Peter Calleja tried not to scowl.
He’d had to drop what he was doing and come down to the dockside to supervise the removal of HMS Torquay because Samuel had failed to report for work that morning. A second supervisor was also absent, although in his case he — or rather, his wife — had phoned in his apologies in advance. The poor fellow had chicken pox.
“Well, as you see,” Peter Calleja grunted, “he’s not here.”
“I thought I was the unreliable one!” Joe chuckled.
His father gave him a withering look.
The son held up his hands.
“Okay, I’ll find something useful to do!”
Peter Calleja watched his twenty-three year old younger son scamper away and despite himself, smiled. But only for a moment. It was completely out of character for his eldest son to fail to report for work. Especially, on a day like this! He began to pick his way along the dockside, pacing the frigate as it was slowly drawn out into the open waters of the Grand Harbour. The masters of the tugs knew their business; slowly but surely the ship glided out of the dry dock which had become her temporary coffin. As soon as HMS Torquay’s bow cleared the dock gates she became somebody else’s problem.
With a ship one could always, sooner or later, wash one’s hands of all responsibility; not so with one’s children. Marija had been more than a little distracted since she’d learned Peter Christopher was likely to finally set foot on Malta; Joe had quickly reverted to his old awkward, cheeky, activist self; and in recent weeks Sam had been, well, a complete stranger not just to his family and his young wife, Rosa, but to practically everybody.
A parent’s work was never done.
Today he was worrying about Samuel; a few days ago he’d been worrying about Marija.
Last weekend Marija had asked to speak to him and they had walked down to the Sliema waterfront, sat awhile watching the activity on the salvage barge moored alongside the wreck of HMS Agincourt on the Manoel Island side of the Creek. Mostly, his daughter was unsettled and preoccupied with when, or if, Peter Christopher’s ship would ever sail into the Grand Harbour. However, that was not her only dilemma. Dom Mintoff, the leader of the Maltese Labour Party and a former Prime Minister of the Archipelago in the 1950s had asked her to stand as a Member of Parliament in the next General Election, which was scheduled to happen as soon as May. Mintoff, whom Marija had regarded as an unwanted and overly confrontational advocate of her work with the Women of Malta movement, had indicated that she would almost certainly be elected because he planned to insure her name was at the top of the Labour Party’s Candidate List. Marija, being Marija, was guilty about this because she instinctively hated being treated differently from anybody else. Moreover, she really wasn’t very keen to be any more involved in politics than she already was and besides, how could she possibly make such a big decision without talking to Peter Christopher about it first?
Peter Calleja and Marija’s mother didn’t know what they’d do if — horror of horrors, when eventually the star-crossed pen-friends finally met face to face — it transpired that they weren’t actually meant for each other after all.
Joe presented another kind of problem.
Now that peace had broken out he had thrown himself straight back into the Dockyard Workers Committee and once again become one of its most rebellious and most stridently vocal proponents. With the shelving of martial law normal industrial relations had been re-established in the Naval Dockyards. HMS Torquay would have been refloated and moved out of her dry dock a week ago had it not been for a series of maliciously timed, wildcat strikes and a resumption of the old pre-war malaise of individual workers downing tools and walking off site at the drop of a hat. Likewise, absenteeism rates in the yards had swiftly doubled and trebled in the last month much to the exasperation of the Admiralty Board that oversaw the Naval Dockyards.
Peter Calleja had tried to explain to his younger son that if things went on this way that ‘the British will sack you all and bring in their own people from England’. Joe had looked at him as if he was speaking double Dutch. His son couldn’t seem to understand that if the British decided that they couldn’t afford to operate the docks as a social welfare scheme designed to support the wider Maltese economy, they’d have little difficulty importing highly qualified men from their own bomb-blasted homeland and presumably, from elsewhere in the Commonwealth. Even Dom Mintoff and the other local politicians understood as much, and had cautioned the unions — not just in the docks — against ‘irresponsible actions’ everybody might later regret.
Joe’s mother thought her errant — favourite son — would settle down one day. All he needed was a good woman by his side, somebody who would keep his feet on the ground. Unfortunately, Joe was too busy rabble rousing and politicking in the yards to find time to court, let alone woo, a ‘good woman’.
Today he was worrying at Samuel.
Sam had failed to report for work for the second successive day. That afternoon Peter Calleja planned to sign out a car from the Dockyard Pool and drive to the company house at Kalkara that Sam shared with his wife, Rosa. It was high time he and his eldest son had a man to man talk. The boy — even though his son was thirty-one he still thought of him as ‘a boy’ — needed to pull himself together. Ever since the October War Sam’s moodiness had worsened, he’d become less approachable, angrier. It had got so bad that Rosa’s parents had spoken to him and asked him to speak to his son; lately, he’d wondered if he ought to try to get Sam to speak to a psychiatrist. The ‘boy’, Sam, was behaving as if he was suffering the delayed effects of shell shock. Perhaps, the nightmare of the siege twenty years ago when Malta was the most heavily bombed place on Earth had reawakened old demons in Sam’s head? Who knew? Who could possibly know?
HMS Torquay glided past with men on the deck standing by to start up her pumps or to handle new lines. Peter Calleja stared at the great, crudely welded patch over the catastrophic rent in the frigate’s starboard flank which had transformed her from a finely tuned fighting machine, into to a wreck in a split second. The bomb had torn the ship open from the keel to her amidships main deck instantly flooding her engineering spaces.
He sighed a heartfelt sigh of relieve as the frigate’s bows cleared the dock gates. He checked his watch. It was a little after noon which meant that, give or take a few minutes, the operation was on schedule.
A green flag waved at the seaward end of the dock.
Peter Calleja waited a few seconds and raising his right arm made a circling gesture to the man across the dock from him standing on the cab of an old Bedford lorry. More flags waved and as HMS Torquay was dragged out into the Grand Harbour the dock gates began to swing shut.
A good job well done!
In the end, leastways.
HMS Torquay was safely on her way to her temporary anchorage on the other side of Valletta in Marsamxett Harbour; and he could return to his office and get on with his paperwork. He was looked around for the dock foremen who, in his son’s absence, had done most of the work ensuring that this morning’s work had gone so well. He was a man who made a point of letting his men know that he appreciated their efforts and always remembered men who had done good service.
He turned away from dock at the exact moment the first dull explosion rolled down the glassy waters of French Creek. It sounded like the discharge of one of the ceremonial saluting guns on the bastions opposite the ruins of Fort St Angelo. Except this explosion was muffled.