by James Philip
“Now you are going to tell me that you can’t answer my question because of ‘security concerns’ or some such clap-trap!”
“No,” the Angry Widow said coolly. Strong men in the room blanched, fearfully, rather guiltily anticipating that something unpleasant was about to transpire. “However, I will tell you what I said to President Kennedy last Friday.” She let this sink in a moment. “I advised him not to retaliate on our behalf, or because of the loss of so many brave Americans on the USS Enterprise and the USS Long Beach, for two reasons. Firstly, I was not convinced it was possible to target the wicked criminals who launched the attack without killing many thousands, perhaps, millions of innocent people. Secondly, I pointed out to him that in the event that we continue letting off nuclear weapons in the atmosphere sooner or later we will so poison the World that life itself will be rendered impractical. I further emphasised to President Kennedy that it was my personal view that I could see no circumstances in which, at this time, a retaliatory strike, even of a very limited nature, was consistent with the pursuance of a sane approach to international affairs. For what it was worth I also informed him that although the Government of the United Kingdom has no formal ‘first use’ policy or doctrine, that there was no conceivable scenario in which I personally would authorise the first use of British nuclear weapons.”
Silence.
The sound of pins dropping on a carpet ten miles away would have been deafening.
“I hope that answers your question, Mrs Castle?” The Angry Widow inquired flatly. The question was entirely rhetorical and with a brusque, unusually disconcerted shake of her head the older woman resumed her seat.
Chapter 15
Thursday 13th February 1964
Royal Naval Hospital, Bighi
Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher was a little shocked to discover that Captain David Penberthy – the man whom he still regarded as the Talavera’s rightful, legitimate commanding officer - was a gaunt, prematurely aged version of his old self. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes almost hollow and he had about him the look of a cancer patient in terminal decline. Peter very nearly groaned aloud with relief when his former captain cracked a pleasantly surprised smile and struggled into a more upright position on the bed in the crowded sunny, south-facing ward. Around him were officers and men – the majority American survivors from the USS Long Beach and the USS Enterprise – for whom, like David Penberthy, the crisis had passed.
Peter tried very hard not to stare at the heavily bandaged stump where his former captain and mentor’s left foot had been; until an anti-tank round fired by Red Dawn insurgents close inshore off the island of Lampedusa had removed it at the ankle and showered HMS Talavera’s flying bridge with shrapnel. He had awakened in a cold sweat a couple of times since that night. The carnage and chaos on the destroyer’s bridge, the flash and the shuddering crash of the broadsides of the other ships in the gun line, the thudding, crunching, screeching impacts of solid shot against the thin plates of Talavera’s sides, and the blood glistening evilly in the light of the half-moon every few seconds when the main battery unleashed a new salvo. He had gone to the bridge rail, stepping over the bodies, discovered HMS Puma drifting out of the line, the water around her boiling and erupting with exploding cannon shells and near misses, helpless as the shore batteries concentrated their fire on her. He had shut out the cries of the dead and the maimed and without a moment’s hesitation steered Talavera between her wounded consort and the withering fire...
“My goodness!” David Penberthy chuckled hoarsely. “You’re a sight for sore eyes, Peter!”
The younger man shook his bony hand.
“You look...”
“Pretty bloody dreadful, I should imagine,” the man in the bed grinned. “I’m on the mend.” He guffawed feebly: “Although I rather doubt I shall be back at sea any time soon.”
It was Peter’s turn to smile.
“I suspect that whenever you are fit to resume sea duty, sir,” he assured the man who had been like a father to him and the rest of Talavera’s crew in the grim times after the October War, “there will be no shortage of employment for chaps like us.” After the war the ship was moored like a floating prison hulk in Fareham Creek along with most of the Channel Fleet for endless months, inactive while the ships of his father’s British Pacific Fleet shepherded the Operation Manna convoys half-way around the World to the old country. “I don’t think the Fleet will be spending much time in port for the foreseeable future!”
