I’m told the University will next week be wheeling around a roadshow called Skopri l-Università fit-Tlett Ibliet! (Discover University in the Three Cities!). It’s apparently an attempt to bring the world of lectures, degrees, and unnecessary exclamation marks to Cospicua, Senglea, and Vittoriosa. It’s also part of University’s ongoing Cottonera Resource Centre initiative.

I have lived in Cospicua for eight years now and I think I can speak with some experience and knowledge of the town and its people- Mark Anthony Falzon

I’m not about to savage the hand that feeds me. Still, there are things that need to be said. I have lived in Cospicua for eight years now and I think I can speak with some experience and knowledge of the town and its people.

First of all, this initiative is sailing very close to the wind. One thing that really gets up the noses of Bormliżi is the idea, and actions in its direction, that there is anything the matter with their lives. They resent, with a passion and a vengeance, do-gooders who barge in with a missionary zeal to civilise the place as it were.

I have come to share that resentment. Certainly there are individuals and families in Cottonera who could do with some ‘skills’, in the parlance of the day. But it would be wrong to think of the area as some kind of skidrow-on-sea. Most people here are perfectly ordinary citizens who get on with their lives.

They may be a bit louder and more colourful than average, truth be told. But I find it annoying that even as we fête the ganutell and festival tal-kappar and such fakeloristic rubbish, we dismiss urban working-class culture as so much ħamallaġni (boorishness). It may actually just be a case of the bourgeoisie creating the world after its own image, or trying to.

I’m not implying that the University initiative is doing that. What I am saying is that the people behind it have to watch their step carefully to avoid tapping into a sea of ill feeling.

It was statistics that set the whole thing off in the first place. For some reason this part of the island seems scarcely to have experienced the paper (I hate to call it ‘upward’) mobility of the rest of Malta. People with a degree or who are studying to get one are thin on the ground here.

Thing is, that was the situation in Malta generally until recently. A big chunk of University education is first generation. People with degrees over 35 or so are unlikely to have parents or aunts or uncles – let alone grandparents – who went to University. It is only since 20 years or so that a noticeable percentage of the population is University-educated.

Which leaves us with the question of Cottonera. The stock explanation is that the harbour towns’ cargo of ‘social problems’ (whatever that means) is a heavy load indeed and one which makes them lag behind the rest of the fleet.

I don’t entirely buy this. That’s because my neighbours (broadly defined) hardly fit the bill. Every morning I see people walking their children to school, making absolutely sure the copybooks are labelled and the pencils sharpened. I overhear mothers – of the single or attached type – discussing the merits or otherwise of local schools. I also have no reason to believe the teachers at these schools are less competent than their peers elsewhere.

The general feeling is that, in Cottonera as elsewhere, parents are likely to ‘jirsistulhom’ (give their children the best, private lessons and such included). Even if one allows for a few wayward families, statistically the pushy parents are in a majority.

So what on earth is happening? Why is it that these immaculately cared-for children seem eventually to lose interest and drift off into badly-paid jobs? Why hasn’t Cottonera experienced paper mobility?

It has. I’ve lost count of the number of people I meet at University who have close family connections in Cospicua, Senglea, or Vittoriosa. For example, I know six academics whose immediate families lived, or live, in the couple of streets around the cloistered-nun convent in Cospicua. And that’s not including the Mifsud Bonnici clan, most of whom are visiting lecturers at the Faculty of Laws.

Of these six, one still lives here. He’s young and lives with his parents, and I believe he has plans to get married and move elsewhere sometime soon. And therein lies part of the answer to the (dismal, if you assume that the degree makes the person) statistics.

My explanation is as follows. The island-wide paper mobility I mentioned earlier coincided with major demographic shifts in the harbour area. I am not about to give you the old (and not necessarily true, if the historians are right) story about a glorious elite past that was shattered by German and Italian bombs.

Rather, it’s an easily-verifiable fact that Cottonera tends to bleed its paper-mobile and aspirational human resources all too easily. The growing ranks of people with degrees we witnessed in other places hasn’t really happened here. That’s because they’ve moved elsewhere, and continue to do so. Meaning the numbers never quite add up.

There are at least three reasons for this. First, their historical biographies as small and overcrowded walled towns means that Cospicua, Senglea, and Vittoriosa are desperately short of desirable properties. By ‘desirable’ I mean homes that make the grade in terms of contemporary expectations of comfort, privacy, light, and space.

The relatively few potentially-desirable properties there may be tend to be too expensive for young professionals to afford or too dilapidated for them to bother.

Second, locals of a certain chin-up class who set up home with partners from elsewhere are unlikely to get the nod to do so in Cottonera. People who have never lived in a harbour town tend to find the ambience claustrophobic and off-putting.

The third reason is the obvious self-fulfilling prophecy. The more the place continues to bleed well-educated people, the less attractive it becomes to the same. (Forget waterfronts and regeneration; the ranks of gin palaces and signposted finery have left the rest of the place unaffected, socially and demographically.)

Cottonera may have few graduates and University students, but that’s not because it lacks social mobility. Rather, it’s because of its physical mobility. The place simply keeps on exporting its paper resources. That’s something no roadshow or Resource Centre can fix, assuming it needs fixing.

mafalzon@hotmail.com