A Coro-nerlude: Malta in the 1950s

This post is a complete non-sequitur.  I hope it may be some light relief to those who want to read something other than news about Corona virus.  I originally started it some years ago, with the intention of capturing some memories of what was for most of us involved, an extraordinary experience in the British Colonies, mostly as a result of WWII, but also to some extent of the Suez Crisis.  In my generation we are, many of us, the diaspora of the major conflict of the middle of the 20th Century.  Although not of very high standard, my father's colour slides capture some of the aspects of life there between 1955 and 1958.  I hope you enjoy it.

A Maltese farmer, probably on his way back from the market

Dghajsa racing, Grand Harbour, Valetta

RFA 'Retainer' leaving Grand Harbour; the old Royal Naval Hospital, at Villa Bighi, as recommended by Nelson as C-in-C Mediterranean, is in the background with the flag flying

Two fishermen - unsure of location.  Typical Malta coastline

MALTA

We travelled to Malta in 1955.  I suppose we must have been well into the Summer term at my little school, Trevose, on the London road leading out to the East of Bath.  Mother recalled us arriving in Grand Harbour, Valletta, on the 1^st of the month, so it was probably the 1^st of June.  This date we recalled because of the emphasis mother put on the amazing heat on our arrival – it was apparently 100 deg F that day.  Whether this was exaggeration or not, I remember the heat, and I remember us going ashore (in something) and landing at the old Customs’ House quay, and some delay and frustration in the heat, before we moved off.  I don’t remember how we arrived at where we were to stay, but I know that first of all we lived for a while at the Plevna Hotel, a family run hotel in Sliema.

Being naïve about ships at the age of seven, I had no idea why the pleasant and beautiful breezy day as we rolled through the last few miles of the Mediterranean Sea towards Valetta had suddenly become so hot.  Ignorant of the generation of wind by a moving ship, I am sure I could not work out why the temperature had risen so.  We had enjoyed a wonderful two weeks on board ship, the longest I was to spend on a boat for the next forty years….

I dimly recall the excitement of the start of the voyage.  We went to stay with Dad’s colleague Sid White, in Plymouth.  Their house looked out at the newly built toll bridge across the Tamar.  I presume we sailed from Devonport, and we definitely sailed on a RFA (Royal Fleet Auxiliary) vessel, (in our case, she was called ‘Amherst’) as did most families accompanying their parents to overseas Admiralty postings.  John and I must have been warned about seasickness, something we had obviously never experienced before, and I must have observed that there was no problem at all as our vessel glided away from Plymouth.  I remember one of the crew saying ‘Wait ‘til we’re in the Bay of Biscay before you say that!’  The Bay of Biscay came soon enough, and I remember feeling awful and lying in my bunk.  My porthole was above the waterline, but I remember seeing the sea crashing against it.  Whether it was because the sea state improved, or because we found our sea legs I don’t know, but with the change in the weather came days on deck, when we learned how to play deck quoits, and about the mysteries of the ship – why did it have that rope trailing out behind with a mini-propeller on it (the log), why was one of the officers called ‘Sparks’, and so on.  In the lounge we found a variety of games including a primitive Lotto machine, turned by hand, with beautifully made wooden balls with the numbers on from 1 to 99.  We saw dolphins, and never seemed to tire of watching the cream of the wake cut the blue of the water behind us.

We arrived in Gibraltar.  Here, some former colleagues of Dad’s from a previous posting welcomed us, and took us around the island.  We probably stayed between 2 and 4 days here.  I had been primed with the stories of the wild apes that lived on the top of the rock, and sure enough we were taken up by car to see them.  Before long we were back on the Amherst, for the trek eastwards across the Mediterranean to Malta.  On this part of the voyage I can remember is the contrast of the creamy white wake, and the rich blue of the sea, and never a trace of seasickness now, as we rolled our way to Malta.

I saw the Grand Harbour so many times after that, and again in recent years on visits.  How can I say what effect it had on me?  Nearly 50 years later I can’t remember the impact, but it must have been extraordinary.  Even today I am amazed by the height of the bastions around the harbour.  It must have been with a feeling of awe that we disembarked for our new life on this strange and rocky island.

We didn’t have to go to school immediately.  The Plevna Hotel had the advantage of being right behind the Sliema seafront, and we spent time at Tigne beach.  Of course Tigne, like so many Maltese shores is not a beach, but cut into the rock were some shallow swimming pools with a channel connecting them with the open sea.  John and I had had some preliminary trips to the Beau Street baths in Bath, but we certainly couldn’t swim.  Mum had been a good swimmer, with life saving medals, and was keen to teach us.  I remember the first day that I managed to pluck up the courage to float on my back, to let my head tip backwards, and look at the sky above, and to hear Mum’s reassurance that as long as I knew how to do that, I could just float, and I wouldn’t drown.  We learned to doggie paddle, and before long, with the Med’s wonderful buoyancy, we were swimming if not competently, at least confidently.

Our first house was in Rabat.  I know that I couldn’t find it today, because it was a new house on the back edge of Rabat, away from Mdina, and that there were fields on the other side of the road which by now will be built up.  The floors were hard and cold, of stone or marble, with no carpets anywhere.  Things broke easily, and the edges of things hurt.  Mum and Dad hired a maid.  I know they did this because I can only remember one thing about her.  Mum must have asked her to get John and me our breakfasts.  With a cereal bowl in front of me I sat horrified as she put her hand into the cornflake packet, pulled out a handful, put it in the bowl, and then repeated the process.  ‘Mum, mum she’s putting her hand into the cornflake packet.’  The poor woman had probably never seen breakfast cereals in her life before.

