by James Philip
It was known that calcium citrate helps the body resist Sr90 by competing with Sr90. This works because bone and bone marrow can only absorb isotopic contaminants at a given rate. Calcium citrate will therefore, reduce Sr90 take up and therefore reduce the total level of contamination. The recommended dosage of calcium citrate was 1000 milligrams daily – adults and children – immediately after an attack, and thereafter 500 milligrams per day for three weeks. In addition to calcium citrate prophylactic doses of vitamin C (ascorbic acid) tended to regulate the production of bone protein and promote the formation of white blood cells. The recommended dosage of Vitamin C was 300 milligrams a day for a month after the first fallout and 100 milligrams daily thereafter for least two months.
After Sr90 the next most dangerous fallout isotopes were iodine131 and iodine133. Radioactive I131 and I133 iodine collects in the thyroid gland in the neck. Adults exposed to these radioactive isotopes of iodine acquire a massively heightened risk of cancer; and because the thyroid gland regulates growth children exposed to these isotopes are likely to be stunted and prone to childhood cancers. It was known that potassium iodide – a daily dose of 130 milligrams taken for at least the first hundred days after an attack - helped to inhibit the build up of I131 and I133 in the thyroid.
Lieutenant-Commander Simon Collingwood completed his brief, didactic review of the situation. He knew exactly what needed to be done and there was nothing to be gained by delaying or attempting in any way, shape or form to finesse the brutality of the decision he was about to make.
Dreadnought’s store of potassium iodide, calcium citrate and vitamin C tablets was sufficient to provide a minimal level of fallout protection to the men he needed to get the boat to sea. He had no surplus to spare for useless hands.
His orders were unambiguous.
‘HMS Dreadnought will make ready for sea with all urgency. CO HMS Dreadnought is hereby empowered to take any measures appropriate to requisition staff and resources to achieve this outcome at the earliest date. Lethal force is hereby authorised against any person, military or civilian who obstructs CO Dreadnought and or, any of his personnel in this work. CO Dreadnought is expressly forbidden to divert resources at his disposal to civilian defence or relief operations....’
Welcome to the brave new world!
The Commanding Officer of HMS Dreadnought cleared his throat.
“We must clear the boat of civilians,” he said resignedly as he rose to his feet and jammed his cap on his head.
Chapter 11
10:15 Hours Monday 29th October 1962
HMS Talavera, 88 Miles East of Whitby
Lieutenant Peter Christopher shut the door of his claustrophobic cabin beneath the bridge and drew up the chair in front of the small, sharp edged plywood counter that served as his desk. His bunk took up most of the rest of the space in the compartment. Hard-edged overhead lockers threatened to brain him if he moved his long, angular frame without extreme due care and attention in any direction.
Talavera was riding relatively easily on her anchors, her bow pointed into the wind and the serried ranks of eight to ten foot waves. Every now and then one of the screws churned and the anchor capstans rattled as the destroyer adjusted her heading. The wind was slipping around to the south and nobody knew if that was a good or a bad thing. As if it mattered. Fallout would be everywhere in time.
Peter was officially off watch but the Old Man had ordered him to take a break on his last round of the ship. No man onboard had conducted himself more calmly than Commander David Penberthy. He’d regularly addressed the crew over the tannoy, and every ninety minutes or so he strolled from stem to stern, patting men on the back, his affable manner and his unruffled presence suggesting that whatever anybody else believed, that not all was lost. His had been an object lesson in grace under pressure.
“You don’t have to try to put your head down, Peter,” the Captain had said, paternally. “I don’t think any of us can do that right now. Just have a few moments to yourself. Stretch your legs. Look in on the wardroom. Have a stiff drink. I need my officers to keep their heads on their shoulders. You can’t take care of your department if you’re not taking care of yourself.”
Peter Christopher had looked into the Wardroom.
Drunk over-stewed coffee.
