Rebel

She sits quietly on a bench, reading a book. She is one of those rare people who are happy in their own skin. Rare to find in general, but even rarer here, where people tend to cling ever more tightly to human contact. Most of the residents at this care home come here because they need some form of supervision, but also because of loneliness. Only the other day, one rather sprightly gentleman said to me, ‘As long as my wife was around, it made sense to be at home but now....’

He didn’t need to continue. The hunger for companionship, for a herd to belong to is as old as life itself. 

Not Melina though. Oh no, no; she is not one of those supercilious biddies who think they are better than anyone else. She is friendly, and will engage in conversation with anyone, on almost anything. True, not many of the other residents get her dry wit, or her self-deprecating humour, or even her references to the books she’s read. But relations are not unfriendly, and at the end of the day, the creaks and aches of old age are something they can all relate to. 

Melina loves to read, and that in and of itself, I guess, sets her a bit apart.. you cannot play bingo and read a book at the same time, or watch the latest instalment of ‘Corrie’. At least not here.

Today she is sitting out in the garden, with a warm blanket over her legs. The early spring sunshine is warm enough to forgo a heavy coat, but not warm enough for arthritic knees. She is reading a book, a thriller I recognise from the cover. She looks up as I approach, and puts the book down on the bench beside her, when I sit down. 

‘Is it any good?’ I ask, indicating the book. 

‘It’s Coben; his books are always good. A bit far-fetched sometimes, but good.’

‘It’s a thriller,’ I say. ‘I guess if you want raw and unvarnished you could always get historical books, or biographies. 

‘Hmmm’ she pauses for a second, then looks at me, with a twinkle in her eye ‘Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction’. Her smile falters, as she continues, ‘and history can be depressing. Especially if you see it repeating itself.’

‘Surely you haven’t been around long enough to see history repeating itself, Melina.’ I wonder how old she is... I mean, of course, she is elderly - a pre-requisite for a place in this home is that residents must be 60 or over, but she’s hardly ancient.

‘Eh, you’d be surprised, my friend’, she gazes off into the distance for a few moments, before turning back to me with a quizzical expression. 

‘Do you remember the school protests, the riots?’ she asks. ‘I was there,’ she continues, without missing a beat. ‘I was on the forefront of those marches. I was gassed and arrested and beaten up by the police. My husband had to bail me out. He wasn’t best pleased, I can tell you.’ 

I have a vague memory of my mother saying something about the riots, but I have very little first hand knowledge of this time. I was still a toddler at the time, and my brother was practically a newborn - that is what my mother has always said. That she couldn’t attend the protests, not with two very small children in tow. In truth, she’s never seemed particularly regretful of missing out.

‘It was the summer of 1983.’ Melina is speaking again. ‘Things had been building up for a long while. The government of the day was trying to impose a new education system. 

‘The main bone of contention was that all privately-owned schools should be opened up to anyone, just like state-owned schools. And that they would be free. 

‘I remember, there would be five-minute-slots on the telly everyday, where the education minister would give a sound bite and a brief explanation about what the new system was going to look like. Each slot covered a different aspect, but the message was always one of imposition. This is how we will be doing it, going forward...

‘We had a lot of those five-minute slots in those days. The government of the time believed everything could be a vehicle for passing on the message. This was before the internet hit Malta, and the telly was still the way to reach as many people as possible.

‘The Prime Minister at the time was rabidly anti-capitalist; he had made hundreds of speeches about how the rich exploit the poor in every way, all the time. And how the man in the street needed to be given the same opportunities as the man who lived in a palace. Not that there were many who lived in palaces by then.

‘That, and the way they were trying to impose the system, made it easy to frame it as an attack on private schools, on free enterprise. It is what made our protests such a success. So many people felt angry at it for different reasons, but ultimately they were moved to oppose the government on this one. I’m not sure why. God knows, most people at the time were quite happy to be led, to have big brother looking after them. Still are, to be honest...

‘It was just a few of us, at first. A group of fifteen, twenty, maybe two dozen.. it helped that we were just parents, with no connection to private schools beyond paying fees. People saw our anger and concern for what it was, rather than as a form of hidden interest.

‘We began really small, standing outside the office of the PM; every day, rain or shine. We stood there with placards, singing slogans of freedom for us and for our children. Those of us who had children took them along too, in buggies laden with food, drink, nappies, clothes, toys and books. Slowly, people began to take interest, and the group swelled. Maybe it was just that people had seen those sort of protests happening abroad, and wanted to be like them. I don’t know. 

‘Then the church jumped into the fray too... of course, a number of those private schools were church-owned. I went to one of them as a kid - the fee was about 20% of my dad’s pay packet. 

I remember the thundering sermons in church every Sunday - back then I still went to church. This was merely communism, slipping in through the back door, they roared. At the time, communism was like the big, bad bogeyman, and akin to the devil. 

