by James Philip
And then like a mirage she was gone, called to be with one of Talavera’s wounded.
“Somebody you know, sir?” The hulking American, his teeth flashing white against the blackness of his skin, inquired in a kindly, familiar way no leading rate in the Royal Navy would dare, let alone think of employing in the company of or heaven forbid, actually risk employing to address a three-ringer.
“Yes, I think so.” Peter Christopher shook his head, spoke hoarsely. “Yes,” he echoed, the weight of the World descending anew upon his aching shoulders. “I think so.” He looked the other man in the eye, grimacing. “Thank you for catching my arm. My wife,” he nodded to towards the jetty, “would have worried if I’d gone over the side.”
Without warning the Tannoy blared.
“Now hear this! Now hear this!”
A bell started ringing continuously.
On shore the ululating wail of air raid sirens began to wash towards Kalkara Creek from somewhere beyond neighbouring Dockyard Creek. Within seconds the sirens were shrieking like banshees across the water in Valletta.
“We’ve got to get you and your guys below deck, sir!”
The men on stretchers were carried with care and constantly apologetic noises into the shelter afforded by the bridge superstructure and the amidships deck houses, and arranged in corridors and vacated messes. A boyish Lieutenant junior grade conveyed the destroyer’s captain’s invitation for Peter to join him in the Berkeley’s CIC – Command Information Centre – but the offer was politely declined. Peter would have been under his counterpart’s feet in the CIC and he did not want to be separated from his wounded men.
The sound of the air raid sirens was muted within the ship.
A few minutes after the Berkeley had closed up at action stations the sirens fell silent.
“Now hear this! Now hear this!”
The destroyer’s commanding officer’s voice drawled from the bulkhead speakers.
“The air defence plot is currently painting no hostile aircraft or threats within one hundred miles of Malta. The alert was probably a false alarm but the ship will remain closed up at Air Defence Stations for another thirty – repeat three-zero – minutes just to be on the safe side. That is all.”
Peter had lowered himself, painfully, to the deck beside an injured engine room artificer. The other man was of approximately his own age and he grinned conspiratorially at his commanding officer.
“The Yanks don’t know they’re born, sir,” he observed sardonically.
Peter would have patted the ERA’s arm in agreement had not the poor fellow’s arms and most of his face been swathed in moist bandages protecting flash seared flesh that would be terribly scarred for the rest of his life. The ERA’s name was Dobson, Raymond Dobson, and he was married with a baby boy who had been born a fortnight after Talavera had sailed from Portsmouth to join the Ark Royal Battle Group in the Bay of Biscay in November. Like Peter he had survived the Battle of Finisterre, the fight off Lampedusa, and yesterday’s action...
“Neither did we until we learned the hard way, Ray,” he grimaced. “Neither did we.”
He must have dozed off because the next thing he was aware of was a man timidly shaking his shoulder.
“Time for you to go ashore, sir.”
It was still dark when he emerged onto the deck of the destroyer to be greeted by an RAF Flight-Lieutenant with a thick, bloody bandage wrapped inelegantly around his brow. The other man came to a shambling approximation of attention and threw a typically lackadaisical, sloppy ‘air force’ salute.
Peter Christopher returned the salute – he liked to think with a little more crisp aplomb, but somehow he doubted his salute had been any more military than the RAF man’s – with a sinking heart. Something told him that he was not going to be allowed the luxury of going ashore to search for his wife quite yet.
“Air Vice-Marshal French’s compliments, sir,” the bandaged Flight-Lieutenant explained, “but would you be so good to attend him at his emergency command centre at your earliest convenience, sir?”
The flier – he wore wings above his left breast pocket – was swaying on his feet, not from the slight motion of the USS Berkeley in the sheltered waters of Kalkara Creek; rather, from his exhaustion and probably the lingering effects of his head wound.
Bidding his farewells, restating his heartfelt thanks to the commanding officer of the American guided missile destroyer, and requesting that a message be sent to Miles Weiss at RNH Bighi that he had been summoned to an ‘interview with the C-in-C’, he followed the RAF man down the gangway to the waiting launch.
