by James Philip
However, everything had changed on the night of 30th January in Cheltenham when he had found himself playing the role of nervous, timid – and to be honest, frightened – moderator in the now legendary ‘Clash of Titans’. That was the night when the new Prime Minister, every bit the dazzling blond bombshell he had been warned to expect; and the wizened, tortured eminence grise of Midlands and national politics, former intelligence officer, poet and scholar John Enoch Powell, the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West, had gone ‘head to head’ in a no holds barred debate before a countrywide radio audience of millions in the febrile gladiatorial atmosphere of the packed old Edwardian Town Hall. That night had accidentally launched his post-war career on a new, wholly unexpected and exhilarating new ballistic trajectory. The ‘great debate’ had ended in the high drama of a failed assassination attempt on the life of the Prime Minister, the wounding of Enoch Powell and one of Margaret Thatcher’s Royal Marine bodyguards – neither seriously, thankfully – and overnight the name of Barry Lankester became forever associated with and therefore known to every household in the land. Moreover, for reasons beyond his ken, his own BBC ‘big wigs’ had concluded that he had deported himself so well that the Corporation had stumbled upon a new Alan Whicker or a likely new Richard Dimbleby, and promoted him accordingly. It was all a little bizarre and he was still getting used to it but who was he to look a gift horse in the mouth?
In the last few weeks the former introducer of ‘The Archers’ had been ‘borrowed’ by The Ministry of Information and personally despatched by the Secretary of State – Iain Norman Macleod, one of the Prime Minister’s closest lieutenants - to Lisbon, Gibraltar and latterly, Malta, to make a series of special ‘foreign movie features to boost morale on the Home Front’. Along the way he had, among other things, been catapulted from the deck of a Royal Navy aircraft carrier – HMS Eagle – in the second seat of de Havilland Sea Vixen jet fighter, been ferried hither and thither on numerous Royal Fleet Air Arm and RAF helicopters, been royally entertained in the Mess of a V-Bomber Squadron and the Wardrooms of half-a-dozen frigates and destroyers and frankly, he had had the time of his life.
Nevertheless, nothing had prepared Barry Lankester or his four man crew – a cameraman who had been with Eighth Army in North Africa at the time of the Battle of El Alamein, a boyish assistant cameraman with an unruly beatnik haircut, a soundman who had worked for EMI before the October War, and an amiable old BBC stager who performed the combined roles of director, producer and general fixer – for what they had lived through, and somehow survived, in the last two hours.
The crew had been setting up for a routine background, or ‘filler’ piece – just to lend an extra layer of local colour and context to the melange of material they had recorded in the last week – when, out of a half-blue, half-overcast warm Mediterranean spring sky, salvos of huge shells had begun to fall on the island. It had been as if the heavens had suddenly been torn asunder, ripped apart. The air itself had screamed in agony and then belatedly the sound of the first great explosions had tolled like thunder across the previously idyllic sandstone buff and yellow bastions, ramparts and close-packed houses in the cities surrounding the Grand Harbour.
Coincidentally, the crew had found itself in a prime position to witness what followed. The Lower Barraka Gardens commanded an unobstructed view of the Grand Harbour and of all traffic entering and leaving port via the gap in the King George V Breakwaters which protected the anchorage from easterly storms. The ‘gardens’ contained a colonnaded neo-classical temple – a ‘folly’ erected in fairly recent times – and monuments to the person of Alexander Ball, the first British governor of Malta and commemorating the Great Siege of 1565.
Barry Lankester had been delivering a loosely scripted talk to camera as he strolled – very slowly – through the gardens, which were a little overgrown and somewhat unkempt, about the person of Sir Alexander John Ball, when the World went mad.
