A woman who flew to Malta from the UK equipped only with a few black-and-white photos and scarce information has managed to meet the nanny who cared for her 60 years ago in Sliema.

But the encounter was only made possible after a Times of Malta reader whom she had never met spent two weeks looking for the nanny.

Rena, the Herrings’ childhood nanny.

When reader Anna Grima learnt of Angela Herring’s visit from the newspaper, she did all the groundwork beforehand and managed to trace the childhood carer Rena, née Sciberras.

Ms Herring, née Pollitt, lived in Malta as a child between 1955 and 1959 and her memories are “hazy but very happy”.

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Her father was in the Royal Marines and left a week after her family arrived to go to Cyprus. She recalls living on Sacred Heart Avenue, in a block of flats that stood alone overlooking a grassy hillside. “We played a lot on the hillside and in the street – there were very few cars. One day some Maltese boys were throwing stones towards the roof and I got hit on the head. My mum rushed me up to the hospital at the convent and I remember them stitching the cut. It was very painful.

“There was a farm next to us that has been knocked down, and sadly the whole area is now built up.” Ms Herring remembers several places from her time in Malta: a playschool in Valletta, the Army School at Mtarfa and beaches like Għadira and Golden Bay that have not changed much.

But one of the highlights remains meeting her nanny, Rena, to whom in her letter she refers as Raina or Reigna.

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“Meeting Rena was amazing – she remembered our family so well, she remembered how quiet and shy my brother was, how smart and precise my father was and also how kind my mum was.

“It was wonderful to meet her after all these years, and I cannot thank Anna Grima enough, because without her it would have been impossible,” she told this newspaper.

Ms Grima made it her mission to find Rena when she read Ms Herring’s letter in the newspaper.

The fact-finding venture took her from Sacred Heart Avenue to several other streets in Sliema, Balluta Bay and St Julian’s as she was referred from one person to another. Each referral lifted her hopes, but each time she realised that she was knocking on the wrong door.

When she finally traced Rena to Naxxar two weeks later, the 25-minute drive seemed an eternity.

There she knocked on Rena’s door and handed over the photos that Ms Herring had published in the newspaper.

“She looked at them, looked back at me with a big smile and said ‘Yes, this is me’. I cannot explain what I felt. My eyes were watering and apart from feeling relieved and satisfied, there was so much happiness in my heart,” Ms Grima recalled, noting Rena’s brother had helped her out.

Ms Herring’s trip to Malta will probably not be the last.

“We loved Malta, absolutely loved it. We have visited several Mediterranean countries, and Malta was by far the cleanest and the most welcoming. Everyone was so helpful. There are a lot of cars, and the signposts were not brilliant, but as everyone told us, ‘You can’t get lost’.

“We definitely hope to return. There were many places we did not have time to visit. Sadly we didn’t have time for Mosta, which I remember visiting with Rena as a little girl at Christmastime.”