by James Philip
“When we invaded Sicily in the Second War,” HMS Talavera’s commanding officer remarked cheerfully, “we had to plaster the whole island for days before we winkled out the garrison. Fingers crossed, it is looking a bit more straightforward this morning.”
His Executive Officer took one hand off his binoculars and held up his right hand with his first two fingers as crossed as he could get them.
“Touch wood, sir,” Peter Christopher agreed.
Westland Wessex’s were relaying troops onto the island, racing to and from HMS Ocean above the gun line at masthead height. If there had been any serious resistance the destroyers and frigates under David Penberthy’s command had been ordered to stand off and shell the island’s single airfield and Porto Pantelleria until the locals saw sense. Everybody was a little relieved that this was not going to be necessary.
“The Flagship says for the gun line to move close inshore, sir!”
“Number One!” David Penberthy chuckled. “Put us at the head of the line if you please. We’ll lay the old girl off the entrance to the port. The rest of the squadron can demonstrate due east of the sea wall.”
“Aye, sir!” Peter Christopher started calling orders.
“Guns fore and aft!”
The line of grey warships followed in Talavera’s broad wake.
Confirmation that the local dictator on Pantelleria had surrendered unconditionally was received as the destroyer came abreast of the entrance to Porto Pantelleria. The harbour and town looked quiet, empty but then it was still very early in the day. Fishing boats bobbed, moored haphazardly in clumps behind the sea wall.
Two small motor launches approached.
“Small arms parties to the port side!”
HMS Talavera’s eight man Royal Marine detachment quickly took position, fingering their FN L1A1 rifles and Sterling submachine guns. Two squads of seaman hastily mounted heavy machine guns on the aft deck house rail.
It was a profoundly anti-climactic moment when a rotund, bald, sweating man in an ill-fitting lounge suite and two unarmed youths in creased and grubby Italian Army uniforms struggled up onto the deck and after much bowing and scraping, and with a cringing show of self-abasement, obsequiously requested in halting English, ‘the honour to place our humble island in the safe hands of the Royal Navy.’
It transpired that ‘the Fascisti’ had taken to the hills and that for the rest of the island’s population this was ‘liberation day’.
It took a few minutes for this to be reported by radio in the clear to the Flagship. At a little after ten, Captain David Penberthy went ashore to liaise with the Royal Marine contingent in Porto Pantelleria, leaving Peter Christopher in command of HMS Talavera.
By then the Mayor of Pantelleria, Signore Mario Simonelli, had regaled him with the history of his home. The Carthaginians had seized the island in the seventh century before Christ; the Romans had briefly conquered it in 255 BC, lost it the next year and not finally incorporated it into the Empire until 217 BC. Nine hundred years later – give or take a decade or two – the Moors had gained suzerainty and clung onto it for four centuries before a fellow called Roger of Sicily, a Norman freebooter by all accounts, had eventually supplanted Moorish rule. But... No dynasty survived forever. In 1311 an Aragonese fleet under a certain Lluis de Requesens had taken Pantelleria; whereupon the victorious admiral had installed himself as a Prince. Ah, those were the days... In the sixteenth century – quite recently in Mediterranean history, just yesterday really - the Turks had sacked Porto Pantelleria. Peter Christopher had been a little disappointed that there had been no mention of Barbary Pirates. Eventually, the Mayor had collapsed in an exhausted, hoarse heap at the Wardroom table and his hosts had had to pour a brace of stiff drinks down his throat to revive him. The poor fellow had been waiting for somebody to invade his little fiefdom for several months and when the evil day finally arrived, he had expected the women to be ravished and the men massacred. Today’s events had been so ‘civilised’ that he was very nearly swooning with relief.
“Rape? Massacres? No, no, no,” Peter Christopher had reassured him, “we don’t do that sort of thing. It simply isn’t done.”
