Trevor Zahra and I were born on the same day, 16 December 1947; he in his Zejtun home and I in my family's temporary home in Hamrun.
Today I live in Zejtun while he lives in Marsascala.
Yet we have never met; our paths have never crossed. And I have never read anything that he wrote, neither the books intended for children, nor his adult and more recent ones. It just happened like that.
This book is the latest in the series Bejn Storja u Miti, edited by Sergio Grech. It consists of a series of articles written by Trevor's friends and colleagues through which we can get an appreciation of Trevor Zahra as an author, teacher, animateur - the life and soul of any gathering, etc.
Perhaps, though, one gets less an idea about what a book says from what other people say about it than from reading the book itself. I remember I made the same mistake in my BA finals and, to this day have not managed to read the set books themselves.
Trevor Zahra had a rather straight forward upbringing but his roots go deep. His father was Walter Zahra, a trade union leader, sent to Egypt by the British at the onset of World War II, and a keen follower of the Maltese literature of his time.
On his mother's side, Trevor is related to the artist Guzeppi Caruana. In fact, apart from his books, Trevor enlivens his books with his own drawings.
He began writing poetry when still young and he used to send them to the Children's Own and the Catholic Action's Il-Huggiega.
Then, once out of school, he joined MTV (the forerunner of today's PBS) as a script writer on adverts. At the same time he began reading the first of his children's tales on television.
Next he entered the teachers' college and, once that was over, began teaching Maltese and Art at the Zejtun Secondary School.
He must have been happy there and, apart from all those generations of students he taught, he never applied to move elsewhere. And he gave the school a tradition that galvanized students and staff equally - the Christmas pantomime with the teachers as actors.
Trevor grew up with acting in his blood, from the childhood years he spent at the Catholic Action of Zejtun for whom he wrote countless plays, usually handwritten on a cheap exercise book.
His first books were aimed at children, such as Il-Praspar Ta' Kuncett u Marinton based on tales his grandmother told him, who got them from her grandmother who lived in the time of the French. Other books include Il-Pulena tad-Deheb, L-Ghar tax-Xelter and many others.
His first book for adults was Taht il-Weraq tal-Palm in 1974, followed by six collections of short stories - Lubien (drowsy), 1996, Provenz (2000), Sepja (2007), Penumbra (2010), Vespri (2015) and his latest 365 (2018).
Many of these collections, especially Provenz, are notable for their high erotic content - in Anglu Abjad the woman protagonist tempts by her under-the-table activities and her skimpy dress the medium who was trying to contact her dead father. In Rih li Jokrob Wahdu the artist Nicolo Armani breaks off his painting session to romp about with Belinda, his model. And in Vespri we read about the married woman who makes love while her husband is proudly wearing the Roman centurion's costume in the Good Friday procession.
Unfortunately, the timeline at the beginning of the book does not give us the date of publication of one of Trevor's best known books, Il-Hajja Sigrieta tan-Nanna Genoveffa (or, as the Sunday Times put it, Nanna's dirty secrets) though it tells us the book was translated into English and later into French and Russian.
The book was also turned into a successful screenplay. This was not the only Trevor Zahra original to be turned into a play though, the most known, must be Minn Wara z-Zipp, an attempt to create a male version of Vagina Monologues.
Genoveffa scandalised many who had thought Trevor was just a tame and harmless author of tales for children and he was roundly, and loudly, upbraided for it at a ceremony in the presence of the President and the Prime Minister.
Speaking of translations, I point out the contribution of Kristina Quintano who writes about translating Trevor into Norwegian and how to translate Genoveffa's Mediterranean environment so that it could be understood by Norwegian readers. How to make a Norwegian understand what a Maltese pastizz means or il-qaghaq tal-gunglien? We have read these very days how many books about Malta are being sold in Norway, though there are no direct flights between the two countries as yet.
The book is a series of personal testimonies by many people on Trevor as a person and as an author. These include editor Sergio Grech, Albert Borg, Joseph P. Borg, Adrian Buckle, Ray Calleja, Noel d'Anastas and many others. Many speak about the personal tragedy when his wife of just 18 years died and how he learnt to cope with raising two children and continuing with his life.
Finally, the book contains a revelation. Some years ago, the Zejtun parish was led by a saintly priest who later died on the day his mother died. Well, this priest collected funds to replace the largest bell in the belfry. The new bell was sourced in the UK and brought over and installed with much fanfare. An account was later put up on the parish's website.
Some days later the priest was roused from his afternoon siesta by an irate woman from Xaghra, Gozo who upbraided him for daring to paste figures of naked women on the recently blessed bell.
Astonished, the priest went to check and he found that the image had been tampered with or photo-shopped. The culprit? That same gentle Trevor. And the one who spilt the beans - Trevor's dear friend, Mario Galea, MP.