Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (22 page)

I had now moved from the village to a shabby little concrete villa, the best accommodation that could be found at short notice in the capital. It was a dispiriting
sort of place, but suitable to the times which did nothing to allay my misgivings about the future of all of us. My recommendations for my office were treated with consideration and dispatch, but I had already learned to interpret the hollow laughter which greeted me when I spoke of securing supplies and staff in a few weeks. I had not yet learned that the Crown Agents in whom the whole marketing business of the Colonies is centralized were the most dilatory body in the world. They must have read my letters with knotted brows in London for there was not one which did not appeal for something to be sent to me by air. By air! I might as well have addressed love-letters to the Dalai Lama. Nor could the local market supply the demands we made—and here the terrible shabbiness and inadequacy of Nicosia were amply illustrated. It was not only that it lacked a theatre, a swimming-pool, a university, a decent bookshop; it seemed absolutely innocent of technical trades and skills of the type that any provincial town in England could show—printing, blockmaking, fine-grain developing, designing.…

I realized now why the Cypriots regarded Greece as so far advanced. It was, if one compared capital with capital, Athens to Nicosia. With all its anfractuous and crazy anomalies Athens was Europe. Nicosia could only be compared for twentieth-century amenities with some fly-blown Anatolian township, bemused and forgotten on the central steppes. On all sides we were confronted with modern towns like
Beirut and Alexandria. The comparison was unfair, of course, but it was inevitable, and one made it mentally a hundred times a day. Nicosia was a town which had been left becalmed by the Turks, to drowse away its life on the dusty Mesaoria; what had been done to awaken it? There had been no need until now.

While my village was only an hour away, it seemed to be situated in another world, for the foreground of my life was already beginning to fill up with new faces, journalists, M.P.s, dignitaries of various calibers, each of whom had to be welcomed and briefed. Some wished to interview mayors, others to talk to peasants, others still to nibble at the crowded hours of free time enjoyed by the Colonial Secretary and the Governor. The Administration suddenly found itself spotlighted on the world scene, subjected to the darts and probes of the world press, whose representatives crowded the grim Tyrolean bar of the Ledra Palace Hotel, circling over our corpses like vultures. “There is nothing Potter fears except a P. Q.,” said my friend, and there were plenty of them now, to which we had to find effective answers or oblique retorts (“leg glides”). We were like men who, becalmed for a long time without food and water on a balsa-wood raft, suddenly find that they have drifted into the middle of a sea-battle. The few inches of space the island had enjoyed hitherto in the world press had now swollen out of all recognition, had proliferated like a cancer into feature-articles, political treatises, supplements and leaders.

Disorders increased under the stimulus of rhetoric and the envenomed insinuations of Athens Radio, and we were already floundering in a sea of upheavals caused by the students and apprentices of the five towns. Under all these stresses, the Administration began to show some justifiable annoyance and there were calls for action. But here we came up against another factor to which I had been blind hitherto, but which was perhaps the real determinant of the situation as it developed. The state of the police force was deplorable: underpaid, inefficiently equipped, inadequate in size, it was totally unprepared to meet the needs of the day. Indeed, it was already showing signs of strain and a marked inability to deal with civil disturbances organized by students. I am not revealing secrets—for the findings of the Police Commission of 1956 have been published as an official document and no historian concerned with cause and effect can afford to neglect it. It is the key document to the years 1954-6.

“You complain,” said Wren, “of neglect in your own department. You should see mine!” But he was too loyal and too single-minded a person to say more. We were both newcomers to the satrapy faced with the need for drastic changes and conscious that time was ebbing. We met with our woes at the great square desk in Government House to lay them before the Governor. The enormity of past neglect must have been visible not only in our demands but upon our faces; in Wren’s case he was faced with the task of trebling
his force overnight if he was to contain the present discontents. The Police Force had remained almost unchanged, except for a change of title, since 1878! I heard him describe the state of his inheritance in that quiet and unemotional voice of his—a voice without rancor or any of the smaller envies—and I marveled at his coolness. He was someone rather exceptional in the world of the Police, and had the fine spiritual head of a grammarian or a philosopher. He, like myself, found himself in the toils of that small committee of minor dignitaries which presided over estimates, and which chipped and pared at them without the faintest knowledge of the particular needs of the department concerned, and certainly with no imaginative grasp of the current urgency of our needs. The Governor was far from deaf to our appeals, and nearly always threw his weight in upon our side; but he himself was tied hand and foot, not only by the rigidified machinery of the Regulations (which represented diagrammatically would resemble something like a wrapped mummy) but by the timeless inertia of the Treasury.

