Somehow, I don’t think the deputy prime minister is being given enough to do. It’s either that, or he is adopting a strategy of divide and rule. First he generated divisive chaos by campaigning to have abortion slotted into the Constitution. Now he has whipped another amusing little pastime out of his hat: agitating to have a monument erected to the internati of World War II. For heaven’s sake, why this and why now?

Despite the best efforts of the very vocal and influential descendants of some of those internati at turning this ugly incident of wartime history into something of national importance, it remains nonetheless a matter of personal tragedy. Indeed, I would consider “tragedy” too strong a word, given that they all returned alive to resume their normal life in Malta. The same cannot be said of those who stayed here and died. “Tragedy” might more aptly be used to describe the fate of a family of children buried beneath the rubble of their home, their mother returning from a hunt for food to find everything gone.

I have kept my mouth shut about this until now, resisting even the urge to join in the furious debate about the matter some months ago. I kept my silence not because I don’t have an extremely strong opinion about the matter, but because I have no wish to offend the sentiments of some of the descendants of those who were transported, for whom I have a great deal of fondness and respect. Similar feelings of restraint clearly underpinned many of the letters published in the newspaper that served as a forum for this debate, putting forward a different view to that held by those who favour a monument. I think I can sum up the situation by saying that those of us who are not descended from the internati or their close friends and fellow political sympathisers, do not wish to cause offence by pointing out that it is self-serving and self-delusory to suggest that the suffering of those interned in Uganda was somehow greater or more worthy of note than the suffering of those who stayed behind. Put simply, there are more of “us” than there are of “them”, and yet they are the more vocal ones, largely because they have people like the deputy prime minister to speak for them. They are also, by definition, literate and influential, but their constant persistence on this matter is starting to come across as arrogance and self-obsession.

The descendants of the woman from Gudja whose 17-year-old son was blown up in the trench where he took shelter, when the Hal Far air field where he worked was bombed – and who was then hastily buried where he lay, even before his mother was informed – cannot write letters to The Times or persuade the deputy prime minister to call for a monument. That case is just one of many terrible tales of personal sorrow. True, there are various monuments to the fallen of World War II, but they are anonymous. I can find no way of putting this tactfully or kindly, but it has to be said: the fate of that woman and her son affects me deeply; the fate of the internati does not. Given a choice between having my 17-year-old son blown up and buried in an airfield trench and having my father sent to Uganda for a few years, I would without a moment’s hesitation choose the former, and he would too. And I like to think that if my parents had been interned in Uganda while I stayed behind to observe at first hand the suffering of those who died, of those who were maimed, and of those who lost everything, I would never for one moment claim that they or I had suffered anything at all by comparison.

It is tactless and tasteless for the descendants of the Uganda internees to make such a dramatic fuss of their suffering during internment and their pain in being taken away from Malta, when so many thousands of their fellow Maltese endured so much more and kept quiet about it. There were 3000 – yes, three thousand – bombing raids on Malta and those who were not in Uganda lived through them all, or died in them. How can people like the deputy prime minister fail to realise that the audience for their claims on behalf of those who were transported to Uganda is made up of people whose own parents and grandparents – if not they themselves – endured so much more because they had to stay here? My parents were both war infants living in two of the worst-hit areas of Malta. Their early years were shaped by bombs, shrapnel, wailing sirens, filthy shelters and hunger. Both had grandmothers whose homes were reduced to piles of rubble in an air raid. My mother remembers her father cycling across Malta – car fuel couldn’t be had for love or money – and coming back home with a single egg, for four people. She remembers one of her small friends being blown up by a bomb he’d picked up on the beach while they were playing. She remembers coming home from the long walk back from school with a bag of sweets that some soldiers had given her, asking her mother what they were, and her mother bursting into tears. She was lying in hospital when an air raid warning sounded in the middle of the night and all the staff disappeared to the shelters, leaving her there aged five, alone with her mother, unable to move. When my grandmother lay dying, 60 years later in 2003, she thought she was living through that night again.

I never moaned to my grandmothers about the deleterious effects of having small children, mindful of the fact that they had to look after their own small children in conditions of danger and deprivation that are beyond my imagination. Once, when talking about “women’s things”, one of them mentioned that she had miscarried her third child. I made the foolish mistake of asking why, given that it would have had to be during the years of the blitz. “Oh you know,” she said. “I hadn’t slept or eaten for two days. The children wouldn’t stop crying because they were frightened and hungry and all I had for them was some stale bread dipped in coffee. But at least I had that. We were in a shelter during one of the worst raids ever and I was very worried that the house would be hit.” Well, that shut me up. The trouble is that the thousands of experiences like this one do not shut up those who want a monument to the people who sat out the war in an internment camp in Uganda. This is because those who truly suffered are silent. They do not clamour for attention because they know that they are not unique, that thousands went through the same thing or worse. They do not shout about it in public because they take it for granted. More to the point, they are aware of the far greater suffering of those who died in concentration camps or while fighting. They might have died in other countries, but they died in the same war.

Today, my mother will pick up the telephone and berate me for having mentioned her experiences. She will be embarrassed. Those who speak for the internati, on the other hand, show no embarrassment at all in forcing their experiences down the throats of the general public. I can’t mention my father’s experiences because he never talks about them. My parents would never dream of making a fuss because they know that what they went through, many thousands of others did too, and some of them with much worse results. They consider themselves relatively privileged, compared to the suffering of others, of those who queued for gruel at the Victory kitchens, of those who were orphaned, or who had to forage for rats to stave off starvation. At least they had a bed to sleep in; at least they got through the war alive. Their attitude is shared by their contemporaries. You never hear a single whining word of attention-seeking, and yet they are all forced to endure the dramatic descriptions of the experiences of the internati and their families.

