The Great Storm: March 1962 (Timeline 102762 - Countdown to War) by James Philip

Author:James Philip [Philip, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Tuesday 14th March 1962

Pembroke Barracks

Chatham Royal Naval Dockyard

Kent

England

Peter Christopher had begun, abandoned, and subsequently thrown into the wastepaper basket several attempts to write the letter he ought to have written to Marija at least half-a-dozen times in the last fortnight.

Nothing he said seemed to be…right.

It was not just that he was tired – the dockyard might not labour tirelessly from dawn to dusk and long afterwards as he, Hugo Montgomery and their still small commissioning detachment had in recent days – it was as much that each night as he returned to his room at the Pembroke Barracks, alone he was confronted with the realisation that he had been, despite all his efforts to the contrary, well on the way to turning into exactly the sort of man he had never wanted to be.

His father’s son.

The Admiral’s infidelity and indifference had driven his mother to despair and drink, and would have killed her long before her time had not a cancer claimed her first.

Was he really any better than his father?

Ever since his latter teenage years, during his time at University, at Dartmouth, on his midshipman’s cruise, and then on the Leopard before encountering, and bedding Phoebe at the end of his spell at UCL last year, his behaviour and attitude to women had been of an ever more deeply ingrained pattern, a type increasingly indistinguishable from his father’s shameful example. What was it they said about having a girl in every port?

Well, that might have been him the last two or three years.

Okay, he was not a serial adulterer like the Admiral; and so far as he knew – or had paused to ascertain – he had only had sex with one married woman but otherwise, was he so different from the man with whom he had not exchanged a familial word since his mother’s funeral the best part of four years ago?

And as to Marija, surely she deserved a better man than an unspeakable cad like Lieutenant Peter Julian Christopher RN?

And…when all was said and done: what sort of life could he offer her? A life of separations punctuated, if his past history was to be acknowledged, with unfaithfulness and grief? Granted, he was feeling guilt, remorse now but would that last beyond the next fling?

No promises. Much though he wanted to make Marija promises, he had no right to do that. Even though it occurred to him, in passing, that she might not expect or even want that of him, not in the black and white prose of a letter; all the while there was the unknown and the unknowable: how could either of them predict what might happen if and when they finally met and looked each other in the eye?

Either way, he had beaten about the bush long enough; he meant to bare his soul to her. To throw himself upon her mercy because anything short of that would be pure moral cowardice. So, that evening he had determined to put an end to

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