His cabin was designed to bunk two officers but he’s always had it to himself; the man who’d been posted to join Talavera last autumn having disappeared in the cataclysm. A Lieutenant-Commander! Did that warrant a single cabin? He tried to sit still at the tiny corner desk. He couldn’t stay still. He got to his feet, paced two steps to the bulkhead, and back again. He wished he could go topsides, take a turn around the upper decks, uncoil a little of his roiling internal angst. He felt a little guilty to be so elated, so excited. He was still here in Fareham Creek and Marija was still in Malta over fifteen hundred miles away, enduring whatever she was enduring, alone… Except she wasn’t alone, she had her family, her friends, people who depended upon her and mercifully she still lived in a place virtually untouched by last October’s madness.
Chapter 4
The banner was threadbare in several places. Every morning as the sun rose and people began to set off to work a group of women gathered opposite the gates on the Gzira side of the heavily guarded bridge onto Manoel Island. The protesters were women of all ages, since the summer they’d stopped bringing their children because sometimes the British half-heartedly tried to clear the pavements on which they set up their makeshift daily camp beneath the awnings stretched out from the houses of supporters. A large number of women came every day, to show solidarity, perhaps only for a few minutes or an hour or two. Mostly, the women organised themselves to ensure that there would be at least a dozen of them outside the gates, holding their banner, from dawn to dusk every day. There was never any shortage of volunteers.
The women came from all over the Maltese archipelago. Some had travelled from Xlendi, Victoria, Xaghra and Sannat on Gozo, carried across the stormy strait disregarding bans on travel to the main island by sympathetic fishermen. Like the women from Mellieha, Rabat, Mdina, Mosta, Birzebbuga, Marsaxlokk and Marsaskala they’d been put up in Sliema, Valetta, and Floriana by their sisters. The Gozo women, perhaps because they were farthest from home and separated from the free members of their families for weeks on end, tended to be the most implacable of the protesters but all the women shared the same fears and the same outrage. The big grey warships riding on their anchors in Sliema Creek to the left of the bridge, and clustered about the slab sided depot ship HMS Maidstone in Lazaretto Creek to the right, acted like silent, ever present goads to the women.
In their eyes burned a sense of betrayal and it was this more than anything that lingered in the memories of every man who stood on the bridge — rifle in his hands — confronting the women of Malta.
Was this what gallant little Malta, the famous George Cross Island, had suffered for two decades ago? Was this the reward of the Maltese people for standing by the British in their darkest hour? Was it for this that the three cities of Cospicua, Vittoriosa, and Senglea become in 1941 and 1942 the most heavily bombed cities in the world? Why was the oppressor’s jackboot on the necks of the Maltese?
Such was the message in the eyes of the women of Malta that day and everyday on the Gzira waterfront opposite the bridge to Manoel Island which accommodated the Headquarters of the British Mediterranean Fleet and the Military Administration of the Maltese Archipelago.
The soldiers manning the gates were newly arrived on the island. This the women could tell because these men hadn’t yet acquired the leathery tan of men long exposed to the sun. It was obvious that to these men the cool of the breezy November day still seemed to them like a balmy spring day at home before the cataclysm struck. There was uncertainty and curiosity in their eyes and as the women had discovered in their dealings with the majority of the British rankers with whom they’d ever come into contact, guarded but entirely genuine sympathy. An hour ago an officer had ordered the soldiers to sling their black L1A1 Self-Loading Rifles over their shoulders before he walked across to the women.
“My men mean you no harm, ladies,” the young, fresh-faced subaltern had declared in a voice that was slightly tremulous. “You have a perfect right to peaceful demonstration on public property. My men will not take any action against you unless or until you trespass on military property.”
Marija Calleja had introduced herself to the boy.
“Second Lieutenant Jackson at your service, Miss Calleja,” he’d smiled before he remembered he was supposed to be the enemy. “I’m delighted to make your acquaintance. I’ve heard so much about you…”
Marija’s stern expression cut him off in mid sentence.
“Yes, well,” the young man blustered, embarrassed by her cool, mildly vexed scrutiny. “We don’t want any trouble today.”
Marija had collected her thoughts, aware — as she was always aware in these situations — that the women behind her were hanging on her every word. She didn’t know if she liked that, or the way they others increasingly looked to her to say, and to think, the thoughts that were on their own tongues.
“Before the October War,” she explained evenly to Second Lieutenant Jackson, “my brother played football for the Dockyard team against the Navy, and the Army, and the Royal Air Force’s teams at the Empire Stadium,” she glanced momentarily over her right shoulder in the direction of the ugly, oval arena hidden by the buildings a short walk away. The stadium was modelled, albeit on a less grand scale, on the much grander Empire Stadium that until a little less than thirteen months ago had stood at Wembley in North London. “Now you,” the British, “use it as a clearing house for my brothers and my sisters who dare to speak out against the tyranny of your occupation.”
“Miss Calleja, I…”
Marija pointed beyond his shoulder at the tops of the tents peeking above the razor wire around the old parade ground on Manoel Island.
“My brother was beaten up by British thugs before he was detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure without trial over there!” She hadn’t raised her voice above a low monotone but Second Lieutenant Jackson felt as if he was being subjected to a coruscating dressing down.
The young man’s cheeks flushed with anger.
“I really must…”
Marija put her right hand on his left elbow in a gesture of sad friendship. She had no personal grudge against this young man who was simply obeying his orders. He’d had no personal part in her brother’s beating or the decision to detain him. She could see from the expression in his grey blue eyes that the fresh-faced subaltern was very new to Malta and that he didn’t begin to understand the damage the actions of his superiors had already wrought.
“I know it is not your fault, Lieutenant Jackson,” she assured him. “I know that you were not one of those animals who put my brother into the hospital on HMS Maidstone. But while my brother and so many others like him remain unjustly in British prisons,” she half-smiled, “please do not imagine that you and I can be guided by the angels of our better nature.”
The subaltern swallowed hard.
He nodded curtly, spun on heel.
The gaze of the women fell on his retreating back like a sudden squall of storm wind hastening his passage back to his men.
Marija Calleja placed her left hand on the corner of the ten foot long banner, clasped it to her breast. It was odd how heavy such a relatively flimsy, insubstantial thing as thirty square feet of sewn together bed sheets became when one had been holding it up for over half-an-hour. Even when one had been holding it up with the assistance of several other women. Her throat was dry and her voice had grown hoarse from chanting.