Things sometimes went a bit over the top at Union Club dances. About the time a driven Gladys Emma Peto was relentlessly club-hopping in Malta, the minutes of the Valletta premises record the rather unfunny exploits of a certain Lieutenant Eykyn, who believed he had discovered the perfect way to make one of the balls there the ultimate, unforgettable experience. He planned to enjoy himself and, being unselfish by nature, to amuse the company too. He may have worked at it for weeks in advance, or maybe you can put it down to a genius for improvisation. Whichever, a roaring success.
The houses in Malta are nearly all haunted by the ghosts of those who have been hurried away from these pleasant places
Lt Eykyn (probably Fredrick Bentley Eykyn, of the Royal Navy, who died on August 21, 1927) went about it with class and elegance. He snatched the cymbals from the band, climbed an electricity pole on the roof of the club, and from there clashed the brass plates as loudly as he could, all the time hurling empty beer bottles in any direction he believed would cause most havoc. This he did after smashing a champagne glass, and grabbing a telescope and a kitchen knife from head-waiter Bonnett. The telescope he flung three times on the concrete floor and its brass-work was none too happy for that. This, I trust you all agree, was such-jolly-good-fun-what?
At the end, everything turned to business as usual, when Eykyn apologised, in between that booze-up and the next. A gentleman, mildly sober or blind drunk, is always a gentleman, capish? Would he otherwise be allowed to set foot inside the Union Club? I am sure there must have been some gentlemanly sub-paragraph in the membership rules that took care of that as gentleman to gentleman.
In summer “the centre of all life” in Malta (Peto’s words) moved to the Tigné Ladies Bathing Club, run under the hawk-eyed tutelage of Johnny, a wonderful diver. The men’s bathing club was separate, but only a few hundred yards away, so the men always sneaked in to join the ladies’ tea parties, what else.
True, the club suffered its own appalling calamities, like rumours of sightings of an uncivil octopus that failed to show the respect expected of everyone for the empire-builders of George V, king and emperor. The wife of an officer, Octavius by name, felt a soft, caressing hand playing round her pretty ankle. “Don’t be silly, Harry,” she whispered “everyone will see”. It wasn’t lustful Harry. It was the octopus.
Most of the officers’ wives seemed to have little else to do apart from partying, clubbing and feeling neglected – they all employed nannies, cooks, chars, handymen and gardeners. Peto relieved that overwhelming, unacknowledged ennui by painting and getting herself a creative life, in between running breathlessly away from any Maltese within dangerous distance and towards corporate fun. No one, but really no one, could afford not being where everyone else was.
Yet overdosing daily on amusement could have its dire effects. Desperate housewives, desperate colonial housewives. Some only managed to cope with those manic entertainment torments by coveting their neighbour’s spouse, religiously mixing whisky and soda, agonising at the hatter and the haberdasher about the colour of the ribbon, and overall, gossiping with visionary flair – the stress of all this fun invariably proved just too debilitating for many. With so much going on, you are not amazed that many were left with no time to think. It was a hard life in Malta for its owners, now wasn’t it?
Peto has one great line to bring all this together: “the achievement of solitude in Malta presents a great problem.”
About Maltese lace: some of it is pretty, “some of it is nice to give away to your less-loved friends”. The author’s inability to buy cloth in Malta for dress-making provokes an acute observation on the origin of the faldetta. Someone had told her about Maltese women inventing that sombre garment at the time of the uprising against the French and vowing to wear it until Napoleon’s troops were defeated, or, as another version went, for a hundred years. Peto had her doubts: try buying three yards of anything in Malta, she reflects, even when there is no war or siege on: you are told politely that the cloth is expected next month. Just imagine every woman in Malta getting hold of three yards of black silk or sateen – all at the same time. That’s how myths are born and disposed of.
In Peto’s eyes, the real, genuinely Maltese Malta was mostly about goats and ghosts.
The artist honestly believed the Maltese saw ghosts and the devil everywhere. A secondary road that links Msida to Sliema, not hugging the coast (Rue d’Argens?) “is a most unpopular road with the Maltese. It is supposed to be filled with both ghosts and devils, and at night the high sides of it resound with that particular chant that is supposed to preserve the singer from all such evil creatures”.
The reason the trains stop running at dusk harks back to the same fears. The employees who man the level-crossings cannot be prevailed upon to stay at their posts after sunset. For many devils appear to walk about Malta “so to be out late in a lonely place is a most foolish and dangerous proceeding”. The Museum railway terminus at Rabat had a particularly sinister reputation: “it is approached through a delightful avenue of palm trees. This is, however a very dangerous, devil-haunted road, according to the Maltese, who avoid it at night”.
Karozzin drivers figured among the most convinced subscribers to the supernatural and the paranormal realities of ghosts and devils. “When you arrive on the island you imagine that every carrozza driver possesses numerous small sons and nephews, to whom he is perpetually giving little evening treats by driving them out on the box-seat of his carrozza.” But then you discover the real reason for this kindness: “it is the fear of the very active devils who inhabit Malta. Apparently an unoccupied box-seat holds a fatal fascination for them.” However, if the seat is occupied, the devil will not intrude.
