I had recently returned from Mauritius after the death of my husband and I was trying to resettle here with my two young daughters. I was free-lancing and having read The Cruel Sea was intrigued by its writer and his much younger wife who was living in Gozo. Ann was Nicholas Monsarrat's third wife and he was 30 years older than her.

When I arrived in Gozo one hot August morning in 1991 with my younger daughter Justine, then 11 and a school friend of hers Louisa, it was to keep an appointment in Ann's home in San Lawrenz. She was by then a widow.

The house was oozing with character, just like her. She was tall, slim and tanned and turned out to be simpatica. We settled down for the interview while the children explored the garden. Just looking at the greenery outside was balm for the soul compared to the dryness outside.

A mug of freshly brewed coffee in hand, Ann told me how her husband Nicholas and herself had come to buy the house. "We had a marvellous little island, one of the Thousand Islands on the St Lawrence river in Canada. Nicholas was living in Canada where he was director of the UK Information Office. But the river froze for six months of the year so we also had an apartment in Ottawa. We wondered what we were doing having such a complicated life, so one day we decided to go where it was sunny."

They subsequently moved to Guernsey in the Channel Islands. "But had we bothered to look at a map we would have realised that an island in the English Channel wasn't going to be better than living on the St Lawrence River."

They spent 18 months trying to decide where to settle. They met Professor Parkinson of Parkinson Law fame, who was building a holiday home for himself in San Pawl-tat-Targa. "Parkinson was a very sociable man. He spoke of Gozo to us and said that it was very beautiful but far too quiet and nobody could possibly want to live there. But it sounded as if it was just what we wanted. So we came for a week and fell in love with it immediately."

There were no estate agents then so a school teacher - a part-time estate agent - took them round. "You're much too famous, you'll have to live in a villa," said the estate-agent-teacher.

They were shown round plots and town houses, flats and hillside villas. "But on the very last night of our stay he relented and showed us a farmhouse. It was getting dark and we couldn't see it well but it felt right and we said we'd buy it. The electricity had cut all over the island, which was quite a common occurrence then, and my husband signed the papers by candlelight. The nutar looked as if he had just stepped out of Ulysses or T.S.Eliot," she remarked. "A marvellous man but with us no more. We gave him carte blanche and a full power of attorney. Next morning we caught the 8am ferry and couldn't remember which village the house was in. We came back three months later and a lawyer in a panama hat, Dr Anton Calleja, had done everything. It was all signed and sealed."

In the villages then many houses were without electricity and for many families their only supply of water came from the village pump. Kerosene for cooking and light was delivered door to door by donkey cart. Many women rarely left the house except to go to church. She commented that it was very different now when so many families have television and there was a sense of real prosperity. "At festas when we first arrived, the girls all stood on one side of the square and the boys on the other and only the boys were allowed to follow the procession." But there were several things she missed from those earlier, simpler days, like the great flocks of sheep and goats which rustled past the house every morning and evening and the donkeys, "which pulled the ploughs and were for many the only means of transport. It was a much quieter island then."

They thought they'd stay five years or so, long enough for Nicholas to write the Kappillan of Malta. "But I've lived here for twenty-one years. Longer than I've lived anywhere else in my life."

I looked around me and the farmhouse was comfortable but simply furnished. In Malta we tend to fill our homes with all kinds of objects often cluttering them. Did she have a philosophy about material things?

In Ann's words: "I tend to act on impulse rather than philosophise, but now you ask I suppose I don't set much store by possessions. I always seem to be gathering things around me to make life easier and more comfortable but have never yearned for precious objects that have to be worried over and guarded. I do, however, greatly admire and enjoy other people's beautiful possessions and have a few paintings and bits of jewellery that I would be extremely sad to lose - though mainly for their associations rather than their monetary value."

Nicholas Monsarrat died in London in 1979 and Ann was living alone in their farmhouse in San Lawrenz. Many famous people tend to settle in famous places. What did she find so rewarding about living away from it all?

"Peace and freedom though wherever one lives, 'the kitchen of life', as a friend calls all the daily chores and demands, catches up with you in the end."

Ann Monsarrat was a writer herself besides having been happily married to a famous one. She had been commissioned "to write about how we came to have white weddings." The book And the Bride Wore... is about customs that came together and from where they stemmed. She has also written a biography of William Makepeace Thackery who visited Malta in 1844 and was kind enough about it in his writings although he spent some time in Lazzaretto in quarantine. At the time of the interview she was researching a book on Claremont, the stately home where people such as Clive of India lived. It was designed by Capability Brown, who by then was already famous for the gardens he had designed.

"The Gozo Library is full of Victorian studies, many of which came from the Garrison Library," she had told me. The junior librarian lived in San Lawrenz so Ann had her inter-library loan books delivered to the door. Before she married she was a journalist.

Ann was very much in demand socially but felt that social life can become a chore and unless you allow yourself time to do interesting things and not just socialise you've got nothing to contribute in the end.

We had spoken about languages and their importance. She said that one of the weaknesses of Britain was that it was becoming insular (this in 1991). "The strength of Malta has always been that people here can speak English and Italian apart from their own Maltese. These three cultures are a tremendous heritage. You are very much part of the world." But how long will this heritage last, we wondered as we walked around the well-tended garden, with the excessive energy that was being spent on Maltese. Will the other two languages survive as well as they had done in the past, very much part and parcel of the education system?

She regretted that the teaching of history seemed to be going out of fashion. "How can you understand and plan anything if you don't know what's happened before?"

We also came to the conclusion that as you get older you discover that most people are only muddling through. "A great many people you used to consider experts have turned out not to be so after all."

I had asked her if one could live an emotionally fulfilling life alone. "No, not totally. But then many people don't live an emotionally fulfilling life together. To my mind there is nothing to beat the long term companionship of a loving partner, but the right loving partner is hard to find, especially when you are past the first flush of youth. By then most good men are already married to someone else."

However, she had emphasised that friends are marvellous and through them one probably leads a wider life than when there is one specific person to consider all the time, since they lead you into their interests and activities, and, if you are lucky, "you can have just the right friend for every occasion: one who enjoys the same books or films, another to walk or play tennis with, one for modern art, another for Old Masters. I feel extremely lucky to have had one perfect husband. It might be greedy to expect to find another!"

The interview was published in Eve Arnett's Femme magazine.

Ann and myself went on corresponding intermittingly and she never failed to give good advice when asked.

I am not going to say Rest in Peace as nobody knows if anything at all happens after we die, but no matter, I know that she will live on in many hearts, especially in Gozo, and including my own.

[email protected]