‘How many in each?’ asked Zulu.
‘Six? Any more and these mules will collapse.’
Zulu jumped up onto the first gharrie. ‘Who’s with me?’ he shouted, standing up and clutching the reins. ‘Yee-ha!’
‘Come on,’ said Harry to Edward. They clambered up beside Zulu. Lucky, Red and Laurie joined them.
‘Just like being in the Wild West, eh Red?’ said Zulu.
‘Oh sure. All we need now is Injuns.’
‘Okay, listen everyone,’ shouted the bearded submariner. ‘The course is this: back through City Gate, up past the Opera House to Castile Square, once round and back. That’s fairly free of rubble, isn’t it?’
‘Come on, let’s get going,’ shouted another of the submariners.
‘All right. Ladies? Ready?’
The girls nodded. ‘Ready,’ they shouted, ‘Steady! Go!’ With a lurch the gharries rumbled forward.
As they quickly discovered, this was no modern-day chariot race. The mules barely broke into a trot despite frantic yee-ha-ing, so by the time they reached the front of the Opera House, all the pilots except Zulu had jumped down and were pushing and pulling the cart along with the underfed mule. The submariners immediately followed their example and the pace of the race quickened, those not participating following behind and yelling shouts of encouragement. Around the square the pilots had the edge, but as they turned back down beside the Opera House once more, the submariners began to catch them, so that as they turned into the final straight leading up to the City Gate, the two gharries were neck and neck. Edward felt exhausted: his legs ached, his chest was tight and a stitch had developed across his stomach.
‘Come on, lads!’ screamed Zulu. ‘We’ve got ’em now!’
But they hadn’t. Both teams tried to proclaim themselves the winner, but the girls were adamant the race was a dead heat. ‘So no kisses, I’m afraid.’
‘Surely that’s not fair,’ said the bearded submariner. ‘Surely you should give us all a kiss.’
‘No,’ said Kitty firmly. ‘No winner, no kiss.’
They staggered back to the Union Club. More drinks – pink gins all round; there was no Pimms left. Edward felt his head begin to swim. Someone suggested a singing competition, and then the bearded submariner was standing on a table belting out a sea shanty about a sailor who had got up to no good during a stay in port. Edward looked up at the man: tie undone, face red, the veins on his neck bulging, spittle darting into the air. Everyone cheered. One by one the others followed: some barely made it onto the table. Laurie was so flat and tuneless, he was pulled down before he’d hardly started.
‘Who hasn’t sung yet?’ shouted Zulu. ‘Eddie and Harry! You haven’t been up. Go on, your turn.’
‘All right, all right,’ said Edward, ‘but this is going to be a duet.’ Clambering onto the table amidst whistles and cheers, they stood arm in arm, precariously balanced, and began singing Lili Marlene. It was such an obvious song – whistled and sung endlessly by both sides all the way from Germany to North Africa and back across the Mediterranean – and yet no-one else had thought of it. Within moments everyone in the Snakepit had joined in, even, Edward noticed, Kitty and Elizabeth, and even some other officers who had only just stepped into the bar.
They sang two encores, and as they did so, Edward looked out over the room, at the haze of cigarette smoke, at the red, open-mouthed faces, and at the two girls sitting to one side, singing and laughing along with the boys. He looked down at Lucky, and at Laurie, Zulu and Red; Zulu with sweat pouring down his round face, Lucky and Red arm in arm as well. And he felt Harry’s hand gripping his shoulder, swaying him from side to side as they led the now-crowded bar on the final verse:
'Resting in our billets, just behind the lines,
Even though we're parted, your lips are close to mine.
You wait where that lantern softly gleams,
Your sweet face seems to haunt my dreams
My Lili of the Lamplight,
My own Lili Marlene.'
When they finished, they jumped down to more cheers and whistles. Shrill, ear-piercing wolf-whistling was a talent shared by both Zulu and Lucky and they repeatedly blew them now. Kitty and Elizabeth declared that Edward and Harry were the unquestionable winners, and they kissed them both.
