Margo, who had been desperately worried she was about to lose Marija ‘to domestic bliss and in no time at all, motherhood, I shouldn’t wonder’, was so delighted that her protégé so obviously still wanted to be a part of her two decade-long project to makes nurses of women who had previously been passed over by the old Maltese ‘medical mafia’, that she had instantly appointed Marija the ‘Chief Administrative Officer of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women, Orthopaedic Clinic, Royal Naval Hospital Bighi’. Privately, Marija thought this was a somewhat cumbersome title for somebody who was in effect, simply Margo’s secretary and receptionist at Bighi.
The senior people at the RNH Bighi had been as nice as pie, notwithstanding that they had tried to fob her off with premises in a Nissen Hut in the grounds. She had insisted, politely, on having a waiting room and a consultation room in the main building on the grounds that from time to time ‘Doctor Seiffert will want to seek the expert advice and opinions of fellow senior doctors and surgeons’. Surgeon Captain Hughes, a greying thoughtful man called out of retirement because of the October War, had given in to her demands with good grace after minimal half-hearted obfuscation. Nobody was going to deny the daughter-in-law of the Commander-in-Chief anything, providing she asked for it nicely, it seemed.
Life was good. So good that something was bound to go wrong soon.
But Marija would worry about that another day.
Chapter 35
The moment HMS Talavera cast off her the last two cables — bow and stern springs — the ship felt different. She was alive again for the first time in over six weeks; better than that, the endless mess and detritus, power lines and hoses snaking everywhere, and the civilians slouching about blocking every passageway, were instantly forgotten. The balance of the crew had transferred back onboard from the Cunard liner Sylvania moored across the Grand Harbour opposite the neck of French Creek; and the last three days had been a chaos of making good, cleaning, testing and drilling to ensure that the two dozen or so new men knew where to go, what to do, and who to follow if the alarms went off.
Life was good, thought Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher, as he leaned over the newly painted starboard bridge wing. He felt the ship vibrating softly under his feet, and listened to the reassuring rushing of the blowers filling the air with a quiet roaring, thrumming like a storm of approaching insects. The acrid taint of boiler smoke hung in the still airs and slowly, very slowly the narrow ribbon of dark water between the side of the destroyer and the wharf began to widen.
“Wheel AMIDSHIPS!” He called.
The order was acknowledged crisply.
“Stop STARBOARD!”
The ship’s slow inertia was drawing her out into the Creek.
A small red and black liveried Admiralty tug stood by ready to assist if called upon — her screws periodically churning at the blue waters in the main channel — but Peter Christopher had waved her off. He had made a judgement about where the wind, slight as it was, was coming from, studied the benevolent sea conditions within the anchorage and decided HMS Talavera would float out into the Grand Harbour of her own accord. Assuming, that was, he did not make a hash of the casting off — which had gone well — or inadvertently issue the wrong rudder commands.
The Master at Arms, Chief Petty Officer Spider McCann was bullying the new men into position along the port fo’c’sle and main deck rails. Talavera looked so fine in her new paint and in her much changed fighting trim that it would have been a pity not to give anybody watching on this fine Easter Monday morning from the heights around the Grand Harbour a show.
Marija had explained to him how much it cost the Maltese people to be ‘robbed’ of their Easter Monday; even if there was a war to be fought. She said his father had been wrong to decree that the day would be a ‘normal working day’, and promised that she would say as much to ‘the great man’s face’ the next time she met him. Peter Christopher had wished his wife ‘good luck’, she had frowned and then she had giggled and thrown her arms, ecstatically, around his neck…
“Sea duty men are closed up, sir!” Lieutenant Miles Weiss reported, joining his friend at the bridge rail.
“Very good, Number One,” Peter Christopher acknowledged, grinning at his friend. Neither of them could really believe that they were respectively the captain and executive officer of one of Her Majesty’s destroyers. Too much had happened since that November day a little over four months ago that Talavera had cast off from her moorings in Fareham Creek, slipped through the narrow entrance to Portsmouth Harbour and raced out into the wintery English Channel to rendezvous with the Ark Royal Battle Group bringing home the first and biggest of the Operation Manna convoys. They might both be older and wiser, blooded by their battles and in their dreams, haunted now and then by the faces of the dead and the missing, but they were, now more than ever, two young men living their dream.
Stripping so much of the damaged, wrecked and generally useless modernity out of HMS Talavera and restoring her to a quintessentially late-Second World War type of fleet destroyer, albeit one equipped with modern air search and gunnery control radars, had completely altered the silhouette but hopefully, not the sea-keeping characteristic of the ship. Gone was the peacetime light shade of battleship grey, replaced with a darker, more menacing hue from the waterline to the base of her black, slowly spinning double bedstead four-ton Type 965 aerials high above the bridge on top of the great lattice foremast. Of the Fast Air Detection Escort that had left England in November, only Talavera’s main battery on the fo’c’sle deck and that towering foremast remained unchanged. Practically everything aft of the bridge had altered. An ungainly quadruple 21-inch torpedo mount now stood aft of the funnel where the deck house accommodating the ship’s advanced Command Information Centre had previously stood. Further aft the old radar room was gone, replaced by a rugged steel platform for the torpedo director; and twin 40-millimtre Bofors mountings almost blocked the main deck to port and starboard of the new structure. The reconstructed stern house was festooned with four twin 20-millimetre Oerlikon mounts arranged around an ugly nest of ready use ammunition lockers. A twin 40-millimetre anti-aircraft mount had been welded onto the stern where the deck had been strengthened to absorb the recoil of the now absent Squid anti-submarine mortar.
Shortly before Talavera cast off a detachment of seventeen Royal Marines under the command of a fresh-faced Second Lieutenant had disgorged from the back of two Bedford lorries. Each man marched up the gangway with — so Second-Lieutenant Magnus Bell claimed — ‘about a hundred pounds of personal kit and weaponry’. The arrival of the Royal Marines underlined the fact that there was nothing remotely cosmetic about HMS Talavera’s change of silhouette. Her new role was one of searching and destroying; not advanced Soviet missile cruisers and destroyers or submarines, but rogue merchantmen and for want of a better word, ‘pirates’. The shores of Sicily, the narrow waters north of Cape Bon in Tunisia and large tracts of the North African coast of the Mediterranean were lawless and unpoliced. In the months to come Talavera’s sisters, HMS Dunkirk — which was never converted to the Air Detection role, and HMS Oudenarde were to be modified along similar lines. HMS Scorpion, which had suffered heavier and more structurally extensive damage in the fight to quench the fires burning in the USS Enterprise’s stern, was likely to become another ‘fast gunboat’ in due course. In the meantime the old 7th Destroyer Squadron had been disbanded, with Nicholas Davey, its former Captain ‘D’ taking command of the 23th Escort Group, a mixed bag of old and new ships including the weapon class destroyer HMS Broadsword, both HMS Dunkirk and HMS Oudenarde, HMS Leander, the repaired HMS Puma, and the frigate, HMS Plymouth, Talavera’s saviour in the storm after the Battle of Cape Finisterre in what now seemed like another lifetime but was in fact a few days short of four months ago.