coyly, faultless teeth flashing in his wide, strong mouth. Matinee idol looks and a sense of humor. Perfect fodder for Rosamund, Max mused. She’ll never forgive me if I don’t offer her the right of first refusal.
Pemberton explained (with a degree of candor 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 bigwig 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,” replied Max. “The seaplane you should have flown out on last night is missing.”
“Missing?”
“Brought down near Pantelleria, we think. They have the 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 had skipped across northern Europe as though it were his private playground, on a small island in the Mediterranean three obsolescent biplanes had been 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, there were six of them.”
“Six?”
“Gloster Gladiators. And a bunch more held back for spares.”
Pemberton frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Three makes for a better story, and there were never more than three in the air at any one time, the others being unserviceable.”
The names had been coined and then quietly disseminated by Max’s predecessor, their biblical source designed to chime with the fervent Catholicism of the Maltese.
“It’s part of what we do at the Information Office.”
“You mean propaganda?”
“That’s not a word we like to use.”
“I was told you were independent.”
“We are. Ostensibly.”
Max detected a worrying flicker of youthful righteousness in the other man’s gaze. Six months back, he might have retreated and allowed Pemberton to figure it out for himself, but with Malta’s fortunes now hanging by a thread, there was no place for such luxuries. He needed Pemberton firmly in the saddle from day one.
“Look, none of us is in the business of dragging people’s spirits down. The Huns and Eye-ties have cornered that market.”
He manufactured a smile, which Pemberton politely mirrored.
“You’re evidently a bright young man, so I’m going to save you some time and tell you the way it is.”
He opened with a history lesson, partly because Pemberton’s file made mention of a respectable second-class degree in that subject from Worcester College, Oxford.
It was best, Max explained, to take the stuff in the newspapers back home about “loyal little Malta” with a pinch of circumspection. At the outbreak of hostilities with