We must have lived in Rabat for longer than I subsequently imagined, because it was long enough for Mum and Dad to acquire a car.  It was our first car.  In Bath in the early 1950’s it seemed normal to travel on a bus, though most often, even if we were going into Bath, we walked.  Occasionally we travelled with friends who had a car.  The only cars I remember belonged to my parents’ friends who were vets – Arthur Boughton who had a Morris Oxford, and Ray Pryce, who I think had a Rover.  Most people who lived in Malta bought a car during their stay there.  If you had owned a car for a year there was no import tax to pay on reimporting it to the UK.

We must have been primed by Mum that something special was up.  I remember being outside our house in Rabat in the afternoon sunshine.  A sparkling new grey and wood Morris Minor traveller roared up the dusty road (this is how I remember that the road was not yet surfaced) with Dad in his naval whites summer uniform behind the wheel, and as it came to a halt I remember the click of the handbrake ratchet.  This allowed us to travel around the island, and it also led to mother’s first driving lessons, from Dad, and from a driving instructor, Charlie Brincat.  Mother’s cussedness was a feature of her driving lessons.  When we went for trips around Malta mother would drive, with my patient and mild-mannered father giving instruction.  There were outbursts of temper, and I remember sitting quiet and awed in the back seat as the car lurched up a hill start, or as mother double declutched down through the gears (double declutching was a compulsory part of the Maltese driving test despite the new fangled synchromesh on the Morris’s gears).  When Mum eventually took the driving test, which was always administered by and supervised by a policeman, her driving instructor was allowed in the back of the car.  His car was an open top Morris Minor, with a cracked rear view mirror.  Amiably enough the policeman said ‘I see you have not fixed your mirror, Charlie’ to which Charlie replied ‘What is behind, let it look out for itself’ with a Maltese nonchalance, and the appropriate cadence of words indicating a simple fact of existence.  Our car came from the Mizzi garage, and was named by mother ‘Mizzi’ (pronounced Mitzee), and received the registration plate 14722.  Mizzi had a divided front windscreen, and was the first of our Maltese Morris Minor Traveller’s.  The car which we acquired later, probably one year before our reposting to the UK, had a curved one piece windscreen, still with the 848cc engine, and became 19639.

My memories are hazy about starting school at Verdala.  It’s possible that we started in the summer, for the final part of the summer term.  I rather think we did because John definitely only commenced school in the following September, at which time he was five, and I remember feeling that I was an old hand when he started, and what on earth was all the fuss about.

Transport to school was through an elaborate system of pickups by school buses.  Maltese buses are famous tourist attractions even now, and surely no Verdala schoolchild can forget those magnificent Dodge buses, in beautiful colours, each one signifying its own particular village, with their gleaming chrome, their poop-poop hand blown trumpet like horns, and the religious images that protected us (and the driver), illuminated or otherwise up above the driving position.  Sometimes they were just images, sometimes a veritable tableau or shrine.  There were no doors – at least none that closed.  The driver’s son (oh how we envied him) stood nonchalantly on the steps of the bus, holding on to the chrome handle, and as often as not, holding out his own home made bamboo windmill to whirl excitingly in the breeze as the bus lurched along.  If we were lucky he taught us how to make them with a penknife and some bamboo.  At some time after that kites became the rage, made from fine tissue paper or greaseproof paper, and bamboo as well.  The glue used was flour paste.  The driver’s boy taught us how to make them too.

Sometimes, trips to school were halted by a donkey in the road.  I remember Malta as being the first time I ever heard that unearthly hee-haw sound.  Donkeys were everywhere.  Donkey and cart was a common means of transport for everything.  On a few occasions, we would be penned behind a funeral procession, and were late for school.  No vehicle ever overtook a funeral procession.  Most funerals were very traditional.  Black horses pulling a transparent glass carriage, in which resided the coffin.  Black and violet crepe were everywhere.  The extravagance and the imagery of Maltese Catholicism were scary, coming from England with its lack of figurative representation of religion.  This was especially so because the only church John and I had been to was Presbyterian, which was the complete antithesis of Catholic iconography.

Verdala school is now quite celebrated, despite the fact that it only existed from 1949 to 1976.  It has its own website, dedicated to revisiting the experience (strange for us all) of a Naval primary school run by a strange mix of staff which included some local Maltese teachers.  The headmaster was a serving naval officer, and dressed in naval uniform.  It was ensconced in the grounds of a former prison in Cospicua, to the south of Valetta.  The buses from all over the island (there was no ‘school run’) arrived in the huge dry moats of the enormous fortifications surrounding the school playground, and we poured off them, up the steep slope that led under the fortress walls, and inside to a wide open space of compressed sandy ground and concrete. Around the area, some impressive old buildings, 19^th century I suspect for the most part, contained a large hall which doubled as gymnasium and canteen, and some of the other buildings contained the classrooms.  Buildings were erected during our stay – there was a new music room for instance, and another wide expanse of ground beyond the quadrangle was our sports field and athletics area.  This again was just compressed sandy earth.  Our football boots did not have studs in them, they would have been of no use, the boots had compressed leather bars across the sole, which provided a minimal amout of grip, and one of my memories is the painful barking of skin, which occurred during football.

Marbles - a favourite game

The climbing frames - although I don't remember it as so, it seems that the girls took one and the boys took another.  Must have been winter time because of the sweaters

The boys' climbing frame - who are they and where are they now?