It is a one-sided conversation in which those who speak for the deported seek to convince us of their incomparable suffering while being oblivious to the fact that their audience is made up of the descendants of people who stayed behind. Or, as in my case and that of countless others, of people whose antenati were not internati, but soldiers fighting in very dangerous conditions, so that people like the deputy prime minister would be able to stand here alive and free in 2007 and call for a monument not to those who fought to keep his parents safe, but to those who were deported. It is thanks to people like my grandfather’s brothers, all of whom fought in the war, that the deputy prime minister is here to irritate us today, and not thanks to those on whose behalf he is campaigning. Had it been for some of them – and here I cannot emphasise the “some” enough – we would have been part and parcel of Mussolini’s Italy. Being part of a fascist State was to them preferable to being part of the British Empire, and that is precisely why they ended

up where they did. Unfortunately, the innocent and the harmless were gathered up as well.

What we must not forget here is that internment of citizens of the enemy State, or of those whose sympathies were in doubt, was normal during World War II. The Italians interned Maltese people, in Italy and in their North African territories, because they were the enemy. Germans and Italians who lived in British territory were interned. The Germans – well, we know what the Germans did. The internment of the Maltese deemed to sympathise with Italy or with Mussolini was not exceptional but routine. The point at issue here is not whether they should have been interned, but whether they should have been transported to an internment camp in another country. The British argued that interning them in Malta was unsafe because of the tiny size of the island and because all suitable locations were being used for military purposes. The deputy prime minister has quoted once more the judgement given by Antoine Montanaro-Gauci, disingenuously suggesting that it was against the internment of these people, rather than against their deportation. Montanaro-Gauci ruled against the latter, and not the former, on the principle that a citizen should never be deported from his country. He cannot have felt much sympathy for their cause. His sister-in-law and her two babies were in a Japanese internment camp for the families of British officers, and those internment camps were the most horrific of World War II. Her husband was in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, also among the worst, and took years to recover. His brothers-in-law were soldiers – my great-uncles whom I mentioned earlier – one of them a British army officer in a German prisoner-of-war camp, and another a US army officer in Salerno.

The deputy prime minister quoted in Parliament one internee’s written description of his temporary parting from his children, when the policeman called to pick him up. I feel horribly awkward saying this, and I would have said nothing at all hadn’t the deputy prime minister brought up the matter once more, because I know the people involved – but I just wasn’t impressed at all. My own perspective on the war is very different, because I am not blinded by contempt for the British Empire to the suffering of those who fought and died on its behalf, or of those who got caught in the cross-fire. It is the lack of discretion and dignity in all these cries for attention that is most annoying. May I suggest to the deputy prime minister, and to others who feel as he does, that they improve their perspective on the situation by reading James Holland’s acclaimed Fortress Malta: An Island Under Siege. It is replete with the testimony of Maltese survivors of the siege years 1940 to 1945, and with extracts from previously unpublished letters and diaries. They put the diaries of the Uganda internees into proper perspective.

The book opens with an extremely distressing account of the agonising death of a 20-year-old fighter pilot, who was blown out of the sky while defending, among others, the deputy prime minister’s parents and the relatives of the internati. His battered, unconscious body was carried for miles over fields to Mtarfa Hospital by the peasants who saw him crash. He was just one of many. Perhaps even more painful than the account of this boy’s supreme sacrifice was his mother’s letter of thanks to the Mtarfa hospital matron, quoted in the book: “I thank you so much for writing to me about my son’s death. I was so thankful to know that he never regained consciousness after his crash, and so did not endure any terrible suffering. He was always such a splendid brave boy – and I am proud to know that he has been one of the defenders of Malta... I shall hope, one day, when this cruel war is over, to visit Malta and see where my boy is buried. My husband is in hospital in Durban, suffering from shell shock. He was bombed in Singapore. Again with so many thanks for your kind letter and sympathy, from yours sincerely, Dorothy Mackie.”

The deputy prime minister’s understanding of Malta’s wartime history is deeply flawed. It has caused him to show very little respect for the experiences of others: the soldiers who manned gun-posts through the night, the air-field workers who were shot at, the crewmen who died on the ships carrying food into port to keep the islands from being starved into surrender, the stokers who kept feeding the furnace even as the ship sank, the dockyard workers who repaired crippled frigates during air raids, the volunteers who manned the soup kitchens, the men who dug shelters, the doctors and nurses who worked 48-hour shifts tending the maimed for no pay while their families survived on charity, the ordinary people who lost their homes to bombs and their children, parents, brothers, sisters, and spouses in the wreckage. Maybe he should remember the many men and women who went hungry so that their children could eat, the plagues of lice, scabies and disease in the shelters, the 19-year-old boys shot out of the sky so that today’s 19-year-old boys are free to take drugs and stay out all night.

Let commonsense prevail. We don’t need yet another divisive monument to commemorate yet another divisive episode from history. The only difference with this one is that the population is not divided 50-50 for once, but 95-5. It’s just that the five per cent happen to come from the most vocal and influential sector of Maltese society, so they know how to make their voices heard, pull the strings of sympathetic politicians, and not shut up about their case. Please, Mr Prime Minister, give your deputy something to do. Clearly, he has too much time on his hands.