When I was a boy in the early 1950s, I used to act as a ‘chaperone’ to my cousin when she went out with her boyfriend.

One evening, we went to the ‘talkies’ at a cinema in Valletta. After the show, we went for a walk in the dark and ended up at the deserted entrance of the Upper Barrakka Gardens. My cousin’s boyfriend was irritated with my presence because I stood between him and his intentions. He told me to stand and wait at a certain spot while he led my cousin to the corner near the entrance of the closed garden. He proceeded to kiss her there for quite a while.

Consider what Maltese men back then had to put up with –just to get a kiss.

This hothouse of a repressed sexuality was reinforced by a priestly pall that hung over everything.

A senior citizen who was interviewed in Bliss magazine said: “Back then, we used to think the Catholic Action boys would all turn out to be priests... The parish priest actually came to my parents’ house before the wedding to check that the neckline wasn’t too low-cut!”

It makes you wonder how the parish priest could find the time in his busy schedule ‘to check’ women’s necklines in addition to hearing countless ‘confessions’ on the guilt-ridden sex lives of his parishioners.

In the Senior Times, a woman related how, in her youth, she and her fiancé used to recite the rosary on their daily walk to the Upper Barrakka Gardens. Even by the oppressive, religious standards of the 1950s, the recitation of the rosary in the street by courting couples would have been looked down on as “tal-mużew”.