School sports, the tug-of-war.  I note Bill Willsher and Peter Ross, but not sure about the judge

School sports, fathers' race

School sports - mothers' race

The teaching however was good, and there must have been a certain smattering of eccentricity among the staff.  Molly Vasey taught us Marion Richardson handwriting, but I don’t think I had enough lessons, because my writing, though legible thanks to her, has been in a very quirky, semi-italic script since.  It is however, better than most doctors.  She stayed on in Malta, but I think she had to move out when Mintoff, the Prime Minister, moved firmly into anti-colonialist mode, and forbade foreign nationals from owning property on the island.  Ironic when they are only too pleased to have Manchester United footballers there now.  Molly ended up teaching in Japan, and remained loosely in touch with my mother for years.  There was an eccentric music mistress of Maltese extraction, Miss Candy, who wore flowing dresses and enormous amounts of jewellery, especially bangles, which rattled as she played the piano.  I had recorder lessons from Miss Kernahan, which was a boon, and allowed me to begin to learn the guitar later on, when my parents bought me one for my tenth birthday.  There was a witty Yorkshireman, Jack Ouseby, who I am still in touch with, who remained in Malta for some years, but then returned to the UK, where he has written successful children’s TV plays for Yorkshire television.  Needless to say, television was unknown in Malta.  There were tatty old wireless sets which said ‘Rediffusion’ and had two fixed channels, A and B.  Having been used to Uncle Mac and children’s favourites in Bath before leaving, I’m surprised that I cannot remember anything at all about the radio in Malta.  I know that we used to listen because my first memories of pop songs came during those years.  The usual 1950’s favourites were played – Alma Cogan, Doris Day.  I do remember Bill Haley because I had the sheet music for some of his songs, presumably after I had acquired my guitar in January 1958.

Miss Pam Lock was my form teacher in the first full year at Verdala, and she became a close friend of Mum’s.  I know that my first attempts at essays were uniformly hopeless, and consisted of about two lines.  Eventually I got the hang of it, wrote masses (some would say far too much), and won the school prize in my last year.  I can picture the book that I received as a prize now, but it’s not with me.  It vanished, either by accident or design, as did so many of John’s and my toys as we rattled around the world, living in an average of more than one residence a year.

During my first year at Verdala, my aptitude for Maths was plain, so it was with some surprise that Miss Lock had to reduce my marks for getting sums wrong.  In those days she wrote the sums in chalk up on the board.  It turned out that when she looked closely, the answers were right, but they were to the wrong sums.  I was making mistakes in copying the numbers from the board.  Whether because of the strong Malta sunlight or no, I was becoming short sighted.  At first of course, there was anxiety that I was going blind.  I was taken to see an extremely old and famous Maltese ophthalmologist, Count Sir Luigi Preziosi.  I remember the intensely white light glaring into my eye.  The upshot was nothing more than my lifelong sentence to wear glasses, which has probably protected me as well as hindered me, especially when performing operations.  The occasional unexpected jet of blood from a small artery has usually landed harmlessly on the front of my specs.  Many years later, when I mentioned Dr Preziosi to an ophthalmology consultant, I ventured to say that I believed he was extremely famous.  “Famous my boy if you believe that his major contribution to ophthalmology was to punch a hole in the eye with a device like a red hot poker to relieve glaucoma.”

During the summer term, school started early and finished at lunchtime.  Otherwise, lunch was served in several sittings in the school hall, by the NAAFI (Navy, Army, And Air Force Institute).  We were given our little blue tickets every day to take to school.  I think the meal cost 1/- 4d (about 6p nowadays).  I can only remember one of the cooks – Maltese, sweating, enormous, laughing, hoicking huge trays of spam fritters around.  Spam fritters, banana fritters, semolina with jam…

Perhaps more of school later.  I should pass on to other aspects of Malta.

We did not stay in Rabat for too long.  I remember that we stayed long enough to experience one of the Saint’s days for which Malta is famous.  Nobody went to work, and there was frenzied activity throughout Rabat for the whole day.  As evening came on, a huge float, carried by the local men, and surmounted by the figure of the Virgin Mary, was carried on shoulders around the streets.  There was wailing and crying, which I later discovered were entreaties to the Virgin to save some ailing member of the family, or of penitence for sins.  Then, in the field across the road from our house began the fireworks!  The Maltese have always admired noise in their fireworks, the loudest being the ‘mortali’ (a rough phonetic version of the Maltese word).  I understood it to mean ‘mortal’, or deadly.  The mortali consists of two shells, one to propel the charge into the air, and the other to go off high up in the air with a huge bang.  Sometimes the planned trajectory doesn’t quite work, and there were always fatal accidents among the men who heroically volunteered to set off these dangerous items.  Mother told us that death during this activity was regarded as especially esteemed – the victim going straight to heaven without time in limbo, or in purgatory (needless to say we knew nothing of the whys and wherefores of Catholicism).  Once we left Rabat, we moved to a flat in Dingli Circus, in Sliema.  The flats are still there – Nelson Flats they’re labelled, though I had forgotten the name until I saw it again for the first time since 1957, in 2002, on holiday with Anna and Katie.  I stood there, nearly half a century later, older, much sadder, perhaps wiser, and wished my childhood back, the photograph cannot speak the volumes that are in it.

We acquired a new maid.  I’m not sure whether we went through one or two.  We probably did.  One of them, Giovanna, who babysat and cooked, remained a friend.  For many years afterwards she apparently ran a bar at Luqa airport.  I recall the first time we came back to the flat to an intense smell of cooking that produced an instant sensation of nausea.  It was garlic, lots of it, and the first time that I had smelt it.  What poor tastes we must have had in the England of the 1950’s.

