Won't Get Fooled Again

by James Philip

  Inevitably, Lucy missed her father, and Government House sometimes felt a little empty without Catherine, Philip and Anne, even though the latter came ‘home’ at holiday times and now and then, or just turned up unannounced, usually to have a chinwag with Marija or Mary Griffin, Lady Marija’s Appointments Secretary…

  Marija smiled at Lucy.

  “How horrible was school today?” She asked conspiratorially.

  Lucy giggled.

  “Not very,” she confessed.

  It was around that time every afternoon that the Governor’s Spouse – Lucy’s mother had thought that was a dreadfully old-fashioned, odd title – laid down her pen, made final checks that all was in order for whatever events were planned that evening, and spent a little quality time with her bambinos.

  Elisabetta was a precocious three-and-a-quarter-year-old force of nature; whereas, her younger brother Miles, born shortly after Peter and Marija had taken up post at Yarralumla in 1966, was at eighteen months old, a relatively quiet, calm, gurglingly happy toddler.

  Until the last few weeks, Mary Griffin, Marija’s friend and the Government House Appointments Secretary – in effect, her private secretary and companion – would have welcomed Lucy back home, and joined the party in the Yarralumla Nursery.

  However, Mary was expecting her first baby – due any time now, Marija said, and she should know because she had trained and practiced as a midwife back on Malta right up to the day that she had married Peter – and on her friend’s orders, was resting in her rooms.

  Truth be known, Mary had soldiered on far too long, afraid to ‘let Marija down’. Which was ridiculous, Marija and Lucy had agreed; also agreeing that this would be their secret and remain unshared with Mary.

  In fact, the whole of Government House was on tenterhooks over the impending birth. Even the imperturbable and terrifyingly efficient Sir Murray Tyrell, who had now been the tireless, faithful Secretary to the last five Governor Generals of Australia, was not quite himself.

  Lucy wondered, sometimes, if there had ever before been such a ‘family’ spirit at Yarralumla. Her own parents had won over the Australian public by bringing her and her three elder siblings to Canberra but even then, she remembered Government House still being a relatively stiff, formal place outside of the family’s chambers. Peter and Marija had swept all that away; not that there was ever any question who was captain of the Yarralumla ship.

  Nonetheless, within its walls the ‘Yarralumla Couple’ oversaw a regime whose informality and lack of ‘starchiness’, would probably have quietly appalled Lucy’s parents. But then her father was a viscount and her mother had been the daughter of Lord Gort, the Commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1940.

  Peter and Marija did things their own way.

  Lucy could never imagine her father addressing a lowly footman or clerk, or typist by his, or her first name but then nobody could ever remember a Governor General of Australia and his ‘spouse’ ever being respectively best man, and maid of honour at the wedding of a Chief Petty Officer and his bride, Jack and Mary Griffin. For all the Republican chatter in Parliament and in the press, nobody doubted most Australians had taken Peter and Marija to their hearts; as the very ‘best sort of Poms!’

  “Peter is supposed to be getting back from Melbourne soon,” Marija told her young ward, rising from behind her desk to exchange pecking, sisterly kisses with Lucy.

  Initially, Lucy, had had something of a crush on the dashing new Governor General, and lowered her eyes for a moment. It was an innocent thing, to a girl, and in fairness she was not alone in her initial infatuation, all her friends had been reduced to simpering imbecility when they had first been introduced to the tall, handsome, heroic titular Head of State of Australia.

  Marija, Lucy knew, thought it was all hugely funny but most of the time she hid it marvellously behind a mask of wholly genuine sympathy: she had captured her Prince Charming and she was not about to let him go…ever.

  In fact, from the outset she had always treated Lucy like the little sister she had never had and the pair of them had got on famously. This also, was a thing attentive Yarralumla observers had noted; the irony of a viscount’s daughter being under the protective mother-hen wing of a proud daughter of the Admiralty Dockyards of Malta. But then, as everybody acknowledged these days, it was a funny old world…

  And it was not as if Marija was a typical daughter of any Admiralty Dockyard, anywhere on the planet!

