Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (27 page)

Mine was not a widely shared view, at least among the foreign community. General opinion here suggested that tough tactics and economic reprisals could be effec tive against the middle classes who would not long with stand a direct assault upon their pockets, and indeed would if pressed hard surrender from their midst the few active terrorists among them. This showed a frightening political ignorance, both about the nature of revolutions in general and about the animating spirit of the present discontents. It was clear even at this time that the intel lectuals regarded EOKA as having behind it the irre sistible momentum of modern Greek history; Cyprus was simply a repetition of Macedonia. Crete had, after all, been cleared in this way; and the only tragedy of the whole affair was that the war was directed against a tra ditional and much-beloved friend whose lack of histori cal understanding was incomprehensible.…

It was easy to talk in bars about tough tactics (“One touch of the stockwhip, old boy, I’ve seen it before” and “We must squeeze the Cyps till they squeak”) but these were lines of thought which were politically unfruitful; for the stockwhip might fall upon innocent shoulders, and unwittingly cause a resentment which would provide recruits for EOKA rather than informers for the Government. There was a village proverb which said: “He couldn’t catch the mule so he gave the saddle a good thrashing.” This was what we were gradually being compelled to do by the pressure of events, though at this early time, with a Conference coming up at which our problems might all be rationalized, there seemed no undue cause for despondency. Indeed as far as could be judged the general public enjoyed a widespread feeling of relief that at last Cyprus was going to be submitted to the arbitration of the mind, and not allowed to rot slowly like a gangrened limb.

My own luck, too, was in; for I was offered a three days’ visit to Athens and London for duty consultations, an opportunity I grasped eagerly. I also snatched a night alone at the Bellapaix house during this slight lull among the tensions of politics, glad to recreate with deliberation the routine of last year—which already seemed remote and unrecapturable; rising at four, I mean, and cooking my breakfast by rosy candlelight and writing a letter or two, to far-away Marie or my daughter, before clambering down the dark street with Frangos and his cattle, to watch the dawn breaking behind
the gaunt spars of the Abbey. Clusters of gold and citron, stretched taut as a violin string, upon bass Gregorian blues and greys. Then to climb the range with the light, spoke by spoke, to where the dawn spilled and spread on the bare cardboard plain with its two spikes of minaret rising out of the indistinctness, the car falling like a swallow towards the tableland of the Mesaoria.… I had come to love Cyprus very much by now, I realized, even its ugliness, its untidy sprawling vistas of dust and damp cloud, its hideous incongruities.

Then up over the Cyclades, into a different weight less world inhabited by the music of gulls and surf breaking upon deserted beaches, covered now in a green fleecy mist which allowed an island to become visible from time to time, tenuous as a promise. The edges of the sea lime-green, cobalt, emerald.…

Athens was recognizably beautiful still, as a woman who has had her face lifted may still be beautiful; but she had become a capital now, full of vast avenues and towering buildings. She had lost her grubby and endearing provinciality—had moved a step nearer towards the featureless modern problem town. It was hot, and everyone was away in the islands. The few friends I could find writhed over the Cyprus question like worms halved by the ploughshare—hardly able to believe their own eyes and minds. I was able to spend one memorable afternoon forgetting Cyprus however, with old George Katsimbalis in a favorite
taverna
under the Acropolis; and a whole day recalling Belgrade with
Sir Charles Peake, who had been my Ambassador there, and who was now grappling with the thankless task of representing us in Greece: a Greece changed out of all recognition by the Enosis problem.

On the quiet terrace at his summer villa, near Kavouri, I recaptured some of the old illusion of timeless peace as I watched the sky darken at his shoulder, and the smooth black polish of that magnificent bay become slowly encrusted with lights, sweeping and slithering upwards into the sky, the hot black sky of Attica. Here and there a green eye or a red glowed and smoldered, marking a ship. But sea and land had become indistinguishable.

He spoke with gentle affection of Greece and of his hopes for the coming Conference which might find a resolution for things and bring us all a more breathable air; and I echoed them. It was hard to say good-bye, though, and leave that delightful villa, to drive back through the dry scented starlight to Athens; harder still to watch the Acropolis from a thousand feet fade and diminish in the dawn-light, all its nacreous marbles glowing at the sky.

