Frontispiece of Malta and Me by Eric Shepherd.Frontispiece of Malta and Me by Eric Shepherd.

Eric Shepherd disliked Malta, hated Sliema but adored Gozo. I believe he wrote what may be the most expressive, most bowled-over appreciation of Gozo and the Gozitans I have ever read.

The crossing from Marfa to Mġarr lifted the curtain on the rhapsody that the experience would turn out to be. The Shepherd couple went there during the Easter break, on a Gozo boat “about as superbly graceful and swanlike a vessel as you are ever likely to see... a sort of ancient Phoenician coasting-craft, sturdy yet lovely of build, gaily picked out with colour, reassuringly sea-worthy”.

The Shepherds stayed at an unnamed hotel in Victoria, quite likely the Duke of Edinburgh, owned by the legendary Pawlu Portelli tal-Lingi. “Had we eaten all that there was to eat at every meal” they would have needed Gargantua’s mouth, he remarks. “The wine of Gozo is good, the cheese is even better, and there was a young waiter at the hotel whose smile, without any exaggeration, was one of the happiest and most beautiful things that I have ever seen.”

The book has over 20 pages about Gozo, which can be summarised in two sentences: “Oh, Gozo is a gem of a little island! Utterly, utterly outside the orbit of the ordinary world.” And the Gozitans? “The people were all equally pleasant and wistfully persuasive, like nice children.” They almost succeeded in reconciling him with anti-colonialist super bogeyman Nerik Mizzi, whose party had vast popular support in Gozo (though not from Shepherd’s hotel-keeper, the staunchest of imperialists). If such wonderful people as the Gozitans trusted and voted Mizzi en masse, then there had to be more than something winning about him.

Shepherd, his wife and his two unmarried sisters (both of whom later entered a convent) travelled 1st class on S.S. Meteor from Marseilles to Malta and reached the island on September 3, 1920. There had be some exchanges as to whether the Colonial Office should be bearing the costs of the sisters’ passages, and eventually Shepherd accepted that they should be his responsibility.

The young Shepherd – he was 28 when he took up his teaching job in Malta – had been proposed by the Colonial Office in London to fill the vacancy of the chair of English in the University of Malta created by Professor Fallon’s retirement. Teachers sent from the UK to Malta had to be Roman Catholic, but they also had to be certified supporters of the imperialist ethos. No way would the UK find anyone a job in colonial Malta unless he (very rarely she) guaranteed a gushing loyalty to the supremacy of the British Empire.

Shepherd’s successor, Prof. Owen J. Fogarty, besides English literature, also taught history at the University, and I was registered in his course. He had set his history students only one solitary textbook, revealingly called: Ideas and Ideals of the British Empire, authored by Sir Ernest Barker, a sad 1941 booklet written to justify the rape by one perfect nation, of others less perfect.

The unparalleled fortune of being subjects of the British Empire was all Maltese university students needed to learn about the history of the whole universe. That, and knowing the first stanza of the God Save the King, equipped them with all the skills they would need in life to turn them into serviceable natives – the rest was irrelevant. At the risk of failing my exam, I defiantly refused to buy Fogarty’s textbook. I had no money to spend on garbage and no time to spend on refuting it. I did not see why I should fork out my parents’ rather sparse savings for the benefit of being defiled.

Throughout his book, Shepherd laments how miserly his pay in Malta was. The 1921 annual Blue Book issued by the government hardly supports that moan. Shepherd received a basic annual salary of £320, but then the Maltese treasury supplemented his official income by another four handouts: teacher of modern history, examiner in literature and science, remuneration for extra classes, and a house allowance. These added another £172 to his annual income – absolutely lavish by 1920s Maltese standards. I bet he was not paying Dolor, his full-time, live-in Maltese maid, who he claims he valued as perfection personified, more than one pound a month.

Today few know of Shepherd or of his book about Malta. After so many years, it has now acquired the status of a dusty cultural artefact. But some months ago a foreign historian interested in the 1920s asked me to point out any British literature that would throw light on Malta in the near aftermath of World War I. I could only think of three books: Malta and Cyprus by Gladys Peto, Melita Effulgens by Michael Balfour Hutchinson Ritchie, and Shepherd’s Malta and Me. On the first two I have already written extensively. Maybe that query was a good excuse to revisit Shepherd some 60 years after my first painful encounter with what had been left of my dear nationhood after it had been, ehm, reviewed by him.