He had not told anybody other than Spider McCann that his father was dead. In the aftermath of yesterday’s battle it was not for him to broadcast the news. Moral was a tender thing after any battle, especially a battle lost.
The eastern sky was lightening from obsidian black to dark hues of grey, and the last stars were winking out as the sun rose towards the twilight horizon as the launch – actually a somewhat knocked about whaler similar to his old captain’s barge on the Talavera – chugged around St Angelo Point and west across the neck of Dockyard Creek. A mist of smoke hung over the water of the inner creeks, flotsam and oil, rafts of shattered cork, wood and here and there small buoys and waterlogged rubber fenders bobbed in the black water of the Grand Harbour. The saluting battery on the Valletta ramparts was briefly glimpsed between the lingering fogs of war.
Peter Christopher stood in the confined space between the small low forward and aft deckhouses of the whaler silently preoccupied with the cost of a battle lost as the first pre-dawn greyness fell across Malta. There must have been mornings like this after big night air raids by the Germans and Italians during the Second World War siege of the archipelago; mornings like this one but not so dreadful, nor so poignant with despair. Malta was more than just a fortress or a safe harbour to the post World War II Royal Navy; it was a symbol of everything that made the Service what it was. The blood of countless Navy men was etched and stained into the fabric of the archipelago; these waters were sacred, hallowed ground. If Malta had fallen in 1941 or 1942 there would have been no El Alamein, Rommel would not have been beaten back from the gates of Cairo and the Suez Canal, the war would have been lost and he would have grown up speaking German. Two decades ago Malta had been briefly the most heavily bombed place on planet Earth and yet British and Commonwealth arms had prevailed because the Mediterranean Fleet would have paid any price to save it.
“That was a brave thing you did yesterday, sir,” the wounded RAF man said quietly in the cold half-light. “A damned brave thing!”
Peter Christopher brushed this aside.
“I gather Yarmouth was run aground?” He asked, his voiced hollowed out with exhaustion.
“That other American destroyer, the John Adams, she shepherded Yarmouth onto the beach in St Paul’s Bay, sir. The locals went out in fishing boats and such like to take off her people...”
HMS Talavera’s former commanding officer vented a new sigh of relief. He had ordered Yarmouth to draw the enemy’s fire while Talavera raced in to launch her torpedoes; he had known at the time that he was issuing the under-gunned frigate’s death warrant.
“Sir, are you all right?”
“Yes.” Peter Christopher was half-a-head taller than his escort. “Yes, thank you,” he added absently, quirking a curious eyebrow at the bloody bandana around the other man’s brow. “You look like you’ve been in the wars, too, old man?”
“Oh, this?” The RAF man grinned crookedly, raising a hand gingerly to his head. “We had a field day shooting down the second wave of transports that came over the islands. Well, until we ran out of ammo and fuel, that is. All the runways hereabouts were cratered to buggery by then. I ejected straight into a pack of the blighters. Last thing I remember was falling through dozens of parachute canopies before I woke up in a crater at Hal Far with a cracked skull!”
Neither man spoke for a minute or so as the whaler slowly proceeded
deeper into the anchorage.
“Air Vice-Marshal French has moved his command centre to the old seaplane station at Marsa Creek, sir. The hangars aren’t ideal but I think it was a question of finding somewhere with uncut telephone lines to the outside world which hadn’t been completely flattened by that blasted Turkish battlecruiser!”
Peter Christopher had been staring at the darkened wharves below Corradino heights where less than twenty-four hours ago Talavera had been ammunitioning and provisioning ship when the balloon had gone up.
‘Cut your lines and go, Peter...’
Chapter 26
06:50 Hours
Saturday 4th April 1964
Royal Naval Hospital Bighi, Malta
The tall blue-eyed, flaxen-haired youthful American naval officer had found the nutmeg-haired, slender young woman in the blood-stained pale blue nursing smock at the cliff top wall in front of the shell-scarred main building of the hospital complex.
