Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (25 page)

Outside all this, of course, our moral and legal title to the island was unassailable, though it would be a psychological error to lie back upon it. The same went for the Turks, whose reaction to Enosis could be counted upon to remain hostile. But while one must deeply sympathize with anyone not wanting to be administered by Greeks it was impossible not to recognize that the Turks were a minority—while their actual influence in the island as traders, business men, industrialists was very small—their life being almost entirely agricultural. Besides there was a certain hollowness about their case—though it was supposed to rest upon a desire for Union with Turkey. It was not, in fact, a desire for change but an understandable desire for the
status quo
. It was difficult to see how they could expect
more than the most complete minority safeguards in the case of Enosis. But with fifteen years in hand anything might happen—and I myself would be prepared to believe that, if the present Anglo-Greek amity prevailed, a referendum might even give us the Cypriot vote outright.

Of course, the island could always be held by military force—but nowadays, with wobbling electorates at home unable to stand bloodshed and terrified of force, could one hold a Mediterranean colony if the measures one had to take in order to do so overstepped the bounds of ordinary police procedure? I doubted it. Besides all this, too, the secondary effects of the Cyprus issue might impinge on the solidity of the Balkan Pact and NATO.

I have no idea whether such propositions sounded at all convincing; in the dusty purlieus of the Secretariat they perhaps read like the ravings of some unhinged temporary civil servant. Yet they were opinions which I had tested over and over again in conversation—not only among the peasantry but among people of different political persuasions, even among people like the secretary of the Archbishop.

Throughout all these tiresome months of tergiversation the Ethnarchy itself had become alarmed by the difficulties it was facing. The swollen tides of public opinion in Greece and Cyprus were pressing upon the walls of the slender dam—the Archbishop’s personal prestige, which alone kept events captive. He too had
his difficulties; not merely from Balkan fanatics pressing for trouble, but also from a fair-sized Communist party. “He who rides a tiger fears to get down,” says the Chinese proverb. There was almost a note of anguish in the Ethnarchy appeals for some issue to the problem.

We could not provide it—only London could—and the wires were silent while the omens gathered about us. “In default of a policy try a bread poultice” seemed to be the general attitude, and indeed seen from Whitehall Cyprus itself looks absurdly small—a pink spot the size of a fingernail on the fretted map of the tragicomic landscape of the Near East. Disappointed as I was, I calculated that it would take London perhaps six months to see the truth, for certainly the rising discontents in the Balkans would alert the Foreign Office. The reports from Athens and Ankara would show how quickly the tide was rising, and how necessary it was to think about Cyprus instead of taking cover behind indifference or petulance.

Ten days later Wren’s small force brought off a well-planned
coup
, capturing the caique
Saint George
with all its cargo and the crew of five Greek nationals, together with the reception party of eight Cypriots, on the desolate beaches near Khlorakas. The prime mover appeared to be Socrates Loizides, expelled from Cyprus in 1950 for his seditious activities. A document which he obligingly brought with him revealed the existence of a “well-armed and organized secret revolutionary organization EMAK, which was to overthrow the
Cyprus Government.” He had apparently been working on his preliminary manifesto when Wren gave the order to close in, for it was unfinished though full of the usual rhetorical flourishes which I had heard in every coffeehouse of the capital during the past year; he also carried on this operation—a typically Cypriot touch, this—an English grammar: he had, it seems, been brushing up his irregular verbs during his non-revolutionary spare time. (He is still studying hard, I learn, in the Central Prison at Nicosia and nobody need show surprise if he takes his Matric. by correspondence at some time during the next ten years!) All tragedy is founded in human comedy, and even here, at the turning-point in our affairs, the spirit of the irrational which always hovers over the Greek scene kept brushing us with its wings; it was impossible at Paphos, when the trial opened, not to be amused by the gallery of desperadoes who sat in the dock, so perfectly did they symbolize the ignorant and lovable peasantry of those islands where so many thousand Commonwealth troops were given shelter after the collapse in Greece. Paddy Leigh Fermor reappeared briefly to cover their trial and together we sat in the narrow little dock-house at Paphos, while the mob howled and banged outside the courthouse, and fragmented the learned exchanges of lawyers with the sound of breaking glass and characteristic ululations. Of course they were all mad by logical standards; worse, blissfully unaware of the
moral guilt
of their position in law as felons. This
was what shocked the jurists. They showed absolutely no sense of civic conscience—nor for that matter very much revolutionary bite. The whole thing had the air of a good-natured farce—it belonged to that operatic world of fictions based in the Greek attitude to modern history. Loizides himself, a painfully shy man, awkwardly constructed and of spiderish aspect, who wore glasses of a high magnification, conducted himself like a schoolboy convicted of roasting an aunt. He carried his black little Japanese head low; but the others reveled in the limelight—the Cypriots were particularly good types, easy to replace imaginatively by any of my villagers. They beamed when the sentences were passed and cocked an appreciative ear to the hubbub outside. They felt themselves to be heroes and martyrs.