From all this followed another unpalatable fact—and one which from the point of view of Public Relations I found alarming. What the police could not enforce the military would have to undertake at gunpoint.… It seemed to me that if we were contending with Athens for the compliance (not even loyalty) of the Cypriot peasant and the maintenance of order, there was no quicker way of igniting the villager than
by shooting a couple of schoolchildren during a riot. I said nothing about the creation of martyrs or the reaction of the world press—for these were self-evident factors. But here I found opinion divided. Some officials thought that sharp action would give the Cypriots a lesson and quell disturbances, which would only mount in intensity the longer they were allowed free play. They did not believe that the Cypriots had any real fight in them; but inability to see Cyprus detached from the colonial framework blinded them to the fact that Cretans might come over and set the island an example—and this was certainly to be feared. This classical piece of ignorance was impossible to dispel among officials, none of whom had any knowledge of European politics and the Balkans. They regarded Cyprus as if it were Tobago—their only referent. Few spoke Greek or Turkish, and while many had spent years in the island, few had ever visited Greece or Turkey. Perhaps this was not very serious—though it seriously bedeviled judgment on the spot; for they lived by the central colonial proposition which, as a conservative, I fully understand, namely: “If you have an Empire, you just can’t give away bits of it as soon as asked.” I differed with them only in believing that in Cyprus we had an issue which could be honorably compounded, and should be treated diplomatically with the traditional skill and experience which were available to us; and that we should lose by force everything that could be gained by diplomacy. In a sense this assessment of
things excluded the Cypriots—for I had already rec ognized in them the martyrs of a situation which was only partly of their own making. I based my views on what I knew to be true of Greece—namely that the Enosis proposition touched the very quick of the Greek heart and that whatever was said about it (how ever hysterical) was deeply felt. And here too I did not think of incitement and intervention in Cyprus as the work of a Government or an official organ, but the spontaneous efforts of those whiskered island lunatics I knew in Rhodes and Crete, any three of whom could constitute a self-appointed band of “heroic liberators.” Cyprus was wide open by sea, its police force practi cally nonexistent. Twenty Cretan shepherds with a load of abandoned war equipment such as litters the waterfront at Salonika could do a tremendous amount of damage in a very short time.…

But now my journeys began and I became an experienced conductor and pilot for visitors. My map of Cyprus became cross-hatched with visions of its landscape under sun or cloud, in various weathers, at moon-rise and sunset: in the grim mountains of Troodos, or the smiling vine and mulberry lands above Paphos, at Salamis and Jalousa, Myrtou and Famagusta.

But though I had deserted the village it retained its hold on my attentions and affection in the person of almost daily visitors to the ugly little house; they arrived in a roar of dust at the door, where the good Dmitri deposited them from his bus, to spend an early
breakfast-tide with me. Mr. Honey brought me cyclamen bulbs and a report on the bitter lemon trees which needed grafting; Andreas brought a pocketful of new tiles of an Italian type which had recently been imported and with which he wished to beautify the bathroom; the
muktar
brought me an encouraging account of my brothers dancing at Lalou’s wedding, which had surpassed in grace and agility all the young bloods of the village—and which had been due to
ouzo
as far as could be judged; and Michaelis brought me his eldest son for whom he wished to find a post in the Government service. Anthemos brought fresh vegetables from his garden. And surprise among surprises, even old Morais turned up one day with a bunch of flowers and a great bag of nuts.