There was a hard chair next to the bed and Peter Christopher pulled it up, settled.
“I rather doubt it,” the older man agreed.
“I apologise for not coming to visit sooner, sir,” the younger man offered, grimacing.
“I wouldn’t have known you were here until a couple of days ago,” he was comforted.
David Penberthy had lost so much blood by the time Talavera’s surgeon - before the war a third-year medical student who had been press-ganged into the Royal Navy under the provisions of the War Emergency Act - had staunched the bleeding, that he had very nearly died on the destroyer’s bridge that night while Peter had fought the ship standing and stepping over his prostrate, unconscious body. At Bighi he had fallen prey to fever, balanced precariously between life and death for over a week.
“I gather you saved the day at Lampedusa with the Nelson gambit?” The older man inquired wryly, the amusement that was flickering in his rheumy eyes hardly touching his drawn, ashen features.
“Er, I don’t know about that, sir.”
“Steaming inshore of the gun line? Drawing the enemy’s fire while you got a hawser onboard the Puma? It sounds pretty bloody Nelsonian to me, Peter?”
The younger man blushed with embarrassment.
“It was the only thing to do,” he shrugged. “Puma was taking a beating and she was dead in the water.” He shrugged again. “I only did what I thought you’d have done in the same circumstances, sir.”
David Penberthy wasn’t having any of that. He waved around the ward. Beds were crowded into practically every available space and uniformed visitors cluttered the aisles and clustered around the cots as voices babbled softly in the warm, sunlit hall.
“As if your exploits off Lampedusa weren’t enough, from what my new friends from the lost colonies tell me, you and Nick Davey saved the Enterprise’s bacon a week ago. Apparently, the chaps on the carrier couldn’t believe their eyes when Scorpion and Talavera disappeared under the Enterprise’s flight deck overhang and started pumping water into her stern. Is it true what they say about a Phantom falling across Talavera’s bridge wing?”
“Er, that was nothing,” Peter said evasively. “It was just the wing tip that clipped us. I think one of its external fuel tanks lit off about the time the fuselage went overboard so a few of the chaps got singed eyebrows. Everybody on deck was kitted out in anti-flash kit and fire-fighting suits, so not much harm was done. Scorpion got knocked about a lot worse than Talavera.”
David Penberthy thought about this while he collected his strength.
“Whatever,” he muttered weakly. “These fellows,” another attempted sweep of the arm to take in their surroundings, “think you and Nick should get medals...”
Peter waited patiently for his friend to recover.
“How goes it with your young lady?” The older man asked eventually.
“We’re engaged to be married, sir.”
“Good...” Exhausted, Peter Christopher’s former commanding officer sank back onto his pillows. “That’s good...” He shut his eyes and slept.
Peter patted the back of the older man’s hand, remaining in his chair. He had an appointment with the newly-appointed Superintendent of the Admiralty Naval Dockyard at his office in Senglea later that afternoon but he was in no hurry to leave. Once he left Bighi his day was going to be a succession of meetings and journeys between them. There would be no opportunity to see Marija again for another day or two now.
Yesterda
y evening had been dreamlike; sitting with Marija in the cool inner courtyard of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women in the Citadel at Mdina, quietly, intimately alone with her for the first time. The first time he had ever been truly alone with her and he ached to be alone – just the two of them – with her again. They had said very little, held each other and when the time had come for him to go they had kissed, slowly, innocently.
On the coming Sunday evening he had been invited to the Calleja family home in Sliema where he would meet Marija’s ‘Mama’, and – probably – any number of her aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces. ‘Joe’ she had promised, ‘will be on his best behaviour’. They had smiled at each other at that point; he had bent his head, they had nuzzled foreheads...
That was yesterday and this was today.
He found Petty Officer Jack Griffin in the hospital canteen laughing and joking with a comely girl in the pale blue uniform of one of Margo Seiffert’s ‘nursing auxiliaries’. He had seen several women so dressed in his brief visit to Bighi. The red-bearded Petty Officer straightened and sobered the moment he saw Peter.
