Out of the city the country — a patchwork of fields delineated with chest high dry stone walls — the bus picked up speed as it chugged, rattled and bounced along the pot-holed roads. The British used to trouble themselves with the potholes. Not now, why would they? They’d soon be gone if, or if not gone, on their way home if the gossip and the stories in the Times of Malta were to be believed. It was over three years now since the Royal Naval Dockyards had been sold to a local company — Messrs C & H Bailey — and independence was only a matter of time. So why bother filling the potholes in the roads?
Passing Ta’Qali airfield she’d expected to see all the jet fighters and helicopters gone. Instead, two sleek shark-like fighters swooped in to land as the bus stopped at a crossroads. She was reassured to glimpse several other silvery jets were parked in their blast shielded hardstands across the other side of the airfield.
Ahead, the twin cities of Mdina and Rabat stood on the rising ground overlooking Ta’Qali. As a girl she’d spent endless hours on the ramparts of the hill top city gazing down on the aircraft, Spitfires, Hurricanes, twin engine Beaufighters in those seemingly long ago days in the 1940s, taking off and landing. After the war those aircraft had been replaced with the first jet fighters; Meteors, Vampires, Hunters. She’d thought their whistling, thundering engines sounded like God’s fury as they climbed high in the azure blue skies over the ancient walled cities on the hill. From her bedroom window in old Rabat she’d awakened every morning to an eagle’s eye view of the south of the island. She could see Sliema and Valetta, and sometimes if it wasn’t too hazy the big ships manoeuvring outside Marsamxett or the entrance to the Grand Harbour. Sweeping her eye from left to right she could see the rooftops of the Three Cities — Floriana, Vittoriosa and Cospicua — across to Luqa, the flattest place on the whole Maltese Archipelago and the biggest airbase, and further west to where the fishing village of Marsaxlokk lay hidden in the morning mist. On those timeless sunny childhood mornings how could she not believe that Malta was God’s own island?
The bus began to climb up the hill. At first the incline was gradual, then the road turned, twisted and soon with the increasing steepness of the gradient gears began to crash, acrid fumes began to belch from the labouring vehicle’s rattling exhaust pipe. Some days the jolting, stop start bus journeys made Marija feel old and worn, today she hardly noticed, her thoughts elsewhere.
Something terrible had happened in the early hours of Sunday morning.
When the bus stopped outside the old citadel she walked at her customary measured pace towards the medieval gate. The series of operations to straighten her left thigh and rebuild her crushed pelvis had — in a mechanical sense — worked better than even Captain Reginald Stephens — the extraordinary naval surgeon to whom she owed her life — had hoped. However, on uneven surfaces if she tried to walk too fast or forgot to consciously put one foot down, carefully, after the other, she tended to lose her balance. If she hurried overmuch she might end up tottering like a drunk, and she was always inclined to fall harder than she ought. So this morning, of all mornings, she walked at her own steady, relatively slow pace. There were treacherous cobblestones underfoot, testing her patience and constantly tempting her to throw out her arms like a tightrope walker.
St Catherine’s Hospital for Woman was situated off the Cathedral plaza. It had opened in 1936, a jumble of small wards, treatment rooms and cupboard-sized offices in a three storey block arranged around a cool, airy, shaded courtyard. The institution — which operated on the model of a typical small English cottage hospital catering specifically to women and children — was constantly under threat of closure; the only thing that kept it open were the tireless, indefatigable endeavours of its tigerishly formidable Chief Physician and Senior Administrative Officer, Doctor Margo Seiffert. With her nurses Margo preferred the title of ‘Director’ or simply ‘Margo’, but the authorities in Valetta tended to be more impressed by long and unnecessarily convoluted titles. Margo said it was the ‘Italian streak that runs in Malta’s veins’.
Marija’s mother was Sicilian, her father the son of a British naval officer who’d been killed in the far away Dardanelles in 1915. That she bore the surname Calleja was an accident of that sad history; her maternal grandmother having remarried in 1918 and her father assuming his step father’s name. Notwithstanding her own somewhat polyglot lineage, Marija understood exactly how an outsider like Margo Seiffert could see so clearly the underlying tides in the Maltese character. Before the 1939-45 war there had been a popular movement in the Maltese Archipelago to be reunited with Italy. The war had undermined and destroyed that groundswell, possibly for many generations to come but the Maltese psyche was complex. The Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Moors, Barbary pirates, Christian Crusaders, the Knights Hospitaller from which the Order of St John, the Knights of Malta had evolved, and latterly, the British had all been lords of Malta at one time or another — sometimes for many centuries — but each in their turn had relinquished their hold over the Archipelago; yielded to the new overlords…
The Maltese had never been their own overlords; and yet they were as a people a melange of all those peoples and religions that had ever held sway over them. Marija’s father was half-British and half Maltese, her mother likewise half-Sicilian; what did that make her? A quarter of this, a half of that? And what of her parents’ parents? Her mother’s maternal grandparents came from Naples; her father’s grandmother had been Sephardic Jew, so once upon a time Marija’s distant ancestors had been expelled from Portugal in 1492. Yet she was Maltese in her soul, to the very heart of her being even if she had no idea what it actually meant to be Maltese. Would she understand herself and her heritage any better if the British left?
Marija set aside such problematic thoughts upon entering the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women. The building was her second home, a second home that was with every passing day becoming her real home. Within its walls she was among her truest friends in Christendom, within a true sisterhood in which she was no longer the helpless child her parents — bless their loving souls — remembered every time they laid eyes upon her. Among her sisters Marija was her own self, free and independent and most importantly, needed.
A small crowd had gathered in the reception room on the ground floor, apparently waiting for Margo Seiffert. In the thirteen years Marija had known Margo Seiffert the sixty-one year old former United States Navy Surgeon-Commander had become her best friend in the world.
“Margo’s been on the phone to the American Consulate in Valetta,” Marija was informed in hushed tones. Margo was a small, wiry, greying bundle of restless energy who kept the clinic alive by constantly recruiting and training local nurses — nursing ‘assistants’, officially — from all over the archipelago.
Because of her childhood injuries from which she would never — in the eyes of officialdom — ‘fully recover’ Marija wouldn’t have been accepted into any ‘authorised’ nurse training program on Malta or anywhere else. Even she had to admit, very occasionally, that she simply wasn’t capable of performing all the duties normally expected of a nurse. However, Margo didn’t care about details like that. She took whatever a young woman had to offer and set about making the most of it. Inevitably, Margo had clashed with successive British Chief Medical Officers in Valetta, although not so much of late. This was yet another sign that the British were winding down what remained of their colonial administration. In fact many of the functions of that administration had already been quietly passed, or as Margo would say ‘abdicated’ to local officers in recent years.