The storm that raged over Malta on 25 October 2010 was one of the worst in living memory. People still remember how the rains came that day and how (empty) coffins broke out of their storage and floated away.

That was the night when a plucky Irishman who had been holidaying in Malta fell ill and had to be rushed to Mater Dei Hospital. With his indomitable courage, Packie (Patrick) Mc Crystal, survived the massive heart attack and went back home to rest and recover with his family. However, he died on 7 January 2011, aged 91, in Ireland.

This slim and very readable book is the story of his life as told to his granddaughter Mary Mc Cartan.

It is the story of a man who had been through many harrowing experiences in wars in foreign lands but of which his own family knew nothing about – until tragedy struck.

In 1998, he was a 79-year old retired engineer, living a quiet life on the outskirts of Omagh. Things were looking up in Ireland then, as all sides, pushed and cajoled by Tony Blair, had signed the Good Friday Agreement and everyone lived in hope that ‘The Troubles’ were over.

But on 15 August, an explosion shattered the quiet afternoon. Bit by tragic bit, Packie found out that his daughter Geraldine, who worked in a shop in the centre of Omagh, was one of the victims of the explosion. She was airlifted to a Belfast hospital but died soon after.

It was this terrible tragedy, another reminder of the banality and waste that is war, or terrorism, that brought back to Packie’s mind the life he had lived, which then seemed to him to have been spent in the shadow of wars and bombs.

Ever since he had got back home after World War II, he had kept his wartime experiences under wraps: after all, his family was Catholic and shared the prevalent anti-British sentiment of the minority Catholics in Northern Ireland, so it wouldn’t do for him to advertise he had been employed by the British Army fighting the British people’s wars.

It had been poverty, grinding poverty that had driven him to join the British Army aged just 17 in 1937: he really had no other option. The food was good with four meals a day, you got a bed of your own and new boots and a uniform. The wage was five shillings a week and an equal sum was paid to your parents.

Some basic training in Aldershot followed and soon afterwards Paddy was on a boat full of cows rolling on a stormy Irish Sea on the first leg of a seven-day journey that brought him to Malta. It was January 1938 and World War II was about to begin.

Packie loved Malta and was billeted at Mtarfa Barracks. He enjoyed the swimming, the social life, and many years later, aged 91, he could still remember Maltese words – imbid, birra.

But by October he was on another ship that took him to Palestine as part of General Montgomery’s troops. There he found that life in Palestine was nowhere as safe as Malta. The British soldiers found themselves attacked both by Palestinians and Jews and guerrilla warfare was the order of the day.

Soon, he was back on a ship and on his way back to Malta where he thought he was due some rest and recreation. How wrong he was: war was declared and Malta found itself in the thick of it. His regiment moved out of Mtarfa and spread along gun posts along the coast between St Andrew’s and Pembroke.

There have been, of course, many books that described, even from a British point of view, life in Malta during WW2. This book stands out from others because it is full of praise of the spirit with which the Maltese faced up to the war: “I have total admiration for the fortitude of the Maltese people as they could easily have surrendered the island with a pro-Italian and church sympathy ticket, but they held fast and taught us soldiers some lessons from the Maltese Siege Survival Procedure Manual.”

He describes his various duties, from anti-aircraft duties, to unloading ships while under attack in Grand Harbour, and later at Ta’ Qali, repairing the bombed runways, loading planes with ammunition… and all the time waiting for the coming and inevitable invasion with a single shot rifle from WWI with a bayonet and a pouch of ammunition.

Significantly, he says some soldiers went crazy and ended up at Mtarfa Hospital.

On 9 April 1942, he was filling holes at Ta’ Qali but an intense attack made him run to take cover in nearby Mosta where he saw the bomb falling on the Mosta Dome. He ran back to the airfield and the safety of a crater before the church could explode around him.

Despite the George Cross, by the summer of 1942, Malta was in dire need of food and fuel but then on 15 August the Santa Marija convoy made it, with terrible cost to Grand Harbour, and the misery of the siege began to ease.

But it did not ease for Packie. One night in June 1943 he and some mates went to Birkirkara to socialize and he was injured in an air raid. However, he refused to go to hospital and this decision was to affect his life.

