Warsaw Concerto, page 17
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
For a while, in the carnival atmosphere of those days, people had temporarily forgotten the disaster which had befallen humanity. Elspeth, at the time nearly seven months pregnant, Pat and their two young children – Michael Patrick then three-and-a-half, and his sister Joan Elizabeth just two-years-old – had been among the first visitors on board the Ark Royal, transported out to the great ship in the waist of the Admiral’s Barge over an hour in advance of the arrival of the initial wave of local dignitaries.
A month or so after she had learned of her father’s death on Malta, her ‘little brother’s’ marriage and his subsequent heroic deeds in the Mediterranean she had written to Peter, honestly not knowing what to say but feeling a crying need to reach out to him in some way in her own grief, recollecting that day in December 1962 she had been re-united with their father.
And made her peace with him…
‘I had had no idea how huge the ship was. As we got closer it was like a great big wall of grey steel. It was still quite early, the best part of the day before it got too hot. Nearer to the ship one felt and heard the distant thrumming of powerful machinery. Pat was in seventh heaven because in organising the visit the Captain of the Ark Royal’s Secretary, had promised him a personal guided tour of the whole boat. I confess I was dreading meeting father again. We had parted horribly after mother’s funeral; I had said things which I probably ought not to have said and so forth as one does in the heat of the moment. In any event, after we had handed the children to sailors to carry aboard and half-a-dozen handsome young officers had fussed around me to make sure I got up the gangway safely in ‘my delicate condition’, I found myself suddenly standing in front of the Admiral...and well, suddenly, I really could not remember why I had been so bitter for so long. Mind you, it was a little strange; father had organised a reception line for us in the hangar deck as if we were visiting royalty. I think he was much more nervous than I was; I don’t think he started to relax until I asked him if he would like to hold Michael. As soon as he picked up Mikey everybody started cheering!’
Elspeth recollected that things were a little more formal when the Premier of New South Wales, Robert Heffron and the Mayor of Sydney had come aboard the flagship a couple of hours later. Elspeth and her children had watched the comings and goings for an hour or so from the privileged heights of the Ark Royal’s flying bridge while her husband clambered through the bowels of the monster with one of the carrier’s Engineering Officers for his guide. Later, they were introduced to the great and good of New South Wales, before a meal was served beneath awnings on the vast flight deck.
‘I ought to have written to Father before; I did not even send him pictures of his grandchildren which, in hindsight, was mean of me.’
That day aboard the Ark Royal had been the first of several encounters with ‘the Admiral’ before in the autumn of that year the big carriers, the Ark Royal and the Hermes sailed for England with the Operation Manna convoys. Once, about a month after Elizabeth Rose’s birth her father had driven out to St Leonard’s and spent a blissful afternoon a million miles away from the unimaginable weight of the burdens he must have borne in those days, far from home in a time of dreadful crisis.
Some weeks later she and Pat had gone down to stand in the crowds on the Harbour Bridge, waving farewell to the Ark Royal and her consorts as they began the long haul back to England.
During that visit to St Leonard’s her father had spent most of the time talking engineering and ship systems with Pat but that was okay, it had been nice just to be normal.
Not to be angry.
Elspeth had maintained a desultory correspondence with Peter over the years; they were both so busy with their own lives that their letters were of the dutiful, brisk kind in those times before the cataclysm.
Oddly, it was meeting and becoming reconciled with her father that had allowed her back into her brother’s life in ways she suspected, Peter, left to his own devices, would never have volunteered.
Elspeth was astonished to discover that the Admiral knew absolutely everything about Peter’s ‘progress’; that he had very nearly made a fool of himself with a ‘charming girl’ in South Africa, and again with a ‘nice’ girl in England who would have made a perfect Naval wife; but was probably unsuitable in every other way! As for Peter’s long-time pen friend in Malta; they had both agreed that Marija seemed like a really sensible person –no kind of gold-digger - and that it was a ‘crying shame’ that they, Peter and Marija, that is, had never actually met face to face in all the years they had been friends.