Spider McCann, HMS Talavera’s Master at Arms had listened to most of the Mayor’s outpourings. Afterwards, he accompanied the Executive Officer onto the main deck. The two men walked unhurriedly to the bridge.
“Sometimes I wonder what’s happened to the World, sir,” the older man admitted wearily. “It has got so everybody is afraid of their own shadow.”
The two men went up onto the open bridge.
The sky was clearing to a perfect azure, the sun was warm on their faces and the nearby island seemed idyllic. The flanks of the eroded ancient volcanoes were covered in vegetation, smoke rose lazily from chimneys beyond the harbour and crowds had come out to stare at the big grey warships moored and slowly parading close inshore. HMS Ocean’s helicopters came and went in an endless relay. Signore Simonelli had mentioned shortages of fuel and medicines, spare parts and the like but not alluded to hunger among his people, which was probably a good sign. Presumably, the survival of Pantelleria’s fishing fleet had keep starvation at bay since the October War.
Try as he might Peter Christopher could not help but think of Malta, less than one hundred and fifty miles a little south of due east from where HMS Talavera rode on the gentle swell in the lee of Pantelleria. One hundred-and-fifty miles, less than five hours steaming at flank speed for the old Battle class destroyer. Not that the old girl had sufficient fuel in her bunkers for a run like that; the Old Man had burned their boats in the overnight rush to join the gun line.
“It would have been a pity to bombard this place,” he said distractedly.
“A waste of good ammunition, sir,” Spider McCann agreed.
Peter Christopher shook his head and chortled softly. Every mile Talavera steamed closer to the Maltese Archipelago he felt another tiny weight lifting off his shoulders, a lightening of his spirits, an optimism that he had not known since before the October War. It was as if a new life was calling to him. In retrospect it was bizarre that until a few days ago he had never been to the Mediterranean, other than to spend a few hours ashore when his first ship, HMS Leopard, had touched at Gibraltar on the way to South Africa. A couple of months later he had very nearly made a fool of himself with the sporty, blond younger daughter of a Cape Town lawyer while Leopard had been based at Simon’s Town. He had been so shaken up by that experience that he had fallen easy prey to a pretty, very sensible Vicar’s daughter called Phoebe Louise Sellars soon after his return to England in late 1961. Luckily, nothing had come of the ‘engagement’ and he had no idea if Phoebe was dead or alive. Looking back he could not believe he had been so one-eyed about Marija until it was almost too late, or that she had waited so patiently and for so long for him to come to his senses.
HMS Ocean had moved to within about two miles of the coast. In the morning sunshine she looked like a great white flat-topped whale as the glare reflected back off her box-like high sides.
“Engineering request permission to damp down Number Two Boiler to conserve fuel, sir?”
“Negative,” Peter Christopher retorted patiently. “Notify me when the bunkers are below ten percent please.”
Everything seemed to be going swimmingly, the little invasion had been a bloodless walkover; but if he had learned anything in the last few weeks it was that a wise man took nothing for granted.
“Are both boilers on line?” Captain David Penberthy asked as he stepped back onboard just before two o’clock that afternoon.
“Yes, sir. I’ve warned the Flagship our bunkers are running low.”
“Very good. We’ll put our guests ashore as soon as possible. I don’t think we need to be hanging around here much longer.”
While the island of Linosa had fallen without a shot being fired, land-based artillery had engaged the gun line off Lampedusa and aircraft from Malta had been called in to support HMS Victorious’s w
eakened and untried air group in the suppression of ‘enemy’ resistance around the island’s airfield.
In mid-afternoon Talavera went alongside the Defender and took onboard fifty tons of heavy bunker oil; then, leaving HMS Nubian as a sentinel outside Porto Pantelleria, the old Battle class destroyer led the four ship gun line south-east at twenty-seven knots.
In the night the fires burning on Lampedusa were visible over thirty miles away.
