Earlier Willie Whitelaw had asked Sir Richard Hull if what he had heard about Carver was true. The Chief of the Defence Staff had guffawed at this.
‘He’s related to Wellington on his mother’s side and some people maintain he looks a bit like the old Iron Duke. I don’t see it myself in the paintings of the great man and I’m sure Michael Carver would be mortified by the suggestion. He was at Winchester as a boy, detested it by all accounts. Afterwards, he went on to Sandhurst when he was eighteen; that would have been in 1933, hated that too at first. Legend has it that he almost went to New Zealand to train as a priest but fortunately somebody talked him out of it.’
Whitelaw liked the CDS personally and deeply respected his calm professionalism. He had hit it off with the bluff old soldier from the outset; his relations with Hull immeasurably reinforced by his meticulous disinclination to meddle directly in military affairs. Both men had been in Germany at the end of Hitler’s War and broadly speaking, until the disaster of October 1962, they had earnestly hoped never to see the like again.
‘In any event, in 1934 Carver passed out top of his class at Sandhurst,’ the Chief of the Defence Staff had explained. ‘He won the King’s Gold Medal, the Anson Memorial Sword, the prizes for economics, military history and military law, and won a five year Army Scholarship. A year or so after he left Sandhurst he got into a set to with dear old Percy Hobart,’ Percy Cleghorn Stanley Hobart was the man who had written ‘the book’ on British Army armoured warfare tactics in the years before the Second World War, ‘apparently old Hobo Hobart once felt moved to have a chat with him about insubordination. Hobart was a one off, he really was. The story goes that he told young Carver that the secret of success in the Army is to be sufficiently insubordinate!’
Both men had chortled at that juncture.
‘Carver almost resigned his commission around 1938. He’s not a very clubbish sort of chap, not a man who really enjoys mess life and all that and I think he was bored stiff in the pre-war Army. Some clot had sent him out to Egypt as the transport officer at a camp near Heliopolis. Still, it turned out all right in the end. Hobo Hobart brought the 7th Armoured — you know, the brigade that ended up being The Desert Rats — out to the Middle East and suddenly Carver was back in the thick of things; as he was for most of the Second War, actually. Like all the other chaps who were there in Egypt from the start he traipsed up and down the North African coast for a couple of years until Monty arrived to sort things out, then he was in Italy, and Germany of course. By the end of the war, still just thirty he was a brevetted Brigadier in command of 4th Armoured Brigade. Like everybody else he reverted to his substantive rank, captain, when the Army shrank back to peace time proportions. A lot of good men just went back to Civvy Street because of that; Carver stayed in the service even though it took him the best part of fifteen years to work his way back up to substantive brigadier. That was when he got command of the 4th Brigade in West Germany in 1960. In between he’d held key technical posts with the Ministry of Supply, been head of exercise planning at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe, and held senior staff posts in East Africa and so on. He was Director of War Plans between 1958 and 1960.’ The Chief of the Defence Staff had finished his peroration with the opinion that: ‘Practically everybody in the Army who knows him, even the people he’s upset, think he’s the cleverest man they’ve ever met.’
The table was rectangular, ten feet by about seven but of such antiquity that its dimensions had probably been fixed by eye rather than by rule. The CDS had been sitting at one end, Whitelaw at the other with Sir Varyl Begg and the Chief of the Air Staff each sitting alone on the long sides. A chair scraped and the newcomer sat down beside the First Sea Lord.
Carver opened his brief case and pulled out several folded maps.
Then he sat back and waited to be called to account.
“What do you have to tell us, General Carver?” Willie Whitelaw asked, raising his tea cup to his lips.
The drink tasted so foul he wondered if the disgruntled Merton College porter was actually a closet Red Dawn sympathiser intent on poisoning the men at the apex of the faltering British war machine.
Chapter 14
Captain Sir Peter Christopher, VC, had been surprised and less than ecstatic to receive the summons to meet the Prime Minister’s flight at Brize Norton at less than twelve hours notice yesterday morning. Marija had been typically stoical about their unexpected separation; whereas he had felt desperately guilty abandoning her in a strange and for the time of year unseasonably cold and rather miserable land.
‘Rosa will be here to keep me cheerful,’ Marija had comforted him in that serenely accepting, happy way with which she greeted practically every setback. ‘You will only be away for three days. It is not as if you are going away on a long voyage, or anything. And besides, if you are going to be with the Prime Minister I know you won’t have an opportunity to be stupidly brave or to get yourself killed, husband!’
Privately, Peter guessed that Rosa — the widow of Marija’s executed elder brother Samuel — would be hanging on Lieutenant-Commander Alan Hannay’s arm every minute that HMS Talavera’s former Supply Officer was off duty.
Every man who had survived Talavera and Yarmouth’s unequal battle with the Soviet invasion fleet had been raised — substantively — one grade or rank. Consequently, Peter’s ‘personal steward’, formerly acting or probationary Petty Officer Jack Griffin was now much to his horror, a full-blown Chief Petty Officer. In comparison Alan Hannay had received the news of his promotion with no little sangfroid.
Alan had subsequently been given the onerous task of co-ordinating with the other interested parties — the Royal Household, the Army, the Air Force, the Mayor of Oxford, the Prime Minister’s Private Office, and the Chief Constable of Oxfordshire among others — the arrangements for the ‘Battle of Malta Parade and Investiture’. This event was now scheduled to take place on the afternoon of Tuesday 21st April; the parade being ‘through Oxford’ and the investiture, mainly the awarding of medals for bravery and suchlike, at Kings College. Some doubt remained over the practicability of the 21st April since it was not known if Her Majesty the Queen would be sufficiently recovered to take the salute on the steps of Oxford Town Hall, or to officiate at the investiture by that time.
Peter Christopher was not looking forward to the ‘big party’, as Alan Hannay kept referring to it. Nor were his emotions yet settled on the question of how he viewed inheriting of his father’s baronetcy, or the somewhat premature addition of the letters ‘VC’ to his name wherever he went, and to whomsoever he was introduced by a third party.
There was not much he could do about the ‘Sir Peter; but he had not yet actually had the Victoria Cross, cast from the metal of a Russian gun captured at the Sevastopol in the Crimean War, pinned on his chest.
‘Detail, old man,’ Alan Hannay had informed him. ‘The bally thing has been gazetted and that’s that!’
Peter’s had been one of four Victoria Crosses awarded in respect of the naval part of the Battle of Malta. Commander John Pope, in command of HMS Yarmouth had been promoted Captain and awarded his VC posthumously; and his widow was being brought to Oxford to receive his medal. Petty Officer Stanley George who had, in effect, taken command of the by then wrecked Yarmouth, organised other survivors to restart the emergency pumps, and from the auxiliary steering position near the stern of the burning frigate, somehow threaded a course through the reefs and run the ship aground in the shallows of St Paul’s Bay, saving tens of lives, was Yarmouth’s second VC. Talavera’s second VC was to be pinned on the narrow chest of one of the smallest big men in the Royal Navy, Warrant Officer — formerly Chief Petty Officer — Nevil ‘Spider’ McCann, the destroyer’s Master at Arms who had been everywhere during the height of the battle, directing the damage control teams that had kept the ship afloat long enough to for her to launch torpedoes that ‘won’ the aforementioned battle.