Another unwelcome visitation to the flat, and one which we did not get rid of so easily, or accustom ourselves to were the cockroaches.  They lived somewhere in the kitchen, in the warmest spot, you usually heard them rather than saw them, but they were unpleasant to catch sight of as well.  I could never bring myself to squash them they seemed so big and made a substantial mess.

Another intruder, if you will, was the noise.  Malta was, and I expect still is, noisy.  In the well of the buildings around us were the neighbours’ chickens, and rooster.  Apart from the noise they made, the neighbours were always shouting at one another in Maltese, ‘Aima Maria, Madonna…..’.

Living in Dingli Circus, we were only about 200 yards away from the sea.  We used to walk down to the shore and swim close to the promenade.  There were no sandy beaches there.  It was swim directly in the sea, and come out by ascending a metal ladder set into the rock.  Once during a storm, a huge waterspout developed, and we walked down to the prom to see it.  It looked just like the tornado in Wizard of Oz.  Imagine my dismay when some seven years later, my physics teacher in Bath denied that waterspouts were physically possible!  An exciting sight for us in 1955 was the sight of a real shipwreck, the ‘Star of Malta’, a vessel running between Malta and Sicily.  She was returning from Sicily in thick fog when she struck the reef of Dragonara Point.  She was a tourist attraction for some months before she was refloated.

I can also remember being amazed at the Maltese swimming in the sea.  I think it was probably a convent outing.  The women just walked in to the sea in their outdoor clothing, festooned with the black coverings that traditional Maltese women wore.  After some desultory paddling around they walked out again!

Despite the noise and the neighbours, we were happy in Dingli Circus.  Jack and Marion Ousbey were in the same flats, and I remember being astounded to see their new daughter, Belinda, completely naked, aged one week, being carried through by her mother.  I had never seen a naked baby before!  Our car gave us substantial freedom however, and weekends were usually times when we had at least one trip to a beach, or to the favoured place for us to picnic and swim, the admiralty depot at Kalafrana.  The admiralty and naval engineers had enhanced this rocky bit of coast so that there were steps to get out of the water (iron ladders), two diving boards, and a water slide.  By late summer in 1955 we were confident swimmers.  There was a raft moored about thirty yards off shore, covered with coconut matting for sunbathing on.  Coconut mats allowed us to whizz down the water slide.  There was no sand, but this was all to the good when it came to cleaning ourselves up, or eating picnic lunches.  In consequence of the rocky shore, the water was crystal clear.  John and I were perpetually frustrated by virtue of mother’s diktat that we must wait for one hour after lunch before swimming again.  All the other children only had to wait for half an hour.  Mother would speak of dire consequences of getting cramp and drowning.  Kalafrana was truly heaven for us.

The ritual would be the same.  Usually we went on a Sunday.  Before this we had to suffer going to the Presbyterian church in Valetta.  If it was winter time John and I were forced to wear kilts, but in the summer it was shorts, probably with a tie, though our usual informal attire was an Aertex shirt.  Socks and sandals were the footwear.  There would be a hymn and some announcements, and then we children would troop off into another room for Sunday school.  After the usual session on one of the parables, or trying to imagine Jesus’ ordeal in the desert (much easier to imagine in rocky sun-baked Malta), or learning the names of the books of the bible by heart, we would rejoin the adults, there would be a few pleasantries outside the church, and then, probably about 1115 or so, we would get into the car (always an unwelcome experience, trying to avoid touching any bare skin on the searingly hot metal), and drive to Kalafrana.  Sometimes, if it was not a Sunday, or if we had not been to church, we would organise ourselves together with the Lavers’ family (Ron, Gladys, and their daughter Naomi), and if we were lucky, ride in his Morris Oxford, which was faster than our mere Morris Minor, perhaps going a different route along the runway of the old Safi airstrip, and getting up to the dizzy speed of 60 miles an hour!

We often picnicked with other families, going on adventurous trips of at least 15 miles to other deserted beaches.  All the service families knew of the few sandy beaches there were.  The ones which attracted fewest visitors were near the top of the island (North), such as Paradise Bay or Armier Bay.  The largest, and the only one with yellow rather than white sand, was at Ghajn-Tuffieha, where there were many steps down to the beach, but a big expanse of sand when you reached it.  Nowadays named prosaically ‘Golden Sands Bay’ with a ghastly hotel on the cliff top, it’s probably one to avoid.  Sometimes our decision had to be dictated by the state of the oil on the beaches (thanks to tankers scrubbing their tanks), or to plagues of jellyfish which sometimes afflicted the island, varied sites being affected, dependent on wind and currents.  There were big sales of eucalyptus oil for removing the thick black crude oil which we sometimes acquired.

At some time in the late summer of 1955, swimming ended for the season.  I expect this was late September, or possibly October.  We did not swim at all again until, in the early Spring of 1956, Mum and Dad decided the weather was nice enough for a first visit of the season to Kalafrana.  I remember that the water was choppy, and that I dived off the diving board with every confidence, but coming up, and perhaps getting a wave in the face, I realised that I couldn’t swim.  Dad came to the rescue!  Soon the confidence came back.  Looking out across the bay from Kalafrana we would see flying boats coming in to land, their keels kissing the surface of the water, turning the deep blue to a line of cream as they tore across the sea.  Behind the swimming area were the storage piles of munitions in enormous boxes, a little bit like the massive sea containers that one sees nowadays at any port.  They were piled several boxes high, probably up to about 20 feet up.  It was exciting to clamber up and over the top of the heaps, completely unconscious of the gleaming torpedoes within.  We knew that they were torpedoes because by peering through the cracks in the door of the maintenance sheds (locked at weekends) we could see them sitting on stands ready to be assembled or stripped down.

