Housebound for weeks due to COVID-19 lockdown precautions, and my penchant for travel and on-the-spot drawing restricted, I decided to unearth and search through my past travel sketchbooks and rework from them more finalised delineations. Leafing through the pages of my Gozo series, a craving nostalgia developed for the towering bastioned fortress of the island’s citadel; a commanding edifice I have long held close to my heart, since my student day vigils, while staying at a Gozitan fellow student’s residence in San Lawrenz. Extended sojourns allowed me time to track the island’s village paths and country lanes and learn to love its squared hills, cubed houses and flamboyant ornate churches; with a special preference for the imposing enclave of the citadel.

I remember those nights well
as the moon rose silently
to greet the evening light
I paced the tortuous pathways
of this ancient hilltop town.

As I mapped its shadowed secrets
I swear I shared my strides
with phantom spectral shapes
And in the silvered mirrors
of those mellowed moon-lit stones
we even spoke at times.

Today alas the ghosts have gone
they are no longer there
and as the town church clock hands
meet to etch the mark of midnight
I walk these streets alone.

Richard England. Photo: Jonathan Borg

Later my obsession with this ancient town focussed on the formal affinity between the citadel’s silhouette and that of a seaborne aircraft carrier. The relationship extended further in terms of both having functioned as war machines in different eras, the former as a fortress of the land and the latter as a fortress of the sea.

The thematics of this aesthetic-functional affinity were later further developed in the publication Carrier-Citadel Metamorphosis (MRSM publication 1973), and in a series of prints in collaboration with the Scottish poet artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. Later, there was also a project to erect a sculpture of an aircraft carrier (modelled on HMS Illustrious due to the ship’s epic wartime relationship to Malta) on a rural site on the Marsalforn side of the citadel. Citadel and aircraft carrier would have emphasised the aesthetic analogy of the two war machines and also their metamorphosis over the passage of time into peaceful elements; carrier to bird bath and impenetrable fortress to welcoming tourist haven.

Carrier - Citadel Metamorphosis

Later still I was to return to the citadel with a new series of drawings for my publication Gozo Island of Oblivion (Libria Italy 1987). Now, three decades later, flashbacks of sketching the fortress and mnemonic wanderings in the corridors of my mind, together with the revisited images from my sketchpads revitalised an urge to redraw the citadel in formats I had not previously attempted. In these new delineations the citadel towers over its contextual surrounding townscape, yet once again the drawings are visual manifestations of a lifelong love affair with the lily of Calypso’s isle. 

Richard England’s drawings feature in the forthcoming book Metropoli + Mythopoli (Timia Italy) by Richard England due for publication October 2020. For information on this and his other work, visit www.richardengland.com or contact Richard England on englandrichard37@gmail.com