Notwithstanding, Nelson had described him as a ‘great coxcomb’ on first acquaintance in 1782, Ball was by all accounts a remarkable man. Ball had subsequently confounded his old friend’s opinion of him when in command of HMS Alexander at the Battle of the Nile in 1797, and later achieved the rank of Admiral. Appointed Civil Commissioner of Malta he was sent to the archipelago in 1801 as the Plenipotentiary Minister of His British Majesty for the Order of Saint John to arrange the evacuation British forces in accordance with the provisions of the Treaty of Amiens, that most ill-found of armistices which book-ended the two great paroxysms of the Napoleonic Wars. When those wars had re-ignited, partly because of the British refusal to hand over the Maltese Archipelago to the ‘Little Corporal’, Ball became the man responsible for first bringing the Maltese islands into the Empire.
‘Napoleon had once said that he would rather see a suburb of Paris under the governance of the British if that was what it took to remove the Royal Navy from the Grand Harbour,’ Barry Lankester had been explaining in what he hoped was his trademark urbane, engaging way. ‘Under the terms of the Treaty of Paris in 1814 as ratified by the Congress of Vienna, Malta and all its dependencies passed to the British. Ball was greatly loved by the Maltese people; he had after all saved the islands from the brutal despotism of Napoleon. Ball’s secretary and assistant from around 1804 was a certain Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a man whose poetry would later leave an even more indelible mark in history. Coleridge said of Ball that he was a truly great man...’
That was when the first shells had screamed over the Grand Harbour and rained down on the most strategically vital airbase in the British Commonwealth.
Barry Lankester had swung around to watch the pillars of smoke and fire erupting from the direction of RAF Luqa. He had stared for some seconds in disbelieving shock, until registering the banshee ululating wailing of the air raid warning sirens sweeping across the island he had got a grip.
Thereafter he had kept talking; the soundman had kept on recording and the camera had kept rolling until they exhausted their Kodak 16-millimetre film stock.
Now the five dusty, ragged looking BBC men surveyed the carnage in Valletta and in the cities across the Grand Harbour; the vile stench of burning was in their faces, oily smoke fell into the anchorage like an evil miasma. Distantly, small arms fire rattled; here there, everywhere it seemed because their ears still rang with the concussion of the savage bombardment which had eventually silenced the 3.7-inch calibre guns – no more than peashooters in comparison with the naval rifles of the big ships off shore - of St Elmo’s Fort less than a quarter of a mile away.
Barry Lankester blinked, his eyes full of pulverised grit.
“Please tell me we got that destroyer on film,” he demanded rather than asked.
None of them had quite believed what they were seeing.
The long, grey deadly silhouette of HMS Talavera – festooned with gun barrels, her decks a hive of activity and with a multiplicity of flags running up, and being run up her masts – had raced for the open sea throwing up a seething white bow wake the like of which the Grand Harbour had never before, nor would in all likelihood, ever see again. The ship had seemed so close to them that they could almost have reached down and touched her mastheads at that moment when two thirds of her length had disappeared – completely disappeared– inside a monstrous forest of shell splashes.
They had all held their breath for a moment, and another.
And then the destroyer had rushed out of the maelstrom.
Even from the best part of two hundred yards away Barry Lankester had seen the splinter damage on the Talavera’s bridge, the bodies strewn on her decks, glimpsed the fresh red blood spilling down her flank and splashed across her single elegant funnel.
The image of the blood and the great battle ensign streaming from the ship’s main mast halyards would be etched on his waking thoughts forever...
“I got everything, Barry,” the crew’s balding, greying cameraman said, his taciturn delivery edged around with atypical br
eathlessness. “The ship, the bombardment, even the parachutists. We’ve got five reels of gold dust. Absolute pure bloody gold dust, mate!”
The man patted his camera.
“The battle out to sea was probably too far away to show much of anything in particular except gun flashes and the lightning,” he went on. “But I got good long steady shots of those Yank destroyers and that bloody battleship blasting away as they headed north. Pure bloody gold dust!”
Barry Lankester turned away and looked out to sea where in the middle distance a great spring squall was tracking across the leagues of ocean where the modern Battle of Malta had just been fought. A battle fought with unremitting, mercilessly savagery like some terrible trial by combat of yore; with no quarter asked or given while all the while the thunder clouds gathered and giant tridents of lightning spiked down into the midst of the fight. He felt like he had just witnessed some kind of Götterdämmerung; a scene straight out of a Wagnerian opera, a dreadful twilight of the gods.
