Some sixty years back I lived in one fort in Malta (Ricasoli) and went to school in another (Verdala) so naturally I developed an interest in exploring both and in particular I investigated the tunnels with which both, as indeed all the forts in Malta, were honeycombed and often delved deep into the ground.
The circumstances were different in both locations for though Ricasoli was a fort built by the Order (The Knights of St John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta) it was occupied by the British Army in the form of the Royal Artillery and Royal Malta Artillery and had been modified and brought up to date in order to protect the entrance to the Grand Harbour. What was generally known as Fort Verdala however was properly called the St Clement's Retrenchment and was built by the British to join the Order's immense Cottonera Lines to the earlier Margherita Lines in accordance with the thinking of military architects in the early nineteenth century. The new ravelin so constructed was obsolete as soon as it was completed but was utilised as a school, the Dockyard School.
I lived in the married quarters of Fort Ricasoli but our building was actually constructed for the families of the soldiers who manned the great 100 ton gun of Fort Rinella alongside Ricasoli but the cannon had been abandoned in 1905 and thirty years later it was just our plaything. Other playgrounds were the tunnels beneath the outworks of Ricasoli, Malta's largest fort and these as I now know were actually mining tunnels for they ran under the glacis or killing ground, a bare slope up to the fortifications up which an attacker must climb and so mines were laid beneath that area in narrow passages ending in beehive shaped rooms in which the explosive was stored. John Hale the son of the sergeant major of Ricasoli and I spent much time in these rooms and as ten year olds we referred to them as negative igloos. Forty years later I read a book called "The Fort" by John, who was then an established author and playwright in which he used that term and as it was set in Ricasoli (not by that name) and he wrote of the two sons of the sergeant major down in these tunnels (he was an only child, like myself, at the time) and so I believe I was featured as his brother - though he never admitted it.
John was in the class below me at the Dockyard School and had no objection to singing so he did not join me on my Thursday afternoon sorties into the tunnels beneath our school and, as I have mentioned before, the tunnels there were much larger behind the casemates than the small passages of Ricasoli. These large corridors were made good use of as shelters for the people of Cospicua during the bombing of Malta and were the scene of the talks by the Parish Priest to take minds off the outside inferno in Nicholas Montserrat's book "The Kappillan of Malta". I was intent on escaping out of the school altogether and so explored further beneath the ramparts (I had no fear of tunnels for I come from a Cornish tin-mining family) but could not get out for every access was barred and there was reason for this in that the storage chambers under the school were filled with naval stores and fittings but suitable for ships of an earlier age. The school, as its name implied, was close to the Dockyard and the storage rooms were stuffed with those knobbly things that festooned the rigging of sailing ships, blocks and tackle, and associated spars barrels of what seemed to be tar and other more mysterious liquidsand even sails. There was a regular Aladdin's Cave of fascinating objects. most of which I could not recognise -except the cannon balls! There were thousands of them down there but no gunpowder, which may have been just as well!
In those days old cannons were everywhere in Malta, many had been embedded muzzle down in the quays to provide mooring places and can still be seen whilst others in better condition guarded the entrances to public buildings and even barracks - though of course they had been spiked in the interests of safety. Besides them were often piles of cannon balls in neat pyramids, again welded together for security. In their original warlike use the cannon-balls were held ready and in place by a wooden triangle embellished by polished brass and termed monkeys. I have been told that since the spheres became unstable in extremely adverse weather it gave rise to the expression "Cold enought to freeze the balls off a brass monkey". I can think of no other derivation for the term.
Eventually I did contrive to get out of the school of a Thursday afternoon but it was by such an obvious ploy that I felt foolish for not using it earlier but that again is for another day.
E-mail to Peter Prictoe: rinella@cableinet.co.uk
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