There was still a shouting match going on outside in the corridor.
“And would somebody please tell those idiots outside to stop shouting the house down!”
Chapter 45
Margo Seiffert had begun transferring patients from the first floor down to the cloistered garden in the middle of the hospital immediately she heard the ululating wail of the air raid alarms travelling like a tsunami across the island. The more seriously ill patients, or those confined to bed were carried straight down into the cellars of the old houses that comprised the modern hospital. The staff at the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women had practiced this drill regularly since the air raid in early December, and today everything went so smoothly that Margo was able to return to her office to attempt to make some calls. It never hurt to find out what was actually going on. She felt the distant explosions through the soles of her feet; but had shown no hint of alarm as the hospital went into its well practiced air raid drill. She was unsurprised to discover that the telephone lines in her office and in the Reception Room were dead.
Clara Pullman stuck her head around the door.
“The lines are down,” Margo announced, phlegmatically.
“I went up to the western battlements,” the other woman said, still a little breathless. She was flushed and her fair hair was awry. Her pale blue auxiliary nurse uniform smock did not flatter her mature figure the way it inevitably did some of the younger women. However, Margo doubted that her newest, very able and very worldly recruit, was preoccupied with such things right now. “Soldiers and Redcaps are ordering everybody inside,” she reported calmly, collectedly. “I think Luqa was hit first. Now they are hitting Ta’Qali. You can’t see much over towards Valletta, there’s too much dust and smoke. Once your eyes get used to the haze you can see the flash of the big guns out to sea.”
Another salvo plunged into the nearby airfield, the windows rattled, the ground seemed to recoil in pain and the sounds of the explosions rumbled through the narrow streets of the Citadel like great iron wheels. Margo looked down into St Paul’s Square as a squad of British infantrymen doubled towards the main gates.
More guns were firing.
Margo scowled her frustration and hurried through the lobby onto the cobbled piazza outside the hospital. Clara followed her, unsure whether she should attempt to restrain the older woman.
The sky was criss-crossed with grey tracers and black spots, hundreds, no thousands of them were crawling like insects between the sporadic shell bursts and shot-torn air.
“Get inside!” A man yelled at the two women as he sprinted past. When they did not move he skidded to a halt, holding his steel hat on his head. “Get off the street, ladies! This place will be raining shrapnel and bloody paratroopers in a minute!”
Margo did not move a muscle.
Clara snatched her arm, refusing to be shaken off.
“Margo, you’re the last person we need becoming an unnecessary patient!”
The older woman saw the logic of it but hated showing weakness. Unhurriedly, she followed Clara back inside grumping and complaining almost but not quite under her breath. She had got so used to having Marija pull her up short when she was being too awkward, or stubborn about something that now that her protégé was rarely around she was enjoying the freedom to be as awkward and as stubborn as she pleased. Clara apart, few of her other women had the nerve to stand up to her. Suddenly seeing a lot less of Marija — in most of the ways that counted the daughter she had never had — heightened Margo’s awareness of her advancing age and had given her an uncomfortable glimpse of an aching loneliness in the years to come. She had led a lonely life until she had come to Malta after the 1945 war. She had been married but that had been a loveless experience; it was in Malta that she had fallen in love, befriended Marija as a child and grown with her over the years, sharing the young girl’s every minor and major triumph, spill, setback and step along the road to womanhood as any mother would. She knew she had not really ‘lost’ Marija any more than Marija’s own mother had ‘lost’ her. But everything had changed. Her little princess was in love and glowing with the joy of exploring the first days of what seemed likely to be a blissfully happy marriage. All being well Marija would soon be producing her own bambinos and bambinas…
The staccato ripping of automatic gunfire from very nearby stopped both women in their tracks.
“Everybody get down into the shelter!” Margo snapped. The dreamy mental picture of her holding Marija’s first born in her arms evaporated. Except that for the rest of her life she remembered that Marija’s first born was a beautiful, perfectly formed, healthy baby girl…
There was a continual racket, savage to the ear. Outside. It was all around the hospital. In the piazza, in the surrounding streets and from above. Most of the shooting seemed to be coming from above, short, odd sounding burps. Metallic detritus was tinkling onto the cobbles, ringing as it struck iron gutters and pipes, and making a cracking, rolling noise on the tiles of sloping roofs.
At the door down to the cellar the women involuntarily flattened themselves against the wall, covered their heads.
In the enclosed inner courtyard glass shattered, the old tree that had grown in its centre for fifty years shuddered, branches creaked and gave way and with a sickening, bone-breaking thud a man crashed head first into the stone floor in front of the benches, where nurses and patients alike had come to reflect, to be quiet, and to reconcile their lives in the sanctuary of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women.
The man on the ground was dressed in military camouflage fatigues, weighed down with a huge bulging backpack and black webbing festooned with grenades and ammunition pouches. His gun, a Kalashnikov with a polished wooden stock lay between the door to the courtyard and the soldier’s unmoving, prostrate body.
Before Clara could stop her Margo had instinctively rushed out into the open to find out if the man was still alive.
Clara turned just as the never-ending burst of automatic gunfire defiled the courtyard with sound, fury and the pitter-patter ringing of falling cartridge cases hitting the iron hard, centuries old granite flagstones.
Chapter 46
The Secretary of Defence, William Whitelaw, looked peeved and untypically worried when he accompanied the Foreign Secretary, Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson into the Prime Minister’s Private Office. The bright spring sunshine pouring into the room fell across Margaret Thatcher’s desk, its colour tinted sepia by the ancient imperfections of the sixteenth century glass in the windows. She put down her pen and looked up as a third man entered the room and quietly shut the door at his back.
No trace of the unease he was feeling at that moment found its way into Sir Henry Tomlinson’s demeanour. The greying éminence grise of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom, by the grace of God and her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, Secretary to the Cabinet and head of the Home Civil Service, had witnessed many dark days in the last eighteen months. The one facing the Government and the country today might, he fervently hoped, seem like a storm in a tea cup in a few days. The problem was that in his heart he did not actually believe it. Still, a visible manifestation of existential angst in public was not going to help anybody.