“Is it true?” The younger man asked.
“About Marija meeting the new Admiral?”
“Yes,” there was a strange hoarseness in Sam Calleja’s throat which his father put down to the smoke and dust which still hung around the docks two days after the attack.
“You know that the new Admiral is the father of Peter Christopher, Marija’s…”
“Pen friend, yes.”
Peter Calleja gave his son a sharp look, stung by the bitterness of his retort.
“What’s got into you tonight?”
The younger man waved at the wreck of the frigate in the dry dock.
“I lost a lot of good men in that,” he ground out between virtually clenched teeth. “And for what?”
Peter Calleja didn’t know the answer so he said nothing for about a minute as the two men eyed the scene. There were surveyors climbing about, sometimes disappearing under the ship where she rested on grounding blocks, many of which had penetrated or warped her plates when she rolled over. A hundred feet away HMS Torquay’s lattice foremast lay across the quay, broken, bent. It was a surreal sight.
“The last time I saw something like this was back in the forty-five war,” the father said, eventually, to his son. “HMS Kingston was in dock. She’d got too close to a couple of fifteen inch shells from an Italian battleship. Anyway, there was a big raid and when we came up out of the shelters, there she was, lying on her side, just like this. She was a constructive total loss in the end although there was a lot of pressure to patch her up. Afterwards we stripped her down to a bare hull, plugged her holes and moored her out of the way while we got on with the war. Later she was towed north and scuttled in St Paul’s Bay.”
“I thought Joe was under some kind of curfew?” Samuel queried, ignoring what he’d just heard.
“Er, yes and no. I only know what your mother told me after she’d spoken to Dr Seiffert. You know how your mother tends to gabble when she talks about the La Dottoressa Seiffert but from what I can gather, Dr Seiffert ‘squared things away’ with Admiral Christopher.”
Sam Calleja grunted.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered, “I’m tired.” He nodded at the frigate lying wrecked on its side in the dry dock. “A couple of the guys who are still missing joined the yard when I did.”
His father planted a hand on his arm.
Peter Calleja was of the ‘war generation’ who’d gone through the bombing and the siege of 1940 to 1943. He’d seen his idyllic island home scarred with rubble, stood and wept by more gravesides than he cared to recollect, and watched the sinking, wallowing remnants of the convoys struggling into the Grand Harbour. With every new convoy more of the destroyers and cruisers the Senglea Yards had patched up would be missing. The horror of fighting monthly battles just to keep the people of Malta from starving was written in the faces of the men of the warships who fought the convoys through. His son had been only ten when the Italians, and soon afterwards, the Germans began to bomb Malta. There had been no hunger in the beginning, that came later when convoy after convoy of vital supplies; food, fuel and ammunition, was decimated by dive bombers, U-boats, torpedo boats and mines lying in wait in the narrows between Sicily and Tunisia. There was nowhere for the convoys to hide on the wine-dark Mediterranean seas and the waters around the Maltese Archipelago had become a graveyard for the Royal Navy. His son had grown into adolescence knowing fear and hunger; their family home in Birgu — Vittoriosa to the English — had been destroyed, Marija nearly killed, crippled. Those were the worst of times. They said Malta had been the most heavily bombed place on Earth in 1941 and 1942. Every day he’d awakened wondering if this would be the day of the invasion, the day when German parachutists fell from the sky like a dark, malevolent swarm of vultures, and Italian soldiers poured out of ships onto the quays of the Grand Harbour. It had been bad for the adults; for the children those must have been years of unimaginable terror. He’d always understood — better somehow than his dear wife seemed capable — how hard that time had been for his eldest son. If he’d been a little older, or a little younger, perhaps he’d have shrugged off the memories of the things he seen, heard, and lived. But the war had caught Samuel at that cruel cusp between true childhood and the possibility of manhood; at that moment when his mind was at its most vulnerable and his personality — the man that he might become — was emerging from the innocence of his youth. Other boys of a less sensitive disposition, who were more confident in their own physicality, or just that little bit farther down the road to growing up had shrugged off the horrors of the siege; but Samuel had been the prisoner of those days ever since and probably always would be. Peter understood this as only a loving father could understand it; the tragedy was that Sam’s siblings never would. Such was the true evil of war.
“I’m going to put my head down for a couple of hours in my office,” he told his son. “There’s no point trying to get home at this time of night.”
“No,” the younger man agreed, grimacing. Even if the buses ran at this time of day — which they hadn’t for several months due to fuel shortages — a lot of the roads were still blocked. Besides, he didn’t want to have to answer his wife’s questions. Whatever hour of the day or night he got home to their company house in Kalkara, Rosa would bombard him with demands to know everything about the nightmare of the last few days. At first he’d found her attentiveness, and the melodic soprano of her voice comforting, reassuring but lately she got on his nerves and it was hard to conceal his true feelings. He’d needed a good marriage and Rosa, the daughter of an old and respected Maltese family embedded in the fabric of the island and its nationalist politics, had seemed too good to be true. In other circumstances they might easily have been happy. He felt a little guilty denying Rosa the bambinos she so longed to bear him; otherwise, he was beyond regret. “Maybe I’ll try to have a nap in my office later. There’s too much to do here.”
Peter Calleja, thinking he saw a suggestion of wry amusement in his son’s hooded gaze felt a renewed paternal connection. Ever since the October War he’d been aware of a distance between him and Sam, as if his son had retreated into his shell, shut out the world. Like fathers everywhere and in all times, he seized on any small sign that the Samuel he loved and for whose existence he had always thanked merciful God, still lived behind the mask of worry and exhaustion that sometimes afflicted all men.
“You do that. If I learned anything in the bad old days it is that a man must get his sleep because…”
His son grinned involuntarily.
“Because something worse is always likely to happen tomorrow,” he said grimly, repeating his father’s familiar mantra.
“You can rely on it!” Peter Calleja chuckled.
Shortly afterwards father and son parted; Sam Calleja to clamber down into the dock to check the progress of the surveyors, Peter Calleja to his office where he planned to spread a blanket on the floor and rest his aching head. Tomorrow was a new day and unlike his son, at his age he needed several hours sleep a night if he was to be able to function again in the morning.
The younger man briefly walked into the shadows beneath the bow of HMS Torquay. Down in the dock it was as if the whole World was upside down, inverted, topsy turvy like something out of a darkling fairy tale.
Sam Calleja paused in the blackness, reached up and ran his hand along the clammy cold steel of the broken frigate’s plates, remembering the dead still trapped in the ship’s hull. The pain of dislocation, of not belonging, of forever feeling alien stabbed his soul anew. His father knew nothing; he lived his life like a sleepwalker. Things might have been different but the war had come that October night when the Yanks and their British lackeys had set fire to half the World and after that, hope and reason had died. In this brave new poisoned World the very act of procreation had become a lottery, Russian roulette; the very air he breathed was blighted yet people like his sainted sister, the Heroine of Birgu, carried on as if everything was normal. The last time they’d spoken they’d quarrelled, she’d told him that ‘people are still people’, and that ‘we must do what we can’, and ludicrously, ‘to believe in a loving God is to believe in a future in which hope will surely be rewarded’. Of course, he’d provoked her into that nonsense. He and Marija were chalk and cheese; they’d always fought like alley cats.