  Some months after the event, Lucy had learned that the only thing that her father and her would-be guardians had ever ‘had words about’ was the subject of her future education. That Daddy had obviously been swayed, even though he would have still been harbouring profound doubts, said volumes for the persuasiveness and charm of the Yarralumla Couple.

  It had been decided that Lucy should attend public school ‘like every other teenage girl in the Dominion’.

  Lucy’s private tutors had been retained for several weeks but from the spring term of 1967, she had had to get up at the crack of dawn – it was inconceivable that the daughter of one Governor General and the ex officio ward of another would ever be late for the start of the school day – bathe, breakfast, gather up her books and jump into the car to take her to the gate of her new school.

  There had been worries about her ‘security’ in the beginning, which was why Jack Griffin, Mary’s ginger-haired and bearded, very, very rough diamond husband and, when he was at Government House, Peter’s – his Captain’s – Master at Arms, had personally supervised the first daily ‘school runs’ and often turned up, ‘like a bad penny’ at the gates of the school, Canberra Girls Grammar School situated in the Deakin suburb of the capital, about a mile or so from Government House, to ensure that everything necessary was being done to assure his charge’s safety.

  Lucy would much rather have walked or bicycled, meeting up with her friends but because she was who she was, that was not a thing she could ever do without a chaperone, which for a girl of her age, took all the fun out of being alone, and out of school with one’s friends.

  It had surprised her how easily and quickly she had made new friends…

  Marija had gone out of her way to make things as uncomplicated, and as ‘normal’ as possible. From the start Yarralumla, in between overseeing Government House’s regular big functions – greeting new Ambassadors and High Commissioners, holding receptions, and hosting all manner of diplomatic bean feasts and such like – Marija had decreed that it should be an open, ‘family’ house for Lucy’s gang of chums, and to oil the social wheels, to their gawping, incredulous parents, too!

  Nevertheless, last year Lucy’s birthday had been…truly awful.

  The Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher had been staying at Government House on the first leg of her return from the United Nations get together in San Francisco, when that dreadful telegram from Oxford was received.

  Peter and Marija had had to break the news to the Prime Minister of her husband’s death in France.

  People said that Mrs Thatcher had had some kind of nervous breakdown; that she had been catatonic for days, incapable of rising from her bed, refusing food, and wept without remission for days and nights, refusing to see anybody, railing incoherently at the flood of commiserations which had poured into Government House from all over the world.

  Lucy had tried to keep out of the way; carried on going to school, and warned her friends to stay away from Yarralumla, tried to be invisible, and tried hard not to cause any of the customary adolescent difficulties, or embarrassments her classmates routinely brought home to their…parents.

  Peter and Marija had protected Mrs Thatcher as best they could, that at least, Lucy understood. Peter had practically barred the doors of Yarralumla, Marija and Mary, and the Prime Minister’s especial friend, that kind, patient and very wise woman, Lady Patricia Harding-Grayson, had stayed with her all the time, afraid, it was said, that otherwise, their charge would harm herself.

  The Prime
Minister’s stay-over in Australia, originally scheduled for a few days, had lasted three weeks and then she had returned home without meeting the new Indian Premier, Indira Gandhi, in Delhi, or detouring to inspect the garrisons at Cyprus and Malta, or even visiting newly liberated France. In all, the Prime Minister had been completely out of the public eye for nearly two months before, re-appearing at last, to attend her husband’s memorial service in Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford.

  Lucy had never met the late Major General Francis St John Waters, VC, but since his passing his fame – much of it garnered in the secret world - had rapidly spread all around the globe. In the Second War he had been a veteran of the desert war with Rommel, a hero of the partisan campaign in Yugoslavia, and Italy, a founding member of the Special Air Service Regiment; since 1945 he seemed to have been everywhere, anywhere the fighting was the hardest and the dirtiest, Malaya, Aden, Africa, Cyprus, and when the Russians had invaded Iran in April 1964, by all accounts, he had virtually waged a one-man war against them until he was wounded in an air attack, captured and carted all the way back to a KGB prison cell somewhere beyond the Urals, where, legend had it he had told his interrogators to just get on with it and shoot him because whatever they did to him, he was not going to answer any of their ‘bally questions’.

