by James Philip
Peter Christopher could feel the easy motion of the ship under his feet as she effortlessly breezed along at a speed no merchantman in the world could match, her blowers hissing, her fabric softly, rhythmically vibrating.
“They probably don’t realise we’re half-blind with most of our radars down,” he chuckled. Before they departed Gibraltar he had heard that the Spanish had sent a delegation to the border of the colony to deliver a formal ‘ceasefire concordat’. It seemed that, just so there could be no further ‘unfortunate misunderstandings’, Generalissimo Francisco Franco Bahamonde had personally commanded all Spanish land, air and sea forces, and all internal militias to observe an indefinite unconditional unilateral ‘armistice’ with the ‘forces of the British Empire’. “If those contacts are Spanish they’re a long way from home?”
“True,” the officer of the watch agreed. “Initial contact was on a northerly bearing. As I say, they’ve slipped back a bit in the last hour or so. Obviously, in our present situation there’s no way we can interrogate their radar signatures,” presently, Talavera’s electronic warfare capability was negligible, “so for all we know those fellows might not even be Spanish.”
“The French and the Italians had US search and fire control kit before the war,” Peter Christopher mused aloud. He did not overly care for the notion that the two shadowing contacts might have better eyes over the horizon than his own ship. In this age having better and more capable electronics systems was the equivalent of having the lee gauge – the advantage of the wind – in former, pre-steam eras. He sighed, focused on more immediate matters. He glanced at the bulkhead clock. “Air Defence Stations in eight minutes,” he grinned. The old hands were accustomed to being welcomed into the new dawn by the alarms blaring through the ship; for the green draftees many of whom were still sea sick, it was a horrible introduction to another exhausting and bewildering shipboard day. “The Master and I will make our way to the auxiliary damage control station.”
“Aye, sir.”
The Auxiliary Damage Control station – ADC - was in the gutted after deckhouse. The dockyard had restored direct telephone links to the bridge and the engine room, repaired the emergency steering position, and tested all the linkages to the destroyer’s twin rudders. In dire extremis HMS Talavera could, theoretically, be conned from the ADC station although in practice, the very thought sent a shudder of apprehension through every fibre of the destroyer’s Executive Officer’s being.
Petty Officer Jack Griffin was waiting for the two men when they reached the stern. He was staring into the darkness where Talavera’s propellers churned the water white and faintly iridescent. The deck vibrated much more noticeably nearer the stern.
“Morning, sir. Morning, Master,” rasped the stocky, red-bearded man who Spider McCann had commandeered as his Deck Division number two and made responsible for turning the greenest of the latest replacements into ‘real seaman’.
“Not like you to be woolgathering at this time of day, Petty Officer Griffin?” Peter Christopher observed.
“I’m getting soft in my old age, sir!” The other man retorted.
Spider McCann snorted derisively
”Seriously, Master,” Jack Griffin protested. “Some of the blokes we took onboard at Gib are just kids who volunteered for this lark to get...” His voice trailed away. “You know, things aren’t that good at home, I suppose.”
“It’ll get a lot worse if we fuck up!” The Master at Arms reminded his most junior Petty Officer.
Peter Christopher had wondered how Jack Griffin would cope with suddenly finding himself at the bottom of the pecking order in the Petty Officers’ Mess. He needn’t have worried. Spider McCann had set him to work night and day with the youngest, least ‘naval’ of the new men and from what HMS Talavera’s Executive officer had heard and seen to date, Jack Griffin might have been born to bully and mentor confused, frightened and sometimes angrily belligerent boys towards manhood. Jack Griffin threw a salute and departed ahead of the alarm to his damage control station in the empty deck space behind the funnel where the CIC had been. The compartment had been so comprehensively wrecked that the whole structure had been cut away and dumped on the dockside at Gibraltar. The absence of this element of superstructure, the GWS 21 Sea Cat system, the Limbo anti-submarine mortar and the old main mast meant that Talavera had lost somewhere around seventy tons of top weight, all of it relatively high above her notional centre of gravity; consequently she was a much stiffer sea boat, and her period of roll shorter. This ought to have made life easier for the new men, reduced the agonies of sea sickness. It ought to have, anyway. In another way it made Miles Weiss’s job as ‘Guns’ – the gunnery officer – harder because not only did he have to contend with an absence of a working fire control system but the new ‘stiffness’ of the ship made her a much less stable gun platform in any kind of cross sea.
“Another few days and we’ll be in Malta, sir,” the Master at Arms remarked as the two men waited on the stern beneath the flapping White Ensign on the jack staff over their heads.
Everybody who had been on Talavera any length of time, certainly everybody who had been onboard before the action off Cape Finisterre, knew the story about the Fighting Admiral’s son and his Maltese sweetheart. There were few if any secrets on a ship the size of the old Battle class destroyer, especially when the ship had been tied up in harbour most of last year awaiting a call to action nobody had seriously believed would ever come.
Well, they had been wrong about that as they had been wrong about practically everything else!