As we grew older, our excursions to swimming spots grew more varied.  A favourite was Peter’s Pool.  This involved a walk from the nearest parking place, and swimming was into deep deep water, diving straight off high sandstone rocks into water of wonderful clarity.  I remember some Maltese spear fishermen showing me how they found octopuses on the bottom, by the simple expedient of cutting out the bottom of a biscuit tin, and glazing a square piece of glass into the gap.  The underwater view was breathtaking.  Octopuses were a source of fascination and terror – we never knew quite how big an octopus would have to be before its suckers were strong enough to hold you to the bottom until you drowned.  As far as we were concerned the only good octopus was a dead octopus!  Apart from jellyfish, we were never particularly frightened when swimming.  There were occasional scare stories about sharks.  The Navy would sometimes issue a warning that schools of sharks had been seen in such and such a spot, but we never saw any.  One of the teachers, a Mrs Smedley, lost her husband to a shark, but accounts of the incident were unclear, and all that we knew for sure was that Mr Smedley had vanished without trace and was presumed drowned or eaten by the shark.  Once or twice during our three years in Malta I remember going for a midnight swim.  Fortunately, none of us knew about sharks more commonly venturing in to shore during the night.  I expect the trips were in the late evening, and not at midnight, but they were always in the summer, and the fantastic feature was the stunning phosphorescence that we stirred up as we waded through the shallows of the sea.

The miracle of modern search engines has found the full story of the disappearance of Jack Smedley, which happened in July 1956.  There was an eyewitness, a Tony Grech, and it certainly sounds as though he was taken by a great white shark.  I do remember a vague fear thereafter for a while but being children these thoughts did not take long to evaporate.

The other scary event that happened during my first year or so in Malta was the so-called Ghallis Tower murder.  The Ghallis Tower was one of the chain of lookout towers that dotted the shoreline.  It was easily accessible from the road.  A murder victim was found in the ruined basement of the building.  The actual crime took place in February 1955, but the trial took place in 1956.  I was now able to read, and saw this story in the paper.  Not long afterwards we persuaded Dad to stop and walk to the tower with us.  I had nightmares on one or two occasions after that.

The year after our arrival was probably the most spectacular in Malta since WWII.  It was the time of the Suez Canal crisis.  I had no appreciation of the wider significance, but I do remember Dad taking us to the top of the Upper Baracca, which overlooked most of the Grand Harbour.  He made a big thing of it, and though I don’t remember his words, I knew that he wanted us to see it because, he told us, we would probably never see quite so many British naval vessels at one time ever again.  In this I suspect, despite fleet reviews, and later the Falklands, he was right.  As a small boy I was most excited by the aircraft carriers, and would make Airfix models of them.  HMS Eagle, Bulwark, and Albion were the carriers in Grand Harbour that day.

Grand Harbour, the fleet assembling, dghajsa in the foreground

Fleet dressed overall, unsure of the occasion

Grand Harbour

Our summer uniform at Verdala was a khaki shirt and shorts, with a woven wool tie in the colour of our school house.  Mine was yellow, John’s blue.  I know he was in Drake house.  Predictably, naval connections were everywhere.  The red tie was Nelson.  I think mine was White (who was he?)  The green one was Stevenson.  Morning services used to be taken by the headmaster, but often by a naval padre or chaplain.  ‘Eternal father, strong to save, whose arm doth bind the restless wave’ was a regular, and I am sure it was the hymn sung on Trafalgar day.  Having recently with much emotion celebrated the 200^th anniversary of the battle, I’m sure that our school service in 1955 on the 21^st October (it was a Friday) was very important for everybody.  Dinned into us with regularity, there can’t be many children from R.N. School, Verdala, Malta, G.C., Earth, Solar System (as we wrote in our books) who have forgotten that the immortal day was October 21^st, 1805.  A good feature of the summer term was the early start (8 I think) and the afternoon off.  On one occasion, I remember as if it were yesterday, the naval padre got up on stage and told us that there had been a terrible tragedy, and we were to pray for those affected, because a plane carrying the whole Manchester United football team had crashed in the snow in Germany, and many of them had been killed.

During my time in Malta, I was introduced to the Cubs, the junior organisation of the Scout movement.  We met in the evenings in a church hall somewhere in Sliema, and most of our activities and ceremonies were outside in the dusty garden (there were trees but I don’t think there was any grass).  Some or our education in this sessions came from an elderly gentleman whose name I cannot remember, but he had known Baden-Powell, and had served in the Boer war.  It was only 1955, so I guess he might have been, say 20, at the beginning of the century, and therefore around 75 when talking to us about his experiences in South Africa.  Our main skill at Cubs was learning to tie knots and to light fires.  Lighting fires was not very difficult in Malta.  Some of the schoolboys had magnifying glasses and the lens, concentrating the sunlight, would easily set a piece of newspaper burning.  Sometime during our stay, Lady Baden Powell came to inspect the Malta Scouts and Cubs; a big affair, with our tiny troop lined up somewhere between Floriana and Valletta.  An old lady in the far distance stood on a rostrum.  We marched somewhere and that was it.

Some time during our later years in Malta, mother decided I had to begin French lessons, so once a week I walked up Dingli street to the home of a lady who started me off on French, with my black cahier (one of the first words I had to write in it).  More excitingly and lastingly, for my tenth birthday, January 21^st, 1958, I was given a guitar.  It was around ¾ size, had steel strings, and I commenced lessons with Mr ‘Micky’ Micallef (teacher and star of Maltese radio) once a week.  Unfortunately, we left Malta a few months later, and in the wilds of Pembrokeshire the guitar lay fallow, until some friend showed me a few chords, and I stumbled through Buddy Holly’s ‘Oh Boy’ and Ricky Nelson’s ‘Pretty Blue Eyes’.  One of my presents from a friend on my birthday was a collection of sheet music from Bill Haley and the Comets.

