When World War II hit Malta Carmelo Axisa was barely 14. By the time it ended, he had borne the brunt of it on a physical and emotional level. Today an 82-year-old retired policeman, Valletta-born Carmelo relates his experiences and escapades throughout the turbulent six years of the war as he lived it.
He certainly remembers how it all started very clearly, “I was helping the priest during the 7am Mass at St Dominic Church in Valletta, close to where we lived. First we heard the cannon shots and then heard people shouting that the Italians were attacking Malta. I didn’t bother staying there – I just left the priest at the altar, and ran for my life. There was panic in the streets, with people running around seeking shelter and carrying whatever belongings they could grab. We found out soon enough that the Italians did not fly low but had a knack of firing from great heights and hitting their targets anyway, together with much of the surroundings.”
His large family –Carmelo was the fourth of nine children – moved to Zebbug into two crammed rooms, shared with two other families, all strangers, all evacuees. They spent some 18 months in their new “home” but Carmelo eventually returned to Valletta to stay with his grandmother because he loved the city too much. It was however far from safe. For one thing, the police immediately enrolled him to help out in the Victory Kitchen. “I was not supposed to have been enrolled because I was still not 16. Still, enrolled I was and it was my first work experience and a relatively safe one. The Victory Kitchen to which I was assigned was by the small fountain near St James Cavalier. I remember we used to prepare two large cauldrons of food – simple food like bean soup. We would give people one portion a day, either at noon or in the evening. A meal was only given against the presentation of a ticket. Without that, you didn’t get to eat at all. In addition, children were entitled to a quarter rotolo of bread a day, while adults had half a rotolo each.”
He recalls how one day he was asked to clean out the cauldron in which a handful of boiled beans were left over. He didn’t know what to do with the beans, so he chucked them in the ruins of the Opera House just across the street. “Two ladies, well-dressed and apparently highly educated, had been watching me. As I returned to the kitchen, I observed them in turn... they went down into the ruins and literally started scavenging for the food, that handful of squashed beans. I rushed out and on seeing their evident desperation I excused myself – had I known they would have taken the food, squashed as it was, I would not have thrown it out. They were picking the beans from the rubble, one by one and holding them in the palm of their hand as if they were gold nuggets. One of them told me not to worry, that they would wash them out and eat them afterwards. The shortage of food was that bad. People everywhere were hungry all the time. I know I was.”
There were his own desperate moments, such as the time he fell from a height of three storeys in his attempt to get some food for free. He had noticed how a man used to hide chunks of bread in a ruin. Being still a child himself, he had not learnt to evaluate danger and he decided he would get it for himself. His food hunting was not successful and after his fall he ended up in hospital with a bruised and battered body. The experience did not however deter him from dangerous situations and he was one of the first to run down to the Lower Barrakka during air raids to help British servicemen load their cannon. Carmelo worked at the Victory Kitchens for several months. At one point in time, the air raids abated temporarily, only to resume with a vengeance when the Germans took over the attack on Malta from the Italians.
“The Germans were worse than the Italians because while they were very exact at hitting their targets, once they realised they had little chance of survival, they dived their planes straight onto the target, indifferent to their own obvious death. They were also very cunning. Once, I remember being on top of the belfry of St Dominic’s church when, suddenly, a storm of low flying Stukas approached, weaving their way in between the buildings to avoid the cannon attack. That was 1941, the time when the ‘Illustrious’ had hobbled into Grand Harbour, half sunk. One of the planes actually crashed into the destroyer.”
On one intensely full day of air raids he still remembers how a group of British services employees went to the ‘talkies’ in Strada Reale or Strada Rjali, as Republic Street was called back then. There were 200 of them inside the building when it was bombed and they all perished. They had not heard the air raid warning sounded outside. Air raids were continuous and Valletta bore the brunt of most attacks. There were diverse shelters around the city but not all were as safe as they should have been. In one instance Carmelo narrates the story of how he was hiding in a bell-shaped shelter that had originally probably been a deep well. The shelter was in lower Strada Reale. As he sat there, huddled with a few others, the bombardments raged outside. Suddenly he looked to his side where two people had been sitting. They were dead, killed by the blast of a bomb that had exploded close by.
