Purple Prose by Liz Byrski

Author:Liz Byrski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fremantle Press
Published: 2015-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Purple is also the colour of some wild thing overlooked, a violet by a mossy stone, the skin beneath my second child’s eyes, the insides of cockleshells, and the jacaranda bells falling and falling. The slide to summer – l’estate.

With thanks to Lesley Dougan, Josephine Wilson, and Tony Hughes-d’Aeth.

The Trouble with Purple – Annamaria Weldon

The ship was suddenly there: 2,700 years since it sailed, thirty years after I had left the Mediterranean to live on the other side of the world in Western Australia, and just as I was drafting this essay. The image glowed from my iPhone screen. A Phoenician trading vessel surrounded by turquoise water off the coast of Gozo, my grandfather’s native island, in the Maltese archipelago. My inner poet wants to write that it floated on my Facebook news-stream, but floating was not what it was doing.

The pictures were submarine, for I was looking at freshly discovered wreckage in pristine condition. The discovery and its location had been kept secret for the past month, during which the find was added to the Inventory of Cultural Treasures of Malta. When announced, it made world headlines. Three countries became engaged in the recovery effort and ensuing research. Because Malta was a significant dot on the historic purple trade route, about which so little is known, expectations are high that this ancient vessel and its cargo will prove to be a kind of Rosetta Stone.

I was born in my maternal grandpa’s home on the main island, which was so central to the Phoenicians’ seafaring trade in purple dye. When he was a young man, my paternal grandfather had crossed the channel from Gozo to live in Malta while he attended university. He was the first of his family to do so, eventually became Chief Justice of Malta and was knighted by the late King of England. But to us he was just Nannu Turo, who remained proudly ‘Gozitan’.

Gozo, overlooked by the chain of colonisers who conquered Malta, had retained its traditional agrarian and fishing culture. This hilly little island produces an abundance of fruit and vegetables and its bread is the best I have ever tasted. As our family’s second home, its history was ours: my parents honeymooned there during World War II, and my London-based brother, now in his sixties, still holidays on the island every year. When we were children, each June at the start of the summer holidays, Nannu Turo and my grandmother Nanna Nusa returned to their tiny Gozitan beachfront home at Marsalforn Bay. The flock of cousins which followed them across the channel for this annual migration included us.

On the island we spent all the hours of daylight outdoors, in the sea, by the sea or on it in small boats. After dark, youngsters were allowed to roam the fishing village, where all the families knew each other. We congregated along the sea wall, or in side streets wherever anyone was playing a guitar on their doorstep. We made sorties to the only shop (no bigger than a bathroom), which sold ice-creams and fizzy drinks.

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