by James Philip
The Foreign Secretary’s wife – a slim, elegant, greying woman in her late fifties – stepped forward and examined her unlikely friend. She nodded with approval. She had quietly, and very privately mentioned to the Prime Minister that ‘Sunday best middle-class housewife really won’t do any more’ before the mission left for Washington, and had been astonished when the younger woman had asked if she would ‘look into my trousseau for me’, because ‘honestly, I don’t seem to have time for anything these days!’. Thus the former novelist and wife of the obscure civil servant who had been catapulted unexpectedly into the international limelight six weeks ago, found herself in the role of the Angry Widow’s fashion counsellor. Secretly, Pat Harding-Grayson suspected that Margaret Thatcher had had an ulterior motive in asking her advice; how else was she to reserve a few minutes each day in her diary when she would be free to talk to another woman, about something other than matters of absolute life and death? Pat, who had never been an overly maternal person had even found herself spending time with and enjoying the company of her friend’s twins, Carol and Mark.
It was a funny old World.
“They ought to roll out the red carpet, Prime Minister!” The older woman decided. If only the Prime Minister had the confidence in her looks that she ought to have had, she would be on the front page of Time every week of the year, not just when there was at a big US-UK summit.
Margaret Thatcher nodded satisfaction. Patricia Harding-Grayson – since her husband’s elevation to a life peerage in the New Year’s Honours List, now Lady Patricia – had ordered half-a-dozen dresses from Bloomingdales in New York ahead of the delegation’s arrival at Andrews Air Force Base. The ‘trousseau’ had been ready and waiting for the Prime Minister.
‘I know you took a host of measurements but all these dresses fit me like a glove?” The Angry Widow – in her most gushing, pacific mode – had demanded of her friend.
‘I gave Bloomingdales all your measurements and they tailored these exactly for your figure, Margaret.” Pat and her husband were on strictly first name terms in their private dealings with the Prime Minister; and because of it they were meticulous about observing the appropriate public protocols.
“A dress fit for a soirée attended by three Presidents, Prime Minister,” agreed Lord Franks, a wise, patient man with gentle eyes and the charm of a born diplomat. Oliver Sherwell Franks had previously been British Ambassador in Washington between 1948 and 1952. A graduate of Queen’s College, Oxford, pursuing an academic career between First and Second World Wars. He had been Provost of Worcester College, and then Professor of Moral Philosophy between 1936 and 1946 at the University of Glasgow. During World War II he had joined the Ministry of Supply, ending the war as its Permanent Secretary. He had encapsulated the lessons learned during the war in Central Planning and Control in War and Peace, a document which had been at Margaret Thatcher’s elbow for much of the last year and was, basically, the source ‘bible’ for much of the work of the UKIEA Ministry of Supply in the aftermath of the October War. After the 1945 war Franks had been close to Clement Atlee, the Labour Prime Minister and to Ernest Bevin. It was the latter who had tempted him away from Queen’s College, where he was provost, to head the British mission to discuss the Marshall Plan; later he was involved in the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), and Chairman of the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OECD). Returning to London after four years in Washington he had spent the eight years before the October War as Chairman of Lloyds Bank. What with one thing and another Lord Franks had been top of a very, very short list when candidates were mooted to replace Sir James Sykes, who had been assassinated in the ‘Battle of Washington’.
“Thank you, Lord Franks,” Margaret Thatcher grimaced, a little uncomfortable to be complimented.
Jack Kennedy was at the head of the somewhat daunting reception committee.
First the United Kingdom delegation was introduced to Dwight Eisenhower, thirty-fourth President of the United States of America.
Margaret Thatcher had to fight to resist the urge to curtsy.
“I am delighted to meet you, Mister President,” she smiled.
The flinty-eyed, lean, somewhat more rotund and grizzled version of the great wartime leader she had only previously seen in Pathe movie clips and newspaper and magazine pictures shook her hand and held it just long enough for her to meet his gaze. She met his stare unblinkingly and after a moment the man nodded.
