by James Philip
“Will you be gone for many days?” She asked shyly.
“A day or two. Maybe three. Trials, that sort of thing. We’ll shoot off a few rounds; let the new chaps blaze away at an oil drum with the new anti-aircraft guns the yard welded onto our stern house. Oh, and exercise with the new torpedo tubes, I suppose. That should be fun, lots of high speed runs and fast turns. The thing is to see if anything breaks,” he continued assuredly as if he was an old hand with twenty years experience under his belt. “That’s what Miles says, anyway.”
Rosa liked Miles Weiss, the destroyer’s youthful Executive Officer. He and Peter Christopher had been catapulted into their present, elevated positions by the death and wounding of friends and senior officers, and subsequently earned their confirmation in those roles by virtue of the decisive and courageous way in which they had responded to their new responsibilities.
Out of the corner of his eye Alan Hannay saw his commanding officer reluctantly disentangling himself from his wife’s embrace.
“Perhaps, you’d allow me to take you out when we get back?” He suggested to Rosa, his voice quavering with the tiniest hint of nerves. “You know, to celebrate being separated from the cast on your leg?”
“Yes,” Rosa whispered, almost inaudibly.
Marija joined her and together they watched the battered old Austin that Alan Hannay, as HMS Talavera’s Supply officer, had requisitioned – nobody knew from whence, as ‘ship’s officers transportation’ soon after the destroyer was surrendered into dockyard hands – disappear up the hill.
The high overnight clouds were scudding into the northern sky, and overhead there was a carpet of perfect azure blue. It was going to be a warm day, a clear day; a good day for watching ships coming and going through the Grand Harbour breakwaters.
The two women set off a snail’s pace after an early breakfast of bread and a little cheese, a few olives and English milky tea. Rosa struggled a little with her crutches until she found a rhythm and Marija was in no hurry. The hospital was less than a mile from the house in Kalkara and it was a bright, optimistic morning.
“You are looking more like yourself, sister,” Marija observed after the women had been walking ten minutes.
Rosa thought about arguing. She was a little hot and bothered from the unusual exertions of the day thus far but she took comfort from knowing that Lieutenant Hannay had not seen her like this. Otherwise she could not deny that she was feeling much better in herself than she had for a long time. It was only now, comparing the friendless misery of the last year of her marriage with her current situation – seemingly surrounded by real friends - that she realised how desperately unhappy she had been with Samuel.
When she had first overhead the malicious gossip that Sam was a Soviet agent provocateur, possibly a member of Red Dawn, she had not been as surprised as she ought to have been; it was as if she had always known something was wrong, that something had been awry in Sam’s life long before he had married her. Suddenly, she had an explanation for his moodiness and, well, coldness towards her. If he was a terrorist – the word made her inwardly shudder – things began to add up. Of course, it was all the perfect clarity of hindsight. Before HMS Torquay was sabotaged, before Sam had disappeared and the security police working for Colonel Rykov had rounded up the ‘real’ terrorists, she had never have believed a word of it. Not a single word of it.
“I look a mess,” Rosa said.
“Your hair has grown back to hide the bumps and most of the pink bits,” Marija retorted. Scars were just ‘pink bits’ to Marija and nobody was about to get into a fight with her, of all people, about it. “And as soon as that plaster cast is off you’ll be back to normal in no time.”
“I’m all skin and bones and I feel like I’m squinting at people with my bad eye!”
“Margo says even that will get better eventually, sister.” Marija stopped, having got a couple of paces ahead of her sister-in-law. She was unaccustomed to inadvertently walking faster than a companion; people usually had to moderate their pace to not leave her behind. “Besides, nobody can tell you are squinting.”
“Are you sure?”
“Lieutenant Hannay seems quite taken with you exactly the way you are, sister.”
Rosa coloured in an agony of embarrassment.
Marija remembered, belatedly, that her sister-in-law had wanted to keep her infatuation with the young naval officer private. Mortified by her insensitivity – her own happiness was blinding her to the preoccupations of others, which was inexcusable – she put on her contrite face and put an arm around the other woman.
“I’m sorry. Ever since Peter came to the Hospital that day after I fell over I’ve been walking on air. It is all I can do to remind myself I can’t actually run. I keep catching myself about to break into a run. It is so silly, I know, but there it is. But things have been awful for you and all I do is flaunt my happiness in front of you. I am truly sorry, sister. Can you forgive me?”
