George Cini: Strada Stretta, Allied Publications, 2010, 246 pp.

George Cini has compiled a special contribution to the history of Valletta in his Maltese-language book, entitled Strada Stretta, It-triq li darba xegħlet il-Belt.

It’s a lavishly illustrated collection of interviews and character sketches, a travelogue through a single narrow street in the heart of the city. We are introduced to the families who owned and serviced the various bars and nightclubs, and the performers who brought them to life.

The book is so full of information that I’ve had to select a handful of stories for further exploration. After reading through it, I was left with the feeling that getting to grips with Valletta’s contemporary history would be the work of several lifetimes – luckily for us, Cini has chosen to focus on a period during and after the Second World War and its effects on the denizens of Strait Street.

Nicknamed “the Gut” by English sailors, “la Sada” by Italians, Strait Street was Malta’s first experience of a contemporary melting-pot between social classes, nationalities and radically divergent walks of life. Cini opens his books in a very Maltese way by focusing on language – the way the people of Valletta, specifically those who lived, worked and spent every free minute in Strait Street ended up speaking their own special patois.

He noticed this during interviews with people in their 70s and 80s, old enough to remember what it was really like when the street came alive each night with music and chatter. The mixture of Italian and English, the coining of new words and the slow transformation of dialect fascinate the author.

He’s equally keen to talk about the way people lived, the money they used, the drinking culture that sustained Strait Street’s reputation (“do you know how much beer was drunk there?” says one interviewee, “you have no idea!”) and the sporting passions that saw football teams acquire foreign players, for a game or a season, from visiting ships – the book is full of detail, recreating Valletta’s past from the debris of a disappeared time.

There’s the story of Stella Qtates, a spinster who lived with her cats and earned a reputation as a witch, a woman “out of the Middle Ages” – this story sits alongside accounts of women who teased sailors from England and America, holding out for long enough to get themselves a new dress and then vanishing down a darkened alley.

The musicians, local men of talent, filled the halls with jazz melodies they had only ever heard on records brought over from the US. Then there’s the bar owners, men and women who kept the street going with a characteristic mixture of haughtiness and open-hearted hospitality.

The book includes an interview with Ġużi tal-Cairo, one of Strait Street’s drag queens. He began his career at the age of 14 and learnt English in the bars and clubs: “I learnt a few words in one place, a few in another. Then I put them all together.”

His mother owned the Cairo, a favourite haunt for many British sailors. Ġużi wasn’t the only cross-dressing entertainer, he remembers several others.

The book includes a striking photograph of ‘Frankie’, a drag queen made up in an elegant evening dress singing at the Silver Horse. “We were all married, we all had families,” he says – Strait Street was a place full of contradictions.

Cini interviews one woman, identified as Nina, who remembers invitations to dine at the Britannia, one of the street’s underground restaurants. She details the expense she went to, buying the latest fashions in order to impress American sailors.

The Americans were often very young, she says, and many of them were black – with tensions back then not dissimilar to reactions today, they were sometimes harassed.

“I didn’t done nothing, I didn’t done nothing,” one sailor said to her after he had been beaten up. While she dressed his wounds and comforted him, he asked her why it had happened. In broken English she replied, “because nigger”.

The undercurrent might be seedy, but Cini doesn’t shy away from the fact that beyond the confusion, these were joyful lives making the best of a situation entirely out of their control.

With Malta one of the most heavily bombed places in Europe during the Second World War, money at a minimum and hope at a premium, the escape into a fantasy of colour and music must have been difficult to resist.

The book is a fine piece of Melitensia and an important contribution to studies about Valletta and the people who live there. It is fully illustrated, well referenced and one would certainly invite future historians to take a similar approach. Cini has done himself, and Strait Street, proud.

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