Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (26 page)

Y
OUTH
O
RGANIZATION OF
E
OKA

Oath

I swear in the name of the Holy Trinity that:

If I disobey my oath I shall be worthy of every punishment as a traitor and may eternal contempt cover me.

Signed

EOKA

“Moreover,” he went on, “there appeared to be plenty of bombs to go round—we’re scooping the stuff up all over the island. They seem mostly homemade; the village smithies appear to have been working overtime. It rather makes nonsense of your theory about innocent old rustics with straw in their hair toasting the queen. You can’t organize these things overnight, you know.” He was right, of course, and events bore him out. As the nights shook and rumbled to the crash of grenades it became clear that, despite the amateurishness of execution (there was more broken glass than anything at first), the whole thing was part of a design. Situated as trained hand. Evidence began to come in of Cypriots having received paramilitary instruction somewhere outside the island—in Greece. Rumor spoke of “phased” operations which would be directed against the police to begin with, and added under its breath the words “like Palestine.”
we were at the frail center of the cobweb, we held our breaths and praised heaven for the inefficiency of these mosquito raids. They succeeded overwhelmingly in one thing, however, and that was the undermining of public morale. Here and there, too, among a hundred incidents of juvenile futility there was one which bore the pug-marks of something uglier—the

To the disorder and alarm of the night-hours were added further demonstrations and riots organized by the schools which were dealt with crisply enough—but it was obvious that the police could not work right round the clock, chasing bombardiers all night and louts all day. The field of operations, too, lent itself to these harrowing tactics, for the labyrinth of warrens in the old town could hide a veritable army of bomb-throwers—even military estimates indicated that it would take practically a Brigade to search it thoroughly in one operation. When it was cordoned off, piece by piece, malefactors could easily slip over from the Famagusta Gate to the Turkish Konak in a matter of minutes.

The public, too, always timorous and in this case deliberately sympathetic to the trouble-makers, became deaf and blind, prejudicing the course of justice by its silence—which in the end could only lead to sterner
measures by which the public itself would suffer. The perversion of justice was perhaps the most serious factor from the point of view of administration; Wren found it impossible to secure convictions against people unless caught
in flagrante delicto
. And then, the age groups to which these youthful terrorists belonged struck us as alarming. Moreover the moral pressure exercised by Athens radio, which went into raptures at every evidence of what it described as an open insurrection, was backed up by the local clergy whose public utterances reached new heights of bloodcurdling ferocity. The legal apparatus found itself grappling with new and disturbing formulations. Repressive measures would have to be taken; in what light would they be regarded by a world press already critical of our attitude to the question?

And then the police—always the police; Wren’s calm and measured assessments had been committed to paper and sent on their way; but how could they be “implemented”—with the best will in the world? And if things got worse would they not fall short of the requirements he now thought necessary?

The nights became stretched and tense, punctuated by the sullen crack of grenades and the roar of police traffic as Wren’s forces raced to the incident in the vain hope of a capture. To the customary homemade grenades and Molotov cocktails was now added a new unpleasantness—a bomb fitted with a time-pencil: a soul-destroying weapon in its effects on the morale of peaceful civilians. These at least were not homemade.

“Freedom is acquired only by blood,” shrilled Athens radio. But whose blood? A bomb placed in a letter-box at the entrance to Nicosia Central Police Station went off while the street was still crowded with market-visitors and killed a Greek outright; sprawling among the wreckage on the sidewalk were thirteen injured Turks and Armenians. The shadow of communal reprisals grew bigger as the leader of the Turkish National Party warned the Greek community against any further out rage in the Turkish quarter. Bars, private houses, restau rants, graveyards—a bewildering succession of pointless targets came up. The military sent in supporting patrols by night now to help Wren; roadblocks and searches began to mark off familiar thoroughfares. The patient taciturn soldiery now began to stop cars and lorries on the main roads to hunt for arms.…

