We studied it at school in its original Maltese version - Taht in-nar (1949) - but re-reading it now in its Italian version I could remember nothing of the original book.
This is a work of love, a translation by Isabella Ellul Mercer Cefai of the original in Maltese by her relative (grandfather?).
It is also more than a just retribution, in that it tells the Italians (and maybe the Germans) what untold suffering they caused the Maltese during the first year of World War II.
The author has never explained why he stopped keeping his diary when the first year of war was over. Maybe he continued writing in his diary but did not get round to condense them in book form. Or maybe he was so dispirited by then, with the situation looking so bleak and the threat of invasion so real, that he simply gave up. You don't think of writing a diary when you don't know if you will still be alive the next day.
In fact, many important events that happened in the war are outside the book's account - the granting of the George Cross, the Santa Marija convoy, the bombing of the Mosta church, the destruction of the Opera House.
The diary tells us a lot about the personality of the author. At the time of the war he was a clerk with the British services at Lascaris, hence the crucial core of the defence of Malta.
Later on, he was to enter politics where he became Deputy Prime Minister between 1955 and 1958 with Dom Mintoff as prime minister.
He was also a prolific writer giving us, among other works, Leli ta' Haz-Zghir, the first psychological novel in Maltese literature.
In this diary, he appears as a rather timorous person frightened to death by the incessant air raids with the Italians and more the Germans playing cat and mouse with the suffering population, multiplying air raids in the night hours, forcing the population to run to the rock shelters with all the accompanying inconveniences of damp, close confinement, and all sorts of diseases.
There were times when he stopped going to work and stayed at home. Then, as he moved around to Rabat, Birkirkara and later to his native Msida, he made up some courage and continued going in to work even in the worst air-raid days.
The population lived on rumour and word of mouth but he, as an employee of the British Services, had access to more, many times worse, information.
He describes many of the deaths that took place as a result of the air-raids and, though repetitive, each episode is a story in itself, a human life snuffed before its time.
As we all know, the first months of the war saw Malta being bombarded by Italian planes, which stayed very high up and let off their bombs from a high altitude, not always on target. But when the Germans came, in January 1941, with the attack on the Illustrious, different tactics were adopted - the planes dive-bombed almost to sea and land level. And the German numbers were simply overwhelming.
Even with his close working relationship with the British, the author does not seem to have understood why the Germans, after the initial onslaught, eased off. He seems to think that the Germans, who at first intended to invade Malta, as they had done in Crete, realised that air-power alone would not have subjugated Malta, without the help of a navy.
There may be a variant to this - the Germans were being held by the fighting in the Libyan desert and many planes were diverted to this theatre of war, where ultimately they lost, and the course of the war was changed.
In conclusion, one may read this book as the account of the suffering of a small people, punished for what it was not accountable for - a colony under the British crown, which had never harboured belligerent thoughts against its close neighbour until war split them apart.
Unfortunately the book contains many small mistakes, for example, on place names that a more attentive editor would have spotted.
There is, however, one small item which maybe has escaped notice - Lord Strickland died on 21 August 1940, while his successor, Dom Mintoff also died on the same day and month, obviously many many years later.