Elspeth remembered her father guffawing as they considered this and observing: ‘Yes, I’ll have to do something about that when I get home.’
Elspeth had assumed he was joking because ‘the Fighting Admiral’ was notorious for ‘not pulling strings’.
Those months in 1963 had been unreal, surreal. The pomp and ceremony, the open days and the parties on deck, the flags flying, when the big grey warships anchored in Australian harbours had become the focus – beacons of hope – for the whole nation over the next six months.
That sultry warm Saturday afternoon, Elspeth tried to contain her nerves but the urge to coral her three children and to vent a little of her existential angst upon her poor hard-pressed, darling husband was almost impossible to resist.
This is stupid!
I did not feel this nervous on my wedding day!
Or that morning we went aboard the Ark Royal and that was the day I was re-united with my father and we were introduced to the Prime Minister of New South Wales!
Of course, on the other hand she had never actually entertained the Governor-General of Australia in her home before…
She nearly jumped out of her skin when her husband touched her arm.
“What!”
He leaned towards her and planted a pecking kiss on her cheek.
“It’ll be fine, sweetheart. I bet Peter and Marija will be as nervous as we are about today?”
Elspeth very much doubted that Sir Peter Christopher, Victoria Cross, Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB), a newly appointed Privy Counsellor to Her Majesty the Queen, formerly the United Kingdom’s Ambassador to the United States, the hero of a string of desperate battles, a man who counted as a friend - for goodness sake! - and had gone sailing with Jack Kennedy, a man whose children had Prime Ministers and former Presidents among their godparents, was anywhere near as anxious about today as she was!
And as for his wife: everything Elspeth had heard about Lady Marija spoke to her being the most level-headed, serene woman on the planet!
“How can you be so calm?” She plaintively complained to her husband, albeit half-heartedly.
She already knew the answer to that one!
The idyllic wood-boarded house in St Leonard’s had been their fast-growing family’s fourth ‘halt’ on their whistle stop journey around the fastnesses of the great southern continent. Pat was one of the men who designed and oversaw the building of bridges, docks, roads and railways – sometimes styled a ‘consultant engineer’, or ‘managing engineer’ or simply a ‘project engineer’ – and his talents were hugely in demand in the expanding post-war Australia of the fifties and early sixties. Their son had been born in Perth, Western Australia, his first sister in Melbourne, Victoria, and since they had made Sydney their home he had been, on average, away from his New South Wales office in nearby Chatswood, for six months or more in each of the last three years.
It was Pat who had put an end to their life ‘on the road’. It was no way to bring up a young family; and truthfully, Elspeth’s initial excitement of following her husband from one great project to another had been beginning to wear a little thin by the time of the October War.
It was not until she had had a proper home into which she could pour her energies that Elspeth had known what she was missing, or really appreciated how much her children needed stability, security more than ever.
Nevertheless, her first four years in Australia had been a whirl of exciting, exhausting discoveries: new places, new friends, inevitably, exhausting with two very young children in tow even though there was always a welcoming circle of wives – all of whom were in exactly the same boat - to help out. Even now, when Pat disappeared off up country on one of his little ‘jobs’, or was away for weeks on end in Brisbane or Adelaide, she was rarely lonely.
The first time she met him, Pat had entranced her with talk about Australia; he had served with Aussies in Singapore and spent two months as an instructor with the Navy in Melbourne while he was in the Far East in 1956, and could not wait to get back. They had always been going to emigrate, it was an unspoken thing between them from the start although looking back, she had had no idea what to expect when they stepped off the SS Orchades at Perth. That had not mattered one iota because once she found her feet she felt like Cinderella at the ball.
Right up until the Cuban Missiles disaster…
In the days and weeks after the October War many people, Elspeth included, had patiently, fatalistically anticipated the end of the World. They all knew that ‘On the Beach’ was just a fictional thing, a movie, that was all, but deep down everybody had started waiting for the radiation to arrive…
Of course, since then it had, and it had not.
