Thick banks of smoke still fell into the void of the Grand Harbour, roiling down off the fires burning in Valletta, Birgu-Vittoriosa, Senglea and a score of other places. There was the stench of burning bunker oil in that smoke, the grit of pulverised sandstone and the sting of bone dry hardwoods, teak and oak, and of earth reduced to dust.
Peter suddenly became aware that one of the nurses on the jetty had stood up, shielded her eyes from the glare and dazzle of the arc lamps, and was staring at the USS Berkeley.
Peter Christopher gazed across the water, glassy and millpond calm glittering like a mirror now the sound and fury of the previous day was spent and the madness was over at least for now.
He hauled himself to his feet, and hopped and stumbled to the rail where he tottered uncertainly for a second.
A big American seaman took his arm and steadied him.
Peter stared at the woman silhouetted in the glare of the arc lights.
Marija…
He ached to shout her name but he knew she was too far away for his temporarily ruined voice to carry.
So he waved.
And after a momentary delay she waved back.
And then like a mirage she was gone, called to be with one of Talavera’s wounded.
“Somebody you know, sir?” The hulking American, his teeth flashing white against the blackness of his skin, inquired in a kindly, familiar way no leading rate in the Royal Navy would dare, let alone think of employing in the company of or heaven forbid, actually risk employing to address a three-ringer.
“Yes, I think so.” Peter Christopher shook his head, spoke hoarsely. “Yes,” he echoed, the weight of the World descending anew upon his aching shoulders. “I think so.” He looked the other man in the eye, grimacing. “Thank you for catching my arm. My wife,” he nodded to towards the jetty, “would have worried if I’d gone over the side.”
Without warning the Tannoy blared.
“Now hear this! Now hear this!”
A bell started ringing continuously.
On shore the ululating wail of air raid sirens began to wash towards Kalkara Creek from somewhere beyond neighbouring Dockyard Creek. Within seconds the sirens were shrieking like banshees across the water in Valletta.
“We’ve got to get you and your guys below deck, sir!”
The men on stretchers were carried with care and constantly apologetic noises into the shelter afforded by the bridge superstructure and the amidships deck houses, and arranged in corridors and vacated messes. A boyish Lieutenant junior grade conveyed the destroyer’s captain’s invitation for Peter to join him in the Berkeley’s CIC–Command Information Centre — but the offer was politely declined. Peter would have been under his counterpart’s feet in the CIC and he did not want to be separated from his wounded men.
The sound of the air raid sirens was muted within the ship.
A few minutes after the Berkeley had closed up at action stations the sirens fell silent.
“Now hear this! Now hear this!”
The destroyer’s commanding officer’s voice drawled from the bulkhead speakers.
“The air defence plot is currently painting no hostile aircraft or threats within one hundred miles of Malta. The alert was probably a false alarm but the ship will remain closed up at Air Defence Stations for another thirty — repeat three-zero — minutes just to be on the safe side. That is all.”
Peter had lowered himself, painfully, to the deck beside an injured engine room artificer. The other man was of approximately his own age and he grinned conspiratorially at his commanding officer.
“The Yanks don’t know they’re born, sir,” he observed sardonically.
Peter would have patted the ERA’s arm in agreement had not the poor fellow’s arms and most of his face been swathed in moist bandages protecting flash seared flesh that would be terribly scarred for the rest of his life. The ERA’s name was Dobson, Raymond Dobson, and he was married with a baby boy who had been born a fortnight after Talavera had sailed from Portsmouth to join the Ark Royal Battle Group in the Bay of Biscay in November. Like Peter he had survived the Battle of Finisterre, the fight off Lampedusa, and yesterday’s action…
“Neither did we until we learned the hard way, Ray,” he grimaced. “Neither did we.”
He must have dozed off because the next thing he was aware of was a man timidly shaking his shoulder.
“Time for you to go ashore, sir.”
It was still dark when he emerged onto the deck of the destroyer to be greeted by an RAF Flight-Lieutenant with a thick, bloody bandage wrapped inelegantly around his brow. The other man came to a shambling approximation of attention and threw a typically lackadaisical, sloppy ‘air force’ salute.
Peter Christopher returned the salute — he liked to think with a little more crisp aplomb, but somehow he doubted his salute had been any more military than the RAF man’s — with a sinking heart. Something told him that he was not going to be allowed the luxury of going ashore to search for his wife quite yet.
“Air Vice-Marshal French’s compliments, sir,” the bandaged Flight-Lieutenant explained, “but would you be so good to attend him at his emergency command centre at your earliest convenience, sir?”
The flier — he wore wings above his left breast pocket — was swaying on his feet, not from the slight motion of the USS Berkeley in the sheltered waters of Kalkara Creek; rather, from his exhaustion and probably the lingering effects of his head wound.
Bidding his farewells, restating his heartfelt thanks to the commanding officer of the American guided missile destroyer, and requesting that a message be sent to Miles Weiss at RNH Bighi that he had been summoned to an ‘interview with the C-in-C’, he followed the RAF man down the gangway to the waiting launch.
He had not told anybody other than Spider McCann that his father was dead. In the aftermath of yesterday’s battle it was not for him to broadcast the news. Moral was a tender thing after any battle, especially a battle lost.
The eastern sky was lightening from obsidian black to dark hues of grey, and the last stars were winking out as the sun rose towards the twilight horizon as the launch — actually a somewhat knocked about whaler similar to his old captain’s barge on the Talavera — chugged around St Angelo Point and west across the neck of Dockyard Creek. A mist of smoke hung over the water of the inner creeks, flotsam and oil, rafts of shattered cork, wood and here and there small buoys and waterlogged rubber fenders bobbed in the black water of the Grand Harbour. The saluting battery on the Valletta ramparts was briefly glimpsed between the lingering fogs of war.
Peter Christopher stood in the confined space between the small low forward and aft deckhouses of the whaler silently preoccupied with the cost of a battle lost as the first pre-dawn greyness fell across Malta. There must have been mornings like this after big night air raids by the Germans and Italians during the Second World War siege of the archipelago; mornings like this one but not so dreadful, nor so poignant with despair. Malta was more than just a fortress or a safe harbour to the post World War II Royal Navy; it was a symbol of everything that made the Service what it was. The blood of countless Navy men was etched and stained into the fabric of the archipelago; these waters were sacred, hallowed ground. If Malta had fallen in 1941 or 1942 there would have been no El Alamein, Rommel would not have been beaten back from the gates of Cairo and the Suez Canal, the war would have been lost and he would have grown up speaking German. Two decades ago Malta had been briefly the most heavily bombed place on planet Earth and yet British and Commonwealth arms had prevailed because the Mediterranean Fleet would have paid any price to save it.
“That was a brave thing you did yesterday, sir,” the wounded RAF man said quietly in the cold half-light. “A damned brave thing!”