Purple Prose (16 page)

The pictures were submarine, for I was looking at freshly discovered wreckage in pristine condition. The discovery and its location had been kept secret for the past month, during which the find was added to the Inventory of Cultural Treasures of Malta. When announced, it made world headlines. Three countries became engaged in the recovery effort and ensuing research. Because Malta was a significant dot on the historic purple trade route, about which so little is known, expectations are high that this ancient vessel and its cargo will prove to be a kind of Rosetta Stone.

I was born in my maternal grandpa's home on the main island, which was so central to the Phoenicians' seafaring trade in purple dye. When he was a young man, my paternal grandfather had crossed the channel from Gozo to live in Malta while he attended university. He was the first of his family to do so, eventually became Chief Justice of Malta and was knighted by the late King of England. But to us he was just Nannu Turo, who remained proudly ‘Gozitan'.

Gozo, overlooked by the chain of colonisers who conquered Malta, had retained its traditional agrarian and fishing culture. This hilly little island produces an abundance of fruit and vegetables and its bread is the best I have ever tasted. As our family's second home, its history was ours: my parents honeymooned there during World War II, and my London-based brother, now in his sixties, still holidays on the island every year. When we were children, each June at the start of the summer holidays, Nannu Turo and my grandmother Nanna Nusa returned to their tiny Gozitan beachfront home at Marsalforn Bay. The flock of cousins which followed them across the channel for this annual migration included us.

On the island we spent all the hours of daylight outdoors, in the sea, by the sea or on it in small boats. After dark, youngsters were allowed to roam the fishing village, where all the families knew each other. We congregated along the sea wall, or in side streets wherever anyone was playing a guitar on their doorstep. We made sorties to the only shop (no bigger than a bathroom), which sold ice-creams and fizzy drinks. The adults were at café tables playing cards, or strolling along the seafront, stopping from house to house to greet friends resting on wicker chairs or the low walls of the small tiled area outside each front door, called the ‘parapet'. It was too hot to stay indoors in the late 50s and early 60s, as there was no air conditioning or even fans in remote, rural Marsalforn. I remember oil lamps, my grandmother's lighting ritual each evening: that dramatic flare of bright and shadow they threw on the uneven surface of interior stone walls, and bedtime's acrid smell of extinguished wicks.

I had never before been part of such a great amorphous crowd of relatives and friends. After spending a decade overseas, mostly in London, my family had just returned to live in Malta on the cusp of my teen years. Those first summers – when I was an outrider fish, skirting the school of youngsters as it darted and dived through the dark streets – felt like the beginnings of belonging. As the only daughter of strict parents I was unaccustomed to the social freedom
that blessed our summers in Gozo, where I was part of the large sub-group collectively known as ‘the Mercieca cousins', some who had their own family summer houses in the bay, others like us who always headed to Nannu's home for meals and to sleep. There were often times when eight of us shared the room which served as a dormitory in the two-up, two-down sandstone terraced house. I remember lying in bed late at night as we whispered in the dark, while moonlight reflected on the shiny beach pebbles we had set out on the windowsill – and I remember the embarrassment of having to use the toilet, where the ancient chain-pull made such a crashing sound. I remember the fascination as I watched the gutting of fresh fish caught by neighbours, and my excitement as I waited for the chinking bells which heralded a small herd of goats arriving each afternoon to be milked into enamel jugs at our kitchen door.

Nannu had always seemed very old and venerable. When I was nineteen and he was in his late nineties, he became gravely ill and, typically, eschewed hospital care for the ministrations of his devoted wife, mother of their eight children. As summer came in that year and his illness progressed, he seemed to live merely on the salted breath of his beloved Marsalforn Bay, so his bed was placed across the open balcony door, where he could feel its every caress and see the Mediterranean if he opened his eyes. When he closed them for the last time, the island's two main (and fiercely rival) band clubs argued over who would do the funeral honours and escort his cortege to the ferry, for burial on the main island. Eventually they settled on a very Gozitan solution: Nannu's hearse would be driven up the hill from his home to the capital Rabat, not once but
twice,
giving each band club a turn at leading his farewell procession.

The discovery of a Phoenician wreck in those shallow Gozitan waters was announced on the international news just ten days after I had shared these memories in the multicultural session of last
year's Perth Poetry Festival, together with poems I had recently written about Gozo's coastal place names, and photos to illustrate them. Images of the buttery sandstone fortress walls round Rabat's ancient fortress capital Medina, on the island's highest hill; the turquoise bay waters; cerise and purple wildflowers growing in the shallow soil deposits of the island's craggy
garigue.
The timing of this marine discovery seemed doubly synchronous. I had just begun to write about my ‘ancestral' connection to purple, so my first thought and question was: how long will it take for investigators to discover which amphorae had contained purple dye? Survey photos of the wreck, where it lay 130 metres deep, showed fifty amphorae still intact and scattered in the surrounding sand. These containers were of diverse shapes, each a distinct signature indicating that the ship had visited many different harbours and was indeed a trading vessel.