Nor did the scholars of the Gymnasium abandon the link I had severed when I left my teacher’s post; every morning a couple of grubby youths would bicycle up to the door with some urgent request—to write a letter to a girl or an application to a Correspondence College, or for help with a piece of homework.

Neither the failure of the Greek appeal nor the mounting tide of strikes and school-lockouts seemed to have affected their sunny good-nature, or the profound belief that the politics of the greater world outside would, like some stage-curtain, part suddenly one day to allow some happy solution to appear—England and Greece, hand in hand, like Punch and Judy, bowing and smiling to the public and expressing
an undying affection for one another against which all these hot misunderstandings would fade and give place to a new era of blissful Union. But among the intellectuals in the Gymnasium common-room the temper had grown much uglier and the tone of public opinion was slowly beginning to follow suit. As if to match this new sharpness the voice of the moderates raised itself to a new key of apprehension asking us “not to let things go too far”—though none could specify where they might end, perhaps because none dared to contemplate such an end calmly.

From the cockpit of my office I had another, by no means reassuring angle of sight, for from here the international position of the case seemed to be deteriorating rapidly. Turkish feelings both in the island and outside had been roused and one began to see, as if sketched in outline upon the peaceful landscapes of the island, the silhouette of communal disorders whose roots, embedded so deeply in the medieval compost of religious hatreds, might easily be revived by the accidental shedding of blood.

In December troops opened fire at Limassol, under severe provocation, and wounded three youths—an incident, though trivial, which straddled the front pages of the Sunday press in London and convinced the Government that such tactics were politically expensive and should be abandoned. I was heartily grateful, for the effect of this shooting in Cyprus itself was great and caused an instant sharpening of
antagonism, and a disgust which was shared by moderate and extremist alike. The situation was becoming envenomed by neglect, inflamed alike by the hysteria of the apprentices and the schools and the poison of the Athens broadcasts. It was clear, too, that the available police forces could barely contain a determined demonstration composed of bottle-throwing schoolgirls, let alone a band of rough Paphiot youths, or members of the Union of Bricklayers. Troops would have the invidious task of turning out to restore order where the law could not.

But the restoration of order was only one aspect, the public aspect, of our duties; behind it there lay another task of greater magnitude, the tranquilization of the public mind which was now a prey to conflicting hysterias and in a state likely to be ignited by rumor or challenging speech. The climate of affairs was altering subtly, and those who had charge of their direction, now began to feel the tug of pressures for which they themselves had not been prepared. Slowly but distinctly we had begun to slide upon that treacherous surface of rhetoric and passion which for so long had expressed itself in a void of empty gestures, and still there was no sign from London of the urgent approaches such happenings should foreshadow. “Something is going wrong,” said a Greek journalist. “I feel as if I were no longer in control of my arms and legs. We are becoming marionettes, you dancing to London and we to Athens.” There seemed to be no retreat possible from
the extreme positions which had been taken up by everyone, and if we the satraps prayed in the direction of London like devout Moslems facing Mecca, our prayers were echoed not less fervently by the vanguard of the Enotists, who were themselves in the grip of forces both domestic and foreign. A strange feeling of vertigo was in the air—as of sleepwalkers suddenly being awakened to find themselves poised on a steep cliff above a raging sea.

To all the opposing tensions there was only one answer—inaction—until such time as the reforms we considered necessary should be “implemented,” to use the delicious phraseology of the schoolmen. But if a renovated Public Relations department was to take me six months to build how much longer would it take, for example, to build a police force? It was not simply that it had to be recruited and trained, and its terms of service reformed: there was nowhere even to
house
the hypothetical body of the force. Decades of masterly inaction had reduced the common amenities of the island to an almost Turkish state of desuetude; the telephone system for instance was hopelessly out of date. We could not equip hotels with telephones: how then were the police to expand their communications network—by heliograph? Wherever one turned one came up against some insuperable obstacle of the kind which only the determination of a Hannibal could have shifted; but the regulations precluded our use of dynamite though our adversaries later were to labor under no such limitation.