He clicked the microphone switch.
“Captain to talker.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Put me on tannoy.” Collingwood waited for the acknowledgement. “This is Simon Collingwood, acting Captain of Dreadnought. I’d like to welcome aboard all non Dreadnoughts. The situation topside looks a little grim but there haven’t been any further big bangs since that last one which appears to have been over open water in the middle of Morecambe Bay.” Try not to be too bloody cheerful man! “Right now you are in the safest place. Dreadnought’s pressure hull is like several inches of armour plating,” which was a complete lie, “so what we’re going to do is sit this thing out until we know it is safe to go back outside. It is dark up here but there is enough light to be able to tell that the town of Barrow is still intact. I daresay a lot of windows have been broken but everything still seems to be standing. This is one of those times when we all need to stick together. While you remain on Dreadnought I am responsible for your safety. Please stay calm. Everybody, please stay calm. If there is any fresh news I promise I will pass it on to you as soon as I can. Captain, out.”
Collingwood heard a sound behind him and a bulky figure in a parka and white balaclava like his own emerged from the open hatch at his feet.
Lieutenant Richard Manville, Dreadnought’s Supply Officer, was an oddly clumsy, well-proportioned man of around six feet in height. Submariners tended to be smaller, wiry men like Collingwood himself but Dick Manville was one of the new breed of University educated, short-commission — seven or thirteen year men rather than ‘lifers’ like Collingwood — entrants to the underwater club.
“Well said, sir,” the newcomer declared, breathlessly as he straightened to his full height in the cramped cockpit. “The Chief asked me to tell you we have thirty-six Dreadnoughts onboard, and one hundred and eighty-one assorted guests, including thirty-two youngsters under the age of twelve. We’ve got enough fresh water for a couple of mugs of tea for everybody but not a lot else in the larder, I’m afraid, sir.”
Collingwood grimaced under his balaclava.
“I don’t want any foraging parties going ashore until it is fully light, Dick.” He eyed the malevolent night around the sail. “Or until such time as the whiz bangs have stopped.”
The younger man was staring at the fires in the town.
“Understood, sir.”
“I’m going to come below in about ten minutes. Get the Chief to organise a relief up here.” Collingwood was thinking ahead. He needed to be seen in the crowded spaces of the boat, to be a visibly calming presence. Then he needed to be making plans to get Dreadnought out of this dock and taking her somewhere where she would be safe.
Marija Calleja and her brother Joe had walked down to the waterfront. She was wrapped in a shawl over her coat, he just wearing his tattered and torn dockyard monkey jacket over his grubby work clothes. They sat on the sea wall, swinging their feet, watching the black silhouettes of the darkened warships desperately raising steam, crabbing out of Sliema Creek. Across the water on the tip of Manoel Island the Headquarters of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet was a ferment of dark noise. HMS Phoenicia sat inside the great medieval fortress walls first raised by the Knights of St John overlooking both Marsamxett and Sliema Creeks.
A consequence of Marija’s childhood and adolescence mostly spent in hospital was that she was inordinately well read by the standards of her peers. Everybody thought she was the most bookish of women, a mine of useless information, in fact. However, there were compensations. For example, on a night like this she could fall into the well of her thoughts and contemplate the history and the traditions of her people drawing on an unusual wealth of background facts.
“I wonder if the British would have put their headquarters on Manoel Island if they’d known that originally it was Malta’s plague island?” She asked out aloud, baiting her little brother to say something nonsensical.
“Best place for them!” Her sibling retorted. He opened his mouth to continue but tonight the unreality of what was going on had unsettled him to the point where he didn’t know what to think anymore.
Marija let it go in silence, swiftly falling back into her thoughts.
Manoel Island had originally been called l’Isola del Vescovo or, in Maltese, il-Gżira tal-Isqof which translated roughly as ‘the Bishop’s Island’. And so it had remained until post medieval times when in 1643 Jean Paul Lascaris, Grandmaster of the Knights of Malta, had built a quarantine hospital — a lazaretto — on the island, in response to the periodic waves of plague and cholera brought to Malta by visiting ships. The island hadn’t obtained its modern name until the 18th century, renamed in honour of António Manoel de Vilhena, a Portuguese Grandmaster of the Knights of Malta under whose leadership the original Fort Manoel was built in 1726. At the time the fort was a marvel of 18th century military engineering. Some uncertainty existed as to the guiding hand behind the original plans for the structure. However, the general consensus was that the grand plan was the work of one Louis d’Augbigne Tigné, somewhat modified by his friend Charles François de Mondion. The latter was actually buried in a crypt beneath the fort. Bombed repeatedly by the Luftwaffe in the early 1940s Fort Manoel — currently named HMS Phoenicia — retained its impressive internal quadrangle parade ground and arcade. The baroque chapel of St. Anthony of Padua within the fort’s walls had been almost totally destroyed by bombing in March 1942 but had subsequently been rebuilt as the base chapel, albeit not quite in the magnificent style of its pre-German war pomp.
Some ten minutes ago the brother and sister had gazed at the tall, threatening, elegant bulk of a British cruiser feeling its way past the rocks at the foot of Manoel Island and the seaward end of Tigne Point. Now HMS Broadsword, the last of the 7th Destroyer Squadron’s big beasts was finally moving. The dirty, sulphurous waft of smoke from her thin rear stack blew down the length of the Gzira waterfront.
Valetta across the water was still in total darkness.
There were soldiers with rifles on the streets and sailors trying to jump on the last boats back to their ships, hundreds of civilians like the brother and sister milling, aimlessly, sleepily as army trucks spilled away from the nearby Cambridge barracks vehicle pool.
Marija gazed at HMS Broadsword. With her tall forward lattice mast, big bedstead radar and strange thin second funnel she lacked the lithe grace and greyhound lines of so many of the British destroyers that she’d seen in Sliema Creek over the years.
In years gone by she and Joe had often come down to the Creek, sat on the sea wall swinging their feet, killing time, teasing each other. They’d always been the closest of the three Calleja siblings, sharing the same dry, mischievous sense of humour. Tonight in the minutes before the first hint of the pre-dawn twilight the skies above the island were full of jet engines. The roar buffeted their senses, making the whole world reverberate.
A British soldier rested the butt of his rifle on the ground a few paces to Marija’s right. She heard the scratch of a match, a flame flared as the man lit a cigarette.