This is the second volume of the author's autobiography. The third volume has just been published.
In this volume, the author speaks of the years between 1973 and 1988, which were the years of the Dom Mintoff government. The juxtaposition is not entirely coincidental.
In the first volume, the author wrote about his childhood, the loss of his father when he was only 11, St Aloysius College and his accountancy Articles in London as well as his marriage to Anne Winfield.
The 1960s were happy days for the author and his family. The Borg Olivier government set Malta on the road to prosperity and the prime minister himself was a friend of the family. Besides, the British High Commissioner to Malta, Geofroy Tory was his wife's stepfather.
But not all in Malta saw those years as happy ones, especially the dockyard workers and the Maltese employees of the British services whose jobs were at risk.
Meanwhile, the author was working at Central Cigarettes and his job had bored him to death. And his part-time job, dabbling in property, was passing through a rough patch as the property market became depressed.
To top it all, Dom Mintoff won the 1971 elections and the author looked outside Malta. Through connections, he found a job at Singer & Friedlander in London.
By August 1973, the family had relocated to London and lived in Surrey. Work was congenial even though Britain was having the worst of the clash with the trade unions and the three-day week. The company prospered through many international contracts and the author found himself going to Iran and increasingly to Latin America where his company organised many international consortia of banks to take up sovereign debt issues. In time, he joined Manufacturers Hanover Trust (usually known as Manny Hanny) and the entire family relocated to the US.
After a relatively short time with MHT, the author moved to Chemical Bank International, doing the same job he had been doing at MHT. Travel took up most of his time and slowly he and his wife drifted apart. She never liked the US and took up batik in her spare time. Yet the author is always considerate in the way he speaks about her.
Even the author had been having too much time on his hands and he became engrossed in books and bookselling. But the hectic life he, and by extension the family, were living, took its toll. The author began thinking of retirement, even though he was still relatively young. And then he had the brainwave: to set up a bookselling business cum art gallery, the Melitensia Art Gallery, in Lija.
Meanwhile, the Nationalists were back in government and the gallery was opened by the new Minister of Education, Ugo Mifsud Bonnici.
In Part II of the book, perhaps to make up for not being in Malta during the Mintoff years, the author interviews many protagonists or almost-protagonists of that time, from Lilian Miceli Farrugia, to the son of Speaker Attard Bezzina, Dr Roger Vella Bonaita, Louis Fenech, the majordomo of the presidential palaces for years and years and finally Claude Gaffiero, the suave ADC of Governors and Presidents from Maurice Dorman to Agatha Barbara.
As the preceding book, this is an enjoyable and chatty book, dripping with names, some recognisable and some not.
I must point out, however, two howlers. On page 163, he quotes the chant by Labour supporters around 1971: "Le, le, le, Gorg 'il barra ma rriduhx, Assassin tal-Maltin". Actually, the chant was "Le, le, le, Gorg il-barri ma rriduhx..." There is a world of difference and a universe of meaning in the second and truer version.
And on page 201, the author differentiates between Lino Spiteri, the economist and Lino Spiteri, a former minister under Mintoff, not realizing they were one and the same person. How Lino would have laughed at that!