We for our part were filled with a quite unjustifiable elation at the trimness and expertise of Wren’s little operation; it proved that the Police Force, though small, could be used efficiently—and indeed it was to accomplish marvels for its size and state of hopeless disrepair throughout that stormy year.

“Still in the operatic phase”: the phrase has much to commend it. “But what happens,” asked my brother idly, “when in the middle of the opera a real shot rings out and an actor falls dead?”

“It will never reach that pitch,” I said.

“I wish I could be sure,” he said.

So did I but I could not say so.

Chapter Eleven: The Feast of Unreason

Branches of orange, lovely with flowers;

seven are the Bridesmaids who sew the bed
.

Into the Bride’s hall flew two nightingales;

they came to bring her English needles
.

—Cypriot Greek bridal song

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice neither is in my opinion safe.

—E
DMUND
B
URKE

W
AS THE CHOICE
of the Ist of April fortuitous? I do not know. It was not inappropriate. We had spent the long tranquil evening walking upon the battlements of old Nicosia, watching the palms flicker in the twilight wind which the dusk brings across the bony Mesaoria. The ravens creaked home on weary wings to the tall trees by the Turkish Athletic Association, where nobody ever smiled.

My brother was due to leave, and as a tribute to him and the noisome menagerie he was taking back with him, we had friends in to drink his health, and to stare (holding their noses) into the crates and cardboard boxes which housed his catch, and which temporarily occupied my spare bedroom. Afterwards we dined by candlelight and talked, and were on the point of going to bed when the silence of the little town began to ripple and bulge all round us. Parcels of steel plates began dropping from heaven on to paving-stones, while pieces of solid air compressed themselves against the window frames making them jingle. Something appeared to walk up the garden path and lean against the front door, something of immense weight—a mammoth perhaps. The door burst open to reveal the dark garden and the heads of flowers tossing in the idle night wind. Then something appeared to go off between our teeth. “I take it you are trying to say goodbye to me appropriately,” said my brother. “Believe me, I am honored.”

A string of dull bumps now, from many different quarters at once—as of small geological faults opening in the earth somewhere along the battlements of the fortress. We ran down the steps and along the unlit gravel road to where the main road joined it. A few bewildered-looking civilians stood dazed in the shadows of the trees. “Over there,” said a man. He pointed in the direction of the Secretariat building which was about two hundred yards down the road. The street
lamps were so few that we ran in and out of pools of darkness on the fringes of the unpavemented highway. We came round the last corner abreast and walked into a wall of solid yellow fog smelling strongly of something—cordite? In the vagueness figures walked about, aimlessly, with detached curiosity, uncertain whether to go or stay. They did not seem to have any more business there than we did. There was a tidy rent in the wall of the Secretariat out of which smoke poured as if from a steam engine. “Dust,” said my brother grimly, “from under the administrators’ chairs.” But there was no time for jests; somewhere a siren began to wail in the direction of Wren’s headquarters. A lorry load of police materialized vaguely out of the yellow coils of fog. And then another series of isolated bangs and, after an interval, a deeper growl which was followed by a sudden small contortion of the still night air. “The whole bloody issue is going up,” said my brother fretfully; he had been peevish all evening about the failure of his film which had run into difficulties, he said, due to a sudden wave of non-cooperation which followed hard upon a visit by the parish priest to his actors. “Wherever I go there’s a bloody revolution.” He had just come back from Paraguay where they had revolted under him, so to speak. A bang nearer at hand lent wings to our purpose. “I must get back to my animals,” he said. “The owls have to be fed.”

