Daddy, We Hardly Knew You

by Germaine Greer

  In August Operation ‘Pedestal’ was mounted to cover the progress of a much bigger convoy, including the new Texaco oil-tanker Ohio. Despite the deployment of a dummy convoy and the support of all the Malta-based fighters and submarines, on 13 August only three of the thirteen merchant ships reached Grand Harbour; the cheering was heartfelt, but the truth was heart-breaking. The Ohio was not among them; she had been hit six times in all, and twice had to fall out of the convoy. The precious fuel, life-blood of Malta’s resistance, had not arrived.

  The next morning another merchant ship, her bows blown open by a torpedo, limped into the harbour. And on the next day, the feast of the Assumption, by another miracle of Santa Marija, came the Ohio, under tow, deck awash, steering gear out of action, held upright in the water by a RN destroyer on each side. The Ju88s had followed her every mile even when she came under cover of the Malta-based Spitfires; the wreckage of one of the German bombers was lying on her deck when, as her escorts nosed her into her berth, she settled on the bottom. This was the Malta convoy which ran the gauntlet of the seven hundred aircraft, three U-boats, eighteen submarines, six cruisers and ten destroyers, assisted by untold E-Boats and MTBs, that the Axis sent to intercept her. The 32,000 tons of cargo the convoy brought had cost nine merchant ships, one aircraft carrier, two cruisers and a destroyer, and many lives. At such cost Malta was able to play her part in the mounting of the second front.

  In August two transport planes left by night for Cairo carrying some of the worst-affected mothers and children to a place where they could be nursed back to health. When they disembarked at Almaza, battle-hardened men wept to see them. I do not know if F/O Greer saw the pathetic procession of emaciated women and children covered with sores before it was scooped up and swept off. Even if he had, he was probably well enough ‘in the picture’ to know that the worst of Malta’s agony was past.

  Reg Greer in Malta

  So stand by your glasses steady,

  This world is a world of lies,

  Here’s a toast to the boys dead already,

  And here’s to the next one that dies.

  ANON, ‘THE AIR-GUNNERS’ LAMENT’

  Reg Greer probably came to Malta on the ‘Magic Carpet Service’, provided by five of the mine-laying submarines of the First Flotilla based in Alexandria, Porpoise, Parthian, Regent, Cachalot and Rorqual. The submarines brought in petrol in their freshwater and main ballast tanks, and necessarily small supplies of kerosene, medicines, ammunition, mail and powdered milk, and passengers.

  It was Mr Admans who told me that my father was taken into Malta by submarine. He found the idea of my father cooped in a submarine for an undersea journey of 820 miles hilarious. ‘Reg Greer in a submarine! He must have had a stroke!’ he chortled. I don’t know why he thought being in a submarine would cause Reg Greer such stress; perhaps Mr Admans knew that Daddy suffered from claustrophobia. There is of course no official record of the use of submarines for the movement of Y personnel into Malta which was now effectively mined in. Daddy arrived on 13 September, the very day that the George Cross was formally presented to the people of Malta, now to be known as Malta G.C.

  Reg Greer probably travelled on Porpoise, which was the principal carrier of the flotilla, and had lettered on her flag PCS for ‘Porpoise carrying services’. The Germans were well aware of the importance of the submarines in running the blockade; in four days Porpoise attracted a record of 87 depth charges. Reg Greer was probably less affected by the consciousness of the risk that he was running than he was by the no-smoking rule that prevails on submarines even when the cargo is not so inflammable.

  If he walked up from the docks in the luminous morning of a Mediterranean autumn he would have seen a small crowd gathered round the ruined Palace Square to witness the George Cross presentation ceremony—a bullshit parade if ever there was one. The backdrop was the ruin of the Grand Palace, open to the sky, flanked by the Casino Maltese with its cornice blown off and the roof collapsed at one corner. On the other side stood the Palace of Verdelin, abandoned now by the Civil Service Sports Club. The corps of photographers climbed on to a pile of rubble and stood together on a massive door panel blown out of one of the portals of the Magistral Palace. All the forces were represented, the Royal Navy, the RAF, the Army, the Police, the Special Constabulary, the ARP, the nurses; practically everyone was in uniform of one kind or another. Only a few of the older women wore faldettas, shiny, black veils held over their faces by a stiffened brim. Colour was supplied by the clergy who swept by glorious in magenta taffeta, against which the tassels of their hats burned like green flames. Viscount Gort, representing the King, solemnly presented the George Cross, the highest civilian decoration for gallantry, to Sir George Borg, the Chief Justice, resplendent in his black and gold robes, representing every man, woman and child in Malta. The crowd then dispersed quickly. The siege was not yet lifted.

