Death pact, food rations and a morgue visit that haunted a woman for life
New book recounts childhood of girl stationed in besieged Malta during the war
When Margaret Staples, aged 12, found a loaded gun in the linen cupboard of her Floriana home, a plan by her father to have the whole family killed was the furthest thing from her mind.
It was her eldest brother Pat who divulged the secret he had been keeping all along: “If there’s an invasion, or we have to surrender, dad’s going to use it to shoot us all. If he’s not here mum has to do it. And if neither of them is here, it’s my job.”
Margaret and Pat survived the war in Malta with the whole Staples family and went on to have their own families away from the island.
But the Staples left parts of them behind – literally and figuratively – and Margaret’s daughter Linda Peek has documented the family’s posting in Malta at the height of World War II.
“Although my mother’s parents were not Maltese, they were very much in touch with the Maltese and grew a strong bond to the island, so much so that when my grandfather tried to persuade my grandmother to leave with the children as several others had done, on a ship to Egypt or South Africa, she refused,” Linda Peek told Times of Malta.
“She said, ‘If the Maltese can take it, so can we.’ The ship that my family would have been on was sunk by the enemy soon after it left the island. Had my grandmother made a different decision that day, none of us would be here.”
Sam Staples was posted in Malta with the Royal Engineers in 1939, accompanied by his wife Hilda Mary and their five children, aged between seven and 11. When the Staples went back to England six years later, Margaret was aged 15. She returned to Malta several times.
Margaret died in 2018 aged 89, and that is when her daughter Linda, who lived in Australia, stepped in to write the book her mother never got to write. She based the book – called Malta. A Childhood Under Siege – on oral and written accounts by her mother and notes from her grandfather’s diary.
Next month, Linda will return to Malta to meet with the descendants of some of the people who crossed paths with the Staples family and to speak about her book at the Lascaris War Rooms, where her grandfather once overlooked construction works. Linda told Times of Malta her grandfather Sam, as Garrison Engineer, designed the complex of tunnels that would later serve as a command centre for the Allies during the invasion of Sicily.
It was during such works that Sam met Emvin Cremona, recognised among the foremost Maltese painters of the 20th century. At the war rooms, however, Emvin was painting the doors of a toilet block to help feed his family.
In her book, Linda notes when Emvin told Sam he could not even afford canvas, he arranged for him to get a job at the Manoel Theatre. In expressing his gratitude, Emvin offered to paint a portrait of someone in the family.
Sam chose Margaret to pose for the portrait, and it so happened that one day, while posing for the painting, a sculptor dropped by. The sculptor – Marco Montebello – had been commissioned to make a statue of St Theresa for the Attard parish church.
“He immediately noticed my mother’s hands and asked whether he could use them as a model for the statue, explaining he had been searching for some time for someone whose fingers were shaped like hers... So, whenever my mum visited the island long after the war, she would always go say hello to St Theresa,” Linda said.
Lifetime impact
Linda noted that surviving the war in such a heavily bombed place left a lifetime impact on her mother.
“I remember that thunderstorms would remind her of the bombing. She was also a terrible hoarder of food and whenever we questioned her reasoning, she’d tell us ‘you don’t know what it’s like to go to bed hungry’. Some of us might have experienced a similar fear during COVID… but my mother carried that fear with her through life.
“Like other Maltese families, my family also depended on rations and my mother would go to the Victory Kitchen with a pan to collect soup. She used to say it was a generous portion for two but not what you’d normally serve seven people.”
Margaret would also often recall how one day somebody knocked on the door to tell the maid Carrie her auntie had died. Margaret accompanied Carrie to the morgue to identify the corpse. Till the day she died, Margaret could describe every corpse she saw there.
Despite the topic of the war, Linda insists her book is a positive one about Malta, with those who read it having put the island on their bucket list.
“It is about the day-to-day things of surviving as part of a community that suffered as one… but it’s also about family and friendships, about going to school and being in the boy scouts and putting on shows to entertain the troops.”
Those interested in meeting Linda and hearing about her book at Lascaris War Rooms on May 29 at 6.30pm can get in touch on linda@peek.net.au