Rosa felt salty moisture trickling down her face from her stinging eyes.
The women hugged.
“Lieutenant Hannay really does like me?” Rosa queried presently, as she, and Marija, both dried their tears.
“He seems to, sister.”
“I shouldn’t be so excited about it, I know. I’m still married. Nobody knows what really happened to Sam...”
The preparations for the re-taking of Cyprus had prevented salvage operations getting under way to comprehensively survey and eventually, raise the two sunken sections of HMS Torquay. The sunken frigate had had her magazines emptied before she was refloated and was therefore, deemed, as shipwrecks go, ‘safe’. Thereafter, salvage operations had never had a high priority once it was clear that the wreck posed no major hazard to navigation within the Grand Harbour. Moreover, Rosa had been warned by Margo Seiffert that even if human remains were eventually recovered from the wreck the likelihood of being able to categorically identify them as being the mortal remains of Samuel Calleja were remote. In time Rosa might be able to persuade a court to certify her husband as deceased, but until then she was in limbo.
The women trudged slowly towards the gates to the Royal Naval Hospital.
In asserting her new found authority as Medical Director of the Malta Defence Force, Margo Seiffert had succeeded in re-opening each and every one of the old fissures in her relations with the medical establishment of the archipelago. Those wounds had been papered over and a large fund of goodwill built up by the contribution Margo, and her cadre of auxiliary nurses, had made in dealing with the avalanche of casualties after the bombing in December. In a situation in which all of the existing hospitals had been damaged to some degree, and dozens of doctors, nurses and administrative staff killed and injured, Margo’s organisational prowess and her direct line to the Commander-in-Chief had enabled her to circumvent many of the normal bottlenecks, and her fifty plus additional trained ‘auxiliary’ nurses had helped to make a bad situation both tolerable and eventually, manageable. However, now that the immediate emergency was over, true to form, Margo and the medical establishment of the archipelago were at loggerheads again.
It was for this reason that Marija had offered to organise the twice weekly orthopaedic clinics at Bighi. She had put it to Margo that things would run a lot more smoothly if she let her do all the talking to Surgeon Captain Hughes – to whom she was a little princess and Margo was a ‘Meddling Yank’ - the Chief Administrative Officer of RNH Bighi. Consequently, Marija had liaised with Captain Hughes and explained to Margo that all she had to do was turn up on time, do her ‘doctoring’ and depart, hopefully, without ever having to meet any of the people she had upset, or anybody who had by their ‘smug, complacent, lethargic, lack of urgency’ so upset her in the past.
Margo, who had been desperately worried she was about to lose Marija ‘to domestic bliss and in no time at all, motherhood, I shouldn’t wonder’, was so delighted that her protégé so obviously still wanted to be a part of her two decade-long proje
ct to makes nurses of women who had previously been passed over by the old Maltese ‘medical mafia’, that she had instantly appointed Marija the ‘Chief Administrative Officer of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women, Orthopaedic Clinic, Royal Naval Hospital Bighi’. Privately, Marija thought this was a somewhat cumbersome title for somebody who was in effect, simply Margo’s secretary and receptionist at Bighi.
The senior people at the RNH Bighi had been as nice as pie, notwithstanding that they had tried to fob her off with premises in a Nissen Hut in the grounds. She had insisted, politely, on having a waiting room and a consultation room in the main building on the grounds that from time to time ‘Doctor Seiffert will want to seek the expert advice and opinions of fellow senior doctors and surgeons’. Surgeon Captain Hughes, a greying thoughtful man called out of retirement because of the October War, had given in to her demands with good grace after minimal half-hearted obfuscation. Nobody was going to deny the daughter-in-law of the Commander-in-Chief anything, providing she asked for it nicely, it seemed.
Life was good. So good that something was bound to go wrong soon.
But Marija would worry about that another day.
Chapter 35
Easter Monday 30th March 1964
French Creek, Grand Harbour, Malta
The moment HMS Talavera cast off her the last two cables – bow and stern springs – the ship felt different. She was alive again for the first time in over six weeks; better than that, the endless mess and detritus, power lines and hoses snaking everywhere, and the civilians slouching about blocking every passageway, were instantly forgotten. The balance of the crew had transferred back onboard from the Cunard liner Sylvania moored across the Grand Harbour opposite the neck of French Creek; and the last three days had been a chaos of making good, cleaning, testing and drilling to ensure that the two dozen or so new men knew where to go, what to do, and who to follow if the alarms went off.
