by David Black
Even though he felt shot to pieces, and more than half drunk after Hubert’s gin, he was too wired to sleep, and too distracted to join the welcome home party in the wardroom, so he walked off the base and round the Sliema Creek to where the ferries had resumed plying across Marsamxett Harbour to the bottom of the Kingsway steps.
The German bombers that had been such a permanent fixture, ranging free over the island’s skies, were absent now and life was beginning to re-emerge from the cellars and the dugouts. Across the water, old medieval Valetta presented a blasted and ragged profile that still managed to glow in the late sunshine, but the closer the ferry approached, the more the town’s scars showed. He got off and walked up the rubble-lined hill, where he came face with the other legacy of the bombing: the patina of pale dust that blanketed everything. It got in his eyes and up his nose and gritted his teeth, and rose in little puffs with every footstep. There were a surprising number of people about, nearly all civilians in their threadbare clothes, and all of them scrawny as well as dusty too. Since he’d left Malta all those months ago the rationing had become so strict there was nothing left for shops to sell so everyone ate from soup kitchens that had been set up by the Government all over the island. Even though the rump of the last convoy had made it through, its cargo had been mostly military supplies; whatever there was to eat aboard had been swallowed up by the distribution system and already passed around. Everybody looked grimmer, scrawnier. And nobody met his eyes, or smiled the way he’d remembered. The Maltese had used to be such a jolly, irrepressible lot. Not anymore.
He also noticed how the dust had given the bloody sand flies a new lease of life since he was last here.
When he got to Scots Street he turned left and walked the short distance to where he remembered the RAF HQ offices had been. Like every other building, little of it was left intact, just a doorway that opened into a collapsed façade, with a small RAF ensign hanging limply above it, and an Erk standing outside in shorts and a tin hat, on guard with his Lee Enfield and fixed bayonet.
To his astonishment, the spindly RAF “other rank” recognised him.
‘Ullo, Mr Gilmour, sir. Long time no see,’ he said, snapping off a “general salute” with his rifle. But then Harry had been a regular here when he was last on Malta, working with the RAF photo-recon technicians on a little project for the Tenth Flotilla’s navigators.
‘Hello,’ said Harry, who had no idea who the lad was. ‘I see you’ve had the builders in.’
The Erk guffawed loudly, ‘Yeah and look at the mess. Bloody cowboys. You lookin’ for the photo reconnaissance offices again, sir?’
Harry nodded.
‘Second pile of rubble on left then keep going until you come to the big ’ole. They’re in there, sir.’
When he got there and popped his head in, he half expected to see Katty sitting at her desk behind her big typewriter, and had little butterflies wondering how he’d find her. But she wasn’t there. In fact, he didn’t see anyone he recognised. At least not immediately. A gaunt, bespectacled pilot officer, with no wings, and who looked about 14, wandered into the room clutching a slip of paper. He looked Harry up and down and then after a deliberate pause, asked him, ‘Can I help you?’
But before Harry could answer, a corporal who followed the pilot officer into the room, clapped eyes on him and exclaimed, ‘Blimey! Mr Gilmour. What did you do to get sent back ’ere, sir?’
Even after the corporal had walked him back out onto Scots Street, Harry wasn’t exactly sure what had happened. Had he done something wrong? If so, what? All he’d asked was, ‘Miss Kadzow, is she about?’ And the entire room had turned into a Bateman cartoon: The Man Who Asked About the Polish Nightclub Singer! And the next thing he knew he was on the street.
‘Miss Kadzow don’t work here anymore, sir,’ the corporal had said at length, like he was explaining the death of a favourite pet to a five-year-old. Harry had stared at him, and under his gaze the corporal had looked uncomfortable. ‘It was after the Groupie went—’
‘Group Captain Mahaddie?’ asked Harry. Mahaddie had been the RAF’s deputy air officer commanding, and despite his exalted position, he and the lowly RNVR Lieutenant Gilmour had shared something of a colourful past, both of them arriving on the island together after dramatic unscheduled diversions. Harry had liked Mahaddie – eventually – and he remembered how the man had always looked after Katty Kadzow, but only in a strictly avuncular uncle sort of way.
