by David Black
He had obviously wanted the company.
The weather was so bad, not even Jerry could fly in it, but the forecast was predicting clear skies sometime beyond the next forty-eight hours, and everybody knew what that meant. Jerry would be back. So the AOC had ordered his deputy to get out there and see what they would have available to put up against what would be coming in.
On the drive inland, the roads had been totally empty. No buses any more, Mahaddie had explained. ‘Can’t spare the fuel, and anyway, the 109s shoot them up.’ The journey had mostly been taken up in a monologue by Mahaddie: about how nobody at Scots Street knew from one day to the next how many fighter aircraft they had in their order of battle. How one minute the ingenuity and sheer bloody-minded determination of the erks would manage to resurrect one moribund Hurricane and get it back on ops, only for it, or another one, to expire again, the next. Not that the Hurricanes were any good, not against the 109s. They’d see a Jerry raid massing across the straits – courtesy of the island’s secret ring of radar stations hidden in collapsed barns or poking out of a ring of Neolithic standing stones – and the fighter controllers in their underground labyrinth, hacked out of Valletta’s southern bastions, would scramble whatever was available right away, but even then, the Hurricanes couldn’t gain height in time. Jerry was always above them.
As for Malta’s offensive capability, the Wellingtons were a liability – too big for a blast pen to completely protect and next to impossible to operate off cratered runways. As for the Blenheims – well, they kept getting shot down now. And shot up. No replacement parts to keep them flying.
And the bastard Germans had only been hitting them for a couple of weeks. What was it going to be like when Jerry settled down to the job, day in, day out. Oh, and another thing: just before the weather had turned bad, they’d started coming over at night too, so that was going to be something else to look forward to.
‘What we need here are fuckin’ Spitfires,’ Mahaddie finally said, with some vehemence. ‘There are entire squadrons of the fuckin’ things lyin’ about all over the south of England, whose sole contribution to the war effort right now is to go swannin’ off over northern France shooting up Hun NAAFI trucks. “Our principal role in this campaign is offensive,” that’s all bloody Hugh Pughe parrots, night and day. “But, Hugh Pughe,” says I, “ye cannae stay on the offensive very long if the place yer being offensive from has been reduced tae a smoulderin’ pile of rubble!” But does he listen? Naw. Bombers on the brain.’
Hugh Pughe – Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Pughe Lloyd, Air Officer, Commanding, Malta, widely recognised as always being on ‘transmit’ and never ‘receive’.
Mahaddie brooded, and then as he was crunching down the gears, he suddenly asked, ‘How’s your Eyetie chum doing?’
Harry saw Katty looked confused in the rear-view mirror.
‘No idea,’ said Harry. ‘Situation unchanged since you last asked. Once we’d handed him over to the Army MPs at Gib, I never heard another thing about him. I suspect though he’s feeling a lot better than he otherwise might have.’
Mahaddie barked a laugh. Maybe the opportunity for a good moan to someone not in his chain of command was indeed proving therapeutic to him. ‘Aye, yer right there, son!’ he said, as he pulled the car up at the tents. ‘Yon Luigi’s got a lot tae thank you for. He’s probably a prisoner oot in Canada by noo, workin’ fer beer money oot oan the prairie, ridin’ the range on one o’ they combine harvesters, gettin’ a tan and workin’ up a sweat fer the Saturday night hootenanny, an’ aw them strappin’ farm lassies, their farmhand boyfriends away in the soldiers, leavin’ them jist dyin’ tae fraternise wi’ an Eyetie POW. Lucky bastard. Lucky, dirtae bastard, eh?’ and he winked at Katty salaciously. Then he turned the engine off and gestured for his briefcase, before lumbering out with a parting ‘Wait here’, as if they were going to go anywhere in this rain.
Everything was quiet and the only sound in the car was the sound of that rain on the roof, while Harry considered his optimism about war tempering the Groupie might have been a tad premature. The silence dragged on. Katty didn’t look as if she were going to say anything, and Harry couldn’t think of anything he wanted to say. Until eventually, just to break the monotony, he said, ‘It wasn’t Luigi.’