My imagination soared beyond this essay as I pictured possibilities for a book-length poetry project. I already had plans underway to visit Gozo in the new year after an absence of almost a decade, following an invitation to deliver a paper at the University of Malta. Perhaps that would provide me with an opportunity to meet some of the Phoenician wreck research team … Before long I was daydreaming about an island writing residency.

And then I remembered that a clairvoyant had once offered me a swatch of coloured cards, or fabric (the details are fuzzy) and I picked purple, which is when she told me,
That colour will bring you nothing but trouble
. The prediction seemed overly dramatic. But it did suggest an image to me, a coloured thread running through the tapestry of my life, only occasionally visible on the topside of the fabric. Could I, should I, avoid purple in the future? As the White Queen remarked to Alice,
It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
¹

Early in adolescence I had learned of the link between my Maltese heritage and the Phoenician trade in purple dye. I promptly adopted the colour. The phase survived unkind remarks (a schoolfriend's observation that I was
possessed by purple
and the summer party where my aunt's friend said to me, too loudly:
Few people can wear that colour, Anna, and you are not one of them
). I wonder, now, whether purple became my opium for the pain of non-entity? The experience of returning to my birth island after a nomadic childhood in Africa, the UK and Central America had equipped me with exotic memories in which nobody was interested, and left me totally ignorant of face-saving local knowledge. A foreigner in my own culture, ignorant of the vital sequence of feast days with their associated foods and customs which shaped island life, illiterate in Maltese, the local language which still permeated everyday discourse, although ‘out of fashion' in colonial Malta where fluent English speakers were privileged (my one advantage), I muddled the names of my sixty-four first cousins and the twenty aunts and uncles to whom I had been so suddenly introduced and who were now central to our family's social life. What meagre sense of belonging I had mustered came from religion.

Being a Roman Catholic was a kind of citizenship: no matter where we lived, my family were devout churchgoers and I was educated by nuns. In those days of a universal Latin liturgy, the sense of shared sacred history and symbolism was as powerful as a tribal sense of place. It gave me known terrain, enriched by poetry remembered by heart; its seasons were easily distinguished by their prayers, music or ritual colours; its archetypal characters and stories patterned my imagination. The most transformative times in the church calendar, the traditional observances which reinforced our identity as Catholics were Lent and Easter, Advent and Christmas. These were magical and emotional events. Passages of transition and waiting, dread and longing. They were always celebrated in purple, that colour between hope and uncertainty.
Silken purple. Brocaded purple. Opulent purple. Priests robed in purple vestments, the interior walls of high cathedral and village church alike entirely hung with purple cloth. Tabernacles sheathed in purple. Still significant to this day, it is a colour code from ancient times, when cathedral stained-glass windows were storybooks for the illiterate, and a change of vestments signalled the beginning and end of sacred seasons.

To the devout, the long weeks of Lent and Advent exist in ‘time out of time'. They are not, in liturgical parlance, ‘ordinary time'. And although, in this post-Christian era, Lent and Advent are invisible to the secular world, back then I was not in the secular world most of the time. Throughout high school I spent the scholastic year in a convent. Obliged to wear what I thought was a particularly ghastly winter uniform and assigned a cubicle barely big enough for my bed, chair and washstand, I compensated with purple striped sheets, a purple bedcover and purple plastic water-jug and bowl. This gesture of individualism was a whim my mother indulged. She had no say in where I was schooled but she understood my resistance to conformity, detested convents and loved colour. As it turned out, the convent shaped me for life and also, I think, for the better. I made lifelong friendships, fell in love with literature and learned to live with less. But that realisation only came with hindsight.

There are many such paradoxical turning points in anyone's life. Mine have a colour signature. Was it prescience or protest when in my late forties I chose to wear a pale purple cape and carry purple liliums at my second wedding? Through divorce and remarriage, I broke faith with the rules of Catholicism. My soulmate was Wayne, a retired career soldier and wounded survivor of the Vietnam War. So in the Anglican co-cathedral that day I also carried red poppies and rosemary for remembrance, with golden ears of wheat for rebirth
.
And following Wayne's unforseen death just nine months later, I wore that shade of pale purple again, obsessively.