Legacy of Survival in the Busuttil Family of Malta

The consequences of the war on Malta were significant. Malta was the most bombed place in the world during the Second World War.

Mum (Georgina Busuttil nee Borg) was born in Malta in 1927 and is still alive, now aged 96. She lived in Marsa and could see the dockyard from the back window of her house. Most of the bombing in Malta was aimed at the docks, airports, and Valetta. She was aged between 12 and 15 during the bombings and her and her friends would watch bombing raids not fully understanding the dangers. Her mother would pull her inside and take her to safety in the underground bomb shelter her father (Andrew Borg) had made under their house. Malta is built upon limestone and the shelter was dug out by hand using a pickaxe. The underground chamber was connected to others next door so that they would have an exit route if their home had ever been hit. They had a primus stove in the chamber that they used for cooking. They would take bedding down for the nights they spent there during air raids. Made of straw, the mattresses would then be taken upstairs in the daytime to air them. During the worst bombing raids, they would live for days on end under the ground.

Georgina would have seen Operation Pedestal but doesn't remember anyone being killed during any of the war years; her son wonders is a result of her repressing the truth at a young age. She does however remember seeing dog fights in the sky and watching a plane crash.

One of her brothers was with the Royal Malta Artillery and one evening a colleague requested to swap shifts with him. The gun emplacement was attacked and the person who had asked to swap shifts was killed. Her other brothers also served in the military, and her father was a police officer. He helped oversee supplies being delivered to the island. All survived the war.

Dad (Joseph Busuttil) was born in 1920 in Malta. He joined the British Army aged 18 and was already stationed in the Middle East by his 19th birthday. He was originally with the RAOC then REME. He then returned to Malta after the defeat of the Afrika Korps while the rest of the 8th Army went on to Italy. His son has requested his service record, which hasn't arrived yet, to see if there was a reason for this posting beyond merely being re-deployed to Malta. He suspects that there may well have been a psychological reason for it. Mum (at the age of 96) told him that 'he was the only one left out of his group'. There are some suggestions that he was suffering severely from what then was known as 'battle fatigue' or PTSD as it's currently known. He died in 2001.

Joseph's father had fought in the Gallipoli campaign, and his grandfather was a stoker on the destroyer HMS Grampus. The contributor is interested in the inter-generational stress that these experiences, and those of his father in the Second World War, may have created.

On first meeting, Joseph and Georgina fell in love and then married in 1946. Although they were second cousins and lived on the same street, they hadn't known each other previously. After the Second World War, Joseph remained in the British Army and was stationed in Kenya, the United Kingdom and Malta. After Joseph had left the Army, the family emigrated to Australia. Although Joseph had worked as a carpenter, he initially struggled to find relevant work and instead obtained employment in factories. Georgina worked first at home, and then in factories and as a tea lady.

Unlike many others of his generation, Joseph would sometimes talk about his experiences in the Second World War and carried the trauma from it for the rest of his life. Near the end of his life, he was witnessed calling out in his sleep 'get out of the truck, it's on fire, it's on fire', possibly suggesting some of the trauma he still held in his subconscious.