Warsaw Concerto, page 35
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
There was a strange mood in the air that day.
The immediate furore over the Soviets’ ‘defilement of West Berlin’ and the angry condemnation of the re-creation of the so-called Warsaw Pact, had died down a little over Christmas week and consequently, tempers within the Nixon Administration and the DC body politic had cooled somewhat. Not least because the President’s National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger had gone on TV and assured Walter Kronkite that in the scale of things: ‘A few Red Army tanks and a couple of dozen MiG fighters rolling around and flying over a city devastated by Soviet nuclear strikes in October 1962, hardly represents a significant existential threat to the United States.’
Besides, the first week of 1967 had been deemed ‘Union Remembrance Week’ and the politicking was in abeyance, today and in the coming days as the nation reflected upon its loss.
To be other than an American in mourning in the capital that day was to be an outsider, somehow an interloper, a little guilty to be witnessing the sadness and loss of native-born friends, and comrades in arms.
Several of the British Special Air Service men who had taken part in the final battle of the war, bizarrely at a place called Berlin in rural Wisconsin, in which over half their comrades had died, had attended a presentation at the White House that morning.
Lieutenant Colonel Julian Calder, the commanding officer of D Troop, 22nd SAS, had received his Congressional Medal of Honour – never before awarded to a member of a foreign military but exceptionally, permissible in this case because the Department of Defense had solemnly certified that he was operating under direct US command – from the President. His proud wife, Helen, and his eleven-year-old daughter, Sarah, now flanked him as a gang of photographers – displaying exemplary respect and patience – snapped pictures of the hero, who was still not by any means fully recovered from his wounds.
“I thought that all went very well,” Commander Alan Hannay observed soberly as he and his wife, Rosa, accompanied the British Ambassador and his family down the steps towards the waiting Embassy cars. The Hannays had left their two very young children - their new daughter Sophie Elisabetta was not quite six weeks old - at the embassy compound. “These things can very easily turn maudlin and Dean Sayre struck just the right note, don’t you think?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Nicko Henderson agreed amiably. The British Ambassador was a large, jovial presence with an unruly mop of hair often to be found wandering from one meeting to another with a good book under his arm. He had laconically navigated, with exemplary charm and good humour, what might have been an uncomfortable period as the Chargé d’affaires – deputy Ambassador under Peter Christopher’s regime – to a much younger, less diplomatic diplomat with immense, and since taking over the reins, operated with a marvellous, unfussy competence which had endeared him to the US media and all bar the most Anglophobe of DC insiders. These days, the press regarded him pretty much as the ‘British member of the Nixon Administration’.
Alan and Rosa Hannay were sad to be leaving Washington – their much-delayed re-posting to the British Naval Legation based in San Francisco having now been superseded by Alan’s temporary attachment to another newly ennobled knight of the realm, former Labour politician Sir Roy Jenkins. Most of their goods and chattels, few as they were, were already packed and they were scheduled to fly west on Tuesday.
Alan had been provisionally appointed as Naval Staff Liaison Officer to the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative (designate) to the United Nations, albeit only for an initial three-month period since nobody knew where the – in future possibly peripatetic – UN caravan would pitch up once it had been ceremonially re-inaugurated on board the USS United States, or somewhere else, the whole affair still being shrouded in mystery and uncertainty, in San Francisco Bay this month or next. Nonetheless, the youngest Commander in the Royal Navy – he was still only twenty-eight and his seniority dated back to July 1964, days after his twenty-sixth birthday, when he had been promoted and posted as Naval Attaché in Philadelphia - still entertained hopes, albeit flimsy ones, that sometime this coming year, or perhaps, next he might finally find the seagoing berth he so desperately craved…
Dream on…
For the moment the thing was to keep one’s eye on the ball!
Today, the Ambassador would normally have been accompanied by his deputy, fifty-six-year-old the Right Honourable Christopher Soames. Unfortunately, the chargé d’affaires was unwell, laid low by the latest influenza epidemic stalking the streets of the capital.