Chapter 21
Monday 27th January 1964
St Catherine’s Hospital for Women, Mdina, Malta
Dr Margot Seiffert guided her young friend to the chair by her desk in her cramped but immensely organised, and ridiculously tidy first floor office overlooking the inner courtyard of the three storey two hundred year old merchant’s house at the heart of the hospital.
A decade ago she had started out with three ground floor rooms running a clinic two days a week exclusively for women and children. With the patronage of St Paul’s Cathedral, literally a few steps away at the other end of the square outside the front of the building, her little empire had grown, and grown; donations had trickled in and then dripped, eventually becoming a steady stream, and she had purchased the rest of the house. Later the Cathedral had leased her adjoining properties for a peppercorn rent and arranged for the residence behind the new hospital to be made available to La Dottoressa, as Margo was known in church circles and among the local people in Mdina and the sprawling hill top town of Rabat beyond the Citadel walls.
Marija was one of over sixty Maltese women she had trained – each over a period of at least three years of mainly practical, on the ward, tutelage - as ‘nursing auxiliaries’ in the last fifteen years. Although Margo’s nurses ‘qualifications’ were not recognised by the archipelago’s hide-bound medical establishment, none of her women were certified as ‘qualified to nurse at the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women’ until or unless she was personally satisfied that, given the opportunity, her auxiliaries would easily pass the final exams and interviews ‘mainstream’ or ‘ordinary’ nurses on Malta were required to pass to earn the sobriquet of a State Registered Nurse (Malta). Like most of the young women she had trained, Marija had been rejected by the medical schools set up by the British and latterly run by local doctors when she was nineteen. Marija had been rejected because of her childhood injuries and the likelihood they might impinge upon her capacity to perform standard ‘nursing duties’ as she got older. Other of ‘Margo’s auxiliaries’ had been turned down for irrelevant educational considerations or because their family backgrounds, or their personal circumstances did not sit well with the all male Maltese Medical Establishment. For example, illegitimacy was apparently an irredeemable disqualification, as was being a young mother, as was having at some time in the past refused an offer of a place at a Medical School. None of that mattered at the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women. Marija had fully qualified – by Margo’s exacting lights – aged twenty-two and had been a practicing nurse at the hospital and as a visiting nurse and assistant midwife in Rabat and Mosta for the last four years.
The recent upheavals on the archipelago had vindicated everything Margo had been trying to achieve. Her auxiliaries had performed, according to the letter signed by the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean – and therefore, the de facto Military Governor of the Maltese Archipelago – ‘with great professional efficiency and dedication during the recent emergency’. Vice-Admiral Sir Julian Christopher had asked her to make known his personal appreciation for her nurses ‘invaluable and selfless work to each and one of her angels of mercy’. Furthermore, he sincerely ‘hoped to be able to thank each and every one of them personally in due course.’ In lieu of this he had already ‘included my highest commendation for the work that you and your nurses performed in the days after the attack on these islands in my official report to Her Majesty.’
Margo Seiffert had snorted an involuntary laugh at this; but ‘her girls’ had been touched to the quick by the idea that they had been ‘commended’ to the Queen for doing no more than what they had been trained to do.
“How is our little princess this evening?” Margo asked her friend.
Marija gave her a mildly vexed frown.
“I’m okay, I suppose,” she grudged with a sigh. That afternoon she had gone to the company house in Kalkara to pick up clothes and some toiletries for Rosa. Alan Hannay had insisted on providing her with a car and a driver, he was a nice boy but every time she saw him she thought about Jim Siddall, with whom the youthful looking flag lieutenant had struck up an immediate, somewhat unlikely friendship. She had detoured to her home in Sliema to spend a little time with her Mama before returning to Mdina to meet her injured sister-in-law when the ambulance from Bighi arrived at the Citadel. She need not have worried about her Mama; the Sliema apartment was full of aunts and cousins she hardly ever saw. She had gone for a walk down to the waterfront with her father, who had been forbidden to enter the Admiralty Dockyards while ‘investigations continued’. Arkady Rykov, Clara Pullman and several different Redcaps had interrogated him for over twelve hours the previous day and he was in a mild state of shock, unwilling and incapable of believing the ‘lies about Sam’. Her younger brother, Joe, was being ‘grilled’ today.
