‘We’ll go to Ta’ Qali, all right? And up to Mdina. Boy, just wait ’til you see the Xara Palace again.’
‘I’d like that very much.’
‘And then, Eddie,’ added Lucky, clutching him by the shoulder, ‘and I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but I’d really like you to come back with me to my place. Spend a coupla’ days there. It’s a nice house – you’ll have your own room and bathroom. Will you do that? Ditch the Preluna for a bit. I mean, I know you’ve paid for it and everything, but my house is free, so you won’t be losing out. And I’ve got a few things tucked away up there I’d like you to see. What do you say?’
For a moment Edward wavered. Lucky looked at him, glassy eyes searching his face.
‘All right, Lucky,’ he said at length. ‘Why not? That would be lovely.’ This is why I’m here, he told himself. Then he said, ‘Tell me, Lucky. Whatever happened to all those pictures you used to take? I remember that camera you had. You always seemed to get film somehow.’
Lucky grinned. ‘Still got ’em. One of the reasons I want you to come over to my place. There’s pictures of all us: you, Zulu, Harry. The whole gang.’
Edward felt his spirits rise. ‘You know, I’d love to see those, Lucky.’
‘Well, come on over to Gozo and you can.’
They went their separate ways. Edward took the opportunity to do some sightseeing, something there had been little chance to do the last time he’d been there. As he ambled through the cathedral and the Grand Master’s Palace, reading about the previous Great Siege, he remembered Harry’s history lesson that first day they had been on the Island. And I was the one who become a history teacher, he thought.
Later, back at the hotel, he sat out on his narrow balcony, glad for the chance to sit quietly and collect his thoughts for a moment. He was exhausted: all that walking about. Yes, he might be fit for his age, but he’d noticed in recent years that he tended to tire more quickly. I’m getting old, he thought.
He was not sure how he felt. It was good seeing Lucky – he’d enjoyed talking with him over dinner the previous evening, even though Lucky had been half cut and had done most of the talking. It had made him realise he wasn’t alone; Lucky, too, had suffered in the long years since the war. Of course, he and Lucky were very different, but they’d been different back in 1942 as well. They’d become good friends then, and Edward was enjoying Lucky’s company every bit as much now – more than he had first expected. And today his old friend had been sober and, in truth, not so very different from the drunk version; slightly less maudlin perhaps. And the wit and irreverence that Edward had liked so much when he’d first known him was still there. He was looking forward to staying in his house; was glad that Lucky had asked him and that he had wanted him to stay.
His thoughts turned to his son, Simon. You’d approve of me meeting up with Lucky again, he thought, and then wondered whether one day he might bring Simon to Malta too – perhaps even with Nick. Perhaps with Katie and Lucy too. When this is all over, Simon, he thought, I’ll tell you everything. I promise. He clenched his fists and lightly tapped his leg. Everything. But not yet.
And what about Valletta? There was much about the city that struck him as familiar; sometimes, fifty years seemed not so very long ago. Certainly, those once dormant memories were now erupting furiously into his mind. And yet he had just spent an afternoon playing the tourist, admiring the Caravaggios and the Maltese architecture; the Island had become a holiday destination. Half a century before, it had been the world’s worst posting. One of the most violent spots on earth.
Absent-mindedly, he rubbed the rough, melted plastic of his chair, where some earlier guest had stubbed out a cigarette. Harry had been in Valletta that day, when the Opera House had been destroyed. It had not been the only building to have been hit: the Castile, several of the old Knights of Malta auberges, God knows how many others. He remembered Harry telling him about it. As the bombs had started falling, he and Kitty had rushed into the nearest public shelter. ‘I’d never realised what horrible, fetid places they are,’ he had said to Edward the following morning. ‘The smell was appalling – of sweat and piss. And it was damp and heaving with people. There was nowhere to sit. Barely anywhere to stand.’ Children had been crying, others praying out loud, the wailing increasing every time another bomb dropped, shaking the ground as it exploded above. When the all clear had sounded, they had emerged, the dust still thick in the air. The scene of devastation that greeted them had shocked even Harry. ‘People were just staring at the remains of the Opera House,’ he’d said. ‘They couldn’t believe it. Nor could I, for that matter.’
