The world is living at a time when it is struggling with spikes in COVID-19 and the situation could spiral out of control as many are still holding mass events and not keeping social distancing. The virus is waging an unseen war against humanity. This feature is about a personal first-hand account of an unknown author revealing how people sought refuge at a time when the enemy was visible in the form of German and Italian bombers attacking Malta.

"In the evening, I left my car at the hospital gates. There were, at this late hour many final touches to be given. The hospital staff now at its full complement had to be based, fed and bedded. Nurses, doctors, chaplains all were present and settling in. Were the feeding arrangements all right? Was the spare water supply in working order? The emergency lighting system? The operating theatres? There were naturally a hundred points to be examined - so many nuts and bolts in the hospital machine to be seen to and tightened up.

By 2 o'clock in the morning, the chauffeur of the car which had brought me hours before mildly asked if he would be needed further that night. For seven hours he had waited without food or rest, rather than desert his place. Of course, the poor man had been forgotten in the general activity, yet such were the working man's attitudes on that fateful night.

Just seven hours after midnight, the stillness of the June morning was for the first time cut by the scream of sirens, going in earnest. I turned to a hospital doctor. "Is it practice or is it the siren calling men to work in the dockyards?"

(Author's Note: At the Dockyard, and harbour region area, the "Balomba" or "Palomba" was used very much in people's colloquial rather than the word "siren". The "Balomba" was an electrically operated mechanism giving a loud continual warning sound like that of a siren used at the Dockyard to indicate time for beginning or stopping work as well as for other warning purposes. During the last war it was used as an air-raid warning.)

We were hardly inclined to believe that reality would strike so early. Mass was just finishing in the chapel of the hospital which had up till a week before, been a school.

It was my duty to warn the congregation,

"Air raid warning... to the basement. This way!"

The procedures, which were so familiar, had begun. The priest finished the service just in time. All the staff present in church, including many women and religious sisters who had never known war (some of them French and Italian) filed calmly down into the basement.

But already a few people were, instead of at the hospital door, staring into the flawless blue of a Mediterranean summer sky. One after another the white cloudlets of the anti-aircraft bombs were appearing overhead,

"Give it them, boys!"

Then the planes were spotted. Specks of white hardly visible to the naked eye.

"They're theirs!"

For the first time "Theirs" and "Ours, became a vivid destruction. No question of Britain or Malta now, only "Ours" - friendly aircraft and "Theirs" - the enemy's, the weapons with which Mussolini had boasted he would shut out the sunlight itself and which were so soon to become the butt of every wit in Malta.

"They're overhead! They're turning! Making for the dockyard!"

But even before they had reached us they already had dropped bombs, had already shed the first blood of people to their work.

I forget now for how long that first raid lasted. I recall vividly the unperturbedness of the staff in the basement almost all praying. Yet not out of fear as silly and superficial observers might think but because to the Maltese, religion is a living force. The chaplain administered Holy Communion, which would normally have been given at the end of the mass. Then somebody produced coffee and that was perhaps the best touch needed to restore normality.

In a hospital the real work starts after the raid has ended. Casualties were expected to be heavy, and it was really gratifying to find that no casualties turned up at our hospital after that first raid. That day, however, there were seven other raids, most of them directed on the dockyard and casualties turned up in a fair number, later.

Throughout the island the story was the same. Many people, including the majority of the inhabitants themselves, expected the people to panic. The Mediterranean race, one supposed to have a temperament, but everyone was happily surprised at the actual events. Individual reactions were odd. One man, who had bet me half a quid, Italy would not declare war stated that he went out after the raid eager to see what message the leaflets conveyed. Of course, the Italians had thrown no mere papers. Children as elsewhere become eager collectors of splinters. The soldiers manning the anti-aircraft guns were the most envied and proudest of men.

At the end of the first day, the accounts were that everybody agreed that the defences had coped well with the enemy. The hospitals had been found adequate and the people's behaviour, if it surprised nobody else, succeeded at least in amazing the people themselves.

The full account of all the events in Malta during the war will probably be published sometime in the Official History of the War in some 47 volumes, promptly bought by the libraries and by some of the generals who took part, located on the shelves and left there to gather the dust of ages. In them, I am only concerned with recording some of the thoughts and feelings when Malta had, for a space of time longer than any other place, to endure going through the mill and earning for itself new interest."