“Do you think the British will leave Malta?” She asked.
Her father avoided her eye, shrugged in that perversely Gallic way of his that he’d cultivated to deflect the many vicissitudes of his life.
“Will they?” His daughter pressed.
Her father’s gaze took in the broad sweep of Sliema Creek. This evening there were only two big ships, destroyers, swinging around their mooring buoys. Both were moored on the Manoel Island side of the anchorage. Several patrol boats were tied up alongside the jetty where the inner Creek narrowed and was eventually closed to navigation to even the smallest of boats by the low brick bridge from the Gzira waterfront onto the island. He was afraid in his soul that the British had already left Malta. Given up hope. Their aircraft, their soldiers and a few of their ships remained but in their hearts, the British had already packed their kit bags and decided to go home. He saw it in the faces of many of the officers he dealt with the Senglea Docks; and among the rank and file of the occupiers there was a strange end of term euphoria.
“One hears so many rumours one doesn’t know what to think,” he obfuscated, making a throwaway gesture with his right hand. “It is so good to see so many young people out and about on the waterfront,” he added.
Although far from everybody had come out to celebrate the ongoing prisoner releases, a large number of people had and many of them were promenading along the front in memory of older, better times.
“The detainees are being set free, you should be happy for them,” Marija’s mother declared.
Marija wondered sometimes what world her mother was living in, although she loved her none the less for her wilful blindness.
Around them the rickety tables were full of other family groups, some celebrating, others communing together, hoping or fearing for the future. Before the October War the taverna would have been a constant riot of buzzing, burbling, laughing voices. Tonight the mood was sombre, cautious because everybody understood that this might be the lull before the storm.
“It is for the best that Joe is under your wing,” Peter Calleja told his daughter. “This isn’t the time for thumbing one’s nose at the British.”
Marija relented.
“Margo has Joe under her thumb already,” she giggled. The formidable Director of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women had promised ‘not to let the little Bolshevik’ out of her sight while Marija went home for the weekend.
“Ah, Dottoressa Seiffert,” Marija’s mother beamed as if her daughter had mentioned the name of a guardian saint. “Such a woman!”
Marija looked at her feet until her muddled emotions washed over and away, like a wave breaking on a nearby beach. Her mother had an unrivalled knack of making her feel guilty, proud, happy, melancholic and utterly mothered that caught her unawares. It must be like this for daughters everywhere in every epoch, she reflected, briefly submerged in her thoughts and as she often did in the throes of this and similar passing moods, she suddenly thought about Peter. She picked up her gaze and half-turned to look over her shoulder down the sun dappled length of Sliema Creek; at the big grey warships, the grey blue water lapping at their cold steel hulls as overhead occasional gulls wheeled above the tall black silhouettes of the destroyers’ great latticed masts. One of the destroyers, HMS Agincourt — her pennant number, D96, painted in letters several feet high on her almost square transom — was making steam, a hot, hazy, wispy column of almost invisible smoke rising from her single funnel and being swept away the moment it rose out of the lee of her forward superstructure. Occasionally, the taint of acrid burning bunker oil wafted across the Gzira waterfront but it was a familiar, vaguely comforting taint that reminded the majority of the promenaders of happier times when Great British had been Malta’s friend, protector and ally and not her jailer.
Marija sighed; Peter Christopher could be anywhere.
Most likely his ship was still swinging around its anchors in ‘Fareham Creek’, which he’d confided, more than once, was nowhere near as scenic or picturesque as it sounded and didn’t rival what he’d heard about any of the ‘sun-kissed safe harbours of sunny Malta’. He’d applied for a transfer to the Mediterranean Fleet but even if that now happened there was this dreadful talk about the British leaving. The sudden ache welled from deep within her psyche like a physical pain until she forced her thoughts to move on, to step away from potential despair. Peter had said he would come to her. If God was willing; one day Peter Christopher’s ship would sail into Sliema Creek and tie up alongside one of her sisters. Perhaps, HMS Talavera would slowly churn to a halt and moor to the buoys next to HMS Agincourt. She continued to stare at the destroyer, her graceful, fighting lines somewhat marred by her great masts and — she noticed for the first time — the slowly revolving huge metal bedstead radars at its peak.
Her brow furrowed a little as she saw that men were moving, running on the destroyer’s deck and as she watched the destroyer blew her steam whistle. A banshee shriek of angst seared across the anchorage as an outpouring of grey black smoke billowed from her single stack. With a sensation of unreality Marija stared at the slowly traversing forward turrets of the anchored destroyer, the long guns rising towards the heavens. It was then that she noticed that on the stern deck house men were tearing at the protective shrouds around the missile launcher mount and the big anti-aircraft cannons.
HMS Agincourt blew her horn a second time.
“We must take cover!” Peter Calleja ordered. His chair crashed to the floor as he reached to grasp his wife’s arm. “Marija!”
His daughter turned and blinked at him.
And in that instant the flash of the first explosion reflected in his eyes.
Chapter 34
The destroyer was alone in a pitch black, wind-maddened sea as the full force of the winter storm tried to drive her back onto the rocky shores of Northern Spain. The pungent stench of burnt insulation — and much worse — filled the Combat Information Centre and the shipboard public address relayed a constant stream of new and updated damage control reports. HMS Talavera was holding her own but only just and nobody knew how long her luck would last. If she lost steam on her remaining boiler, a pump failed or the five hundred pound unexploded general purpose bomb lodged in the flooded bilge abaft the forward main battery magazine went off it was likely that every man onboard would die.
The two Douglas A4 Skyhawks had lobbed four big iron bombs at Talavera. One had crashed through the deck between the bridge and the back of B turret and come to rest in the bilge. Another had exploded at the base of the main mast. Fortuitously, blast coefficients being viciously capricious and fickle things, apart from bringing down the mast — which had gone over the side in fouling the starboard propeller had comprehensively wrecked the shaft’s reduction gear — caused few casualties. Unfortunately, the bomb that detonated in the water on the port side of the after deck house had killed virtually everybody on deck and left the stern a burning splintered charnel house. Commander Hugo Montgommery was among the thirty or more dead, cut to pieces as ran to his battle station in the auxiliary conning post when the warheads and propellants of two unfired GWS 21 Sea Cat surface to air missiles exploded virtually above his head. Nobody had any idea what had happened to the fourth bomb, although a stem to stern search of the destroyer had confirmed it hadn’t lodged anywhere onboard.
After the bomb run the Skyhawks had circled and returned.