Katty didn’t respond, so he added, ‘His name wasn’t Luigi, it was Fabrizio.’
‘Ah. The one you kidnapped from Majorca,’ Katty said eventually, studying the rain on the windows.
‘My prisoner of war,’ said Harry, doing likewise. ‘To stop him getting . . .’
‘Yes, yes,’ Katty interrupted testily, ‘. . . ending up as a guest of the Gestapo. How thoughtful of you.’
She knew the story? Of course. Mahaddie would have told her everything, and then put knobs on it. More silence. Then Harry spoke again. Asked something he’d sworn to himself he wouldn’t. ‘How’s Chally?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ said Katty lightly.
‘No?’ said Harry. ‘Well, he never was the chatty type, I suppose, but surely you can tell from his general demeanour . . . the roses on his cheeks . . . any tendencies to flatulence . . .’
‘He’s in Egypt,’ Katty interrupted again. ‘Posted there the day you sailed away.’
The silence returned. Then eventually Katty said, ‘I heard Nicobar had returned, and yet you never came to see me. Where were you?’
And Harry felt a huge fist crush his heart. He turned in his seat and their eyes met and locked, and then the door flew open and Mahaddie dropped himself on to the driver’s seat like a felled giant redwood.
‘He wusnae pleased, though, your Luigi, wus he?’ said Mahaddie, continuing his conversation as though he’d never left off. ‘Aw naw. But there ye go. Hoo many o’ us always know whit’s good fer us, eh? No’ a lot. Right, that’s us done. We’ll no bother wi’ Hal Far. It’s only your lot, Gilmour, that’s doon there, and Ah doot there’ll be any volunteers among them, willing to go dogfightin’ wi’ 109s in a Stringbag.’
He crashed into gear and they were off again, back to Valletta.
Katty was still house-sitting in Floriana, and it was there Mahaddie dropped her and Harry off with, ‘Be good and play nice, boys and girls.’ Katty gave Harry a blanket to wrap himself in as they sat on the sofa. It was a place with huge vaulted ceilings, striped wallpaper and entire walls filled with art, and some draped in tapestries. Each room had a marble fireplace. The chandeliers were long redundant, and the only lighting came from small gas wall lights and the odd table lamp. Without the gas, the table lamps gave the only light, and the radiators stayed cold. Nor was there anything to burn in the grates. No wood, because there had never been any wood: because there were no trees on wind-scoured Malta. There was no coal either now. Whatever had been left was long commandeered for use in the dockyards. And it was against the law now to own an electric fire – they burned too many amps for the struggling island power stations.
‘We’ve been warned the rationing is going to get even stricter,’ Katty had told him, presenting him with a cup of tea brewed over a small spirit stove. ‘And the Rediffusion has gone too,’ she said with a sigh, ‘although the Times says it should be back up soon. Meanwhile all I can get on my little crystal set is the same old maudlin rubbish from Italy . . . opera this and aria that . . . not a tune you can tap your toes to.’
They went out to the Union Club that night. She wasn’t performing, just a jazz band of RAF erks. The booze was rationed. And there was no point in complaining: it was much worse elsewhere. Apparently they had completely run out down in The Gut, and the drinking dens the length and breadth of it were all now shuttered and closed. They met people she knew, talked and went home. Harry stayed the night. It wasn’t discussed, neither asked the other; it was too cold for the layer-by-layer etiquette of seduction. The next day they went shopping for fish, walking all the way to St Julian’s, and came home via their café in Sliema, drenched. They went out again that evening, back to the Union.
And all the while Harry was watching her: the way when they were together she always stood close to him. It wasn’t clingy, at least it didn’t feel like it: it was more like she was making a statement – that she might be here of her own free will, but she was his responsibility. And the more he noticed, the more it seemed that a whole new road was opening up for him, should he choose to take it: the whole panoply of human entanglement laid out along its length, with all the ways on show as to how it would involve, engulf and embrace him, should he choose to take the first step.