The President, his wife and daughters and a coterie of senior cabinet members had already departed in a great convoy of armoured limousines and military vehicles toting fifty-calibre machine guns.
As the Dean of the National Cathedral, Francis B. Sayre had observed, ‘there is much in this land which will not be as it was before again for many years, perhaps for many generations but we should be grateful for the mercies that God, in his infinite wisdom has graced to bestow upon us and the strength we draw from our faith in confronting the dark legacy of the war now ended…”
The Dean had been born in the White House, the first grandchild of the 28th President of the Republic, Woodrow Wilson, and many took it as read that he had inherited his rhetorical gifts from that loquacious patrilineal antecedent.
The Hannay’s settled in the backwards facing seats in the Ambassador’s Rolls-Royce.
Mary Henderson grimaced at the crowds still gathered along Wisconsin Avenue NW.
Had they really cheered them as they emerged from the Cathedral?
The Ambassador’s Greek-born, former Time-Life war correspondent wife, still found life in Washington a little disorientating. To be clapped, cheered wherever one went seemed to defy credulity given the very nearly malignant atmosphere prevailing when she and her husband had first arrived in the United States, literally not knowing what to expect; very much fearing the worst and hoping for the best.
It seemed a lifetime ago that she, Nicko and Alexandra, their daughter, had arrived at the Montgommery County embassy compound outside Philadelphia. That had been at the height of yet another crisis in Anglo-US relations and if that was not bad enough, they had been wondering – with no little trepidation - what manner of reception they could expect from the, they presumed, by then despairing Ambassador, Sir Peter Christopher and the alleged, by the misery guts back in the FCO in Oxford, ‘Maltese Wives’ cabal that supposedly ran the embassy. In the event they had been welcomed like prodigals returned, Nicko had been taken straight into Peter’s confidence and the unjustly maligned ‘Maltese Wives’ had instantly inducted her and Alexandra straight into the heart of their little ‘cabal’.
Now that Alan and Rosa were departing, the last members of Peter and Marija’s original ‘Embassy Family’; the place would just not be the same even though Nicko had felt guilty hanging onto them for so long. excusing his selfishness – well, his, Mary’s and Alexandra’s – on grounds of maintaining stability, continuity and ‘all that good stuff’ that ‘diplomacy is built upon’.
Alan particularly, had been at a complete loose end lately now that David Penberthy, the man both he and Peter Christopher would always regard as their ‘Captain’, had been promoted rear admiral and despatched to Aden to command the Commonwealth Indian Ocean Squadron.
‘A motley collection of frigates, destroyers and patrol boats with a handful of Royal Fleet Auxiliaries to keep it at sea, responsible for sustaining the freedom of the navigation from Mozambique to the Straits of Hormuz and all parts in between,’ David Penberthy had explained brightly, itching to be back at sea again.
The poor man could hardly wait to jump on a plane for England and his obligatory Admiralty briefing, before getting on with the job. Ever since that night he was struck down on the bridge of the Talavera off Lampedusa, he had been yearning to get back into the thick of things and the wait had become very nearly unbearable.
In her latest letters, Marija reported that her own husband was likewise, getting ‘itchy feet’ about the ‘endless life ashore’; although recently, she had made cryptic remarks about how Peter and Jack Griffin might be ‘getting their feet wet again’ in the spring, but not, it seemed, necessarily aboard ships of ‘the Grey Funnel Line’.
Mary’s reply had only gone into the diplomatic bag yesterday so Marija would probably not receive it for three or four days, demanding to know more! The fact that Rosa, like her Maltese sister, was another inveterate letter writer – not withstanding she freely admitted she lacked Marija’s chattily fluent adroitness and charm – was the only thing making this latest fast-approaching farewell half-bearable.
