The book is a dark tale of sickening abuse, unflinching violence, unfettered gambling, arson, prostitution and the killing of a pet rabbit. Indeed, The Hiding Place’s patriarch – Frankie Gauci – is a dark figure who casts a long, vampiric shadow over his wife Mary, all six of his daughters and, for a long time afterwards, the reader. Taylor pointed out that the Maltese of British fiction were primarily ‘low-life bit-parters in Soho crime novels, gamely hurling paraffin heaters through the windows of dirty bookshops.’ If Azzopardi’s characters were more fully realised than their pulp fiction counterparts, they hardly painted her father’s countrymen in a more positive light. Published in 2000 – the year after the rebranded ‘ Cardiff Bay’ became the nation’s political focal point – it is anything but sentimental.Ĭontemporary reviews celebrated The Hiding Place as a revelation and exploration of a community underrepresented in literary fiction in The Guardian, D.J. Trezza Azzopardi’s debut novel is a family saga set in the dockland community of the forties, fifties and sixties.

As the graffiti once had it, this was Independent Tropical Wales.Īlthough there are grains of truth within what is undoubtedly an attractive idea of one of Britain’s first truly multicultural neighbourhoods, it is in stark contrast to such cosy sepia visions and lazy stereotypes that The Hiding Place sets itself up. It was where sailors from around the world – Norway, China, the Caribbean, Arabia and the Horn of Africa – stopped and settled, fell in love with girls from the Valleys and created their own rainbow nation within a nation. In the popular imagination, Tiger Bay was both a community of vice and danger and a place where you could leave your front door open. But from John Mills’ evocative shots of Pillgwenlly’s Transporter Bridge through Shirley Bassey’s upbringing in Splott to the Dr Who Experience at Roath Lock, ‘the Bay’ has always been a place of tall tales, a place that easily succumbs to myth-making. Through its oft-celebrated Otherness, its non-traditional version of Welshness, its cosmopolitan grid of terraced streets and roughhouse boozers have become a shorthand representation of Wales almost as powerful as pitwheels and red jerseys and chapels on remote hillsides.

Tiger Bay occupies a singular position in the Welsh imagination. In the latest entry in the Wales Arts Review Greatest Welsh Novel series, Dylan Moore takes an affectionate look at Trezza Azzopardi‘s masterful, Booker-nominated, The Hiding Place.

The Hiding Place by Trezza Azzopardi