  As the new ‘wingless wonder’ fresh from the fleshpots of Egypt walked up the steps through narrow streets lined with roofless yellow stone houses piled high with rubble, he would have seen the starving dogs and cats that the householders had been unable to take with them when they moved with their families to the interior, foraging in the mess, eating paper or rag if they could find it. He would not have seen the English ladies distributing the dog biscuits that had been sent by the RSPCA from England, each one embossed with a V for victory, for the people had got to them first. He would have seen the rats liberated from the broken sewers, now running out of control inaccessibly inside the rubble, feasting on human and animal remains. He would not have known that the last outbreak of bubonic plague in Malta was only six years before. He would have seen the hollow-eyed children, infested with scabies, scavenging, trading bomb fragments. He might have seen the long lines of tins left waiting on the street corner for the arrival of the kerosene cart, and the housewives waiting patiently for their daily ration of bread or in the queue outside the Victory Kitchen. He must have seen civilians and military sifting through the bombed-out wreckage gathering every sliver of wood for cooking fires. He would have noticed the absence of cars, the uncanny silence interrupted only by the fanfares from the square. He would have marvelled at the number and the size of the churches, one in every tiny street, and shuddered at so much superstition. The damp wind called the scirocco might have been blowing, as it does most days in September.

  Reg Greer may not have bothered to take a look at the presentation ceremony. He was never one for martial music and gold braid, for bacon-and-eggs and gongs. I had thought there was no other entertainment in Malta, but I reckoned without the ingenuity of the officer class. Fliers returning without drop-tanks used gin for ballast; though the Cisk brewery at Ham Run had closed down and there was no beer for the Maltese, and the Gut was no longer thronged with sailors and prostitutes but mostly dark and choked with rubble, something could always be found for ‘the bloody boys in blue’.

  When Fred Chappell, an Intelligence Officer with the RAF in the Western Desert, visited Malta in November 1942 he managed to have quite a pleasant time:

  ‘More rain today and no ops because of weather… got to know more of the local Intelligence people who are a very nice crowd. With the Wing Commander and Squadron Leader I went back to the billets and then to an evening out at the flicks, These Glamour Girls. The film was not bad, and two “glamour girls” tried to attract us afterwards, who were quite young girls, only fifteen to eighteen years of age.

  ‘We went to the “Chocolate Box” and “Charlie’s Bar” and had more drinks than ever before in my life—owing to the CO’s “another one for the road” repeated about seven or eight times. We talked to two English girls married to civilians on the island and learned the truth of the situation. They get one tin of bully and one tin of sardines per fortnight and live mainly on bread. This explains the nasty blotches on many legs and arms of civilians. We walked back to the mess with them and gave them a tin of bully, a tin of sardines and a tin of the Squadron Leader’s
cigarettes and so to a late meal and bed.’

  Many soldiers would have envied Reg Greer his officer status and the fact that he was forbidden to place himself in any personal danger. To any member of the PBI (the Poor Bloody Infantry) Reg Greer’s war would have seemed positively cushy. There was never the remotest possibility that he would have to come under fire, or kill or maim another human being. And he would have all the glamour of the RAF, a tidy uniform, a good billet in a Sliema hotel, an officers’ mess where ‘neat-handed Maltese girls’ served and ‘one reads the newspaper at breakfast’, as Chappell, used to the rigours of the desert campaign, noted with astonishment. As an officer Greer would not have been expected to sleep in the poorhouse near Luqa where 890 airmen were obliged to put up. The building, which was badly damaged by bombs even before the RAF moved in, adjoined a leper colony, whose inmates were allowed to roam the district at will. This is just as it ought to be, but the airmen did not appreciate the fact. They were obliged for lack of space to sleep in three-tiered bunks, where sandfly nets could not be used; sandflies were the only species profiting by the bombing which provided ideal breeding grounds. In the RAF alone there were 322 cases of sandfly fever in 1941.

