Chapter 43
One day, when Riva went to the bakery to buy bread, there was an especially long queue. A woman with a lined face and a headscarf covering most of her grey hair, turned round with a look of desperation in her eyes.
‘It’s a waste of time,’ she muttered.
‘What is?’ Riva asked.
The woman frowned. ‘They’ve run out of bread. What’s my daughter supposed to give her little boy? He’s only two.’
‘I’m so sorry. What are you queuing for if not for bread?’
The woman sighed and looked close to tears. ‘Goat’s cheese and butter. The dairy got bombed so they’re selling it here … You don’t look scared. Aren’t you scared? I’m scared. All the time.’
Riva reached out a hand to her. ‘I know. Me too.’
‘We’re going to run out of food, aren’t we? My husband, Pawlu, he says we’re all going to starve to death.’
Another woman joined in the grim conversation. ‘My son reckons we’ll be starving by the middle of August if no convoys manage to get through. He works at the docks, you know. Says almost nothing has come in.’
Riva nodded. It was unthinkable and she wished she could believe this was the usual exaggeration and fearmongering, although she suspected it was not.
On 16 June all her worst fears were confirmed when she switched on the wireless at Otto’s place, and turned the volume up – the Governor was about to give a live broadcast on Rediffusion.
‘I am sorry to have to announce,’ he began, ‘that the latest two convoys of twenty-four ships that set out to bring us supplies have failed. One convoy was so heavily attacked by the Luftwaffe that only two small ships have reached us. The other convoy was forced to turn back.’
Riva gasped to hear this. ‘Oh God, Otto. There really will be dreadful times ahead. Only two out of twenty-four ships. What on earth are we going to do?’
‘It is a fraction of what we had hoped for,’ the Governor continued.
‘You can say that again,’ Otto muttered under his breath. ‘And the black market doesn’t help. My sources tell me that Stanley Lucas has his finger in that particular pie.’
‘Why does it not surprise me? Bobby mentioned that supplies to the officers’ mess in Mdina have been intercepted, petrol syphoned from army vehicles too.’
Otto shook his head. ‘Despicable. But there are always the good guys and the bad guys, and a time of war is no different, in fact it simply offers new opportunities for people like Lucas.’
The broadcast continued. ‘There will be deprivation and we must do everything we can to avoid waste. Our stocks of oil are low. Paraffin is almost gone. Rationing will be more stringent than ever. Supplies will come. We must remember that. But in the meantime, we are introducing severe penalties as part of the campaign to halt the black market. There will be a maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment. ’
Soon after that Riva was walking around the town desperate to see if she could stock up on the food they needed.
So far, she’d only managed to get hold of some goat’s milk and a bar of chocolate the shopkeeper said had been found under a box in the back and was probably mouldy.
Riva didn’t care and bought it anyway. What she really hoped to find were eggs.
People still had chickens so there had to be eggs somewhere.
The devastation she saw, the smell of destruction, the thin, gaunt people she passed, all of it was so disheartening she felt like giving up.
Just sitting down in the dirt and the dust of the cobbled street and giving up.
Instead, she carried on and strayed away from the areas she knew well.
Suddenly a ferocious dive-bombing attack began.
There had been no warning. Petrified, she began racing back to the part of town she was familiar with.
Most islanders spent their days sheltering from the long and terrifying attacks and had their favourite places in the tunnels excavated by the British miners.
But people had also been digging underground through the limestone rock in the countryside, in the courtyards and beneath their homes in the town.
Riva now found safety in one of those dugouts near to the bombed Opera House.
Inside it, she squatted and saw someone was holding a lit candle.
She covered her ears as best she could, but still heard the gut-wrenching whistle of the bombs, the thud, the crash and then she struggled for breath at the sound of falling rock, and part of the shelter caving in.
In the fetid air she could not see any light.
Had the candle blown out or was it now on the other side of fallen rock?
Heart racing in the pitch blackness, she felt for her bag, located it, and fumbled around inside for her torch.
She always carried a torch. Why wasn’t it there?
She scratched around on the floor, growing increasingly frantic.
She heard whimpering and then she found the torch, thank God, where it had rolled a few feet way.
Its light was dim but enough for her to see that the fallen rock had formed a jagged wall.
She went to look for a way through, feeling with her hands.