April had been the worst month. Day after day, night after night, the bombers pounded Malta into dust. The Island’s cities became piles of rubble. Back then, Edward had understood little about what the civilians had gone through; unlike Harry, he’d never been in one of the shelters dug out underneath Valletta, and nor had there ever been much cause to speak to many of the Maltese. How callow he had been! As pilots they’d been so wrapped up in their own desperate existence, but they had not lost their homes and possessions; they hadn’t been expected to live day in, day out in a tiny stinking subterranean cubbyhole. That April the Island had been awarded the George Cross – an unprecedented honour – but a medal could not feed, house or clothe the Islanders. And while most Maltese had been forced to stay on that accursed Island, those that could leave were doing so. Even the submariners. One of the Royal Navy’s finest bases in the whole world now had no navy left at all.
And Kitty had left too. Her father had insisted; she’d wanted to stay. Wanted to stay with Harry.
‘What do I do?’ Harry had asked Edward one afternoon as they sat out on the balcony of the Xara Palace. Even then, Hal Far and Luqa were under attack, huge plumes of dust and smoke billowing into the sky. ‘She’s in danger every night. We’re all right up here, but her flat’s in the front line.’
‘Could she move to one of the villages?’
‘Then how would she get to work? She’d still have to get into Valletta every day, and even if she did manage it, she’d still run the risk of being strafed by those bastards.’ He sighed, ran his hands through his hair. ‘She should go. She should do as her father says. This place is too dangerous. But Eddie, I’m just so worried that I’ll never see her again.’
It was a night flight. A Wellington was flying from Luqa to Gibraltar. There were a handful of spare places, and Kitty took one of them. The timing of the plane’s departure was everything: after the early evening raid, but before the next. Harry had gone down to see her off, Edward remembered, then his friend had cycled back, through the dark, railing against the unfairness of it all. Somehow he’d got hold of a bottle of whisky – from the pilot of the Wellington? White Horse whisky – yes, Edward could even remember that. ‘Eddie, I need you to get drunk with me,’ Harry had said when he arrived back at the Xara Palace, and so they’d gone out, walking through the narrow streets of Mdina – the Silent City – until they reached the bastion walls that overlooked the hilltop hospital of Imtarfa. For a few hours the bombers had left the Island alone, and so the two of them had sat there, perched on the walls, legs dangling over the side, the Island around them still and eerily peaceful. And as they drank they cursed Malta and the Germans and the Italians, and they cursed themselves for being such stupid bloody fools.
And now I’m back, he thought.
Malta – April, 1942
20th April, 1942. At last, more Spitfires were about to arrive – forty-eight of them, two whole squadrons. As Hugh Pughe Lloyd had assured them at his briefing the night before, these new arrivals would, at last, make all the difference. ‘With plenty of Spits we can give the Hun a bit of his own medicine,’ he’d told them. ‘You’ll all get a good chance to send him burning into the sea. This time we’re going to hurt him, and hurt him hard.’
The new Spitfires were expected to arrive just before ten that morning, but the pilots of ‘A’ Flight ha
d been at dispersal since dawn. There were just six of them: Red O’Neill had been shot up and was in hospital at Imtarfa; Doug Routledge had been posted back to Britain and had not been replaced; Tony and Alex McLeish were laid low with a touch of Malta Dog; while another of the ‘A’ Flight pilots, Johnny Dillinger, had been moved over into ‘B’ Flight. Edward sat on a rock outside the shattered remnants of the hut, and watched a lizard scurry in sudden darting movements through tufts of dried grass and then disappear between some stones. He rubbed his eyes, yawned, and looked at Zulu, prostrate on a stretcher a few yards away and snoring. A tiny line of saliva ran down from the Rhodesian’s mouth and chin, staining the dusty canvas.
Edward smiled to himself. Zulu had not been among the pilots to walk down from the Xara Palace a few hours before. Instead he’d met them there, still drunk, with glazed eyes after a night in Valletta with a friend of his from Luqa – a photo reconnaissance pilot newly back from Egypt and armed with bottles of brandy.
Lucky, now Flight Commander, had told him to take himself back to the mess. ‘Come back when you’ve slept it off,’ he’d said.
But Zulu had had none of it. ‘A bit of kip and I’ll be fine,’ he had assured Lucky as he lay down on the stretcher. That had been nearly three hours ago.
