These are my childhood memories, corrupted by time and young age.
I left Malta at age 7, and remember something of Tony and my grandmother, Edith. They lived in a flat on Tower Road. We also lived on Tower Road at that time. The sunsets and sailboats from a third floor flat were incredibly beautiful.
We called him ‘grumps’ and her ‘granny Edith’.
I remember ascending to their floor, probably also on the third or fourth floor in a woodpanelled elevator. Unless I am mistaken, the elevator doors opened right into the kitchen of their apartment. You had to go through the kitchen to get to the rest of the apartment.
My grandmother had blue eyes, like my father. I remember her at her sink. Closeby hung a garland of garlic gloves. The cloves excited me, as my other grandmother had essentially banned garlic from her house, and the look, smell and taste were essentially unknown to me. Contraband.
I remember my grandfather in an easy chair in the living room, with the sun streaming through the glass doors and the view of the Mediterranean. He was probably reading the paper. My father and his brother were talking to him about some connection of someone to Sir Philip. There was a glass topped coffee table and I was playing with something on top of it.
My grandfather had beige coloured hearing aids that sat behind the ear. I believe he would turn the aids off to save power and turn them on for important conversations. This led to loud talk most of the time. I was also told if you wanted him to hear you, you could also put your forehead to his, and through bone conduction, make yourself heard.
The story was he had lost his hearing during the war due to a shell explosion. This was an exciting story to me then, something I asked my father about, probably multiple times.
I suspect this was roughly around the time Tony and Edith knew we were leaving for Australia.
When we were in Australia, and the only family we had was Uncle John who lived on Beaconsfield Parade. We visited him every few weeks. My grandparents seemed so far away and inaccessible. It was in the 1980s and phonecalls were expensive. A death of a family member warranted a 20 minute phonecall which cost over a $100. Long calls were for serious events.
After a long phonecall with Malta, my mother was keen to reassure me that Tony’s death was peaceful. On his last day, he had somehow detected he was having a heart attack. He was with my grandmother and called to her. He realised that it was useless to call an ambulance. He went into the room off the kitchen and sat in a chair, she followed him, and sat near to him. He started to count up or down in whole numbers, and before he had reached ten or zero, he had passed away.