Nothing. It was solid. Fear, absolute and immediate, gripped her.
Apart from an elderly man in the corner who looked more dead than alive, Riva and a heavily pregnant woman with two small children were the only ones trapped there.
Everyone else was on the other side of the rocks.
When the pregnant Maltese woman began to weep, Riva tried to comfort her, held her hand, spoke to the children, who were now sobbing too.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, although she felt sick from something far worse than mere worry.
She went over to the rocks and shouted for help.
Screamed that they were trapped. Thumped on the rock with her fists, then picked up a smaller rock and banged it against the large rocks.
She heard faint voices on the other side and listened.
Impossible to make out anything beyond a rumble.
She screamed again to let them know. ‘We are here! We are here!’
The pregnant woman was moaning softly. Was that normal? She remembered her own pains when she suffered the miscarriage. The woman let out a sudden yell and held her belly, her eyes wide and helpless in the dim torchlight. Was it just fear? Surely the woman wasn’t really going to give birth here?
Although terrified she would never get out, never see the light of day, never see Bobby again, she had to focus on helping the woman.
It was a filthy place to be giving birth and Riva could still hear the now strangely muted sound of the bombs dropping on the city above them, could even hear the distant rat-tat-tat of anti-aircraft fire.
An image of the small but exquisite courtyard garden in Mdina slipped into her mind.
Her garden. She gulped. What if they were all going to die?
The woman was panting now, her children whimpering.
She tightened her grip around Riva’s wrist and screamed.
Then she went quiet again, her pain seeming to ebb.
In the silence Riva dipped in and out of alertness, feeling nauseous and stifled by the heat and the smell. Time passed. Endless hours. She had no idea how long. If only she could see the light. Daylight. Any light. They only had darkness, and the weakening beam from her torch.
The bombing ended.
Then came a respite.
The children slept and when they woke Riva gave them her chocolate.
Silence again.
But soon it was broken by a low growl and then a scream. Riva could only imagine the pain the woman was in and held her hand, speaking soothingly in response to desperate pleas for help. Riva had no idea how long the labour would last.
The woman began panting between slow breaths.
Sick at heart, Riva waited and prayed.
It seemed colder in the shelter, or hotter. Which? How long would the oxygen last? Riva’s thoughts raced and raced until she felt light-headed, longing for nothing but to be able to close her eyes and go to sleep.
But then a high-pitched, furious wail arose.
It was unmistakable. The baby. Riva immediately came to full consciousness and reached down between the woman’s raised knees.
Amazed, her heart thudding, she felt a soft, wriggling infant on the ground.
She unwrapped her own scarf and carefully cocooned the baby in it, then passed the little bundle over to its mother.
The woman was talking rapidly now but Riva did not understand, though then she heard the word ‘afterbirth’.
Of course. She knew about that and waited, hoping it would just happen on its own.
After a while, the woman gasped again and there was the sound of liquid gushing. Blood? Was it blood? Then a wet slithering sound.
The woman made a scissoring action with her fingers and said, ‘cut.’
Riva didn’t have a knife or scissors, did she?
Maybe nail scissors in her bag. What if she couldn’t cut it?
Was it dangerous? She really didn’t know.
Hurry, she told herself. Hurry. She put down the torch and with trembling fingers she felt for the nail scissors and almost cried in relief when the zipped inner pocket revealed them along with a lipstick.
She picked up the torch again to look. The afterbirth lay like a purple slab of lumpy liver.
But where should she cut the cord? The woman indicated higher up so Riva battled the tough cord with her minute, ineffective scissors, the woman making exasperated impatient sounds.
When it was done the woman used her hands to indicate a knotting action and held the baby up, pulling the scarf away.
Riva quickly tied a knot in the cord quite close to the baby’s belly.
She hadn’t realised she’d been holding her breath and now she let it out in a long juddering sigh.
The two children snuggled up with their mother and Riva went back to the fallen rocks, shining the torch trying to work out which ones might be safe to move.
Which might cause another rockfall? She was frightened to move any at all but decided there was nothing else for it so gingerly she removed a few of the smaller rocks, gradually gaining confidence to roll a couple of the bigger ones away.
In between moving rocks, she paused and shouted for help but now she heard no voices coming from the other side.
Exhausted, her throat and chest raw, she sat back on her heels. What if they never got out?