Harry Truman, Eisenhower’s predecessor and the only American other than Jack Kennedy to order the ‘first use’ of nuclear weapons was visibly frail yet openly pleased to make the Angry Widow’s acquaintance.
“It is an honour to meet you, Mister President.”
It was all a blur.
Behind her Lord Franks swapped banter with the two former Presidents and at her side Jack Kennedy was talking, exuding a charismatic charm that at once fascinated and vexed her.
Ahead lay a set-piece banquet and her moment in the limelight; her opportunity to state, definitively her own vision of an Anglo-American alliance which no longer relied upon the eddying currents of some mythical ‘special relationship’.
“You must miss being with your family?” She asked Jack Kennedy when drinks were being served and the VIPs were mingling in tightly coordinated circles. “You have young children, just as I do.”
“Washington isn’t safe for Jackie and the kids,” the man shrugged. “I’ve managed to get back to Hyannis Port a couple of times since the rebellion but you know how it is. You and I, we don’t get to have a normal family life.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Forgive me, that wasn’t said very well, Prime Minister,” Jack Kennedy apologised instantly.
Not for the first time Margaret Thatcher felt the loneliness of her role, and recognised how exposed she was on this frighteningly dangerous World-stage. Her life before the October War had been busy and fulfilling, carefully ordered and managed but in retrospect so stultifyingly narrow that nothing in her past had remotely prepared her for this test.
“Please don’t apologise, Mister President,” she said quickly, and changed the subject.
Over a month ago Vice-Admiral Sir Julian Christopher – a man she whom she hardly knew; but whom she had known intensely for several hours and subsequently for snatched pieces of less than a single week before he had flown to the Mediterranean to stop the rot – had proposed marriage to her and she had...stalled. Or rather, she had asked for time to consider his ‘kind offer’. The ‘Fighting Admiral’ had not mentioned the matter again, and she knew he would not unless she broached it. It had been easy to defer a decision, she had faced down one crisis after another in the last four weeks, sleeping barely two to three hours some nights, travelling the length and much of the breadth of the surviving areas of United Kingdom attempting, with uncertain success, to tie the Conservative Party and the nation together once again into some kind of cohesive entity. After Edward Heath’s death she had had no real mandate – and nor did she now - to govern. All she had, all she owned, was a fleeting opportunity to do the only thing she had ever wanted to do in her whole life; to make a difference. Specifically, to make the lives of the people she represented and now led, better and if at all possible, safer. If she was to do that she had to earn the right to do it and that meant earning the trust and the respect of her people. Not just the Tory faithful but of many of her natural political gainsayers as well. In her mind there was no more Conservative or Labour, Liberal, Communist, or any other kind of grouping that ideologically mattered; that sort of thing belonged to the old pre-cataclysm World. For better or worse the October War had changed everything. Oh, the old parties would survive but there was no real scope for alternative agendas, the priorities were so patently obvious to anybody who had eyes to see that it was positively unpatriotic to pretend otherwise. The country and those who relied upon it had to be made safe, fed, and offered a real chance to make a World that was fit for their ch
ildren, all their children, to live in.
“My loss is as nothing compared to that suffered by so many of our fellow countrymen and women.”
Jack Kennedy pursed his lips, waited, knowing intuitively that the seemingly unfathomable woman who had come to Washington and acted – against all expectations - with such disconcerting sure-footedness, and with such a profound grasp of the underlying political realities facing his Administration, was about to let him glimpse a little of her vulnerability.
“Please don’t misunderstand me but,” the British Prime Minister became hard, unyielding at the very moment she revealed an inner doubt, “there but for the grace of God I might have done exactly what that poor woman did in the Oval Office.” She forced a smile. “Oh, I’m sure people will say she planned it all and somebody, somewhere put her up to it or encouraged her, but I think it is more likely the truth is that when she learned about her son being listed as missing in action and heard about the gun camera footage of his plane being shot down, well, she finally lost all hope.”
The most powerful man in the World digested this unhurriedly, understanding that the woman neither expected, nor wanted him to address any part of what she had just said to him. She had needed to tell him that whatever he had heard about her, and whatever conclusions he had drawn about her from their relatively brief acquaintance; nothing to her was black and white. Things were not always what they seemed to be and she understood as much.
