As Reg Greer struggled to explain his pitiable condition at Heidelberg Hospital, the Medical Officer wrote on his file: ‘When posted to Malta patient found he was more affected by the food situation and working conditions than by enemy raids. The food was very poor and consisted mainly of bread with limited fats.’
When Reg Greer arrived the Times of Malta was running a convoy fund for the support of the families of the three hundred and fifty seamen who had lost their lives trying to relieve the island, reminding the people by such means that, however relentless their hardship, they were at least relatively safe. Every day the Times of Malta carried news of the heroic resistance of Stalingrad, and the people willingly tightened their belts still further. They were not tempted to make the invalid comparison between Malta and Stalingrad that outsiders made, because every day they were reminded of the huge loss of life among the Soviet troops and civilians. Their architecture was gone, their sewers and gas mains and electric light cables were gone, but the Maltese were alive and could rebuild it all. They gave more than £7,000 for the seamen of the convoy, and then they opened a fund for the families of RAF casualties (292 RAF personnel are buried on Malta).
The military ration in 1942 allowed for eleven ounces of bread a day, an ounce each of biscuits, flour, M and V (Meat and Veg), tinned steak-and-kidney, chocolate, tinned potatoes, processed peas, fresh fruit and margarine, and four ounces of tinned meat, and two ounces each of tinned vegetables, and fresh vegetables, and a smidgin of jam, salt, tea, and too much sugar. F/0 Greer was also entitled to forty cigarettes a week, two ounces of tobacco, and one box of matches. This provision is markedly more varied than what was available to civilians, yet Reg Greer described his diet as if he had been given civilian rations.
‘Meat consisted of goat and horse.’
At no time were horses slaughtered to feed the Maltese population. The only time they were lucky enough to get horsemeat to eat was when a horse had been killed by enemy action. Fuel supplies were desperately short; even Lord Gort rode around on a bicycle. For all journeys too long to be made on foot or bicycle people had to use the horse-drawn karrozins. At one stage an antique horse-drawn bus was serving Valletta. The owners of horses had ration cards for them; horsemeat was never on the menu at the Victory Kitchens or anywhere else. Horsemeat is especially rich in iron and can still be bought from equine butchers in the Mediterranean at a higher price than other meat.
The goats did not enjoy the favoured treatment meted to the horse. The Maltese had been told that they could not continue to keep their goats, because the little fodder available had to be reserved for the horse population. No significant improvement in fodder supplies was to be expected, as it took up far too much room in the ships on which they depended. The decision to kill the goats was probably mistaken; goats supply not only milk and cheese, but kid which is palatable, whereas goat is not. Goats can survive in desert conditions. They are by no means as fastidious about their diet as horses, and can grow fat on the thin cover of scrubby aromatic shrubs on Malta’s coralline plateaux. Before the war the goatherds used to bring their goats into the cities each morning and milk them on the doorsteps, but concern about the organism that causes undulant fever which was found in their milk, led to the banning of the practice and the setting up of a pasteurisation programme. The people were strongly attached to their fresh goats’ milk and persisted in buying unpasteurised milk, despite the risk of fever, long after bottled milk was available. Cheeses both fresh and aged are eaten at almost every Maltese meal, including breakfast and elevenses, but instead of goats’ milk and cheese the authorities thought they would be better off with milk powder and goats’ meat.
The unfortunate goatherds, who were supposed to be given thirty shillings per carcase, were cheated by middlemen who bought up their flocks for a song. The people did not normally eat goat, and nobody knew how to make it palatable, but the military authorities were convinced that feeding the poor beasts to the hungry people was the only course of action to follow. On 3 September, A.V.M. contributed a humorous poem, called ‘Farewell to the Goat’ to the Times of Malta.
Gone are those halcyon days when door to door
(Consuming the odd newsheet on the floor)
You never failed in your deliveries
Of pints and pints replete with calories.
Ravages of war now wrench you from us.
Speed on your way to Capricornus.
