It is practically impossible for a child who is left to fend for himself from the age of nine to turn out all right. Yet, when he turns out badly, we expect him to pay the same price as though he were a boy from a good home, with all opportunities at his feet, who wilfully pushed the self-destruct button and did something wrong. Yes, the law does make allowances for mitigating circumstances, but some cases go beyond the law and demand that we open our eyes and ask a few questions.

I was struck by the newspaper story of 21-year-old Clyde Bonavia, a repeat petty offender who was finally jailed for having stolen a motorbike and driving it with false plates, no driving licence, and no insurance. When asked for his plea against the charges brought against him, the young man raised his hand and told the magistrate that he had been living alone since he was nine years old, and had survived on packets of fig roll biscuits for five years. Now there might be more than a tinge of exaggeration here, because a child or teenager who eats nothing but biscuits for five years will become seriously debilitated and diseased, and because a nine-year-old living entirely alone and abandoned is bound to draw the attention of neighbours, who we would like to think would be responsible enough to report this to the authorities. A child so young would also have found it difficult to obtain food when street urchins are unknown in Malta and there is no begging. Many parents will instinctively know what the young man means, though. Children who endure long parental absences during the day, or even periods when one or both parents are entirely absent because of work trips, will often accuse those parents of having “left them alone”, even if they were actually left in the care of friends, relatives or paid carers. The sense of being left alone is caused by parental neglect or parental absence, rather than actual abandonment by parents. As for the fig rolls, the same may be the case. Perhaps an adult provided the occasional meal, but then shut the child up with fig rolls off the supermarket shelf when he was hungry the rest of the time.

Whatever the details, this young man appears to have been left to his own devices since childhood. How, then, was he expected to turn out like a boy from a decent home, with parents to care for him, food on the table, somebody to see to his education, someone to ensure that he washed himself and had good clothes to wear, and more to the point, someone to whom he meant something, someone to give him a sense of the future, rather than a sense of nihilism. I am surprised his worst crime so far appears to have been the theft of a motorbike, and that he is not into something much worse.

We expect too much of people without making allowances for the reality of their circumstances. Teenage boys from good homes still give their parents sufficient reason to spend many a night awake with worry, and many a day fraught with concern. It’s the nature of the beast, so to speak, and to expect otherwise would be to expect the unnatural. If even those boys with all the advantages go through periods when they are extremely troublesome, then it is useless to expect miracles from boys who are treated in their homes like stray dogs. They are never going to turn out to be pillars of society, holding down jobs and making their way in life, then settling down to marry and have children. The mess they make of their lives is inevitable; there is no other road.

When Clyde Bonavia gets out of prison in a year’s time, there will be nobody to give him guidance and to help him get on the straight and narrow. At 22, he falls outside the remit of those who work with juvenile delinquents. As a single young man, he is not going to be a priority for social workers burdened with problems of child abuse, drug-addicted mothers, and domestic violence. So what will happen to him, and to others who have been left to grow up like feral children? Nobody has the answer, because there isn’t one.

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We should at least be grateful that Malta has changed a great deal in the last 50 years, and that the social strictures which caused so much suffering no longer exist. There are many who frown at “all these babies, born to girls and single women’ in a “what’s going to become of Malta” kind of way. I always ask them whether perhaps they would prefer going back to the days when pregnant girls were whisked off to convents in Gozo as their bellies began to protrude, and the babies whisked away from them as soon as they left the womb. Girls who fell pregnant outside marriage were severely punished for the crime one way or another, and the child was punished even more – for surely there are few deprivations harder for a child than the absence of maternal care.

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Il-Mument last Sunday carried an interview with an elderly lady, Rita Formosa, who used to help her sister, a well-known village midwife in days gone by. She explained how, when an illegitimate baby was born, it became the responsibility of the midwife, who took the child until she could find a home for it. Finding a home for these illegitimate babies was next to impossible, said Mrs Formosa, because there were so many unwanted babies and supply far exceeded demand, to use the language of the marketplace.

Mrs Formosa was herself the victim of the peculiar immorality rampant in what were supposedly more moral times in Malta’s history. Her husband went to England to find work and disappeared into thin air. She never heard from him again. She was left with a small baby and two toddlers, and no money, at a time when there were no jobs for women. Disappearing husbands were a fact of life in Malta, and not just because, until the early 1970s, they had so many places to disappear to (Australia, Canada, Britain) but also because in a strange way people were actually more immoral then, and not less so. Their morality was a matter of religiosity and socially-imposed restraint. It did not come from within.

There were many encounters with heartache and grief for Mrs Formosa, who as a mother herself found certain situations extremely distressing (her sister, like most working women in those days, was the quintessential childless spinster). Several cases rankled so much that they stuck in her memory, including that of an unmarried young woman who had a baby she was able to keep for 10 months after the birth, because her father was away with the Merchant Navy for all that time. The day before he was due to return she asked Mrs Formosa to spirit the child away to the nuns, who immediately put him up for adoption. The baby went to a new home. Somewhere in Malta there is a man of around 50 who has lived his whole life not knowing his story, and his mother, who is dead, who lived hers aching for her child and wondering what became of him.

Can we imagine, today, a society in which a grown woman is so afraid of her father, so dependent on him for financial support and a roof over her head, so fraught with the impossibility of survival as an unmarried woman with a child, that she is forced into a decision as perverted as this? No, we can’t – and for that we should be thankful. Fortunately, girls are no longer forced by their parents to hide their pregnancy and dump the baby with strangers. Grandparents are now as thrilled with their “illegitimate” grandchildren as if they had been born in marriage, which is the way it should be.

Mrs Formosa also told how another unmarried woman, older this time, hid her pregnancy and gave up her baby because she lived with her bachelor brother and was afraid of his reaction. Maybe the child was the bachelor brother’s – who knows? Very often, the more moral a society is on the surface, the more sordid it is beneath. Anyway, this was yet another child deprived of his mother for no reason except fear of male relatives and social opprobrium, and forced to grow up in an institute. There is a more positive note to this sad mess, though; because he was never adopted he was allowed access to information on who his mother was. He found her and got to know her, but at that stage, you can never be more than friends with your child, if you have missed out the crucial period between birth and adulthood. Wasted lives and spoiled happiness – and for what? For nothing at all, except what others might think, and to preserve the notion of a “moral” society to which deluded misfits like Philip Beattie and Martin DeGiorgio wish to return us.