When branding was not necessary

Charles Flores writes about authors and artists who chose to work or live in Malta in the 1960s and 1970s "when no one seemed to mind us as a people, let alone branding us":

..I, for one, was frequently involved with the almost daily chore of carrying a not-so-sober Ernle Bradford from our favourite watering hole to his home and bed, much to the relief of his sweet wife. He was not the only author around. There was Hugh Atkinson and his wife Phoebe who enjoyed flying her private aircraft. One day I was crazy enough to accept her offer of a ride. “I’m sure you’d like to see Kalkara Strand from the air,” she had told me invitingly. As a long sufferer from vertigo, I still get stomach-aches just by reliving the memory.

Derek Maitland was yet another author who made Kalkara his home after having retired from a few years working as a journalist for Australian news sources in Vietnam. His book The Only War We’ve Got was mostly written in his Kalkara home, in between our daily wine-and-pizza bouts of the period..

This same scenario occurred in other towns and villages all over Malta and Gozo. Lija had Desmond Morris. Gudja had Frederic Mullally. Gozo had Nicholas Monsarrat. There were other writers, painters, architects, sculptors and plain old six-penny settlers who chose Malta when they could have had Spain or Cyprus and other sunny spots.

At Kalkara, we also had the fortune to mix with several film stars who happened to be involved in productions taking place at the nearby film facilities in Rinella. And they too seemed to find absolutely nothing wrong with most Maltese they met and, surprise, surprise, drank with in the same village corner pub.

The most popular with the local lads, no doubt, was Lee Marvin who walked all the way to the Strand daily and immediately ordered beer for everyone in sight. The ale kept flowing late into the night when the guy “born under a wandering star” finally hailed a taxi back to his camper in Rinella. There are still pictures, treasured in some Kalkara households, of the many dishevelled youngsters and their famous foreign pursers of those wild nights.

Roger Moore was less eager to follow the beer trail, but having met him one morning while a couple of friends and I idled our time in the vicinity of the huge cannon at Fort Rinella, then in complete and utter neglect, it turned out that he too found us Maltese easy-going enough for company. He wanted to know about the cannon and the fort, about the nearby Wied Ghammieq cemetery… information we gave only too willingly, if somewhat exaggeratedly. For a whole fortnight after, I bought and took him a copy of the old Malta News, which he seemed to enjoy reading with two or three UK papers of the day...