It was as if the World had been turned upside down yet again.
Chapter 3
13:33 Hours
Friday 3rd April 1964
HMS Talavera, 10 miles west of Tigne Point, Malta
HMS Talavera was sinking. The horribly mauled carcass of the old destroyer wallowed deep in the troughs of the short Mediterranean swells. She was no longer rolling with the seas, more a water-logged breakwater than the sleek deadly war machine she had been when she and her consort, the desperately under-gunned modern frigate HMS Yarmouth, had joined battle with the Turkish battlecruiser Yavuz and the former Soviet cruiser Admiral Kutuzov. Great gouts of venting steam escaped from her riddled funnel, fires burned on her deck and within her mangled superstructure fore and aft. In a moment a change in the wind blew the steam and smoke out to sea cruelly laying her mortal wounds bare for any eye that could still see.
Lieutenant Alan Hannay clung to the shoulder frame of the twin 20-millimetre Oerlikon cannon mount into which he had been strapped for the final dreadful, exhilarating minutes of the fight. His right hand was still closed over the big trigger mechanism of the twin mount although both magazine boxes were empty and the guns had been silent several minutes. The dead still lay around him; at his feet and sprawled obscenely mutilated on the stern house gun platform. The sun had come out just after the battle and now the blood which randomly splashed him from head to toes was drying, coagulating fast in the warmth of the early afternoon. He guessed that some of the blood was probably his but there was as yet, little pain. He was still mostly deaf, his ears rang and nothing he saw was real. Somewhere in the back of his mind he understood that he had just survived the most intense, insane few minutes of his life. However, if anybody had stopped to ask him what had actually happened in the last hour he would have been hard pressed to explain.
His thoughts jarred, one falling over another in no particular order or rational sequence as he desperately attempted to collect his scattered and shocked wits.
In what seemed like less than a blink of the eye ago HMS Talavera had been tied up alongside the ammunitioning wharf below Corradino heights; that much at least made some kind of sense. Reloads for the main battery had been passing down the chutes into the forward shell rooms; that had been the Gunnery Officer’s concern while Alan Hannay had supervised and chivvied along the general provisioning of the ship.
As he had organised the human chains transferring frozen and chilled meat, porridge oats, coffee, tea, soap, tins of spam and dried fruits, bags of bread flour, pulses and bottles of cooking oil, engine room spares and books and magazines for the ship’s tiny onboard library, he had been assiduously preoccupied with ensuring that the galley pantries and larders, refrigerators and freezers, spares and pre-designated lockers were stacked and stocked in an orderly fashion so that once at sea it would be unnecessary to constantly turn them out to find a given item. When he had taken over as HMS Talavera’s Supply Officer and Purser he had been shocked by the disorganised, slovenly way his predecessor – the poor fellow had been badly wounded in the Battle of Lampedusa so he tried not to think of speak ill of a wounded fellow officer other than in moments of particular angst – had managed his bailiwick. All the fellow had had to do was make sure the ship had the supplies and spares it needed to go to sea; but somehow he had made a complete hash of it! Alan Hannay was proud of the way he had swiftly put his department in order and quickly freed up sufficient of his time to be able to offer his services and that of his senior divisional writer as stand-in Captain’s Secretaries...
The ship lurched drunkenly under his feet and there was an ominous creaking, tearing sound from somewhere deep in the bowels of the sinking destroyer.
It was a funny old World...
What with one thing and another the last few days and weeks had been by far and away the happiest days of his life...
Rosa...
He had fallen head over heels for his commanding officer’s beautiful dark-eyed sister-in-law shortly before coming onboard HMS Talavera. This despite the fact that the first time he had encountered Rosa Calleja – who was still officially a married woman because her missing husband had not been legally declared dead - she had been an invalid with her right leg in a bulky plaster cast and half her head swathed in thick bandages. None of that had mattered one jot. He had taken one look at her and for a split second she had looked back at him... And, well, something had just clicked. It was nothing he could put his finger on yet the moment had been uniquely electric.
