by James Philip
Life or death; to live or to die.
He had done his duty; he had done the honourable thing.
His father had given him leave to save himself and his ship; knowing that he could no more run from a fight than renounce his recently made wedding vows to the woman he loved.
Cut your lines and go...
His father had actually meant ‘engage the enemy more closely’.
The Battle of Malta was over, now the battle to preserve the brittle Anglo-American alliance upon which the future of his country depended was about to begin.
Peter Christopher had not lost his ship and so many of his men just so that senior officers in the Mediterranean and far, far away might indulge in pointless recriminations and thus leave the door open to politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to manufacture an even more disastrous defeat to Allied arms.
He was his father’s son and now was the time to prove it.
He looked Dan French in the eye.
“What do you need me to do, sir?”
Chapter 33
12:30 Hours
Saturday 4th April 1964
The Citadel, Mdina, Malta
The small convoy – two ambulances from Royal Naval Hospital Bighi escorted by a Land Rover carrying four Royal Marines equipped to fight and to win a small colonial war – crawled up the hill towards the Citadel as the clouds over the island parted, and suddenly, eye-wateringly bright sunshine bathed the hill top twin city of Rabat-Mdina.
Marija sat wedged between the Royal Navy Medical Orderly at the wheel of the first ambulance and Dr Michael Stephens. The drive from Kalkara to the centre of the island, a journey of some ten miles had taken over two hours and the sights she had seen in those two hours had very nearly broken her heart. So much that had been rebuilt since the Second World War had been destroyed and all along the road the dead were laid out in rows. There were bodies in strange grey and brown and green uniforms, stacks and piles of weapons outside the Citadel; nobody had bothered to spread blankets or sheets over these men and the flies were already swarming.
The convoy was waved through two roadblocks and across the bridge into the Citadel. Work parties of servicemen and civilians were still clearing rubble from the road inside the gate. The ambulance bumped and jolted over the debris. The ancient streets and alleyways of the Citadel of Mdina were narrow, difficult to negotiate at the best of times and with a horrible, sinking feeling Marija began to face up to what might await her at St Catherine’s Hospital for Women.
‘Mrs Christopher,’ Dr Michael Stephens had asked awkwardly, approaching her earlier that morning. ‘There’s been no direct contact with medical services in Rabat or Mdina, we think all the telephone lines are down and at present operational radio traffic has absolute priority over all other communications, including medical affairs. I have been asked to lead a party to the Citadel. It occurred to me that as you are much more familiar with the layout and know everybody who is anybody in that city, you might care to come along as my assistant?’
Marija was confident that her friend and mentor, Dr Margo Seiffert, the Medical Director of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women and designated future Head of the Medical Directorate of the Maltese Defence Force, would already have started to organise things in her inimitably feisty no-nonsense way as soon as the shooting had stopped the previous afternoon. Knowing Margo, she would have probably got to work long before the shooting stopped. But knowing that was not the same thing as knowing that Margo and her friends and fellow nurses in the Citadel had come through their ordeal unharmed.
“We’re going to have to go forward on foot,” Michael Stephens declared. A building had partially collapsed into the street ahead and fallen masonry blocked any further progress. He jumped down from the cab of the ambulance.
Marija squirmed across the seats, hesitating in the door while she briefly contemplated how exactly she was going to persuade her stiff, sore and aching bones to carry her down to the road in such a way as to not leave her in an undignified and significantly more bruised heap on the ground.
“Please. Let me help you, Mrs Christopher.”
Michael Stephens had realised that the young Maltese woman was physically flagging and now felt horribly guilty asking her to accompany his mission to Mdina. But he had needed somebody who knew the Citadel and would be capable of facilitating whatever needed to be done when they arrived, so he had asked her to come with his ‘advanced guard’ – other parties would be sent from Bighi and elsewhere when resources permitted - knowing that it was not remotely likely she would refuse him. Given what Marija had been through as a child and throughout her adolescence he could only imagine how beaten and battered she must be feeling after more than twenty-four hours on her feet without sleep or any real respite, or any extended opportunity to rest her reconstructed lower body.