Marija was staring down into Kalkara Creek, apparently transfixed by the shape and form of the big guided missile destroyer gradually emerging out of the shadows with the onrushing dawn. The USS Berkeley looked like something out of one of her little brother, Joe’s, comics. With its boxy superstructure, its harsh edges, lattice masts festooned with a myriad of radar sensors, dishes and aerials, rounded gun turrets fore and aft, and the tall pylons of what could only be the launchers for her Tartar surface-to-air missiles she was the shape of things to come; and yet yesterday’s battle had been fought and by, and largely won by two smaller, older and infinitely – on paper – less formidable British ships. It was all very confusing. Marija’s family had always been a ‘dockyard family’; her father was a senior Under Manager at the Admiralty Dockyards of Malta, her elder brother Samuel had been a foreman, and Joe was an electrician. Her earliest memories of sitting at the dinner table with her father and siblings had been of the talk of ships, the sea and of the strengths and weaknesses of British naval architecture, radar, sonar, guns, torpedoes and latterly, missiles. All things considered she was something of a connoisseur of the ships, engineering, mechanical, electrical and weaponry systems of the post-World War II Royal Navy. Now as she stared in wondrous fascinated curiosity at the USS Berkeley - a veritable apparition of applied scientific shipbuilding design the like of which was almost entirely new to her uncannily knowledgeable eye - she silently marvelled at the shape of things to come.
The American coughed, softly so as to not risk alarming the woman.
Marija turned.
“I was admiring your fine ship, Lieutenant,” she half-smiled.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
Marija gave him a seraphically quizzical look.
“My husband has been called away,” she said simply before the newcomer had had a chance to open his mouth again.
“Er, yes, ma’am. How did you know?”
“Because he would have been standing where you are standing now if he had not been ‘called away’, Lieutenant,” Marija explained, her rueful serenity completely disorientating the young American. Her terrors had fled away when she had recognised the tall figure of her husband gazing towards her at the rail of the USS Berkeley two hours ago. She looked away, back down at the long menacing lines of the USS Berkeley. “They say your Captain took your ship alongside HMS Talavera as she sank?”
“Yeah, I guess he did...”
“That was very brave. One day I will thank him personally for saving the life of my husband,” Marija declared solemnly. She had come up to the cliff top to be alone for a few minutes to reflect on the knowledge that against all expectations the man she had loved half her young life had really survived. She had wanted to believe it when the first of the wounded men on the jetty below Bighi had told her that Peter lived. She had started to actually believe it when Alan Hannay, very nearly unrecognisable beneath his bandages had staggered up to her and blurted out the news. She had finally believed it when Chief Petty Officer McCann – a small man whom she knew to be a veritable legend in his own lifetime in the Mediterranean Fleet – had paternally taken her aside and assured her that ‘the Skipper is a little worse for wear but he’ll better for laying eyes on you, I’ll wager!’
Marija had almost fainted with astonishment when, dazzled by the brilliant arc lights, she had practically walked into her little brother, Joe. Joe had looked sorry for himself and he had yelped in pain as she had tried to hug him. Joe’s right forearm was in an ultra modern-looking tubular metal and fabric splint; he had looked as if he had been beaten up by a gang of drunken matelots in a Valletta backstreet and left for dead.
‘Marvellous!’ The red-headed, stocky Petty Officer who had been guiding Marija’s brother towards the bed lift had complained. Jack Griffin had looked almost as bad as Joe had, the difference was that this was not the first time he had been badly knocked about and he was immensely smug about having actually survived the previous day’s adventure. ‘This little so and so gets a hug from a beautiful girl and all I get is pointed to where I’m supposed to queue for the bloody lift!’
Marija had allowed Jack Griffin to renew his protective grip on her brother’s undamaged left arm. She had wanted to ask how Joe had come to be onboard HMS Talavera but she had been called away and had not seen either Joe or his unlikely guardian again since.
It was so strange to think that a little more than a day ago she had been in Peter’s arms; and that since then the World had gone mad.