Malta is a beautiful island, but you have to look carefully for the beauty.  In spring, for a short while, there is greenery and wildflowers.  Hidden away, nowhere near where tourists venture (but explored in detail by my father, and by us, trailing along with him) were deserted walks along cliff tops or in undercliff areas on the west coast of the island, sometimes finding families living virtually as troglodytes in house built into caves in the cliff, looking after a few sheep or goats.  There would be a few rough stone walls surrounding makeshift pens, and from every nook and over every stone wall would lurch, sometimes tower, the ubiquitous prickly pear, with its fruit protected by small sharp instantly detachable spines.  Everywhere we walked there were scurrying lizards, or we would watch geckos in the evening, walking slowly down the walls, waiting for a fly.  Or grasshoppers jumped away from our every step.  We had no fear of snakes.  One of the first things that Dad had told us was that there were no snakes on Malta.  This was due to St Paul, who had been bitten by a snake which came out of some firewood that he had used to build his fire on the rocky headland of St Paul’s Bay.  Thereafter, there were no snakes.  On spring or early summer evenings, in the right place, there would be the scent of orange blossom, or great displays of bougainvillea.  Wild freesias with their beautiful scent were easily found on the wilder walks.  Later in the year, atop every house, even the most modest, pumpkins would be stored to ripen.  Melons were a ubiquitous fruit – but their subtle taste didn’t suit me as a child.  I preferred watermelons, though the pips were a nuisance.

Or we would wander down small streets in some of the less frequented villages.  On summer evenings, old ladies, always dressed in black, would sit outside their houses, making lace, clicking and flicking the little wooden bobbins attached to the delicate cord to weave the pattern of the mat, or tablecloth, that they were working on.  Sometimes, seemingly even older ladies, would hobble down the streets towards the church for the evening mass, dressed in their traditional faldetta, a stiff hooded garment that covers the head in a broad curve, and flows down into a long cloak.  These were always black, except in one or two villages.

Churches galore.  The current total for Malta and Gozo is 359, in an area about one third of the size of Greater London.  The great Maltese period of church building came later than the period in which the great basilicas and cathedrals of Italy were designed and constructed.  Rather than Renaissance therefore, the typical Maltese church is Baroque – the greatest concentration of Baroque Roman Catholic churches in the world.  We visited many – most of which gave me the same impression – ornate scrolling exterior architecture with dark, foreboding spaces inside, full of gory imagery, or statuary of saints whose martyrdom had not particularly troubled post-reformation England.  Mosta however, is unique.  A huge domed church, a little resembling the Pantheon.  On a never-to-be-forgotten day, my father took me to St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valetta.  This is called so because it shares the honour of being the island’s senior cathedral with the ancient cathedral in Mdina, the island’s old capital.  I can dimly remember the ornate chapels of the various orders of the Knights of St John, and the rich marble floor decoration, but the moment which makes me shiver even now is when we descended into the vault or chapel where hangs the great, perhaps the greatest, Caravaggio painting, the ‘Beheading of John the Baptist’.  I doubt that many exhibition attenders have ever seen this if they haven’t visited Malta.  The painting is just too big to transport.  It occupies an entire wall of the chapel.  The detail of the gory scene, viewed by an eight or nine-year-old, was so intense and visceral, I can remember the moment now.  I feel very lucky to have seen it at that age.  Even going back to see it 40 years or so later, I was still impressed by its size.  I had assumed that the distortion of perception which we feel as a child would leave me feeling cheated when I saw it again, but no, it was still magnificent.

I’m not sure how long we lived in Dingli Circus.  Perhaps it was a year, maybe more, maybe less.  Eventually however, we moved to a new flat in a purpose built block called Egmont Close.  I think this must have been specifically for Admiralty families.  I know we weren’t the first ones in, because of the smell from the rubbish chute.  Living on the third or fourth floor, the kitchen rubbish was collected in communal bins in the basement of the block.  All the garbage went down a chute mounted on the outside wall of the kitchen.  You tilted a weighted flap back to expose a square metal chute, tipped whatever it was in, and bingo, down it went.  Can you imagine a more daft way of dealing with communal waste in a country like Malta?  In the summer, the smell coming up from the chute was appalling.  There were other vagaries about living in Malta.  The island’s water at that time was awful.  It was salty, and as it emerged from the taps it was not particularly nice to drink.  The Admiralty had a desalination or water distilling plant at the dockyard, and our water for drinking and cooking came in a huge glass carboy (previously acid containing), contained in a metal frame and cushioned by a wicker cradle.  For the first time, we had a fridge.  It ran off paraffin, and the flame for the heater was viewed by a little metal reflector below the fridge.  The flame had to be blue, and was regularly inspected.  While living there we acquired a tortoise which was fed on lettuce, and after much pestering (many of our friends had one), a budgerigar called Bertie.  Bertie was well trained, flew around the room, perched on your finger, said a few words, and enjoyed eating the edge of the newspaper.  A few families bought dogs, but Mum and Dad were reluctant, pointing out that 6 months of quarantine would be mandatory if we were to take it home to UK.  Some friends had a dog and then passed it on to other families when they left.  Everybody left, sooner or later.  I think three years was about the average – that’s what we enjoyed, enjoy being the right word.

