Noting from our newsletter that there are new owners for the Casino di Venezia in Malta brings back a host of happy memories and I apologise not one whit for droning on about childhood recollections.
Not many know that I have some connections with that tiny Mediterranean island group, for in the 1950s (yes, I am THAT old) I lived there for three years. Father in the army, posted there, etc. I can remember it still being mostly rubble, without considering why and how. But in those days, unlike today it seems, children were allowed to roam. I could not have been more than nine or 10 but would go out all day and wander for miles.
I can still remember coming home to our army married quarters and my mother asked me where I’d been. “Talking to the nice ladies,” I remember responding. “Which nice ladies? Where?” “Down The Gut,” I responded, knowing that the part of Valetta where I’d been was colloquially referred to as The Gut. I recall her face was a picture.
With the knowledge that comes from worldly experience, I now know of course that The Gut was the disreputable part of the city where visiting matelots went for ‘rest and recreation’ and the ‘ladies’ I referred to happily (for they fed me sweets) were undoubtedly anything but…
My colleagues will joyfully and triumphantly proclaim that the experience has set into stone my preferences ever since, but then wonder how I married a saint.
All of this is of course the ramblings of an elderly hack with no real point to make, except to go on to say that Malta is today a wonderful island of genuinely nice people. The casinos (three of them, I think, if the Venezia is back in action) are all well up to international standard, although weren’t around in my heady and formative years there. I did go back, in 2010, for the first time in over 50 years and found the island positively charming.
Couldn’t find The Gut though.
