He removed his cap; unbidden, his men followed his example.
“We will now sing the Navy Hymn.”
The line of VIPs; with the two Cabinet Ministers, Admiral Sir David Luce and Air Vice-Marshal Daniel French to the front had doffed their caps and hats. The Naval Chaplain of Malta stood awkwardly apart. He had offered to officiate at this brief memorial; Peter had firmly, politely rebuffed him.
Peter looked towards the second bowed group of men paraded to the left of his Talaveras; thirty-one men from HMS Yarmouth. The Rothesay class frigate had gone into battle with one hundred and sixty-one officers and other ranks on her roster. Yarmouth’s commanding officer, Commander John Pope had been killed early in the action and none of his eight divisional officers had survived the battle uninjured. By the time Petty Officer Stanley Bloom had run the burning wreck of his ship aground in St Paul’s Bay over half her crew were dead. Others had died in the water and of their injuries since. Of her original one hundred and sixty-one men only seventy-eight had thus far survived.
“We, the survivors of Her Majesty’s Ships Yarmouth and Talavera today share the honour and the glory of a battle fought to the limit of our strength and our powder; today we remember comrades and shipmates lost in battle. For all the days to come our two ships’ companies will forever be united by the travails of that battle. I salute you all!”
After the parade was dismissed Marija walked stiffly, trying not to limp and hobble in front of so many witnesses and rolling and clicking cameras to hand her husband his walking stick. His right leg was immobile, agonizingly swollen at knee and ankle; not that he would admit of any physical impediment.
Spying the approach of a pack of VIPs and dignitaries he smiled wanly, dug out a handkerchief and gently dabbed at Marija’s tear tracks.
His wife had no care for the great men who thought to own her husband.
Marija buried her face in his chest and sobbed while the camera flashes exploded and the men from the Ministry of Information began to rub their hands in quiet satisfaction.
Chapter 74
The last person who had tried to govern the United Kingdom from Oxford had come to an untimely end beheaded on a scaffold at Whitehall. Of course, Margaret Thatcher’s position was only incidentally analogous to that of King Charles I. By the time Charles Stuart had retreated to Oxford his war had already been lost; he just did not know it at the time. She was confident that her war was only just beginning and she was fairly sure that her people did not want her head on a block quite yet. Not that she did not inwardly concede that such a day might not come; for in this brave new World any leader who failed to consider that possibility was an out-and-out fool and basically, deserved everything he, or she got.
In the absence of Iain Macleod, the Leader of the House, one of his protégés thirty-six year old James Prior, the Member of Parliament for Lowestoft had stepped up to the mark.
Margaret Thatcher had been impressed by how well the mild-mannered, rather staid man, whom she had never really got to know before or after the October War, had acquitted himself. Notwithstanding that the leftish factions of the splintered Labour Party and the more vociferous of the Powellite dissidents from her own party had attempted to give him a rough ride; Prior had cut a decent, officer-like, gentleman farmer type figure and guided the house through the preliminaries without serious mishap.
“Statement by the Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher!” The Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Robert Grimston the sixty-six year Member of Parliament for Westbury in Wiltshire called. He had stepped into the Speaker’s shoes at short notice just before the session was scheduled to commence; the Speaker of the House Sir Harry Hilton-Foster having been discovered in a state of collapse in his rooms at Christ Church College by his clerks. Grimston’s appointment as Deputy Speaker had been the subject of an appeal — a parliamentary objection — back in 1962 but he had been dutifully ready to step into his sickening predecessor’s shoes for some weeks despite the fact that he himself, was neither in the full flush of youth or health.
Margaret Thatcher slowly rose from the front bench. She missed the rambunctious presence of Iain Macleod and keenly felt the absence of Airey Neave, the man who had stood by her shoulder and guarded her back the last year. Today she was flanked by a grim-faced James Callaghan, a large, lugubrious man on one side and by a solemnly hang-dog William Whitelaw on the other. Behind her the Party faithful had coalesced in a solid phalanx and had started to drum their hands on the hard pews installed in the Great Hall only in the last week.
The Prime Minister looked around.
Before the October War standing in the pit of the old House of Commons confronting one’s political foes across the chamber virtually eye to eye had been a pipe dream; not a thing a woman, any woman might dream. When she had been appointed as Parliamentary Undersecretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance in 1961 she had been frankly, astonished. At the time she had been the first of the 1959 intake of MPs to be brought into Government and the youngest woman in Harold MacMillan’s administration. Before the October War she had never believed that a woman would be Prime Minister in her lifetime; the Party and the electorate were too stuck in their ways, too prejudiced and too narrow minded to ever install a woman to Downing Street. No matter what she had felt about it that was the way of things and there had seemed to be very little she could do about it. And then the night of the October War had changed everything. That night had robbed her of so much and yet ironically, opened up so many unimagined possibilities. She had ridden the crest of the wave of her good fortune these last seventeen months. Edward Heath had recognised her true capabilities and promoted her, eventually, into his inner circle. Iain MacLeod — the man most people imagined to be Ted Heath’s natural successor — had dropped the premiership into her arms before she knew what was happening. Serendipitously, at around that time she had briefly discovered a new, wise, brave soul mate who might, in happier circumstances have guided her through the struggles to come. But it had not been meant to be. Julian Christopher was lost to her and the nation and today, her own future lay balanced on a knife-edge.