Most of all she wondered if, in this brave new World, if she would ever trust another human being again.
Chapter 26
A radio had been set up in the corner of the quadrangle now filled with tents and rows of hospital cots. It seemed that overnight Radio Malta had temporarily relocated — from its antiquated, low-power emergency transmitting station on Gozo — to a shed at RAF Luqa where, utilising one of the base’s redundant World War II era masts, it was broadcasting again at maximum strength. It had been playing music — mostly dance music — with half-hourly news reports. Everybody who heard those reports knew instantly that the censorship regime of the last year had been abandoned.
“Sir Julian Christopher, the new Commander-in-Chief of British Forces in the Mediterranean, who addressed the Maltese people last night, has promised to extend a hand of friendship to leaders of the Nationalist and Labour Parties. Mr Borg of the Nationalists has welcomed this development but Mr Mintoff has thus far declined to comment…”
Marija Calleja, pausing in her work sorting dressings in the cabinet Margo Seiffert had had moved — ‘so that it is actually where it needs to be, close to the patients’ — to its present location from the store room at the back of the fort, listened to the purposeful voice of the announcer. There was a note of hopeful optimism in the man’s normally stentorian delivery, as if he’d been set free.
“News from elsewhere in the world. The two British destroyers damaged by air attacks in the Atlantic are reported to have safely reached Oporto in Portugal. Both ships suffered heavy casualties but no casualty lists have yet been released. In naval engagements in and around the Straits of Gibraltar the British report the loss of two frigates to air attack but continue to blockade the Straits. His Royal Highness Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh’s doctors in Scotland report that he is now out of danger, although there is no news as to whether he might still lose one or both of his legs…”
Marija sniffed back a tear.
If there had been any news about Peter Christopher the Admiral would surely have let Margo know; so no news was good news.
She hoped…
“There are reports on American radio and television networks of numerous explosions and of heavy gunfire in the capital of the USA, Washington DC. Details are scarce but in one account a hospital spokesman speaks of scores of casualties and of ambulances and fire engines being fired upon by persons unknown. Less than an hour ago the Reuters agent in Valletta told me over the telephone that there may have been some kind of coup attempt in the American capital, although at this time there is no confirmation of this report. It is not known whether the trouble in Washington was connected to President Kennedy’s State of the Union Address, in which he blamed the atrocities against Malta and Her Majesty the Queen on ‘dark elements emerging from the shadows’. In washing his hands of responsibility for the actions of the US Air Force and ‘other agencies beyond the control of the Administration’, President Kennedy has won few friends…”
Marija smiled a grim private smile. A week ago the radio announcer would have been arrested for so frankly stating ‘the news’.
Lilting dance music began to emanate from the radio.
Margo had ordered Marija to go home and stay there for at least twenty-four hours.
‘No, no arguments!’ Her friend had declared. ‘You are tired, you are hurting all over and I don’t want you having a fall and doing yourself an injury. We have quite enough real patients as it is!’ Marija was to go home to Sliema and to let her mother ‘fuss over’ her.
“Your taxi awaits you, ma’am,” a tired but smiling Lieutenant Jim Siddall, lately of the Royal Military Police, now a ‘political intelligence officer’ on the staff of the new Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations, announced wanly as he looked into the small office.
Marija was a little disorientated.
“I don’t understand…”
“Doctor Seiffert has ordered me to drive you back to Sliema.”
“Margo can’t order you about,” Marija objected.
“When my boss, Admiral Christopher, refers to somebody by their rank,” he explained, patiently, “and that rank is Commander in the Navy, that person outranks me so, yes, Doctor Seiffert can ‘order me about’, actually.”
“Margo is retired from the Navy. She wasn’t in our Navy,” she corrected herself, “your Navy, I mean. Or at least that’s what I think I mean. I’m so tired I don’t know what I mean…”
“It is on my way,” the big man assured her. “I have a meeting in Valletta with Mr Mintoff’s people.”
Marija didn’t think he’d enjoy that encounter.
As the spokesperson and public face of the Women of Malta protests — protesting against the detention without trial of so many Maltese men — she’d met Duminku, or as the British knew him ‘Dom’ — a diminutive of his Anglicized name — Dominic Mintoff a number of times. The forty-seven year former Rhodes Scholar at Hertford College, Oxford, and leader of the Maltese Labour party had been briefly placed under house arrest several times in the last year. By profession an architect and journalist, Dom Mintoff was the kind of man who was not going to forget that ignominy any time soon. He’d actually been Prime Minister of the colony for three years in the 1950s, and until the October War had been itching to be the first Premier of an independent Maltese Archipelago. Unlike many Maltese politicians Dom Mintoff was never, ever going to be cowed by or in any way supplicant to the colonial power.
Marija looked in on Margo Seiffert to wave goodbye.
“I don’t want to see you again until Thursday!” The older woman informed her. “Promise me that you’ll try to rest?”
Marija had nodded, they’d exchanged pecking kisses and she and Jim Siddall had walked the short distance to where the man had parked his vehicle, a Land Rover in desert livery. She let him hold the door and didn’t object when he steadied her elbow as she stepped into the cab,
“Have they found any more survivors at HMS Phoenicia?” Marija asked after a minute of jolting along the pot-holed coast road to the south through the coastal village of St Julian’s. Her driver had been based on Manoel Island opposite Sliema for his whole tour on Malta; he must have made a lot of friends among the base personnel who’d been killed on Friday.
“No,” he retorted flatly. “They won’t, either. A bomb like the one they dropped on the fort kills everything and everybody in its way. They say the blast collapsed both bomb shelters. Some of the outer walls of the fort are still standing, but inside…”
“I’m sorry.” Marija understood herself well enough — bearing in mind the fact she’d never had a boyfriend, not one that was real, flesh and blood and next to her rather than thousands miles away, and that she really knew nothing about men — to know that a man like Jim Siddall would be good for her, and to her. But knowing it was not wanting or wishing it to be so, and she felt a little guilty even to be entertaining such thoughts while she waited to hear news of Peter.
The big man at the wheel of the Land Rover chuckled ruefully, guessing she wasn’t just thinking about the people whose lives had been blown away by that final fuel-air abomination dropped by one of the doomed B-52s of the 100th Bomb Group.
“If my wife’s still alive in England I’m still married,” he confessed because that’s what you did when you glimpsed the end of the World. If there was another war the end would come quickly, fierily and there wouldn’t be time to confess one sins; so now was as good a time as any. “My boy Jack would be nearly seven now, if he survived last winter. Doris couldn’t hack the military life and I wasn’t going to buy myself out of the Service. One day I came home and Doris and Jack were gone. Back to her people in Wolverhampton, that’s in the English Midlands, almost as far from the sea as you can go in the old country.”