  Nobody knew for sure – well, not at Government House – but it seemed that it had been the Russians who had brought him with them to England for talks with the British Government at some stage in 1964; whereupon, the Angry Widow had had him spirited away to safety by the SAS…

  Even to a teenage girl brought up in a sheltered cocoon, it was apparent that much of what was said about the Prime Minister’s late husband might, or might not be, apocryphal. No matter, Lucy was sorry she had never met him; he sounded like he was…fun. Peter and Marija had met him; they both smiled at the mention of his name, and sighed with sadness remembering what his death had done to their friend, the Prime Minister.

  They had done their best to protect Lucy from all that.

  The body of Major General Waters, whose remains had originally been interred in a French Military cemetery, close to where the vehicle he had been travelling in had been destroyed by a massive roadside bomb, now lay in the new Commonwealth Armed Services Cemetery in the grounds of Woodstock Palace in Oxfordshire, where his widow, on occasions visibly distraught, inconsolable, was known to visit the grave every few days.

  Cruelly, gossips said that the much mellowed ‘Angry Widow’ of before, was an irretrievably embittered woman now but Lucy would never dream of repeating that sort of loose, careless, thoughtless talk within, or without, the walls of Yarralumla for today, like every other female member of the Yarralumla household, she wore a small loop of black ribbon above her heart; while the menfolk wore their dark armbands.

  “My little brother, Joe, and his new wife, Luiza,” Marija announced brightly, for she was philosophically opposed to moping, regardless of the excuse, declared, leading Lucy out of her claustrophobic office. “And their bambinos!” She added happily. “Will be finally arriving in Australia sometime in May!”

  Marija’s twenty-seven-year-old younger brother Joseph had lived in California since the autumn of 1965, studying journalism and political science at Berkeley. It seemed that his student activism, he was an unrequited self-confessed socialist which apparently, did not go down too well in certain quarters of the American media, and his friendship and association with Miranda Sullivan – she of the still rumbling Warwick Hotel Scandal – a leading figure in the Women’s Movement in San Francisco, had gained him an unwanted notoriety in what was, after all, election year in the United States. In his letters to Marija had had talked about moving up to Canada, or perhaps to England.

  Lucy knew that Joe had married a woman from Puerto Rico, Luiza, who already had two children – a widow, she assumed - in January last year.

  It had been Marija’s suggestion that her brother should bring his young family to Australia, and she got the impression that like most of the men in her friend and guardian’s life, Joe was putty in her hands.

  Joe Calleja was, of course, Joseph Mario Calleja, GC; awarded the George Cross – the Empire’s, for he remained a citizen of that part of the Commonwealth which was still, strictly speaking, the British Empire highest civilian award for gallantry - for his part in the Battle of Malta on board the doomed Talavera.

  Another hero…

  Joe and Jack Griffin had been the men, the last men alive in the waist of the sinking Battle class destroyer, who had launched the torpedoes which had sunk those Red Dawn battleships and saved Malta…

  Lucy’s own father had won his Victoria Cross fighting half the German Army single-handed while he was practically bleeding to death from his wounds. She and her siblings had giggled when they discovered where he had been wounded, in the buttocks, explaining why when pressed about his wounds her brave Papa had always remarked: ‘In Italy!’

  ‘It was not easy for Joe on Malta,’ Marija had confided to Lucy one day a week or so ago. “Peter and I were a long way away, and all the people he had fought with were gone, too. And there were jealousies. Nasty, political things going on at home. And,’ she had shrugged, ‘Joe hates being a hero. He is a hero and one day he will get used to the idea but not now, not soon. When he was younger, he was always too busy looking after me. I should have seen it at the time, I blame myself.’

  Lucy had been astonished to learn that Joe Calleja’s wife could neither read nor write.

  ‘Joe is teaching her,’ Marija had declared, as if it was nothing out of the ordinary.

  The plan was for Joe to pick up his post-doctoral PhD studies at Sydney University, under the auspices of the Betancourt Foundation’s International Student Exchange Program.

