All I know of my father is that his name was John Schembri, and that he was maltese. My mother was English, she would never talk about my father.I was very young when they parted “for what ever reason” and dont remember much about him, except a very tearful goodbye.

My mother has now passed away, and there is nobody to ask the burning questions, why, when, where,I do not feel angry or resentful towards my father.I am at an age when I understand that everything is not as black and white as we would like them to be, and that there may have been many reasons for my fathers departure.

However I would still like to trace him if possable, but I am not sure where to even begin, do you know if there is help for people like myself in Malta.

Georgina Allen

[Daphne – You’re a strange man. The only vane around here is the one on our roof.]

[Daphne – I wear flat shoes. I don’t even own stilettos, and I can no longer be described as thin. Your wife is not ‘medium’ at 5’9″ but tall. Models start at that height. What’s your problem here, anyway?]

[Daphne – Then I must be more than 5’7″ because I am quite obviously tall and not medium-sized.]

when on holydays in Malta, whenever I spend some time on the beach, I meet those “sharking around” perverts.
Yes, I am blonde,not that young anymore, obviously not maltese…AND I ALWAYS wear a bikini top, read a book…and sometimes I even bring my friends’ children with me.
That as a whole never stopped the perverts to carry on with their dirty “peeping business”.

[Daphne – Sorry, I don’t get your point. And you seem to overlook the fact that your assumptions reek of class hatred of a different sort.]

[Daphne – That’s probably because the mothers reading books were not 24 years old, 5′ 7″ and a size 6 in a minuscule bikini, as I was……..]

[Daphne – Actually, I do. And religion definitely was the root cause of the problem – not the religion per se, but the way it was taught, as a substitute for true morality. And let’s not get started on the sexual repression. This holds true of some other religions besides Catholicism, and especially of those religions which, like Catholicism, teach/taught that non-Catholics were somehow inferior or ‘didn’t count’, which is precisely why so many Maltese men felt free to do things with and to their non-Catholic women that they would never have done with and to their Maltese women back home. It goes beyond mere religion, and takes in nationality too: Maltese Catholics are/were considered superior to any other sort of Catholics. This meant that, in an English Catholic woman, her Englishness took precedence over her Catholicism, and so she was disposable. I can’t imagine why you deny this, given that we still continue to see it today. Whole armies of Maltese men line up to masturbate at or expose themselves to ‘foreigners’ on our beaches, in the countryside, and even in gardens, and at playgrounds. I am in no doubt at all that the reason I attracted so many of these perverts when I lived in touristy Sliema was because my height, general appearance and the way I dressed led them to think I was yet another ‘frustiera’, ‘barranija’ or ‘studenta’, and the same when I used to go down to Ghajn Tuffieha beach with my little blond children and a BOOK, two clues that I wasn’t Maltese.]