I Forgot!

Author - Andre Zammit

Publisher - BDL Publishing 2013

Extent - 224 pp

This book is a sequel to a previous book by architect Andre Zammit. Since the first book was called ‘I Remember’, he decided to call this sequel ‘I Forgot’ so that he could include the odds and ends from his varied life which he had left out (or forgot) in the previous book.

The author is chatty, at times irreverent and prone to make a joke of things. He has had a full life, working as an architect, following in the family tradition. His boast regards how he managed to solve the problems faced by others in the Porte des Bombes underpass, which in its time was an achievement.

One of the main chapters of this book, and also the subject of a talk at Din l-Art Helwa which I had reported, concerns a sort of archive he discovered in the loft of the old paternal house in Lija. As he tells in his book ‘Our architects’ the finds concern the notebooks of no less than 19 architects related to him and of four others, dating from the last years of the Order in Malta to the British period.

Born in Gozo, as he says in his first book, in a family related to the Camilleri and its scion Sir Luigi Camilleri, he describes the carefree days of Rabat in pre-war times (even mentioning my uncle, George, who was one of the best footballers in his team).

Then he fills in the gaps as regarding his studies, both in Malta and abroad, with many homely details about life in post-war Valletta and his boyhood following of the Bologna team through Calcio Illustrato and Brain Glanville’s articles leading on to his studies in London and later in Milan.

As almost every person living in Malta, politics, sooner or later, intruded. Though coming from a Nationalist family and background he had an easy relationship with fellow-architect Dom Mintoff, for which he was sidelined by the Nationalists when in power. For all that, it was Mabel Strickland who offered him (in vain) to become a party candidate.

Being a man of numbers, his strong point, about which he wrote many letters to the press, regards the quaint quota system which he calls a huge arithmetical blunder. That is his bête noire, along with the rent laws.

Entire chapters of the book contain his chatty reminiscences of his travels, especially to Corfu and Armenia.

The last part of the book contain some essays on various subjects he wrote, his many letters to the press on the most disparate subjects and lastly his letters of appreciation (we normally call them obituaries) for friends, colleagues and acquaintances who died.