In 1988 my family moved to the island of Malta. In the late eighties and early nineties it was not the cosmopolitan place it is today, reeling as it was from years of near-socialist rule, corruption, and the usual chaos that post-colonial countries find themselves in after independence. Many people still had black and white TVs. There were no MacDonald’s or recognizable brands of sweets on shop shelves. The buses were from the 50’s and 60’s. Any kind of fashionable clothing labels had to be brought from abroad by a travelling relative or friend and were greatly admired by one’s peers. The first escalator was introduced to the island in my time there and was a source of much excitement. There was just one set of traffic lights in the whole country.
It was something of an idyllic life for a young teen. I fell in with a gang of skateboarders and in those long, hot summers, we’d roar along the promenade from beach to skate spot to beach, with no parental supervision. Malta, as it is still, was a tourist hotspot, so our gang would be augmented with young skaters on holiday with their families who came from all over Europe to enjoy the Mediterranean sun. I would skate home late in the evening tanned a deep brown, with salt on my skin and sore limbs. I’d sleep soundly and get up and do it all over again the next day.
School was a million miles away from the education I’d had up until that point in Canada where I’d attended a co-ed primary and junior high. The building itself was a 16th century hospital that had been built and run by the Knights of St. John. It was surrounded by fortified walls and besides classrooms there were within, secret rooms and endless underground passageways ripe for exploration. Of course this was forbidden but that didn’t stop us. It was a Private school for boys, and I had to wear a uniform. Teaching methods were primitive. Memorization by rote encouraged. There was little substance or dynamism to any of it. Literature class consisted of boys taking turns fumbling through paragraphs from Animal Farm or the like while the teacher, a priest who doubled as the head of religion stared at us imperiously and twiddled his trouser flies. My level of reading was better than any of the Maltese boys who would stutter and labour over each sentence, and when the teacher discovered this, literature class became, for weeks on end, me reading whatever book we were studying to the class. This was incredibly boring for them, and pretty god damn shitty for me.
Corporal punishment was alive and well and it was meted out by elderly cartoonish priests who would take a student down in a hail of fists and feet or any available switch like object at hand for the slightest indiscretion. They were neither feared or respected and the beatings were no deterrent as boys will be boys and even then, recognized how ridiculous these men were that they needed to beat the crap out of kids.
And they weren’t always up to the task. I’ll never forget the sight of a septuagenarian priest being baited by a group of young boys in the playground. He had a long stick in his hand and was swinging wildly at anything that moved, but the kids were faster,and he was flailing his weapon like a poor man’s Erol Flynn. He spun and staggered and his black cassock whipped up in the frenzy and sweat poured from his red brow as his combover,which was clumped into one fat strand and thick with pomade grease, flopped in the air like an enormous grey caterpillar, slapping his bald pate and knocking the horn rimmed glasses that perched atop his nose askew.
Even when the beatings were successful, they were nothing compared to the bruises I got on my skateboard throwing myself down a flight of 10 stairs or landing on my face in the middle of a 16foot half pipe. If anything it was considered a badge of honor to walk around with a battle scar delivered by one of these men. I was particularly proud of amagnificent black eye that I received in study hall from the combover priest who I had most definitely been provoking. I’d been attempting to impress a kid from the year above mine who had become legendary for a home-made incendiary he’d manufactured and placed under the door of the fly-twiddler’s office. The device had proved more explosive than he’d anticipated, for as well as the desired loud bang and profuse smoke, it had also blown the door in half and took what was left clean off at the hinges. The priest was apparently incapable of speech for a few minutes, found as he was, white-faced and clutching the edge of his desk in terror.
My parents, however, were not impressed with the shiner. Nor were they of the fact that in three years I had gained the ignominious distinction of getting the lowest grade the maths teacher had ever seen (5%, which although a reflection of my limited intellectual powers was also an indictment of his teaching skills) and, with the exception of a couple of decent English teachers, all I’d learned in my time there was how to swear fluently in Maltese, that I had very little respect for the Catholic church and how to be a bit of a shit.
And so it was a well-aimed right hook from a Jesuit that put an end to three good years and helped pave the way for me back to Canada.