Soon after, the party dissolved. Everyone was drunk; the party had run its course. Outside, daylight was just beginning to fade. The pilots stumbled back up through the City Gate and soon after managed to catch one of the very few buses that still ran across the island. As the bus began trundling its way through the narrow lanes of cleared bomb damage, they sang Lili Marlene once more for good measure, and Zulu commented on the consideration of the Germans not to have bombed them once all afternoon.
The enemy bombers were back in force later that evening, however. It was dusk by the time the bus pulled into the main square at Rabat. As the pilots stumbled off and headed back through the gates of Mdina to the Xara Palace, the sirens began wailing once more and they paused a moment, listening to the distant thrum of aero-engines. The bombs had started falling before they reached the front door. Hurrying up the stone staircase to the balcony, they emerged to a deafening roar of engines and explosions.
‘My God,’ said Harry. ‘Look at that.’
Row upon row of black shapes filled the sky as far as the eye could see. And they all seemed to be heading for Takali. Bombs were whistling and screaming, guns blasting. Soon the airfield was shrouded in smoke, so thick Edward could smell the cordite and dust from his vantage point two miles away. Overhead, the bombers thundered by, job done, on their way back to Sicily.
But they were back again the following morning – more than two hundred aircraft, and once again, Takali was the target. What buildings had remained were now utterly destroyed, planes were obliterated on the ground, and the airfield looked more pockmarked and cratered than the surface of the moon. In less than a day, Takali had become the most bombed airfield in the world.
In the weeks – and years even – that followed, Edward would look back upon that afternoon at the Snakepit and draw solace. An afternoon to cherish, and to remember. On Malta, there would be no more like it.
Malta – June, 1995
‘What was the name of that girl Harry was so sweet on?’ asked Lucky as a waiter brought over their coffee.
‘Kitty,’ said Edward, whisking a fly away from his face.
‘Kitty,’ repeated Lucky. ‘Ye-es, that’s right. He was pretty hooked on her for a while, wasn’t he?’
Edward smiled. ‘Quite bowled over, I’d say. Harry had such charm and the girls always adored him, but I think it was quite different with Kitty. I think she had the same effect on men that he did on women. After all, she was rather beautiful, wasn’t she?’
‘Oh, sure. She was a blinder. We were all jealous as hell.’ He grinned. ‘Leastways, I know I was.’
‘And she’d been on the Island since before the siege began. One can only imagine what it must have been like for her: one of the best-looking girls on Malta, surrounded by thousands of sex-starved men all hanging on every word she said. Then Harry comes along. They were a match for each other – at least, I thought they were.’
‘Maybe, Eddie.’
‘Do you remember, he borrowed a bicycle from one of the erks? Whenever we weren’t needed, he’d scurry off to Floriana – she had a flat there, and I think she was on her own by that stage because the girl she used to live with had already left the Island.’
Lucky laughed. ‘Actually, now you mention it, I do recall you and I spending quite a few nights on our own. Can hardly blame him. And it wasn’t as if there was so much flying at that time, anyway.’
‘No.’ He thought for a moment, then said, ‘Yes, he really fell for Kitty.’
‘I wonder whatever became of her.’
‘Hm,’ said Edward. He thought about telling Lucky about the time he met her later, back in England, but instead said, ‘Probably married a successio
n of rich husbands.’
‘A bit cynical for you, isn’t it, Eddie?’
Edward shrugged. ‘She was that sort of girl.’
They drank their coffee. Edward looked around the tables and brightly coloured sunshades, at the throng of people, laughing, talking, writing postcards. At the centre of the square, gazing down on the café scene below, stood the stone statue of Queen Victoria. Such a sour expression, he thought. The ageing empress, mistress of all she surveyed; she had no need of beauty.
Not for the first time Lucky said, ‘How did we do it, Eddie?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘How did we live through those days? Jeez, but this was a tough place back then.’ He wiped his mouth and shook his head. ‘Hell, you know what? I think I am going to have a drink. Just a beer. You’ll join me, Eddie?’
Why not? thought Edward. A cool glass of beer might be refreshing. ‘Yes, all right.’ He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a drink before six o’clock in the evening.
