Last Wednesday the Times of Malta reported the results of recent research that showed that, when compared with those in a number of other countries, children in Malta are the least satisfied with their immediate surroundings. A good number of them told the researchers they did not feel safe walking in their neighbourhoods, and that they were hard pressed to find local spaces where they could play.

There are various reasons why a part of me is inclined to raise an eyebrow. First, notions like feeling satisfied and safe are notoriously hard to pin down. It is known that people can feel dissatisfied with perfectly reasonable incomes, for example, and unsafe in perfectly safe places.

Second, children often mimic the things adults say, simply because they reckon (rightly) that nothing makes adults happier than listening to their own voices as parroted by their offspring.

Third, I have it on reliable authority that the favourite habitat of many children today is the tablet, irrespective of the gardens of parched scents that may beckon outside their homes.

Still, I think there is something to be said for these findings. It’s probably true that many children in Malta today find themselves clueless about and alienated from their neighbourhoods, even as they are taxied around from school to piano lesson to jiu-jitsu class by suicidal parents who have all the time in the world to contemplate the traffic and the wisdom of contraception.

Partly the problem is that people in Malta today are inclined to picture the island as one continuous cartography of possibility. Thirty years ago most of us played, shopped, and often worked locally. (The last explains why the population of Cottonera huddled around the dockyard, for example, or why Żwieten swam at St Thomas Bay.) ‘Locally’ has now come to mean ‘in Malta’. People think nothing of spending the day driving all over the island to sample its dispersed offerings.

Except they do think. I’m tempted to paraphrase and thank heavens for the thought of suicide, because it gets one through many a rough traffic jam. More seriously, the costs of all the mad rushing about are huge and affect children as much as they do their grown-up torturers. Ranked high among these costs is the sense of loss of locality and neighbourhood.

The costs of all the mad rushing about are huge and affect children as much as they do their grown-up torturers. Ranked high among these costs is the sense of loss of locality and neighbourhood

Now I don’t imagine that these exiled little princes-on-board will grow up to become the mass murderers of tomorrow. There are no easy correlations in these matters, and we know that the generations who played happily in village squares as children managed two world wars and a spot of genocide as adults. If there are any, the consequences will probably be more subtle, and of a largely aesthetic nature.

I happen to be familiar with the daily life of a boy who lives in a city in Switzerland. Like most of his friends, he walks to school and back home every day. In winter this usually involves walking in knee-deep snow, which apparently only adds to the fun, especially if there are schoolmates around who might be tempted into a snowball fight.

There are the skiing weekends and the occasional trip with his mother to the shops on the other side of town, to be sure, but most of his time is spent in the immediate neighbourhood. I can picture him in 50 years’ time reminiscing about the streets and shops and gardens where he spent his childhood.

The connection is relevant. As a kind of basic research for this piece I asked a few people to tell me something about their childhood. It turned out that all of the happy bits had to do with the places of that childhood, in all cases the immediate neighbourhood of the family home.

A friend who was brought up in Lija told me about how he would spend his after-school time running around with other children in what was then an overgrown field. He remembered all the village shops and seduced me with anecdotes and stories of local characters and their foibles.

Someone else described the Ta’Ġiorni of her childhood in the late 1970s. At the time the place was still largely a landscape of tilled fields and carob trees. She described it as a perfect paradise where children from urbane backgrounds would play with age-mates from local farming families. Shopping came in the shape of a daily walk to the grocer’s or a visit to a farm to buy eggs.

The bucolic setting is incidental. I grew up in Valletta where fields and bicycles and farms were a distant planet. And yet my attachment to the neighbourhood was in no way dented by their absence. I have vivid memories of the shops and of the colourful characters that peopled them. I can still hear the bells of the many churches that surrounded us, and the deserted silence of the streets on Sunday mornings. They are the closest thing to a happy childhood I can speak of.

I wouldn’t wish to make this sound too idyllic and nostalgic – too Enid Blyton, so to say. The point is not that Lija, Ta’ Ġiorni and Valletta were perfect places. Rather, it is that neighbourhood was the repository of childhood, and of later recollections of its happiness. The streets and fields where we grew up were the lumber room of Saki’s short story.

Which brings me to the aesthetic bit. The film by Federico Fellini I like best is Amarcord. The name is local dialect for Io mi ricordo (I remember) and the film takes us back to the director’s childhood in a small village near Rimini. Or rather it partly does, because it plays deliberate tricks with memory and is only semi autobiographical. And yet it’s hard not to feel that the rest of Fellini’s work can scarcely be understood outside the ambit of childhood and neighbourhood portrayed in Amarcord.

The same can probably said of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. His childhood connection with a neighbourhood of Palermo and a country villa in Santa Margherita di Belice permeates the rest of his work and makes it the brilliantly evocative literature it is.

We have no way of knowing how the alienation and dislocation will affect children. My guess is that they will grow up to do much the same things we do. It’s just that the endless rush all over the place may well be robbing them of the aesthetic experience of locality.

mafalzon@hotmail.com

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.