London with its drooping grey mist and unemphatic tones awaited me. Coming out of the Colonial Office I knew at once that the Empire was all right by the animation of the three African dignitaries who shared the lift with me, and who walked to the bus stop talking like a trio of cellos. They gave off overpowering waves of Chanel Number 5—as if they had hosed themselves
down with it after breakfast like genial elephants, before starting out on a round of official calls. I pitied the occupants of the bus they hailed with yells and waved umbrellas.

I attended as best I could to the wants of my office, but was completely unprepared for the honor of a personal interview with the Secretary of State, to whose office I was summoned on my third day. His intimidating height and good looks would have marked him out as extraordinary in any company; but to these were added the charm and liberal disposition of an eighteenth-century gentleman—great style completely untouched by affectation, and a broad cutting mind which was sophisticated in the true sense. And humor. There was no room for timidities and attitudes in his presence—his simplicity and directness would have riddled them. I told him what was in my mind; how great were the hopes to be reposed in the coming Conference. I added that while sharp Turkish reactions were to be expected, and the Turkish support of our case might seem on the face of it politically expedient, it would be unwise to shelter behind it. We should face the self-determination issue squarely if we wished to achieve a lasting settlement which would mobilize the general goodwill of the people without which even a heavily defended base would be simply an enclave in a bitterly hostile area. Cyprus seemed to me one case where sovereignty and security were not necessarily compatible; and within a
planned time-limit of twenty years (which I believed might be acceptable) we might achieve a great deal. The present situation was containable indefinitely by force, of course, even if it grew worse; the one dangerous aspect was the police picture in the island.… I can put these points down since I made a note of them immediately after this talk.

He listened to me gravely and sympathetically, and I knew why. He himself knew the island well, had lived in Pearce’s lovely house and walked the lemon-glades of Lapithos, or taken coffee with the villagers. He knew every inch of the sinuous Gothic range with its tiny hospitable villages. For him too the present situation was painful, crowded with associations, and full of thorns. He could tell me little, however, as the Cabinet was still debating the affairs of the island.

From the vantage-point of Whitehall, too, the angle of vision changed, for here in London Cyprus was not only Cyprus; it was part of a fragile chain of telecommunication centers and ports, the skeletal backbone of an Empire striving to resist the encroachments of time. If Cyprus were to be frivolously wished away then what of Hong Kong, Malta, Gibraltar, the Falklands, Aden—all troubled but stable islands in the great pattern? Palestine and Suez had been questions of foreign sovereignty; they had never been Crown possessions. Cyprus belonged, from the point of view of geography and politics, to the Empire’s very backbone. Must it not, then, be held at all costs?

I could not find my way forward among all these mutually contradictory propositions; it seemed to me that everybody was right and everybody wrong. Yet a peaceful solution must be there to be won if only we could provide a formula. But the Conference would perhaps do that for us.

While I was busy with these brain-wrenching considerations I was told that the Secretary of State had decided to visit Cyprus the next day, and that I must return to my post forthwith. Arrangements had been made for me to travel back in his private plane.

The take-off was scheduled for five the next day, but frequent telephone calls were necessary to check this; we would fly all night, touching down only at Naples for refueling.

At four that afternoon I found the sleek old-fashioned C.O.I. cars drawn up outside the private office, together with the Secretary of State’s own gleaming Rolls. There still remained hurried last-minute dispositions to be made and my car was told off to pick up the personal bodyguard and Sir John Martin who was to travel out with us.

In the shady portals of New Scotland Yard we picked up a ruddy-faced, white-whiskered man in well-cut clothes, who combined the air of being a regular colonel with something else, an indefinable sense of having seen the seamy side of life; he joked slyly as his luggage was loaded. No, he did not carry machine-guns about him on assignments like these, he said. “I manage with
a good eye and a very small Colt.” One had the impression that anything larger would show a bulge in that well-cut suit. He had a novel and a set of pocket-chess with him, and proposed to spend the night working on a problem.

Now we swept across London, halting only to pick up Sir John and his suitcase. He was armed, more appropriately, with a copy of the
Iliad
which sorted well with his gentle and scholarly manner.