But I felt the tug of other duties. I took the car, ignoring the fretful pealing of the telephone in that
silent, book-lumbered hall with its dripping candles, and raced down to the Police Headquarters at Paphos Gate. It had a forlorn deserted air, and was, apart from one sleepy unarmed duty sergeant, unguarded as far as I could judge. In the operations room on the top floor the Colonial Secretary sat at a desk tapping a pencil against his teeth; he was wearing a college blazer and trousers over his pyjamas, and a silk scarf. Behind him the two clerks crouched in an alcove beside the receiving set which scratched out a string of crackling messages in Doric English. “Famagusta … a bomb in the garden of … Larnaca an attack on… a bomb thrown at a house in Limassol.…” He glanced at the signal pads as they were hurriedly brought in and placed before him. He was composing a message to the Secretary of State. He looked up quietly and said: “I suppose this is the sort of thing you meant?” “Yes, sir.” “The worst thing so far is the radio station. Five masked men tied up the watchman and blew it up.”

By now the press had begun to block the meager lines and I diverted them to an outer office where I dealt with them as faithfully as I could; but police reports were very slow in coming in and in many cases the Agencies were hours ahead of us. (They were to remain so for many a long month to come.)

The radio station was indeed badly blitzed, but it was lucky in the possession of an engineering staff which had been eating its heart out for a chance like this; by two o’clock the engineers had crawled into the wreckage
and produced a fairly detailed report on the damage and the welcome information that one of the transmitters had escaped, which would allow of some sort of program going out next day, on reduced power.

By the time I got home again to the importunities of the telephone—which thenceforward was to ring on an average every six minutes, night and day—the picture was clearing and becoming coherent. The attacks had been island-wide and synchronized. Leaflets, scattered in the street of the capital, spoke of an organization calling itself EOKA (ETHNIKI ORGANOSIS KYPRION AGONISTON), which had decided to begin the “struggle for liberty.” They were signed DIGHENIS, an ominous enough name which, to the Greek mind, rings the same sort of bell as Robin Hood does to our schoolboys. He is a hero who belongs to a cycle of medieval folk songs; his battles are famous and he fears no one, not even old Charon, Death. Did he not, in the course of one of them, leap across from Asia Minor and leave his fingerprints on Pentadactylos, in Cyprus, before recovering his balance and leaping back?

Next morning the swollen-eyed headlines covered the front pages of the world press and in fits and starts the power lines grew heavy with questions and answers, with telegrams and messages, the idle flickerings of the world’s frontal brain; and the press corps began to swell.

Yet the morning, like some perfect deception, dawned fine, and nobody walking about the calm streets of the
town, watching the shopkeepers taking down their shutters and sipping their morning coffee, could have told that some decisive and irrevocable action had taken place in the night; a piece of the land had broken away, had slid noiselessly into the sea. In a sense now there was no more thinking to be done. We had reached a frontier. From now it would be a question of hanging on. Such solutions as those we had dreamed about were all thrown into relief by the ugly shadow of impending insurrection. And yet everywhere there were doubts. The ordinary people of Cyprus went about their work with the same friendly good-manners, many of them genuinely shocked by the work of “hotheads” and genuinely grateful when the Governor described them as “law-abiding.” I concluded that EOKA must consist of a small body of revolutionaries, unknown to the general public. Wren did not share this view. “What would you say,” he said dryly, “if every sixth-form boy in every public school in England had signed this oath?” His agents had brought in a new document.