There is a generation of Maltese, now very elderly, and fewer every year, who grew up inside one of the most extraordinary ordeals of the 20th century: the wartime siege of Malta, the most bombed place on earth. They were children when it happened, and what they lived through is almost unimaginable to us now. They went to school in shifts, morning or afternoon, in ordinary houses converted into classrooms because the real schools had been bombed or turned into hospitals, and lessons stopped for hours whenever the sirens sounded, sending them into the shelters. They queued every single day at the ‘Victory Kitchen’ for a ladle of thin soup and, if they were lucky, a slice of bread. One woman remembers being so hungry as a child that she secretly scratched the lime off the walls of her house with her fingernails and ate it, just to feel full for a moment. Families from the bombed harbour towns crammed into relatives’ houses in the countryside; in one case, 33 people under a single roof. Beloved pets vanished into the cooking pot. And death became so routine that, as one man recalled, watching the hearses pass was no longer frightening to a child. Yet through it all, survivors remember something else too: that morale, somehow, stayed high. Drawing on the words of the people who were actually there, this is what life was really like for the Maltese generation who grew up during the war. ( Collected )
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