Marquis Nicholas De Piro

This photograph is actually dated 26th October 1942. My mother was twenty-five and I was just one year and two months old. I vaguely seem to remember her saying the photograph was taken by her maternal uncle Ugo Calì at the Grand Studio in Valletta. She is wearing black, in mourning for her father-in-law who had died one week before my first birthday in August. My father, at this harrowing period in time, was on active duty as an anti-aircraft gunner in the Royal Malta Artillery.

My mother was the granddaughter of Giuseppe Calì. She could draw and play the piano with ease. She was what must have been considered an ideal wife: calm of temperament, she read books making her an interesting conversationalist; she liked sport and accompanied her father to the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936, but she had very little experience of the kitchen, as her father had not allowed his girls to cook! She played tennis, could knit and sew, and loved swimming. I always remember pets in the house, both cats and dogs.

Those were the days when the man was very much in charge of his family. My dear mother felt she owed it to her husband to do him the honour of making him feel confident in his authority, and she succeeded admirably. That said, she was intelligent and well able to get her own way by always giving my father the impression that important decisions which she wanted to be taken were inspired by him – and so they lived happily without the boring confrontation one sees so much of in marriages now.

My mother’s influence has been to encourage me to listen to other opinions opposed to my own, and to cope with situations which can so often be unfavourable. She loved the arts and perhaps it was through her that I inherited a little aestheticism. I enjoyed a good deal of affection from both my parents and only really came face-to-face with real discipline when at the age of nine I was sent to school in England (where everything was on ration), and did not return to a holiday and the comfort of my sorely missed home for a whole year.