember as nothing less than a triumphant and joyful progress. The roads through Almada and its villages and suburbs were lined with cheering and chanting crowds, some with red flags decorated with homemade-looking hammers and sickles. Really? In Portugal? This really was unbelievable!

In Lisbon, the scenes of seemingly unbridled excitement and joy were everywhere. My friends took me to the teeming Rossio, to the recently-vacated headquarters of the despised secret police, the PIDE/DGS in the Chiado, and we ended up in a family-run bar somewhere near the Largo do Carmo above the Rossio. I remember a woman who was part of the family who ran the bar holding her baby up to the window below which the jubilant crowds were singing the previously-banned José Afonso anthem Grândola Vila Morena and saying to her child, “Nunca, nunca esquece-te disto, filha!”, and I cast a thought back to that affluent dinner-table in Madrid barely a week earlier.

Whatever may have happened after those febrile few days and however history judges the Portuguese revolution of fifty years ago that moment was unforgettable and it will always be like this in my memory.

Viva o 25 de abril!

Author

Jonathan is from London and has lived in Lisbon since 1985. He studied Drama at the University of Manchester and, until he retired, taught English and Theatre Studies at the University of Lisbon.

He was active for many years at the Lisbon Players as a director and actor. His play, Waking Thoughts,  about the eighteenth century writer, collector, traveller, and builder William Beckford was performed in London, Edinburgh, Bath, and Lisbon. He made two films, We Came to Lisbon, a documentary about visitors to the Portuguese capital, and Offstage Stories, about the theatre. He has written the libretto for an opera by Christopher Bochmann based on Queen Phillippa of Lancaster. He took part in a film of King Lear last year, playing the title role.

A short story of his, Mary Dances, was selected for publication in the Daily Telegraph magazine in 2021.

Jonathan Weightman