Finding St George's Bay

This is me at five years old, a year or so before we went to live in St George's Bay.  This month I'm doing some teaching in Swieqi just up the valley from St George's.  It has got me thinking about the process of memoir and writing.  I hate what St George's has become and wrote about it in a blog back in January 2009.  When I was writing Washing up in Malta last year I used some of those ideas in a linking piece and that's what I've reproduced here. 

Landscape is a keeper of memory.  The ghosts of our past drift through the sand and sea, the streets and walls of the places we have known.  When concrete covers the earth, memory is strangled along with the trees.

Finding St Georges Bay

My flat is on the top floor of a large block in Valletta.   The foundations quarry down into the old slave market or so I am told.  The block was built after the Second World War to house people bombed into homelessness.  Sometimes I meet their descendants in the lift.  Sometimes I imagine the ghosts of slaves who wander the stairs lamenting their lost children.

When I am not sitting in the square, I sit at my window and watch harbour traffic leaving and returning through the mouth of the twin breakwaters.  The daily catamaran heads North West to Sicily, the cruise liners head West and East to explore the wider Mediterranean, the float plane lifts off and heads West, North West to the sister island of Gozo. 

At night, the lighthouses at the harbour entrance blink red and green.  In calm weather, small boats fish along the harbour walls.  In stormy weather the waves crash mightily against the ancient stone of the breakwaters.

Sitting at my window, I think about opening up this small world where I have come to live.  Could I put in an arch here, knock out a wall there?   Then I could watch the boats come and go even when I am in the kitchen washing up.

 Is it peculiarly Western this disease, this need to renovate? 

Now, when I scan the local papers, published in English for the benefit of the most recent colonisers, I look for possible builders and architects to help me with my renovations. 

That’s how I notice the advertisement in the Times of Malta.  A conference was to be held to present the findings of a research study funded by the European Union.  The study investigated best practice in equality in Northern Ireland, Italy, Cyprus and Malta. The conference venue is a big new hotel in St George’s bay.    We lived there when I was a girl.

I get the number 19 bus from Valletta and at the end of the run the driver points me vaguely down a road lined with hotels and bars.  I can recognise nothing.  I walk down towards the bay.  I try to feel for the shape of the land underneath all that concrete.

Here is the fall of the valley running down to the beach.  This concrete space must be the small, unmade triangle where dad used to park his grey DKW motorcar.  So to my right is the road where we used to race our go-carts.  I feel again the hairpin down to the bay that now disappears in blocks of flats.  To my left the steps go down St Rita Street.  A small street sign hidden under the huge hot dog advertisement confirms it.

I set off down the steps that are now a warren of small bars and fast food outlets towards the street where I used to play cricket with Ben and Peter outside the nunnery.  At the bottom a huge crane is lifting concrete up to the top floor of a block of flats on the corner.  I scurry anxiously under the enormous bucket.   The workmen on the roof grin their control of this space that once was mine.

The conference hotel is just around the corner and the marble clad entrance opens onto our cricket street. The nunnery has vanished, but for a fleeting image of a small girl pressing the doorbell at the front gate to ask in trepidation for the return of her brothers’ cricket ball.

I sit through the conference knowing that I must be sitting over the back garden of our old house.   It is like sitting on a tomb.  What happened to the tortoise that dad brought back from North Africa to make its home in a hole under the wall half way down the garden?  What about the pigeons and hens and rabbits we kept at the far end and the budgerigars and canaries in large cages by the back door?   Are there any back gardens left for their descendants to sing and lay eggs in?

I am still there for the conference summary but I don’t hear it.   I walk out through the glass and marble reception area in the hot stillness of the afternoon and follow the cricket street down to the bay.  Everything has been “embellished” - an esplanade around the small sandy beach and palm trees planted.  The palms are struggling.  The rocks where I learnt to dive have been concreted over and made into a beach club. 

Piles of brown winter seagrass have washed up on the beach as always.  The concrete has not yet reached the underwater meadows where the natural cycle of destruction and renewal begins.   And here is the little square stone building that the nuns used in the summer to change into their swimming habit.  As they entered the water in a group and settled into a circle to chat, their black habits billowed out around them like the petals of a flower.  What did they talk about cradled in their black roses?  Did they concern themselves with matters of equality in their small, closed community?  What did they think of the little girl who rang the doorbell and asked in English for the return of her brother’s cricket ball?

Back at the flat, there is an email from the architect.  He has completed concept designs and would like to come round to talk about them.

Am I ready for that?  He is such a young man.  I don’t want to stifle his creativity but I sense that he is impractical and his ideas are expensive.  Besides, I am old enough to want my space to remain mine untainted by the flights of fancy of new generations.  I sigh as I phone him and arrange a suitable time for his visit.