V.

No sleep, little food; but no complaints. Are we not, Maltese, English and the few Americans, one? There is, we are taught, a communion of saints in heaven. So perhaps on earth, also in this Purgatory, a communion: not of gods or heroes, merely men expiating sins they are unaware of, caught somehow all at once within the reaches of a sea uncrossable and guarded by instruments of death. Here on our dear tiny prison plot, our Malta.'

Retreat, then, into religious abstraction. Retreat also into poetry, which somehow he found time to write down. Fausto IV has commented elsewhere on the poetry which came out of Malta's second Great Siege. Fausto II's had fallen into the same patterns. Certain images recurred, major among them Valletta of the Knights. Fausto IV was tempted to put this down to simple "escape" and leave it there. It was certainly wish-fulfillment. Maratt had a vision of La Vallette patrolling the streets during blackout; Dnubietna wrote a sonnet about a dogfight (Spitfire v. ME-109) taking a knights' duel for the sustained image. Retreat into a time when personal combat was more equal, when warfare could at least be gilded with an illusion of honour. But beyond this; could it not be a true absence of time? Fausto II even noticed this:

'Here towards midnight in a lull between raids, watching Elena and Paola sleep, I seem to have come inside time again. Midnight does mark the hairline between days, as was our Lord's design. But when the bombs fall, or at work, then it's as if time were suspended. As if we all laboured and sheltered in timeless Purgatory. Perhaps it comes only from living on an island. With another kind of nerves, possibly one has a dimension, a vector pointing sternly to some land's-end or other, the tip of a peninsula. But here, with nowhere to go in space but into the sea, it can be only the barb-and-shaft of one's own arrogance that insists there is somewhere to go in time as well.'

Or in a more poignant vein:

'Spring has come. Perhaps there are sulla blossoms in the country. Here in the city is sun, and more rain than is really necessary. It cannot matter, can it? Even I suspect the growth of our child has nothing to do with time. Her name-wind will be here again; to soothe her face which is always dirty. Is it a world anyone could have brought a child into?'

None of us has the right to ask that any more, Paola. Only you.

The other great image is of something I can only call slow apocalypse. Even the radical Dnubietna, whose tastes assuredly ran to apocalypse at full gallop, eventually created a world in which the truth had precedence over his engineer's politics. He was probably the best of our poets. First, at least, to come to a halt, about-face and toil back along his own retreat's path; back towards the real world the bombs were leaving us. The Ash Wednesday poem marked his lowest point: after that he gave up abstraction and a political rage which he later admitted was "all posturing" to be concerned increasingly with what was, not what ought to have been or what could be under the right form of government.

We all came back eventually. Maratt in a way which in any other context would be labelled absurdly theatrical. He was working as mechanic out at Ta Kali and had grown fond of several pilots. One by one they were shot from the sky. On the night the last one died he went calmly into the officers' club, stole a bottle of wine - scarce then like everything else because no convoys were getting through - and got belligerently drunk. The next anyone knew he was on the edge of town at one of the Bofors emplacements, being shown how to operate the guns. They taught him in time for the next raid. He divided his time after that between airfield and artillery, getting, I believe, two to three hours' sleep out of every twenty-four: He had an excellent record of kills. And his poetry began to show the same "retreat from retreat."

Fausto II's return was most violent of all. He dropped away from abstraction and into Fausto III: a non-humanity which was the most real state of affairs. Probably. One would rather not think so.

But all shared this sensitivity to decadence, of a slow falling, as if the island were being hammered inch by inch into the sea. "I remember," that other Fausto wrote,

“I remember

A sad tango on the last night of the old world

A girl who peeped from between the palms

At the Phoenicia Hotel

Maria, alma de mi corazon,

Before the crucible

And the slag heap,

Before the sudden craters

And the cancerous blooming of displaced earth.

Before the carrion birds came sweeping from the sky;

Before that cicada,

These locusts,

This empty street.

Oh we were full of lyrical lines like "At the Phoenicia Hotel." Free verse: why not? There was simply not the time to cast it into rhyme or metre, to take care with assonance and ambiguity. Poetry had to be as hasty and rough as eating, sleep or sex. Jury-rigged and not as graceful as it might have been. But it did the job; put the truth on record.