‘He’s gone too?’ asked Harry.
‘Aye, sir. To the Desert Air Force in Cairo, sir. He’s runnin’ fighter ops there now.’
‘And?’ said Harry, meaning he was waiting to hear about Katty.
The corporal shuffled, ‘One of the new scrambled eggs came in one day and said she wouldn’t be comin’ back. Told us she was an “undesirable alien”, sir, and that we was to just shut up about her,’ he said, looking up the street, as if she might suddenly appear walking down it and catch him.
“Scambled eggs” was RAF slang for the braid they slapped on staff officers’ caps. Harry didn’t understand. Suddenly the sky was filled with the deep-throated roar of Rolls Royce Merlin engines, and a loose-deuce of Spitfires went winging their way out over Marsamxett Harbour. Harry followed their progress but when he turned back, the corporal was gone.
****
Harry hadn’t expected Katty to open the door at Wincairns’ preposterous villa; a housemaid maybe, or being Wincairns, perhaps a butler.
He had first set eyes on Katty Kadzow when she fronted a swing band in the Union Club on the top floor of a Venetian-era palace called the Auberge de Provence – while it had still been standing. She had been an impossibly exotic creature to the young ingénue Gilmour fresh out from Blighty – a creature from another world, unattainable and entangled in a famous love affair with a wild and fabulously brave RAF reconnaissance pilot called ‘Chally’ Challoner, whose exploits hunting the Italian fleet had passed into island legend. And then she and Harry had been flung together – Harry and Katty, in the RAF photo-reconnaissance section offices where Katty had her day job as a civilian ‘girl Friday’. She’d been foisted on him to type up his translations of those 1920s Italian inshore sailing guides he’d found in a second-hand bookshop. The raw intelligence hiding in plain sight between their covers had allowed the Tenth’s submarines to operate close inshore without fear of piling up on a reef or burying their bows in a sandbar, and the RAF PR boys had provided the aerial reconnaissance shots that supplemented the guides’ charts and sailing instructions.
When she opened the door, he felt his throat contract; it was really her. He hardly noticed how diminished she was.
‘Hello, Katty,’ he said, not sure whether to offer to shake her hand, or put his arms round her like he used to do.
Her eyes, hiding in their dugouts, looked out at him suspiciously, from deep cover, then they lit up.
‘Oh my! Look at you!’ she said, her voice slightly croaky. ‘You are a big boy now.’ But she stood there, still holding the door, not stepping back, or forward, just looking him up and down in a way that made him feel slightly mocked. He noticed she didn’t say his name, and in that moment he saw her more clearly.
Shrunken; no more haughty, erect presence to her anymore, but not nearly as skinny as the other civilians he’d seen – the ones who’d been living out of soup kitchens. No, indeed, Katty didn’t look like she’d been living on just the basic ration. And the light tan to her skin under her light floral sun dress showed off the fact she was still a beautiful woman. Even so there was something missing.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me in?’
She regarded him coolly, ‘That’s very forward of you, Lieutenant Gilmour. I might already have a gentleman caller.’
Harry bowed his head and went to step back, ‘Oh …’ was all he said.
‘Oh God! Don’t be so English!’ and she flung the door wide, stepped forward and gave him a hug.
Harry couldn’t quite recall how t
heir romance had started under the nose of Chally – the larger-than-life, burn-the-candle-at-both-ends Chally, the man of the grand-gesture and the huge heart that was so big it was impossible for him to look down and notice what was happening with the little people.
Harry hadn’t been able to work out what she had seen in him back then, compared to her flashy fly boy, and in a weak moment he had asked her. She’d replied frankly, ‘There’s something about you that tells me you’re going to walk away from this war in one piece. You’re a survivor. I can tell. Because I know so many who aren’t. And maybe if I cling to you very tight …’
Chally had been posted away at one point, to Cairo. But then he’d come back, and the part of Katty that had liked living in the candle flame too, prevailed, and she went back to him. And then Harry had been posted too.