He and his mates were ordered to a troop ship just as the invasion of Sicily was being organised in Malta. A lone U-Boat found itself faced by two British ships. It let off a torpedo that passed some seven inches off Packie’s ship but hit a nearby troopship with troops going home on leave, mainly for convalescence and this ship sank in a few minutes with all aboard it.

After some time in Egypt, and some training once again in Palestine, they were ordered to Leros, a small Greek island, smaller than Malta. Soon, like a Nemesis following him, the Germans attacked as the island had a good harbour they wanted for their push into the Middle East.

Packie and his mates soon found themselves completely isolated as the RAF was unable to provide cover and the Germans had complete air superiority. Packie and his colleagues were spread over the open hillside, each man for himself. The Germans landed and mopped up the lone British soldiers. Packie was caught and became a prisoner of war, one of the 3,500 British soldiers who were captured.

Eventually, he was sent on a train that travelled through Greece, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Austria to a prisoner-of-war camp near Munich, along with Russian, Polish, French and even Italian prisoners. Then, completely demoralized, he was sent to another camp and later again to a labour camp near Dresden. On the night of Shrove Tuesday, 13 February 1945, Dresden was firebombed. From 45 miles away, Packie heard the relentless bombing. He and some 25,000 Allied prisoners of war were ordered into the city and ordered to help with the clear up operation, that is mostly to dig mass graves and bury the dead. Meanwhile, the Red Army was very near and the German people, from victors suddenly became exiles in their own country, panicking before the oncoming Russian invaders.

Packie and the other prisoners of war soon found themselves being bombed by the Americans. The area he found himself in was one of the last to be liberated. By April, the two armies moved closer and closer until they were nearly face-to-face. Packie and a mate from Manchester made a run for it but were caught and fortunately not shot. He was locked up for 21 days in solitary confinement. He drifted in and out of consciousness while bombs fell all around him.

Then one day he regained consciousness and found himself out of prison. The war had once again caught up with him and he was once again lucky: instead of being caught by the Russians he and a colleague found shelter with a German family and then, the next day, when the Russians took over that sector and raped and massacred German civilians, the two just walked away … right in the path of American soldiers.

That same night, Packie for the first time in his life, flew in a plane and was soon back in Britain for rest and recuperation.

Strangely, once back, no one seemed interested in his wartime adventures. Packie went back to Civvy Street, was unemployed, met his girlfriend and married her within a year, did some plastering work, went off to London to work and then found a job at the Post Office in Northern Ireland. Life was peaceful and Packie’s family grew.

Then the war, in the form of the Irish troubles, came looking for him and one day in 1998, the Omagh bomb killed his daughter and his wartime secret was out. His wife Mary died in August 2006. Left on his own, his granddaughter Mary, a kindred spirit, convinced him to write down his wartime experiences.

That was when the idea came to revisit Malta. Accompanied by a camera crew, he revisited a much-changed Malta where, nevertheless, he could still identify landmarks from his wartime service. Besides, visiting all the sights in Valletta, he also visited Mosta and was shocked that the small village he used to know had become such a vast town.

Then, on his last night, as said, the big storm broke and Packie suffered a heart attack and was taken to Mater Dei Hospital where he also found a nurse with an Irish surname, Claire Milligan, and another, O’Neill. Packie found out he still remembered some words in Maltese.

He would have wanted to remain in Malta and perhaps take part in the Remembrance Day celebrations but that was not to be. Instead, on Remembrance Day he was flown back to Ireland with, irony of ironies, a German doctor to assist and watch over him during the voyage.

At the end, 91 years old and soon to die, he could say: “I have been a child of war, a soldier in battle, a prisoner of war, and a bereaved civilian. … Buddha tells us: ‘When one person hates another, it is the hater who falls ill – physically, emotionally, and spiritually. When he loves, it is he who becomes whole. Hatred kills. Love heals’. In the long scheme of my life, there have been more good days than bad. I refused to allow the tough times to dominate and destroy the rest of my life with anger and self-pity, as I know that anyone I love, living or dead, wanted me to move on with the living.”

Mary Mc Cartan:

A Long Road to Freedom

AuthorHouse 2011, 213pp