Another by an RAF poet wished the goats a happy journey ‘per abattoir ad astra’. If the military authorities realised that horses will not make do with what goats are prepared to eat, or that goats milked on the doorstep are less efficient vectors of disease than powdered milk made up with water from broken mains, they never said so. They were wedded to their ‘slaughter policy’, probably because, being northerners, they overestimated the importance of meat in the Maltese diet. Besides, since 1905, members of the armed forces in Malta had been forbidden to consume goats’ milk. On 7 October, 1942, secret telegram OZ1458 advised the Air Ministry in Whitehall that the slaughter of all animals other than draught animals would yield a thousand tons of carcase meat and postpone the exhaustion date of the Maltese population one week. For most of the year ‘Harvest Day’ or ‘Target Date’, as the exhaustion date was known for communications purposes, had never been more than a week or two away.
‘Patient found he could not eat goat due to distaste for odour.’
The Maltese agreed with the patient. Goat is no more revolting than any other meat if it is properly prepared. The housewives of Malta could probably have made something of the carcase meat if they had had the fuel to cook it. Unfortunately in May it had been decided to set up Victory Kitchens for the communal preparation of food to be dished out ready-cooked into vessels brought by the people. Food can be prepared more efficiently and economically in bulk, but the results of the communal feeding programme in Malta made a bad situation very much worse. Hungry people were given food that they simply could not stomach. Deep-frozen liver was not allowed to thaw properly before being cooked at the wrong heat and speed; the result was jaw-breaking and nauseatingly bitter. The people who had paid for it threw it away. If the goats’ meat had been properly hung or marinaded in a smidgin of garlic and oil or in sour goats’ milk or yoghurt, or rubbed with pepper, it would not have smelled so disgusting that only the starving dogs and cats would eat it. If the meat had been minced and used as the basis for the salsa it would have gone further as a condiment for the hard bread ration, in one of the myriad versions of the Maltese hobzbzeit.
Every day the Times of Malta published anguished correspondence about the Victory Kitchens. People were given unequal portions, too much or too little, were told that food had run out after queueing for hours, produced evidence of waste and pilfering. People who brought an extra dish for the goats’ meat (so they could give it to a starving pet or somebody who liked it) were told that everything had to be put in the same dish, slop, slop, slop in traditional army (and prison) style. Bulguljiata (the Maltese version of the Arab eggeh) made with egg-powder and beans was curdled and inedible, the beans fermented or undercooked. The authorities answered that the cooks were all professional restaurant cooks, or navy or NAAFI cooks, which to this latter-day observer explained everything. If housewives had run the Victory Kitchens they would have known how to improvise. A committee of inspectors recommended on 22 October that the Victory Kitchens be disbanded and the food rations distributed to the people. The Governor refused, on the rather good grounds that the poor of Malta would have had no vegetables at all if what was grown on the island were sold in the open market. Even if undercooked, overcooked, half-rotten or fermented, vegetables were served to all comers by the Victory Kitchens.
‘Main vegetable—carrots.’
Most of the available vegetables were not grown by the peasants who went to work their exposed fields and lay down in the shelter of their low stone walls to escape the flak when Jerry came over, but dehydrated stuff brought by
the convoys. Most people found dehydrated carrots harder to tolerate than bombardment, but few can have taken repulsion to the lengths that F/O Greer did. After he left Malta he never, never allowed a carrot, no matter how succulent, to pass his lips. He would hunt out the smallest slice of carrot that had hidden under his pot-roast or insinuated itself into his Irish stew and, holding it on the tip of his fork, with his face averted, tip it onto somebody else’s plate. Carrots were Daddy’s Room 101.
Was it a way of forgetting, Daddy, or a ritual of remembering? Were you really reminding us, through the carrot carry-on, that you were a survivor of the Malta Siege? Or was it really unbearable for you? Did the sweet smell of carotin make your gorge rise and your bowels quake as it used to when you were anorexic in Malta? For it wasn’t that you didn’t have enough to eat, was it, Daddy? You had the teenage girls’ affliction, didn’t you? Poor Daddy, I am the last one to despise you for that. But I’m not so sure about Mr Admans.