“Yes,” the younger man muttered. “In my spell on Hermes I allowed myself to get carried away with things,” he confessed. If he could not trust the Master at Arms with a harmless secret then what hope was there? He had started dreaming of seeing Marija waiting for him on the quayside as the carrier glided into the Grand Harbour. “For the moment I think taking things day by day is the ticket.”
The older man sniffed.
“That’s very wise, sir!”
Chapter 18
Thursday 23rd January 1964
Cabinet Room, Government Buildings, Cheltenham
“Good morning, gentleman!” Margaret Thatcher called as she swept into the oak beamed room which the previous owner of the mansion – a now deceased Fleet Street press baron – had probably honestly believed resembled a classic Tudor reception room. The dead newspaper magnate had been a man of decidedly flawed and ill-informed tastes and the big house that now accommodated the Cabinet Office and the rooms of several of the most senior members of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom reflected his foibles. The devil, as they say, is invariably in the detail and the one thing the magnate had not invested in was the building’s plumbing and central heating; neither of which worked. The Cabinet Room was relatively warm thanks to a roaring fire in the great, baronial hearth at its northern end; facilitated by the Prime Minister having given her personal seal of approval to the pooling her Ministers’ daily personal coal rations. Today was going to be a long day and she did not want her key associates slowly turning into blocks of ice when there was work to be done.
The Prime Minister was in bullish form, her mood untouched by the troubling news from the Mediterranean and the disturbing intimations from across the Atlantic that the ‘America First’ camp in the relocated Congress in Philadelphia was stronger and more vociferous than Tom Harding-Grayson, the Foreign Secretary, had anticipated in his worst nightmares. As much as she hated waiting on events, the situation was what it was and there was no point moping about it. One played the game with the hand one was dealt.
Besides, half-an-hour alone with Julian Christopher had made her invincible.
At the end of the ‘conference’ in the Officers Mess at RAF Brize Norton yesterday evening, the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations had baldly requested: ‘Might I have a few moments alone with you, Prime Minister?’
The room had cleared without her having to say a word.
‘Perhaps, if we sat down?” The man had suggested as orderlies had brought fresh cups of tea and retreated to a safe distance out of earshot.
The couple had at sat at the end of a long trestle table, sipping their tea.
‘I am very much afraid that this will be a bloody thing, Margaret,’ Julian Christopher had said eventually. ‘But you must not worry about me.’
‘That’s impossible!’ She had blurted.
‘My proposal stands,’ he had continued, quirking a wry smile, his eyes locked on her face, ‘I will be honoured to be your husband at the drop of a hat. But I know that now is not our time.’
Time had been so short there was no scope for beating about the bush.
‘I think about you a lot,’ she had explained, feeling tongue-tied.
‘And I you, Margaret.’ He had seemed a little distracted for a moment. ‘Right now you belong to our people. Even from where I’ve been sitting in Malta it is abundantly clear to me that you have caught a mood, galvanised in some way the imagination of the man and the woman in the street. In Britain certainly, and perhaps, elsewhere throughout the Commonwealth.’ He had set his jaw. ‘Nothing must distract you from your,’ he had shrugged apologetically, ‘destiny, is probably what I am trying to say.’
She had looked at him in astonishment.
‘Destiny?”
‘Yes, I think so. Things are so mixed up these days that perhaps, there is room again for that sort of word. The war changed everything. For example; I was appointed C-in-C Pacific Fleet just before the October War in recognition that I would never be First Sea Lord. My time had passed, you see, and the Pacific Fleet was my, shall we say, quid pro quo for acknowledging with such good grace that some time in 1963 David Luce would succeed the then First Sea Lord, Sir Caspar John. As it happens I can think of no better man than David to be at the helm in these times. But for the war I’d have left the Navy by now. I’d be sailing my yacht, the Aysha, in the Solent, and preparing myself to circumnavigate the British Isles single-handedly. That, incidentally, was the one thing I’d promised myself I’d do before I died. Sail single-handed all the way around these, er, sceptred isles.’
She had summoned her courage.
‘The night after the Balmoral atrocity you were a little delirious. You mention ‘Aysha’ several times. It was my impression that you weren’t talking about a yacht, Julian?’
He had tossed back his greying, tanned, handsome head and fixed her with twinkling grey blue eyes.
‘No,” he admitted, shaking his head. ‘I was at Singapore before the Second War. Attached to the staff of the C-in-C Far East. There was hardly any ‘staff work’ to be done and I’d spent most of the thirties racing yachts. I dreamed of winning back the America’s Cup for Britain and the Empire, but it was not to be. My naval career was in the doldrums, I’d probably have left the Service but for the war. Peter was only a few months old when I was posted to Singapore and my marriage was already a farrago, truth be told. In Singapore I raced yachts, I drank heavily, and I womanized. Aysha was the mistress of one of the richer, more obviously crooked rubber planters; one of the ones who dealt contraband and kept a foot or a hand or a finger in every conceivable pot. He was the sort of man without whom no Empire can function. His name was Li Leung-Chung, a Chinaman, probably a gangster although we didn’t ever use words like that in those days. A man like Li Leung-Chung never gave a fig about who was running the show just so long as he got his cut. That was the way of Empire; people like him were the glue that held the whole edifice together. In Singapore nobody asked any questions so long as the rubber kept flowing to the factories of the English Midlands, and nobody – not for a single minute - cared if the underlying fabric of the Imperium was rotten.’