It may have been quiet at dispersal, but around the airfield there was much activity. Soldiers were carrying supplies to the numerous blast pens that now dotted the perimeter in expectation of the Spitfires. In the meantime, the mechanics continued their desperate efforts to inject life into another of the sickly Spitfires that still existed, their muffled clangs and hammering resounding across the dusty field. ‘Maximum effort’ had been demanded from the ground crews – it was essential that as many fighters as possible were ready to provide cover for the new arrivals. The chief mechanic had told Lucky there would be six of the old Spitfires available that morning – a rarity; so far, there had been even less flying in April than there had been the previous month. On two days that month there’d been no flyable Spitfires at all. Edward had been in the air only twice, once at the beginning of the month when he’d hit a Junkers 88 before being pounced on by a flight of 109s, and again four days before, when nothing much had happened; he had been almost thankful for that. In three weeks he’d had just over an hour’s flying.
Now, though, it looked as though they would all soon be airborne, so long as a raid developed before lunchtime, and no-one would bet against that. It was the reason Lucky had agreed to let Zulu stay; it would have been unforgivable to have left one of the planes on the ground. Edward stood up, threw a few pebbles at Harry, who was reading a paperback, then wandered a few yards away from dispersal, before pacing back again. A nauseous feeling sat in the pit of his stomach, and he looked up into the deep blue unending sky. So empty now, but soon it would be alive with swirling aircraft, the rattle of gunfire, and streaked with vivid white contrails and lines of black smoke. And he would be in the thick of it. He shivered involuntarily.
Perhaps Hugh Pughe was right, he thought. Perhaps these new planes would make all the difference; he wanted to believe so, and yet the enemy had so many aircraft – hundreds, not just fifty. He thought about the last new squadron to have been posted to Malta – 229, who had flown across the Mediterranean from Libya shortly after the blitz on Takali a month before. They had come with twenty-four Hurricanes, and just over three weeks later, they had lost half their pilots and the majority of their planes. Despite having had plenty of experience fighting against the Germans and Italians in North Africa, they had not managed to shoot down a single enemy plane. It wasn’t their fault: it was the planes they flew and the overwhelming superiority of the enemy.
Edward’s thoughts were interrupted as sirens began wailing out over the Island once again. Glancing at dispersal, he then looked at his watch: nearly nine o’clock.
‘Jesus, what the hell’s going on?’ said Lucky. He bawled at the duty telephonist sitting outside dispersal at a rickety table. ‘Get Woody on the phone pronto.’
Moments later the gunners were opening fire, the sky over the harbours and south of the Island soon became peppered with black smudges of flak. Aircraft were wheeling in between, engines screaming as they dived. Edward noticed Harry had not even looked up from his book. Lucky was on the phone, nodding, one eye still on the developing raid.
‘OK, relax, fellers,’ he said, having handed back the receiver. ‘We’re to sit this one out. Woody wants us to wait until the Spits are closer. By his reckoning, they’re an hour away.’
The raid passed, the attackers never troubling either of the two main airfields. Takali’s Bofors crews pounded away as a lone Junkers, trailing thick smoke, skirted nearby. Almost as quickly as it had begun, however, the attack was over and the skies were clear once more. Only the slow-drifting pall of dust and smoke that hung over the harbours remained.
A little before 10 a.m. The familiar whirr of Merlin engines could be heard. Soldiers and ground crew stopped what they were doing, looked up, pointing. There, look! The pilots watched, too, as the first specks appeared, then gradually grew until one after another, the first flight of new Spitfires began touching down amid flurries of dust. One squadron had flown into Luqa, the other, 603, into Takali. Erks leapt onto their wings, directing them to the blast pens.
‘They’re all down,’ said Butch, who had now appeared at dispersal. All but one, an American, who had taken off with them but had then disappeared. The CO looked happier than Edward had seen him in weeks.
Soon enough, the new pilots began wandering over to dispersal. They looked dazed, bleary-eyed, and clearly dismayed at the state of their new fighter base. And white-skinned too, their new tropical kit clean and fresh. We must have been the same, thought Edward, and smiled to himself. He picked at the frayed edge of his cotton shorts. They had become as bleached and stained as his face and arms had been browned. The new pilots were talking, several all at once. A few 109s had been seen as they had approached the Island, but they’d not attacked; otherwise their trip had been thankfully uneventful. They’d been nervous about switching over to the overload tanks; another had lost his maps when they’d blown out of the cockpit; what was the smoke over the south of the Island? When would they be flying again?
‘We’ve got to get your planes battle-worthy first,’ Butch told them. ‘But brace yourselves. We’re expecting a visit any moment. Malta’s a bit different to what most of you will have been used to in England. There are no massed fighter sweeps here.’