“This is Miss Anna Boffa, sir,” he reported. “She trained in Mdina with Miss Calleja, sir.”
Peter Christopher shook the young woman’s hand and to his horror, she very nearly swooned with delight.
“It is good to see that you are making friends with the natives, Jack,” he observed dryly as the two men marched out of the hospital towards their car.
“All you have to do is tell a girl that you’re off the old Talavera, sir,” the other man explained, cheerfully, “and suddenly it’s like being a movie star. Right now they’d make you King of Malta if you asked, sir!”
Peter did not care for that thought, or have the least inclination to encourage the sort of transient hero-worship that Jack Griffin and presumably other of his men were likely to exploit to gratuitously take advantage of impressionable young women who really ought to know better.
“Grand Masters,” he grunted. “They don’t have Kings, they have Grand Masters of the Knights Hospitaller of the Order of St John of Jerusalem,” he equivocated, not confident he had remembered the name of the Order correctly, “I think.”
Peter was surprised to be confronted by an old friend when he entered the outer office of the new Superintendent of the Admiralty Naval Dockyards.
Forty year old Ralph Hobbs, the one-time former Second World War Lancaster wireless operator and Edinburgh-based Marconi radar man, had been on board HMS Talavera on the night of the October War ironing out the converted destroyer’s new electronics suite. The older man rose to his feet and with and ever broadening smile shook the tall young officer’s hand.
Ralph Hobbs was half a head shorter than the acting Captain of HMS Talavera, his face pale from the cold of a northern winter and his angular frame unhindered by a single ounce of spare flesh. His hair was noticeably thinner than fifteen months ago when the two men had bidden each other farewell at Rosyth, where Talavera had docked five days after the war. At the time they had assumed they would never meet again.
“What on earth are you doing out here, Ralph?” Peter blurted.
“I came out on the Sylvania with most of my department from Scotland. My wife and both my girls came, too. Things have been a bit grim in Edinburgh the last year,” he pursed his lips, the grey green in his eyes clouding, “out of the frying pan into the fire, as they say. Marconi was running down my research program and I reckoned Sarah and the girls deserved a little sunshine.” He seemed to remember the real object of the original question. “I’m to be assigned as Under Manager of all Electrical Installation at the Admiralty Dockyards. I’m the new head radar man, essentially. A lot more good men will be coming out to the Mediterranean but I’m reliably informed that the C-in-C – you father – wants me to train up as many locals as possible to install, configure and maintain the latest state of the art kit.” He hesitated. “I imagine there must be a lot of bad feeling about bringing so many people in from the old country?”
“A bit. I’m not convinced it has been handled very diplomatically...”
The door to the office of the Superintendent of the Admiralty Naval Dockyards opened suddenly.
“What’s that? Not diplomatically?” Demanded the small, bustling figure who bowled into the reception room. Two uniformed typists leapt to their feet.
“Er, no criticism intended, sir,” Peter Christopher said hastily.
Commodore Kelvin Renfrew tried to give him a hard look but gave up quickly because he was getting a crick in his neck. The boy was a fraction of an inch taller than his only slightly more famous father and cut exactly the same kind of handsome dashing figure Julian Christopher had between the First and Second World Wars, in the days when he was a society dilettante racing America’s Cup yachts at Cowes with that incorrigible rogue Nicholas Davey.
The likeness is uncanny!
“Ralph said you two were old friends,” Commodore Renfrew observed, tersely. “Both of you come into my den,” he commanded, turning on his heel and marching back into his relatively palatial office on the top floor of the Victorian building which butted onto a high barbed wire topped iron fence which separated the dockyard from the closely-packed streets of the ‘city’ of Senglea. He waved for his guest to sit down, in motion all the while, radiating nervous energy in every direction. “I had a good chin wag with Mr Hobbs yesterday while you were meddling in the industrial relations of my bailiwick, young man,” he went on, bristling momentarily before he dumped himself into the big chair behind his even bigger mahogany desk. There were grey and buff Manila folders and files on the desk, and a dozen large, partially unfurled blueprints and mechanical, engineering and electrical schematics apparently strewn at random.