The main social occasion for colonials was the ‘cocktail party’.  I suppose it’s possible that dinner parties happened, though I don’t think it was a particularly big thing.  Most people had fairly limited fare, and there wasn’t much point in inviting people over to eat the same thing that they were likely to be eating anyway.  Most of the social activity and fun was at the weekend and at the beach, at least it was for us.  Occasionally on special occasions, our housemaid would stay as babysitter and mother would dress in a gaudy print dress with belt – a little like the Ava Gardner Hollywood style that now we would associate with the 50’s, and off they would go.  By the time they came home we were usually in bed.

On one special occasion we had a family outing together however, to see the circus.  As I remember it the company was called Circus Pellegrini, but I may be wrong.  It was a traditional circus, but with a number of things that wouldn’t be allowed now, such as a lion cub being carried round the edge of the ring for children in the front seats to stroke.  I remember the trapeze act as particularly good, and of course the cantering round of the horses with acrobats performing on their backs.

Treats were rare in Malta.  One evening however the Captain of RFA Retainer invited our family to come aboard to see the exciting new film, ‘The Dam Busters.’  We sat outside on the deck; some rows of seats were provided, and the film was projected onto a large white sheet used as a screen.  Between reels, the mariner operating had to change the film cassettes.  Perhaps our most remarkable holiday was a tour of the Sicilian coast, on one of the admiralty supply ships.  Families were allowed the occasional trip if the vessel were not on operational duty.  Some luck families made it to Cyprus, some to Tripoli, but my main recollection is my first experience of eating tagliatelle at some port in Sicily.  We did manage to see the Graeco-Roman theatre at Taormina and Mount Etna.

Grand Harbour, leaving Customs House quay, view of Upper Baracca and the lift

There was rarely any central heating in Maltese houses.  If heating were required it was often with paraffin heaters.  The paraffin man would come to the house with his lorry (container section green; driver’s cab red) and would dole it out from a pipe at the rear of the vehicle.  I learnt some Maltese swear words from these travelling sellers.  Much of people’s groceries were bought from itinerant grocers, loaded on the back of donkey cart.  Food was fairly basic.  Coca Cola and Seven Up were sold in bars.  There were few sweet treats.  A poor imitation of a KitKat was a ‘Clarnico’ bar.  Ice cream came from the Wembley ice cream factory.  At times in the summer, the heat would be so intense that we virtually all stopped eating – no one had any appetite.  At such times Mother would try to persuade us to eat a salad.  Swimming was the only antidote to the heat.

Much has been written about our experiences at Verdala School by other pupils.  All games in the playground were very simple.  Marbles was hugely popular, and ‘Jacks’, where you bounce a ball and pick up little six legged jacks before you caught it again, was too.  The girls also played hopscotch or skipping, and both boys and girls used to climb up and down the climbing frames – giant nets erected by the Navy on steel poles.  People would fall off them regularly, but there was little concern about health and safety.  Towards the end of our time there, one American pupil (I envied the American boys their crew cuts – not allowed by my mother), brought in a record player.  Of course this only played 78 rpm records.  The only song I remember was Paul Anka singing ‘I love you baby’.  It might have been his only record.  As such I can still remember the words by heart.  There were occasional fights but these were very rare indeed.  Sometimes the Army would come to do safety demonstrations where usually one squaddy would be playing with a tennis ball, and then purposely not noticing the 3 ton lorry appearing menacingly would lose the ball, run after it and pretend to be run over by the lorry.  On one occasion, and I feel sure my memory is not playing tricks over this, we had the stupendous sight of a Vulcan bomber flying over the playground.  Research suggests that the Vulcan was probably still on proving flights at the time, but all the same it is an indelible memory.  I do remember the playground as being hot, but fortunately I think we must have broken up before the summer really got its hold on us.  Within the classrooms at Verdala though, I never remember feeling overheated.  They were huge buildings, built of thick and solid stone, so the interiors remained cool.

In the main hall, where poignantly I sat in 2010 to listen to a history of the buildings and their graffiti (some dating back to prisoners of war – to think we never noticed), we did PE when it was presumably too hot to go outside, and we had music lessons.  In most years there was a school show, written by the talented Jack Ousbey, with music by Miss Kernahan.  Everybody participated, but the one event I remember was a solo dance by a very pretty girl called Eileen Mocatta, who must have been to ballet classes.  It seemed wonderful.  I saw recently, in the Telegraph obituaries, a mention of a Commander Michael Mocatta – such an unusual name, who was 91 – perhaps her father?  Another schoolfriend whom I initially got to know in the recorder group (thank you Miss Kernahan), was Lesley Collett, who was a spirited and mischievous girl.  I remember her leading me up an impossibly high watch tower down at Kalafrana one summer – there was only a single long ladder up to this viewpoint – how we didn’t fall off and kill ourselves I don’t know.  Lesley led, and I followed!  Having met her again in 2010 – I would have known her anywhere, even after 50 plus years, we are good friends again, and I have the good sense to know when not to follow her.  Our experiences in Malta were a huge bonding time for children – and not especially for each other (because that was impermanent); but to the place, and to the school.  The interest in Verdala now is unbounded, and considering that the school only existed from for 27 years this is remarkable.