He extended his arms.
“I’ll catch you,” he promised with a broad smile that said, louder than any words that ‘there is no need to be brave all the time’.
Marija stopped worrying about getting down to the ground with dignity and pretty much fell into the man’s waiting arms. He caught her under her arms, clung to her like she was an antique, immensely fragile urn and refused to let go of her until she had steadied on her feet. When he finally let go she swayed precariously for a moment and he grabbed her left elbow.
“The cobbles of the Citadel have always been a little bit of a trial,” Marija confessed sheepishly. She ought to have got used to the men around her being overly protective; too easily convinced that she was some delicate flower when in her own mind she was anything but a delicate bloom. She had noticed how swiftly Peter flung his arms around her the instant he suspected she might lose her balance; one day she would have to talk to him about that but there was no hurry. Nothing was quite so sublimely perfect as being swept of her feet by her new husband...
No sooner had the doctor released her than he stuck out his right arm.
She took his hand, knowing that the way she felt – her lower back, pelvis and legs were hurting rather than aching – a single misstep would send her tumbling, most likely onto her face.
“Lead on!” The man invited, with forced cheerfulness.
The dead lay in long rows on the flagstones and cobbles of St Paul’s Square before the blast-scarred towering facade of the Cathedral at its eastern end. The bodies of the invaders were casually strewn in a ragged line, those of British soldiers and Maltese civilians were arranged in neat, orderly lanes. Marija began to count the corpses, stopped because there were so many. The stench of death was already heavy in the air, unnaturally contained within the high walls of the buildings all around. Most of the windows in the square had been blown in or smashed; bullet holes and sprays of shrapnel had defiled every frontage. Sawdust and dirt had been thrown haphazardly over the black, fly-blown puddles of congealing blood and viscera between which the members of the newly arrived medical party stepped.
The blue double doors of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women had been blown in, and off its hinges.
Forgetting her pains Marija shrugged off Michael Stephen’s supporting hand and staggered into the gaping hole where the doors had been and lurched into the wrecked interior of what had once been the reception lobby of the hospital.
There she stood, her eyes slowly growing accustomed to the gloom.
“Marija!”
One, then two, and then a third woman emerged from the shadows.
“Marija!”
The women were suddenly hugging and sniffing back tears.
Others were emerging from the darkened hallway leading to the inner courtyard of the hospital; patients and more nurses in their pale blue smocks.
Marija began to search for Margo’s face.
“We knew you’d come!” One woman said and it set up a chorus.
“Where is Margo?” Marija asked eventually.
And the silence told her everything she needed to know.
Everything she n
eeded to know and everything that she had known and sensed but stubbornly refused to believe many hours ago...
Chapter 34
12:35 Hours
Saturday 4th April 1964
Married Quarters, Kalkara, Malta
‘I am discharging myself,’ Alan Hannay had half-informed, half-asked Lieutenant-Commander Miles Weiss, Talavera’s former Executive Officer. Of the two men the destroyer’s Supply Officer looked much the worse for wear but his injuries were largely superficial, whereas Miles Weiss kept blacking out – probably, doctors had concluded, the delayed results of a concussion sustained when an eleven-inch shell from the battle cruiser Yavuz had torn off the top of his gun director tower, and cut down Talavera’s great lattice foremast as if it was made of papier-mâché – so of the two men, he was the one with the stronger claim to be categorised as ‘walking wounded’.
Miles Weiss had been lying on a palliasse in the corridor of the old Zymotic Wing of the hospital solicitously attended by an uninjured Talavera, a leading seaman from Spider McCann’s deck division.
‘Consider yourself discharged, old man,’ Talavera’s second-in-command had concurred, drunkenly forcing an ashen-faced grin.
Alan Hannay had explained that the reason he was ‘discharging himself’ from RNH Bighi, ‘which had plenty of much more deserving cases to take care of’ was specifically, to ‘escort’ Rosa Calleja back to her house in Kalkara.
