“What you did was heroic, Nick,” Julian Christopher said much more loudly than he needed. “Bloody heroic!” He swung around and let his eye fall randomly on the men around him. “Bloody heroic, I say! There aren’t enough bloody medals in the World for you and your men!” The ship was half-wrecked and it was astonishing that there had been no deaths on either HMS Scorpion or on HMS Talavera during the Hellish hours they fought to pump water into the USS Enterprise’s fire-ravaged stern. Both destroyers had had several men badly injured; but nobody was on the critical list which was proof positive that miracles happen sometimes. “Finest traditions of the Service! The finest bloody traditions!”
The Commander-in-Chief was about to call for three cheers when he, the Captain of HMS Scorpion, and everybody else on the deck of the destroyer, and on the dockside and on the high ground flanking both sides of French Creek were distracted by a commotion on the quay alongside HMS Talavera.
“Ah,” Captain Nicholas Davey sighed, “that will be that boy of yours making a damn fool of himself, no doubt.” The words were said with a mellow, brotherly indulgence that belied their apparent harshness. Without a word both men stepped to the head of the gangway to get a better view.
“Hip! Hip! HURRAH!”
“Hip! Hip! HURRAH!”
“Hip! Hip! HURRAH!”
It seemed as if every member of HMS Talavera’s crew — decked out in unreasonably good order considering the parlous state of the ship around them — was lining her starboard rail. Not that much of her starboard rail survived; many men were leaning precariously into space to get an unobstructed view of the scene on the quay. A hundred caps were raised in the air in unison; on shore there was more cheering and then, wild clapping.
At the foot of HMS Talavera’s gangway Marija Calleja was in her beau’s arms, clinging onto his neck, her feet dangling clear of the concrete dock while the couple slowly turned circles.
Julian Christopher saw that his son’s cap had fallen to the ground.
The young couple were briefly so caught up in the moment that they completely forgot about the hundreds of watching eyes; but because they were both sensible, organised, rather conventional young people, as soon as they realised that they were making a spectacle of themselves they felt a little foolish and made a half-hearted attempted to retrieve the situation.
Peter Christopher carefully returned his fiancée’s feet to terra firma.
“I got a little carried away,” he muttered, blushing deeply. “I didn’t hurt you, lifting you off your feet that way?”
“No,” Marija giggled, loving the closeness of him, wanting him to pick her up again and yet knowing that would probably have to wait for another time, another place; another place much more private that this one. “I am not a wallflower. I will not break,” she said awkwardly. And hissed: “Everybody is looking, Peter!”
The man grinned, holding the woman a little apart from himself.
Decorum! Stop mauling the poor girl in front of all these people, man!
Oh, no, my father will be watching this…
The last time he had seen the woman he loved — the woman he had loved since he was a spotty adolescent, half a lifetime ago — she had been in a hospital bed with a fat lip, two black eyes, and with a freshly stitched wound in her left eyebrow. The swelling had gone down. Make up, he assumed, had covered up the darkness around her eyes which was all the more reason not to maul her! Not right now.
“You look much recovered?” He stammered.
“Margo spent forever making me presentable this morning,” the love of Peter Christopher’s life confessed. “But I am okay. Really I am.”
“Just don’t try to run again until you are fully healed up,” Peter quipped, wondering as he said it if it was the wrong thing to say. Less than a week ago Marija had fallen — literally on her face — because she was trying to attract his attention, call to him, catch up with him as he strode down the narrow cobbled streets of the Mdina Citadel in conversation with Lieutenant Hannay. She had been so agitated that she had tried to run after him. Which was fine except for the fact the last time she had run anywhere was in 1942 when she was five-and-a-half years old. In between then and now she had spent her childhood and teenage years in hospitals slowly, painfully being put together after being crushed in the rubble of a collapsed bomb shelter in Birgu. Last week she had briefly forgotten she couldn’t run. Or rather, after she had run five or six steps she had remembered she couldn’t run, and straight away fallen flat on her face. “Sorry, silly thing to say…”
Marija raised her right hand and touched his lips with her finger tips.
Such a sweet man!
Suddenly, they both forgot all about the watching eyes.
Peter bent his head to hers, she clasped her hands behind his neck melded into his arms and again, her feet left the ground. This time they kissed. A first, exploratory kiss before they stopped caring about where they were, who was looking, or even who they were until after an eternity, they had no option but to come up for air.
“Well,” Margo Seiffert declared a little later as she approached Julian Christopher and the heavily bandaged inordinately cheerful, somewhat portly man standing on the dock beside HMS Scorpion’s blackened bridge, “I thought that went better than expected!”
“Yes,” the proud father murmured ruefully. “I think we can say that the young lovers were, er, glad to see each other again.” The Commander-in-Chief grimaced and introduced the Captain ‘D’ of the 7th Destroyer Squadron. “Margo, his is Nick Davey, Peter’s squadron commander,” he guffawed, “Nick, this is Surgeon Commander Margo Seiffert, formerly of the United States Navy but soon to be Medical Director of the Malta Defence Force.”
“Pleased to meet you, Captain Davey.” Hands were shaken. Margo cast a peeved look at Julian Christopher. “As to the MDF thing, you know full well that I haven’t decided yet!”
Now that the crowds had cleared the air was filled with the sound of the regular gushing, spewing rhythm of the pumps that were keeping the two damaged destroyers afloat while preparations were finalised to transfer them into dry docks on the other side of French Creek the following morning.
A slim young lieutenant approached the group, came to attention, saluted the C-in-C and waited respectfully to be asked what he wanted.
“I hear you acquitted yourself with distinction, Hannay?” The great man smiled, returning his former flag lieutenant’s salute. “Welcome to the real Navy.”
A little over a week ago Alan Hannay had had what most of his peers regarded as the cushiest job in the whole Mediterranean Theatre of Operations. He had been Julian Christopher’s bagman, the guardian of his diary, the man who organised his life, basically. Nobody got in to speak with the C-in-C without getting past him, and whatever he asked for he got. For the last two months he had spoken with the C-in-C’s voice, and he could easily have lived the rest of his career safely on the staff, far away from the shooting. Julian Christopher had known this but he had done nothing to stop Alan Hannay sailing towards the sound of gunfire.
“Ah,” the young officer’s Squadron Commander recollected, “you must be ‘that blasted young rogue Hannay’ the Captain of the Resurgent wanted me to place in irons the morning we sailed out of Sliema Creek?”
Alan Hannay looked sheepish.
“Talavera was rather short of a longish list of essential supplies, sir.”
Nicholas Davey was laughing softly under his breath.