Jack Kennedy quirked a grin.
“This old house was built as long ago as 1824,” he said, apparently going off at a tangent; in reality, he was adroitly assuring his guest that she had made her point. “It was built for the Surgeon General of the Army. It wasn’t until twelve years later that Francis Preston Blair bought the place. Blair was a publisher and a close friend of President Andrew Jackson. The Government didn’t actually buy the place until 1942, since when it has been the official residence for guests of the White House, and incidentally, the place where former Presidents usually set up camp when they are in DC.” He spoke in a friendly, chatty way as if he was not the President of the United States of America and she was not the embattled Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. They might have been simply taking in the sites of the city, two private citizens who would never know the pressure-cooker ferocity of leadership in times of direst strife. “Of course, President Truman spent most of his Presidency here while the White House was being rebuilt. They discovered during the war that parts of the original building were practically falling down. A single well placed bomb would have brought the whole place down around FDR’s head.”
Margaret Thatcher relaxed, enjoyed exchanging polite conversation.
She ate little during the grand dinner. She sat to the President’s right, next to James William Fulbright, his new Secretary of State. Fulbright had struck her as being a most impressive man, and she looked forward to getting to know him better when he travelled to England on a ‘fact finding mission’. Conversation during the meal was of the inconsequential, throwaway variety; she was too preoccupied with her forthcoming key note speech, and the men flanking her were determined not to inadvertently surrender new hostages to fortune.
“Mister President, Ladies and Gentlemen,” Margaret Thatcher began once the microphones had been arrayed before her and the reception hall had fallen silent. “Circumstances are difficult but the warmth and the whole-heartedness of the welcome with which I and my party have been greeted in this great, somewhat battered, city has been second to none. Truly, the last few days have witnessed the renewal of the most ‘special’ of special relationships between two countries which hold dearest to their very beings, the flame of freedom!”
There would be no hecklers in this audience made up of Administration notables and senior hacks, Army, Navy and Air Force officers and virtually the entire forward echelon of senior staffers for the restored United Kingdom Embassy. However, the Prime Minister was not talking to the men and women in Blair House. Her words were being broadcast live across America, and atmospherics and technological gremlins permitting, to the British Isles and the rest of the World.
“This afternoon President Kennedy and I signed a historic treaty reuniting our two countries in a great crusade.”
It took an enormous effort of will to contain the urge to hector, to berate her listeners. She did not have to shout to be heard; those days were behind her and not everybody out there was against her. She had friends as well as enemies.
“My detractors call me the ‘Angry Widow’,” she went on, a trace of irony in her voice. “I am an ‘angry widow’ and I have every right to be one. People have a perfect right to be angry and frankly, if a lot of people weren’t angry about the state of the World it would be a sad thing. I lost my husband in the October War, my children lost their father. Countless others lost so much more. How could it not be natural to be angry when one’s whole World is swept away in a single day? But no matter how angry I am, I know that there is no magic wand that I can wave to bring back that old age which is gone forever.”
Margaret Thatcher stood away from the microphones, briefly looked to Jack Kennedy before stepping back to address her worldwide audience.
“President Kennedy and I have vowed to work together,” she declared, the pitch of her soprano voice rising. “As it was in the dark days of the Second World War the United Kingdom may one day, once again be the New World’s gateway to the old in the rebuilding of European civilization.”
Chapter 5
Thursday 16th January 1964
French Creek, Grand Harbour, Malta
The big tug in the red and grubby white livery of the Harbourmaster’s Department blew its steam horn twice as the hawsers picked up out of the crystal clear blue water. The propellers under the stern of her smaller Royal Navy consort churned up a sudden maelstrom and a few seconds later the hulk of HMS Torquay began to slide slowly – stern first – out into the open waters of the Grand Harbour.
