It was entirely predictable that in the event of an all out nuclear exchange that the greater part of any ‘collateral damage’ suffered by NATO would inevitably be in Europe.
Whatever else the movers and shakers in Washington knew about the strategic balance of terror; the virtual destruction of Western Europe was a given.
Even now, fifty years later, there are senior politicians and shapers of opinion who — flying in the face of the fact of history — deny this.
Chapter 8
That morning Marija Calleja had left the house just after seven o’clock and walked down the gentle slope to the bus stop on the Gzira waterfront overlooking the eerily empty anchorage of Sliema Creek.
The big, predatory grey silhouettes of the ships of the 7th Destroyer Squadron hadn’t returned to their anchorage in the sheltered blue waters of the Creek. Neither had the minesweepers or the ungainly LSTs (Landing Ship Tanks) usually moored in the shallower water nearer the sea wall or at the end of the Royal Marines’ embarkation jetty on Manoel Island. Over twenty-four hours later the semi-organised panic and commotion of the early hours of Sunday morning had been replaced with an atmosphere of horribly uneasy calm. There were unsmiling armed men in Naval and Army uniforms on the sea wall and directing traffic and in the sky jet engines quartered the heavens.
Marija’s mother had pleaded with her to stay at home.
Radio Malta was playing patriotic music and asking everybody to ‘keep calm’ every fifteen minutes. It had been announced that there would be a dusk to dawn curfew the coming evening. A state of martial law had been declared. Marija didn’t know what that meant, just that it sounded very bad.
Her little brother, Joe, had started complaining about ‘British Imperialist oppression’ and that the ‘proletariat should stand up to the English bully boys.” She’d given him what she hoped was a withering look, told him not to be stupid and to go to work as normal.
“Will the buses be running?” Her mother had demanded in her most plaintive of tones.
“I don’t know,” she’d retorted. “But if they are I will go to work. As normal!”
It was often remarked upon how the myriad of little things that seemed to dominate other people’s lives left Marija Calleja untouched, and that she had an uncanny knack of serenely breezing through the day to day minor tribulations that tripped up practically everybody else. It wasn’t true, of course. It was simply that she’d decided, many years ago that her ‘life cup’ was always going to be half full, rather than half empty.
At the waterfront bus stop opposite Triq It Torri — the road that climbed the hill at a right angle to the harbour and cut across the base of the Tigne Peninsula linking Gzira with the Sliema — Marija had discovered that the buses were running normally. The buses were not actually running on time, or with any particular reference to the printed timetables, but the buses were running, more or less, normally by the lights of buses on Malta. That morning, normal felt very strange and the crowd at the bus stop was unusually subdued, a nod or a terse ‘hello’ passed for greetings whereas before the weekend conversations would have flowed, possibly volubly.
It was a bright, sunny late October morning and few people wore coats. The last air raid siren had shut down a little after six o’clock yesterday morning and afterwards the streets had filled with people spilling out of basements. There had been nothing to see except the empty anchorages of Marsamxett, and Sliema and Lazaretto Creeks and the starry sky slowly turning to grey with the new dawn.
Marija settled in a window seat on the left hand side of the bus as it rumbled around the harbour following the sea wall, past the entrance bridge — now heavily barricaded — to the headquarters of the British Mediterranean Fleet on Manoel Island. As the bus turned left and dragged painfully around the corner Marija saw that Lazaretto Creek — customarily crowded with vessels of all sizes — was almost as empty as Sliema Creek. Apart from the big, slab-sided accommodation and depot ship HMS Maidstone and a single destroyer — HMS Cassandra — moored alongside all the big ships were gone. Further along she got her first sight down the length of Marsamxett where the destroyers came to take on oil and ammunition. Accustomed to spying the long, low shark-like silhouettes of as many as half-dozen submarines sheltering under the ramparts of Fort Manoel it was a little unnerving to see the whole length of the anchorage completely empty. All the big ships that could raise steam and the submarines were gone.
At the circus-shaped bus station outside the citadel gates to Valetta she stepped off one bus onto another, which sat twenty minutes on its stand while the driver smoked two cigarettes and conversed loudly in Maltese spiced with ribald pigeon English with his friends. Eventually, the bus set off down the gentle incline into war-scarred Floriana. She remembered travelling this same route as a child. In those days it had seemed to her that every other building was in ruin. Rubble from the war was still piled in great mounds, in summer the pulverized stone dust blew across the streets like swirling sandy devils every time the wind gusted from the south west. The rebuilding had only really begun in the last few years and in many areas the old wounds were as yet, hardly less raw than they’d been twenty years ago.
The scandal of the snail like pace of the reconstruction was the one thing she and Joe agreed about. Ever since the war the British had populated Malta’s anchorages with warships, expensive castles of steel, and filled the Archipelago’s skies with modern jet aircraft that seemed like machines straight out of futuristic science fiction comics; and yet the pace of rebuilding and reconstruction was maddeningly slow. In flaunting their military power before the Maltese people while so many of the islanders still lived in hovels without piped water and electricity the British had been their own worst enemy in recent years. While it was true that the British employed thousands of Maltese in the dockyards and in their colonial administration, and that the military formed the backbone of the archipelago’s medical services and that the ongoing ‘occupation’ — if that was what it was — was essentially benign, it did little to appease the ‘Malta for the Maltese’ movement. Marija found the trend of nationalistic sentiments and the erosion of old loyalties very sad. Partly, this was because she knew she owed ‘the British’ her life but it was also because she feared what might happen if and when the Mother country abandoned ‘little’ Malta. There was no one political party that spoke for the Maltese people or even a significant proportion of them; only disparate groupings of nationalists, communists and liberals. What would happen to an archipelago of small islands in the middle of a great sea with a population of some three hundred thousand souls that was only capable of feeding a third of its people from its own resources. Malta had no oil, hardly any fresh water, its land was arid and difficult to cultivate. Ever since the time of the Knights of St John — possibly, since the dawn of civilization — Malta had been the trading crossroads of the central Mediterranean and under the guardianship of the Royal Navy it had, Hitler’s War apart, basked in what everybody understood had been a dangerously false sense of security.
The sight of the empty anchorages left Marija with a nagging feeling of emptiness, as if the soul had been hollowed out of the old world. She’d grown up taking the presence of the big grey warships in the Creeks around Valetta for granted. That they were gone today was troubling; that one day they might be gone forever was…almost unthinkable.