The royalty in my drawer
Sometime in the first months of 1951, when I was in Primary Standard II, music teacher George Theuma, a tall, spectacled man, entered our classroom and, after talking to our teacher, picked up a piece of chalk and wrote some sentences on the large framed blackboard resting on an easel.
We kept quiet, anxious to see what he was going to write.
Primary school music teacher George Theuma. Photo: Stephen/Claudia VellaWhen he finished, after striking a musical tuning fork against the surface of a bench, he turned to us and let us listen to what was a ‘do’ musical note, produced by the vibrating fork.
Then he tried to make us sing that note.“All together, now, ‘doooooooo’.”
And we all repeated for several times ‘doooooooo, dooooooo…’.
Then he read what he had written on the blackboard… it was the ‘God Save the King’. And we read and repeated with him the text in English, which we had hardly started to learn.
Theuma was teaching us how to sing the UK’s national anthem as Princess Elizabeth – King George VI’s first child – was going to visit Gozo. Rabat’s sive Victoria’s schoolchildren were to greet Her Royal Highness in certain places where she was going to pass or visit.
On that...