‘Patient was working 80 ft. underground in a very damp section and also very dusty. There was no air-conditioning and ventilation was poor—humidity high and also hot. Wet all day due to perspiration. Also working long hours 8–9 hours per day.’
Reg Greer never worked an afternoon in his life, except for eight months as a Secret and Confidential Publications Officer in a cavern eighty feet underground beneath the Lascaris Bastion. Some might say he just wasn’t used to hard work, couldn’t knuckle under, a play-boy, a spiv. But I couldn’t work in the underground cavern either, although I can and usually do work many more hours than eight or nine in a day. Flight Lieutenant Morrissey who was assessing Reg Greer for his medical board in Melbourne thought he was an ordinary anxiety neurosis case, so he asked him about the strain of living through the bombardment. Daddy could have made much of that; most people thought he had been worn out and shaken to pieces by the Malta blitz. He could so easily have lied, but instead he said, ‘Never had a raid nearer than half a mile at any time.’ He was ‘never unduly distressed by air-raids’, and although he ‘slept above ground’ he ‘might have lost six nights sleep the whole time he was there.’ I only know one other person who would rather sleep above ground among the falling buildings and the flak than safe in the catacombs, who would defy the ban on placing oneself in personal danger and reject the offer of eighty feet of solid rock between oneself and the bombs. That person is I. Like Daddy I’m claustrophobic. Seriously claustrophobic. In a room without a window I can become dizzy, pass out or throw up. I wouldn’t have lasted in the catacombs eight hours, let alone eight months. Claustrophobia is hereditary.
On 11 October the Luftwaffe began a last concerted attempt to contain Malta. Six hundred aircraft, bombers with fighter escort, came over in waves. The Maltese Spitfires went out to meet them, following AOC Park’s policy of ‘forward interception’. Between 11 and 19 October there were 250 daylight raids on Malta. Enemy losses were so heavy that German fliers developed a state of anxiety known as Malta Sickness, for despite the daily bombardment of the airfields every night the RAF continued its attacks on enemy shipping. Rommel’s supply-line remained cut. On 23 October, the Eighth Army took El Alamein.
Top-secret telegrams to the Air Ministry in Whitehall began to deal with other things beside the constant begging for more Spitfires. The Director of communal feeding, Rowntree, flew to London to beg supplies of vitamins. The order went out for flour, dried meat and dried vegetables.
During the night of 7–8 November, Allied forces landed in French North Africa, covered by the Wellingtons from Luqa bombing Sicilian and Tunisian airfields. On 16 November, a convoy reached Grand Harbour intact, watched and cheered by the people standing on the rooftops of the houses still standing in Valletta and the Three Cities. The tide had turned. It was time to look to the starving, exhausted, and ill of Malta.
On 14 December, F/O Greer complained to F/L K.M. Parry of a pain in his chest. He was thin, coughing slightly, unable to concentrate, and nauseated. The MO examined his chest and sent him to Mtarfa Hospital, where he was admitted. He told them that in the last twelve weeks he had lost one and a half stone and that in the eight months since he had left Australia he had lost two and a half stone. If he had lost so much weight he would have been no more underweight than the average Maltese, but in fact he had not. On entering the service he had weighed 147 pounds; if he had lost as much weight as he claimed he would now weigh eight stone, which for a man of his height would have meant emaciation. When he was weighed in April his weight was nine stone five pounds, and again he said that he was two stone four pounds below his normal weight, which he was not. Well might Major Tunbridge, ‘medical specialist’, remark that the loss of weight was ‘excessive for this period’. He did not say that he did not believe the patient, who in truth looked piteously thin, but he did see that the problem was not in Daddy’s lungs: ‘There is a serious psychological background in that this Officer finds it difficult to acclimatise himself to service conditions. His insight into this is excellent. The loss of weight is not impossible for this cause…. There is a history of diarrhoea in Egypt for a short period—but there is nothing clinically to suggest amoebiasis. If there is no complaint about this Officer regarding his work, I do consider that the effect of change of environment and possibly a change of work might be tried.’