Did he love her? Did it matter whether he did or not? There was some indeterminate promise here, that he was being asked to make – one of those woman-understanding things, that men never quite get. Harry, the sensitive boy, was still in there somewhere though: enough of him at least to let him guess that much. So he considered matters.
And that was when he made the decision to cynically take advantage of this woman. He didn’t even bother to try dressing it up with fictions, in the way that Harry the young student used to do. This was about sex. He wanted her, and for the first time in his life there was nothing romantic about it. This was all about a man wanting a woman, nothing more. And as for the indeterminate promise? He knew he had no intention of honouring any promise, indeterminate or otherwise; she could believe what she chose to believe. He didn’t care. Harry, the sensitive boy, the knight errant he had always believed himself to be, deep down, had been shown the door. How did that make him feel? Sophisticated? A man of the world? An utter shit? Well, there was a war on, and . . . blah, blah, etc., etc., and all the other excuses he gave himself for not ending up the fellow he’d always thought he’d be. Maybe someday, one day, in the future, he might have the time to reconsider his actions: unless a mine, or a depth charge or a strafing 109 got him first, of course. Right now, he was having Katty Kadzow. She was his woman, now.
Chapter Nineteen
The Bonny Boy had read all about the action off the Hammamet Banks in the newspapers, and the sour expression that hit his face when he read the name of the heroic junior officer involved, who had stepped up to do his duty when all around had fallen, had stayed pasted there for days afterwards.
The story had made quite a splash. An attempt by three Italian cruisers to prevent the Royal Navy intercepting a major Axis convoy carrying vital supplies to Rommel, stopped dead in the water by a lone British submarine. Front-page headlines announced the victory, and the stories filled in the epic details: the small, storm-tossed British submarine, on the surface and alone in the vast Mediterranean Sea, her Skipper washed overboard in the tempest, her First Lieutenant critically injured, leaving her junior officer, just twenty-one years old, to press home the attack. There were photographs of a tiny submarine, and beside it, for effect, two even larger photographs, of the Italian cruisers the plucky sub had crippled – sleek, fast, beautifully-lined: giant floating beasts, bristling with guns. The Bonny Boy couldn’t stop himself from reading all about it, especially all about that young junior officer, Sub-Lieutenant Harry Gilmour RNVR, a volunteer, a mere part-time sailor, and his ‘cold, calculating courage’, and how he had swept the seas clear for the cruisers and destroyers of the Royal Navy’s Force F, and let them get in among Rommel’s convoy, to sink every damn ship in it.
And now there was that name again, on the pile of signals that had just landed on his desk. That was why the sour expression was back. Funny how you could be sitting safe, buried deep within such an impregnable citadel such as Northways House, concealed inside the vast bland sprawl of a northwest London suburb – the secret home to the Royal Navy’s Flag Officer, Submarines – miles from the sea and miles from the war, and yet the past could still reach out and find you.
Sub-Lieutenant Harris John Gilmour RNVR: his name on a recommendation from his Captain (S) for the award of the Distinguished Service Order.
All such recommendations in the submarine service passed across the desk of Captain Charles Bonalleck VC, the Assistant Chief of Operations to the Flag Officer, Submarines. There was a process to be gone through. You didn’t just throw out these decorations and gallantry awards willy-nilly on the say-so of so-and-so. You never knew what kind of character, by whatever vagary of fate, might find himself up for a gong. It would be too late, after an award had been Gazetted, to find out your hero, when he took his uniform off, was really called Doris and had worked as a barmaid in Stepney before the war, or was a secret Satanist. Good grief! It was the King’s name that went on these citations. No. There had to be checks done. The Bonny Boy wasn’t actually responsible for any of the checking himself; he merely allocated the duty. However, he did have a say over what information should be checked.
He didn’t even have to think about it, before he was reaching for the typed report he’d written about Sub-Lieutenant Harry Gilmour, that he always kept handy, just in case.
