by James Philip
The young Maltese women sighed at each other.
“What ho!” Lieutenant-Commander Alan Hannay chirped cheerfully as he breezed into the first floor lounge. “It is official, the World has gone mad!” He declared, pausing just long enough to exchange a smile with Rosa before drifting to the window and risking a look out across Wister Park.
“What’s happened now?” Marija inquired, actually more worried about inadvertently transferring the tiny drip of blood on the tip of her left ring finger onto the partly unstitched frock she had been ‘working on’, than hearing the latest bad news.
“We’ve fallen out with the French.”
“Oh.” Since she had not realised that the British had ever properly made friends with the French at any time in the eight hundred and ninety-eight years since the Battle of Hastings in 1066, this hardly qualified as news.
“And the Ambassador is considering evacuating all ‘non essential’ personnel from Philadelphia. Probably, to the old country’s United Nations Mission compound in New York, or to Montreal or Quebec in Canada.”
Marija shook her head.
“Would we really be any safer somewhere else, Alan?” Before he could answer she went on. “I mean, back in December the Italian Air Force sank HMS Agincourt a hundred yards away from where my Mama and Papa and me were sitting, the American Air Force dropped very big bombs on Fort Manoel a quarter of a mile away while I was treating injured people on the Gzira waterfront. A couple of months ago Rosa and I hid under a table when shells from those Russian ships Talavera sank were shooting right over the top of Kalkara. Crazy people shot down the airplane that tried to land ahead of the one Peter and me were on at Cheltenham a few days later. Forgetting all about what happened with that crazy man on a motorcycle coming back from the Cathedral that day, do you honestly think we were any safer in Malta or in England than we are here?”
“Yes, but...”
Marija smiled seraphically.
“Peter dreams of rockets to the mountains of the Moon; I want to see California. We should all live our lives while we can. If bad things happen,” Marija shrugged, “that was what was meant to be but,” another shrug, “in the meantime we live our lives.”
Alan Hannay laughed.
“Actually, I think that’s pretty much what Peter is saying to the Ambassador right now,” he confided.
Alan Hannay was a handsome man in a dapper, boyish sort of way, slightly built and more comfortable in his Navy blues than the civilian suit which he was wearing. He was half-a-head shorter than Marija’s husband but then Peter, like his late father, was well over six feet tall, and naturally fairer than Alan Hannay, whose mop of short, still unruly dark hair only accentuated his youthfulness even though he was just eighteen months younger than his friend.
Marija’s husband would be twenty-eight in six weeks time; and most likely he would be the youngest full captain in the Royal Navy for many years to come. Alan Hannay, at just twenty-five, was probably the youngest Lieutenant-Commander in the Service and both men had glittering careers ahead of them if, and it was a big if, that was what they really, really wanted. Marija did not think that was what Alan wanted – not what he really wanted – and of the two men he was the natural diplomat and facilitator. Her husband was more the sort of extraordinary, reckless and foolish, man who steered a thin-skinned destroyer within a hundred yards of a shoaling rocky shore to engage a gun battery manned by Red Dawn fanatics, or placed his ship under the stern of a burning nuclear powered aircraft carrier to fight fires beyond the reach of that great ship’s crew, or steamed at full speed towards a whole enemy fleet just after he had been ordered to run away!
Marija had married a hero.
To her Peter Christopher had always been a hero; just a different kind of hero to the one he had become lately. She wondered sometimes about the toll having lost so many friends would take on him in the years to come, and took great comfort that he and Alan Hannay were such firm brothers in arms even though they had never met until four months ago. Friendship was like that sometimes, two people seeing a spark in the other the day they meet; like star-crossed lovers except in some ways a much purer thing, uncomplicated by the turmoil of new love, infatuation and its strange urges...
Marija broke from the circle of her thoughts.
Quite apart from being sick every day her thoughts were often preoccupied with longings and needs, distractions of the sort a good Catholic wife ought not to be so constantly exercised by, especially in her condition.
