A touch of Malta

Wherever one goes in the world, it seems, there is no escaping a touch of Malta and the Maltese, writes Charles Flores:

I am sure many readers have gone through the same experience. Wherever one goes in the world, it seems, there is no escaping a touch of Malta and the Maltese, however small a nation we have been and always will be. And I don’t mean the days when we all used to meet inside the duty-free shops at Heathrow and Fiumicino airports to clear out the chocolate shelves an hour prior to departure.

Social and historical developments over the centuries had of course been the chief reason for this widespread Maltese connection even in the most unlikely places. My first such coincidence, though, was in a rather likely one. I was on my first trip ever to the UK, sitting on a bench inside London’s Victoria Station, and with my luggage safely in view at my feet. That was when railway stations still had benches and the poor hobos had no problem sleeping the night away in relative safety and warmth.

I soon realised an old lady was looking rather curiously at me and my luggage. This was London that had just come out of the Swinging Sixties and one would have thought female hippies wearing beads, sporting peace badges and colourful headbands would be eyeing you rather than this plump, pleasant lady in a twinset. She finally mustered enough courage to approach me.

“I notice you come from Malta,” she told me nicely, having obviously read the label on my luggage, then added: “You see, my son lives in Malta. He is a writer and you may have even heard of him.” The lady, I was to discover, was the mother of Ernle Bradford, famous author of The Great Siege and other books with a Mediterranean theme. Even more amazing was that at that moment in time he was actually living in Kalkara, the very village in the Cottonera area I had left a few hours earlier.

I replied saying Ernle Bradford was a good friend of Malta and explained how we – that’s her son and I with various others – often met inside the murky village corner watering hole for the serious business of taking part in the strictly non-literary activity of boozing. She smiled happily and left to catch her train...