  F/O Greer would have had an open invitation to all the officers-only dances, the dances that the pretty girls went to, with genuine drinks, when he was not doing his stint as a Secret and Confidential Publications Officer. The bars stayed open even during alerts; when the red flag went up the bar-tenders would dash down to the shelters, leaving the till drawer open to collect the money for the drinks that the servicemen went on drinking. Officers frequented the Union Clubs in Sliema and Valletta, or Captain Caruana’s or Marich’s Smoking Divan or the Monico Bar. There was plenty of live entertainment; at the Command Fair, set up in the damaged ward of the Knights’ Hospital, the PBI Parade did its stuff together with the RAF entertainment officers, who called themselves the Raffians or the Fly Gang. A professional troupe marooned on Malta by the blockade called itself the Whizz Bangs and put on shows at the old police barracks in Port St Elmo. Every night one or other of the regimental bands struck up for a dance somewhere or another, or for a concert of classical music at the British Institute. There were eleven cinemas, three of them in Sliema, that showed fairly recent English and American releases, as well as the most recent propaganda movies. There were boxing tournaments at the Command Fair, and the military played soccer, rugby and Australian rules football but on 2,100 calories a day they were not playing conspicuously well.

  Reg Greer probably celebrated his arrival with an attack of Malta dog, the local form of gastro-enteritis which was virulent enough to send a steady proportion of cases to hospital. It would have joined up with the gyppy tummy he had never quite got rid of, and never did get rid of, come to that. It was understood that all personnel would have stomach upsets at each change of location. The best available treatment was probably gin and lime. Rest, good food and relief from tension were in short supply. Many years later the repatriation medical services identified the chronic amoebic infestation which was the root cause of the recurrent gastric problems of returned servicemen. Until then they were all classed as idiopathic.

  However he spent his time off, F/O Greer had to do his stint in the underground offices in the Lascaris Bastion. Nowadays tourists are shown tall, whitewashed chambers, where the air is kept sweet by the air-conditioning installed when they were used by NATO. These rooms were excavated at the end of 1942, to serve as ops rooms for the allied commanders during Operation ‘Husky’. The rooms used by Ultra personnel lie beneath them; other signals personnel worked on the other side of the entrance tunnel. Malta limestone is easy to tunnel, for it is soft; it hardens on exposure to the air, but the surface remains friable and constantly generates dust. Worse, the stone is porous; during the rainy season water leached through the rock on its way to the underground aquifers which ensure Malta an adequate year-round supply of pure, cold water. The tunnels attracted the water like sumps; navy cypher personnel were given sea-boots as regulation issue. When Reg Greer was working under the bastion there was no ventilation in the tunnels except the natural openings in the rock face; the air was thick and damp. Mould grew on everything; within hours, clothes, shoes, papers were covered with it.

  The strain of the communications work would have been terrible without the ordeal of being trapped within the airless rock. The Sigint personnel not only had to listen intently to their headphones, sorting out their signal from the general cacophony on the airwaves, but they had also to absorb bad news, and keep it to themselves. They heard the preparations for the massive raids on Grand Harbour and knew the scale of the attacks. They knew better than anyone how close the island was to exhaustion, and how close it remained even after the blockade eased, for the supplies that began to arrive were barely enough to meet present needs. They also knew the full scale of casualties and losses; guilt at not sharing the danger began to erode the efficiency of the most level-headed. The tension of intelligence work in these conditions, without the relief of action, or even of kicking up a fuss, ‘getting it off your chest’, took its toll, especially as tours of duty lengthened into months and even years without leave, but it did not and does not figure in accounts of war casualties.