“No, we must not hide in New York or anywhere else,” she said finally, as if that was an end of the matter. Once one allowed oneself to live in fear life became a tiny death every day. They owed it to the dead to live without fear. They had been sent to America to ‘fly the flag’, to ‘make friends’ and to ‘influence people’ and that was exactly what they were going to do.
Moreover, albeit they had only been in the United States a month Marija and her husband – the denigration of ‘Britain’ in the papers, on the radio and the television, the assassination attempt and yesterday’s bombings excepted – had been as fascinated as they were appalled by what little they had thus far seen of the land of the free. They both yearned to break out of the bubble they were obliged to inhabit in Philadelphia and to discover and experience the ‘real America’. They had embarked upon a great adventure and their time in Philadelphia was simply treading water. Notwithstanding the hostility directed at their country – Marija had married an Englishman and was therefore now ‘English’ as well as ‘Maltese’ – they had encountered nothing other than kindness, courtesy and a strange melange of enthusiastic, unqualified curiosity and acclaim, as if they were movie stars in their short time in Pennsylvania. She and Peter had been feted, applauded, cheered and endlessly photographed on their public appearances; Congressmen and Senators who lined up in the newspapers to heap excoriating scorn on the ‘British Empire’ and the person of the Prime Minister, whom they seemed to regard as some kind of a witch, had positively drooled over the opportunity to be seen and photographed with the English ‘Navy Couples’.
It was all very, very odd.
Last night her husband had, gently and rather sweetly, told her off for ‘sneaking off to the hospital’ with the wounded; and of course, for spending so much time on her feet. They had also talked about how they felt about continuing their ‘American odyssey’.
Peter used such lovely words sometimes...
England was a drab, hungry place presently and little was likely to improve in the coming months. Moreover, whatever Peter said or did nobody was going to send him back to sea any time soon. Their situation was uncomplicated. They were in America, they had been sent to America to ‘make friends’ and that was what they were going to do.
Marija’s husband did not make an appearance until later that afternoon. Alan Hannay had been called into his long meeting with the Charge d’Affaire, Sir Patrick Dean and Lord Franks, the Ambassador. The two wives were sipping tepidly warm weak tea when ‘the boys’ finally escaped.
Marija noted that her husband and Alan were looking smug in a righteous sort of way. Peter bent and planted a pecking kiss in her hair before dumping himself in the chair beside her.
“Two pieces of news,” he announced, trying not to grin too broadly.
Alan Hannay’s face cracked into a conspiratorial smile.
“All non-essential Embassy staff will be packed off to Camp David,” Peter explained. “Apparently the President feels so bad about what happened yesterday, and what with all the anti-British ‘nonsense’ that’s flying around he wants to ‘make a point about hospitality and civility to middle America’, whatever that is.”
Marija had hugely enjoyed their recent brief stay in the Catoctin Mountains. Dining with the President and the First Lady, meeting the Kennedy children and generally being treated like visiting royalty already had about it a dreamlike quality in her memory.
“In the meantime,” her husband continued, “the four of u
s and our ‘personal staff’ will leave for California on Friday morning.”
Marija knew there was more, so she waited patiently, her expression quizzical as she met her life partner’s gaze.
“While the ‘staff’ go on ahead to set up the ‘mission’ in San Francisco,” he explained, ever more smugly, “we shall be going down to Huntsville. That’s in Alabama...”
“Isn’t that where they make the rockets?” Marija teased.
“This is true,” Peter Christopher confessed, as if this salient fact was of absolutely no interest to him. “We shall be the guests of NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, staying at accommodation within the ‘secure area’ created after the troubles in Washington last December.”
Marija shook her head, viewed her husband fondly.
