an officers’ mess for the Ta’ Qali squadrons, although Ralph treated the place as if it were his private residence. As ever with Ralph, this was done with playful insouciance, his tongue firmly in his cheek.
Ralph was tall, with a shock of sand-colored hair that the sun bleached to a startling white in summer. He wore it longer than regulations permitted, but regulations didn’t figure large in his thinking. He set store by the adage that “rules are made for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools”—a line he was quite happy to quote to his superiors.
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 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