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.
