The Information Officer (19 page)

Ralph’s lack of respect for “the machine,” as he called it, was a product of hard experience reaching back to his very first day on the island. Of the reinforcement flight of twelve Hurricanes that took off from the aircraft carrier
Argus
, Ralph’s was one of only four to make land. The others were lost to the unforgiving waters of the Mediterranean because someone, somewhere, had miscalculated the amount of aviation spirit required to see them safely as far as Malta. Ralph had crossed the Dingli Cliffs on vapors, gliding in to Luqa on a dead propeller. He had lost his best friend that day, and he’d lost many more friends since, thanks to the “sheer bloody incompetence of the machine operators.”

Bovine compliance didn’t come naturally to him; his trust had to be earned. He would have cut his hair if the order had come from someone he respected, but the few people he esteemed tended to rate him highly in return and were happy to let him operate with a certain latitude. His reputation helped. With ten “destroyed” and six “probables” to his name, he was one of the few aces on the island, albeit one who had badly blotted his copybook.

The incident had occurred the summer before while Ralph was convalescing at the pilots’ rest camp on Saint Paul’s Bay following his accident. Jumped by a gaggle of 109s over Qormi, he’d been forced to crash-land in a field—a nearly impossible thing to do on Malta without hitting a stone wall. Unconscious, he only survived the burning wreckage because a couple of Maltese women working nearby heaped earth on the flames (after struggling and failing to haul his inert six-foot-something frame from the crumpled cockpit). Patched up by Freddie, he had spent two months in traction at Mtarfa Hospital, successfully resisting all efforts to have him posted home “non-effective sick.” The air battle for Malta was one fight he intended to see through to its bitter conclusion, and he’d managed to secure for himself a further period of convalescence at the pilots’ rest camp on Saint Paul’s Bay.

“Camp” was something of a misnomer. It was a villa with a sloping lawn and honeysuckle arbors and a winding pathway leading down
through a shaded avenue of trees to the water’s edge, where a couple of rowboats and an offshore swimming platform bobbed lazily on the swell. At the mouth of the bay lay the flat little island where Saint Paul had been shipwrecked in a storm some two thousand years before. Struggling ashore, Paul had been welcomed in Mdina by Publius, the chief man of the island, whose father had been gravely ill at the time. When Paul healed him, Publius promptly converted to the new religion, carrying his people with him and building the first ever Christian church in Mdina. With a heritage like that, it was hardly surprising that the Christian faith remained the mainspring of Maltese life.

The proximity of Saint Paul’s Island with its solitary statue of the healer saint lent a certain logic to the location of the rest camp: a peaceful spot where men came to repair themselves, a haven amidst all the suffering and destruction. Max had grown to know the place well during Ralph’s stay, riding out there on his motorcycle whenever he could snatch a moment. It was the day after one such visit when Ralph overstepped the mark.

He and some others had been lazing in the garden, listening to gramophone records, when a dogfight broke out high over their heads. They strained to make sense of the specks darting around the heavens, but as the aircraft lost altitude in a bid to gain speed, it became clear that two Hurricanes were taking a pasting from a covey of determined 109s.

One of the Hurricanes broke for home with a German on his tail; the other Hurricane didn’t fare so well. Streaming a white plume of glycol, it spun away earthward and piled into the hillside at the back of Saint Paul’s with a sickening crump.

By the time Ralph and the others made their way to the crash site, the army was already on the scene and a wallet had been recovered. It revealed that the pulped mess amidst the smouldering wreckage had once been Greg Dyer, a young Canadian based at Hal Far. Ralph knew him—not well, but well enough to take issue with the army major who ordered his men to dig the body in. The fellow had come halfway round the world to join the fight, Ralph protested, and he deserved a decent burial, just as his family deserved the right to come
and stand at a white cross in a cemetery and pay their tributes when the war was over. The family could have their white cross, was the major’s reply, and if Ralph wanted to bag up some bits of flesh and bone to bury at the foot of it, then he had five minutes to do so.

Opinions were divided as to which of them threw the first punch—the witnesses were split along predictable army/RAF lines—but there was no doubt about who came off worst. The major’s jaw was broken in two places, and he was still eating through a straw when he flew out of Malta a few weeks later.

