Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (18 page)

I was swept along on the tide of these feelings whose bewildering polarity and succession of moods followed one another so fast that there was hardly time for one to cohere before another took its place; from the Girls’ Sixth form, plunged in anti-British anarchy, I crossed the road to hear a classics student reciting Byron with tears in his eyes. They were admirable children, each wrapped in the bright silken cocoon of a dream; sleepwalkers who were awakened only by the crash of a pistol or a bomb, and who then gazed about them wonderingly to find that all these brilliant words and thoughts had a resonance only in death, and that the stark geometrical designs of commerce and policy cared nothing for these flowing free-hand poetical designs of a perfect world where Union with Greece meant something not unlike the
mystic’s Union with the Infinite. The tragedy is that it need not have happened.

Need not? It is easy to be wise after the event. Yet in all honesty I cannot be sure whether my own approach to the problems of Enosis would have been more fruitful if it had been embodied in a policy and applied. But in these early days, under the spell of the summer sun and the unpremeditated kindness everywhere, there hardly seemed to be the need for undue haste and worry.

The Greek educational system itself is an oddity. It was designed by the Germans with a thoroughness and efficiency which is spellbinding. The curriculum might have been designed to keep the student awake all day and all night—so overloaded was it, and so crammed with subjects. In the hands of Greeks too, it had acquired a few subtle modulations without losing its basic form. Teachers were issued with a huge register graduated and squared in which one apparently entered every breath drawn by one’s charges. Intensive tests and checks had to be listed therein and a complicated system of marking adhered to—based apparently on the Queensberry rules. As the curriculum was so vast there was no time to expound. Blocks of printed matter were hurled at the students to learn parrot-fashion. The results were carefully noted on a sort of temperature-chart and then transferred to the register. As there was always a riot if students found their marks falling below the required pass standard
one began to fudge them—if only for the sake of peace and quiet. The teacher’s life was a rather tricky one, for the student regarded it as his right to complain to the head if he felt that he was being victimized—and everybody who did not get ten out of ten felt immediately victimized. Many were the storms, the public inquiries, the denunciations, while more often than not the parents of a protesting child would appear at the hearing and wave threatening umbrellas at the responsible master. It was marvelous, and the situations which arose would have delighted the heart of a Dickens. But the professional teacher in the Gymnasium lived a life of acute mental unease. Twice I heard of cases where the teacher undermarked, i.e. victimized, the daughter of a rich and powerful man, and brought down the father’s wrath upon the unfortunate headmaster. “Tread softly, tread lightly, piano pianissimo” was the watchword.

The composition of the classes was pleasingly democratic, though, and very reminiscent of a Scottish school. There was absolutely no class feeling; Andreas’s son in his tattered clothes sat next to the son of Mr. Manglis, my millionaire, and they were firm friends. But then in this sense Greeks have always been the world’s greatest democrats.

I was exposed to three of the school’s many classes—the two Sixth forms, male and female, and one which roughly corresponded to an English upper fourth. Epsilon Alpha. This was full of incorrigibles aged around
fourteen who spent their time in a variety of ways—but never in listening to me. To achieve silence was impossible—a soft but persistent susurrus like a slow puncture was the nearest one could get to this—and the normal was a growling wave of chatter which rose and fell like a sea. I tried, as an experiment, sending talkers out of the room one by one, in order to see at what stage the class became controllable. I was left at last with three students. As no corporal punishment was permitted in the school it was impossible to do more than gesticulate, foam, dance and threaten: which is what my Greek colleagues did for the most part.