  Lucy could not help but be caught up with her friend’s excitement: soon there would be a new baby in the Yarralumla family, and she would be reunited with her brother.

  “Now,” Marija said, taking Lucy’s arm as they emerged into the broad hallway, speaking lowly, confidentially as if they were two conspirators, “we’ve been invited to dine at the US Embassy this evening.”

  The American Ambassador was a famous US Navy Admiral, a somewhat weather-beaten, superficially pugnacious man whose face dissolved into an ear-to-ear smile the moment he laid eyes on the Yarralumla couple. Admiral McCain and his wife, Roberta, were regular guests at Government House, and Peter and Marija at the Embassy residence, their relationship being familial rather than official; it was almost as if whenever either couple were at a loose end, the phone was picked up and a get together arranged.

  Lately, it was as if the only time that Peter and Marija could truly relax when they were away from Yarralumla, was when they were with the McCains. It was a standing joke in the Australian press that if only the Old Country and the White House got on as well as the Christophers and the McCains, the world would be a far better, safer place!

  Mrs McCain was always very solicitous when she spoke to Lucy; who got the impression the old lady missed having her own children around

  “It is not a big, formal thing tonight,” Marija explained, “just a quiet affair at the Embassy Residency. Ambassador McCain’s son, John junior, the hero of the last battles in Michigan, will be there. I can hardly take Mary along – not in her condition - to make up the numbers. So, I’ve spoken to Peter. Why don’t you put on a nice dress and come along with us tonight, Lucy?”

  Chapter 3

  Wednesday 21st February, 1968

  Ukrainka-Seryshevo Air Base, Siberia

  Forty-eight-year-old Major General Vladimir Zakharov, since the latest reconfiguration of what little remained of the once mighty Red Air Force Strategic Aviation Corps, the commandant of the half-derelict Seryshevo Air Base, stepped out of the staff car as the huge, silvery Tupolev T-95K bomber ran up its four Kuznetsov NK-12 turboprops. Even from a mile away the noise was hurtful to ears long-numbed to the screaming thunder of those great engines. Before the Cuban Missiles War Sov
iet airfields had reverberated to the roar of those monstrous power plants, the ground itself had trembled at the might of the Red Air Force. Now, there were only ashes, fading shadows of the glory of former times. Much of what had not been destroyed in the war had been wasted in a succession of misbegotten, piecemeal actions and campaigns, until all that was left were the carcasses of sleek long-range jet bombers that could no longer be maintained in airworthy condition, and a few, trusty Tu-95s, kept in the air only by cannibalising their abandoned sisters.

  The lone bomber was moving.

  Back in October 1962, there would have been hundreds of bombers on standby across the Motherland, and here at Seryshevo, as many as a score of long-range Myasishchev M-4s capable of reaching American cities, medium-range Tupolev T-22 supersonic bombers, Ilyushin Il-28 tactical bombers, and perhaps, nine or ten of the faithful, magnificent Tu-95 Variant Ks, each armed with a Raduga Kh-20 MiG fighter-sized cruise missile capable of hitting targets hundreds of kilometres from their distant, stand-off launch points, ready and prepared to attack any target on the North American continent.

  That morning the flight roster had reported just three of the giants as ‘ready for operations.’ Officially, another two were undergoing extended overhauls but would probably never fly again; as for the three M-4s, seven Tu-22s and five Il-28s still listed on Seryshovo’s order of battle, none had flown for over a year and even had there been crews available to fly them, they were mothballed, rusting in their revetments, forgotten and decaying beneath camouflage netting. Lately, it was an unending struggle to keep just two of the three mechanically viable Tu-95s airworthy.

  Zakharov had lost his wife and both his sons on the night and day of the war in October 1962, consumed somewhere in the seared wreckage of Moscow. His younger brother had been killed in Iraq while the Brezhnev Troika had allowed his sister-in-law and his nieces and nephew – like the families of so many of the men who had died in Iraq - to starve back home, and eventually fall victim to a typhus outbreak in the camps near Saratov. It was a mercy that his parents had passed away before the war, relatively comfortable in their declining years in one of the post-1945 tenements thrown up in the ruins of Leningrad.