In Malta’s Stony Playground, the Boulder Meant an Upstairs

Some school playgrounds have tarmac. Some have grass, or at least the ambition of grass. The Dockyard children’s school at Tal-Handak, in Malta, in the late 1940s, had stones.

The infants had worked out what to do with them. They built houses.

The rules, as one former pupil remembered them, were strict. Stones marked out the rooms, with gaps for the doors. The walls needed only a couple of layers, since nobody was going to lean on them. A kitchen was essential. A front door was essential. A bathroom was optional, which tells you most of what you need to know about six-year-olds.

And the prize, contested every morning before the bell, was the boulder. A boulder meant an upstairs.

There is nothing like an upstairs for making a six-year-old feel she has got on in life.

She had arrived from England when her father’s work took the family to Malta, and she took to the stone houses at once. Playground property, it turned out, behaved exactly like the real kind: everything depended on location, and the best plot went to whoever got there first.

I have watched the same property market in action in four countries. In Copenhagen it was the top bunk. In Madrid it was the seat in the car with the window that opened. In Brussels it is the end of the sofa nearest the radiator, and it is held, as at Tal-Handak, by whoever is sitting on it when the bell goes, the bell in this case being me saying dinner is ready.

The youngest has developed the boulder strategy. She gets up from the table first, walks very fast and sits on the radiator end, then refuses to move on the grounds that it is “upstairs”. When asked what that means, she says it is the best part of the house and she was there first.

The eldest has appealed to me. My husband has appealed to the eldest. Nobody has appealed to the radiator, which is the only party that seems content.

At Tal-Handak, the stone houses came apart every day and went up again the next, which strikes me as a sensible arrangement for a property market. Nobody owns anything for long. Everyone gets an upstairs eventually, if they get up early enough.

I have proposed this for the sofa. A rota, starting each morning. The youngest has agreed, on condition that the rota begins with her and that it starts at six.

She was on the sofa at 5.58 this morning. Upstairs.