Bejn Storja u Miti: Anton Buttigieg

Editor: Sergio Grech

Publisher: Horizons / 2023

Pages: 373

This is the latest in Horizons' series that consists of different articles about a famous person, written by people who knew that person.

The person they're writing about this time is Malta's first elected president and its second president, Anton Buttigieg.

There have already been books about him. And also his own autobiography in five volumes of which the fourth volume has never been published. Maybe this pointed at a period in his life particularly painful for him to write about including the death of two of his three wives. Maybe too he simply ran out of time.

We can distinguish his life in a number of periods.

First comes his childhood and early life. He was born in Qala, Gozo in a very poor family. His father was a sailor, away from home for years and years.

Buttigieg never renounced his origins - in fact he was known as Toni tal-Bahri.

As a poet he sang about his surroundings in Qala - the sea, Hondoq ir-Rummien, the flowers in the fields.

He continued to write about nature even after his father, retiring from the sea, migrated with family in tow, to Hamrun, living first in the Okella Agius, then,, as it is still today, a symbol of substandard housing.

Buttigieg was educated in Gozo, at the Bishop's Seminary. He was grateful for the education he received but also caustic about the faults in the system.

The students and their teachers were uniformly and rabidly Nationalist whereas he and his family were supporters of Lord Strickland.

There was no public transport then and this small boy had to walk all the way from Qala to Victoria and back. Once the small boy, suffering from rheumatism that did not let him use the bicycle, was resting by the wayside when the Bishop of Gozo, at that time Bishop Gonzi, passed by in his car. He knew Buttigieg who was a student at the Seminary. But he just blessed the boy, and drove on.

Even at Hamrun Buttigieg intended to become a priest and I have met people who said they remember him wearing a cassock and being ordained as a sub-deacon.

His heart was not in it and he left. Instead, he studied law and became a lawyer. Again he found himself ostracised by the vast number of Nationalists in the law course.as he had been earlier at St Aloysius College.

With World War II approaching, he became a Police inspector and thus spent the war years as a non-combatant.

Then he was also, for a time, a journalist with The Times of Malta writing mostly court reports.

But politics beckoned and he joined the Strickland party without getting elected and then the Labour Party. It is instructive that he was never elected to Parliament from Gozo.

Although in character he was miles different from fiery Dom Mintoff, he was chosen as Deputy Leader, later to become Minister for Justice and Deputy Prime Minister.

He had a pungent character, well suited to parliamentary repartee. He was also somewhat vain and every August, when the feast of San Gejtanu came around, even though as president of the San Gejtanu Band he could pull rank, it so happened that every year he would be Acting Prime Minister and he made it a point to attend the Translation of the Relic that starts off the feast with the official prime ministerial car flying the Maltese flag, receiving the honours due.

The collection of articles in the book gives ample coverage to this period of his life - Rigu Bovington about Qala, Dun Frans Camilleri on his poems and about Hamrun.

Most of the time, whatever his official designation, he continued to write poems. He had a facile ability to play with words and rhyme.

At the same time he was for a time in the forefront of the battles of Maltese poets to make a name for themselves as the new generation in the post-Independence period.

Then, in this period of experimentation, he discovered Japanese literature and, in particular, the haiku and in a short time he became the haiku-man of Maltese literature.

Maybe at that time he was rather over-exposed and school children were fed Buttigieg poems by the gallon.

All Maltese children of that time would remember his poem about Majsi the lamplighter, reflecting the time when electricity was in its infancy and streets were lit by oil lamps.

I remember Marsalforn of those years, the lamplighter going from lamp to lamp with his ladder and the groups of Sliema residents playing cards at il-Baxan, in the light of gas lamps.

The book also includes Daphne Caruana Galizia reacting against the preponderance of Buttigieg poems inflicted upon schoolchildren.

Unfortunately, the book does not include the poem about "sodda ta' t-tnejn, mifruxa ghal xejn" (a bed for two, spread in vain) his despair after the death of his first wife, Carmen Bezzina, who died of cancer.

His second wife, Connie Scicluna, then died in a traffic accident in the UK. His third wife, Scot-woman Margery Patterson, outlived him.

It is fascinating to note that both he and Mintoff had British wives in those days of anti-British sentiment.

I think the best article on the Buttigieg poems is the elaborate one by Immanuel Mifsud but other articles are equally interesting.

I enjoyed the snippets on life in my home town Hamrun. His last residence in High Street was just up the road from where I was born and lived till I was 9 and we moved to the upper part of High Street.

My two aunts and a great aunt remained living there till they all died. The three-storey building is today used by the Legion of Mary.

The book tells of two episodes from the religious conflict years.

Once Buttigieg reported directly to the Vatican that a local priest, Can JM Aquilina from the Birkirkara Chapter, had skipped his mother as she was waiting for confession.

The matter was taken rather seriously by the Vatican and the Nuncio, Archbishop Cardinale (not Cardinal Cardinale as the book has it) was asked to investigate.

The priest came up with a lot of excuses - that he did not know who she was, etc.

Years earlier Buttigieg was queuing for the bus in the Hamrun Square and he overheard a well-known police inspector, Cassar, joke with a friend of his about Mintoff's latest initiative to get friendly with the Russians and sarcastically joking that this would bring goodies to Malta.

Buttigieg heard the remark even though it was not intended for him, left the queue and would have confronted the inspector but the two were restrained by other people. Undaunted, Buttigieg reported the incident to the Governor General not trusting the matter would be properly investigated by Police Commissioner Vivian de Gray. The inspector was later acquitted.

Otherwise in a Hamrun hotbed of political and festa rivalry, as president of the youngest and better-followed band he tried hard to foster better relationships with the other side even if, as I myself happened to see one day, he risked being physically attacked by hotheads of the other side.

His death in 1983 avoided his seeing the black day in 1987 when the festa was turned into a civil war and the victims were ...the statues of the angels.

As a politician his lifelong ambition looked about to be fulfilled when the British were about to leave Malta and as the second president of the republic he was due to light the memorial lamp on top of the Gholja tal-Helsien in Vittoriosa after reading a speech which declared that day to be, in Mintoff's words 'Malta's date with destiny ' but the whole was turned into a shambles by Libya's Gaddafi and his rowdy supporters.

The next day Buttigieg and his wife were on top of the bastions waving Adieu to the last British ship to leave Malta.

After the mayhem and confusion of the previous day this gesture went a long way to signify thst the two countries would always remain friends (at least until Brexit).

 Buttigieg genuinely yearned for peace in Malta but his term saw some of the gravest incidents in Maltese history - the killing of schoolgirl Karen Grech, the 15 October 1979 burning down of The Times and the attack on the residence of the Leader of Opposition Eddie French Adami.

As President, he left the university graduation ceremony when student leader Michael Frendo attacked the government's dismantling of the university with student doctors having to continue their studies abroad. At that very minute, imported thugs were attacking the students and guests.

In his last speech as President he expressed the regret that things had turned out so bad.

Then, the final stage - having completed his presidential term, he was diagnosed with cancer and he died in the UK where he had gone for one desperate bid to avert death. The book gives us the touching last poem he wrote just days before he died.