“Please don’t misunderstand me but,” the British Prime Minister became hard, unyielding at the very moment she revealed an inner doubt, “there but for the grace of God I might have done exactly what that poor woman did in the Oval Office.” She forced a smile. “Oh, I’m sure people will say she planned it all and somebody, somewhere put her up to it or encouraged her, but I think it is more likely the truth is that when she learned about her son being listed as missing in action and heard about the gun camera footage of his plane being shot down, well, she finally lost all hope.”
The most powerful man in the World digested this unhurriedly, understanding that the woman neither expected, nor wanted him to address any part of what she had just said to him. She had needed to tell him that whatever he had heard about her, and whatever conclusions he had drawn about her from their relatively brief acquaintance; nothing to her was black and white. Things were not always what they seemed to be and she understood as much.
Jack Kennedy quirked a grin.
“This old house was built as long ago as 1824,” he said, apparently going off at a tangent; in reality, assuring his guest that she had made her point. “It was built for the Surgeon General of the Army. It wasn’t until twelve years later that Francis Preston Blair bought the place. Blair was a publisher and a close friend of President Andrew Jackson. The Government didn’t actually buy the place until 1942, since when it has been the official residence for guests of the White House, and incidentally, the place where former Presidents usually set up camp when they are in DC.” He spoke in a friendly, chatty way as if he wasn’t the President of the United States of America and she wasn’t the embattled Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. They might have been simply taking in the sites of the city, two private citizens who would never know the pressure-cooker ferocity of leadership in times of direst strife. “Of course, President Truman spent most of his Presidency here while the White House was being rebuilt. They discovered during the war that parts of the original building were practically falling down. A single well placed bomb would have brought the whole place down around FDR’s head.”
Margaret Thatcher relaxed, enjoyed exchanging polite conversation.
She ate little during the grand dinner. She sat to the President’s right, next to James William Fulbright, his new Secretary of State. Fulbright had struck her as being a most impressive man, and she looked forward to getting to know him better when he travelled to England on a ‘fact finding mission’. Conversation during the meal was of the inconsequential, throwaway variety; she was too preoccupied with her forthcoming key note speech, and the men flanking her were determined not to inadvertently surrender new hostages to fortune.
“Mister President, Ladies and Gentlemen,” Margaret Thatcher began once the microphones had been arrayed before her and the reception hall fallen silent. “Circumstances are difficult but the warmth and the whole-heartedness of the welcome with which I and my party have been greeted in this great, somewhat battered, city has been second to none. Truly, the last few days have witnessed the renewal of the most ‘special’ of special relationships between two countries which hold dearest to their very beings, the flame of freedom!”
There would be no hecklers in this audience made up of Administration notables and senior hacks, Army, Navy and Air Force officers and virtually the entire forward echelon of senior staffers for the restored United Kingdom Embassy. However, the Prime Minister was not talking to the men and women in Blair House. Her words were being broadcast live across America, and atmospherics and technological gremlins permitting, to Britain and the rest of the World.
“This afternoon President Kennedy and I signed a historic treaty reuniting our two countries in a great crusade.”
It took an enormous effort of will to contain the urge to hector, to berate her listeners. She did not have to shout to be heard; those days were behind her and not everybody out there was against her. She had friends as well as enemies.
“My detractors call me the ‘Angry Widow’,” she went on, a trace of irony in her voice. “I am an ‘angry widow’ and I have every right to be one. People have a perfect right to be angry and frankly, if a lot of people weren’t angry about the state of the World it would be a sad thing. I lost my husband in the October War, my children lost their father. Countless others lost so much more. How could it not be natural to be angry when one’s whole World is swept away in a single day? But no matter how angry I am, I know that there is no magic wand that I can wave to bring back that old age which is gone forever.”
Margaret Thatcher stood away from the microphones, briefly looked to Jack Kennedy before stepping back to address her worldwide audience.
“President Kennedy and I have vowed to work together,” she declared, the pitch of her soprano voice rising. “As it was in the dark days of the Second World War the United Kingdom may one day, once again be the New World’s gateway to the old in the rebuilding of European civilization.”
Chapter 5
The big tug in the red and grubby white livery of the Harbourmaster’s Department blew its steam horn twice as the hawsers picked up out of the crystal clear blue water. The propellers under the stern of her smaller Royal Navy consort churned up a sudden maelstrom and a few seconds later the hulk of HMS Torquay began to slide slowly — stern first — out into the open waters of the Grand Harbour.
It was six weeks and six days since the two-and-a-half thousand ton modern anti-submarine frigate had been wrecked in the dry dock. A bomb had exploded in the water between her thin, unarmoured hull and the dock wall and the immensely amplified explosion had opened up her side like a giant can opener with a twenty feet long blade. HMS Torquay had capsized onto her beam ends in seconds and forty-seven men had died. Only the frigate’s masts falling across the dockside had prevented her from turning turtle and probably killing twice as many men. It had taken three attempts to right the stricken ship; now, with her masts, her single forward turret, most of her bridge superstructure removed she presented a sad, cut down, rusting spectacle. The miracle was that the ship hadn’t broken her back when she sank, or subsequently at any point during the salvage operation; now there was vague talk of one day towing her back to England to restore her to her former glory.
Peter Calleja, Superintendent Under-Manager of the Senglea Naval Dockyard didn’t think that was likely. A ship that had been so badly stressed as HMS Torquay was unlikely ever to be sound again unless she was rebuilt from the keel up. What sense did that make? The immediate plan was to tow the hulk around to Marsamxett and moor it beneath the ruins of For Manoel in Lazaretto Creek. The ship’s fate would be decided another day. Today the priority was to clear the dry dock and to prepare it to receive the big ships he’d been warned to expect in the next few weeks.
“I thought Sam would want to be here to see this, Papa,” Peter Calleja’s younger son, Joseph said by way of a greeting as he approached his father. Father and son were alike in their features but the son took after his mother in build and in some respects, temperament. Where Peter was taller than average and sparsely built, Joe was stockier and would tend toward roundness in his middle years like his mother’s Sicilian brothers. Samuel, his eldest son took after his father in both looks and frame, if not in his introspection and moodiness.