Life at Sunderland House

My very dear friends, the Scicluna family of Naxxar, kept the pages of The Times of June 28, 2004, and gave them to me when I visited Malta in January.

The main feature on pages 24 and 25 were the memories of Gunner Stan Ward who was stationed at St Paul's Bay with the 484 Searchlight Battalion of the Royal Artillery.

Like Stan, I arrived on the island in 1941 after being shipped from Gibraltar on board the cruiser Manxman in the company of cruisers Hermione and Arethusa, plus, of course, several escorting destroyers after our troopship, The Leinster, ran aground in Algeciras Bay in Spain.

It was only when I arrived at RAF Kalafrana that I found out that the Royal Air Force had its own navy and I became one of the crew of HSL (high speed launch) 107 whose main function was going out to search for, and possibly recover, aircrew who had had to ditch.

Neither did we differentiate between allied and Axis aircrew; if we could find them we picked them up and brought them back to base.

Round about March 1942, Skipper Flight Lieutenant Eric Price took 107 to the other end of the island to a newly opened base at the bottom end of St Paul's Bay, where we were billeted in a house on the water's edge called Sunderland House. The house is still there today and I'm sure the paintwork is still the same colour.

I also gather that the Maltese name is Tal-Vecca but I must point out that the jetty is two or three times as long as it was in my years. But I also must point out that we were a very happy crowd at Sunderland House, even though at times I was scared stiff each time we put to sea. After all we were virtually defenceless - but that is not the point of my story!

Like Mr Ward we all finished up with a pocketful of "chitties" that could add up to two or three shillings but in my case I never had any difficulty in using the scraps of paper especially in Valletta.

We were all aware of the constant threat of invasion and accepted the fact that should it happen any coinage on the island was likely to maintain a value for a while anyway whereas notes would lose their value straight away.

Perhaps I should say at this point that on the island at that time we used the same coinage and currency as we had at home in the UK - half-pennies, pennies, silver three penny bits, silver sixpences, shillings, florins (two shillings) and half crowns (two shillings and sixpences!) plus 10-shilling notes and £1 notes. I really cannot recall any notes bigger than the £1 note, though in the UK I knew there were more valuable ones.

It did strike us that there was a shortage of coins on the island, no matter where we shopped, be it getting change on a bus or in a shop. I never really wondered where all of the missing coins might be, I just put it out of mind and stuffed another chitty in my pocket with the rest.

I suppose it was natural that some of us had friends in the village - St Paul's Bay village then was quite a tiny place compared to what it is today. There was only rock all the way down the bay with the few Air Ministry buildings of the AM Experimental Station (AMES) at the seaward end of Salina Bay.

Two of my friends were brother and sister Anne and Charles Grima who lived about halfway up the hill from the top of the steps down to the base in a house over the garage that housed the bus that ran from St Paul's Bay to Valletta.

I got to know them through playing Housey, Housey in the street where the caller sat on the balcony of his house and we sat on the footpath while others sat on the balconies of their houses. It was great fun and really friendly!

Knowing Karlu (that is what we called him instead of Charles!) didn't mean that I travelled free on his bus - I still had to pay my fare but it did mean that after the Housey was finished I was invited in for a cup of tea.

One of the first things I noticed on an early visit to the sitting room above the garage was an alcove at the roadway end of the room which was curtained off and never opened.

At first I ignored the curtained alcove and enjoyed the cups of tea that I was given and the conversations we had on all kinds of subjects. For me, as an 18-year-old far from home, it got me away from the day-to-day routine of the RAF marine craft base because, as my main task was working as one of the crew of the HSL, I was often assigned to work as the wireless operator on Seaplane Tender No. 280 when she had to work out of sight of the base - doing freight trips to Gozo for example. Even though I had several wireless operators who knew quite a lot about the electrical and wireless equipment on the launch and the seaplane tender, it was still my responsibility as a wireless operator mechanic to oversee their work especially when I was promoted to the dizzy heights of corporal. But my curiosity got the better of me and I asked the question that had been in my mind for a long time.

"Karlu," I asked at last one evening, "What is behind that curtain over the alcove?"

When I looked at him he had a broad grin on his face and he replied: "Nothing much!"

I just couldn't believe my ears at his casual answer, even when I saw the grin still on his face.

"You've been wondering what's behind there from soon after you started to come up here, haven't you?

I had to agree with him and hoped he would tell me to put me out of my misery.

Without saying another word he got up from his chair and went over to the corner in question and, very dramatically, slowly pulled the curtain to one side.

I couldn't believe my eyes at what I saw that had been hidden behind that curtain.

The alcove was shelved from floor to ceiling, it was about two feet deep and the room was about eight feet high, and each shelf was filled with large glass sweetie jars and as I looked at them I knew where some of the missing coins were!

Each jar was filled to the brim with coins of every denomination.

Now, I wonder how Charles, and all the others, got them back into circulation.