“On another day, word got round that some 350 planes were fast approaching the islands to launch a massive attack. I panicked. I ran down to the Mediterranean Conference Centre building, which at the time housed the Police Headquarters and depot. As the halls were so huge and had such high ceilings, many inhabitants of Valletta sought shelter there. The building had always been strong. That day however, it suffered a direct hit and part of it fell. I was unfortunate and fortunate at the same time.”
Carmelo had gone there with five other friends – one girl and four boys. As the rubble fell on him, he was buried beneath it, with his five friends lying dead on top of him. He could see a light in a crack between the broken stones and timber, but he could not shout because his mouth was full of dust, but he was comforted by a hand, which caressed his feet as the rescue operation was going on. They got him out just in time. “There was a boy, still alive, with only his head above the rubble. They were trying to dig him out when another attack took place and everybody ran for cover. By the time it was over the boy was totally buried and there was no hope of saving him.”
The trauma young Carmelo suffered was terrible. He was taken to his grandmother’s house in Zejtun where the rest of his family had moved to after leaving Zebbug. There he descended into the small shelter his grandfather had excavated beneath the house and stayed there for one whole month to the further detriment of his general health. It was a slow process convincing him to leave the shelter and resume life above ground, albeit all its potential dangers.
After leaving employment at the Victory Kitchen he was offered another job, which turned out to be even more precarious than anything he had done before. His responsibility, at 17 years of age, was work on the old lift in the Barakka Gardens. Six men were employed – two engineers, one handyman, two money collectors and himself as maintenance boy. His task entailed oiling the shafts of the lifts, machinery which was placed on the top of the lift. “I spent two years working there and worked all day even through the air raids. It was a popular and convenient means of transportation, both for the servicemen who needed to reach the harbour quickly and for the populace who sought refuge in one of the several shelters located below, and then rushed back up to gauge the damage to their properties and try and resume their life. My job was particularly dangerous – I had to climb up onto the top of the lift, oil the shafts and go down 200feet with the lift, perched right there on top of it. I couldn’t stay up there when the lift was going up because that was not considered safe!”
Shortly before the war ended, Carmelo joined the police force as a “riservista”. It was either that or joining the army or the navy. Training was intensive albeit short, lasting only one month under the tutelage of disciplinary English instructors. “My first service number as a reserve was 175. Conditions were very strict for reserves and we had to be on our best behaviour. At the first ‘crime’ committed, we would be sent into the army, which most boys were not too keen on joining. Eventually after three years, I was given a permanent post in the police force, a post I held until 1974 with Police No.486.”
But before that happened, he had to contend with his first duties as a fledgling policeman albeit a riservista. He was first sent to the Zejtun district, which incorporated Marsaxlokk, Birzebbuga, Ghaxaq and Gudja. This meant he had to register at Zejtun and go to whichever police station needed his services. “It was very difficult leaving the safety of the Zejtun police station and setting out on foot with my blanket under my arm, in pitch darkness as required by the black-out, and all alone because of the curfew. Although all the villages were in close proximity, walking the country roads at night and in the dark, even without being bombed in the process, was no mean feat. The villages had no electricity anyway, so light, when it was allowed, was provided by simple paraffin lamps.”
One night he was on duty in the police station in the village of Ghaxaq. He was sitting alone in the police station in pitch-black darkness, surrounded by total silence when the phone rang. He answered it and was told that the war had ended. “It was the last thing I expected. The man at the other end of the line ordered me to take out the siren from the police station, prop it up in the middle of the road and sound it. It didn’t seem like a good idea, but I did just that. Only one wail was needed and two men emerged, asking what happened. When I told them the war had ended, they hardly believed me, but took the siren and it wailed on, and on. People started coming out of the houses, terrified, because they did not know why the siren was sounding and when word spread, it was mayhem, and joy and tears and disbelief. The people of Ghaxaq lit the lights around the statue of St Mary for the first time in four years.”
It was the end of an era. Carmelo eventually worked as a traffic policeman under eight different police commissioners. His career in the police corps was certainly colourful, but nothing could ever be as colourful as his war-time experiences and that one singular night when he was assigned the greatest responsibility of all – telling a country village that the war was over for good.