Fortress Malta

 

Some years back, I took my then girlfriend to the George Cross Island for our first proper vacation together.  AirMiles took care of the flights (those were the days!) and a friend of mine's family ran a hotel there and gave us a big discount on the room.  I had been warned off the place by my sister, who had a friend who, back in the early 1960s, had married a Maltese guy and moved to the island: she had hated it.  Much too hot, too many flies, not much to do and "the people hate the British" was her verdict.  Given the island's location in the middle of the Mediterranean, 60 miles south of Sicily and close to North Africa, I could understand the climate and flies issues, but the people hating we Brits puzzled me.  I was aware of some of  the island's history, and had read brief accounts of the Siege during World War 2 in excellent biographies of Mountbatten and Churchill, and knew the island had been awarded the George Cross by the King in 1942 as a recognition of the population's suffering and resilience.  I knew that the island remained proud of that decoration, as the only country in the world to receive it, and had always understood the people still considered themselves close to Britain, despite now being an independent country and sovereign state in the EU.

So we went, to find out for ourselves, and get some late summer sun.  We had a fantastic couple of weeks, hired a car and toured the Island (it is very small indeed, so that didn't take too long), swam and sunbathed, and enjoyed the food.  If there was a disappointment it was in the lack of a real sandy beach - we never did find one, although there are a couple - but there were many places where sandstone plateaus ran into the warm water that were fine.  It was quiet and peaceful, and after a hectic and stressful year that tranquility was just what the doctor ordered.  We took a PADI Scuba Diving course, that my fear (no, TERROR!) of water more than 6 feet deep, courtesy of three childhood near-death drowning experiences, guaranteed I would fail - which I did, dismally: I flunked out after the first dive, but my lady passed with flying colours.  I bought books while there, a tourist guide full of coloured pictures of the pretty (and largely re-built) architecture and the bleak but lovely landscapes, and another that detailed the many dive sites surrounding the Island.  I also bought Nicholas Monsarrat's excellent novel "The Kappillan of Malta" about a priest ministering to his parishioners during the Siege.  But I didn't get around to reading it for a couple of years.

I went back again perhaps 8 years later, this time for some project work, and hardly recognised the place.  Much development had been done, there was a new road network around Sliema and Valetta that I never did understand, and there were several new hotels and office blocks breaking up the skyline.  I was booked into a spa hotel on the waterfront of Sliema, next to an underpass that I'm sure hadn't been there on my first visit, and it was superb.  I had a room that had hydrotherapy gear and a jacuzzi in the bathroom, a huge bed on a raised dais, and a big balcony overlooking the pool and restaurant area 8 floors below.  At the corner of my balcony, a winding staircase took me up to a private roof terrace with my own small pool and barbecue area and superb sea views.  For a two week business trip it was frankly ridiculous, but if the bank wanted me there (and more important picked up the tab), who was I to argue?  I never used my pool: by the time I got in from work in the evenings, the sun was going down, it was cooling and I couldn't be bothered.

But again, the trip gave the lie to my sister's friend's view: the people were invariably friendly, spoke perfect English, and loved talking about what many of them called the Old Country - these were typically the children and grandchildren of soldiers and airmen who had returned to Malta after the war, set up home, married local girls and raised families.  All things considered, I liked the place very much.

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Then in 2020, wandering around Fakenham Market one wet and windy Norfolk morning, while my sister and her elderly friends enjoyed a pre-Christmas fish 'n' chips lunch, I found on a very good bookstall a volume called "Fortress Malta: An Island Under Siege 1940-1943" by a historian I had never heard of called James Holland. I paid my pound, and brought it home with me. 

I finally got around to reading it, and finished it in about 4 days (in between doing other stuff around the flat in the lockdown life we were all then living).  The book is a fine example of "history by narrative" - that is, focusing on an event or series of events and re-constructing in huge detail with the aid of eye-witness testimony.  There are no long, boring pages of justification. lists of key dates and so on that feature in many history books, just a thrilling and often heart-breaking story told with clarity, compassion and a wonderful eye for detail. It is also well illustrated, with pictures of all the characters featured, and action shots of many of the raids and incidents described.  An appendix revisits those people, and tells what happened to them after the War ended - fascinating stuff.

As a description of life eked out by the civilians in the most pressing of circumstances it is without peer. Try to imagine living for nearly three years under the strain of multiple daily air-raids by an overwhelming force of German and Italian aircraft, defended by a small number of incredibly brave and young men flying frequently obsolete pre-war fighter planes. Consider your home for much of that time being a hole dug into the walls of a cellar below an otherwise bombed out building, infested with insects and mice, constantly cold and damp and lacking washing and toilet facilities.  Imagine going from day to day wondering whether (not when) the next aid convoy carrying food will sail into the harbour, while you survive on bowls of thin soup made from whatever can be salvaged, with dry and often mouldy bread.  No, I couldn't either: but that reality is poignantly described in the book.

But it was the lives and deeds of the young men, soldiers, pilots and seamen, that impressed me the most.  Few of them were older than 25, the majority between 17 and 21, fresh out of school, now fighting for their lives and those of the Maltese people.  Again: imagine having to take off from a cratered ploughed field of an airstrip, in an old biplane that should have been retired years ago, with perhaps a couple of planes for company, to take on a group of a dozen or more German bombers and their supporting escort of twice that number of modern, state of the art fighters flown by Battle of Britain veterans.  And doing it day after day, three or four times a day.   Or going to sea in a cramped submarine, again of pre-War vintage, where your hammock is slung between the torpedo tubes, with one toilet shared by everybody, and only able to surface now and again, at night.  No, I couldn't visualize that either.

But the book covers all of those experiences and more.  It often reads like a thriller, an adventure yarn rather than a work of historical scholarship, and is in my view all the better for it.  I feel I understand much better now the Island's history - or at least that defining part of it - and the admiration I already hold for the servicemen of that time (including my dad, a veteran of the North African and Burmese campaigns) has gone up several notches.  They served selflessly, with extraordinary courage, and with little support (financial or otherwise).  As one character in the book says: "In those days nobody helped you to cope with picking up bits and pieces of your mates after an air-raid".  They really were The Best Generation.

I can't recommend this book highly enough.