And as if to echo the disorders of the towns the sleeping countryside now began to wake sporadically with intimations of more serious, more considered, operations conducted by bands which were both more informed and more resolute than the juveniles. It became clear that there were two sorts of enemy, a vast amorphous mass of secondary schoolboys whose task was bombing and pamphleteering and supporting public disorder—and a group of mountain bandits whose task was to raid police stations, organize ambushes, and operate against the net of roads and telegraph wires which constituted the nervous system of the administration. They were dryly classified by
Wren as the “Junior and Senior Leagues.” To these he was later to add a third and final category—“The Killers” which could not have numbered above twenty or thirty, to judge by the later ballistics evidence which could point to one gun, say, as having been responsible for upwards of ten street killings. But all this was buried in futurity, still covered by the deceptive mask of a perfect spring, smothered in wild flowers and rejoicing in those long hours of perfect calm which persuaded all but the satraps that the nightmare had faded. The shopping centers would be deserted for half a day after an incident; and then people would slowly creep out again, wistfully breathing in the silent air, like animals snuffing the wind; and reassured, they would start to go about the hundred trivial tasks of the day which the automatism of ordinary life had made endearing, comprehensible—containing no element of prediction. So they would open shutters, set out chairs, dust, combine, and recombine their wares in familiar patterns, or simply sighing, bend vulpine features to the loved and familiar Turkish coffee which came swinging towards them on the little pendulum-trays of the waiters. And in these same daylight hours blond and brown soldiers walked the streets, chaffing their acquaintances among the townsmen and being chaffed in return—and their wives rolled perambulators full of rosy children, about the market greeted everywhere by smiles and customary attentions. It was unreal. One has seen rabbits scatter like this at the report of a gun, only to
re-emerge after half an hour and timidly come out to grass again—unaware that the hunter is still there, still watching. Civilians have no memory. Each new event comes to them on a fresh wave of time, pristine and newly delivered, with all its wonder and horror brimming with novelty. Only in dull offices with electric light burning by day the seekers sat, doggedly listing events in order to study their pattern, to relate past and present, so that like stargazers they might peer a little way into the darkening future.

The village was no less deceptive in its complete smiling calm—the flowering cyclamen and the rows of glorious roses which Kollis tended so carefully; once more, as the engine died and the silence swelled up round me, my friends detached themselves one by one from the knots of coffee-drinkers under the great tree, to bring me messages whose familiarity restored in a moment the pattern in things which already Nicosia was slowly breaking down and dispersing; talk of carob-wood, lemon trees, silkworms, a new wine. Of the crisis hardly a word was said, save by the
muktar
whose responsibilities weighed so heavily upon him that he felt permitted to ignore the laws of tact. “Aren’t you afraid to come up here?” he said. “Why should I be?” “Are you armed?” “No.” He sighed. “I will lend you a gun.” “Against who—Andreas or Mr. Honey?” He laughed heartily at this. “No. None of us would harm you. But people come here sometimes from outside, at night, in cars. Look!” On the wall under the
Tree of Idleness was written in blue paint: SLAVES BREAK YOUR CHAINS: LIBERTY OR DEATH. It seemed a poor place to choose for a recruiting center, to judge by the statuesque devotees of indolence who sat there quietly enjoying a professional idleness. “They came up in a car and painted it under the headlights. I heard them. Michaelis’s son saw them and said they were masked.”

Up at the house everything was quiet save for the puffing and blowing of Xenu who was clearing up after my family’s departure. At the spring, filling his water-bottle, stood old Morais, who catching sight of me, took a step down and shook my hand with warm agitation. “Before God,” he said hoarsely, “I do not want all these things to happen.” “Nor I.” He stood for a long moment in deep perplexity, at a loss for words—but he had said everything; nobody wanted these things to happen, but they were happening. They prejudiced everything that could have been built out of the firm rough clasp of the old man’s hand. He turned abruptly, almost angrily and stamped up the hill to his little house, muttering under his breath.

