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14 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 4 JULY 2021 NEWS (Mintoff was a lodger at the ageing Har- rises' home on Divinity Road) – "'Total abstinence,' he brazenly acknowledged years later, 'was not in keeping with my normal thinly disguised libertine ways'. This might have been the first time that Dom was unfaithful to Moyra, though definitely far from the last," Montebello reveals. *** S even years later, Dom and Moyra are getting married in an empty countryside chapel. The other witness is Leli Tabone, and Birżebbuġa businessman Zaren Dalli as his bestman. None of the couple's family relations were present. "Not even a bridesmaid for his spouse. Not even his parents; especially his parents," Montebello writes, asking why. The banns had been published months before, since the couple needed dispensations from the respective bishops – him a Catholic, she a Protestant. Neither was Moyra pregnant. "Perhaps Moyra would not have been as yet sufficiently aware that, for better or for worse, her betrothed shielded his privacy with a ferocity that could sometimes be almost preposterous... Quickly will she discover that it would become ever more intense, verging on obsession, as the years went by. When it will be finally eased, Moyra would have been long gone, and so would he. For Dom at long last decided to throw caution to the winds when he set to writing his memoirs in the mid- 1990s, knowing perfectly well that they would only see the light of the day, if ever, well after his death." Montebello displays the contrast be- tween the unassuming, humble and pi- ous Moyra and Dom the great pretender, larger than life but "the all-too-human Dom nearly nobody could know". Years later, Dom would cry crocodile tears for his loyal and faithful Moyra, his tower of strength. For in the forthcoming years of his marriage and his immersion in- to a lucrative profession and full-time politics, together with his sporting pas- sions, Mintoff's brash and domineering attitude was part of family life at The Olives in Tarxien. "Moyra might have merely put her husband's bullying down to culture... she was an extremely gentle person. However, her husband's attitude was not only a question of sternness. At times it was also the mystifying way with which Dom dealt with his wife and daughters, keeping them on edge lest they peeved him in any way. 'It was as if living in the shadow of a volcano', one of his daughters affirmed graphically many years later. He rarely if ever commended them." Moyra was frugal with money "but not as mean as her husband. None- theless, the girls were brought up with second-hand clothes. Even with Dom's salary from parliament and proceeds from the office, he gave Moyra very little money to run everything in the house and the family, allowing her just a mere £60 a month (some US$470 in today's purchasing power)." Profoundly reli- gious, Moyra discreetly helped count- less vulnerable women make ends meet or doing their shopping. "Undeniably, Moyra's life with Dom was no pleasure cruise. Almost nobody outside the Mintoff's house would ev- er come to know the anguish she went through living with a husband she bare- ly could speak with. It went on behind closed doors, and Moyra herself 'guard- ed this privacy'... Even when, years after Moyra had passed on, Dom confessed that 'I strained and abused her saintly patience', this was a gross understate- ment. To begin with, Dom shouted at Moyra a lot.... 'You're so bloody stupid!' he often yelled at her. 'A f**king ignora- mus!' He went on and on at it, scream- ing his head off, like anything. "Anything could irritate him or trigger off his fury... Moyra never shouted back. She loved him dearly, and it was nigh impossible for the terrified children to comprehend why she put up with him while he went into these terrible invec- tives, incessantly bellowing from wher- ever he was, downstairs or upstairs. Though the bullying was habitually more verbal than physical, sometimes Dom did indeed go as far as striking his wife, very often by kicking her hard. Moyra only cried her eyes out. She crept to some corner and wept alone to her- self. Sometimes, at night, perhaps when her forbearance was at its limit, she broke down beside her elder daughter's bed. "Moyra could not have been happy..." *** M intoff 's "closet narcissism", his fear of dirt or illness as harbingers of premature death, and hence his need for cleanliness and physical exercise, perhaps propelled his insistence that Moyra and his children, Yana and Anne, comply with his foibles. "He vehemently detested for them to have friends of their own... Dom would actually check on Moyra's and his daughters' friends, and actually prevent them from meeting them if, for whatever reason, they were not to his liking... for them it was either his crowd or nothing." Dom made his dislike of Moyra's family clear early on – they only ever visited once. Over a 13-year 'interregnum' from 1958 to 1971, Dom built a property fortune: 18 separate purchases esti- mated at present-day values of US$2 million, and 16 sales for US$3m. In 1962 he could afford a Mercedes from West Germany. He had US$80,000 in rents by 1968, a building site he leased out for US$100,000 (together with five others, two of whom his brothers), to- gether with a one-sixth key money for the site of US$1.5 million. Big money for the 1960s where low-grade salaries started at £7 (about today's US$550) a week. Apart from speculative purchas- es, he built Ix-Xabbatur at Baħrija and L-Għarix at Delimara, his private hide- outs. Here he would have enjoyed the com- pany of his confidants, as well as his in- timates. Moyra would not have been surprised at the story reproduced in July 1977 by the Nationalist Party's English-lan- guage newspaper The Democrat, repro- duced from Jack Piler's report in Lon- don tabloid Reveille, on an alleged tryst between Dom and the young actress Charlotte Rampling, during the filming of Orca in Malta (or did he just make a move with her?). The police prosecuted for criminal libel, and the court found for Mintoff. But according to claims by Mintoff confidant Lino Cassar (editor of the satirical Ix-Xewka, also deceased) to the late minister Joe Grima (relayed to Montebello), Dom had taken Rampling to Paradise Bay... "and there became in- timate with her." Truth, or just part of the Mintoff legend? Many of Mintoff's close confidants at the time, male and female, opened up to Montebello about the fiery premier's personal life. "Dom's chronic unfaith- fulness might have been as baffling to Moyra as it perhaps was to Dom him- self... Even Dom's young daughters, aged seven and six, were conscious of it. That was in mid-to-late 1950s. Appar- She could not have been happy: left, in 1955, Moyra and Dom before meeting Queen Elizabeth in Malta aboard their royal yacht. Below, with Dom's father Lawrence Dom's go-between was Lino Cassar, who even arranged private viewings of pornographic movies at the Renters cinema in Valletta's Zachary Street. "When it came to lovers, Dom had a further helping hand from his friend Louis Naudi, the handsome womaniser architect, who willingly passed some of his girlfriends to Dom" "Dom's chronic unfaithfulness might have been as baffling to Moyra as it perhaps was to Dom himself... Apparently, Dom's oft-used subterfuge was to befriend the British or Maltese husband of whichever particular married woman he was interested in, and give both all to frequent access to the family's intimate life" CONTINUED FROM PAGE 13