Ugo, whose wife had been wounded in a strafing attack at the weekend while out strolling with friends near Rabat. Gratifyingly, the pilot of the Messerschmitt 109 had paid for this outrage with his life, a Spitfire from Ta’ Qali dropping on to his tail moments later and bringing him down in the drink off the Dingli Cliffs.
‘How’s Ugo’s wife?’ Max enquired of the waiter.
‘She dead.’
‘Oh.’
In case there was any doubt, the waiter tilted his head to one side and let a fat tongue roll out his mouth. The eyes remained open, staring.
‘Two coffees, please.’
‘Two coffee.’
‘Yes, thank you.’
Max’s eyes tracked the waiter as he waddled off, but his thoughts were elsewhere, with Ugo, and wondering how long it would be before he smiled his crooked smile again.
He forced his attention back to the young man sitting across from him. Edward Pemberton was taking in his surroundings—the tall windows, the elaborately painted walls and the high, beamed ceiling—apparently immune to the mention of death.
‘What a beautiful place.’
‘It’s the old Auberge de Provence.’
Once home to the Knights of St John, the grand Baroque edifice now housed the Union Club, a welcome haven from the hard realities of war for the officer classes. The building seemed to bear a charmed life, standing remarkably unscathed among the ruins and rubble of Kingsway, Valletta’s principle street. With its reassuring whiff of a St James’s gentleman’s club, there was no better place to break the news to young Pemberton. It might help soften the blow.
‘Who’s Ugo?’
So he had been listening, after all.
‘The head waiter.’
‘How did his wife die?’
Max hesitated then told him the story. No point in pretending that things hadn’t turned nasty of late. In fact, it might fire his sense of outrage, winning him over to the cause, although, when it came to it, Pemberton would have very little say in the matter. He wouldn’t be leaving Malta any time soon; he just didn’t know it yet. Another bird of passage ensnared by the beleaguered garrison. Poor bastard.
Max spelled it out as gently as he could. The Lieutenant-Governor’s office had already been in touch with the brass in Gibraltar, who appreciated that Malta’s back was up against the wall. If Pemberton’s services were required on the island, then so be it. Needs must, and all that. Force majeure. First dibs to the downtrodden. You get the picture.
‘I understand,’ said Pemberton.
‘Really?’
‘Absolutely, sir. No objections.’
Max wanted to ask him if he had any notion of what lay in store for him: the breathless heat and the choking dust, the mosquitoes, sandflies and man-eating fleas, the sleepless nights and the starvation rations. Oh, and the Luftwaffe, who, together with the Regia Aeronautica, were intent on wiping the island off the map, on bombing it into oblivion.
‘I never wanted to go to Gib,’ Pemberton went on. ‘It never appealed…as a place, I mean.’
War as tourism, thought Max. Well, that’s one way of coming at it, and probably no better or worse than any other.
‘Malta has a lot to offer,’ said Max. ‘When the history of the war comes to be written, this little lump of rock in the middle of the Med will figure large.’
‘If you’re appealing to my vanity, it might just work.’
Max gave a short loud laugh which drew glances from a couple of artillery types at a nearby table. Pemberton was smiling coyly, faultless teeth flashing in his wide, strong mouth. Matinee idol looks and a sense of humour. Perfect fodder for Rosamund, Max mused. She’ll never forgive me if I don’t offer her right of first refusal.
Pemberton explained (with a degree of candour he would soon learn to curb) that he was sick of being shunted from pillar to post under the protective tutelage of his uncle, a big-wig in the War Office.
‘I should warn you, he won’t be best pleased.’
‘Then you can tell him that Malta has already saved your life. The seaplane you should have flown out on last night is missing.’
‘Missing?’
‘Brought down near Pantelleria, we think. They have Radio Direction Finding and a squadron of 109s stationed there. We won’t know for sure until we hear what Rome Radio has to say on the matter. They talk a lot of rubbish, of course, but we’ve grown pretty adept at panning for the small truths that matter to us.’
Pemberton stared forlornly at his cup of coffee before looking up. ‘I had lunch with the pilot yesterday. Douglas. I knew him from Alex. Douglas Pitt.’
Max had never heard of Pitt, but then the seaplane boys at Kalafrana Bay rarely mingled, not even with the other pilots. They were always on the go, running the two thousand-mile gauntlet between Alexandria and Gibraltar at opposite ends of the Mediterranean, breaking the journey in Malta—the lone Allied outpost in a hostile, Nazi-controlled sea.
‘You’ll get used to it.’
Pemberton’s eyes locked on to Max, demanding an explanation.
‘Look, I’d be lying if I said casualty rates weren’t running pretty high right now. People, they…well, they’re here one day, gone the next.’
When Pemberton spoke, there was a mild note of irritation in his tone. ‘That doesn’t mean you have to stop remembering them.’
Well actually it does, thought Max. Because if you spent your time thinking about the ones who’d copped it, you wouldn’t be able to function. In his first year he had written four heartfelt letters to the families of the three men and one woman he had known well enough to care for. He hadn’t written any such letters in the past year.
‘No, you’re right, of course,’ he said.
Pemberton would find his own path through it, assuming he survived long enough to navigate one.
‘So, tell me, what do you know about Malta?’
‘I know about Faith, Hope and Charity.’
Everyone knew about Faith, Hope and Charity; the newspapers back home had made sure of that, enshrining the names of the three Gloster Gladiators in the popular imagination. The story had courage-in-the-face-of-adversity written all over it, just what the home readership had required back in the summer of 1940. While Hitler skipped across northern Europe as though it were his private playground, on a small island in the Mediterranean three obsolescent bi-planes were bravely pitting themselves against the full might of Italy’s Regia Aeronautica, wrenched around the heavens by pilots barely qualified to fly them.
And so the myth was born. With a little assistance.
‘Actually,
