Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

by Lawrence Durrell

  At the house I found my brother had arrived with his wife and a mass of equipment—including everything except bags of salt and colored beads to suborn the natives. He was somewhat aggrieved to find that I had buried him at Thermopylae but on the whole took its implications very well; after all, it meant free drinks, the proper reward for family heroism. The village rejoiced in his resurrection, and even Frangos was not so huffy about the deception as I had feared. Moreover, within a matter of days, he found to his own surprise that his Greek—which he had imagined gone—returned hand over fist, and this gave him direct access to the affections and understanding of our neighbors and friends. Moreover, with film and sound equipment, he now began an exhaustive survey of the village and its life so that everyone began to nourish absurd dreams of Hollywood contracts and stalk about with an air of deliberation, “acting”; even Mr. Honey whom I would never have dreamed was so frivolous.

  It was time, too, for a change of domicile, for my new duties would forbid my being so far beyond the reach of a telephone; and though sorry to go, I was glad to surrender the house to my brother and to count on enjoying the weekends spent there. If my sadness was mixed with relief it was because I knew that the minute he started collecting the whole place would be alive with lizards, rats, snakes, and every foul creeping thing the Creator invented to make our lives uncomfortable here below. No one who has not smelt an owl at close quarters, or seen a lizard being sick, will have any idea what I mean!

  Chapter Nine: The Satrap

  No sparks in last year’s ashes.

  A fool throws a stone into the sea and

  a hundred wise men cannot pull it out.

  If the stone falls on the egg, alas for the egg—

  If the egg falls on the stone—alas for the egg.

  —Cypriot Greek proverbs

  THE INFORMATION OFFICE had a beguiling air of good-natured shabbiness, and its awkward mirrored rooms gave one the impression of entering an abandoned barber’s shop on the Rue Cherif Pacha in Cairo. I had been led to believe that much needed to be done, but I was unprepared to find so few of the means for doing it. My inheritance seemed in pitiable shape; a cellar full of discarded blocks and photographic equipment so shabby and moldering as to be a disgrace; an aged film van or two; a moribund house-magazine; and various other odds and ends of little practical use. Absolutely no briefs save the Colonial Report a year out of date; and a mountain of posters showing pictures of the Queen decorating coal-black mammies with long-service medals—the very thing to make Greeks and Turks, with their color-bar, dance with rage.

  But nobody bothered to hide its shortcomings, and these purely operational limitations were easy enough to remedy with a little time and money: but both were short, it seemed. “It’s customary to knock administrations,” said a colleague, soberly sucking his pipe. “But when you see the revenue you’ll understand that most of our troubles come from trying to live on our income. Anything we’ve borrowed has gone into long-term projects. Building for eternity, old man.”

  Apart from these remediable deficiencies, however, there was another which caused me uneasiness: there were no policy files. There were mountainous files of factual reporting on districts and personalities. There was nothing vaguely resembling a policy line which one could study and interpret. For the first time I realized that we had no real policy, save that of offering constitutions whose terms made them unsuitable for acceptance, and of stonewalling on the central issue of sovereignty. This too was all right: Enosis had been a staple feature of Cyprus life since our arrival in Cyprus, and was likely to go on being so. Irrationalities of the kind did not deserve to exist—consequently Enosis didn’t exist. The local radio station was forbidden to mention the Archbishop or his case on the air—an absurdity so patent that I could hardly credit it. Were the proceedings at UNO also going to remain unmentioned by the domestic radio—presumably UNO did not exist either? And what of its credit with our public—which I must say, to judge by the village, was quite high? Most of these points called for quick decisions which would have been easier to make had I been able to discover what the formulated policy on the island was. Should one for example behave as if the Greeks were Greeks? The Greek National Anthem—should it be played on Independence Day while Athens was broadcasting scurrilous and inflammatory material, inciting Greeks to rise?

