That was the thing; they had been carrying on a fourteen year long conversation — letter by letter — and they had few secrets one from the other. The more familiar they became with the physical reality of actually being together, face to face, the more they realised that most of the things young lovers normally talked about was old ground, old news.
“Just because I already know a thing it doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear you tell me about it all over again,” the man declared with utter sincerity.
HMS Talavera had finally been refloated yesterday morning, towed deeper into French Creek and berthed alongside a fitting out dock. Peter Christopher had spent that morning going over the wiring schematics that Ralph Hobbs, the ‘Chief Radar Man’ responsible for overseeing the installation and maintenance of the electronics suites of all the ships of the Mediterranean Fleet passing through the Admiralty Dockyards of Malta, had sent him. Ralph was being run ragged and Peter was one of the few people on the island whose second opinion he not only respected but trusted. The storehouses back in the United Kingdom were being emptied to update and equip the ships sent to Malta but a lot of the aerials, distribution boxes, controls, switches, power boards and cathode ray displays were ‘one off’ constructs lacking comprehensive, or in some cases, any documentation. The people back home were scraping the barrel and hoping experts like Ralph Hobbs would make the equipment they were digging out of forgotten stores and cupboards, work on real ships.
“Ralph Hobbs has put in a request to make me his ‘Technical Naval Liaison Officer’,” he told Marija. “I’m not terribly keen about it because I don’t want them taking Talavera away from me.”
“There will be other ships, sweetheart.” Marija was experimenting with alternative endearments; exploring how each new option rolled off her tongue. My love seemed a little excessive; there would be time for that later. Dear heart sounded like something out of a Jane Austen novel. Within the frame of reference of her own immediate family for as long as she could remember her Mama had called her Papa ‘Husband’, prefixing this with ‘dear’ or ‘my’. Decisions, decisions, so many decisions…
“Not like Talavera,” Peter protested, frowning.
Marija put her right hand over his heart and looked up into his face, instantly seizing his entire attention.
“I should be jealous,” she teased gently, “how can I compete with a great big Battle class destroyer. I mean,” she continued, struggling to keep a straight face, “HMS Talavera has great big guns and she can run at thirty miles an hour for two thousand miles!”
Chapter 22
It had been decided to align the pews and chairs requisitioned, borrowed and ‘found’ around the College in a pattern reminiscent of the old debating chamber of the House of Commons in Westminster. Seating had been provided for some four hundred persons, as well as a standing area for the gentlemen of the press. Although the Great Hall of Christ Church College was not that much bigger than the previous home of the Commons, it seemed to many of those present noticeably less claustrophobic. The Speaker and his clerks sat on a low stage beneath great dark, grime-stained windows.
Margaret Thatcher had been Prime Minister for approximately two-and-a-half whirlwind months. In that time she had begun to reconstruct the ‘special relationship’ with the United States, formed a new Government that she was convinced was capable of leading the nation forward, and staked her Premiership on the earliest possible return to ‘politics as normal’. Fully aware that in a few hours time she might be a footnote in the United Kingdom’s post-cataclysm history she had no regrets. She and her Cabinet sat to the right hand of the Speaker; otherwise honourable members sat in cliques and clubs, clans and loose confederations of a dozen kinds on both sides of the divide between the Government ‘front bench’ and the notional ‘opposition’ across the so-called aisle.
Iain Macleod, the Minister of Information and therefore the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom’s key propagandist coughed bronchially, breathlessly. He and Airey Neave, Margaret Thatcher’s former chief of staff at the Ministry of Supply, had arrived at a rough and ready accounting for what was laughingly called ‘the state of the parties’.
Perhaps, fifty percent of Labour Party Members of Parliament were nominally loyal to the Party’s leader, James Callaghan. Within that caucus of support there was, however, rumbling dissent. The rest of Jim Callaghan’s MPs were split between factions on the left of his Party, by far the largest grouping being led by Michael Foot, the firebrand pacifist MP for Ebbw Vale in Monmouthshire. However, while Michael Foot’s followers were likely to be a noisy thorn in Margaret Thatcher’s side, the real imponderable was the mood of her own supporters.
At the last pre-war General Election Harold MacMillan had been endorsed with an increased majority. In that election the Conservative and Unionist Party had returned 365 MPs to the Commons, the Labour and Co-operative Party 258 and the Liberals a paltry 6 members. ‘Supermac’ had therefore enjoyed a majority of over a hundred MPs and it was this fact — regardless of casualties in the October War — which had given first Edward Heath, and then Margaret Thatcher, leave to form Government’s under the auspices of the War Emergency Act.
Of the 629 MPs elected to the old House of Commons, 387 had thus far signed the new Members’ Register, of whom 191 were Conservatives or Ulster Unionists, 192 Labourites and 4 Liberals. Notwithstanding that the head count was significantly less in the Labour Party’s favour than she had expected, the Angry Widow had resolved in advance that she was not willing to continue in office without a ‘properly’ expressed democrat mandate.
New elections would have been her first choice; that was neither practical nor sensible in the present climate. The war in the Mediterranean might have gone cold in recent weeks but preparations were well-advanced to re-conquer Cyprus and to re-establish the Anglo-America presence in the Eastern Mediterranean. Grim times lay ahead and increasingly, she was afraid that the cataclysm — far from brutally concluding the clash of irreconcilable East-West ideologies — had settled nothing. In any event, she was not prepared to carry on without the transparent consent of the surviving elected representatives of the British polity.
The Speaker of the House of Commons banged his gavel.
“The House will come to order!”
Sir Harry Braustyn Hylton-Foster had practically had to be carried into the Great Hall. Illness and the routine privations of the age had taken a heavy toll on his constitution, leaving his formerly military bearing hunched, diminished, and his gaunt face an ashen mask. In this cruel new age when a man began to decline, that decline tended to be rapid and terminal.
Margaret Thatcher was humbled by the daily examples she came across of men and women surmounting terrible adversities simply to carry on doing their jobs and fulfilling their duty.
Sir Harry Hylton-Foster had been Speaker of the House of Commons since 1960. Like many of the MPs present today in the House he now represented a ‘rotten’ war constituency; the Cities of London and Westminster. The Angry Widow’s own constituency of Finchley had been similarly obliterated, and a head count of the MPs who had thus far signed the new Members’ Register, indicated that over twenty percent represented non-existent or sorely reduced ‘seats’. Exacerbating the self-evident ‘democratic deficit’, in the chaos of the last year as many as fifty, more or less intact, Parliamentary constituencies had been without a legitimately elected representative. Of the 232 absent Members of the old House of Commons, at least a hundred had perished on the night of the war, mostly in the capital, a dozen were known to have died elsewhere, killed in the Soviet strikes or dying shortly thereafter of injuries or radiation sickness. Another forty to fifty MPs of the class of 1959 were thought to have succumbed to old age, pre-existing medical conditions or disease in the intervening months. In total, 74 members of the last House of Commons remained unaccounted for; it was not known how many had abdicated their responsibilities, cultivated local fiefdoms in their own backyards, or were serving in the armed forces — although anecdotally, at least a score of men were believed to have rejoined their old Regiments of Squadrons and not requested leave of absence to attend the Great Hall — and as many as thirty MPs in the ‘old House’ had simply disappeared without a trace.