“When I was a young boy of say five years, I remember the sky studded with kites at sunset... they looked like stars. I tried to make one with some newspaper or cement paper as I had no money to buy actual kite paper but did not have much success. When I was 10, my grandpa gave me some kite paper to make one by myself, which I did, but it soon made a nose dive. The sticks had not been done properly. Then I met my grandpa’s cousin, an expert in kite making and flying, and he helped me...
“When I was 15, I managed to fly five kites at once, but on separate threads, attached to a piece of wood, from the roof... People on the road thought that they were being flown by five persons. Then I decided to make the Juventus Football Club emblem as I always supported the team. It turned out well and I never looked back. My friends and neighbours would ask me to make kites for them. They used to bring me the kite paper I needed and an extra paper for me. That was my payment.”
Lino Psaila, 65, of Zejtun, is Malta’s kite flying master and he still makes kites with paper in the traditional way. When he was a child, Lino used to buy two colours of kite paper for a penny , and used to make glue himself with flour and water but this used to attract insects.
Lino got married in 1964 and went to live in Marsaxlokk. The new ambience inspired him to create 10 kites one summer and upon managing to keep them all together in the sky, he decided to make 50 kites the following summer, and then 200 kites, all attached to one thread.
Lino’s kites are often created on a theme which included: the United Nations flags, Grand Masters of Malta, Coat of Arms of Local Council Emblems, Maltese surnames, the U-Boats, football club emblems and animal themes including the 21-metre-long centipede.
In 1977, Lino met a person from the Libyan embassy, which decided to sponsor him to make as many kites as he could on condition that they were green, the colour of the Libyan flag.
“I made 700 of them but managed to fly 565 because the load was getting too heavy,” he narrates.
Back then the Kite Flyers Association, which had members from all over Malta, used to organise kite flying competitions. Lino mentions some of the big names; Freddie Darmenia, Micallef brothers, Mizzi brothers, Victor Rodenas, Paul Grech and George Attard.
“They were much better than me since they read about kites in books and thus they made use of technology. By then Lino had mastered his technique alone, with the help of relatives and friends and was well defeated in his first competition. However he decided to create a kite in the form of a lemonade bottle of a particular brand which was sponsoring the event for the following competition and managed to win it as well as some 20 competitions that followed.
To date Lino still keeps many of his kites stored in boxes in his garage. He flies them from time to time and following each adventure, the kites would go through what he calls the ITU phase in which they undergo maintenance.
However Lino’s kites, manucci, as they call them in Zejtun, flying babies, or coloured angels, as he often refers to them, also got him into trouble.
“I was once flying 250 kites on the roof with my family when we started to hear a helicopter hovering above us some distance away. Police sirens soon followed and they started to get nearer so we started to think about what could have happened. They stopped in front of our door, and a few dignitaries as well as police emerged,” he said.
The airport radar had caught the kites which were being flown on swivels. Authorities had ill-thoughts about the matter, believing they were some kind of parachutes and had decided to keep a plane from taking off at the airport.
On another occasion, Lino was flying the U-Boat theme kites at St Thomas Bay when an Englishwoman came up and started telling him off because the first kite had the Swastika emblem, and the Germans had caused so much damage during the war.
Meanwhile, kite flying is not Lino’s only hobby and he used to spend much of his free time, by the sea, fishing or writing stories, including those published in his book Il- Bahar Rasu Iebsa.
The best gift Lino would receive would consist of sticks from bamboo shoots so as to be able to satisfy his ultimate dream and make 1,000 kites. He explains that the world record is 11,000 kites flown at once since bamboo sticks are much more flexible than the sticks commonly available in Malta. Thus the kites would be three inches wide as opposed to one-feet-wide in Malta.
Lino believes it is too expensive to import the material from abroad since he would only be able to keep the kites in the sky for about 15 minutes.
His only regret is that the tradition is dying however his nieces Leona and Mariah are quite keen on their grandpa’s hobby.
“I had made a baby centipede for Leona, which she named Casper, and we sometimes fly them together,” he said. Leona had also managed to keep some 50 kites in the sky with Lino’s help.
Lino is still trying to revive the tradition and will be giving a demonstration to children on kite making at the Zejtun local council this evening.
Before leaving his house, Lino gave me a blue, white and yellow kite saying ‘Ave Maria’, which he had made for Mariah a few days ago. Although there was little wind since I met Lino Psaila, and I did not yet manage to fly the kite yet, I still intend to try my luck with it as I promised him.
Lino’s kite making and flying was filmed and recorded into a video by Alfred and Jasmine Grech of Mosta. This is available on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8djQlC8u218.