  The only other Secret and Confidential Publications Officer I know besides my father is the man who co-ordinated, in conditions of utter secrecy, the printing of one-time pads for use in the Ultra programme as it was deployed by the Allies in the Pacific. He too took an A & SD course, but he worked in the Directorate of Signals in the RAAF. His work was supposed to be meteorological; the stuff he was sending all over the Pacific theatre was supposed to be weather reports. Somehow after the war he never got quite straight; he was successful in business, he made money, but something was wrong. So seriously wrong that he had to be given colchicine. He seemed to be in pain all the time. He gave up his business. In 1961 he asked if his difficulties could be ascribed to his war service. He blamed the ‘intense and incessant mental strain’; ‘the nature and extent of my secret duties during World War II imposed on me, of necessity, constant very heavy mental and nervous strain with my ever-widening responsibility. It is to this that I attribute my post-war deterioration in health to its present state of complete incapacity.’ Before the Repatriation Commission could decide if this man, who contributed more perhaps to the Allied victory in the Pacific than any other individual, was entitled to a pension, he was dead.

  It must be a terrible business, being stuffed full of secrets, keeping a guard on your tongue day and night. ‘Any way for heaven sake, So I were out of your whispering!’

  Margaux Hemingway is quoted in my daily newspaper saying: ‘It’s the secrets you keep that make you sick.’

  As I sat in the Public Record Office, reading smudgily typed top-secret telegrams, I wrote in the margin of my notebook, ‘A good man cannot live with secrets. A good man cannot watch over himself even in sleep to be sure that he does not give away the secret locked around his heart which dares not murmur in its systole and diastole. The only hope is to neutralise the secret by forgetting it, but you can’t do that either. Never forget, 254280, you are the custodian of a secret. You can never tell, you can never explain, you must let everybody down, you can never justify yourself. You must accept misunderstanding. You must push away the people who love you most for they are most dangerous to you. You must forget them and cleave only to your secret. Your damnable secret.’

  The words are wobbly and smeared, because my hands were sweating and I felt giddy. I laid my pencil by and went out for some air. I kept on walking till I got to Kew Gardens. There was something that I was failing to see. It was right in front of me, looming over me, and I was unable to look up and recognise it. I walked away from the path, over the thin grass until I found a grove of great rustling beeches. The trippers were left behind. I sat on a mossy root and drew up my knees until I was curled against the bole of my tree with my cheek against the bark and stayed there until my h
eart had stopped pounding. The suspicion that Daddy had a secret gradually ebbed; the world righted itself again.

  That night a terrible roaring woke me from my first sleep. The house was shuddering as the wind tried to suck it out of the ground. I did not hear the crash of the laburnum that fell against the back door or the groaning and snapping as the sycamore was torn with its roots bodily out of the ground, nor the terrible howl of the wind as the mother-goddess wielded her flail. That night my beeches and half the other trees in Kew Gardens were destroyed.

  Some people are proud of secretiveness. Ronald Lewin begins his book, Ultra Goes to War, with a chilling story: ‘A quarter of a century after she had been in charge of the Intelligence War Room in Field Marshal Alexander’s Headquarters at the Royal Palace of Caserta in Italy, Judy Hutchinson began to suffer from a brain haemorrhage. Her condition was critical. As she was rushed from her country home to the Oxford hospital where a long operation saved her life she was in great pain and confusion of mind. Yet when she looked back she remembered how the only fear she had felt was not about herself: it was the terror, overriding all other concerns, that in delirium she might give away the secret of Ultra. There could hardly be more poignant evidence of the dedicated attitude that throughout the Second World War—and for three decades afterwards—guarded the most comprehensive and effective system for penetrating an enemy’s mind that has ever been evolved.’

  Some people like secrets; they love knowing things that other people don’t know. They specially like knowing things that other people need to know and not telling them. They like to lead people on in their ignorance, sniggering at them inside. There are men and women who only really enjoy sex if it is a guilty secret. There are others who love to hear the betrayed spouse defending a treacherous partner. There are people who cannot answer the telephone without lying; ‘Just a minute. I’ll see if she’s in,’ they say, looking ‘her’ right in the eye. There are people who mime in the presence of the blind. Our whole lives are lived in a tangle of telling, not telling, misleading, allowing to know, concealing, eavesdropping and collusion. When Washington said he could not tell a lie, his father must have answered, ‘You had better learn.’