That afternoon, in a very un-fussed fashion and without too much pointless chatter, Harry and Katty picked up where they’d left off.
It was getting dark and Harry had already taken his leave and was walking down the road leading from the villa’s cliff, when he walked right into Wincairns, puffing his way up.
‘I know who you are!’ said the figure, wheezing as he stopped, ‘You’re Lieutenant Gilmour, and you’ve been to see my Katty! Our Katty, indeed! Good man! Good man! Was she pleased? I bet she was? Even if she did go all Slavic and sulky on you, she would have been pleased, I assure you!’
As more of his breath came back, Wincairns had become more expansive. Harry must come back any time he wanted and stay as long as he wanted, and with that Wincairns had given him a knowing look. ‘She pines, positively pines, for the attention of a good man,’ he’d said, smiling. Had she told him why she’d lost her day job? She had, said Harry. ‘Preposterous!’ Wincairns had bellowed. ‘Where was she supposed to have acquired a radio, and how was she supposed to broadcast quietly, without all those listening stations hearing her? Carrier pigeons? How was she supposed to keep them out of any half competent Maltese thief’s cooking pot?’
Nobody had actually told Katty why she had been ‘fired’ from the day job; but she had finally heard the rumour – that she was a spy. There had been no proof of course; how could there be since she wasn’t? So there had been no official action taken against her. But once it was out there, she really had become persona non grata.
‘Imagine, in a different world, if I’d been working for the Germans,’ she’d reassured Harry, with her dry sardonic smile. ‘Unlike you British, they wouldn’t have bothered with such niceties as lack of evidence, they’d just have put a noose around my neck to be on the safe side.’
‘That’s why I’m looking after her,’ said Wincairns, with arch pride. ‘We bohemians must stick together in these dark times …’ he paused, wistful; then, ‘Ah Katty! All that talent going to waste now. No stage left standing upon which she can perform. She is an artist, and a beauty, and now she’s trapped in the wreckage.’ And he thought about that too, for a moment, then, ‘In fact she’s like a metaphor for all Europe!’ he exclaimed, and looked thoroughly pleased with himself. ‘Still, she has us to look after her, eh Lieutenant Gilmour? We shall not abandon her!’
Harry pondered on how even Wincairns was looking a lot more saggy these days, the fleshy rolls all but gone. The man had often reminded Harry of other figures he’d met in the course of this war, who did things nobody quite understood, and who appeared to live in a slightly different world from everybody else, but here on Malta, hunger was proving to be a great leveller.
When he got back to Lazaretto, there were letters for him, and gin; the boats transiting to and from the First Flotilla in the eastern Med could now afford to make space for officers’ stores these days. One of the letters was from his mother; wondering what had happened between him and his father.
How had she known something had happened?
He had had a long talk with her before he’d finally been shipped back to the Tenth, after he’d also had a long talk with his father. But he had said nothing about it to her. And, he bet, neither had his father.
He remembered it in every detail. Indeed, in his leisure hours he often reflected on them. On the night, in his father’s study, after the children had finally stopped crawling all over Duncan Gilmour and gone to bed, father and son had talked.
Afterwards, when he talked to his mother, Harry had been distracted at first; for a start, his father letting children crawl all over him? Imagine.
But Harry’s mother always knew when stuff was going on; she could read both of them like a book. Once he’d worked it out himself what had actually happened between him and his father, he’d think about telling her.
Right now he was happy just to sit on a deckchair at the far end of the Lazaretto’s gallery with the pink gin the flotilla’s local steward John had brought him, with his familiar, discreet nod; he sat, swaddled in his submariner’s shapeless white pullover, watch jacket and muffler against the autumn evening chill.
It gave him space to think about Shirley Lamont, and the letter he was holding from her, with its tea stain ring he bet fitted exactly the mugs they used in the Ruchill Hospital ambulance canteen.
Shirley.