‘You know, I just remember feeling so goddam frustrated all the time. I wanted to get up there and get at ’em, but there was never enough planes, never enough fuel, never enough anything.’
‘I’ve still got my logbook,’ said Edward. ‘I’ve been looking through it, and you know, I flew just four times during the last two weeks of March. And every time I seemed to have written, “Jumped by successive lots of 109s”, or “rather hasty landing”. In April, I think I only flew five times all month.’
‘Yeah, I’ve still got mine. I’ll show you. How more of us didn’t get the chop, I’ll never know.’ Lucky grimaced, then pushed back his chair, the noise against the stone paving loud and grating. ‘Just nipping to the bathroom a moment,’ he said.
Edward nodded. So much had come back to him in the past few weeks. So much that he thought had been discarded from his mind long ago. A tough place, Lucky had called it. It wasn’t just tough, he thought, it was brutal. Edward suddenly shuddered, remembering the terror he’d felt as his Spitfire had been pounced on by the 109s; the near panic as he’d twisted and turned, heard bullets tearing into his fuselage. Somehow, the bullets had missed him, and somehow, he’d always managed to make it back down safely. Why was that? He shook his head, and found he was once again on the verge of tears – a sensation that had become all too familiar during recent weeks. That attack on Takali, he thought to himself . . . The ground had shuddered, pounded with the exploding bombs – it had been like an earthquake. He remembered the terror he’d felt – they had all felt. There had been a pilot next to him who had actually soiled his pants.
A picture came into his mind: Takali, bare and rough, dotted with red flags marking the hundreds of unexploded and delayed-action bombs. Some people had believed that the large number of dud bombs was due to the Polish workforce in Germany doing their bit for the Allied cause. But Laurie Bowles, he remembered, had blamed the Italians. ‘They’ve probably got too many Eyeties working on those airfields over there,’ he had said. ‘Lazy bastards probably don’t load them up properly or something.’ Every so often a delayed-action bomb had exploded – and then everyone would jump.
Lucky had wondered how they had stood it; Edward wondered too. Even the pilots had been expected to help repair the bomb damage; Butch had demanded an all-out effort. No-one had been excused. It had been exhausting work: Edward remembered the back-breaking amount of shovelling, the sense of permanent exhaustion made worse by their hunger. And the relentlessness of it all: not just the bombers, but the 109s and Italian Macchi 202s repeatedly buzzing over the airfield at zero feet and peppering the place with machine-gun and cannon-fire. These endless attacks had jarred the nerves. Jarred the nerves and made them tense and irritable. As in Cornwall, there had been too much time twiddling fingers and not enough flying – but for very different reasons: on Malta there had always been plenty for them to do, it was just that there never seemed to be enough fuel or aircraft with which to do it.
What a wreck of a place Takali had become. Even the Mad House, that strange building the far side of the airfield, had finally become a pile of rubble. There had been a week, he remembered now, where the last stubborn section had become smaller and smaller until one day it had disappeared altogether. Dispersal had been the exception, but it had become roofless, while the inside had become full of stones, rocks and shattered furniture. It had become a focal point only. He remembered how they had lain on stretchers outside, using them as sunbeds, or squatted down on rocks. Part of a wing had been adapted as a card table.
And yet they had known so little about what was going on. It amazed him now to think how little he had really thought about the siege at the time. The situation had been so dire. A convoy had reached Grand Harbour around the same time as the Takali blitz – towards the end of March, it must have been. Except that it hadn’t been a whole convoy – just two or three ships and then they’d been hit in the harbour before they’d been properly unloaded. He could picture it now: smoke as black as night rising thousands and thousands of feet into the sky for all on the Island to see.
‘Eddie?’
He looked up at Lucky, who was now back and sitting opposite him once more.
‘I said, there’s a coupla’ things I’d like to show you.’
‘Oh, yes, of course.’
Lucky grinned. ‘Daydreaming?’
‘Just thinking about Butch.’ Edward smiled.
‘Butch Hammond,’ mused Lucky. ‘A great guy.’
‘Yes, he was. And I think I appreciated his candour, even then. He wasn’t afraid of telling us straight.’