Life was good, thought Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher, as he leaned over the newly painted starboard bridge wing. He felt the ship vibrating softly under his feet, and listened to the reassuring rushing of the blowers filling the air with a quiet roaring, thrumming like a storm of approaching insects. The acrid taint of boiler smoke hung in the still airs and slowly, very slowly the narrow ribbon of dark water between the side of the destroyer and the wharf began to widen.
“Wheel AMIDSHIPS!” He called.
The order was acknowledged crisply.
“Stop STARBOARD!”
The ship’s slow inertia was drawing her out into the Creek.
A small red and black liveried Admiralty tug stood by ready to assist if called upon – her screws periodically churning at the blue waters in the main channel – but Peter Christopher had waved her off. He had made a judgement about where the wind, slight as it was, was coming from, studied the benevolent sea conditions within the anchorage and decided HMS Talavera would float out into the Grand Harbour of her own accord. Assuming, that was, he did not make a hash of the casting off – which had gone well - or inadvertently issue the wrong rudder commands.
The Master at Arms, Chief Petty Officer Spider McCann was bullying the new men into position along the port fo’c’sle and main deck rails. Talavera looked so fine in her new paint and in her much changed fighting trim that it would have been a pity not to give anybody watching on this fine Easter Monday morning from the heights around the Grand Harbour a show.
Marija had explained to him how much it cost the Maltese people to be ‘robbed’ of their Easter Monday; even if there was a war to be fought. She said his father had been wrong to decree that the day would be a ‘normal working day’, and promised that she would say as much to ‘the great man’s face’ the next time she met him. Peter Christopher had wished his wife ‘good luck’, she had frowned and then she had giggled and thrown her arms, ecstatically, around his neck...
“Sea duty men are closed up, sir!” Lieutenant Miles Weiss reported, joining his friend at the bridge rail.
“Very good, Number One,” Peter Christopher acknowledged, grinning at his friend. Neither of them could really believe that they were respectively the captain and executive officer of one of Her Majesty’s destroyers. Too much had happened since that November day a little over four months ago that Talavera had cast off from her moorings in Fareham Creek, slipped through the narrow entrance to Portsmouth Harbour and raced out into the wintery English Channel to rendezvous with the Ark Royal Battle Group bringing home the first and biggest of the Operation Manna convoys. They might both be older and wiser, blooded by their battles and in their dreams, haunted now and then by the faces of the dead and the missing, but they were, now more than ever, two young men living their dream.
Stripping so much of the damaged, wrecked and generally useless modernity out of HMS Talavera and restoring her to a quintessentially late-Second World War type of fleet destroyer, albeit one equipped with modern air search and gunnery control radars, had completely altered the silhouette but hopefully, not the sea-keeping characteristic of the ship. Gone was the peacetime light shade of battleship grey, replaced with a darker, more menacing hue from the waterline to the base of her black, slowly spinning double bedstead four-ton Type 965 aerials high above the bridge on top of the great lattice foremast. Of the Fast Air Detection Escort that had left England in November, only Talavera’s main battery on the fo’c’sle deck and that towering foremast remained unchanged. Practically everything aft of the bridge had altered. An ungainly quadruple 21-inch torpedo mount now stood aft of the funnel where the deck house accommodating the ship’s advanced Command Information Centre had previously stood. Further aft the old radar room was gone, replaced by a rugged steel platform for the torpedo director; and twin 40-millimtre Bofors mountings almost blocked the main deck to port and starboard of the new structure. The reconstructed stern house was festooned with four twin 20-millimetre Oerlikon mounts arranged around an ugly nest of ready use ammunition lockers. A twin 40-millimetre anti-aircraft mount had been welded onto the stern where the deck had been strengthened to absorb the recoil of the now absent Squid anti-submarine mortar.
