I read the other day that Kingsway Store has closed down after decades of business. It was the last of a cluster of toy shops in Valletta whose shop windows were within feet of each other.
To a child, that bit of Melita Street between St Zachary and Republic was bliss. It was the lumber room of Saki’s short story, a place where you could stand and stare for hours (but then childhood does funny things to time), and dream of magical lives that could be had, but not quite.
We lived a few paces down, and even now I could probably type out an inventory of those shops. Arrigo Azzopardi sold wondrous toys and what we at the time called ‘electronic games’ – clunky gadgets that would seem temple-period to the Fortnite generation. Britannia toy shop specialised in models and displayed layer upon layer of beautifully liveried Hornby trains.
Kingsway, on the other hand, took the seasonal route. At carnival, the shop window on Melita would be full of masks, black Zorro swords and squeaky hammers in every plasticky colour imaginable. Christmas brought out the finest, confident in the knowledge that the parent coffers would open up.
The Kingsway summer was more serious business. The shop window would be lined with Cressi masks, fins, harpoons and diving knives. I knew the day would come when I would be man enough to march in and get by own harpoon and knife, the meaner the better.
In a consumer society, the shop window takes the place of the looking glass. When that day came, a harpoon was the very opposite of what I wanted. I did, however, buy a mask and snorkel.
Unlike ones frozen in heritage time, living cities change. That the toy shops and their shop windows are gone may be fodder for nostalgia, but little else. It’s the harpoons I can’t help wondering about: for some reason, they are still considered the thing to pack for an average day at the beach.
Thirty years ago, shotguns were the thing to pack for an average day pretty much anywhere, except maybe the bank. There’s a 1960s video online of Maltese people boarding a ship to Australia – two of them have shotguns slung over their shoulders in anticipation of gamiem down under.
I remember well two hunters who would take the bus up north from Valletta every Sunday. They would chat with the driver and stand their shotguns against the dashboard, and none of the other passengers ever thought there was anything the matter about it.
This is not about the wisdom or otherwise of hunting. Rather, I’m intrigued at why, while shotguns and their results have been corralled into volumes of laws and regulations, harpoons and their outcome carry on untouched.
The staple answer would be that fish are edible and spearfishing a perfectly adequate means of securing them, but that can’t be right. Most birds, too, are edible. Gamiem (turtle doves) for one are eminently so, but that didn’t stop the country from holding its third national referendum in decades. The other two were about EU membership and divorce, which shows just how high hunting ranks on the list of priorities.
Thirty years ago, shotguns were the thing to pack for an average day pretty much anywhere, except maybe the bank- Mark Anthony Falzon
Fish, like birds, are wild animals. They are also a limited resource. That they enjoy privileged culinary status should not be a reason for unlimited exploitation, but rather, the other way round. While most would not lose sleep at the thought of less gamiem in the sky, less groupers on the menu would be considerably more worrying.
And yet, it is thought perfectly alright to aim a harpoon at any fish of any size anywhere at any time of the year. Many kinds of fish come inshore to breed in late spring and summer.
It’s also the season when spearfishing is at its most intense, for obvious reasons.
It’s called ‘recreational’, as opposed to ‘commercial’, fishing. For the most part, it doesn’t figure on the conservation menu. The idea is that what spearfishers and other recreational fishers take is negligible in the grand scheme of things. Strangely, recreational hunters enjoy no such immunity.
The blind spot extends to things other than harpoons. Some of them appear so benign that to mention them is borderline silly.
Take the colourful little hand nets (koppijiet) that well-meaning parents buy their children. They can be had at any shop for next to nothing.
They’re also the marine equivalent of the robin traps (trabokki) that were such a staple with Maltese children until a few years ago.
Many of the fish and small animals that find themselves in these nets end up dead. The ones that are released are usually severely harmed, for one reason or other.
For example, the tiny blennies and other fish that are scooped up would in fact be guarding or aerating eggs. The few minutes they spend being stared at in a bucket mean the end of those eggs.
The conservation of birds is about populations and such, but also very much about empathy. Dolphins and turtles aside, that kind of marine conservation has never caught on. Even when we do talk about marine conservation, it tends to be in the dispassionate language of plastic, pollution and so on. To talk about a fish swimming pointlessly in a bucket while its eggs die would be thought banal.
The reasons why this is so would fill a stack of technical anthropology volumes.
What I do know is that, to the boy staring at harpoons at Kingsway, hunters were the Antichrist.