“We go to the old caves!” Marija declared.
Since Marija could not run, and Rosa was still hobbling with the aid of a stick; the young women found themselves moving slowly while men, women and children scurried around them. More shells were roaring overhead but mercifully none landed in the village. Nobody was panicking, people walked fast, heads down, but nobody actually ran. Marija and Rosa kept moving up hill. They were a little breathless as they reached the level ground behind the married quarters where the three old Nissen Huts had stood before Lieutenant Jim Siddall’s death. Without a word they paused to take one last look around before they disappeared into the deep caves in the limestone ridge that rose in front of them. They stood under the lip of the cave roof and looked back down the slope towards the waters of Kalkara Bay and the Grand Harbour breakwaters.
They gasped and then they stared, raptly fascinated and terrified.
Great waterspouts erupted in Kalkara Bay below them, the closest among the small fishing boats moored inshore, the farthest almost beside the lighthouse at the end of the southern Grand Harbour breakwater.
But that was not seized their instant attention.
In the midst of the maelstrom of collapsing columns of frothing white water the long grey deadly silhouette of HMS Talavera was racing for the safety of the open sea. Her funnel was smoking grey-black and she was steaming faster than either woman had ever seen any ship in the enclosed waters of the Grand Harbour.
The destroyer — nearly four hundred feet long — disappeared in a forest of watery explosions, each of which sent spumes of water as high as her slowly rotating four-ton Type 965 double bedstead radar aerials.
The women sucked in their breaths in horror; and breathed again as the destroyer charged out of the maelstrom apparently untouched.
The two sisters were not the only onlookers.
Practically everybody around them had halted and was staring down into the harbour.
Flags were running up HMS Talavera’s main mast halyards and at her stern, a big White Ensign had been broken out. The flags streamed in the quickening wind of her passing, as faster and faster she charged ahead throwing up an ever rising bow wave.
There was a lump in Marija’s throat and a heavy weight on her chest.
Somewhere out to sea there were big ships, at least two, maybe more, and HMS Talavera was alone. One brave little destroyer dashing towards its fate could not possibly be a match for what awaited her out at sea. Nevertheless, it never crossed her mind that Peter Julian Christopher, her husband of less than a month and the man whom she had loved half her life, would not hesitate to throw himself and his ship at his enemies.
How else could he protect all that he held dear, and everything and everybody in the World that he loved?
As another air-rending salvo rocketed over her head on the way to RAF Luqa, Marija watched HMS Talavera heel into a racing turn that took her perilously close to the northern breakwater as another forest of giant shell splashes tore up the grey, shot churned waters of the outer Grand Harbour.
HMS Talavera crashed into the seas beyond the breakwater, already half-lost in the gathering haze of the spring day.
Marija wondered silently if she would ever see the man she loved alive again in this World.
Rosa tugged at her arm.
“Sister!” She cried urgently. “We cannot stay here!”
Shells were screaming down into Dockyard Creek, Senglea, French Creek and beyond. There was dust rising in the air, and for the first time the acrid taint of gun cotton wrinkled her nose. Marija had grown up with that bitter stench in her face and the gritty taste of pulverized limestone and sandstone in her mouth. Nothing lingered like the corruption of fire.
Marija could not make herself move.
Across the other side of the Grand Harbour a battery of three 3.7-inch anti-aircraft guns in emplacements below the ruins of Fort St Elmo belched fire. For a moment she did not understand why their barrels were only inclined a few degrees above the horizontal.
The guns were not firing at enemy aircraft. Those small guns were all the defenders had to shoot back at the big ships out at sea.
HMS Talavera was shrouded in the mist, moving like a wraith, her indistinct port silhouette lengthening as she swung around to the north.
The north…
Towards the sound of the guns…
“We cannot stay here!” Rosa pleaded.
The women turned and stumbled deeper in to cave.
The British had used the caves above Kalkara to store shells for the Second World War anti-aircraft batteries which had once been emplaced all along the ridge. Twenty years ago the caves had been both bomb shelters and homes to local civilians and the gunners alike. The entrance to the biggest cave had been shut off with a grill several years ago but somebody had cut off the padlock and local children used the murky, dank subterranean warren of caverns and tunnels as their playground. Those who had experienced the bombing of the Second World War always knew where the nearest ‘safe’ shelter was to be found.
Two decades ago only the fact that the Maltese Archipelago was riddled with deep granite and limestone caves had saved the Maltese population from a decimation of biblical proportions.
As a girl Marija had been taught and compelled to relive the nightmare. Such was the inheritance of her generation of Maltese children, to have lived through the storm and to be required — as if by law — to know its dimensions, lest future generations dared to forget their past.
Then as now the greater part of the three hundred thousand people who inhabited the islands of the Maltese Archipelago lived on the southern half of the main island, Malta itself, mainly in the ‘cities’ and towns clustered around the Grand Harbour, and the airfield at Luqa. The 1945 war had left two-thirds of all the buildings on the archipelago destroyed or so badly damaged as to be uninhabitable. Of the major populated areas Sliema-Gzira had suffered least, with some 40 percent of its houses surviving either lightly damaged, or undamaged. Either side of RAF Luqa 70 percent of the houses were gone; in Kalkara 70 percent, in Birgu where Marija had been crushed in a collapsed basement, 65 percent, in Senglea and Cospicua abutting French Creek 80 percent, while in Floriana on the landward side of Valletta hardly one stone was left standing above another, and in Valletta itself, notwithstanding its great bastion walls and ramparts, three-quarters of the city was wrecked. However, what Maltese teachers taught their children in schools was about more than the cost in bricks and stones, or the wanton desecration of their proud island heritage; because a people was infinitely greater than the sum of the houses it lived in and the historical monuments that adorned its communities. The miracle of the second great siege — the first had been in 1565 — was that so few Maltese had actually died. Malta had been the most heavily bombed place on Earth in 1941 and 1942 but only 1540 civilians had died; 703 men, 433 women and 404 children.
Malta had survived that trial by fire.
Marija and Rosa held hands in the gloomy, crowded cave. They heard and felt the shells crashing down to earth and the barking of the distant anti-aircraft guns like small dogs yapping in a thunder storm. They listened to the distant whoosh of missiles launching and roar of RAF and American jets. In between the crack of guns and the fall of shot, the air was eerily quiet.
Everybody in the cave had recognised Marija.
The Heroine of Vittoriosa-Birgu was among them so everything would be well.