Shortly before Talavera cast off a detachment of seventeen Royal Marines under the command of a fresh-faced Second Lieutenant had disgorged from the back of two Bedford lorries. Each man marched up the gangway with – so Second-Lieutenant Magnus Bell claimed – ‘about a hundred pounds of personal kit and weaponry’. The arrival of the Royal Marines underlined the fact that there was nothing remotely cosmetic about HMS Talavera’s change of silhouette. Her new role was one of searching and destroying; not advanced Soviet missile cruisers and destroyers or submarines, but rogue merchantmen and for want of a better word, ‘pirates’. The shores of Sicily, the narrow waters north of Cape Bon in Tunisia and large tracts of the North African coast of the Mediterranean were lawless and unpoliced. In the months to come Talavera’s sisters, HMS Dunkirk – which was never converted to the Air Detection role, and HMS Oudenarde were to be modified along similar lines. HMS Scorpion, which had suffered heavier and more structurally extensive damage in the fight to quench the fires burning in the USS Enterprise’s stern, was likely to become another ‘fast gunboat’ in due course. In the meantime the old 7th Destroyer Squadron had been disbanded, with Nicholas Davey, its former Captain ‘D’ taking command of the 23th Escort Group, a mixed bag of old and new ships including the weapon class destroyer HMS Broadsword, both HMS Dunkirk and HMS Oudenarde, HMS Leander, the repaired HMS Puma, and the frigate, HMS Plymouth, Talavera’s saviour in the storm after the Battle of Cape Finisterre in what now seemed like another lifetime but was in fact a few days short of four months ago.
The 23rd Escort Flotilla was due to sail from its anchorage in Sliema Creek later that afternoon; there were no plans for Talavera to attempt to rejoin Captain Nicholas Davey’s command before its return from participating in Operation Grantham. For the next few days Talavera was scheduled to run engineering trials and to exercise her gun and torpedo cr
ews. When she returned to Malta the Fleet Engineering Officer, the Fleet Gunnery Officer, and the Fleet Torpedo Officer would decide if the ship was fit to be restored to ‘active service’.
“Slow astern BOTH!” Peter Christopher commanded. “Wheel AMIDSHIPS!”
HMS Talavera’s twin screws began to drag her out into the open water of the Grand Harbour. Her commanding officer eyed the wreck buoy bobbing in the water a hundred feet off the rocks at the foot of Fort St Angelo beyond the nearby headland on the other side of Dockyard Creek. The stern section of HMS Torquay was no threat but the big ships crowding the bays and creeks were. As the bow cleared the entrance to French Creek he turned.
“Stop BOTH!”
He heard the order repeated.
“Starboard TEN!”
HMS Talavera’s bow began to drift around, slowly, slowly. The whole Fleet would be watching, eagerly waiting for the youngest destroyer captain in the Royal Navy to make a complete ass of himself. Peter Christopher grinned because that was not about to happen!
HMS Talavera’s recently joined Navigation Officer; a Canadian reservist in his forties was quietly, competently taking bearings, checking angles. Lieutenant Dermot O’Reilly had been a sub-lieutenant on a Flower class corvette on the Atlantic run in the last year of the 1945 war, afterwards a mate on a factory ship in the South Atlantic whale fishery, and before the October War a carpenter and an odd job man in his native Montreal. He had never married and but for the war he might have carried on inexorably sliding towards lonely, failed middle age and the bottle. His father had drunk himself to death at fifty, bereft of purpose in his life. After the October War, O’Reilly had applied for service in his own Navy in Canada but his own country had scrapped most of its Navy – or as good as – and sheltered behind American military power since 1945. Thwarted, he had gone to the British consulate, offered his ‘extensive combat experience’ to the Royal Navy. The people in Montreal had not known what to do with him, and referred him to the British Embassy in Ottawa. The ‘call’ had arrived six months ago. He had had to wait two months to hitch a ride across the North Atlantic in one of the old Liberty ships the Canadian Government had loaned from the Americans – the Canadians had carried on sending grain, strategic metals and oil to the old country even though the British pound was worthless on a North American continent in which the dollar was king – and eventually fetched up at the Admiralty Reception Centre in Portsmouth. He had been shocked by practically everything he saw and discovered in England; but the Brits had converted his wavy one ring to two solid ones and after a couple of months cooling his heels teaching navigation to pale-faced kids, teenage sub-lieutenants straight out of school, he had boarded the RMS Sylvania. The rest, as they say, was history. He had reported on board Talavera a fortnight ago.