Today I met one of the 450,000 people from Malta - only the second person from Malta I have met. The other one was one of our old clients who was also from Malta (Maltese?). She told me she was born in the early part of the 1920's to a very very young mother and no father. Her distressed grandparents took her away from her mother as a small baby as it was a disgrace having a baby out of wedlock) went to the docks where a visiting cruise ship had moored and gave her away to an English couple. The husband wanted a baby but the wife didn't however the mother agreed to take the little baby. Our client had no papers and had a life of misery with the mother but was doted on by her father. Her life was of comfort, but not a house filled with love she told me. Her education was very good. Her family moved to Australia from England for a few years when she was in her late teens and by her early 20 s she had a job in a bank as a teller. Her parents moved back to England. She did not follow and worked her way a little up the chain at the bank. She met and married a bank manager and had 5 children, a long marriage until he died and a loving family. During this family time,bher father died and her mother wanted them to move to England to care for her, as she was old and in a wheel chair without any other family. Our client declined but agreed for her mother to come to Australia by boat and she would travel back with her to Australia. The only way they could get her mother who was wheelchair bound on the ship was by using a crane. One memory that always made the client smile (as her mother had not be a kind mother) was the sight of her mother in a wheelchair swinging about and dangling in the air being "loaded" on to the ship. Very politically incorrect these days but that was how it was done then.
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