“I am every age that I have ever been,” wrote American writer Madeleine L’Engle. I turned 40 this year but I can still touch, smell and remember what it was like to be seven, nine and 12. One whiff of chlorine and I am immediately transported to ‘Ġnien il-Għabex’ – a place and time which belongs to my childhood, which I haven’t seen in close on 30 years.

Stored within every one of us is the indelible print of every year we have lived. We each possess a collection of personal stories and selves; people we’ve met, loved, laughed and cried with, which can be accessed and recalled at will.

By the late 70s my parents had forged a very close friendship with Lino and Vivienne Spiteri, which meant that my sister, brother and I naturally became friendly with them and their children, Noelle, Bertrand, Lara and Lincoln.

Children don’t – and shouldn’t have to – question their parents’ friendships and associations. But this was Malta in the 1980s, when politics was so powerfully divisive that friendships between ‘Labourites’ and ‘Nationalists’ were socially unacceptable and unheard of. The ability to rise above and challenge those taboos said a lot about both sets of parents and must have taken unusual courage and an even more unusual intelligence.

I don’t recall politics ever being an issue in our household, although I suppose it was understood we were Nationalist. If you attended a Church school in the 1980s, as I did, politically ‘incorrect’ surnames like Mintoff or Holland were viewed with contempt. The psychological bullying and social rejection these children were made to endure must have been hellish.

I was acutely aware that associations with ‘the other side’ were perceived as a perfidious act of betrayal. Although I was too young to know why or to realise the idiocy of it all, even at the age of nine I knew deep in my heart that the only thing ‘wrong’ was its being made to feel wrong.

Years later, when Bertrand and I reconnected, I was curious to discover whether he had ever questioned the dynamics and implications of our parents’ friendship. His reply epitomised the essence of a sound upbringing. His parents, he said, had not brought up their children as ‘Labourites’, hence he was not inclined to see people in terms of either ‘Labour’ or ‘Nationalist’.

We were not Nationalists: we were the friends of his parents. When, aged 12, he asked his father what the difference between MLP and PN was, Lino handed him a book and told him to make his mind up about politics after he had read it.

I absolutely loved my not so ‘secret’ friendship with the Spiteris (no relation, incidentally, despite frequently being stopped and asked whether I was Vivienne and Lino’s daughter, on the unimaginative basis, perhaps, of our identical surnames, or of a passing resemblance to their daughters).

One or two days before Lino passed away, I was taken aside in court and asked earnestly by a magistrate, how “papa” was. I replied that he was fine and that he was probably playing golf. It was only a few days later that it occurred to me he probably was referring to Lino!

I remember all the New Year’s Eve parties at Dar iż-Żerniq and am able to visualise perfectly the open-plan downstairs and the piano in the hallway which was central to their lives. They were a musical family who wrote, played and sang music. Their ‘għalqa’ in Landrijiet (Ġnien il-Għabex) was every child’s dream, replete with their dogs – Tuta, Farah and my favourite, Sasha – a German shepherd.

The trips we took first to the Abruzzo region in Scanno and later to Kandersteg in Switzerland are among the happiest moments of my childhood. But nothing matches the week we spent at the Golden Sands Hotel here in Malta, when the proprietor Moses Fenech would join us for supper in his white dinner jacket.

This man [Lino Spiteri], unusually, really did appeal to both sides of the political spectrum

I was slightly in awe of Lino, in the way children are of grown-ups, particularly intellectuals of his calibre. Had someone told me then, that 20 years later, I would end up writing for this newspaper and sharing column space with Lino, I’d never have believed it. He had a quiet dignity about him, and although he liked to tease and nicknamed me ‘quarter moon’ (which as I grew older became ‘half moon’), he was usually too busy writing, preparing a budget or arguing a point lucidly.

He especially liked one of my favourite Jesus Christ Superstar songs, which he’d have me sing again and again, one verse in particular. Today, I find myself wondering whether the song Could we start again, please?, which Peter sings to Jesus, represented at the time a disillusionment similar to the one he must have felt with a certain kind of politics – to which he had so unwittingly become a party. Sometimes I think he was secretly singing it to Mintoff . . .

“I’ve been very hopeful, so far

Now for the first time I think we’re going wrong

Before it gets too frightening, we ought to call a halt

So could we start again please?”

As I draw to a close, I can see that much of this has been, all along, little ‘quarter moon’s’ tribute to a man sadly no longer with us. His humanity, transcending political division, was an example to her over 30 years ago: and today it still invites the Maltese nation.

This man, unusually, really did appeal to both sides of the political spectrum. When I think back on it all, I reckon that the friendship our respective families shared was a formative influence in many ways.

Unlike many who consciously or unconsciously rate people according to politics and who still ­punctuate their sentences with idiotic assertions like “he’s Labour/Nationalist, but he’s decent”, I was fortunate enough to understand, from a very young age, that decency has absolutely nothing to do with politics. People are just people.

michelaspiteri@gmail.com