The culture prevailing among the British in Malta is that of junior schoolboys

I did that rather reluctantly – no one really enjoys reopening old wounds that time had somehow healed. And now am glad I did, as I made an amazing discovery: either the book had changed, or I had. It no longer grated on me the way it had 60 years earlier. In fact, I now found it overall charming, often clever in a self-deprecatory sort of clever. No way the savage assault on my Malteseness, nor the splenetic outbursts of a scorned professor out to settle scores, but the soft laments of a visitor who found it impossible to adjust his Britishness to a Mediterranean culture wholly unreceptive to it, and who rather wanted to believe that to be Malta’s fault, not his. Malta and the Maltese really only had two failings in his eyes: that they were not British and did not seem interested in being so. Nothing overtly unkind or hostile – in fact, plenty that is still true today.

How different Peto’s and Shepherd’s books are from each other. Though written and published at about the same time, they stand poles apart. Peto’s is all about the British residents and visitors to Malta, with hardly a mention of the Maltese who had peopled the islands since prehistory. Reading her book you would conclude that Malta was almost exclusively inhabited by dashing British officers and their families, svelte and blonde, with just a minor smattering of faceless, rather darkling, natives left behind on the rock by the carelessness of evolution. The locals consisted almost exclusively of overweight scullery maids who obligingly mopped the toilets, herdsmen with disagreeable goats that spread nasty fevers and got in the way of British cars on endless games of treasure hunts, dgħajsamen who cheated on the fare or on the change, and all the rest, unrelentingly obese, who spent their time dodging ghosts and devils and bawling loudly among themselves in their thoroughly horrid language.

The only point of contact between Peto and Shepherd is that Peto’s husband was an army doctor at Mtarfa hospital, and one of Shepherd’s best friends in Malta was also an army doctor from the same hospital, a “Dr Goldbiggin” who had a manic fixation over Malta’s fossils. The take by the two authors on the British residents in Malta could not be further apart. Peto is hardly critical at all of the brain-dead socialising of the British colony in Malta, while Shepherd appears as censorious of them as he is of the Maltese. Here is one lovely bit of racist British profiling – by a Briton.

“The culture prevailing (among the British in Malta) is that of junior schoolboys, among whom intellectual attainments are regarded as funny and distinctly compromising. In Malta, where the Services are lord of all, the fashionable note to strike is a gin-drinking, Marsa-mad, polo-playing, pony-racing one: if you have a light of any kind, you must put it under a bushel; to stick it in a candlestick would be to flout tradition. If, for instance, you know any history, pretend you don’t, if you are fond of music, pretend you aren’t, if you are well read pretend you never read anything but the Sporting Times while having your hair cut. Never miss any fixture at the Marsa, be present at every dance, drink a number of pink gins before dinner, and you will be regarded as a good cheery fellow... This is the culture we present to the Maltese; is it any great wonder that the ones with brains proclaim a ‘cultural affinity’ with Italy?”

Both Peto and Shepherd saw through the shallowness of so many of the British in Malta, the first with complicit amusement, the other checkmated by dismay. But Shepherd also saw through what he considered the inconsequence of the practice of their religious faith by the Maltese. What they wanted to pass off as state-of-the-art religion, to him was superstition, bigotry, false piety, intolerance, hypocritical double standards between what they disapproved of in others and what they approved of for themselves, between what they were and how they wanted to be seen.

Shepherd’s visceral dislike for the ‘religion’ he witnessed all around him in Malta landed him in trouble in England too with the more doctrinaire British Catholics. They judged his contempt of the Maltese brand of Catholicism as reflecting his contempt for Catholicism, period. Just after the author’s death, a certain R. Vaux wrote a scathing critique of what he considered Shepherd’s phoney Catholicism, as witnessed in his Malta and Me, “that deplorable anti-Catholic outburst”.