He had realised he was rambling.
‘No, Aysha was not a yacht. Aysha was my mistress for three months in 1939 and then the war happened. The rest is, as they say, history.’
‘Have you had many mistresses?’ She heard herself asking, not believing she had had the temerity to ask the question so brazenly.
The man had shaken his head.
‘No, not since my wife died.’
Her face must have been a picture because Julian Christopher had smiled ruefully, belatedly recognising that his answer had been less than unambiguous.
‘That wasn’t said very well,” he decided, ruefully. ‘Let’s just say that there has been no one for several years.’
Bidding the man that one day she planned to marry farewell had not been easy, and her colleagues must have noticed her distraction on the drive back to Cheltenham last night. Somehow she had managed to hold back her tears until she was alone, that was the main thing.
Margaret Thatcher took her seat and waited for her male colleagues to settle again. And then she waited a little longer until she had everybody’s undivided attention.
“Several amendments to the proposed agenda for this Cabinet have been submitted to the Cabinet Secretary. I do not doubt that any of these amendments deserve discussion at the highest level. However, I do not wish to be diverted from the two matters originally mooted for this Cabinet. Any other matters of substance may be debated after we have addressed those key challenges facing the UAUK, if there is time. Otherwise it is my general view regarding how we should proceed in these difficult times that inter-departmental issues should be hammered out between the ministries involved, rather than raised at Cabinet. Nobody around this table would have been invited to join Cabinet if they did not enjoy the total, unqualified confidence of both Jim,” she nodded to her left where the lugubrious, brooding presence of James Callaghan, the Deputy Prime Minister, and the leader of the Labour and Co-operative Party, sat deep in thought, “and myself.”
Several men stirred, none actually voiced an objection until Admiral Sir David Luce, the First Sea Lord who sat in Cabinet representing the Chiefs of Staff Committee raise a hand an inch or so off the gleaming polished surface of the big oval table around which they sat.
“The first item on the agenda is an essentially political one, Prime Minister. I would not be uncomfortable if you asked me to absent myself while it was discussed.”
“I appreciate your sense of propriety in this, Sir David,” Margaret Thatcher countered, having anticipated the First Sea Lord’s unease. “The matter of the relocation of Parliament to Oxford and the reconvening of the House of Commons will inevitably be major headache from the point of view of security. There may well be questions that you will need to take back to the Chiefs of Staff. I would like you to remain in Cabinet.”
The First Sea Lord nodded his assent.
The Angry Widow wasted no time jumping into the bear pit.
“I propose that not later than the last day of February the House of Commons should be recalled to sit in Oxford. Furthermore, I propose that at that time the UAUK immediately seeks a vote of confidence to legitimise its writ for a period of not more than two calendar years. It is my intention that all surviving Parliamentary constituencies currently without a Member of Parliament should organise and conduct a by-election within the next ninety days, and that a General Election be held not later than eighteen months from this day.”
Her Cabinet had had little time to digest the topic, openly stated in the agenda which she had had published less than twenty-four hours in advance. There was an ominous silence when the Prime Minister sat back and looked around at the faces of her colleagues.
The second item on today’s agenda was ‘the situation in the Mediterranean and the likely ongoing response to it by the USA’.
James Callaghan cleared his throat.
“Why wait over a year for a General Election?” He asked. “If you stood now you’d wipe out my Party as a political force overnight, Prime Minister,” he observed dryly.
“Even if that was true, Jim,” she replied, a little surprised that she was not having to fend off a dozen assailants at once. She had contemplated her st
rategy for every contingency except the one she was actually facing. “I don’t believe there has ever been one example in the history of the World when democracy was best served by a single, dominant party or faction. Look at what was achieved in both the First and Second Wars by coalitions of the willing and the like-minded. Look what we achieved together under Ted Heath’s leadership in the darkest days of last year. Besides, I suspect I have at least as many detractors as supporters in the country. Gentlemen,” she swung around to make eye contacts up and down the table, “I will never be a dictator. Never, ever. What we might achieve together dwarfs anything any of us could conceivably achieve alone. At some stage this spring I will look to stand for a vacant Parliamentary constituency, as I expect those colleagues around the table whose old constituencies no longer exist to seek their own seats. Without democratic legitimacy we can achieve nothing in the long term.”
James Callaghan looked to his fellow Labour Party members; Roy Jenkins, Anthony Crossland and Christopher Mayhew. Each man nodded wordlessly.
“The Labour Party endorses the Prime Minister’s proposals for constitutional renewal,” the Deputy Prime Minister declared. With a sigh he added: “Without reservation.”
The Prime Minister tried hard not to give her deputy a suspicious look. She had been brought up to believe that if a thing was too good to be true, it probably was too good to be true.
“Forgive me, Prime Minister,” the Foreign Secretary interjected. “Much as I subscribe to democracy and all that,” he grimaced, “I’m not convinced that running for Parliament is my, er, cup of tea.”
Margaret Thatcher morphed into the Angry Widow for a split second.