How he wished she was sitting here with him now, just to talk about stuff. Not to be on a date, just to be the friends she insisted they now were. Maybe plan to visit Louis’ bookshop on the Kingsway in the morning, if it was still there, imagining her eyes going wide with delight as she stepped down into the gloom and amongst all the books, and what she’d think of Louis.
He took a gulp of gin and remembered her, back in Glasgow.
The bomb that was to prematurely end the career of HM Submarine P268 before it had even begun, hadn’t yet hit when Harry had risked giving himself a 24-hour pass from his job as appointed skipper, and gone off in search of her.
He’d got himself from Greenock to Glasgow and decided to start at the ambulance depot canteen, and lo-and-behold, there she’d been, drinking tea and leafing through the Daily Mirror.
‘What do you want?’ had been her opening gambit when she saw him standing over her.
‘The children,’ he’d said, referring to his parents’ three evacuees, ‘they wanted you to come and see the red squirrels they’re feeding in the garden.’
And she’d sat there, rocking with laughter. ‘That’s the best you can do?’ she’d said. ‘After everything? Come and look at our squirrels?’
But it had got her laughing, and once he’d done that, Harry knew he’d have her attention.
He remembered the walk they took, ending up by the statue of Lord Roberts, the two of them sitting under his bronze horse, looking across the park that ran along the River Kelvin towards Gilmorehill and the university’s gothic rocket rising out of the trees.
‘Did they name the hill after you?’ she said. ‘No,’ he said, ‘Different spelling.’
It might have been peacetime again, a late summer afternoon from a different, saner world. She told him about her life these days.
‘The sheer numbers of bodies got to everyone in the end, one way or another,’ she said, gazing at the view so she wasn’t actually picturing any of the images her words were describing. ‘But then the bombing fizzled out. It’s more or less stopped now, so we don’t really get the mass casualties anymore. Jerry just lays on the odd tip-and-run to keep us on our toes. It’s usually a ship in the docks they’re after. You’d be amazed how rarely they hit them. The blackout keeps us busy, though. Folk falling down holes or walking into lampposts. And there’s the accidents in the shipyards. Everybody working flat out, everybody knackered, and things just happen. You wouldn’t believe what steel can do to soft tissue, muscle and bone. Terrible, terrible wounds. Crush injuries, steel plates slipping out of slings, slicing men up. Burns, and all their attendant horrors. Then there are the ships that come in from convoy. The damaged ones. We’re never away from the Elderslie Drydock. That’s where they take the ones that’ve been torpedoed. When they drain the flooded compartments, that’s
when they start finding all the poor chaps who didn’t make it out. Or the bits of them. The yard workers do the cleaning up, then they give us these sailcloth bags. There’s a big mortuary place we take them where they do their best to find out who they were. Some mother’s son from somewhere.’
Harry remembered listening in silence, lest anything he might say reveal everything churning through him: his cringing at his mindless assumptions until now that the war was only being fought far away, by people like him; the shame he felt, that she should’ve had to live through such things, because for her they were everyday events now, and that he was powerless to protect her; and the pride he felt, for his Shirley. How brave she was.
They’d walked to a café with an Italian name at the bottom of Byres Road and had a cup of tea. He remembered the café having three big photographs in the windows, of the owner’s sons in British military uniform – protection probably, because of the Italian name, in case anyone doubted the owner’s loyalty and wanted to hurl bricks through the glass. Then as the evening drew in, they found themselves at the bandstand in Kelvingrove Park, sitting in the middle of the rising amphitheatre of empty seats. She’d stared at the stage, silent for a while. When she began talking it was like she was catching up on a story she’d already started some time ago in her head.
‘You know, there was a time I couldn’t wait to be with you,’ she’d said, right out the blue, very matter-of-fact, in the same tone she’d used to describe what the ambulance crews did with the body bags from the Elderslie Drydock. ‘You made me feel interesting and witty and a grown up person.’ She flashed him a brief glance like she was checking it was still him she was talking to. ‘You made me feel special,’ she said.
Then she was staring back at the empty stage, all shadows in the twilight.