A cab driver who has been unable to find a boy to sit next to him will equally outfox the devil by continually changing his seat, shifting from side to side. Whenever you take a karozzin after dark, you will always hear the particular chant which scares devils away. Then Peto makes a pertinent, practical observation which would have endeared her to lateral thinkers: why has it never occurred to karozzin builders to design a carriage with only one driving seat?
Devils in every street, ghosts in every home: “the houses of Malta are nearly all haunted by the ghosts of those who have been hurried away from these pleasant places. There was never before a country where all the houses held so strongly that certain knowledge that a ghost had just slipped out of the other door... quite a happy, genial, pleasant ghost, not frightening at all.
“Many houses are quite definitely known to be haunted. Most of them, I suppose by Maltese ghosts, but the one I have met myself is, I feel sure, English.” Now how did Peto establish the nationality of her phantasm? She neither asked for its birth certificate nor for its passport. But the dogs just loved that ghost, so it had to be English, no? Elementary, my dear Emmerson.
In Peto’s eyes, the second natural heralds of Malteseness were the goats of the island. The British, quite understandably, disliked them. Goats had been identified as the reservoirs and conveyors of the nasty Mediterranean fever (the dreaded ‘Malta dog’) which, over the years, had laid low so many unsuspecting British servicemen, visitors and residents in Malta.
The authorities had successfully fought the Brucellosis scourge among the military by banning the sale of goats’ milk to servicemen. But, years after the discovery of the source of the malady, the Maltese “remain faithful to their goats and to their fever”. Though laying no claims to zoological expertise, Peto volunteers her bits of wisdom about Maltese goats and their habits.
“The side streets are principally occupied by goats. The Maltese goat appears to subsist upon old newspapers and cabbage stalks which philanthropic people deposit on the pavement apparently for the benefit of the goats. I have never been able to discover where the goats take their more serious meals and where they spend their nights. Their days are passed in perambulating the pavement.
“Their driver loudly shouts ‘ħalib!’. However few the Maltese words you may acquire during your sojourn on the island (and nobody in the garrison, as far as I know, ever learns the language), ħalib will certainly be one of them, for it is dinned into your ears all day long.
“Should you wish for goat’s milk, complete, I expect, with dirt and possibly with a little Maltese fever, you rush to your door at the sound of this glad cry, bearing a little jar or jug. You then choose a goat, and see it milked on your doorstep directly into your vessel. The other goats lie happily down in the mud and wait till the procession goes on again. They are but rarely run over, for the Maltese goat is the one inhabitant of the island that carefully gets out of the way of horses and motor-cars.”
Perhaps to goats and ghosts we could add a third national institution that rubbed Peto the wrong way: the chaperone. No Maltese woman, particularly none belonging to the bourgeoisie, young or old, would be seen out on her own. This primitive custom had somehow contaminated the English colony too: “Even English young women go to dances in parties, and have a vague and youthful mother somewhere in the background. But there is generally nothing vague or youthful about the Maltese mamma. And she is very much to the fore. Some Maltese matrons of thirty-seven or so look about sixty-seven, and weigh about twenty-seven stone.” Anorexia then won no Olympic medals in Malta.
Maltese peasant girls and those of the shop-keeping class did go out without their mothers in tow, provided they were at least four in the party. It was the society, or would-be society, young lady – read offspring of the bourgeois gentry – that “is guarded as closely as a prisoner”. Peto observed a Maltese family staying in her hotel while their house was under repair. The mother never let her two adult teenage daughters out of sight for one single instant. “Mamma, clad in a pink flannel dressing-gown, conducted each cherished maiden to the bathroom, and waited outside the door until she emerged again.”
Same with the maids and servants who returned home for the night: relatives daily chaperoned them from and back to your door. Female cooks in private employment would follow the same arrangements. “I imagine her grandmother, or possibly both her grandmothers” would call every morning and carefully walk the cook all the way to the market and back; “the fact that one’s cook was fifty or so and possibly a widow, would make almost no difference”. Protection, or, more likely, control.
I find it proper to conclude with Peto’s closing words: “You are sure to leave Malta with your mind quite full of happy memories, and yet, on the whole, you will be glad to go. You will be tired all through of the yellow walls, of the dgħajsas, the carozzas, the jangling bells and the cries of ħalib. You will have come to hate that group of picturesque Maltese who gossip forever beneath your window, for their language is really not a pretty-sounding one.” Very few of the British in Malta learned Maltese, and the rest learned just enough to make sure the servants did not misunderstand the orders.
You choose a goat, and see it milked on your doorstep
What Peto really meant to say is that Malta would have been paradise to live in, were it not for the natives and all those native irritants that made it so thoughtlessly un-English.
To aggravate matters, in Malta the British were forced to fall back on the same pleasures “over and over again. The same opera nights, the same ship’s dances, the same tennis on the same courts... and truly the island is most terribly tiny... you can see almost right across it. Some people get a curious feeling of imprisonment”. Not all, though. A few English families advertised how bizarre they were by actually settling in Malta. “But really, I believe everybody else leaves the island without one regret.”
I am gratified to have done my little bit to retrieve the memory of Gladys Emma Peto for her achievements in art. For the value judgments of Colonel Blimp in tweed skirts, rather less.
Concluded.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Theresa Vella for her assistance in tracing works of art by Gladys Peto and to Hugh Peralta and Kenneth Zammit Tabona for help in attempting to identify the elusive 114 in St Julian’s.