‘Basically, to see if it is still there and so forth...’
Talavera’s Canadian Navigator Lieutenant Dermot O’Reilly, after Miles Weiss the senior surviving officer, and Chief Petty Officer Spider McCann the Master at Arms had organised most of Talavera’s unwounded survivors into work parties, while several of the destroyer’s lightly wounded had been put at the disposal of RNH Bighi for hospital portering, maintenance and general duties; with the ‘fit’ men being sent into Kalkara to assist the civilian authorities.
It was symptomatic of the chaos on Malta that nobody from Headquarters Mediterranean Fleet had greeted Talavera’s survivors on the jetty in Kalkara Creek, and that they had been left, broadly speaking, to their own devices in the intervening hours.
‘In the absence of any orders to the contrary, I’ve asked Mr McCann to muster all able bodied men outside the hospital at zero-nine-hundred tomorrow, Alan,’ Miles Weiss informed his friend before he turned on his side and began to retch uncontrollably. ‘Tell the Master what you are up to in case he needs to find you before roll call tomorrow morning,’ Talavera’s Executive Officer had added, gasping breathlessly after the dry-retching fit had passed.
Alan Hannay had patted his shoulder and departed.
‘I feel guilty taking you away from your people,’ Rosa had confessed as the limping, careworn couple stumbled haltingly out of the hospital gates.
Alan Hannay had had to stop several times, his gait becoming ever more shambling. Twice the couple encountered small work parties of Talaveras, clearing roads, sweeping away shattered glass, and once, kicking a football around with a group of local boys. It soon became apparent that Kalkara had escaped the bombardment relatively undamaged with only a handful of smaller calibre shells falling in the village.
The threat of morning rain had blown out to sea and the spring sunshine was already shimmering off the sandstone walls of the close-packed houses above Kalkara Creek. The man and the woman paused in their laboured progress to gaze down at the USS Berkeley, moored fore and aft seemingly half-filling the inner Creek. The big ships normally moored much farther out but the captain of the guided missile destroyer had conned her so close inshore that it was a miracle her bow had not touched the bottom in his determination to facilitate the speedy transfer ashore of Talavera’s wounded. The Berkeley’s surgeon and every qualified sick bay attendant onboard had disembarked with Talavera’s wounded and been placed unconditionally at the disposal of RNH Bighi.
In the strangely bright sunshine the waters of the Grand Harbour, fouled and despoiled with bunker oil and the foul flotsam of war, here and there turned azure, sparkling blue. Across the anchorage fires still burned in Valletta. Big shells had bitten several large chunks out of the previously clean lines of the King George V Breakwater, the long northern sea wall guarding the Grand Harbour. Numerous small boats plied through the oily water, while out to sea the long grey menacing silhouette of the giant battleship USS Iowa slowly prowled the approaches to the Grand Harbour and Marsamxett Anchorage. High over the island the contrails of otherwise invisible jet fighters flying off the USS Independence criss-crossed the heavens, the thunder of their engines falling to earth as a mere whisper.
The small two-storey former Admiralty Dockyards of Malta house in which Rosa had lived her unhappy married life with her missing, latterly presumed dead husband seemed untouched at a distance. Rosa had been forced to relinquish the house after the Royal Navy took over the estate of the Admiralty Dockyards of Malta; because whether or not her husband, Marija’s elder brother Samuel was dead or alive, he had undeniably and self-evidently ‘ceased to work’ in the docks and therefore his, and his family’s right to a ‘company house’ was terminated. She would have been treated better if she had had any children but not much, because her estranged father had fatally undermined her ‘rights of tenure’ by informing the Navy that his daughter was ‘welcome under his roof in Mosta’. Peter and Marija had saved her from that awful prospect by inviting her to ‘camp’ in the ground floor living room of the house. Knowing the house was falling vacant Marija had used her charm and status as the daughter-in-law of the C-in-C to ‘jump the queue’ and to claim the house. Rosa had been speechless when her sister had invited her to move in.