As a child, there seems to be an air of permanence about one’s life, but things change eventually.  I felt much older at 10 years of age – I had my own roller skates and with friends would skate all around Sliema, particularly the smooth surface of the promenade.  There were occasional visits to the rink at Spinola.  I didn’t realise at the time that it was a favourite Navy pickup joint.  I had my first kiss there behind the oleander bushes with a girl named Brenda Harvey (we were both on roller skates as I recall).  The rink was often full with RN personnel, whizzing at high speed to impress girls both forwards and backwards around the rink; very dangerous for a small child.  Even more dangerous perhaps were the ‘trains’ that we would form, crouched down on the skates and holding on to the boy in front as we careered down the hill from the back of Sliema into Balluta Bay.  I was also often allowed to go out with friends using the various coloured buses to travel all over the island.  (Every village had its own colour for its buses so the system worked well and it was hard to get lost).  We also played everywhere there was a space, including bomb sites, amidst the rubble of the houses.  I read somewhere that the Germans dropped more high explosive on Malta during WW2 than on the entire British Isles.  The bomb sites seemed normal playgrounds and climbing challenges to us.  I once found a burnt out incendiary bomb in a cellar.  Very occasionally there was trouble – confrontations with Maltese children, which ended with shouted insults and occasionally stone throwing.  There must have been a marked amount of jealousy among some of the young Maltese.  It was of course only 10 years after the war that we landed in Valetta, and I suppose there were still shortages for the islanders.  How anybody can grow anything much on Malta amazes me, but there was a fertile red soil between the stony walls, and much animal manure was available.  The above is a preamble to the fact that we left in about May 1958.

My father, always an adventurous type, had planned that our precious Morris Minor Traveller would take us overland back home.  This necessitated transporting it as cargo (there were no car ferries) to Naples, and we would camp all the way home.  During one of his visits back to UK, Dad had bought a tent and some sleeping bags for us all.  It was planned that we would have a week of trying it out by camping in Gozo.

In common with most other Naval or Admiralty families I suspect, we had no ‘foreign’ holidays during our time in Malta.  But we did venture to the sister island of Gozo, and stayed in the tiny hotel on the waterfront in what was essentially just a tiny fishing village called Xlendi.  The first time we went I remember there was no electricity.  Lighting in the bedrooms was with a paraffin lantern.  It was simple and idyllic.  The water in the long bay was shallow and crystal clear.  There were probably ten to twenty dwellings in Xlendi.  Now there are hundreds.  Gozo is a delightful island, much greener than Malta, and for a long time it remained a bit ‘like Malta used to be.’  Dad’s plan was altogether more rural.  During his longer coastal walks (which we were too young to do) he had come across a beach on the north coast called ‘Ramla’.  Ramla is a derivation of Arabic meaning red, and indeed the sand was so beautiful on Ramla beach that it was golden shading into red.  There was no habitation there.  You walked down a farm track through groves of bamboo to the beach.  On the beach there is a statue of the Madonna on a pedestal.  It carried a light or lantern on the top.  There were few if any visitors.  On some days the only person to visit the beach was a lamplighter who faithfully lit the Madonna’s light.  We must have dug latrines I suspect, because there were no facilities at all.  As the evening light faded bats would swoop low over our campground.  Being only 7 and 10 years of age, my brother and I could hear them quite clearly, a fact which was disbelieved by my mother (she was wrong; children can hear the high pitch of a bat).  The trip was a success, except that our pet tortoise who we had taken with us, marched off into the bamboo groves, and may even be living there now after an interval of about sixty something years.  It left mother with a distrust of and a deep suspicion of the Primus stove, particularly the preliminary need to warm the nozzle with lighted methylated spirits, but we survived.

Some views of Gozo.  This is Xlendi, as it was, and how I wish it could be again.  The hotel is the one room wide, three storey pink building.  No electricity in the hotel rooms, just a paraffin storm lantern

Xlendi; elegant fish or lobster pots

Transporting fish or lobster pots

Another view of idyllic Xlendi

Ramla Beach - site of the camping experiment

My brother on one of Dad's challenging walks, probably near the azure windown, Gozo

Mgarr Harbour

Dad plotted a route which tied in with what he had wanted to do – mostly Italy (he went to evening classes to learn Italian) and the Dolomites and Austria (my mother had romantic ideas about the Tyrolean costumes), and also Switzerland (where at that time there were 12 Swiss Francs to the pound and petrol was extremely cheap).  We even ran out of fuel at the top of an Austrian pass and freewheeled down until we came to Switzerland, which was fairly typical of my father (a Scotsman) though a trifle severe in terms of risk and economy.

So it was that we went down to the Grand Harbour for one last time to watch our Morris Minor Traveller supported by ordinary cargo poles (two between the front wheels and two between the rear wheels) and hoisted up and down into the hold of a rather scruffy looking tub that was to take us to Naples.  Our dreamlike and wonderful three years on the Island was coming to an end.  Dad’s next posting was to the complete antithesis of Malta, a tiny Armament Depot in Trecwn, Pembrokeshire, where to start with I would go back to primary school and be forced to learn Welsh…

And here are some other typical Malta scenes:

A big treat - diving from the Admiral's barge - location uncertain

Location uncertain - could it be Ghajn-Tuffieha?

Malta bus - I think this is Floriana and the Grand Phoenicia Hotel

Cavalier attitude to Malta's historic ruins - probably Tarxien

I'm fairly sure this is the road down to Balluta Bay, where we used to roller skate dangerously

Wied Zurrieq

Winter storm at Tigne, Sliema

Not sure of location - view up towards Floriana?

Blessing of the animals, Rabat

The bishop blesses a donkey - even caged birds were brought for blessings

Assembly of cubs for Lady Baden-Powell's visit

The march past

Perching on the ruined opera house, Valetta, on Kingsway, for a big festa

The procession down Kingsway, now named in the post Mintoff era - Republic Street

I think this is the remains of the Roman aqueduct

The Sliema seafront looking towards Dragonara - perfect roller skating territory

John and I, looking towards St Paul's Bay

San Pawl Tatarja?  Our 'Mizzi' in the background

Typical large fishing boat of the 1950s - possibly Mgarr