By his own admission Peter had joined the Royal Navy not because he wanted to be some latter day Nelson but because he wanted to play with expensive ‘gadgets and gizmos’. He had been in seventh heaven onboard HMS Talavera with her complicated radar systems and advanced electronics suite. He had only earned his watch keeper’s certificate because ‘it is good to have another string to one’s bow’; the thing for him was his ‘toys’, all the marvellous, sophisticated ‘toys’ the Navy gave him to play with to his heart’s content. And then the October War had happened, he had become the unofficial radar and electronics warfare ‘expert’ in the fleet locked up in Portsmouth by fuel shortages; the man who trained all the other radar men and EWOs – Electronic Warfare Officers – and perambulated around the anchorage ‘fixing’ old kit and ‘modifying and, or commissioning’ new equipment. He had been astonished when he was promoted Lieutenant-Commander shortly before HMS Talavera had departed Fareham Creek on the war cruise that had ended a little over four months later in the bloody Battle of Malta ten miles off Dragut Point. In those tumultuous months the boy who had joined the Navy, in spite of rather than because of his ‘Fighting Admiral’ father, to gain access to the marvels of the modern scientific age, had become the Royal Navy’s most famous son.
“Men!” Marija murmured, her eyes laughing.
“Men,” Rosa Hannay echoed complacently.
The two husbands looked to each other for mutual support, much as schoolboys caught doing something they ought not to be doing will.
Rosa was remembering a conversation she had had with her sister the second day of the couples’ stay at Camp David. Another guest in the Catoctin Mountains had been Wernher von Braun, the man who had designed the first intercontinental ballistic missile and who, notwithstanding his former credentials as Adolf Hitler’s chief rocket scientist was Peter Christopher’s boyhood hero.
‘Sometimes,’ Marija had observed, a little resignedly, ‘I honestly think that people are more interested in the mountains of the Moon than they are in sorting out all the problems down here.”
Chapter 10
Saturday 6th June 1964
Heliopolis Presidential Palace, Cairo, Egypt
Normally, when there was a coup d’état the drill was for diplomats to keep the lowest possible profile until, literally, the smoke had cleared and it was possible to form a coherent view upon who exactly was now in charge. Other than in cases where HMG – Her Majesty’s Government – had actually fomented, managed or otherwise facilitated the coup in question the long-established principle of ‘wait and see’, had served the Diplomatic Corps well over the centuries. However, every now and then circumstances demanded that HMG was seen to be, hopefully, on the ‘winning side’ prior to the final outcome of the ‘local disturbance’ becoming self-evident. This was one such case although many times during the harrowing five mile drive and trek through the streets of eastern Cairo from the British Embassy, located on the Corniche on the banks of the Nile to the government district, Sir Harold Beeley had asked himself if the game was worth the candle.
The fifty-five year old bespectacled British Ambassador had been in post since before the October War. Having been excluded from the secret talks which produced the unholy accord – a moderately despicable troops for indeterminate territorial and political ‘guarantees’ kind of agreement - that the Foreign Secretary had concluded with Nasser’s regime, he had seriously contemplated resigning from his post.
Within the Foreign and Colonial Office he was not one of those men who regarded Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson as some kind of prodigal returned to the fold, or any kind of diplomatic magician. To the contrary, he regarded the man as a menace and he strongly suspected that his reckless perturbation of the finely balanced post-October 1962 status quo in Cairo had prompted this madness.
Whole districts of eastern Cairo had become battlefields; God alone knew how many people, mainly innocent civilians, men, women and children had been killed and injured in the fighting still raging in streets around the Presidential Palace.
From a distance the magnificent facade of the Heliopolis Palace resembled something out of a 1945 Soviet propaganda film of the Battle of Berlin. The great edifice was half-ruined with its still standing southern aspect scorched by fire and pocked with shell impacts; a pall of evil grey smoke hung over the entire complex and wrecked and burning tanks, armoured personnel carriers and cars blocked all the approach roads. The cadavers of the dead, horribly charred and mutilated lay around the gutted vehicles, more bodies were strewn here and there, forgotten as the battle had ebbed and flowed. The nearest apartment blocks were gaunt, smouldering shells now, and hungry, licking crimson flames roared from the upper storey of the nearby Army Headquarters. Overhead, the scream of jet fighters was an ever-present.