‘After the first of those sermons, the numbers grew, and just kept growing. We began holding rallies every Sunday. Sometimes outside the office of the PM, sometimes near the residence of the education minister. It was essentially a peaceful protest, the way they always were. We’d have speeches, and wave our banners and sing slogans till we lost our voices. 

‘Then one day, the police just descended on us. Myself and all the other organisers were arrested. Luckily, the kids were with my husband that day. 

‘My husband didn’t approve of me putting myself out there. This was Malta in the early eighties - a woman speaking up, and speaking loud, was simply an arrogant cow who needed a good slap to put her in her place. Even at the rallies, I wasn’t always given space to speak, even though I was one of the organisers. And when I got to speak, I was always asked to frame my speech with ‘the good of our children’ perspective.

‘Anyway, we were outside the office of the PM that day, protesting as usual - nothing different from all the other times - and the police just swooped in on us. The first we knew of them was the tear gas; then they were literally marching through the shifting crowds, whacking people right and left, like they were cutting their way through an overgrown field of grass. They came from behind us too. I was picked up and flung off the podium about three feet to the ground. Some of us had chained themselves to the wrought iron fence around the building; they were savagely dragged off. One of them lost a leg as a result. 

‘We were taken to the police headquarters, booked, and thrown into a cell. There were about twenty of us, all jammed in there. Some people were crying; others were trying to keep a brave face. There was talk of interrogations and treason...treason has always been the favourite excuse of bullies and dictators. Formless and shapeless, but packing so much substance.

‘Luckily, we made it out without too much damage. I think it was the leader of the Opposition who came forward as our lawyer and got us all sent home, relatively unscathed.

‘After that, the numbers continued to grow. People were scared but also angered at what had happened. We were routinely arrested, and just as routinely released. My husband complained that I now had a criminal record, that I was setting a terrible example for the kids. He thought what we were doing was useless. 

‘So things were going really well at the protests, but at home, it was really hard. And he kept harassing me to quit the protests. If I could, I would have, if only to get peace at home. I couldn’t though. This was bigger than me. It wasn’t just empty words when we talked about our children’s futures.

‘Then one bright winter morning, it all just exploded. We had gathered for a protest. And the police were there as usual. Suddenly, it was free-for-all - everyone fighting. Beer bottles were flung about, cars overturned; a couple of them were even set on fire. The march moved into the city centre, but by them it wasn’t a protest anymore - it was a mob. They smashed shopfronts, looted. People were injured, some of them quite badly. 

‘We expected to be arrested yet again - it would have been so easy to pin the riots onto us. But nothing happened - the police dispersed the rioters, we all went home and heard nothing else. And the next day, the government announced that it was retiring the plans for the new educational system

‘Wow, Melina... that is really something, a real achievement.’ Who’d have ever thought this little, old lady had been front and centre of all that? And all the weeks of protesting peacefully, and being ignored; only for the government to finally relent when things turned violent?

‘If only the government had listened at those first protests....’ her voice trails off for a second, then pick up again, ‘things would have been different.’ A tear runs down her cheek, and she hastily lifts her hand to wipe it off. 

‘We, my husband and myself, split up soon after that. He wouldn’t see what we’d achieved; all he saw was how many times I’d been arrested and charged with causing a ruckus. Eventually, his disapproval just poisoned everything else. We went our separate ways a couple of years later. The kids took it hard, but there was no point in carrying on with a marriage like that. 

‘I’ve asked myself so many times over the years, was it the right thing to do, to split up? Was it the right thing to do, those protests against the government? I think it was. I was protesting against the imposition, not against the idea itself - the idea itself was good. Better education is meant to be a good thing, is it not?

‘There were people who used the protests for their own agenda too. The private school owners, obviously... the church too - it was a great opportunity to lash out against the evils of communism. And then there were the opposition politicians who went on about how this was another example of how the government was opposed to progress. I remember, they promised to bring big brands like MacDonalds and Next to Malta, if they were elected. Funny how we all wanted big brands back then - like having them on the island was a sign we had arrived somehow, come out of the Middle Ages.

‘I was protesting against the imposition, and maybe that is why it irked my husband. At the time, I thought it was his old-fashioned ideas about women, and it seemed silly to think that could break up a marriage, even if they did. But it wasn’t just that. It was a lot of things, coming together. A bit like life, I suppose...’ she trails off, and seems lost in a reverie of personal reminiscences which extend beyond what she’s just shared with me. 

I say nothing; I don’t want to intrude. But as I sit there, I am thinking how much there is to  people we are with everyday, how much we never guess, or even suspect. What a pity it is to lose these personal and public histories, just because we never realise that they’re there, waiting to be told. Which is why I’m telling it now.