“Of course, Paul.”
“They are saying that Admiral Christopher ordered your husband to save his ship?” He shrugged in an agony of indecision. “That he told your husband to save himself and his ship? Is that true?”
“No,” Marija replied. She spoke now in English. “Peter told me that his father’s actual order was: ‘Cut your lines and go, Peter.’” She let this sink in. “And then Admiral Christopher added ‘get out to sea and await further orders’. But there were no further orders. So my husband interpreted Sir Julian’s orders in the way any destroyer captain in the Royal Navy would have interpreted them. He steamed at full speed towards the enemy.”
Paul Boffa looked at the woman in mute astonishment.
Marija seized the moment.
“Did you know my little brother Joe was onboard HMS Talavera in the battle?” This was self-evidently news to the journalist. “You see the Talavera left the Grand Harbour so suddenly he was not able to go ashore. And then the near misses as the ship was escaping the Grand Harbour killed or wounded many of the torpedo crew. So Joe had to work the torpedo tubes and fire the torpedoes that sank those two big ships that where shelling Malta.”
If Paul Boffa had been struck speechless by her previous revelations he was now briefly dumbfounded, stunned very much in the fashion of a man who has just been hit on the head with a lump of two by four.
She had just handed him the biggest scoop of his career.
Marija viewed him quizzically.
“Your mouth is hanging open, Paul,” she observed sympathetically.
“Can I print that?” He asked anxiously. “I mean all of it?”
Marija nodded, she understood perfectly why the C-in-C’s men had sent the youthful, unwary, idealistic editor of The Times of Malta to her.
“Even the private things,” she emphasised because she knew that her days as a comparatively anonymous dutiful Maltese daughter and wife were over forever.
In the morning a very different life awaited her and the man she loved.
Chapter 50
Iain Norman Macleod was in a vile mood. His back was playing up, his old thigh wound from 1940 was making him walk like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and he was about to board an RAF plane — on which smoking was prohibited — and therefore faced the prospect of the best part of four to five hours without the solace of a single cigarette. The cherry on top of his personal cake of woe was the news which had come in overnight from Cyprus; the modern frigate HMS Leander had been torpedoed and sunk twenty miles west of Pathos, and the enemy on land, having previously retreated into an enclave in the north-east of the island had mounted a local counter attack which had inflicted over a hundred casualties on two companies of Scots Guards and destroyed several armoured vehicles. Moreover, ambushes by ‘stay behind’ guerrilla forces had begun to disrupt the activities of lines of communication troops and to threaten depots as far back as the beachheads. At least thirty people, mostly civilians had been killed in these ‘nuisance’ attacks, necessitating the withdrawal, or the holding back of hundreds of desperately needed troops from the front line.
“It is all very well for the Chief of the General Staff to complacently turn around and say he expected this sort of thing to happen all along,” the Minister of Information complained irritably, “but we simply can’t afford to allow ourselves to get bogged down in a war of attrition in Cyprus!”
The Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir David Luce had spoken to General Richard Amyatt Hull before setting out for Brize Norton. Since the October War he had learned to treat whatever a politician said about making war with a very large pinch of salt.
“General Hull is anything but ‘complacent’ about the situation on Cyprus. It would have been astonishing if we had not encountered any ‘stay behind’ forces, Minister,” he observed tersely. “Likewise, the enemy has every right to attempt to counter attack us at a time and place of his choosing and, unfortunately to do his level best to sink our ships. We are fighting a war, sir. Things go wrong in war. Unexpected things happen and people are killed and wounded. That is the nature of the thing.”
This morning there was impatience and barely veiled disappointment in his voice and his customary imperturbable urbanity was audibly strained.
“Yes,” Iain Macleod snapped angrily, “coming from the man who left Malta undefended that’s a bit rich!”
The Minister of Information had limped half-a-dozen paces farther towards the Comet 4 jetliner waiting at it hardstand in a pool of arc lights fifty yards away before he realised that he and his companion, Airey Neave were alone. With a growl of displeasure he turned to confront the lean silhouette of the First Sea Lord.
“Sir David?” He asked peremptorily.
Airey Neave had taken his friend’s elbow.
“Iain, old man,” he said, a scion of reasonableness. “That’s not fair. Neither you or I was on the spot in Malta…”
The First Sea Lord had not moved.
“Sir,” he said with icy dignity. “Have you actually taken the trouble to read the reports — any of the reports — that I had delivered to your private office during the course of the early hours of this morning?”
“Not of all them. I’ve skimmed through most of them. I’m a busy man…”
This was no lie; in addition to being the Minister of Information and thus the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom’s chief official propagandist, he also held the post of leader of the House of Commons, and the onerous, somewhat poisoned chalice of the Chairmanship of what remained of the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland.
“We are all busy men these days, sir,” the man who spoke for the Chiefs of Staff of the three armed services observed tartly. His tone stated rather than suggested that if a man under his command had attempted to use the ‘I’m a busy man’ excuse to justify not being on the ball then very severe consequences would certainly have ensued. “But for young Peter Christopher’s actions in first drawing the enemy fire, thus allowing our weakened garrison on Malta to achieve local concentration against the main enemy airborne forces around Mdina and Luqa; and secondly, in subsequently crippling two of the three enemy heavy units supporting those airborne forces,” he paused, not for effect but because he had been so angry he had forgotten to take a breath for some seconds, “we might well have lost Malta. Not because of a military decision taken on the ground or at sea in the Mediterranean; but because nobody in Government heeded my repeated entreaties to establish a robust chain of command in the theatre co-ordinating all Anglo-American operations. Frankly, in the present situation it ill-befits anybody in England to sit in judgement of fighting men overseas.”
Iain Macleod opened his mouth to speak in his own defence.
However, the First Sea Lord had not finished and he cut the politician off before he could say a single word.
“Furthermore, whichever official in your department put out that press release which failed to clarify the purpose of my visit to Malta ought, in my opinion, to be shot.”
“That was…”
Airey Neave cut across his Cabinet colleague.
“Shut up, Iain.” He took a step closer to the First Sea Lord. “We’re all a little bit;” he grimaced, “frazzled at the moment, Sir David. My colleague meant no offence. God only knows we are all in the debt of those brave young men in those two gallant small ships. You and Sir Julian were very close, and nobody knows better than you the magnitude of his loss to our cause.”