The world premiere of the musical stage play _Star of Strait Street_
took place in Valletta on 4 April 2017. It celebrates the life of
Christina Ratcliffe, an English singer and dancer who became an aircraft
plotter in Malta in the Second World War. She worked in the underground
Royal Air Force operational headquarters beneath Lascaris Bastion in
Valletta.
This is Christina's story and that of other British and Maltese girls
employed by the RAF. It is also the story of Philip Glassborow's hit
musical _Star of Strait Street_.
In June 1942 fifty-three female civilian plotters worked at Lascaris,
some as young as fourteen. Six including Christina were decorated for
gallantry. What they did, how they lived and how some of them died is
told in part using their own words. Their descriptions of life beneath
the most intensive, prolonged bombing the world has ever seen are
extraordinary and rare: female perspectives at the heart of military
conflict.
Described in the _Times of Malta_ in 1942 as 'Christina of George
Cross Island', she herself said Malta 'is carved on my heart'. For years
after the Second World War in small corner cafés and bars that are such
a feature of Malta's towns and villages, people talked about a
remarkable RAF photo-recce pilot called Warby and his stunning companion
Christina, a true heroine, they said. Yet she died alone and unnoticed
and was buried in a shared grave.
Now the memory of what she and the _LADIES OF LASCARIS_ achieved has
been brought back to life for a well-deserved encore in writing and on
the stage.
