The story is by that born raconteur that is Maurice Caruana. Although he later soared to very different heights in Malta's civil service, he spent the years between 1961 and 1966 as a health inspector with special reference to Strada Stretta.

In the chapter dedicated to him in this book, Mr Caruana tells of his perennial fights to enforce health regulations in the area.

Once, neighbours came to him protesting about an abundance of rats in the area. They seemed to be coming from a residence which was always found to be closed. One day, when all patience had ebbed, the door was forced in and Mr Caruana found an old and ailing man in his bed, surrounded by rats everywhere.

The neighbours said he often played the flute to them. Hence the title of  this review.

George Cini, the author, has broken new ground with his two books on Strada Stretta, this being the second. So much interest has been raised that there have also been one or two spin-offs about the Gut, as Strada Stretta was known, as a television serial and if I remember correctly, a play too, none of which had any connections to Cini's books.

This book is mainly a transcription of many interviews carried out by the author with people who lived and worked in Strada Stretta in its heyday. Although some of the interviews refer to the war years, most refer to the 1950s and the 1960s when British and later American ships used to visit. Some of the people who were interviewed have since died and, were it not for these interviews, their memories would have been lost.

The interviews are literal, word for word, even to the interviewees' way of pronouncing Strada Stretta as Sada Stretta, etc, their preference of saying street names still in Italian, and their colloquial pronunciation of Maltese such as 'giex' for 'zewg'.

The book is an interesting and precious record of a closed world restricted to just one area - Strada Stretta - where people knew each other and defended each other milk the British soldiers or sailors until the victims, plied with drink, could see no more and were milked more.

It was a closed community down there where bars changed hands, barmaids made good money and so did the waiters and even the boys, were many earned money they would never dream of earning with an office job.

With such crowds in such a narrow space, and with all that drink around, it was inevitable that fights broke out but they were usually sorted out by the British military police or Red Caps. The Maltese did themselves well not just through selling drinks and food, nor just by selling small items like matches, through hosting drunk sailors in the small lodging houses instead of going back to the ship, through selling of naval uniforms and other items the Maltese were forbidden to buy, as from Naafi.

Some people today associate Strada Stretta with prostitution but the book explains that the red light activities took place elsewhere, just round the corner. And obviously the music, the dancing and the drinking were many times the preparation for sex. The much-maligned barmaids often gave the sailors a rendezvous, which they then did not keep.

The names of the bars, restaurants, lodging houses take us back to an era when Britain ruled the waves and the names of the people mentioned many times were inter-related through marriage, or other blood links. The book also includes an index of names mentioned throughout the book.

And the nicknames, with my favourite being Mutumallu, and Zalzettu, tal-Patalott, tal-Kumeta, etc.

In short, this is source material for a more extensive research into the social history of this time capsule in Malta's variegated history.