by James Philip
The bus began to climb up the hill. At first the incline was gradual, then the road turned, twisted and soon with the increasing steepness of the gradient gears began to crash, acrid fumes began to belch from the labouring vehicle’s rattling exhaust pipe. Some days the jolting, stop start bus journeys made Marija feel old and worn, today she hardly noticed, her thoughts elsewhere.
Something terrible had happened in the early hours of Sunday morning.
When the bus stopped outside the old citadel she walked at her customary measured pace towards the medieval gate. The series of operations to straighten her left thigh and rebuild her crushed pelvis had - in a mechanical sense - worked better than even Captain Reginald Stephens – the extraordinary naval surgeon to whom she owed her life – had hoped. However, on uneven surfaces if she tried to walk too fast or forgot to consciously put one foot down, carefully, after the other, she tended to lose her balance. If she hurried overmuch she might end up tottering like a drunk, and she was always inclined to fall harder than she ought. So this morning, of all mornings, she walked at her own steady, relatively slow pace. There were treacherous cobblestones underfoot, testing her patience and constantly tempting her to throw out her arms like a tightrope walker.
St Catherine’s Hospital for Woman was situated off the Cathedral plaza. It had opened in 1936, a jumble of small wards, treatment rooms and cupboard-sized offices in a three storey block arranged around a cool, airy, shaded courtyard. The institution – which operated on the model of a typical small English cottage hospital catering specifically to women and children - was constantly under threat of closure; the only thing that kept it open were the tireless, indefatigable endeavours of its tigerishly formidable Chief Physician and Senior Administrative Officer, Doctor Margo Seiffert. With her nurses Margo preferred the title of ‘Director’ or simply ‘Margo’, but the authorities in Valetta tended to be more impressed by long and unnecessarily convoluted titles. Margo said it was the ‘Italian streak that runs in Malta’s veins’.
Marija’s mother was Sicilian, her father the son of a British naval officer who’d been killed in the far away Dardanelles in 1915. That she bore the surname Calleja was an accident of that sad history; her maternal grandmother having remarried in 1918 and her father assuming his step father’s name. Notwithstanding her own somewhat polyglot lineage, Marija understood exactly how an outsider like Margo Seiffert could see so clearly the underlying tides in the Maltese character. Before the 1939-45 war there had been a popular movement in the Maltese Archipelago to be reunited with Italy. The war had undermined and destroyed that groundswell, possibly for many generations to come but the Maltese psyche was complex. The Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Moors, Barbary pirates, Christian Crusaders, the Knights Hospitaller from which the Order of St John, the Knights of Malta had evolved, and latterly, the British had all been lords of Malta at one time or another – sometimes for many centuries – but each in their turn had relinquished their hold over the Archipelago; yielded to the new overlords...
The Maltese had never been their own overlords; and yet they were as a people a melange of all those peoples and religions that had ever held sway over them. Marija’s father was half-British and half Maltese, her mother likewise half-Sicilian; what did that make her? A quarter of this, a half of that? And what of her parents’ parents? Her mother’s maternal grandparents came from Naples; her father’s grandmother had been Sephardic Jew, so once upon a time Marija’s distant ancestors had been expelled from Portugal in 1492. Yet she was Maltese in her soul, to the very heart of her being even if she had no idea what it actually meant to be Maltese. Would she understand herself and her heritage any better if the British left?
Marija set aside such problematic thoughts upon entering the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women. The building was her second home, a second home that was with every passing day becoming her real home. Within its walls she was among her truest friends in Christendom, within a true sisterhood in which she was no longer the helpless child her parents – bless their loving souls – remembered every time they laid eyes upon her. Among her sisters Marija was her own self, free and independent and most importantly, needed.
A small crowd had gathered in the reception room on the ground floor, apparently waiting for Margo Seiffert. In the thirteen years Marija had known Margo Seiffert the sixty-one year old former United States Navy Surgeon-Commander had become her best friend in the world.
“Margo’s been on the phone to the American Consulate in Valetta,” Marija was informed in hushed tones. Margo was a small, wiry, greying bundle of restless energy who kept the clinic alive by constantly recruiting and training local nurses – nursing ‘assistants’, officially – from all over the archipelago.
Because of her childhood injuries from which she would never – in the eyes of officialdom – ‘fully recover’ Marija wouldn’t have been accepted into any ‘authorised’ nurse training program on Malta or anywhere else. Even she had to admit, very occasionally, that she simply wasn’t capable of performing all the duties normally expected of a nurse. However, Margo didn’t care about details like that. She took whatever a young woman had to offer and set about making the most of it. Inevitably, Margo had clashed with successive British Chief Medical Officers in Valetta, although not so much of late. This was yet another sign that the British were winding down what remained of their colonial administration. In fact many of the functions of that administration had already been quietly passed, or as Margo would say ‘abdicated’ to local officers in recent years.