“That night when the bomb went off in the Navy Yard seems like it was half-a-lifetime ago,” Alan Hannay sighed, smiling wanly, “not twelve months ago. So much seems to have happened in the last year, the last four years, I suppose, that it’s sometimes a little hard to keep track of things.”
Rosa took hold of his left hand, unashamedly proprietorial about these things even in public.
Her husband looked to her.
“We’ll be sorry to leave,” he grinned. “I know things have been a bit fraught now and then but we’ve made so many good friends here, and back in Philadelphia. Goodness, our children are both Americans!”
The four adults and the Henderson’s teenage daughter, Alexandra, smiled and exchanged ironic glances in the spacious passenger compartment of the big car. The Ambassador and his wife were in the back seats, Alexandra on the luxurious ‘jump seat’ ahead of them.
“Personally, I’d have you both shackled to radiators if I thought that would keep you here!” Nicko Henderson guffawed.
The friends laughed.
“It’ll be good to look up Joe in San Francisco,” Alan declared.
It seemed that Marija’s younger brother was having a whale of a time in Berkeley, having dived head first into student politics. Tongue-in-cheek he had written that sometimes, he even found time to actually pursue his studies in journalism and modern history! The Betancourt Foundation had awarded Joe a scholarship; initially, an outrageously generous one which, at the time, Peter and Marija had felt was inappropriate in its largesse. Their representations had led to the creation of a small trust fund which Joe could access only upon the successful completion of his three-year course, and a less generous than originally planned stipend which they fervently hoped, would encourage Joe to find part-time gainful employment to help fund his living costs and presumably, curb the party animal in him.
Joe was blissfully unaware of the manoeuvrings behind the scenes, as he had been of most of the machinations which had brought him to safety in California in the first place. Had it not been for his sister and brother-in-law’s intervention he might, even now, be living as a prince rather than just ‘one of the kids’ at Berkeley.
‘Joe will be happier that way,’ Marija had decided, and that was that. Her little brother was a long way from home and his Mama, so, ever since he had come to America, she had taken it upon herself to ‘protect Joe from himself’.
“I wish we could get out to the West Coast for the United nations jamboree too,” Nicko Henderson bemoaned half-heartedly. “Still, you’ll get to see Peter and Marija again.”
The United Nations Jamboree was planned to be a gala event stretching over some ten days in late January and early February hosted, because of ongoing security worries, by the United States Navy. Rumour had it that half the State Department was decamping to the West Coast to organise, facilitate and manage business on board the USS United States.
In fact, no final decision had been taken as to whether Nicko Henderson would accompany the United Kingdom delegation to the forthcoming ‘jamboree’. Like so many of the decisions surrounding the event, little was yet set in stone. For example, presently the Governor-General of Australia and his wife were expected to travel to California, although, even that had not actually been confirmed.
The trouble was that the re-dedication of the United Nations Treaty was an exercise being hosted by ‘the willing’, completely ignoring the wishes of those ‘less willing’ and in many respects, perversely, at odds with the changed realities of the post-October War World.
However, diplomacy had ever been thus…
Alan Hannay had decidedly mixed feelings about taking up a position, supposedly a ‘liaison’ post – albeit one that was so ill-defined that it left him working for but not reporting not to the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations ‘designate’, rather to Rear Admiral Michael Pollock, head of the Royal Navy Mission on the West Coast - in San Francisco. If he could not get back to sea - he had hardly been ‘at sea’ in his five-and-a-half years in the Royal Navy – nearly seven if one included his time at Dartmouth – then what was the point of wearing the uniform?
His entire seagoing career amounted to a short training cruise the autumn before the World blew itself up and a few weeks as Supply Officer on the Talavera before the ship got shot from under his feet.
That was no Navy career!
