Peter Christopher watched his self-appointed guardian angel trot off down the corridor. Jack Griffin had been a several times demoted Leading Electrical Artificer in his Radar and Electrical Division on the Talavera the night of the October War. Griffin’s bad reputation had come before him and Talavera’s then Executive Officer, Hugo Montgommery, sadly killed at the Battle of Cape Finisterre in December, had practically given up on the man. Simply put, Jack Griffin was one of those men who got to be angry about everything when he drank too much, or when he had too much time to think about the many and varied ills of the World. He was also very bad at taking orders from people he did not like or respect, and despite a decade in the Royal Navy he had never really got used to the idea that the word ‘discipline’ applied to him, too.
‘You seem to have got a bad name for yourself, Griffin?’ Peter had asked him upon first acquaintance. In those pre-war days Talavera had been at Chatham running acceptance trials after her radical conversion from a World War Two fleet destroyer to a fast air detection escort designed to act as long-range air defence pickets for the fleet’s big carriers, the Ark Royal, Eagle, Victorious and Hermes. When the ship had finally been handed over to the Navy by the Chatham Royal Naval Dockyard, her officers and men had been horrified by the abysmal standard of the work that had been carried out. Although the external fabric of the destroyer had been sound, the internal fitting out was so bad as to be positively dangerous having been completed with little or no reference to the authorised plans and schematics. The watertight integrity of the ship had been compromised by cableways knocked through bulkheads; and the new deck houses accommodating sophisticated radar and communications equipment, and the generators which powered these critical systems were prone to flooding in heavy weather. Peter’s division had had to rewire and reroute over fifty percent of the Talavera’s cableways, caulk and repair compromised bulkheads and modify the relays and switches governing the output of the new generators before sea trials could commence.
And at the outset he had inherited Jack Griffin.
‘Never mind,’ he had told the man who had been the bane of all of his predecessors on half-a-dozen previous ships, ‘I’d give you a pep talk but that would probably go in one ear and out the other.’
It had been about then that Jack Griffin had begun to suspect he was not dealing with another green, well-meaning but essentially malleable young officer.
‘If you want to be chucked out onto Civvy Street,’ Peter had told him. ‘That’s fine. Just carry on the way you have been carrying on. Right now the ship is a mess and I don’t have time to waste mucking around. Either you are on my side or you are not. A chap like you ought to be well on his way to his Chief’s stripes by now. So, that’s that for the pep talk. As of today you have a clean slate with me. Make me regret it and your feet won’t touch the ground. You’ll be on the beach so soon you won’t know what hit you.’
Peter had stuck out his hand.
‘Make up your mind. That is the contract. Shall we shake on it?’
Jack Griffin had been so astonished that he had stuck out his hand without thinking. A contract was a contract and he had shaken on it. The October War had happened a few weeks later and the rest was history. He had felt responsible for the man who had been his divisional officer, who had later become his ship’s second-in-command, and latterly his Captain, ever since.
Peter Christopher had never been a man to over-analyse or deconstruct personal or service relationships; things were what they were and chemistry was an odd thing. He had always been happiest in the company of men who did not take things for granted, men who thought for themselves and had the courage to be accountable for their own good and bad decisions. Characters like Jack Griffin were worth their weight in gold, the heart and soul of any crew.
“Are you fit for duty, Jack?” He asked, man to man rather than three-ring Commander to his ship’s most newly promoted Petty Officer, as soon as Jack Griffin returned from delivering his message to Lieutenant O’Reilly.
“Aye, sir.”
“Good. In that case I have a couple more errands for you. First off I need you to find the Master at Arms and ask him to report to me at his convenience.” He thought carefully about the next ‘errand’. “The telephone system is down across the island. So I also need you to deliver a personal letter to my wife in Mdina. And if after she has read it she decides to return with you to Valletta, I want you to personally escort her. Things are a bit of a mess between here and Mdina so detail off a couple of fellows who know how to handle themselves. In the event there’s any trouble. Any questions?”
“No, sir.”
“I’ll have the letter ready for you in about half-an-hour. You can set off then.”
Peter Christopher watched Jack Griffin doubling away.
“That man is a maniac,” Joe Calleja muttered from his hospital bed, but not without a tinge of admiration.
“Yes,” his brother-in-law agreed. “Just thank God he’s on our side!”
Finding a place where he could sit down and compose a note to Marija was a less than straightforward business. The occasion and the circumstances in which he was writing to his wife demanded something polished, endlessly perused and edited, re-edited and lovingly crafted but he had no time or energy for that.
In a few minutes he had to get back to Marsa Creek to write his report of HMS Talavera’s role in the Battle of Malta. With Miles Weiss hors de combat he hoped Dermot O’Reilly, Talavera’s navigator would be able to fill in gaps in his recollection of courses, speeds and the general sequence of things and have the presence of mind and wit to correct any obvious mistakes or omissions. Some time tomorrow the first flight into Luqa would bring journalists, men from the Ministry of Information, and several as yet unidentified VIPs all of whom he was, apparently, expected ‘to humour’. He hoped that sometime in the next few hours somebody would find him a uniform which actually fitted him. Air-Vice Marshal French’s Chief of Staff had promised him ‘all that will be sorted out’; but given the situation he had to be some kind of magician if he really believed that. Most of all Peter wanted to hold his wife in his arms; until he held Marija in his arms again nothing would convince him what he had gone through yesterday had been worth it.
Chief Petty Officer Spider McCann found him scribbling his missive to Marija in an old storeroom.
Jack Griffin hovered at the Master at Arms’s shoulder.
“If you would give us a couple of minutes, PO Griffin?” Peter put to the junior of the two men and the red-headed man made himself scarce. He turned to the older man. “I gather Lieutenant Hannay discharged himself from the hospital, Mr McCann?”
“Yes, sir.”
There was a bench in one corner of the dusty room at the back of the old Zymotic — fever — wing of RNH Bighi. Peter waved his senior non-commissioned officer to take a seat.
“You look all in,” he observed when the older man hesitated. “Sit down for a few minutes. Nobody will see you slacking in here, Master.”
“No, sir,” Spider McCann admitted, gratefully resting his battered and aching frame but in absolutely no way entirely comfortable sitting down in his Captain’s presence.
“Mr Hannay,” Peter explained, putting down his pen in mid sentence. “Mr O’Reilly, you, Jack Griffin and dozen fittest survivors from the crew will report to RAF Luqa not later than sixteen hundred hours tomorrow. A party from the Yarmouth is being mustered separately and will meet us all at the air field. I’ve been promised fresh Blue No. 3, or No. 4 dress, I don’t know which, for officers and men so we can all be kitted out presentably for the flight to England on Monday.”