He’d chatted with the Executive Officer, Hugo Montgommery, who’d just completed his own walk around the ship. Back in his cabin Peter had pulled out a pad of writing paper and begun to write.
Dear Marija,
I don’t know if you will ever receive this letter. I hope with all my heart that you do receive it because then at least, I will know that you have come through today’s madness. I’m not a religious fellow – as I think you know! – but if I was I’d be praying for you and your family and friends. I don’t know if Malta has escaped the fire but if it has then perhaps there is a God after all.
Rather more than by luck than anything else, I suspect, we on Talavera have survived. We were well out at sea running radar trials when the balloon went up. Presently, we are riding on our forward anchors in a hundred feet of water on top of the Dogger Bank out in the middle of the North Sea. The Captain is a seaman of the old school and when the madness began he pointed us out to sea and kept on going for as long as there was fuel in the bunkers. Running away was all we could do. Our magazines are empty, a third of our crew hasn’t come aboard yet and we’re two or three months away from being anywhere near operational. So, anyway, here we are riding on our anchors in the middle of a south westerly gale.
We’re detecting the first fallout clouds but we’re pretty well sealed up and the sick bay took on a full ABC inventory before we sailed. We’ve got enough iodine and calcium citrate tablets to see us through the next six weeks, apparently. Because Talavera is virtually a new build we’ve got brand new filters in the ventilation duct and all the hatches are dogged down as tight as you like. What with one thing and another were sitting as pretty as we could possibly have hoped. We’ve got enough rations onboard – if we stretch them out - to stay at sea ten or eleven days. The only fly in the ointment is that we’re low on bunker oil. We’ll be able to keep power in the ship, pump the bilges and manoeuvre if we have to but it’ll be touch and go if we can make port if we stay out here more than a few days.
Morale onboard is fairly good, probably because the chaps haven’t had much chance to stop to think. The Captain has had us busy closing up the ship, drilling and checking equipment all day. I think the worst thing is not really knowing what’s happened back on land.
The Captain has broadcast that London and targets in East Anglia and further up the East Coast of England have been hit. More than that we don’t know. The only people on the ship who saw anything at all were fellows on the bridge. They reported the night being turned into day several times and a sort of ‘lightning effect’ over the western horizon. The main attack lasted about an hour. After that there were a handful of big flashes in the sky between three and four o’clock, and nothing since. We’d turned off most of our radio and radar kit at that stage in case it got damaged but I don’t think it made any difference. We’ve got equipment failures in several systems because the cack-handed way the yard wired everything it was virtually impossible to tell what had power in it and what didn’t until it was too late. Hopefully, tracing the failures will keep my people busy and stop them worrying about things they can’t do anything about.
The good news is that we’ve received broadcasts from Fleet HQ in the last couple of hours and picked up radio traffic from other ships so we know we’re not alone out here.
An hour ago we received the ‘cease hostilities’ order. I don’t know if it means the war is over. I hope it is although Talavera is still closed up at Condition Two (that’s one step below battle stations).
Christopher hesitated, waves of weariness sweeping over him like the grey, spume flecked swells sweeping under Talavera’s sharp prow. He pulled open the drawer beneath the desk, withdrew the three
small framed photographs. He turned them over, stared.
The first small photograph was of his father, his mother and his sister and he the day he’d passed out of Dartmouth. Eight years ago, it might have been in another lifetime. His mother had died five years ago, a mercy in the circumstances. His sister had married an engineer and emigrated to Australia in 1958. As for the Admiral? Peter hadn’t had much to do with his father since mother had died. The Admiral was a stranger. He’d recently gone out to the Far East to take command of the Pacific Fleet. Peter had read about the appointment in the Navy Gazette. Even on that day eight years ago in the sunshine at Dartmouth the Admiral had been inscrutable, his expression at odds with the smiles of his mother and sister
‘The Christophers graduate at the top of their classes,’ the hero of those long ago Malta convoys, and the former implacable U-boat hunting commander of an elite Western Approaches escort groups had observed. ‘Not half-way down the list.’
