Portrait of Eric Shepherd.Portrait of Eric Shepherd.

I first read Eric Shepherd’s Malta and Me clandestinely, in my middle teens, same as I did Table Talk by the arch-heretic Martin Luther and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, that treasonable tussle with the sixth commandment. I was sure that my father disapproved of the three; what I couldn’t be sure of was in what order. I compromised between diligent curiosity and filial devotion by still reading under-the-counter literature, but under the bedspread.

Sir Harry Luke was well aware of this book and how adverse its reception had been by many in Malta. He referred to it as a work “which abounds in puckish humour and flashes of insight and is often extremely entertaining. But partly because of its puckishness, partly because the author laid what might appear to some to be excessive emphasis on such drawbacks to life as may exist in Malta (and where do they not exist?) the book gave a certain amount of offence in the more sensitive quarters of the island”. Luke believed that all that build-up of negativity in Shepherd’s book was, however, set off by the author’s sensitive acknowledgement of the devotion of Dolores, his household’s maid in Malta. How infuriatingly patronising.

Malta and Me, published in 1926, 10 years before I was born, price 18 shillings (about one euro), enjoyed a very tainted reputation in all pre-war circles that were not devoutly colonialist. Had there been a Nationalist Index of Prohibited Books, it would, I guess, have featured prominently. Shepherd, this British immigrant, a member of an invasive species, had been Malta’s salaried guest for three years, and then paid our hospitality back by writing a whole book about what was wrong with Malta and less than perfect with the Maltese. How dare anyone, a Brit to boot, not find the Maltese adorable and Malta fior del mondo?

Autograph note and signature by Eric Shepherd. Courtesy of the National Archives, Santu SpirtuAutograph note and signature by Eric Shepherd. Courtesy of the National Archives, Santu Spirtu

I went through its 300 pages with a rising sense of umbrage. Shepherd’s pet hates in Malta, which he made every effort not to suppress, had been the clueless students of the University (almost all), those he saw as the purveyors of religious superstition and bigotry (almost everywhere) and those who resisted ditching the traditional Italian culture for an English one (almost everyone).

I was a University student myself when I first read that book, and felt a collegial duty to believe myself adequately hurt and to join the front against the common enemy. By the time I had reached its last pages, I had reluctantly acknowledged my father’s wisdom in trying to shield me from such crass defamation of the motherland at the hands of the ungrateful. The onslaught on Malta was all the more distasteful as it came from someone who had recently converted to Roman Catholicism and wrote proudly about his new shining path. Finding fault with the most Catholic nation outside the walls of Paradise – and almost certainly inside too? Et tu Brute?

Eric Robert Shepherd was born in 1892 (only one year after my father) in Reading, Berkshire, the son of a renowned Free Church preacher, Dr Ambrose Shepherd, and received his education at the Glasgow Academy. He converted to the Catholic faith during his early days in Oxford. After his baptism in St Aloysius church of that university city he added Aloysius to his name. He remained a convinced Catholic all his life.

The National Archives at Santu Spirtu in Rabat retain all the background information as to why and how Shepherd ended teaching in Malta. Particularly valuable is one 1920 file containing four confidential testimonials from the UK on which the Colonial Office and the University of Malta relied in the selection of Shepherd as professor of English literature. His predecessor, Prof. Daniel Fallon (1853-1942) had reached the age of 65 during World War I, and the University extended his contract as the Colonial Office considered it impracticable to recruit a new professor and send him over to Malta during the upheavals of wartime.

Had there been a Nationalist Index of Prohibited Books, it would, I guess, have featured prominently

Very exceptionally, the government file which preserves the aspiring professor’s testimonials had a prominent blue label fixed to its cover stating: “This paper is not to leave the L(ieutenant) G(overnor)’s office”. Why? The Colonial Office in London sent four references to persuade the University that Shepherd would be the right choice. The most eloquent, informative and lengthy one was by Thomas R. Strong, dean of Christ Church, Oxford, later Vice-Chancellor of the university there and Anglican bishop of that town. Strong (1861-1944) adds plenty of personal details about Shepherd, unknown elsewhere. Shepherd “was strongly recommended to me by Professor J.S. Phillimore of Glasgow, and was highly thought of by the late C.D. Fisher, senior censor of Christ Church... He has had poor health while he was here and never came off in any examinations. He was rejected for military service, but did some civil work in London. I know him very well and like him.

