The good news is that we’ve received broadcasts from Fleet HQ in the last couple of hours and picked up radio traffic from other ships so we know we’re not alone out here.
An hour ago we received the ‘cease hostilities’ order. I don’t know if it means the war is over. I hope it is although Talavera is still closed up at Condition Two (that’s one step below battle stations).
Christopher hesitated, waves of weariness sweeping over him like the grey, spume flecked swells sweeping under Talavera’s sharp prow. He pulled open the drawer beneath the desk, withdrew the three small framed photographs. He turned them over, stared.
The first small photograph was of his father, his mother and his sister and he the day he’d passed out of Dartmouth. Eight years ago, it might have been in another lifetime. His mother had died five years ago, a mercy in the circumstances. His sister had married an engineer and emigrated to Australia in 1958. As for the Admiral? Peter hadn’t had much to do with his father since mother had died. The Admiral was a stranger. He’d recently gone out to the Far East to take command of the Pacific Fleet. Peter had read about the appointment in the Navy Gazette. Even on that day eight years ago in the sunshine at Dartmouth the Admiral had been inscrutable, his expression at odds with the smiles of his mother and sister
‘The Christophers graduate at the top of their classes,’ the hero of those long ago Malta convoys, and the former implacable U-boat hunting commander of an elite Western Approaches escort groups had observed. ‘Not half-way down the list.’
The Admiral had seemed miffed that he’d opted to let the Navy send him back to University. The Christophers were seagoing, fighting sailors not ‘technicians and staff flunkies’. People assumed the Admiral routinely pulled strings to oil his progress from one plum posting to another; nothing could be further from the truth. Peter might have been disowned for all he knew.
Marija was the only person in whom he’d ever confided how much his father’s estrangement and his coldly distant disappointment had hurt him as a boy, and continued to wound him even now. His mother’s premature death at fifty-three, hastened by loneliness and drink, had sharpened the edge of his pain and anger and made the breach with his father almost irreconcilable.
The second picture was of the Calleja siblings. He gazed at the faded monochrome portrait of Marija aged fourteen, her elder brother Sam, and younger brother Joe on a balcony with the Grand Harbour at their backs. Sam, four years older, obviously felt he was too old for such nonsense as family snaps. Joe would have been only ten or eleven at the time, and Marija — having temporarily put aside her crutches — had her arms around Sam’s waist and Joe’s shoulders. Sam was half-frowning, Joe was grinning guiltily and Marija was laughing, her long dark hair catching on the light summer breeze.
The Admiral had commanded a cruiser squadron based at Malta at the time and Peter’s mother — having deposited him and his sister, Elspeth in boarding schools in England — had gone out to join the hero in Valetta for the last six months of his first seagoing posting as a newly promoted Rear-Admiral. In Malta, his mother, as was her way, had enthusiastically thrown herself into the social whirl of the Mediterranean Fleet, and devoted much of her spare time to miscellaneous good causes. Malta had been wrecked by bombing during the war and in the cash-strapped years of the late forties reconstruction was painfully slow. Thousands of Maltese were still living among the ruins and basic services like water supply, electricity, and hospitals were operating at a level that would never have been tolerated in England.
It was during the course of his mother’s ‘good works’ that she encountered the Calleja family, and their ‘crippled’ daughter, Marija whom, along with her baby brother Joe had been miraculously rescued from their collapsed home in Vittoriosa twenty-four hours after a German air raid in 1942. There had been few such miracles during the Malta blitz and even in 1950 Marija’s story still attracted a great deal of local interest. At the time Peter Christopher’s mother had encountered the Calleja family, Marija had been in a year-long interregnum between a series of major operations that a remarkable naval surgeon called, Reginald Stephens hoped would eventually enable the ‘Heroine of Vittoriosa-Birgu’ to one day, walk again unaided by crutches or sticks.
While Peter Christopher’s mother had been unable to offer any real additional practical support — the medical side of things was already well in hand — she’d been captivated by the vivacious, laughing girl child in the wheelchair. In retrospect Peter suspected that those few months in Malta were the happiest of his mother’s life. She’d become tremendously friendly with Marija’s mother, an unlikely friendship given that she was the daughter of English country gentlefolk and Maria Calleja, the proud descendent of honest Sicilian peasant farmers. The two women had corresponded until his mother’s death, never so far as he knew confiding each other’s secrets to another living soul. Peter’s mother had been completely captivated by Marija and it had been a terrible wrench for her to leave Malta. Back in England she was a changed woman, aware for the first time how ‘shamelessly’ — her own word — she’d been ‘neglecting’ her own children. Practically her last act before leaving Malta was to ask Marija if she’d consider writing to a pen friend in England. At the time she had in mind Elspeth, Peter’s elder sister. Elspeth had been mortally offended by the notion of having a pen friend several years her junior — Elspeth was then nearly sixteen and Marija just thirteen — and in any event, that sort of thing wasn’t her cup of tea. So it was that Peter had become the heroine of Vittoriosa-Birgu’s English pen friend.
That was more than half his life ago.
The pen friends latest exchange of portraits had been that spring.
Peter gazed at the image that seized his whole attention every time he trusted himself to look upon it. Marija had sent him the specially posed, studio head and shoulders monochrome picture, six inches by four, which he’d had mounted in a silvery frame in Edinburgh. There was a small crucifix on a slender chain hanging from her neck. Her skin was clean and clear, her eyes focused a little off camera to show her face in half profile. Her hair was pulled back in a traditional, and to modern eyes, almost Edwardian way and her expression was intent rather than serious, her eyes were smiling…
It is odd that as I write everything around me on the ship seems so normal. Everybody is going about their duties and the ship is quiet, just like it was a normal first watch. I don’t think what has happened has really begun to sink in yet.
Peter had been engaged once — last year to a vicar’s daughter called Phoebe — but it would never have worked. On the face of it Phoebe was very nearly the perfect wife for a career naval officer; petite, clever, pragmatic and devout, she believed in service and in the virtue of duty, and she’d latched onto him like a limpet. He’d been flattered, mildly infatuated with her for several months and not realised the error of his ways until he’d found himself engaged; although he couldn’t later actually remember ever uttering the fateful question: ‘Will you, Phoebe Louise Sellars, do me, the honour of marrying me?” Phoebe was far too well brought up a young lady to have lied a about a thing like that and it would have been extremely bad form to have disputed her word on such a sensitive matter. Especially, after Phoebe’s father had had the engagement announced in The Times. One day they’d been ‘dating’, the next Phoebe was discussing the seating plan for the wedding reception.