The Admiral had seemed miffed that he’d opted to let the Navy send him back to University. The Christophers were seagoing, fighting sailors not ‘technicians and staff flunkies’. People assumed the Admiral routinely pulled strings to oil his progress from one plum posting to another; nothing could be further from the truth. Peter might have been disowned for all he knew.
Marija was the only person in whom he’d ever confided how much his father’s estrangement and his coldly distant disappointment had hurt him as a boy, and continued to wound him even now. His mother’s premature death at fifty-three, hastened by loneliness and drink, had sharpened the edge of his pain and anger and made the breach with his father almost irreconcilable.
The second picture was of the Calleja siblings. He gazed at the faded monochrome portrait of Marija aged fourteen, her elder brother Sam, and younger brother Joe on a balcony with the Grand Harbour at their backs. Sam, four years older, obviously felt he was too old for such nonsense as family snaps. Joe would have been only ten or eleven at the time, and Marija – having temporarily put aside her crutches - had her arms around Sam’s waist and Joe’s shoulders. Sam was half-frowning, Joe was grinning guiltily and Marija was laughing, her long dark hair catching on the light summer breeze.
The Admiral had commanded a cruiser squadron based at Malta at the time and Peter’s mother – having deposited him and his sister, Elspeth in boarding schools in England – had gone out to join the hero in Valetta for the last six months of his first seagoing posting as a newly promoted Rear-Admiral. In Malta, his mother, as was her way, had enthusiastically thrown herself into the social whirl of the Mediterranean Fleet, and devoted much of her spare time to miscellaneous good causes. Malta had been wrecked by bombing during the war and in the cash-strapped years of the late forties reconstruction was painfully slow. Thousands of Maltese were still living among the ruins and basic services like water supply, electricity, and hospitals were operating at a level that would never have been tolerated in England.
It was during the course of his mother’s ‘good works’ that she encountered the Calleja family, and their ‘crippled’ daughter, Marija whom, along with her baby brother Joe had been miraculously rescued from their collapsed home in Vittoriosa twenty-four hours after a German air raid in 1942. There had been few such miracles during the Malta blitz and even in 1950 Marija’s story still attracted a great deal of local interest. At the time Peter Christopher’s mother had encountered the Calleja family, Marija had been in a year-long interregnum between a series of major operations that a remarkable naval surgeon called, Reginald Stephens hoped would eventually enable the ‘Heroine of Vittoriosa-Birgu’ to one day, walk again unaided by crutches or sticks.
While Peter Christopher’s mother had been unable to offer any real additional practical support - the medical side of things was already well in hand - she’d been captivated by the vivacious, laughing girl child in the wheelchair. In retrospect Peter suspected that those few months in Malta were the happiest of his mother’s life. She’d become tremendously friendly with Marija’s mother, an unlikely friendship given that she was the daughter of English country gentlefolk and Marija Calleja, the proud descendent of honest Sicilian peasant farmers. The two women had corresponded until his mother’s death, never so far as he knew confiding each other’s secrets to another living soul. Peter’s mother had been completely captivated by Marija and it had been a terrible wrench for her to leave Malta. Back in England she was a changed woman, aware for the first time how ‘shamelessly’ – her own word - she’d been ‘neglecting’ her own children. Practically her last act before leaving Malta was to ask Marija if she’d consider writing to a pen friend in England. At the time she had in mind Elspeth, Peter’s elder sister. Elspeth had been mortally offended by the notion of having a pen friend several years her junior – Elspeth was then nearly sixteen and Marija just thirteen - and in any event, that sort of thing wasn’t her cup of tea. So it was that Peter had become the heroine of Vittoriosa-Birgu’s English pen friend.
That was more than half his life ago.
The pen friends latest exchange of portraits had been that spring.