I suspect the author may have been Fr Roland de Vaux, a Dominican academic who gained international fame as the major scholar entrusted with the study of the Dead Sea scrolls. Vaux added, fancifully I believe, that Shepherd repented after publishing Malta and Me, and withdrew it from circulation – no copy, Vaux adds, is listed in the British Library “where I had undergone the distasteful experience of reading the book”. The suggestion that the library expunges books which their authors later disown was angrily refuted from Malta by Bro. Leo Barrington, who reassured readers that Shepherd’s book was still present and catalogued in that august library.

This post-mortem polemic turned into a good occasion for more information about Shepherd to emerge. A certain C.M. Davidson from Beaconsfield adds that Shepherd converted to the Catholic faith at the hands of Fr Edgar Blount SJ. Shepherd “is best remembered as a most gifted enthusiastic convert who, by his poetry and lighter works, helped many to the faith”. Davidson adds that Shepherd “never lost a friend that he had made and has left behind him much work which I hope may yet be published, revealing a consistently Catholic mind, but for a short period”. He also records that Malta and Me (which he believes should have been named Me and Malta), had been press reviewed by the poet Wilfred Childe, himself a Catholic convert. I have been unable to find this review. Shepherd’s conversion at the hands of Fr Blount (1858-1933) raises a question: Malta and Me was printed by the publishers Selwyn and Blount Ltd – any connection?

Shepherd’s book points towards the opposite extreme from Peto’s: it deals almost solely with the Maltese population, its politicians, the students, the adhesive Maltese noise, the priests you would like to forget and the barren countryside which you cannot. Of course, English residents and visitors feature occasionally in it too, and so do British imperial politics, but mostly insofar as they seem useful to clarify or explain any point he is trying to make about the Maltese.

One institution (of several) Shepherd could not come to terms with was the law courts. He recorded a phenomenon as it was in his times: the law courts were “Valletta’s centre of gravity and the favourite institution of the island. The law is the profession of professions in Malta, and almost every public man of importance is a lawyer”.

He had some surprises coming his way on the legal front. A pretty young Maltese girl he met over tea boasted to him how “she came of a family of liars. Her father, she said, was a liar, her grandfather had been a most distinguished liar, and most of her brothers were studying hard and with much display of inherited talent, to become liars”. It took him some time to come to ascertain that many Maltese pronounce ‘lawyer’ as ‘liar’.

A sizeable crowd can always be seen gathered in front of the court building, as “nothing so strongly appeals to the instincts of the Maltese as a wordy forensic wrangle”. To the delight of lawyers “whose name is legion and their eloquence prodigious”, Maltese laws tie themselves up in most wondrous complications. The courts shared with parliament the highest rankings as popular distractions.

Criminal libel flourished, and politicians delighted in seeing each other standing in the delinquents’ dock. “Needless to say, it never ended in imprisonment, but in ‘scenes of popular enthusiasm’ after the inevitable acquittal. Maltese politicians never forget their obligations as chief popular entertainers.”

Shepherd recounts a quaint episode through which he almost found himself press ganged as a court expert. The question was whether the phrase “the apparently pious Father X” would be construed as libel by the ordinary Englishman in the street. The professor of English had to milk to the full all the rich nuances of that language to explain how the phrase was capable of different interpretations. Was the emphasis addressed to the ‘pious’ or to the ‘apparently’? Sadly, neither of the words was in italics, so anybody’s guess would be as good as anyone else’s. That phrase was then endlessly and mightily litigated in court.

Malta and Me is about the only British book of the inter-war years that attempts to profile the Maltese psyche, its political knots, its priorities, its dubious potential, its going nowhere. Admittedly, all this from the highly subjective and even suspect vantage point of a foreign teacher who had tried to reform, found he could, in fact, teach very little to Maltese students resistant to anything different or British, and had then left the island in despair, acknowledging that the indigenous culture had defeated him, backed and supported though he was by the might of the British Empire.

In fact, Shepherd, his wife Aimèe (here inexplicably called Sara) and their young child David, born in Malta on May 24, 1922, left the island, with few regrets, I surmise, by the Italian steamer Solunto for Naples, on March 28, 1923 – he did not even complete his third scholastic year which would have ended in June. As a final, and cruel, stroke of irony, the Italian captain listed the anti-Italian professor as “Roberto Shepherd” on the passenger manifest. If truth be told, the man was really hounded by adverse luck.

(To be concluded)

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