Summer days are here again, as the song goes, and there are times when flashes of the summers of my childhood intrude on other mundane thoughts.

For some years our summer mornings were spent at the Ursuline orphanage, down near St Patrick’s and where my parents usually went to mass every day. Some sort of arrangement had been made with the nuns. There we practiced piano, learnt how to embroider and read our ‘Famous Five’ books. My mother simply couldn’t handle five very lively children I suppose. We enjoyed our days at the Ursulines, played with the orphans and got on with our various hobbies.

Then, lunch at home and the ‘Have you washed your hands?’ ritual, prayers before meals and after dessert, lining up for disgusting cod liver oil which my father insisted on calling ‘the finest sweet’. And so, into our bathing costumes and off to the Exiles for lots of swimming with him. No suntan lotions and factor this and factor that. No after sun creams. Just a towel. We dived for sea urchins with a little penknife, looked out for interesting pebbles, acquired a bruise or two and ventured further and further out, quite unafraid. Jaws was as yet to be made and we probably hadn’t even heard of sharks.

Then back home for tea and hobz biz-zejt. I still think there is nothing better in the whole wide world than a piece of Maltese bread soaked in olive  oil and rubbed with tomatoes, salt, pepper, capers and olives  and some mint from the garden. By the end of summer we were as brown as berries. We hardly ever sunbathed. We swam most of the time.

Summers at the Exiles continued in our teenage years and into our twenties. No bikini lines to worry about – girls in bikinis, usually foreign, were hauled to the police station and their photos sometimes splashed in the trashier British press as an example of backwards, Catholic Malta. The effect of girl in a bikini in those decorous times, was seismic.

We crossed the bay from the Exiles to the Cavalieri and back with my friend Monty without batting an eyelid.

In Mauritius, when the children were babies we would take them to the beach in a carrycot which were rare. Most babies were put in a cardboard box or were carried around by a nenen – call her a nanny if you wish. So our baby in a carrycot always elicited much attention and the children were usually surrounded by curious onlookers, which socialized them quickly.

Once the girls were older they dug for all sorts of sea creatures in the sand with their father, and then, rather cruelly, we took them home and made a bouillabaisse.

Summers also meant renting a house with the beach no further than a 100 yards and you could fish from your bed if you wished.  But there was no need of this for when the fishermen landed their haul there were oysters and other fresh delicacies tasting of the sea which they put into baskets and peddled from house to house.

A friend had a house on an island so occasionally we piled everything on a boat or walked there when the tide was low carrying crates of beer, wine and lots of food. I cannot bear to look at those photos anymore.”Non c’e peggior dolor di ricordarsi dei momenti felici nella miseria.” (There is no greater sorrow than to be mindful of happy times in misery).  Dante was so right.

My favourite swim of all time was definitely in the Seychelles on a beach all to myself with rocks and trees reaching up to the sky. Certainly a bit of paradise. There were no cyclones  there, as in Mauritius,  so trees there went right up to the sky.

And now it is back to the Exiles which are much more crowded than I ever remember them. On the way down, the red Casa Said, a landmark, has gone and there are flats instead. In fact all the houses which were so much part of our childhood are no more.

I don’t cross the bay anymore for the idea of man eating sharks worries me. There are creams with different ‘factors’ making the rounds.

One of my sisters invariably goes up to any female who is topless and asks her to put back her top ‘for this is a family beach.’ She invariably refuses to take the louche behaviour for granted and she is right.

If Napoleon had to come again he would not recognize the island he had conquered. Indeed, I barely recognize it myself.