I studied, ate, and slept at St. Edward’s College, going home to Sliema for week-ends every six weeks. After I had found out about my parent’s situation, there were even times when I tried to avoid these home visits and attempted to stay at the college. But it was no substitute for real life. Although surrounded by my peers and playing a full part in college life, I was hurting in ways I could not then have understood. Nevertheless, there were some good times and a few good friends many of whom I still meet all these years later. Dad would turn up at the college to watch the sports and the football on a Saturday. He always brought along some goodies and stayed to the very end.
Over the next four or five years my attempts at partying and pulling silly pranks with friends did not fool my spirit. The pain was hiding itself in dark places within me. I remember one particular prank when four of us rode home from Valletta in a ‘Karozzin’, an open horse-drawn carriage. We made a pact together that we would jump off along the way and the last one on would pay the driver. Of course, when the driver saw one and then another of his passengers take flight, he whipped the horse into a faster gallop and it was even harder to jump. However, jump I did and made my exit at the top of Bisazza Street, landing right onto a police constable! We did pay the driver. You could say it was the ‘long arm of the law’ which saved me that time or maybe God’s grace that I didn’t break my neck!
My time at St. Edward’s ended much the same as my other schools did. I was now seventeen and a school monitor. One afternoon I was in the common room and three of us, including the head boy and his younger brother, were fooling around. At one point one of them threw a dart which hit me in the head. I had a feeling that this was not accidental and retaliated by punching the culprit rather strongly.
At once, he went to the headmaster who promptly asked me to apologise. “No way!” I said, “He caused the problem, not I”
The sheer injustice of this was more than I could stomach. I packed my things and the next day, I walked out of the school, never to return.