Other officers of his age had had at least the good fortune to do their rites of passage global circumnavigation – or an abbreviated version of it – before they got stuck behind a desk, landbound. He had been on the First Sea Lord’s Staff, then appointed Sir Julian Christopher’s flag lieutenant, and Peter’s for periods since, otherwise he had been ‘ashore’, pretty much ‘beached’. Yes, he had a great deal to be thankful for; Rosa, for one. He would never have met the love of his life but for the October War and the extraordinary good fortune to be plucked out of the First Sea Lord’s ‘back office’ and assigned to the ‘Fighting Admiral’ in December 1963.
My, that had been a bolt from the blue at the time…
He had joined the Navy after University, aged twenty-one, already two to three years behind his contemporaries and but for being inadvertently, honestly and truly through no fault of his own, deemed a hero in the Battle of Malta he would probably still only be a very junior lieutenant. Notwithstanding, he ought to have earned his watchkeeper’s certificate by now, served on several ships and gained experience in his chosen specialisation, whatever that turned out to be. He had been Talavera’s Purser and Supply Officer by default because he was no use for anything else, and at sea he would still be no use ‘for anything else’: and to put it mildly, it was beginning to niggle at his soul. He was no electronics genius with a head filled with formulae and equations like Peter, he had no idea which end of a turbine was which, he had scared himself half to death the first time he realised he was standing next to a real gun, and his long absence had transformed his uncertain grasp of naval customs and regulations into a blur. As for seamanship, he had once grounded a skiff he was in command of on a sandbank while he was at Dartmouth, and that, as they say, was about it!
Ship’s Purser was about all he was fit for!
Mind you, everybody agreed he had been jolly good at laying his hands on the hundred and one things the Talavera had needed to get back to sea to run trials after that little excitement with the USS Enterprise…
Nicko Henderson was in an unusually contemplative mood.
“This town,” he declared, “will be like a wasp nest that somebody has just jabbed with a long, very sharp stick by next week,” he added, very nearly talking to himself.
“The Tempelhof thing?” Alan Hannay thought out aloud.
“A lot of people have been keeping their heads down waiting for the media to do its worst. Congressmen and senators will start to return to DC this week ahead of the first sitting of the House on the 10th January. The Administration was wise not to over-react to the news from Germany and that blasted second newsreel but we all know the Soviets would not have risked such a major provocation just to ‘embarrass the President’, or simply to spoil his Christmas.”
“A lot of the papers were disappointed the Prime Minister did not come over for the Memorial Service,” the younger man posed.
“I think the Administration was right to keep things relatively low key,” Henderson replied. “Any suggestion of a summit to discuss West Berlin and all this nonsense about a so-called resurgent Warsaw Pact, would have smacked of, well…panic.”
Alan Hannay shrugged, looked out of the window at the rainy, grey cityscape. The President had decreed that henceforth nationwide commemoration events would be saved for July, the anniversary not of the disaster of the New Year’s Day bombing and the outbreak of the rebellion in the Midwest, but in solemn memory of the swift campaign which crushed the Kingdom of the End of Days.
In the spring and early summer leading up to the July ‘Remembrance Week’, President Nixon was due to pay state visits to the British Isles, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, to ‘thank’ those countries for standing by the United States in its ‘darkest hours’, and to dignify the deaths of the Commonwealth service personnel and civilians killed during the rebellion and in the vicious fighting to put it down.
The trouble was that everybody understood that it was the choreography of a celebration of a war which ought never to have had to be fought.
That it had been fought at all, was due to a systemic failure of Federal governance shared in equal measure by three Presidents, both the big political parties, everybody on Capitol Hill and likely, and a sizeable majority of the population of the Union, from sea to shining sea, North and South, touched or untouched by the war in the Midwest, knew as much.
Rosa Hannay cleared her throat.
Like her sister, Marija, her second pregnancy had been less straightforward than her first and she had taken until now to really get her strength back. They had all been very worried about her which had made her feel a little guilty. Selfishly, she missed her sister, Marija, and for the first time she was achingly homesick for her native Malta.