Portrait of the poet John Swinnerton Phillimore who recommended Eric Shepherd for a professorship at the University of Malta.Portrait of the poet John Swinnerton Phillimore who recommended Eric Shepherd for a professorship at the University of Malta.

“He has had rather hard luck. His father was a prominent Presbyterian minister in Glasgow, of an extremely ‘broad’ theology. The boy reacted against this and ultimately joined the Roman Church – which will probably be an advantage to him in Malta. He has had a great struggle to live, and I think the Romans (Catholics) have not played up, so to say, in regards to him. I tried to get him taken on by the Dublin Review when he left here (Christ Church, Oxford). He would not have been good enough to write their big articles, but he might have done very well their literary notices. But nothing came of this. He is now lecturing at Reading College, which I gather he does very well.”

The J.S. Phillimore who had ‘strongly recommended’ Shepherd, was the distinguished classical scholar and poet John Swinnerton Phillimore from Cornwall who had first taught at Oxford and later became professor of Greek and of Humanities at Glasgow University. He too had converted to Catholicism. And C.D. Fisher, who thought so highly of Shepherd, was none other than Charles Denis Fisher, a promising academic, son of Herbert William, King Edward VII’s personal tutor. The Oxford scholar was killed, aged only 38, in the terrible naval battle of Jutland.

Strong’s reference gives us insight into a tormented youth, dogged by ill-health, by parental conflicts and by career failure. This did not stop Shepherd mustering an impressive battery of outstanding personalities vouching for him.

Portrait of George Stuart Gordon, one of the British professors who recommended Shepherd for his post in Malta. Photo: Magdalen College, University of OxfordPortrait of George Stuart Gordon, one of the British professors who recommended Shepherd for his post in Malta. Photo: Magdalen College, University of Oxford

The illustrious George Stuart Gordon (1881-1942) professor of English Literature in Oxford who had tutored Shepherd, wrote: “He has very great ability as a writer, is a good speaker and expounder and is capable of making proselytes. His reading is wide. You know, I daresay, that he is a convert to the Roman Church. When I first knew him, his conversion was recent and tinged everything he did. But that is long ago and he is now grown up. I think he will be a very great success in Malta.” Gordon may have been an irrefutable authority on the profundities of English literature, but the gift of prophecy was not quite within his reach.

Another outstanding academic also put in a good word for Shepherd. Francis de Zulueta, of Basque origin, Professor Regius of Civil Law at Oxford, was a world-renowned authority on Roman law. Zulueta (1878-1958) – the very first Catholic professor at Oxford since the Anglican Reformation – wrote: “I have known Shepherd for a good many years. He is a man of very high character, a gentleman and a scholar... I think it may be of use if I give my personal impression that he is a man of real ability and force. I do not think that anyone who knows him can doubt this.” As Shepherd had not frequented law courses in Oxford, the connection with Zulueta must have been the Catholic one.

Portrait of Herbert John Clifford Grierson, the famous Oxford don who wrote a glowing reference for Shepherd. Photo: The University of Edinburgh Fine Art CollectionPortrait of Herbert John Clifford Grierson, the famous Oxford don who wrote a glowing reference for Shepherd. Photo: The University of Edinburgh Fine Art Collection

Prof. Herbert John Clifford Grierson of the University of Edinburgh filed the last testimonial in favour of Shepherd. Grierson (1866-1960) was by then acknowledged to be one of the most outstanding Scottish literary scholars and critics. Of the applicant he says: “He is a poet with, to my mind, considerable command of pure, refined and dignified English. From conversations with him I should conclude he has a good knowledge of our literature; and he is a classical student. His Catholic sympathies should be, I take it, no disadvantage in Malta.” Wrong, again. The fact that Shepherd was Catholic, and yet distanced himself from Catholic Malta, figured high on the bill of indictment the Maltese slapped on him.