Having finished their drinks, Lucky took Edward up Kingsway. ‘Although it’s Republic Street now,’ he told Edward. ‘All the old names have gone: Old Bakery Street, Windmill Street.’
‘Is the Union Club still here?’
‘No. Long since closed, although the branch in Sliema is still there. Close to the Preluna, actually, but I don’t go in very often. I mean, I’m a member – course I am – but you still have to wear a tie and jacket and there’s too many people still sipping pink gins. For them the sun is yet to set on the glorious British Empire.’
Edward was about to respond when he suddenly stopped and stared. ‘The Opera House, my God.’
‘Yeah,’ said Lucky. ‘Unbelievable, isn’t it?’
7th April. He looked at the remains, the steps sprouting tufts of grass and weeds, the truncated pillars. The rubble had been cleared away, of course, but otherwise the once magnificent building had been left as it had become on that day in April, 1942.
‘I had no idea,’ said Edward. ‘I just assumed it had been rebuilt, or cleared.’
‘Sad, isn’t it?’
‘And to think we had that ridiculous gharrie race just a few days before.’
‘Yeah – that was fun. And the submariners left soon after, too.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Edward put his hand up to shield his eyes; the sun, now high in the sky, continued to bear down relentlessly.
‘Yup, the whole lot of ’em. Off to Alex. I remember when that happened – and thinking we were really up the creek.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Hell, we need to get a move on. C’mon, Eddie.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘I’ll show you. Follow me.’
Away from Republic Street, Valletta was quiet, the high buildings with their distinctive window boxes and shutters casting thick shadow over much of the streets. Then, as they crossed a road, they would be dazzled by a narrow strip of blinding brightness from the sun. These were nothing but rubble back then, Edward thought. Rubble and dust. Well, there was still thick dust on many of the doors and windows, but not the thin, cloying kind that had covered everything like talcum powder. It had got everywhere – in your hair, down your trousers, in your shoes – chafing and itching; another discomfort.
They started heading downhill, the road long and straight and leading to a vivid strip of azure sea. Then they crossed over and turned towards Grand Harbour, d
own a flight of steps that led them by the Lower Barracca Gardens. Edward stopped, gazing across towards the Three Cities gleaming on the far side of the harbour, but Lucky said, ‘Come on, Eddie, no time for that now.’
‘Where are you taking me?’ asked Edward again.
‘We’re right there – you’ll see.’ And as they turned the corner, Edward did see: an almost white stone rotunda perched high on the sea wall under which hung a large bell. They walked up the road and stood before the wide steps leading up towards the monument.
‘Dead on time,’ said Lucky, as some mechanism from within the rotunda began to click. Then the bell chimed. A low, mournful peel, but one that was loud enough to make Edward start. Back and forth swung the bell, slow, steady and haunting.
When its toll eventually came to an end, Lucky turned to Edward and said, ‘The Siege Bell. It rings at noon every single day. You can hear it thirty miles out to sea.’
Lucky began climbing the steps. ‘And here, let me show you something else.’ Edward followed once more, and they passed through the rotunda and gazed down at a stone plinth on which lay a bronze supine figure of a man.
‘How beautiful,’ muttered Edward.
‘Yeah, ain’t it?’ Lucky leant on the wall by the catafalque. ‘To commemorate all those who died on Malta.’ He eyed Edward a moment, then said, ‘Do you ever wonder why we survived and so many of our friends didn’t?’
Edward nodded.
‘I do quite a bit,’ continued Lucky. ‘And I don’t mind telling you I feel guilty about it. I think of my life and I start realising I haven’t really made the most of the chance I’ve been given. Do you remember Zulu Purnell?’
‘Of course.’
‘He came down just over there.’ Lucky pointed out towards the mouth of the harbour. ‘I wonder if Zulu had lived and I’d died, would he have had a fuller, better life than me?’
‘That’s nonsense, Lucky. You can’t start thinking like that.’
‘But I do Eddie. I do.’
After lunch, Lucky said he had ‘a few things to attend to’ that afternoon, but promised to meet Edward at the hotel the following morning.
A Pair of Silver Wings Page 20