He had never even known that Rosa existed until she had been blown up and badly injured in the same explosion which had killed his first real friend on Malta, Lieutenant Jim Siddall...
Jim had been a fine fellow...
Rosa, there were so many things I ought to have said but...
Alan Hannay felt a firm hand on his arm.
“Mister Hannay.”
His fingers were being gently prised off the twin Oerlikons’ trigger.
“It is time to go now, sir.”
He stared at Chief Petty Officer Spider McCann’s bloodied face. The Talavera’s senior non-commissioned officer – the ship’s Master at Arms – had taken hold of the younger man’s left elbow.
“There’s no more to be done here, sir,” the older man said, his voice reaching Alan Hannay’s traumatised consciousness as if it was coming from the other end of a long tunnel.
Spider McCann was a small, sinewy, muscular man of indeterminate middle years who had once been the Bantamweight boxing champion of the Mediterranean Fleet. His face was deeply burnished by the sun, and wrinkled with irrefutable salty sagacity. The man was the rock around which the Talavera’s mixed complement of battle hardened old sweats and green new draftees had coalesced in recent weeks and months. Within minutes of Alan Hannay reporting onboard either the Captain or the Executive Office, he could not remember which and this bothered him somewhat, had succinctly explained the unique status of the destroyer’s Master at Arms thus: ‘There are only three people who have the right to give Mister McCann a direct order; God, Mrs McCann and the Captain.’ Apparently, the Executive Office got away with it on good days, but the rest of the wardroom ‘asked’ politely and respectfully, rather than ‘ordered’ the diminutive former pugilist when they required his assistance.
In the recent battle Alan Hannay had staggered onto the stern to discover the Master at Arms standing atop the deckhouse bellowing at damage control teams as he stomped through the wreckage. The stern house cannons had been silent, their crews lying in shredded heaps on the bloody steel deck plates.
The destroyer’s Supply Officer was, even at that relatively early stage of the battle, already feeling a little worse for wear and sorry for himself; by then having already been blown off the stern deckhouse at least once.
‘Get yourself back up here, Mister Hannay!’ The Master at Arms had bawled. ‘Sharply, sir, if you please!’ It had never occurred to the younger man to hesitate, let alone query the unequivocal command. Confronted by
the carnage on the stern house gun deck he had been momentarily paralysed. ‘Worry about those boys later, Mister Hannay,’ Spider McCann had counselled, grabbing his arm at the very instant HMS Talavera seemed to plough into an impenetrable wall of huge shell splashes. All around him the ship had clanged and shuddered as a storm of shrapnel had filled the air. The two men had been drenched and forced to cling onto the nearest Oerlikon twenty-millimetre mount to stop being bowled over the side of the ship. One smashed body and several parts of another had disappeared by the time the destroyer surged defiantly through the near misses and out into clear air again. ‘Look at me, sir!’
Alan Hannay had looked into the older man’s cloudy grey-blue eyes and seen pure cold patent steel.
‘Are you with me, sir?’
‘Er, yes...’
‘Good! I’ll take over the damage control crews,” Spider McCann had growled, ‘you get these guns back into action!’
HMS Talavera’s Supply Officer had a very limited theoretical knowledge and no practical experience whatsoever of organising, directing and co-ordinating ‘damage control’; but when it came to shooting guns that was a different kettle of fish. Everybody in the Royal Navy understood the basics. Bullets in at one end and out the other, point the end farthest from the breech in the general direction of the target and pull the trigger. When the gun stops firing load more bullets. Simple. Even a Supply Officer could manage that!
‘Whatever you say, Mister McCann!’
That could only have been minutes ago; but it seemed like hours because in between then and now the madness had been so outrageous that his mind was incapable of reconciling the mill race of events with his, or anybody else’s actions. He had been in a daze, some kind of trance, almost as if he had been outside of his body watching the nightmare unfold...