Stigma Gamma was the appropriate title of the Girls’ Sixth, and here I began my ministrations at seven each day, entering the large unheated classroom with a shiver. They rose politely enough and repeated a prayer under the prompting of the head girl. Then I read out their names from the register—like the dramatis personae to a Greek tragedy: “Electra, Io, Aphrodite, Iolanthe, Penelope, Chloe.” Like the boys, they were a mixed group in the social sense; Electra’s father was a gardener in Kythrea, Io’s father a judge, Penelope the daughter of a shoemaker. They comprised a cross-section of Nicosia and the surrounding districts. But they were uncomfortably united in one thing, besides Enosis, and that was a passionate, heart-rending determination to marry their English teacher. Every morning my desk bore half a dozen offerings—Electra brought black roses and white, Chloe a special kind of meat ball made by
her grandmother, Aphrodite a volume of poems I had mentioned. If their devotion had been accompanied by greater self-control in class life would have been easier; but no sooner had I opened the proceedings than each started to do work of her own. One sewed secretively, another made darts, a third made a catapult from a paperclip, a fourth decided to enter up her diary for the day (“Today he looks cross, my teacher, his jaw is set, his brow grim, but I love him all the more”). Reprisals were always accompanied by agonizing tears as the expelled creature betook herself to the library where she ran the risk of being found by the headmistress. Heaven alone knows what punishments a girl student might be liable to undergo. I never dared to ask. I maintained throughout a decorous reserve which always hovered on the edge of laughter. Aphrodite, appropriately enough, was the most spirited and most difficult of the girls. Her father was a rich confectioner of the town and she had all the confidence and repose which comes of never having been short of money. She was indeed as beautiful as her counterpart in myth was supposed to be; but she was something more—she was a writer. She read poetry to herself in a low murmuring voice and behaved for most of the time as if she were succumbing to ether. But these dreamy Chopinesque moods alternated with moods of anarchy. Invited to the blackboard, she had a habit of passing behind the back row of girls and with one flowing movement, invisible as a conjurer’s pass, of tying their pigtails together—so that
by the time I was studying her blackboard technique a riot had broken out among the back benches, where six girls found themselves yoked like oxen. Invited to write an essay on her favorite historical character she never failed to delight me with something like this: “I have no historical character but in the real life there is one I love. He is writer. I dote him and he dotes me. How pleasure is the moment when I see him came at the door. My glad is very big. How pleasure is that moment. As all people are dreamed so am I,” and so on. Her essays were a perpetual delight; but they were not the only ones. Dimitra also wrote some which were memorable, though she always verged upon self-pity. “I am orphan and have never been enjoyed,” was the beginning to one. She also was afflicted by the verb “dote,” as indeed the whole class was. This was the unfortunate fruit of a day when Aphrodite asked me slyly why English had only one word for “love” when Greek had several; in my attempt not to let the Empire down I produced “adore” and “dote.” The latter stuck like a burr. But unfortunately each girl elected to marry it to a different preposition so that my essays the next day were full of heart-rending examples. Electra described the King and Queen of Greece “doting at each other”; while Chloe wrote: “When they married they were in a great dote. He was so excitement and she was so excitement. They were both excitement.” Which was fair enough I suppose; only it was difficult to see how on earth to correct such work intelligibly. Driving home in the afternoon
I used to brood on these problems, mentally conjugating “dote” like a Bach fugue, “I dote, thou dotest, he dotes.…” On Independence Day I found the blackboard shrouded with crape and with the legend on it
“WE DEMAND OUR FREEDOM.”
Everyone was looking extraordinarily tense and self-possessed. After prayers Aphrodite stepped forward and handed me a petition signed by the class insisting on the right of the Cypriot people to be free. I thanked her. “You understand us, sir,” she said, and her voice had a distinct tremor in it. “So you will understand this.… We do not wish to be impolite or embarrass you.… We love England.…” I laid it silently beside the black rose from Kythrea and the meat pie and the confiscated knitting, hair-slides, ribbons and copy of
Endymion
. It seemed to me to symbolize the situation perfectly.