Sir Harold Beeley had not joined the Diplomatic Service until 1946, before the Second World War having pursued an academic career as a research fellow and lecturer at Queen’s College Oxford and University College Leicester. Rejected for military service in 1939 on account of his poor eyesight, he had worked with the famous historian Arnold J. Toynbee at Chatham House, and in the Foreign Office’s Research Department prior to joining the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945. Beeley’s last appointment prior to joining the Diplomatic Service was as a Secretary to the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry on Palestine, an experience which had permanently coloured his view of the realities ‘on the ground’ in the twentieth century Middle East. In his opinion – formed in the aftermath of the Second War – was that the founding of the state of Israel would hopelessly ‘complicate’ Britain’s ongoing relationship with the rest of the region; an opinion which had earned him no little enmity from prominent Zionists and perversely, had stood him in good stead with practically all the other governments in the Middle East. Ironically, his first posting in the Foreign Office was to the Geographical Department responsible for Palestine, making him one of Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin’s key advisors in the negotiation of the Portsmouth Treaty of January 1948, which most observers unfairly concluded was a licence for Israel’s neighbours to embark upon a huge land grab as soon as British Forces withdrew from Palestine. Thereafter, Beeley’s career had prospered with stints in Copenhagen, Baghdad, Washington DC, and in 1955, his first ambassadorship to Saudi Arabia, where in ignorance of the plans to invade the Suez Canal Zone in late 1956, he had inadvertently put himself in the US State Department’s bad books by honestly reporting in routine conversations that Britain had no intentions of intervening in Egypt. By 1958 he was Deputy Head of the British Mission at the United Nations; needless to say his arrival in Cairo in 1961 had raised unhappy eyebrows in Tel Aviv and quiet nods of approval throughout the rest of the Arab World.
The one thing Sir Harold Beeley had thus far never had to do in the service of his country, was to scrabble through the ruins of a city in the middle of a coup d’état with a bodyguard of heavily armed Egyptian policemen and volunteers from the thirty-man Embassy Protection Detail – men of the Warwickshire Regiment - waving large white flags. While it had been possible to drive the first couple of miles in Embassy Land Rovers and police trucks; thereafter, the str
eets had become impassable, clogged with the detritus of the fighting.
By the time Beeley and his bodyguards stumbled into the Presidential Palace he was filthy, sweating like a pig and on the verge of physical collapse. Inside the building the atmosphere was filled with brick and concrete dust, and the vile stench of burning was all pervasive. Farther within the thick walls of the inner corridors the shooting and the sporadic explosions in the surrounding districts were muffled, distant and the air was cool.
“Get the Ambassador a drink!”
The order came from the lips of Lieutenant Miles Winter, the boyish, seemingly unflappable subaltern in command of the Warwickshires; and remarkably, the least hot and bothered man in the Embassy party.
Sir Harold Beeley greedily drank from a canteen. The water tasted metallic and he felt moisture dribbling down his chin. Slowly, his head cleared and he was able to stand again unaided.
He strained to hear what the Egyptian policemen were saying to their compatriots about his party’s sudden arrival at the Heliopolis Palace. He only caught a few of the words, but they were sufficient to convince him that he had not just surrendered himself to the rebels. The relief must have been palpable on his grime-stained, sweat-streaked face but actually he was beyond caring.
The Ambassador had insisted that his deputy, the Charge d’Affaire remain behind at the Embassy, and permitted only two young unmarried second secretaries to accompany him on this ‘hare-brained mission’. He attempted to clean his glasses with a handkerchief, succeeding only in hopelessly smudging them.