Fortunately for Ralph, the air officer commanding was one of his fans, and Ralph was spared the punishment he probably deserved. Other pilots had been sent packing for far more minor misdemeanors, such as drunken behavior in the bars of Valetta. However, the RAF had to be seen to be taking some form of action against him, and he found himself grounded until further notice. This might have sounded like a godsend, but not for a man itching to get back up there and have another crack at the enemy. His only consolation was that it gave him time to fully recover from injuries that might well have affected his performance in the air and cost him his life. When it came to working the rudder pedals, multiple fractures of the lower legs didn’t help. They were considerably less of a hindrance to the duties of the squadron’s chief intelligence officer, a position Ralph filled for several months before being eased back into action with the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit. This was a compromise that satisfied the army and annoyed the hell out of Ralph, although it beat sitting at a desk all day.

The PRU had a couple of unarmed Spitfires with long-range tanks for snooping on enemy convoys, but Ralph flew a Martin Maryland—in his own words, “a big bugger of a kite.” He’d grown strangely fond of the twin-engine bomber. It was surprisingly nippy and maneuverable, and it was well armed, which allowed him to have a pop at the enemy if the opportunity presented itself (which it seemed to do with far more regularity than was the case with the other Maryland pilots).

Since joining the PRU Ralph had added two to his tally: an Italian Cant seaplane in Taranto harbor and, just a few weeks ago, a 109 over
Sicily, one of six fighters that had jumped him while he’d been making a study of the Catania plain. The Germans’ determination to bring down the Maryland made sense only the following day, when the photos taken on that sortie were developed. They showed new ground strips being built near Gerbini airfield—glider takeoff areas—confirmation that an airborne assault on Malta was imminent.

This grim news sat like a dark cloud over those in the know, but it failed to dampen Ralph’s spirits; he certainly wasn’t going to let it mess with his social calendar. He still traveled into Valetta to bend his elbow at the bar in the Union Club (or one of the city’s less salubrious establishments), and the invitations to dinner at the Xara Palace kept coming.

Rationing had reduced the quality of the food on offer there to the purely functional role of soaking up the booze, of which there was always plenty, thanks to Ralph’s deep pockets. His father had died when he was a boy, and a small fortune had been settled on him when he was twenty-one: “enough to keep me in snuff and absinthe,” he had once joked to Max. It was money he seemed quite happy to fritter away on his colleagues and friends.

That evening, he had somehow managed to get his hands on two cases of Chianti and six bottles of Johnnie Walker whisky. God only knew where he’d got them from (or what he’d paid for them)—contrary to official pronouncements, the black market was thriving—but the first toast of the evening, as always, was to the good health of his great-aunt Enid, for her generosity with the liquid refreshments.

“Enid,” the whole room bellowed before dropping back into their chairs, everyone except the Maltese orderlies, who returned to the kitchen clutching their tumblers of red wine and “a bottle of the brown stuff for the chef.”

Heavy drinking was just about the fastest route to an early grave for a fighter pilot, but given the shortage of serviceable aircraft on the island, almost everyone present could guarantee that they wouldn’t be flying the following day. And if by some miracle they did find themselves called to readiness, then a few minutes of raw oxygen through the mask while waiting to take off worked wonders when it came to clearing away the cobwebs.

The usual smattering of teetotalers and cautious newcomers abstained, but Hugh was happy to take up the slack.

“Rosamund’s arranged one of her women-only whist drives, so I’m good for a glass or five.”

Max and Freddie were happy to match him. For reasons that soon became clear, Ralph took longer to warm up. He was a painter—a watercolorist, primarily—and not a bad one, and he wasn’t going to let the minor inconvenience of a war keep him from his craft. That morning he had set off on his bicycle, as he often did, to record some little corner of the island. Chiaroscuro was his thing, light and shade, and he had found a subject that played to his strong suit: a small chapel in a sun-dappled glade near Verdala Palace. The proximity to the governor’s summer residence may well have played a part in what then happened.

