This is a story set in Malta and Europe in the near future. In the form of a letter from a mother to her daughter Maddy, it shows a family trying to navigate the crisis in the region caused by a rapidly warming climate.

See previous chapters in the story and read a note by the story's author.

We got to Nettuno three days later. 

This was further north than the usual migrant destination ports at the time, and we anchored at the Marina without any issues.

Anselmo came for us and it was good to see a friendly face. 

My father had met him at some olive oil conference a few years previously, and they had stayed in touch, playing online chess and sending each other lame dad jokes that he had sometimes passed on to the rest of us. 

He was a quiet, lonely man who had lost his wife some years back. He invited us back to his house, the understanding being that we would stay for a couple of weeks and then move on. 

By the end of the first week, I managed to sell the boat for a laughably low price. We would have loved to keep it, but we couldn’t afford the berthing fees at the marina, weren’t sure how to keep it safe there, or anywhere else, and needed the cash.

We all pitched in and helped on the farm, trying to make ourselves indispensable. We soon came to an arrangement with Anselmo that in return for our work we could stay in a tiny guest cottage he had near the main farmhouse, together with basic meals and a tiny bit of cash left over. Mum looked after our cottage and the main house while Tom and I did whatever was necessary to help Anselmo manage the olives and the rest of the land – pruning, watering, fighting the bloody olive fly any way we could, harvesting, fencing, ploughing etc.

Despite our best efforts we never once managed to talk to Dad. 

Twice in those first months we got emails from him; apparently, he used a contact of his with a dodgy satellite link to connect to the internet. In the second mail he even said he would give it another couple of months and then try to join us if things didn’t improve. 

But then he fell silent. 

We all tried to connect with him. Mum, especially, checked for his email every day, and wrote to him often. She also called his mobile number every evening. At first we would all look at her expectantly as she did so, but as the news from Malta became grimmer, and as it became clear he wasn’t going to pick up, we tried to put less and less of a spotlight on her attempts to call him. She took to making them when we weren’t there.

Half of the local population got out of Malta between ’29 and ’35

The news coming from Malta, as seen on Italian TV, was certainly grim. 

As the state had imploded there, a UN mission had flown in to try and shore up local law enforcement, but had instead achieved the opposite aim. 

UNOMALTE was financed by an EU that should really have been helping its own member state more directly somehow. I guess it simply found itself trying to battle disorder and chaos on too many fronts at the same time. 

The mission was initially welcomed by the locals who saw it as a relief from the two bickering factions that had long made governing Malta a nightmare (not to mention the ever-growing encampment of dispossessed migrants centred round Ħal Far). 

The moment UNOMALTE came in, any remaining local forces of order disintegrated fully. Most people looked to defer instead to the new Blue Helmets or sought to co-opt them onto their own side against the other. 

But it soon became clear that the small mission was wholly inadequate for the massive job it had been saddled with. 

Its troops were too poorly prepared, badly trained and under-resourced to act as both a police force and an army. After that first flush of enthusiasm, popular resentment swiftly set in and grew in the face of the mission’s failure to immediately solve everybody’s problems. 

The UN troops ended up being forced to remain confined to their barracks, or to fight running battles with the locals. Large areas not under their immediate control soon became completely lawless.

One of UNOMALTE’s most difficult tasks was trying to safely distribute imported bottled water in the face of attempts by different factions to control this vital resource. Photo: Shutterstock.com

There is a piece of footage I saw on the Italian news at the time that remains burned into my memory: a convoy of armoured four-wheel drive vehicles with their sky-blue UNOMALTE pennants racing down the centre of St Anne Street in Floriana past a jeering crowd, the air thick with hurled bottles, rocks and bits of broken furniture.

While I obviously don’t have access to any accurate numbers, if they exist at all, I’d say that close to half of the local population got out of Malta between ’29 and ’35. 

The main power station on the island was plagued with problems after those initial power cuts, and suspected sabotage in the summer of 2030 put it out of action once and for all. 

With little reliable power and no functioning desalination plants, water became an acute problem on the island. One of UNOMALTE’s most difficult tasks was trying to safely distribute imported bottled water in the face of attempts by different factions to control this vital resource.

To add to these problems, the number of migrants still landing in Malta had grown out of all proportion to the much-reduced capacity of the island to deal with the influx.

Large swathes of Africa and the Middle East were becoming close to unliveable by now. According to some sources, up to a hundred million people were on the move, and many parts of the North African coastline had become staging posts in the journey north towards climes that were still more liveable. 

Malta happened to lie along one of the primary routes. 

With no-one in Libya trying to control the flow, and no local coast guard patrolling Maltese waters, the numbers landing in Malta grew exponentially. One estimate in a RAI documentary we saw in ’32 or ’33 said that around 85,000 people had landed in Malta that year; in comparison, nearly a million landed in Italy, a massive number, but still proportionally much smaller than the arrivals in Malta.

Few or none of the boats that arrived there had actually aimed to stop in Malta; it was only navigational errors or lack of fuel that had led to them landing on the island, rather than in Italy. 

Together, now, with much of the Maltese population, their single objective was to head further North, all part of a much broader migratory flow, with streams of desperate people flooding across the Straits of Gibraltar, or coming up through the Middle East and Turkey into the Balkans.

Part nine of We are not angry enough will appear on Sunday, January 30. See previous chapters in the story and read a note by the story's author.

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