  There seemed to be no clear line on all this so I was forced to steer a course between vague amiabilities and reproaches for the time being; counsels of moderation borne upon the wings of hope. I based everything upon Anglo-Greek amity, sure that at least here one had a responsive chord which could be touched, sure, too in my own mind that here was a foundation strong enough to allow a real policy to be constructed over it.

  My fellow-satraps (“Wicked Satraps of the Cyprus Government”—Athens Radio) were an amiable and good-tempered crowd, liberal in instinct and scrupulously fair in their general dealings with the world; but they saw no undue cause for urgency or brainwork on policy matters. They embodied the remorseless weight with which the Commonwealth moves down its appointed grooves, governed by the law of inertia. It is absurd to expect the qualities of ballet dancers in public servants or to despair when one doesn’t find them.

  One of the slogans of the day was “Potterism,” an opprobrious expression coined by a bibulous and witty journalist, a frequent visitor to the island whose articles never failed to cause me concern, though they were never quite so clever as his private strictures on us all. He maintained that all administrators belonged to a cohort of mindless and faceless men who should either be numbered or described collectively as “Peter Potter, O. B. E.” “It’s Potter again,” he would cry, on being informed of some stroke of policy or some new government statement. “It’s that man again.” Potterism, according to him, was characterized by the semidetached mind, and all Potters were rock-cake and lemonade administrators, small-car aficionados, sambo-rulers—and heaven only knows what else. It is easy to criticize, but harder to turn the other cheek, and while I accepted these broadsides on behalf of my fellow-satraps I returned them whenever I could, aiming a shaft or two at the press corps. A Press Officer is, after all, the administration’s whipping-boy, and after years of press work I had grown the skin of a rhinoceros so that even the persistent attacks on me in the local English paper were hardly more than amusing.

  There was so much to do that there was no time for ill temper, though now and again I was snappy from sheer fatigue. The basic problem was to convince the administration that the situation might easily become an emergency; this was no time to jog along. But this I completely failed to do. I found myself imprisoned in the rigidified formulae of the Colonial Office. With the best will in the world (and there were many people ready to cut red tape and take swift personal decisions) it was impossible to make headway through the Sargasso Sea of paper in which we were entangled—all of us, not least the Governor. The submission of estimates, the minuting of files, the endless committee-meetings, were galling to someone who had just seen the Archbishop preaching in Saint John’s, and heard the ominous growling of the crowd. Public disorder was gradually mounting, octave by octave, and it was obvious that the need to contain it would soon be forcing active decisions upon us. The Archbishop had just held an island-wide ceremony at which he had formally and deliberately committed sedition from the pulpit. The Government had saved its face by quibbling over interpretations of the Sedition Law, obviously dismayed by the sharp reactions to the Proclamation from the world press—upholders of free speech (when it pays). Worst of all, the stormy petrels of journalism were beginning to arrive and there was not a stitch of background material with which to feed them; I set the whole staff to dredging for factual data from the various departments, many of whose directors were on leave or absent for conferences. Briefing proceeded by word of mouth, and here at least I had reason to congratulate myself, for by an inspired stroke the Colonial Secretary had appointed an officer to me whose brains and initiative were exception
al—Achilles Papadopoulos. He was typical of the best Cypriot product; one of three brothers, he came from the poverty-stricken village of Pitsillia in the hills. His father, a grey dignified old peasant, used to visit us sometimes, just for the pleasure of gazing at his son who had reached such dizzy heights of success in the Government as even to be decorated. Achilles loved the old man, as indeed we all did, and always made him comfortable on a chair and ordered him a black coffee. Each of the three sons was remarkable in his own line; for the elder and the younger both occupied positions of respectability. Whenever I was assailed on the subject of Potterism I could not help thinking that a system cannot be entirely bad if it has provided a career for such brilliant and hard-working boys as Achilles, who in one generation had stepped from the peasantry into what passed in Cyprus for the gentry. He was well worth his place in the ranks of the satraps and throughout this difficult period handled the bulk of the work, though he was new to it, with intelligence and precision. He also wrote lucid and unexceptionable English, which was a relief.

  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.