The ‘background’ levels these days were supposedly higher, a lot higher – whatever that meant? - than before the war and perhaps, physicists and emeritus professors of nuclear medicine had worked out what that actually meant for the human race; frankly, she did not want to know and that was most people’s attitude. There was nothing anybody could do about the ‘hot stuff’ in the air that they and their children breathed and the dust they kicked up underfoot; so, all things considered it was best not to worry about matters over which one had no control. Selfishly, her children were still healthy, she and Pat were doing just fine and in a few minutes the Governor-General of Australia was paying a house call…
It was easy enough to bury one’s head in the sand.
Many, possibly most, Australians felt themselves to be – and were glad to be – a little disconnected from the disaster which had struck the Northern Hemisphere. England seemed so far away that it was almost as if London might have been a bombed city on another planet.
Elspeth and her neighbours looked around them and nothing had changed, the bridge was still there in Sydney Harbour, the weather was the same, people still went down to Bondi Beach at the weekends and in the evenings. Unless one read a newspaper or turned on the radio or the TV, nothing at all had changed and once the panic of the winter of 1962-63 was over people did what people always do in the face of adversity, they got on with their lives.
Elspeth had discovered that Marija was the letter-writer in the Christopher-Calleja marriage by the early summer of 1964. Since then her sister-in-law had corresponded regularly, never less than monthly, with all ‘the family news’ and Elspeth had been happy to reciprocate in kind. More than once in the last couple of years the two women had referred, in passing, to the happy serendipity which had resulted in Peter, not his sister, becoming ‘that poor little Maltese girl’s pen-friend’ so many years ago!
Marija had supplied Elspeth with an ongoing, blow by blow account of the many and often astonishing adventures she had shared with her remarkable ‘little brother’.
However, presently, this was contributing in no small measure to Elspeth’s wholly untypical mental and emotional disarray…
“What on earth does one say to people who are used to rubbing shoulders with Presidents, Prime Ministers and Royalty?” She demanded of her husband.
Three or four days ago she had been watching TV with the children and there had been Peter and Marija, her brother in his full Governor-General’s regalia and her sister-in-law every inch the dark-haired fairy tale princess who seemed to obsess every editor of every national newspaper, whenever she appeared in public, at an investiture at Government House.
She had not set eyes – face-to-face - on her brother for over eight years…
Now he was one of the most famous men in the World and he and his sublime little Maltese princess were probably the most recognisable people in Australia!
There were more anonymous movie stars than the star-struck couple who were about to walk up to her front door…
She would have had a panic attack had not the front door bell chimed at that moment. In Elspeth’s state of heightened anxiety its demure ding-a-ling ringing startled her as if it had been an ocean liner’s fog horn and she practically jumped out of her skin.
Pat junior sprinted past his parents and swung open the front door.
Husband and wife blinked at the couple in the door.
Neither the man nor the woman looked remotely like the Governor-General or his wife.
The adults stared at each other for several seconds.
A smiling, plump woman in her thirties in an off the peg calf-length grey cotton dress standing next to a military-looking, and a hard-muscled man in a jacket and tie that almost but not quite fitted his barrel-chested frame hesitated a further second or so, before both attempted to speak at once.
They halted, looked at each other and smiled.
“Forgive us, the Captain and the Lady Governess,” the man explained, a half frown flickering across his prize-fighter’s physiognomy as if he knew there was something amiss with the title ‘Lady Governess’. He started again: “I’m Jack Griffin and this is my good lady wife, Mary. We’re sort of the ‘advanced guard’. Mary suggested it would be best if we came ahead of the others. It was the only way we could stop the Captain and Lady Marija’s Royal Marines knocking on your door and giving you the fright of your lives. The Captain and her ladyship will be here in about ten minutes.”