Someone denounced him to the local police for suspicious behavior, and a small crowd of Maltese was present at the confiscation of his artist’s pad by two local constables. Not one of the grinning natives rose to his defense, even though a few of them knew him by sight. Almost tearful with frustration, he had watched some of his best work carried off.

“Toilet paper
is
running extremely scarce,” said Hugh.

Somehow, this set the tone for the evening. Serious subjects weren’t ignored, but they were treated with a light hand, which made a change from the synthetic gaiety that usually prevailed in the mess.

A South African flight lieutenant at their table mentioned that he’d also detected a shift in the attitude of the Maltese toward them, a souring of the relationship. The fighter pilots had always been regarded as the heroes of the garrison and were accustomed to being mobbed and cheered by young boys wherever they went. Lately, though, there had been something sneering in the cries of “Speetfire.”

Hugh was horrified to hear this. Ralph, on the other hand, was sympathetic to the Maltese.

“They’ve every bloody right to be browned off, in my book. They saw the new Spits fly in a few weeks ago, and what do they get? More
planes in the sky? No. More pilots mooching around Valetta. Meanwhile, they’re dying in droves.”

He had nothing but praise for the gunners and the “poor bloody infantry.” The navy was beyond reproach, and the merchant seamen, well, they were the real heroes of the piece as far as he was concerned, gambling their lives away to feed, fuel, and arm the island. No, his own service—the RAF—was the one at fault. Air superiority was the key to Malta’s survival, but how could they hope to achieve it if the imbeciles back home continued to view Malta as a lost cause, little more than a convenient dumping ground for their shabbiest aircraft and least promising pilots?

“No offense intended, I’m sure,” said Max to a couple of ruddy-cheeked flight lieutenants listening in—new boys from 603 Squadron.

“But best to face the hard truth,” added Ralph. “You’ll last longer if you do. That’s why you’re here. That’s why
I’m
here. My squadron CO at North Weald couldn’t wait to see the back of me. ‘Tindle,’ he said, ‘I’ve got just the thing for you….’”

“Ralph, you’re scaring them,” said Freddie.

“They’re already scared. And they’re right to be. They’re up against Hitler’s best. Those boys earned their spurs on the Russian front. They say Werner Mölders has bagged more than a hundred. What do you two have in your lockers? A couple of massed sweeps over France?”

At most, judging from their expressions.

Freddie raised his glass to the dejected pair. “Well, here’s hoping the new Spitfires never arrive.”

“They’re coming,” said the youngest of them. “They’ve got us building new blast pens like there’s no tomorrow.”

Ralph drained his glass. “And Kesselring knows it. He has his eyes and ears on this island.”

“You and your bloody fifth columnists,” said Hugh. “You see enemy agents under every rock.”

“Oh, they’re here, all right. For all I know, one of you is one of them.” His eyes made the tour of the table. “Well, are you?”

“Nein,”
said Freddie, which set everyone off.

After dinner, the four friends retired upstairs to the terrace with a bottle of Johnnie Walker. Night was falling fast, and as they sat there in the gloaming, Ralph announced, “I didn’t want to say before, but they’ll be here on the ninth.”

“The Spitfires …?”

“Mark Vs is the word. Sixty or so this time. Enough to tip the scales in our favor.”

“Where did you hear this?” asked Hugh, who liked to think he had a jungle telephone attached to every brass hat.

“Elliott.”

“Elliott!”

“Don’t underestimate Elliott. He may be a bloody Yank, but he sees the big picture. And he’s got clout where it counts, which is more than can be said for the congenital idiots running our show.”

Ralph didn’t know for certain, but rumor had it that Elliott had played a significant role behind the scenes in the last reinforcement flight to reach the island. The Spitfires had been delivered deep into the Mediterranean by the U.S. aircraft carrier
Wasp
—a commitment that, in Ralph’s view, Britain’s new ally wouldn’t have made without the sanction of their man on the spot.

“I wish I could be somebody’s man on the spot,” said Hugh. “It sounds like fun.”

“Not when it all goes wrong. The last fly-in was a complete bloody disaster. And sixty more Spits count for nothing unless we can get them armed, fueled, and back in the air before Kesselring pounces.”

“Elliott should be here,” said Hugh. “When was the last time all five of us were together?”