As week followed week I returned to the village less frequently, though I would have been glad to live out there if I had been able to persuade the authorities to install a telephone in Dmitri’s wine-shop—but I am forgetting. To the normal hours of a standard office routine I was now forced to add hours of alertness at night, dealing with the routine questions of the
press which poured in from every side. But though the corps had swollen and multiplied the work there were compensations in the form of friends whom I had not seen for some time; and my dinner-table such as it was always had a face or two I was glad to remember: Ralph Izzard, with his gentle and civilized air, Stephen Barber, boisterous and serious at once, Richard Williams whose companionable laughter and sly wit made time pass delightfully. And young Richard Lumley, who came for a weekend and stayed nearly six months, sharing the house and everything that went with it—sudden invasions of friends or visitors: telephone calls: alarms in the night: and blessed laughter (Shan Sedgwick borne through the door on gales of his own laughter with a live turkey under his arm). The crisis brought me people I might never have met again for many years.

The worlds I lived in now were like three separate ice floes gradually drifting apart on the Gulf Stream; the world of Government House or the Colonial Secretary’s lodge—a world of fairy lights gleaming on well-tended flowerbeds under the great stone lion and unicorn; a world where groups of well-groomed men and women tasted the rational enjoyments life had to offer to slow music, pacing upon freshly laundered grass as green as any England can show, outside time. Then the world of the office with its stereotyped routines and worries. Lastly the village, composed around the Abbey as around the echo of a quotation from
Virgil, in which an amputated present was enough and the future nobody’s direct concern. Once or twice I thought I remarked a trifling frigidity among the villagers which might have indicated a change of tone; but I was wrong. If anything they had become less rather than more critical of foreigners. There was something else underneath it, too, like the pressure of a wound, a pain which they carried about with them like a load. If the situation met with any response here it met only with a sad reproach from the dark eyes of the old men. They had stopped saying, “Hey, Englishman,” in the old jaunty cocky way, but they had not yet abandoned the word “neighbor”—only it was beginning to feel weighty, impregnated with sadness. These things are hard to analyze.

In the midst of this deepening sense of crisis there came a welcome relief in the form of a policy statement from London, convoking a Three-Power Conference to study the “political and defense questions affecting the Eastern Mediterranean,” a means of offering the issues of Cyprus at least a safety-valve if not a solution. In my usual optimistic way I thought I saw in it a possible solution to things which might halt the deathward drift of affairs in the island. Alas! it was to prove only a brief respite. By now, of course, we had become inured to the nightly gauntlet of grenades and the running fire of telephone calls; nevertheless the news was welcome, and events seemed to be smiling upon us after so long a time of waiting.

The mosquito raids went on unremittingly of course; you cannot turn Greeks on and off like a tap. The Governor had narrowly escaped being killed by an exploding time-bomb in May—literally by moments—for the bomb, placed in a cinema and fused to go off during a charity performance, exploded as the hall had emptied but while the foyer was still full of people. The raids on the police stations too went on, while almost daily the police uncovered some new hoard of arms or ammunition.

Wren’s deceptive composure covered many things—not least the realization that the task he was setting himself was an impossible one: for a police force is not merely a collection of arms and legs, and cannot be numbered by heads like a trayful of cabbages. Its animating force is intelligence, and here was the gap which could not be filled by the multiplication-table. It was fantastic in an island where everyone was related to everyone else, in an area so circumscribed, how little general intelligence was coming in. Usually in Cyprus gossip penetrated everywhere; if you blew your nose loudly in Larnaca before driving at speed to Limassol you would certainly meet someone on arrival who had already heard of the fact. Partly the silence was due to fear of reprisals; but mostly because the
sympathies of the general public were engaged, and even the non-combatant’s door was always open to shelter a bomb-thrower. Paddy Leigh Fermor had once remarked how completely sabotage operations depended upon the sympathies of the general public, adding: “After all, in Crete there were only about five of us, each with a very small band of chaps, and we kept a number of German divisions sprawling and pinned down for years.” Were we to risk a repetition of the same thing in Cyprus? It was hard to decide, but on balance it did not seem that the Cypriots themselves would have the stamina to last out a long siege. I myself might have agreed with this proposition had I not felt that Greece was able to supply what was lacking in men, materials or moral support; and I knew that the island could not be effectively sealed off by sea and air.