‘A’ Flight was finally scrambled half an hour before they were due to be stood down. Woody phoned, got Butch on the line and told him that fifty plus ‘big jobs’ were heading towards the Island. The inactivity of the morning was dispelled in an instant. All six pilots ran to their planes, which were close at hand. Edward ran over the rough ground, heart pounding like a hammer. Grabbing his parachute, he jumped onto the wing and hoisted himself into the cockpit. How battered his aircraft looked: paint flecked, streaked with oil stains; no squadron markings: there were not enough planes for them to belong to any one squadron in particular, and so the letters had been roughly painted over with ill-matching desert brown. Three Hurricanes roared down the runway, and then it was ‘A’ Flight’s turn. Helmet strapped on, oxygen and radio leads plugged in, quick glance at the dials – oil pressure OK, fuel OK, signal to his fitter and rigger and ease open the throttle. Here we go, thought Edward, and the next time I’m back down again – well, he hoped for the best.
Edward was flying number two to Lucky, Harry wingman to Zulu, and Laurie leading Mike Lindsay. It was now nearly one o’clock and they flew as fast as they could to 17,000 feet. South of the Island, the six of them turned, the sun streaking across them and glinting over their canopies as it swivelled behind them. Down below, the deep blue Mediterranean twinkled, while ahead, leaf-like, Malta seemed to float upon the sea.
They saw the Stukas clearly, slowly heading towards Hal Far. Gunning the throttle, Edward followed Lucky as they dived
towards them, his Spitfire bucking and jerking with the strain. The aircraft loomed towards them in no time at all. His ears raged with the change in pressure, while his whole body felt pressed into the bucket seat. His helmet was slipping, so swiftly he nudged it back off his forehead, flicked the gun safety catch to ‘off’ and quickly strained his head.
‘109s three o’clock,’ he called out.
‘All right, Eddie,’ replied Lucky, ‘I see ’em.’ Lucky pressed ahead towards the lumbering Stukas, so Edward and the others followed. He swivelled his head again. Christ, this will be close. The 109s were closing like angry wasps. He picked out a Stuka, drew as close as he dared, then fired a short burst from his cannon and machine guns. The aircraft juddered, he saw parts of metal fly off the Stuka, but orange tracer was now zipping over his head. No time to press the attack. Ahead of him, Lucky had turned in towards the fire and Edward followed. To his relief he saw the enemy tracer fire whistle past wide. Now there was no chance of attacking the dive bombers again – the sky was full of 109s.
‘Break, Zulu!’ he heard Harry call. ‘For Christ’s sake, break.’
‘I’m hit, I’m hit!’ said Zulu.
‘Get out of there, get out, Zulu!’ yelled Harry, as a 109 streaked past Edward, the mottled sand paintwork and squadron markings vividly clear. More tracer fizzed overhead and then the aircraft jolted as bullets tore into his fuselage. ‘Shit!’ he said out loud, and automatically turned once more into the fire. Four more 109s were heading straight for him, dazzling as the sun, now ahead of him, sparkled across them. Tracer curled towards him, Edward flung his Spitfire one way then another, radio static and chatter from the other pilots crackling in his ears, the horizon sliding back and forth. He flipped the plane and a Junkers 88 suddenly slid across in front of him, huge and seemingly passing just inches away, the wash from the propellers jolting his Spitfire with sudden turbulence. Jesus, where the hell did that come from? Edward felt his stomach lurch, then he dived and saw below and ahead of him another Messerschmitt slowing climbing towards the fray. A moment later he was right upon him, thumb pressed down on the gun button and pumping machine-gun bullets and cannon shells into it. He could see his tracer scoring hits, then a puff of smoke from the engine, the 109 wobbled, and suddenly toppled on its back and dropped out of the sky, smoke pouring in a trail behind it. But no time to think. Two more 109s were attacking him almost head on. The closing speed was nearly seven hundred miles an hour – a split second – and Edward broke left as the 109 did the same. The joystick was knocked from his hand, he was flung against his harness so that the straps tore into his barely covered shoulders, and suddenly the sky had change places with the sea. The Spitfire groaned, began shuddering, then tumbled into a diving spin. Round and round, the sea, the tan cliffs and fields of Malta rotating in a whirr. Shit, shit! He clutched the stick with both hands, but the controls were slack. Come on, come on! The sea and land were rushing towards him. Stop this spinning. The controls still slack in his hand. Christ – what to do? I’m going to die.
A Pair of Silver Wings Page 21