It was six weeks and six days since the two-and-a-half thousand ton modern anti-submarine frigate had been wrecked in the dry dock. A bomb had exploded in the water between her thin, unarmoured hull and the dock wall and the immensely amplified explosion had opened up her side like a giant can opener with a twenty feet long blade. HMS Torquay had capsized onto her beam ends in seconds and forty-seven men had died. Only the frigate’s masts falling across the dockside had prevented her from turning turtle and probably killing twice as many men. It had taken three attempts to right the stricken ship; now, with her masts, her single forward turret, and most of her bridge superstructure removed she presented a sad, cut down, rusting spectacle. The miracle was that the ship had not broken her back when she sank, or subsequently at any point during the salvage operation; now there was vague talk of one day towing her back to England to restore her to her former glory.
Peter Calleja, Superintendent Under-Manager of the Senglea Admiralty Royal Dockyard did not think that was likely. A ship that had been so badly stressed as HMS Torquay was unlikely ever to be sound again unless she was rebuilt from the keel up. What sense did that make? The immediate plan was to tow the hulk around to Marsamxett and moor it beneath the ruins of Fort Manoel in Lazaretto Creek. The ship’s fate would be decided another day. Today the priority was to clear the dry dock and to prepare it to receive the big ships he had been warned to expect in the next few weeks.
“I thought Sam would want to be here to see this, Papa,” Peter Calleja’s younger son, Joseph said by way of a greeting as he approached his father. Father and son were alike in their features but the son took after his mother in build and in some respects, temperament. Where Peter was taller than average and sparsely built, Joe was stockier and would tend toward roundness in his middle years like his mother’s Sicilian brothers. Samuel, his eldest son took after his father in both looks and frame, if not in his introspection and moodiness.
Peter Calleja tried not to scowl.
He had had to drop what he was doing and come down
to the dockside to supervise the removal of HMS Torquay because Samuel had failed to report for work that morning. A second supervisor was also absent, although in his case he – or rather, his wife - had phoned in his apologies in advance. The poor fellow had chicken pox.
“Well, as you see,” Peter Calleja grunted, “he’s not here.”
“I thought I was the unreliable one!” Joe chuckled.
His father gave him a withering look.
The son held up his hands.
“Okay, I’ll find something useful to do!”
Peter Calleja watched his twenty-three year old younger son scamper away and despite himself, smiled. But only for a moment. It was completely out of character for his eldest son to fail to report for work. Especially, on a day like this! He began to pick his way along the dockside, pacing the frigate as it was slowly drawn out into the open waters of the Grand Harbour. The masters of the tugs knew their business; slowly but surely the ship glided out of the dry dock which had become her temporary coffin. As soon as HMS Torquay’s bow cleared the dock gates she became somebody else’s problem.
With a ship one could always, sooner or later, wash one’s hands of all responsibility; not so with one’s children. Marija had been more than a little distracted since she had learned Peter Christopher was likely to finally set foot on Malta; Joe had quickly reverted to his old awkward, cheeky, activist self; and in recent weeks Sam had been, well, a complete stranger not just to his family and his young wife, Rosa, but to practically everybody.
A parent’s work was never done.
Today he was worrying about Samuel; a few days ago he had been worrying about Marija.
Last weekend Marija had asked to speak to him and they had walked down to the Sliema waterfront, sat awhile watching the activity on the salvage barge moored alongside the wreck of HMS Agincourt on the Manoel Island side of the Creek. Mostly, his daughter was unsettled and preoccupied with when, or if, Peter Christopher’s ship would ever sail into the Grand Harbour. However, that was not her only dilemma. Dom Mintoff, the leader of the Maltese Labour Party and a former Prime Minister of the Archipelago in the 1950s had asked her to stand as a Member of Parliament in the next General Election, which was scheduled to happen as soon as May. Mintoff, whom Marija had regarded as an unwanted and overly confrontational advocate of her work with the Women of Malta movement, had indicated that she would almost certainly be elected because he planned to insure her name was at the top of the Labour Party’s Candidate List. Marija, being Marija, was guilty about this because she instinctively hated being treated differently from anybody else. Moreover, she really was not very keen to be any more involved in politics than she already was and besides, how could she possibly make such a big decision without talking to Peter Christopher about it first?
