The harbour that has rather a lot to answer for

We've just got back from Malta, and I've come home with a notebook full of things that have absolutely nothing to do with the book I'm actually writing at the moment.

And this time what got me thinking was The Grand Harbour.

If you've never seen it — Valletta sits on a spit of rock with deep water down either side, and the harbour below is simply enormous. You don't actually need anybody to explain its importance to you. You stand there and you think: ah. Yes. Of course.

And so did the Royal Navy, apparently, because once they got hold of it they would not let go.

The French garrison on Malta surrendered to the British on the 4th of September 1800. Then, under the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, Britain agreed to hand the islands back.

Britain did not hand the islands back.

We simply... stayed. By 1814 it was all made official and Malta was ours properly, and the Navy went on to be there for another hundred and sixty-five years.

Standing looking over that harbour, something struck me.

I spent eight years teaching English to international military students at Britannia Royal Naval College, and I've written quite a few naval officers since. So I'm reasonably at home with ships. But I'd never put the pieces together geographically — I'd never stood in one place and seen the whole lot at once.

My Regency men would have known Valletta. Not as a holiday — as work. Those were the war years, Malta was the key to the whole Mediterranean, and a King's officer of that generation would have known that harbour the way you know your own street.

Then there are my Victorian Shacklefords, with a naval son, living their lives in the 1890s. By their day the British had spent decades deepening and improving those harbours until the entire Mediterranean Fleet could moor there at once. The entire fleet. Malta wasn't a posting to Victorian naval families — it was an address. Letters went there. Wives followed their husbands out, and set up house in the heat, and complained about it magnificently, and stayed.

And then — because the island simply refuses to stop having history — there's what happened to that same harbour in 1942.

Malta was bombed almost past bearing. Ten thousand buildings destroyed or damaged. Of twenty-four merchant ships sent to relieve the island, two got in. And on the 15th of April 1942 King George VI awarded the George Cross to the whole island, in his own handwriting, with these words:

"To honour her brave people I award the George Cross to the Island Fortress of Malta to bear witness to a heroism and devotion that will long be famous in history."

To an island. Not a man, not a regiment — an island.

I stood looking at a harbour full of pleasure boats and sunshine and people eating ice cream, and I thought about the last bit.

The Royal Navy left Malta on the 31st of March 1979.

That's not ancient history, is it. That's within living memory — some of you will remember it happening. A hundred and seventy-nine years of grey ships in that harbour, and then one day in 1979 the last of them went, and the Maltese have marked the date ever since.

Which means my Admiral Charles Shackleford— the one some of you know very well, the one who is thoroughly incorrigible and absolutely impossible — belongs to the tail end of all of that. He's the generation that saw the Navy leave. Everything my Regency men lived through, and everything my Victorian Shacklefords lived in the middle of, ended in his lifetime.

One harbour. Nearly every book I’ve ever written.

I have no idea yet what I'm going to do with it. But I've written it all down, and in my experience that's usually the first thing that happens.

And of course, I’ve made no mention of The Knights of St John, but that’s a whole other post…

Thank you so much for reading, as always — I really couldn't do this without you. And I'd love to know whether you'd follow the Shacklefords somewhere hotter.

Much love Bev xx