At home with Peter Calamatta and family
In this final excerpt the author writes, not without some nostalgia about his family’s four homes
Going over the many stories and events which feature in Me &
My Mentors, I could not help being swept away by a tsunami of nostalgia and the realisation that, as in the Chinese proverb, by seeing where we left from and where we have arrived as a family we can really be proud and thankful to God for helping us achieve all these successes and weather all the pitfalls of an eventful life.
But what is a family without a home? During our married life Simone and I had four homes. The first one, where we only stayed for two years, was a very humble mezzanine apartment in St. Francis Street, Balzan, which we had rented for the equivalent of €55 a month, for those days a big sum of money especially considering my monthly salary was less than €200. Our expenses were many and we could hardly make ends meet but we were happy there even if we knew we wanted to build our own house and it would never be our permanent abode. Our second home, a two-storey maisonette, was built on a plot of land which we acquired from the government under a scheme which distributed plots of land for free. We had no money to build it so we applied for a loan which I think we only got because the bank manager was a family friend.
We built the house in less than a year. I had designed the interior myself and came up with a few revolutionary ideas which made us the envy of all our neighbours. It was a really beautiful house, with an internal marble staircase that went up to the roof. We had the kitchen in front and the living room at the back, incorporating what should have been the yard. This was roofed over with glass, giving us a stunning entertaining area which served us well since, not being able to afford to eat out, we did a lot of entertaining at home. We had three bedrooms so the children had one each, a true luxury in those days.
Luciano Micallef, the renowned Maltese artist who was then relatively unknown, painted the stairwell with a sepia coloured collection of exotic plants and climbers, as if to cement the idea with all our visitors that I was a plant man. We loved this house and would have been very happy to spend all our days there.
However life has its own twists and turns. I am quite sure that what happened after ten years of living in this beautiful maisonette also had the hand of God in it. One day when I was in my shop at Pietá a rugged old man who seemed in quite a bad way came in and asked me for a packet of melon seeds. He said that he would probably never taste the melon fruits that would result from the seeds. When I asked him why he said that he was selling his farmhouse to go to Australia where he had family. Out of curiosity I asked to go and see his farmhouse, mainly because he said it was also in San Gwann, very close to my maisonette. When I walked through his rusty and creaky gate I saw a scene of desolation and neglect but my mind went into overdrive and I envisaged a scene of beauty, a lush and green majestic family home. I heard myself saying to myself ‘This place is going to be mine’.
How I was going to get the capital for this house was beyond me. At the time we had just been dealt a terrible financial blow. A venture with a business partner had just gone sour and practically bankrupted us. My partner had cheated me of my first garden centre, Greenfingers. But I still wished I could get my hands on this dreamlike property.
My brother Alfred came to the rescue, lent me the money, and
“Born when Malta was being bombarded during the second world war, I feel I have survived a whole load of bombs bombs that could have or should have stopped me from fighting on.