“Rosa says that the hospital at Bighi is on alert for casualties from a big battle out at sea,” she said, guessing that Margo would be a better judge of the veracity of this snippet of gossip than her sister.
Margo Seiffert nodded.
“There was a big battle when the British landed on Lampedusa and one of their frigates, HMS Puma was badly damaged. Lieutenant Hannay paid a house call while you were out this afternoon. He said he doesn’t think our services will be needed this time but that we might be asked to take in women and children to free up beds in other hospitals.”
Marija absorbed this.
“I think Rosa will be happier here. Surrounded by other women, I mean.”
Margo hesitated before asking what she asked next.
“She really didn’t have any idea Sam was...”
“A monster?”
“No, I didn’t mean that!”
“None of us had any idea, Margo,” Marija scolded her friend and mentor. “None of us. And now everything is ruined...”
“I’m sorry, that was me being famously insensitive,” the older woman apologised instantly. If she had not been so anxious about her young friend’s state of mind she would never have made such a stupid mistake. “But,” she groaned, “everything isn’t ruined, Marija.”
“No?”
The harshly self-accusative cry of pain cut to Margo Seiffert’s soul.
“No?” Marija said again, quietly, inwardly excoriating. “There must have been signs but I saw nothing. Peter Christopher will come to Malta one day soon and I won’t be able to look him in the eye. Everything that might have been between us is,” she shrugged helplessly, “is gone...”
“Marija, I...”
“Peter is Admiral Christopher’s son,” the young woman reminded her friend unnecessarily. “The Admiral’s son cannot have anything to do with the sister of the man accused of assassinating one of his predecessors. They think Sam blew up that ship that sank in the Grand Harbour, Margo!”
Margo wanted to throw her arms around her friend.
Suddenly, her thoughts were in a hopeless chaos. She had never wanted children, never really wanted to be married although she had tried it once and paid the price for her blunder. She had had numerous affairs, but only one that gave her lasting emotional and physical comfort and by then she had been too old to start having babies. Yet although she had had no children of her own; she had watched Marija grow from broken childhood to the full bloom of her womanhood, been with her every step of the way, shared her growing pains in ways only a mother would normally know, and loved the girl as truly as her own mother. Marija was not the daughter she had never had, but in practically every way that mattered, she
was her daughter.
“You have nothing to be ashamed of.” The bald statement seemed so lame.
“It doesn’t matter. Everything is over now. I shall not embarrass the Admiral. Or Peter. It is not as if there is any arrangement between us.” Marija steeled herself, very calm in that moment. “Besides, he deserves a woman who is whole, a wife who can be his wife in every way. Not a woman who will be a burden to him always...”
“Marija!”
The younger woman quirked a sad smile.
“You know what I look like under my dresses, Margo. How can a man take pleasure in a woman with...”
Margo had stopped feeling guilty. Her guilt was rapidly transforming into righteous anger.
“Marija, I won’t...”
“I have made my decision,” the younger woman said flatly. “I will write to Peter and tell him that it is over. He must forget me. It is for the best.”
Margo was about to say something that later she would probably have regretted. She was saved by the bell, specifically the ringing of the telephone on her desk. The ringing was unnaturally harsh in the dreadful silence filling the air between the two women.
“Yes!” The older woman snapped irritably into the handset.
“My apologies, Dr Seiffert,” Alan Hannay replied contritely, “I hope I haven’t called at an inopportune time.”
“No, no. What can I do for you?” She waved for Marija to stay but her friend was already half-way out of the door.
“I must be with Rosa,” she whispered and disappeared, closing the door softly at her back.
“Would you have a few minutes to spare for a meeting with Admiral Christopher?”
“When did your boss have in mind, Lieutenant Hannay?”
