In 40 years of visiting Spain, my policy has been not to mention the war. In the post-Franco era, the Spanish people adopted a pact of olvido ("forgetting") about the events of their civil war and the lengthy dictatorship which followed.

So it would be disrespectful and ill-advised for an incomer to raise the topic. More than 30 years after Franco's death, the olvido is over and the sniping has resumed, although thankfully only in a metaphorical sense.

The war has been firmly on the Spanish media agenda in recent months after a leading judge, Baltasar Garzón, launched an inquiry into the estimated 130,000 citizens killed by Franco's forces and buried in mass graves.

Garzón is an expert on the criminal activities of various South American regimes and is best known for his legal pursuit - albeit in vain - of Chile's General Pinochet.

Garzón's attempt to bring Franco and his henchmen posthumously to book has also faltered and he has now abandoned his initiative and passed on responsibility for the investigations into the mass graves to regional courts. Spain's national court last week declared that the issue was not within Garzón's remit anyway.

He is seen by some as an inspirational jurist and by others as an opportunist, but whichever, his trawl through Spain's bloody civil war and its aftermath highlighted a particularly distressing issue: the pregnant women held in Franco's concentration camps executed after giving birth. Many of the newborn babies were then given in adoption to Franco-supporting couples.

There are heart-rending stories of people, now in their seventies, who know they have a brother or a sister somewhere - a sibling who was brought up by the very section of society who killed their mother, a memory which makes difficult the promotion of reconciliation and peace.

The Spanish Catholic Church was one of the leading voices urging judge Garzón not to stir up civil war memories. Cardinal Antonio María Rouco Varela said: "Sometimes you need to learn how to forget."

Not all of his colleagues agree. Juan Antonio Martínez Camino, secretary general and main spokesman for the Spanish bishops' conference, said, in a reference to the priests and other clerics murdered during the civil war by the republican side: "The blood of the martyrs is the best antidote for anaemia of the faith."

At a gathering in Madrid last weekend to commemorate the 33rd anniversary of Franco's death, a Catholic priest blessed the assembled supporters of the former dictator - many of them were wearing blue shirts and giving the fascist salute. The priest described the present socialist government as a "harsh left-wing dictatorship".

The Spanish church appears impenitent about its support for Franco's regime. Thousands of children whose parents were executed or imprisoned for lengthy terms were taken away to children's homes run by nuns to be "purified" of the sins of their communist, anarchist, or atheistic parents.

Nuns were prominently involved in running Franco's women's prisons. An order called the Daughters of the Good Shepherd were in charge of a prison in Madrid where girls were executed for being members of a socialist youth movement. There is much to be forgotten in the church's involvement with Franco's regime.

Spain's right-wing elements were infuriated when the Spanish parliament last year passed the Law of Historic Memory which attempts to consign Franco's dictatorship to the dustbin by eliminating any public manifestation relating to the Caudillo. At the same time, the law recognised the illegality of the dictatorship's wholesale slaughter of political opponents and authorised the digging up of the mass graves so that the victims may be identified and buried again with dignity.

This process will be harrowing and will underline divisions in Spanish society which have been hidden and repressed. The disinterment and reburial of poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, who was murdered by Falange fascists at the beginning of the civil war, will be particularly traumatic in this respect.

With so much horror buried in the past and the slight fear that conflict might reignite in the future, the question "What did you do during the civil war and during the dictatorship?" is a not a topic for general conversation.

I went to Spain reasonably well-informed, not just by reading George Orwell and other sources, but also by talking to Scots who had fought in the International Brigade.

It was not a subject I felt I could usefully explore with Spaniards, or should I say the Catalans, Mallorquins, Asturians, Galicians, Aragoneses, Andalucians, Extramadurans, Castilians, Basques, Navarrans, Leoneses, Manchegans, and people from the other regions which make up the rich tapestry most commonly called Spain?

There is usually enough conversation to be getting on with about football, cheese, wine, lamb, sausages and the like without getting into politics; my brushes with the war and Francoism have been entirely coincidental.

An elderly neighbour in Barcelona was in the habit of inviting us in for merienda, or afternoon tea. This did not involve tea and scones but glasses of robust wine, which he had delivered to his door by the flagon, and the consumption of some very dubious marine life out of tins.

One Spanish national day, as the TV showed the armed forces on parade, there was strident military music coming from the neighbour's house. "It is the anthem of my legion," the neighbour said when I asked.

I said that it appeared to be in German. Yes, after joining up with Franco, he had fought with Hitler's Spanish legion on the Russian front.

On a trip to Madrid, I fell into the company of a restaurant owner whose own place was closed for re-decoration, but he took us on a tour of local culinary destinations.

These included a place run by a Madrid man whose said his happiest days had been spent running a chip shop near Stirling. This chap spoke fondly of how he could sell 500 fish, sausage and haggis suppers on the day of an Orange Walk and make a fortune. Unfortunately, the Scottish weather had forced him back to Madrid where his customers sit around all day with a cup of coffee.

When our native guide took us back to his restaurant to give us a bottle of wine from his vineyard, I noticed the numerous photographs and other memorabilia of Generalissimo Franco ready to go back up on the newly-painted walls.

We never had a merienda with the neighbour again. We have not been back to that restaurant in Madrid. I'm all for convivencia, the concept of getting on together which is part of post-Franco Spain's way of life. But I would rather not break bread with fascists.

Franco's victims and those who suffered at the hands of the republicans, will not be forgotten. Their stories have been and will be chronicled by historians, writers and documentary makers.

It is a process best done without anger, not conducted with conflict in the columns of the newspapers. Click here to comment on this story...