This said he half-turned and waved to somebody unseen in the road.
Much to her own surprise Elspeth was the one who stopped gawping like a fish first and invited the unexpected couple inside out of the glare of the burning afternoon sun.
“I’m afraid the Royal Marines still think we’re in America,” Mary Griffin apologised. “They still think there are bad people lurking behind every bush…”
Elspeth remembered that Marija had once, ever so briefly alluded to an occasion when an assassin had tried to do his worst whilst she was on board HMS Cavendish in Philadelphia, fortunately, ‘Jack was there, so we were all right’.
“I’m Lady Marija’s Appointments Secretary,” Mary explained as hands were shaken. “Jack is Sir Peter’s personal,” now it was her turn to frown, this time in askance of her spouse.
“Personal Steward and Chief Petty Officer, Master of Arms on the Captain’s Staff,” the man declared proudly.
Elspeth could not help herself.
She laughed, releasing a day’s worth of pent up angst.
“Sorry, sorry, Chief Petty Officer,” she sobered, now realising she was looking at one of the heroes of the Talavera’s last fight, the man who had thrown himself out of a moving car to dismount a motor bike-riding assassin, one Sunday morning soon after her brother and sister-in-law had arrived in America in 1964. “We’re so pleased to meet you. Both of you. Marija often speaks of you both in her letters.”
It was about then that Elspeth realised that it was likely Marija who had sent these two emissaries ahead of their inevitable Governor-General-fashion cavalcade, to ensure that she and Pat and the children had the gentlest possible landing into the unreal world in which they had been living ever since the Battle of Malta two-and-a-half years ago.
Chapter 16
Saturday 10th December 1966
The Oval Office, Washington DC
The thirty-seventh President of the United States of America found his National Security Advisor’s imperturbability a little irritating, given that the Soviets had just torpedoed his last best hope – ahead of the planned re-dedication of the United Nations in California - of reaching out to the Sverdlovsk Kremlin with concrete proposals for resetting international relations.
What was especially galling about Henry Kissinger’s near insouciance was that he was the man who had been working so assiduously on the project; the big idea of ‘reaching out to the Troika’ since long before the rebellion in the Midwest was crushed in July.
“You seem very,” Richard Nixon murmured, trying hard not to scowl too obviously, “calm about all this, Henry?”
The former Harvard academic shrugged, contemplated his cup of coffee for a moment before meeting his President’s gaze with more than usually hooded, inscrutable eyes.
“Dobrynin,” he offered, his deep voice rumbling like a distant storm, “might have sounded optimistic but I don’t think he speaks for the people back home.” He sighed. “I suspect that the Russians would have replaced him by now if they had been interested in engaging with us in a meaningful dialogue at this time.”
Anatoly Fyodorovich Dobrynin, the forty-seven-year old Soviet Ambassador to the United States of America, and Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor met most weeks to very guardedly, ‘chew over’ the bones of international relations.
Kissinger respected his Soviet counterpart, as did Secretary of State Henry Cabot Lodge junior. Both men considered Dobrynin a useful conduit to the Kremlin but no longer a major player.
Detained under house arrest in the United States for over a year after the October War, Dobrynin knew as well as anybody that his masters back home would never really trust him again. Appointed as Ambassador in Washington only months before the Cuban Missiles Crisis went disastrously wrong, he had once admitted to Bobby Kennedy that ‘the whole thing was badly handled by everybody; not least the USSR’s two representatives to the United Nations – with whom his conversations had been ‘unhappy’ during that period – and Nikita Khrushchev, whose ill-judged blustering brinkmanship had been just plain ‘stupid’.
Nobody had previously sought, or when belatedly war had seemed inevitable, taken Dobrynin’s counsel seriously back in Moscow. Understandably, the man who had come to America, with his wife, Irina and daughter Yelena, in early 1962 with such high hopes both for his own career and to be instrumental in maintaining the peace, hated being relegated to the periphery of affairs.
