Monsignor Philip Calleja has told of how his interest in immigration began. When still a young priest, he was asked by an illiterate woman in Valletta whether he would take down a letter to her son against her dictation. He agreed, and the woman immediately set to with an angry outpouring, replete with expletives, that constituted her communication to her son in Australia. She accused him of forgetting about her, now that he was on the other side of the world. The then Fr Calleja toned it down, but the separation of mother and son by such a great distance in space and culture had piqued his interest. He took it from there, and continues to work hard in the field of emigration today, despite being in his late 70s.

Monsignor Calleja also told anecdotes that sharpened my own interest in the subject. I am fascinated by the brave lack of imagination with which many Maltese – poor, illiterate, unable to speak a word of English, and knowing absolutely nothing about the place to which they were heading – often with large numbers of children in tow, headed off into the great unknown. It was a different Malta they lived in, with a pioneering culture. It made them more willing to take risks, because the alternative was not that alluring. Comfort has made us much less adventurous, or perhaps it is just that we are now better-educated, and this gives us a heightened awareness of the inherent risks in setting off completely unprepared. Ironically, the more equipped we are to venture forth, the less willing we become to do so.

Monsignor Calleja told of one man in the 1950s who, on boarding the ship that would take him to Australia along with hundreds of other Maltese, hurried to put on his pyjamas. Five days later, he was still wearing them. Somebody tactfully suggested that he might wish to change into proper daytime wear, but he replied that his mother had told him he should always wear his pyjamas indoors, and that was what he was doing. He spent the remainder of the voyage – 30 days – in that pair of pyjamas. This little story is a perfect illustration of that combination of bravery and utter lack of imagination that propelled so many Maltese emigrants forth with confidence. How did this man, blindly obeying his mother’s orders to always wear pyjamas indoors, adjust to life as a lone adult in a country so incomparably different in all ways? Did he survive, and if so, then how? How I would love to have been privy to that learning process, to the discovery that people do not wear pyjamas in offices and restaurants, to the myriad bewildering revelations of a new world unfolding. He would have been like a man propelled from the distant past in a time machine to the present, or like a toddler discovering how things work.

People poured out of Malta in numbers that affected the population size – which is precisely why emigration was encouraged. In the 1950s, 5,000 people left every year for Australia and Canada. In 1954 alone, 11,000 left. Most of these were penniless, illiterate, and knew no English at all. They stuck together in ghettos instead of integrating, but this is not surprising because they found security in surrounding themselves with people who could understand what they were saying, and who knew their way of doing things. If you don’t speak the language of the country to which you have emigrated, your chances of integration are nil, and things are more intimidating and threatening because you don’t understand what’s going on.

Monsignor Calleja also reminded us that young Maltese men emigrated alone or in groups, in their thousands, in the space of a few short years. As with what we are seeing now in the attempted movement of Africans into Europe, historically it is the young men who leave in search of work, doing a ‘Dick Whittington’. This had roughly the same effect on demographics as a war in which large numbers of marriageable men were killed. Malta in the 1950s was teeming with woman of marriageable age with no one to marry. Too many of the young men had left for good. Importing men would have seemed to be the obvious solution – and in fact, hundreds of these women married soldiers, sailors, airmen, and others who were stationed here with the British Forces. But opening immigration to Malta, for men only, was a non-starter. It would have defeated the purpose of exporting Malta’s surplus male labour, and nobody would have wanted to come here anyway. Nor would the Maltese have wanted any incursors; for one reason or another, they would have been resented. The chance of marrying a pretty Maltese girl would not have been enough temptation to live a struggling life in 1950s Malta.

So the women were exported too. That’s my choice of word, of course, and not Monsignor Calleja’s – but exportation is what it amounted to. In 1957 there were 9,300 more women than men in the age group 15-34. The women had to be shipped out, or Malta would sink under the weight of its dependent spinsters. A plan was hatched under the Single Females Migration Scheme, and off they went – many of them to an arranged marriage with a suitable Maltese man on the other side of the globe, who preferred to send for a Maltese wife by mail order rather than do anything as crass as marry an Australian or a Canadian. Photographs show groups of these women looking terribly excited, wearing their best suits and nervous smiles, clutching their handbags ferociously. I look at them and wonder what lay in store. How on earth did they adapt? But they may have ended up with a much better life than they could ever have hoped for here, as the spinster seftura to demanding aged parents, looked upon with pity by society and never having a home or income to call their own.

The times being what they were, the Single Females Migration Scheme was heavily criticised, but not for the reason it would have been criticised today: Malta being forced to export its women because it didn’t know what else to do with them. No, it was criticised because it was considered shameful for young women to go abroad on their own, with no chaperoning and no supervision, to end up in a place where they might get up to all sorts. And you know what? I hope they did. The chances are that they discovered life long before the women who stayed here.

* * *

We knew Italy has Europe’s (and possibly the world’s) lowest birth rate, and we also had an inkling why this might be. But now it’s official: huge numbers of Italian men continue to live with their parents for longer than anywhere else in the world. The statistics office Istat has furnished us with the numbers. Forty per cent of Italian men aged between 30 and 34 are still living with mamma. This means that the average age at which Italian men have their first child is 33 – quite a bit higher than the average age of first-time fathers in Spain, France and Finland, and making them the oldest first-time fathers in the world. Istat also confirmed that, once they get round to having a child, they do little or nothing to help their wives raise it, apart from making their financial contribution. They are hands-off fathers. They also think that one child is more than enough, which is why Italy – historically a nation of vast, swarming families – has for the past generation been a country with a one-child-per-family policy. The difference is that unlike in China, the policy is not imposed by the state, which has the reverse problem of trying to persuade – in vain, it seems – the Italians to breed.