Peter Christopher forced himself to stop studying the fascinating detritus on the Dockyard Superintendent’s desk.
“I apologise about that, sir. It won’t happen again.”
“Oh, never mind,” the older man said instantly, as if he had already forgotten about the transgression. “If you hadn’t stuck your oar in I’d have had to lock the blighters out and then there would have been a general strike in the dockyards. I’d have probably have had to sack that little so and so Joseph Calleja, too. As it was somebody had time to whisper in my ear that sacking the blighter would have gone down like a lead balloon in these parts!”
Peter Christopher decided that the best thing to do was to say nothing.
“Right! Talavera!”
“Yes, sir,” the younger man acknowledged, holding his breath.
“We’d have to rebuild her from the deck up to restore her to her former Fast Air Detection Escort status. I know she’s not seen a huge amount of service but we’re talking about a twenty year old hull with a 1945 vintage machinery set. Not to mention she’s taken a fair old bit of stick lately. So, we’re not going to put her back the way she was last autumn.”
“Sir, I,” the destroyer’s proud commanding officer began to object.
Commodore Renfrew raised a hand.
“Ralph assures me that we’ve got the equipment to hand to sort out your Type 965 air defence bedsteads. Your existing ranging and gunnery control radar will have to go but we’ll weld something better onto the foremast. We won’t waste time rebuilding the amidships Command Information Centre or attempt to refit a Sea Cat launcher aft. Too much fiddly electronics work involved and the idea is to get Talavera back to sea sometime in the next three to four weeks. However, in her present state Talavera is missing roughly sixty or seventy tons of top weight in comparison with her post Fast Air Detection Escort conversion, all of which weight can be loaded back on above main deck level without unduly mucking up her undoubtedly fine sea-keeping characteristics. So,” the older, now grinning man declared, “we’ll use the opportunity to put some torpedo tubes amidships and a clump of anti-aircraft guns on the stern.”
The Dockyard Superintendent jumped to his feet and beckoned his guest to peer at the somewhat hastily drawn
line plan he unrolled.
“A quadruple 21-inch torpedo mount, sir?” Peter Christopher queried, thinking aloud. “Do we actually make those things anymore?”
“We’ve got several of them in fairly good condition in a storehouse,” Commodore Renfrew chuckled. “No idea where they came from. Probably the second mount off ships on which we’d bolted so much radar and electronics that they’d have capsized if we hadn’t removed top weight elsewhere. My design people say we can get at least two or three twin twenty-millimetre mounts on the stern deck house without having to strengthen it, probably another one on the stern where the Squid anti-submarine mortar used to be. How do you feel about a couple of barrels in single mounts on the bridge rails? Or on the foredeck between the bridge and the back of ‘B’ Turret?”
Peter was feeling a little drunk; decisions that normally tied design committees in knots for weeks and months - it was not unheard of for decisions to be so long delayed that ships were scrapped without ever getting into dockyard hands - were being addressed with a cavalier abandon. Suddenly, the process was simplicity itself; we don’t have this kit so you can’t have it, but we’ve got other stuff we can weld onto your spare deck space so let’s do that instead!
The Royal Navy’s role in the Mediterranean was no longer one of explicitly fighting a modern, long-range enemy with missiles and fast jets, it was – for many of its smaller ships, destroyers and frigates in particular – one of challenging and stopping suspicious vessels, chasing down pirates and patrolling coastal waters. The age of the gunboat was back; or at least that was Talavera’s fate.
He shook his head, ran a hand through his hair.
“All the extra barrels will make her look a little untidy, sir,” he observed wryly, “but personally, so far as I’m concerned you can put as many guns on her as you like! The more the merrier!”