LIFE
in
Maltese military married quarters

Peter Prictoe

Nearly forty years ago I sailed for home in England from Malta's Grand Harbour aboard a Royal Air Force troopship as the last of several generations of my family who had served the British Empire in various parts of the world but particularly on that sun-baked golden coloured island.

Twice before, as a child, I had joined my sailor father in Malta and on the second occasion in, 1934, it was to live in the married quarters attached to Fort Ricasoli at the harbour entrance but built for the familes of the gunners who manned that enormous hundred ton gun at Fort Rinella that my grandfather had known at the end of the last century.

Built in the eighteen eighties, those married quarters were, to my eyes a palatial building and the first that I had lived in that had both electric light and an inside lavatory - though we had no bathroom. The site was magnificent for, from the front we surveyed the south of Malta from Zabbar to the south and sweeping across distant Cottonera, nearby Calcara and the Naval Hospital at Bighi we saw the full extent of Valletta and its suburb of Floriana on our right to the north. From the back we looked to the open sea with the forts of Ricasoli and St Rocco framing the view.

We lived in the large two-storeyed block with a smaller one in front and there was also a school building and a laundry block whilst opposite the gates was a small chapel. By that period the laundry block was disused and we used it as a wet weather playroom whilst the chapel was securely locked up and never opened and though we boys were curious about it we were never able to get in it and to be honest were a little scared. We buried dead pets in its grounds however. The Maltese caretaker lived in a flat in the smaller block but his family grew so rapidly that he was allowed to take over the school as a residence. At that period it was traditional for the Maltese to have very large families.

To the purist the scene was spoilt by the enormous wooden masts of the nearby naval radio station, one 600 foot monster actually stood on the corner of the complex, and the aerials and supporting cables stretched for immense distances and created an unearthly noise in the wind. Malta like most islands is windy but when the north east Gregale sprung up, as it did so often in winter, the shriek was incredible - though one became used to it.

Other noises were provided by the firing on the rifle range whose site is now occupied by Malta Film Facilities that cover the eastern, seaward slope of the ridge than runs south from Fort Ricasoli and near the entrance to the then range still stands the little chapel and mass graveyard that is a memory of the terrible Cholera epidemic of 1835 that took thousands of lives at a period when Malta was particularly subject to epidemics brought in by the extensive maritime trade of the islands. As so many doctors and nurses fell victim the prisoners in Malta's gaol were released so long as they attended the ill and buried the dead.

The great gun, which still remains in its recently renovated fort, is not visible from even its married quarters and deliberately inconspicuous from the sea but it looms above the chapel as one looks south from the latter.

There are a few houses besides the remaining small block but generally there is little sign of life nowadays though until quite recently the fields beside the road that was constructed to serve the line of forts that are strung along the eastern shore were cultivated. These fields, some no greater than a large modern parlour and reputed to be the smallest on the island, were walled to protect the crop from the salt laden spray of the winter gales that encrusted our windows. Farming was hard in Malta in those pre-war days when the the workers planted single seeds in crevices and grew vegetables, vines and fruit on west facing sheltered walls.

The verges and the glacis or cleared killing ground that led up to the outworks of the great Fort Ricasoli (the largest in Malta and indeed of the old empire) are now overgrown with quite large trees in places. In the old days of which I write however the herds of goats that roamed these remote parts of Malta ate every blade of vegetation that showed itself above the ground and the slopes were barren

We relied on itinerant horse drawn traders for vegetables and groceries though could call on the local farmers if necessary and made a weekly trip to Valletta market for meat and fish - though at some seasons of the year I caught surprisingly large fish on very crude equipment. Once a week in the summer a cart from the Dockyard brought huge blocks of sacking-wrapped ice for our home made ice-boxes - no one had a refrigerator. We cooked on paraffin (kerosene) stoves like most in Malta but lit the old black-leaded coal fired cooker once a week for the traditional English Sunday roast, often several familes getting together for that purpose. We scoured the shore for logs to eke out expensive coal.

We saved food scraps separately from tins and paper and a lady on a cart collected them twice a week and gave us a few eggs in return every now and again. The tins were collected by an old man who made toys and other things out of them-not much was wasted in the Malta of those days. Every year an officer from the Royal Artillery based in Fort Ricasoli inspected our flats to make sure they were maintained in a good clean order.

The occupants of the married quarters were a mixture of soldiers sailors and marines, some of the soldiers (usually Irishmen who were a substantial element of the British Army) had Maltese wives and I recall a Russian lady whom one sailor had met during the first war. It was all very friendly and sometimes we organised picnics though no one had any transport at all, not even bicycles. By mutual agreement(or maybe it was army regulations) no one kept a dog but the odd cat, who hunted down rats, was tolerated.

The approach of the Second World War coincided with my father's navy service coming to an end (though he was recalled as soon as the war started and spent nearly six years on convoy escort duties) and so we returned to England and I did not return to Malta until the war was almost over when as a technician in the Royal Air Force I looked down from the bomber that was bringing me from Italy as the aircraft flew low over Fort Ricasoli on the approach to the old east west runway of then RAFLuqa that is now Malta's International Airport.

A brief glimpse of Rinella showed that all was not well there and after a day or so getting settled in I made my way back to the Married Quarters. As I breasted the hill crest above Calcara village I saw across the bay that there was only a portion of my old home still standing and after toiling up the last ridge I saw that over half the block lay in ruins for, as a prominent feature on the crest, it must have made an excellent taret for some Italian or German bomb-aimer.

Nowadays on visits to Malta I always make a nostalgic pilgrimage to Rinella but the scene is very different today for only the smaller block remains and that is housing for some Maltese families. The school, laundry block and chapel have all gone and only a large slab of over-grown concrete marks the site of my old home in which I spent some happy years .

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