Rain was falling over London but by the time we reached Northolt the sky was clear and full of larks spiraling up from the grass of the airfield. I was impressed by the V.I.P. Lounge, which I was not likely to see, I thought, again in this life, and enjoyed the passport and customs formalities which were so cursory as to make me feel rather like the Aga Khan. Such are the pleasures of traveling in a great man’s entourage. The old Valetta, however, had rather a secondhand air, and the Secretary of State inspected the guard of honor briefly. His wife and children were there to see him off, and he embraced them warmly and naturally in a way that would have touched old Frangos. The red dispatch cases were loaded and we climbed aboard and seated ourselves, while the pilot gave us a sharp talk about life-jackets, adding with a twinkle, “This is a well-victualed ship, and there won’t be any closing time once we are airborne.”

This however did not seem as easy as it sounded; twice we were recalled from the tarmac just as we were about
to make our run, by telephone calls from the Prime Minister, and twice the Secretary of State made a good-humored journey back to the telephone in the lounge.

Then at last we were up, in slow swerves and gyres, into a soft magical sunset over England. There was a general settling down and taking off of coats. “Whisky and soda?” Sir John posed his
Iliad
strategically on the porthole as he accepted the offering. Our ears began to tune themselves to the hum and whistle of the machine; smiles and gestures to replace words. The pilot came forward, stood to attention, and saluted smartly as he handed the Secretary of State a piece of paper. “It’s just come through, sir,” he shouted. “I thought you might like to see it.” I thought this must be some thrilling communication from the P.M. and was quite alarmed when the Secretary of State groaned in anguish and clutched his head. What did this portend? War, perhaps, had broken out. “England all out for 155,” he cried passing the paper to Sir John who pursed his lips and looked vaguely at it, unable to respond to the news with quite the same wholeheartedness. “What a rotten show.”

After an hour of acclimatization and rest the food and drink disappeared and the red dispatch cases were brought forward and their contents spread out upon the table. The party fell to work with a will and carried on through the darkness until I began to doze myself.

We refueled at Naples on a deserted field full of hollow darkened buildings with here and there a flare picking up the rounded flanks of some great charter
aircraft. Cyprus with its problems did not swim up at us until about nine the next morning, brown and misty and framed by the singing sea. Regretfully the
Iliad
was put aside, the dream surrendered for the reality; my own paperbacked P. G. Wodehouse had lain untouched in my coat pocket. (I had been too ashamed to bring it out in such distinguished company. We highbrow poets have our pride.)

For the next two days there were conferences and meetings, indecisive in themselves perhaps, but valuable in giving the Secretary of State a chance to meet the personalities whose different attitudes made up the jigsaw of the Cyprus problem. I was amused too by the consternation in the Secretariat when the great man disappeared at dawn one morning. It appeared that he had gone to Lapithos for an early bathe, and to drink a coffee with some peasant cronies at the little tavern; a typical and delightful touch in the middle of so much boring work. He was back by 9:30.

That morning a time-bomb blew up the Income Tax Office harming no one; there was great dismay when it was learned that all the Income Tax returns for the year had not been blown up with the office. Another and later bomb at the Land Registry Office was discovered in time and rendered harmless. In this atmosphere of tiresome hazard the consultations continued, and more and more the question of self-determination emerged as the key factor to the political aspect of things—though of course this was now only another
way of saying Enosis, since the Greeks were in a majority of five to one.

The Tripartite Conference was everywhere rumored to be a trap, baited by an unacceptable constitution with no safeguards for a future freedom of suffrage on the Union issue; the Archbishop flew the short leg to Athens to keep the uneasy Papagos on the white line. Athens now seemed to have become quite uncertain of itself, for the question had begun to threaten the internal stability of Greece, and the stability of the very faction we had assisted into power and helped to fight the Communists. We were in danger now of letting the Right wing founder in Greece—and this process was being blissfully helped by the Cypriot Greeks who had never had any experience of foreign relations and who pressed for firmer international action. By now, of course, public opinion in Greece was in a very excitable state and anything smelling of moderation sounded “unpatriotic.” Greek cabinets depend on the state of public opinion for their stability in a way that no other government does. Tail was wagging dog, Nicosia was wagging Athens. And behind it all a thundercloud was gathering over Greek-Turkish relations. These were urgent, indeed pre-eminent considerations; against them, it seemed to me, a bomb or two in Cyprus was a mere secondary feature. It was a relief to know that the Greek Government had accepted the invitation to London without asking for the conditions demanded by both the Archbishop and the Communists. It was
a measure of the urgency with which the situation was viewed from Athens. They were in a nasty jam; but then so were we in Cyprus.