Marija had travelled to the hospital in her distinctive pale blue uniform dress. The uniform was virtually indistinguishable from that worn by junior nurses in the ‘official’ centrally managed infant Maltese health system except for the absence of badges denoting her grade or place of work. St Catherine’s Hospital for Women was a privately operated institution wholly supported by gifts, donations and in no small measure the largesse of its landlord, the nearby Cathedral. Marija hung up her coat and went behind the reception desk to check the duty roster. She was pleasantly surprised to discover that she was assigned to the first floor Children’s Ward that day.
Doctor Margo Seiffert bustled into the room. She took a moment to wipe the sheen of vexation off her deeply suntanned, lined face. Her once straw blond hair was grey and the gracile slenderness which would have made her figure willowy in her younger days had become sinewy, rather birdlike in her later middle age. Notwithstanding, she was exactly the same bundle of irrepressible energy whom Marija had first encountered when she’d been Surgeon Captain Reginald Stephens’s — the man who’d patiently rebuilt her broken body — deputy and the senior orthopaedic surgical registrar at the Bighi Royal Naval Hospital at Kalkara all those years ago.
Marija hadn’t realised until much later that the two surgeons — so utterly unalike and seemingly temperamentally utterly incompatible — had been lovers who’d decided to devote the final years of their already brilliant careers to dragging — kicking and screaming, Malta’s antiquated provisions for the health and welfare of its women and children into the twentieth century.
“Can I have your attention please!” Margo asked. Her voice was a little hoarse but as always, her manner was briskly businesslike. “It feels like I’ve spent forever on the telephone since yesterday,” she smiled ruefully, “or at least that’s what it seems like!”
There was an uncomfortable mutter of amusement.
“There is good news and there is bad news,” the Director of St Catherine’s Hospital of Women declared. “First, the bad news. Sometime during the small hours of Sunday morning the world went mad.” She held up her hands. She planned to elaborate on her initial bald statement shortly. “The good news,” she continued after the most momentary of hesitations, “is that most of the madness stopped several hundred miles to the north of us.”
Margo Seiffert was already shaking her head, forestalling questions she couldn’t answer: questions that nobody could yet answer and that historians would agonise over for as long as humanity prevailed as a viable species.
“The Americans, the British and the Russians and I suspect all their allies tried to destroy each other. There’s some suggestion the Russians might have attacked the Chinese. I don’t know why. It doesn’t matter. I’m not even sure if anybody won. All I do know is that the Russians lost. I have no idea what is left of Europe north, west or east of the Alps. I do know that Istanbul and Ankara were badly damaged in Turkey. My information is that the war is over, according to the American Embassy in Rome, anyway. When I spoke to the Consulate in Valetta the Consul told me that the British have declared martial law on Malta because they are afraid of some kind of popular rising being whipped up by communist ‘sleeper agents’. They think there may be assassinations, sabotage and quote ‘Bolshevik inspired civil disobedience’. It sounded like nonsense to me but then if somebody had just dropped nuclear bombs on London I’d be a little bit paranoid, too.”
The women in the room stared dumbly, mouths agape at the older woman.
Nothing that Margo Seiffert had said had truly sunk in until then.
London bombed?
London gone?
How many people lived in London?
Six, seven million?
“I have communicated with the public health people in Valetta and offered my full support to the civilian authorities. Until I hear from them we shall continue as normal and take what steps we can to mitigate the likely public health implications of what has happened in the north.”
Marija’s thoughts were jangling.
Margo was talking about fall out. Radiation from the bombs.
“The wind is blowing from the south-east and has been blowing from that direction for the last thirty-six hours,” Margo was saying. It was as if her friend and mentor was speaking to her from the far end of a long tunnel. “If and when the wind comes around to the north it will be only a matter of time before we will be threatened with fallout.”
Marija listened in a daze.
Margo didn’t talk much about her career before she came to Malta. She’d been married to a naval officer who’d been killed in a sea battle just before the end of the Second War. Before that war she’d been one of the first female surgeons in a prestigious Boston hospital, and during the 1945 war the senior orthopaedic surgeon on a hospital ship at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The Americans had given her a row of medals for her ‘bravery under fire’. After the war she’d been with the American occupation forces in Berlin, Vienna, and later with the US Navy 5th Fleet Surgeon General’s Staff in Naples where she’d met Doctor Stephens and shortly thereafter, followed him back to Malta where Marija had first encountered her on a stiflingly hot, sultry summer day in 1949.
Margo Seiffert spoke levelly, without a trace of fear or doubt and gradually the underlying panic in the room slowly, surely subsided.
“When something terrible happens all that we can do is thank God for our blessings,” the Director of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women said. “The beautiful island upon which we stand has been spared. By the grace of God we are alive as are all our friends and our families on this island. Be thankful for this. Be thankful that for us life goes on and that we still have our own fate in our own hands. It is our job, our duty, to do what we can to care for the people who depend upon us now, and will come to depend upon us in the future.” Suddenly, Margo clapped her hands together. “Let’s get to it! We have work to do, ladies!”
Chapter 9
It was not appreciated by the Kennedy White House until it was too late that ‘the gallant Brits’ who’d stood shoulder to shoulder with Uncle Sam in three World Wars — three wars fought, to put it crudely, to solidify American World economic and military hegemony — weren’t ever going to make the same mistake again.
Before the October War the British talked about a ‘special relationship’; in Washington they talked about the benefits of having willing ‘clients’, a ‘friends’ who could be relied upon to be America’s ‘apologists in the councils of Europe’. True, the Brits had misbehaved back in 1956 but the Suez fiasco was in the past, and afterwards the Brits had seemed to be securely in the back pockets of the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations.
However, after October 1962 there was no more ‘special relationship’. It is jaw-droppingly apparent from his recently published memoirs that the first post-war leader of the UKIEA — a disparate group of the survivors of Harold MacMillan’s pre-war Conservative government and available members of the Labour and Liberal oppositions — Edward Heath, privately regarded the Kennedy Administration collectively as a bunch of ‘freebooting murderers little better than the Nazis and on a par with the idiots in the Kremlin’ who had provoked the global catastrophe. In late 1962 and early 1963 neither he, or anybody else in the world, dared say it out aloud but a terrible, unforgivable crime of unimaginable proportions had been committed and Edward Heath privately vowed, that one day there would be justice for the murdered, and for the murdered hopes of the generations to come.