Marija had travelled to the hospital in her distinctive pale blue uniform dress. The uniform was virtually indistinguishable from that worn by junior nurses in the ‘official’ centrally managed infant Maltese health system except for the absence of badges denoting her grade or place of work. St Catherine’s Hospital for Women was a privately operated institution wholly supported by gifts, donations and in no small measure the largesse of its landlord, the nearby Cathedral. Marija hung up her coat and went behind the reception desk to check the duty roster. She was pleasantly surprised to discover that she was assigned to the first floor Children’s Ward that day.
Doctor Margo Seiffert bustled into the room. She took a moment to wipe the sheen of vexation off her deeply suntanned, lined face. Her once straw blond hair was grey and the gracile slenderness which would have made her figure willowy in her younger days had become sinewy, rather birdlike in her later middle age. Notwithstanding, she was exactly the same bundle of irrepressible energy whom Marija had first encountered when she’d been Surgeon Captain Reginald Stephens’s - the man who’d patiently rebuilt her broken body - deputy and the senior orthopaedic surgical registrar at the Bighi Royal Naval Hospital at Kalkara all those years ago.
Marija hadn’t realised until much later that the two surgeons - so utterly unalike and seemingly temperamentally utterly incompatible - had been lovers who’d decided to devote the final years of their already brilliant careers to dragging – kicking and screaming, Malta’s antiquated provisions for the health and welfare of its women and children into the twentieth century.
“Can I have your attention please!” Margo asked. Her voice was a little hoarse but as always, her manner was briskly businesslike. “It feels like I’ve spent forever on the telephone since yesterday,” she smiled ruefully, “or at least that’s what it seems like!”
There was an uncomfortable mutter of amusement.
“There is good news and there is bad news,” the Director of St Catherine’s Hospital of Women declared. “First, the bad news. Sometime during the small hours of Sunday morning the world went mad.” She held up her hands. She planned to elaborate on her initial bald statement shortly. “The good news,” she continued after the most momentary of hesitations, “is that most of the madness stopped several hundred miles to the north of us.”
Margo Seiffert was already shaking her head, forestalling questions she couldn’t answer: questions that nobody c
ould yet answer and that historians would agonise over for as long as humanity prevailed as a viable species.
“The Americans, the British and the Russians and I suspect all their allies tried to destroy each other. There’s some suggestion the Russians might have attacked the Chinese. I don’t know why. It doesn’t matter. I’m not even sure if anybody won. All I do know is that the Russians lost. I have no idea what is left of Europe north, west or east of the Alps. I do know that Istanbul and Ankara were badly damaged in Turkey. My information is that the war is over, according to the American Embassy in Rome, anyway. When I spoke to the Consulate in Valetta the Consul told me that the British have declared martial law on Malta because they are afraid of some kind of popular rising being whipped up by communist ‘sleeper agents’. They think there may be assassinations, sabotage and quote ‘Bolshevik inspired civil disobedience’. It sounded like nonsense to me but then if somebody had just dropped nuclear bombs on London I’d be a little bit paranoid, too.”
The women in the room stared dumbly, mouths agape at the older woman.
Nothing that Margo Seiffert had said had truly sunk in until then.
London bombed?
London gone?
How many people lived in London?
Six, seven million?
“I have communicated with the public health people in Valetta and offered my full support to the civilian authorities. Until I hear from them we shall continue as normal and take what steps we can to mitigate the likely public health implications of what has happened in the north.”
Marija’s thoughts were jangling.
Margo was talking about fall out. Radiation from the bombs.
“The wind is blowing from the south-east and has been blowing from that direction for the last thirty-six hours,” Margo was saying. It was as if her friend and mentor was speaking to her from the far end of a long tunnel. “If and when the wind comes around to the north it will be only a matter of time before we will be threatened with fallout.”
Marija listened in a daze.
Margo didn’t talk much about her career before she came to Malta. She’d been married to a naval officer who’d been killed in a sea battle just before the end of the Second War. Before that war she’d been one of the first female surgeons in a prestigious Boston hospital, and during the 1945 war the senior orthopaedic surgeon on a hospital ship at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The Americans had given her a row of medals for her ‘bravery under fire’. After the war she’d been with the American occupation forces in Berlin, Vienna, and later with the US Navy 5th Fleet Surgeon General’s Staff in Naples where she’d met Doctor Stephens and shortly thereafter, followed him back to Malta where Marija had first encountered her on a stiflingly hot, sultry summer day in 1949.
Margo Seiffert spoke levelly, without a trace of fear or doubt and gradually the underlying panic in the room slowly, surely subsided.
“When something terrible happens all that we can do is thank God for our blessings,” the Director of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women said. “The beautiful island upon which we stand has been spared. By the grace of God we are alive as are all our friends and our families on this island. Be thankful for this. Be thankful that for us life goes on and that we still have our own fate in our own hands. It is our job, our duty, to do what we can to care for the people who depend upon us now, and will come to depend upon us in the future.” Suddenly, Margo clapped her hands together. “Let’s get to it! We have work to do, ladies!”