At the height of the bombardment from the sea Marija had been pierced by a dagger of terrible loss. She had feared she had lost Peter, now she knew she had lost somebody else close to her. There were no working telephone lines at Bighi, and one glance across the waters of the Grand Harbour at the fires still burning in Valletta and beyond, told her that everywhere was chaos, the roads were blocked and that there was no knowing who had lived and who had died in yesterday’s nightmare. Yet somebody she loved had died. This she knew with horrible certainty. Not her husband. Not her little brother Joe, by any standards the most improbable hero of yesterday’s great naval battle. But if not Peter or Joe, then whom? Her parents, any one of the nurses she had trained and worked with in Mdina for these last ten years? Or Margo...
No, Margo Seiffert was indestructible!
The young American naval lieutenant was still standing before her.
“And,” Marija murmured with a fond shake of her head, “I will also thank your Captain for saving my idiotic little brother, also.”
This clearly perplexed the young American.
“It is complicated, Lieutenant,” she explained. She had no idea what Joe had been doing onboard the Talavera. No doubt this was another thing she would discover in due course. “Forgive me, I am a tired. I don’t usually babble this way.”
“I must get back to my ship, ma’am.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Marija viewed the rapidly retreating back of the messenger.
I wonder if my sister Rosa has let go of poor Alan yet?
Her sister-in-law had squealed with uncharacteristically anguished relief and delight when Lieutenant Alan Hannay had limped unsteadily up the steps onto the Kalkara Creek jetty. Still hobbling painfully from the effects of her own recent injuries Rosa had limped to greet Talavera’s battered Supply Officer. The pair of them had been a sight to behold in the unforgiving loom of the arc lights. They had looked at each other as if they had no idea what to do next; and had carried on looking at each other like two hopelessly embarrassed teenagers right up until the moment they had spontaneously melted into each other’s arms. The men on the stretchers queued to take their turn on the bed lift to the top of the cliff had spontaneously raised a ragged cheer.
Marija decided she ought to go back inside.
She allowed herself one last look out to sea beyond the darkly silhouetted Grand Harbour breakwaters where the USS Iowa patrolled like some giant grey sentinel. Even two miles out to sea with her long low deadly lines blurred by the dawn haze the great ship broa
dcast power and reassurance; a living statement wrought in tempered steel that the United States of America was now, irrevocably, in the fight. Many Maltese had questioned if the Americans had the heart for the new war after the fate which had befallen the USS Enterprise and the USS Long Beach. The massive nuclear-powered super carrier had been set ablaze by the thermonuclear airburst which had wrecked her consort from end to end, and but for the heroic assistance of HMS Scorpion and HMS Talavera, the Enterprise’s fires might have consumed her too. Now, looking at the battleship prowling the approaches to the Grand Harbour there could be no doubt that henceforth the United States Navy and the Royal Navy would fight side by side, come what may.
Marija shivered and involuntarily rested the palm of her right hand over her abdomen. Her long-time mentor and friend, Dr Margo Seiffert had gently chided her when in adolescent she had timidly confessed her occasional ‘presentiments’ and ‘feelings’ about things that were about to happen, or had already happened but that she had yet to learn of. In time Margo had let her ‘intuitions’ go unremarked, in the last year or two, ever since the October War in fact, she had greeted Marija’s ‘premonitions’ and ‘predictions’ with resignation, and a quiet, vaguely maternal pride.
When next she was alone with Margo she would share her news.
Her first child would be a girl...
“They said I’d find you out here!” Called Surgeon Lieutenant Michael Stephens. He came to the cliff top wall and lit up a cigarette. Much to Margo Seiffert’s disgust the young doctor’s illustrious uncle, the pioneering orthopaedic surgeon Captain Reginald Stephens had never quite managed to quit the ‘perfidious weed’, as she contemptuously called tobacco. It seemed that the nephew was, like his uncle, also a martyr to the ‘weed’.
Marija recognised the uncle in the nephew. Michael Stephens was compactly built and already a little fleshy, with a complexion that would easily turn florid. Like his uncle, there was a mischievous twinkle in his eye and his voice carried a threat of sudden, inconsequential mirth. He was a man who enjoyed life and fully intended to carry on enjoying it whatever obstacles were placed in his path.