For Captain Charles ‘the Bonny Boy’ Bonalleck had once been Sub-Lieutenant Gilmour’s commanding officer. Way back, when the war was young, and the Bonny Boy had been a drunk. Sub-Lieutenant Gilmour knew too much about the Bonny Boy, and the bitterness burned in him. He’d always sworn there would come a day.
He found the typed report – or rather a mimeographed and de-identified copy of it. It detailed the events leading up to the loss of His Majesty’s Submarine Pelorus (Commanding Officer, Commander Charles Bonalleck VC) in a collision with a merchant ship at night off the Firth of Forth, back in 1940. Commander Bonalleck had been on watch on the bridge at the time of the collision and had survived. Most of Pelorus’s crew, and all her officers, apart from her Fourth Officer, Sub-Lieutenant Harris John Gilmour RNVR, had perished. The report went on to point out that only reason Sub-Lieutenant Gilmour had survived was because he had deserted his station. It wasn’t true, of course. The truth about that collision was something else entirely; the Bonny Boy knew that. Unfortunately, so did Sub-Lieutenant Gilmour.
The Bonny Boy folded up the copy and put it in an envelope. He then placed it in a folder along with the medal recommendation, and placed both documents in his out tray. It would do for now. Until the opportunity arose to really destroy the self-righteous little prick. And it would come. Of that he was confident.
Chapter Twenty
Harry didn’t like the look of the surf. Yes, the wind had abated quite a bit, and was blowing just a stiff breeze now, none of your tramontane or gregale nonsense, so the flimsy little canoes the pongoes called folbots would have a following sea going ashore. But they’d have to row against it coming back out, with the country in hue and cry behind them; and they’d be a lot lighter and more susceptible to skitter over the waves, going more in the direction the wind wanted them to go, than the one they were paddling.
Carey and the pongo CO were studying the shore through binoculars. They were about three or four miles up the toe of Italy from the little Calabrian coastal town of Bagnara, and not much more than twenty miles away as the crow flies from Villa San Giovanni, where the big railway ferries sailed for Messina and Sicily. Barely two hundred yards from the beach in front of them, the main railway line from the north came out of a tunnel, and five hundred yards further on, went back into it. All the freight, big and small, from oranges for Milan going one way, to vital war supplies destined for North Africa, via Messina or Catania or Palermo, going the other; all heading to or from the huge dock sidings at San Gio, and the big roll-on, roll-off ferries whose cargo decks were floating railway tracks that could each carry half a train across the Straits of Messina and back again.
It was a dark, cloudless night, and bloody cold. But then it would be the first of February tomorrow, so what did you expect. At least the January storms had gone, except that back on Malta that had turned out to be more disguise than blessing. With the clearing skies had come Jerry. It really was the worst joke of the war so far: that you actually felt safer on patrol than back in Lazaretto Creek.
Shrimp had eventually barred Harry from living at Katty’s place – not out of any sense of moral outra
ge, for Shrimp was happier when he knew his boys were able to relax properly when ashore. And even a mature, happily married man like him couldn’t imagine a more relaxing spot anywhere on the island for a chap to lay his head than on Katty Kadzow’s bosom. It was because the raids now were so intense and relentless: up to nine a day now, and Jerry wasn’t caring any more where the bombs fell. Shrimp couldn’t have cared less whether Harry was prepared to risk it. He wasn’t. Experienced submarine officers were precious commodities on Malta now, especially ones who were First Lieutenants. Shrimp wasn’t going to lose one, just because he couldn’t get out of his paramour’s boudoir in time, and down into a public shelter. Lazaretto’s shelters were mere steps away; he could stay there.
As things transpired, however, Harry’s domestic arrangements weren’t destined to last very long anyway. Three nights after he had been ordered back on to base, a 500-pound bomb went through the roof of the tenement block two doors down from Katty’s, and exploded in the basement, shattering the foundations of half the street. The following day, several walls that had survived the night collapsed. Katty’s apartment had remained largely intact, but her bathroom had suddenly become open-plan and her bath was left dangling in mid-air. As a result, Katty, being an RAF civilian employee, got the offer of a camp bed in the ladies’ section of the basement, below the Lascaris main operations centre.
