The Gun Garden.

London: Michael Joseph, 1965. First Edition. Octavo, blue boards (hardcover), map illustrated endpapers, gilt letters, [181] pp. Very Good+, with bookplate and shadowing to endpapers, in a Good, mylar protected dust jacket with edgewear. From dust jacket: Malta 1942 -- a thousand miles from friends, isolated, besieged, blitzed, bombed, desperately short of oil, ammunition, ships, aircraft, fuel, slowly being starved into surrender... Into that hopeless situation, token of the British attitude that attack is the best defence, fly two Wellington aircraft equipped with secret long-range radar. Their role is to find enemy convoys proceeding at night from Italy to Africa, and to lead a tiny naval force of cruiser and destroyer through the darkness on to the unsuspecting target. One is captained by a dedicated R.A.F. pilot, the other by a typical twenty-one year old. Hastily trained, carefree, unwarlike, Peter Forrester is unwillingly pitchforked into this island of heroes and heroines, for it is here he meets miranda Blake, daughter of a naval captain and a plotter in Barracca H.Q. Round these two, a love story develops, paralleled by the narrative of an important enemy convoy leaving Palermo. The fate of both is inevitably interwined -- the idyll of the lovers among the cool shadlows of the ancient citadel, on the beaches and in the flower-filled fields, set against a background of bursting flak, of shot-down aircraft, of shps stealthyly leaving harbour and slipping off into the darkness, culminating in the fantastic crescendo of a night battle at sea. Far from being the usual tight-lipped R.A.F. story, this novel is delicately balanced between love and war, between humour and sadness, between aircraft and ships, between guns and gardens. And since it was inspired by Paul Stanton’s own experiences there, the book brings vividly back to life the exciting story of the Second Siege of Malta.