Secret and Confidential Publications Officers cannot change their work. Captain Donivan discharged him to duty, ‘Medical category unchanged’. Sigint was losing valuable personnel who became real cases of tuberculosis; a phony case of nervous cough was not going to make it. He may have been skinny, grey-faced, drawn and wrinkled, with a nervous cough and difficulty in swallowing, but nobody in Malta was actually looking well. If Reg Greer was not fit for work, then nobody was. There was a war on, after all.
The grimness of conditions for civilian support workers is illustrated by an industrial accident that befell at this time, when ‘an unusual series of cases of poisoning due to petroleum vapour occurred. At this period petrol supplies were vital and it was necessary to conserve all aviation fuel; in the interests of safety, therefore, a consignment of RAF petrol tins containing 100 octane aviation fuel were being moved into a disused railway tunnel, the task being undertaken by Maltese labourers working under contract to the civil government. The men had been working for some four weeks in 12-hour shifts, with an hour’s break for a meal and two other half-hour breaks during each shift. Many of the tins had, unfortunately, become damaged in transit… and leaked slightly at the seams…. Those employed on carrying the petrol tins along the tunnel (a journey taking about 10 minutes) and then returning to the open air… were less severely affected than those responsible for stacking the tins at the end of the tunnel…. In all some 70 persons were affected and of this number four died…. Most of the reported cases were said to have had a prodromal period of anorexia, insomnia, headache, increasing salivation followed by general fatigue, tremors and pins and needles in the limbs. This was followed in the more serious cases by mental confusion and delirium, incontinence, rapid loss of weight, in the fatal cases, a progressive mania leading to coma with convulsive athetoid movements. The milder cases complained of headache, sore throat, dyspnoea and coughing, while many fell unconscious but recovered after being in the open air for about half an hour…. It was agreed that the cause of the poisoning was excessive hours of work in an atmosphere heavily loaded with fumes from 100-octane petrol combined with a lack of proper ventilation.’
Things were rough all over, but much less rough for an officer, a newcomer, a bum-shiner and a colonial than for any one else.
Nobody mentioned claustrophobia; nobody would have thought it a real ailment if they had. As long as F/O Greer did not have TB or any other communicable disease, he was fit. The word had come down from the Air Officer Commanding that ‘moral fibre’ cases were to be dealt with expeditiously and with the utmost severity. Reg Greer’s bid for escape from the tunnels might have worked if there had been another trained cyphers officer to take his
place, but in the event he worked on for four more months.
In my notebook I wrote: ‘No matter how I try, no matter how loyal I feel, I cannot make this man a hero. He was the one who lost his head when all around were keeping theirs. He tried to chicken out; he exaggerated his symptoms to the investigating officers and they believed him. He tried to impose on them; they believed him and treated him courteously, but he failed, because conditions were too grim for his malaise to be significant. Other people were working on, trying to conceal the fact that their chests were filling up with muck, and here is No. 254380 trying to get invalided out with a chest that despite his heavy smoking rings clear as a bell. They ask for sputum to examine and he can produce none. Perhaps I am having to face the fact that Daddy was a bounder. I think of Mr Adman’s satiric smile and my heart fails. I remember the fear and shame in Daddy’s eyes. I wonder if he could not love me any more because he had let me down.’
Why am I applying these standards to him? Why do I demand that he be gallant and brave? I don’t demand that my mother be gallant and brave, do I? But yes, I do. I want both of them to be tough, dinky-di, reliable, stalwart, straight. Both of them, in fact, in their different ways, are bounders. I am a bounders’ child. The blood of bounders runs in my veins.
What if, what if it was not Reg Greer who took himself off to the MO but the CO who noticed this pale and anxious man and recommended that he go for a check-up? ‘Can’t afford to lose you, you know.’ I don’t know that Reg Greer initiated all this medical brouhaha after all. Certainly he didn’t come back to the MO the way most malingerers do. He went back to work and he stayed there in the sodden tunnels.