‘Peter is a captain of a fleet destroyer, sister,’ Marija had explained patiently, winningly as only she could, ‘he will often be away and you will keep me company. If you don’t come to stay with us I will be miserable.’
Rosa had not believed that for a single minute.
Marija was the most self-reliant, strongest person she had ever met and in hindsight it was exactly those qualities which had kept the two young women at arm’s length during her marriage to Samuel. That and the distance which had already existed between the two elder Calleja siblings long before she came on the scene. Samuel had resented Marija. Marija was the ‘chosen one’, whereas he had always been in some non-specific way a ‘disappointment’ to his family. Marija was his father’s ‘little princess’, and his younger brother Joe, his mother’s ‘baby, who could do no wrong’ while he had been just ‘Sam’, the boring one who just got on with his job and who was never quite good enough...
At the time of Sam’s disappearance and the surfacing of the unspeakable lies implicating him in the sabotage of HMS Torquay it had been Marija - not a member of her own birth family - who had rushed to her bedside and implacably defended her from all comers when she had been badly injured in the explosion that had killed her good friend Lieutenant Jim Siddall. Jim Siddall had been Marija’s guardian angel but Marija had never blamed Rosa for his death. Marija had been Rosa’s strength, her true sister.
Rosa and her sister had left the married quarters in such a hurry the previous day that they had left all the windows open; this was what had probably prevented them being blown in. Farther down the road there was a small crater where a shell had scattered shrapnel for fifty yards in every direction and smashed countless windows.
“When the bombardment started,” Rosa explained, clinging to Alan Hannay’s hand like her life depended upon it as they stood surveying the house from the road, “we hid under the kitchen table. The big guns were shooting over Kalkara. At Luqa, at first. Marija and I, we were both little when the Germans and the Italians bombed the islands during the siege so we knew what to do. As soon as we realised the big ships were not shooting at Kalkara we left the house and went up to the old shelters on the ridge above the village.”
They went inside the house.
It was dusty everywhere but only one of the downstairs windows was dam
aged, its glass cracked diagonally. Upstairs two panes had blown out in the small, empty, second – child’s - bedroom. Otherwise, the house was as Rosa had left it; breakfast plates and cutlery on the table, the sink full of cutlery to be cleaned, the beds unmade.
“I thought it would be much worse,” Rosa admitted.
Alan Hannay felt light-headed.
The woman wrapped her arms around him and he groaned in apologetic discomfort.
“I’m sorry. I feel a tad faint, I think I ought to lie down,” he muttered feebly.
Chapter 35
13:05 Hours (GMT)
Saturday 4th April 1964
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
The War Cabinet had adjourned for thirty minutes for tempers to cool, and for the participants to hurriedly acquaint themselves with the latest briefing documents, to distractedly munch rubbery, tasteless SPAM sandwiches and to consume sourly restorative cups of tea before the Prime Minister tetchily reconvened proceedings.
“Do we know when Ambassador Brenckmann plans to return?” Margaret Thatcher inquired of Sir Henry Tomlinson, her Cabinet Secretary.
“No, Prime Minister. He gave me to understand that he was seeking intelligence updates and guidance from his Secretary of State.”
Tom Harding-Grayson, the Foreign Secretary, coughed and every eye flicked towards him.
“We should not lose sight of the fact that we are not alone in our discomfort over matters in the Central Mediterranean and elsewhere,” he observed. “It would be, in my humble opinion, a bad mistake to view the setbacks of the last twenty-four hours through a one-dimensional lens...”
Iain Macleod, Minister of Information, Leader of the House of Commons and Chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland – and incidentally, should Margaret Thatcher elect to stand down or fall victim to some untoward circumstance, like getting shot by a madman at a public meeting as had very nearly happened earlier that year in Cheltenham Town Hall – the man most likely to succeed to the leadership of the Party, snorted loudly.