The brass tolerated his idiosyncratic ways because they knew he had qualities far above the general run. He also served a useful purpose. The Xara Palace was a beautiful building, but ghosts stalked its wide corridors: the ghosts of dead pilots. Beds fell free at an alarming rate, and the young replacements shipped in to fill them knew they stood a fair chance of going the same way as the previous occupants. At twenty-nine, Ralph wasn’t the oldest member of 249 Squadron, but he’d been around the longest, and his presence offered some hope of survival to the new arrivals.
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
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.