Chapter 9
An extract from ‘The Anatomy of Armageddon: America, Cuba, the USSR and the Global Disaster of October 1962’ reproduced by the kind permission of the New Memorial University of California, Los Angeles Press published on 27th October 2012 in memoriam of the fallen.
It was not appreciated by the Kennedy White House until it was too late that ‘the gallant Brits’ who’d stood shoulder to shoulder with Uncle Sam in three World Wars – three wars fought, to put it crudely, to solidify American World economic and military hegemony – weren’t ever going to make the same mistake again.
Before the October War the British talked about a ‘special relationship’; in Washington they talked about the benefits of having willing ‘clients’, a ‘friends’ who could be relied upon to be America’s ‘apologists in the councils of Europe’. True, the Brits had misbehaved back in 1956 but the Suez fiasco was in the past, and afterwards the Brits had seemed to be securely in the back pockets of the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations.
However, after October 1962 there was no more ‘special relationship’. It is jaw-droppingly apparent from his recently published memoirs that the first post-war leader of the UKIEA – a disparate group of the survivors of Harold MacMillan’s pre-war Conservative government and available members of the Labour and Liberal oppositions – Edward Heath, privately regarded the Kennedy Administration collectively as a bunch of ‘freebooting murderers little better than the Nazis and on a par with the idiots in the Kremlin’ who had provoked the global catastrophe. In late 1962 and early 1963 neither he, or anybody else in the world, dared say it out aloud but a terrible, unforgivable crime of unimaginable proportions had been committed and Edward Heath privately vowed, that one day there would be justice for the murdered, and for the murdered hopes of the generations to come.
In Washington, the Kennedy people were so glad they were still alive and that the USA had got away so lightly – less than five million dead and injured, between 2 and 3 percent of the population – that they honestly believed that God was on their side. As JFK toured the outskirts of the bombed cities of the north east and the deep south he talked about reconstruction, and began to build the myth of the great war of national self-preservation that the USA had been ‘forced to wage’ by an implacable, evil enemy who’d launched an unprovoked, massive pre-meditated assault on the last best hope for civilisation. The sacred soil of the United States of America had been stained with the precious blood of its citizens, scorched by the fire of the red dragon of Marxist-Leninist evil but the American people had prevailed. America was great, its destiny never more manifest, the rightness of its cause self-evidently proven. He might have been Caesar returning from Gaul, except he wasn’t.
In the winter of 1962-63 Kennedy and his aides were a little bewildered by the first murmurings of discontent from their surviving European allies. Initially, the Washington cabal wrote this dissonance off as a passing whimper. American charity and wisdom would make all well soon enough. This was a new age and the world was to be rebuilt in an American image. The new Romans had arrived and the world was going to be a better place in years to come.
Kennedy’s people ought to have known that their ‘friends’ would never, ever forgive them for their hubris. The problem was that they genuinely believed they sat at God’s right hand when in fact in the United Kingdom and France the survivors now viewed the Kennedy Administration as a monster kneeling obediently at the Devil’s left hind claw.
If Kennedy’s people had bothered to read the early assessments of their handiwork they might have repented sooner.
This is an extract from one of the first damage assessments dated 15th December 1962 and initialled by JFK on 23rd December 1962.
For the Eyes of the Senior Command List Only
Strategic Air Command
Damage Assessment/United Kingdom/Serial 006412UK
Date: 12/15/62
Summary Report Status: Provisional
Command Summary
Further to Serial 0050788UK a more comprehensive damage assessment has now been carried out by teams on the ground with the cooperation of the UK Interim Emergency Administration under acting Prime Minister Heath.
The Attack
Aerial and ground surveys now confirm that twenty-three fully generated nuclear warheads detonated over or on the territory or the inshore waters of the United Kingdom.
19 (Nineteen) of these warheads were probably delivered via SS-4 or SS-5 MRBMs and four (4) by freefall bombs
by Soviet Bisons which evaded the RAF fighter screen over the Norwegian Sea. Surviving RAF intercept documentation indicates that seventeen (17) of twenty-one (21) Soviet bombers were shot down short of targeting range, and the remaining hostiles were destroyed after they had made their attacks.
The attack fell mainly on London, south eastern counties and the east coast counties where US and British nuclear strike assets were located. However, there were also three strikes in the north west of England.
London. The city was hit by at least four (4) warheads in the 1-2 megaton range. All four strikes were airbursts at heights of between one thousand and three thousand feet.
Kent and Sussex. The Medway Estuary was targeted by a single 1 megaton ground burst 0.2 miles south of the dockyard complex at Chatham. Gravesend was also targeted by a single ground burst. Further airbursts targeted Manston and Canterbury.