The boys were quite as colorful, though in many ways more exigent. I am thinking of Stephanides, the wine-merchant’s son with his battered grin and pocket comb, of Kallias, of that fat ruffian Joanides, of Spiropoulos and Grikos and Aletraris.… It cost me something to hold them in check. Yet they were an easygoing and polite lot of youths, no better and no worse than their counterparts in Europe, and all bedeviled by the national dream. Handsome Leonides, for example, who stayed behind one day and asked me whether I would assist him in writing to a pen pal in Glasgow. Her letter and photograph were produced after much blushing and scraping of
the floor with his toe. It was an odd letter from a factory-hand who was dying to know about the world and thought that a pen pal was the best way to find out. She asked Leonides whether everyone was black in Cyprus and wore nightshirts. These questions did not hurt so much as astonish him. “I thought such an advanced race as the English would know this sort of thing. If I, a Greek, know that they are white in England and only wear nightshirts in bed, how is it that she …?” I answered these questions as best I could, and drafted a reply or two for him, leaving one or two of his characteristic mistakes; but here again I noticed in his draft the word “dote” which proved that he had somehow been in contact with the Girls’ Sixth. When I accused him of it he blushed and grinned. “It is Aphrodite,” he admitted at last, overcoming a formidable resistance. “We ride home together on our bicycles. We are doted on each other, sir.”

Kallias was a strongly built youth of eighteen, with good shoulders and a classical head on them. His curly hair was always crisply trimmed and brushed back from a broad forehead with well-placed blue eyes. His manners were perfect and he always threw his moral weight on the side of good order in class—for which I was deeply grateful. I had heard he was the school’s greatest athlete, and certainly he was deeply respected. It was all the more surprising one day to see him being inattentive and to be forced to confiscate some papers. These proved to be of interest. The first was the draft
of an essay for me in which he had been asked to write a letter to a public figure he admired—some world-renowned musician or politician or what-not—in English. His offering read as follows:

My Dear Reg Park:

I am admiring you for my health. You are the best body-builder in the world and the crip-dumbells for chest and arms are the fruit of a superb imagination. In my dreams I am always found in London and am much enjoyed.…

Among the other fragments was his identity card with a picture on it proving Kallias to a be founder member of the Weight-Lifters’ Association of Great Britain, and a half-completed form for a course in Dynamic Tension in which he had been asked the fol lowing questions: “Are you ruptured? Constipated? Breath Bad? Tongue Coated? Pains in the back? Do you tire easily? Are you married?” To all of which he had replied in the negative.…

In these classes, too, I encountered the same shifting wind of popular opinion which hovered between anti-British intransigence and the old ineradicable affection for the mythical Briton (the “Phileleftheros”) the Freedom-lover, who could not help but approve of Enosis as an idea. Had he not virtually created Greece out of the black dust of foreign tyranny? And then, of his own free will, sealed the gift by handing back the Seven Islands? What could be anomalous in the
desire of Cyprus to share the same fate? Even the great Churchill had said it was to be so one day.…

This was roughly the line of thought. But of course all this feeling was kept permanently at the boil by official direction, by the press, by the heady rhetoric of local demagogues and priests. I asked a teacher why such pains were taken to keep the young people in a state of ferment. “Because,” he said, “we must mobilize opinion for our appeal, and everyone is so slack in Cyprus. Solidarity of opinion is not enough—besides it is there, it exists. But suppose we have to take peaceful action to back up our case, demonstrations, strikes, and so on? Students would play a large part in helping to form world opinion.” “And if they get out of hand?” He smiled. “They will never get out of hand, we have them
there
” He took up a handful of air in his clenched fist, showed it to me, and replaced it. In those days it cost little to be a hero in words or on paper.

Paul was seventeen, an orphan. He lived in the school lodging-house, and spent all his spare time in the library studying the ancient Greek poets. His father had been killed in Italy serving with the British forces and the boy still proudly owned a service medal which had been sent to him after his father’s death. He was a thin, solitary boy, burning with hunger for some chance of advancement in life, which he felt to be closing in upon him. He thought perhaps he would like to be a teacher somewhere, perhaps in England. He was never troublesome in class, and indeed did not seem
to have many friends. His work was tidy and painstaking, and the teacher who was resident supervisor of the School Lodgings told me that he often found him studying in the small hours of the morning. I won his respect by telling him about the modern Greek poets, some of whom I knew, and showing him the work of Seferis, which astonished and somewhat frightened him. But he was enthralled, and borrowed nearly all my books with the same inarticulate, fervent hunger with which he addressed himself to the blackboard when I wrote on it.