Peter gazed at the image that seized his whole attention every time he trusted himself to look upon it. Marija had sent him the specially posed, studio head and shoulders monochrome picture, six inches by four, which he’d had mounted in a silvery frame in Edinburgh. There was a small crucifix on a slender chain hanging from her neck. Her skin was clean and clear, her eyes focused a little off camera to show her face in half profile. Her hair was pulled back in a traditional, and to modern eyes, almost Edwardian way and her expression was intent rather than serious, her eyes were smiling...
It is odd that as I write everything around me on the ship seems so normal. Everybody is going about their duties and the ship is quiet, just like it was a normal first watch. I don’t think what has happened has really begun to sink in yet.
Peter had been engaged once – last year to a vicar’s daughter called Phoebe – but it would never have worked. On the face of it Phoebe was very nearly the perfect wife for a career naval officer; petite, clever, pragmatic and devout, she believed in service and in the virtue of duty, and she’d latched onto him like a limpet. He’d been flattered, mildly infatuated with her for several months and not realised the error of his ways until he’d found himself engaged; although he couldn’t later actually remember ever uttering the fateful question: ‘Will you, Phoebe Louise Sellars, do me, the honour of marrying me?” Phoebe was far too well brought up a young lady to have lied a about a thing like that and it would have been extremely bad form to have disputed her word on such a sensitive matter. Especially, after Phoebe’s father had had the engagement announced in The Times. One day they’d been ‘dating’, the next Phoebe was discussing the seating plan for the wedding reception.
It was over a fortnight – three or four letters - before he dared confess his ‘problem’ to Marija, and another week before she replied, by airmail. Customarily their letters went by overland mail or by the normal shipping routes and sometimes took weeks to arrive. Strangely, when he’d been based at Simonstown near the southern tip of Africa his letters had invariably reached Malta within the week, whereas, from England there was no telling when she’d receive his latest missive, or he’d receive her latest news. Sometimes, letters mysteriously arrived out of sequence so they’d got into the habit of appending a footnote to each letter specifying to which communication they were replying.
Marija hadn’t been upset, or jealous, or angry in any way with his foolishness. She’d known from his previous correspondence on the subject that he hadn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, fallen in love with Phoebe Sellars and didn’t think their ‘relations’ would survive his next sea going posting.
“Have you told her about me?” Marija had asked rhetorically.
He had once, innocently in passing and Phoebe had been rather stuffy about it so he hadn’t mentioned it again.
“You and I tell each other everything,” Marij
a’s letter had reminded him. “If I was your wife I would not put up with it. I would insist that you stopped writing to that brazen Mediterranean temptress! Three is company, as you English say!”
He’d known Marija was being tongue-in-cheek but nevertheless he’d been struck by the fact she wasn’t mincing her words. It was as if she understood how torn he was to be considering breaking – because he was and had been ever since the reality of the ‘engagement’ had sunk in - with Phoebe. He was not, and had never been, a choirboy, notwithstanding he’d always, rather clumsily and guiltily, glossed over his easy come easy go affairs with girlfriends and other women. He hadn’t know what Marija had read between the lines over the years, or even if she had strong views on the subject. Not until that letter.
‘If I was your wife I would not put up with it...’
Marija had never mentioned a boyfriend of her own. Marija was lively, articulate, funny, beautiful and the Maltese valued marriage and family above practically all things so he’d always assumed that one day she’d write to him to inform him of her own forthcoming nuptials. That letter had turned everything he’d taken for granted about his pen friend’s feelings for him on their head.
“There are only three things you can do,” Marija had counselled. “Firstly, you must marry her. She sounds like a very nice and very well brought up young woman who plans to support you in your career and will almost certainly fill up your home with bambinos. Secondly, you can tell her that you don’t love her and that your engagement is over. This would be cruel and she would spend the rest of her life wondering why you could not find it in your heart to love her, and how she could have misjudged a rascal like you so badly.”
Peter Christopher had smiled as he read these words, reassured before he read, and re-read, a dozen or twenty times, the following lines.