Both Shepherd’s sisters became nuns, one a mother superior, and this gave him the right insights to write his most successful book, the detective story Murder in a Nunnery, and its sequel, reprinted in the UK and in America and turned into a play. This thriller, published almost 20 years after Shepherd had left Malta, is all about Baroness Sliema being found murdered in the chapel of a girls’ college in England. Sliema’s assistant was a Maltese woman called Venetia Gozo (sic). I do not believe Shepherd knew about the historically true story of an equally noble lady murdered in a nun’s convent of the Knights of Malta, which I published some years ago. Murders in monasteries reached dizzy editorial heights with Umberto Eco’s international blockbuster The Name of the Rose.

Someone must have convinced the fledgling professor of English literature that the in-place to be was Sliema – and what a let-down

Sliema and Gozo both preyed on Shepherd’s mind. One of his most acidic chapters is about house-hunting in Sliema, and his genuinely lyrical recollections hark back to his visit to Gozo. He had just got married and Malta was to be the couple’s honeymoon island. Someone must have convinced the fledgling professor of English literature that the in-place to be was Sliema – and what a let-down. “I do not see where the attraction of Sliema lies. The houses on the front are badly built, the drainage, I am convinced, is inferior and, in short, the place to my mind is ugly – inconvenient, exposed to the most violent winds, too near the sea and suburban in atmosphere.”

One of the first priorities of the Shepherd couple newly arrived in Malta was to find themselves a house to live in. His wife, Aimèe, 21 years old when she came to the island, was the daughter of John Abraham Le Poidevin, a member of a well known family from St Sampson’s, Guernsey.

It all started on the wrong foot, when they engaged a Maltese sensal to pilot their house-hunting in Sliema, “a ferocious, bristly old house agent” whose name the victim does not disclose. “He wore a straw hat of antique design” probably the Italian paglietta boater, and carried an enormous umbrella under his arm, just like Mrs Gamp, the boozing midwife in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. Between them it was uneconomical hate at first sight, and they both knew it. He showed the Shepherd couple innumerable properties around Sliema which they all turned down, much to the agent’s growing hostility: “You like this nice house? No? You not like this nice house? What you want! This very nice house!” The estate agent genuinely believed he would be fined if he allowed an auxiliary verb to escape his lips.

He particularly tried to flog them a dwelling “of unique unattractiveness” furnished “like the insides of a removal van”. They declined that palace in wonderland too, but sheer physical exhaustion combined with the craven terror they felt for that agent, had by now started breaking down their resistance. He showed them one last house, with the express warning that if they refused it “he would wash his hands of them forever”. Totally worn out, but mostly dispirited by the prospect of losing the charms of Mrs Gamp in perpetuity, they agreed to take it, and the agent, his commission secured, finally rewarded them with a smile.

They only surrendered at the Ultima Thule, beyond which total nothingness threatened, and arranged to meet the landlord who smiled and smiled, and then smiled some more, showed the tenants his nine children and his wife who spoke no English but was introduced as a “very careful” woman, whatever that was supposed to mean. It’s unlikely it referred to her allegiance to the disciplines of the safe period. The house faced the Dragonara across St Julian’s. The honeymooning couple occupied it as soon as the previous tenants left. They had high expectations, and were rewarded with surprises higher still.

The house was alive with flying cockroaches that landed everywhere with considerable skill, with a preference for the soup. Mice squeaked and bickered, peering at them at dinner from the furniture with beady black eyes, and on the first night the professor had to strip to the skin three times to disturb God’s minor creatures who were thoroughly enjoying their right of making a picnic out of him. The honeymooners had not at first noticed, heaped in strategic corners, lines of Keating’s Powder, the acknowledged terror of crawling and flying insects since Victorian times.

Next morning, they reported their plight and sent for the landlord, who swore on a dozen crosses that nothing like this had ever occurred in his hirings before, that he was devastated and that his careful wife just refused to stop crying. An informal lament with the Lt Governor resulted in a raid by a health inspector, who poked the beds with a cane, sighed supportively and shook his head with great solemnity – all extremely helpful, and the bed bugs panicked as they never had before. The Shepherds upped and left. Not the most memorable of honeymoons. The devastated owner and his heartbroken wife immediately rented the house again to a naval officer and his family. The professor tried to caution them, only to be loudly pooh-poohed for his pains by the mariner who knew better. The family marched in. And then marched out the following morning with stiff upper lip rather out of true, and not before having hurled the bedding and the linen through the front windows towards the middle of Tower Road.

(To be continued)

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