Samovar on the Table: A Family Memoir

By Lana der Parthogh

In the spring of 1920, three ships steamed into the port of Famagusta in the British colony of Cyprus with sick and wounded officers and men of the White Russian army, together with their families and other civilians fleeing the victorious Bolsheviks at the end of the Civil War, which had raged through the country after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Britain had offered transport and temporary sanctuary in its nearest territory. 1,546 desperate men, women, and children from two of the ships were housed in a WWI Turkish prisoner-of-war camp to wait for other countries to offer asylum; the other ship sailed on to Egypt and another camp. In Cyprus, some died and some moved on, but a group of about seventy saw opportunities for a new life on the island. They formed the core of a Russian community which attracted other migrs over the decades but whose story is largely unknown or forgotten, even on the island. One of them was the authors grandfather. The author has tracked down official documents and historical sources and interwoven them with her own notes and diaries to tell her personal and human account of a Russian family in Cyprus, through three generations and fifty years of dramatic events.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Nov 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524634841

Lana der Parthogh

Born in Cyprus to White Russian parents, Lana der Parthogh had been to eleven different schools in three countries by the age of seventeen when she walked into the offices of The Times of Cyprus, a controversial English-language daily during the EOKA uprising in the 1950s, and got her first job as a journalist. For the rest of her life she has worked on newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, with experience spanning from a year of working on Vogue, the fashion magazine in London, to more than two decades running English and foreign-language radio programs on the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation. Married to international news photographer, Georges der Parthogh (with whom she has two sons) she was drawn into the politics and human drama of the cataclysmic events in Cyprus and the Middle East during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. She interweaves personal memories of those years with the fascinating and mostly unknown story of how a group of White Russians (including her grandparents) found themselves on a small island in the Mediterranean, a British colony they had never heard of, in 1920, after the Civil War following the 1917 Russian Revolution scattered hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

In March 1920 three ships sailed out of the Black Sea port of Novorossisk. Their destination was Famagusta in the British colony of Cyprus, a place none on board had heard of. The vessels belonged to the Russian Navy, the passengers were all Russians, the evacuation was under the command of the British government. It was the final chapter in the civil war which had swept across the country after the 1917 Revolution. The people on the ships had been on the losing side and, like an estimated one-and-a-half to two million of their compatriots who had already fled, now sought refuge in other countries. They were the world’s first formally acknowledged refugees.

Only two of the ships were allowed to disembark their passengers, the other sailed on to Egypt, splitting families as it did. In all 1,546 men, women and children landed in Famagusta and were promptly placed in a former WWI camp for Turkish prisoners-of-war. They were counted and re-counted over the next two years as some died, others took advantage of offers of asylum in Serbia and Bulgaria or were reunited with families and moved on. A small number remained despite efforts to deport them by the British authorities, worried about the sudden influx of a potentially disturbing foreign element into a poor and sleepy colony.

Amongst them was my grandfather, Nikolai Dimitch Matov, a 35 year-old artillery officer. He was an unwilling refugee who had not been given a choice. His wife, children, parents and parents-in-law were still in Russia. He weighed up the pros and cons of the situation and decided his priority was to get his family out of Russia and to do so he would have to find work, any work.

When his wife, mother-in-law, daughter and son (my father), eventually joined Nikolai Dimitch in Cyprus in 1923 there were around 70 Russians living on the island. They made up the nucleus of what became a slowly growing Russian community, the existence of which few people know about or remember, even on the island

When I was born, the third generation of Russians in Cyprus, it was still a peaceful if impoverished country. By the time I was 15 the island had hit the headlines and has remained in the news, off and on, ever since. Most people now know where Cyprus is, either as a place of unrest or a tourist destination.

This is a family memoir of people dear to me and the events they were caught up in. It is also my own personal story, linked intrinsically with the country I was born in where I worked as a journalist for over five decades.

Lana Matoff der Parthogh,

Nicosia, 2016

Part I

FAMILY

Chapter 1

CHILDHOOD

‘The water has come.’ As grandmother shouted out the good news she was already pulling on her wellingtons and, picking up a spade, running up the hill to where the main water channel from the nearby village of Ayios Georghios was filling up with gurgling water. Grandmother had to lift up a heavy metal sluice gate for the water to run down to our land, then replace it when she had finished so it would run on to our neighbours.

Grandfather had installed an intricate system of stone channels, each with its own small sluice gate set firmly into a groove, which led the water down the terraces and into deep dug-out troughs around the orange trees. That was his work done, it was up to grandmother to operate it. And she did, working fast and methodically, pulling up the gates, using her spade to unblock the way for the rushing water.

‘Don’t stand there,’ she would warn me as I followed her and then laugh as I was caught standing in one of the channels when the water would suddenly be diverted into it, running over my sandals.

My whole world was criss-crossed by ditches I walked on like streets from tree to tree or jumped across. Deep ditches formed the boundaries of our land; these had planks across them to walk across carefully and only with an adult. There was one very deep and scary one with no plank bridge and beyond it a dark, menacing forest behind our house. This I avoided.

Below our house was the river, wide and usually dry, except in winter when it would fill up and I remember being lulled to sleep by the shh-shh-shh sound of it mixed with the tkkk-tkkk of stones picked up and dropped along its way, and in the background the tinkling bells of the camel caravans making their way across the Cyprus countryside with goods from Nicosia and Famagusta to outlying villages. Time to get up was marked by the whistle of the engine as the morning train entered Kalochorio station, an important stop on a railway running from Famagusta to Nicosia to Morphou and on to Skouriotissa and Evrychou, its terminal.

In front of our house there were three trees. They looked different from the orange, lemon and tangerine trees in the rest of the garden; their blossoms were prettier, white and pink, but did not last as long. Two were apricot trees, the other an almond. An apricot tree was the first one I managed to climb, its branches providing footholds and a seating space.

Most of my early memories are of Kalochorio, my grandmother primarily, then my mother and my grandfather. Father was far away somewhere.

My mother and I slept in a two-storied house near the river. There was a bedroom reached by a steep staircase but we never used it, staying instead on the ground floor where there was a large living room leading into a bedroom with two narrow windows looking out on the river and a door onto a large square verandah. In summer we sat on the verandah or I played in the garden, in winter we spent most of the time in the two-roomed house up one terrace where my grandparents lived. Next to it was the chicken house and behind it the chemical toilet grandfather had installed and I was terrified of falling into.

Next to our house was a one-room structure known as The Photographic Room, built by grandfather for my aunt Vera when she graduated from school and took up photography. Part of it was partitioned off for a dark room, whilst in the front was a bench with drawers below. I was not allowed to go into this mysterious building.

Days were long and full in Kalochorio. In the morning grandmother would give me a basket and we would go to the hen-house where I was allowed to lift the hatches lining the outside wall and lift out the brown eggs, flecked with dirt and small feathers. Sometimes a hen was still sitting on her eggs and grandmother would give it a nudge, causing it to cluck and shake its feathers in protest and then move. The eggs had to be washed and put in a large brown bowl. Four were kept for breakfast. My grandmother would put them into boiling water with a large spoon, wait for three minutes by the clock then take out three, leaving the last one to be hard-boiled for grandfather.

After breakfast grandmother and I would go to the village, walking on a narrow path by the side of the river. To get to the main road we had to manouevre several plank bridges, some narrow, some wider, then onto a stone wall at the back of the first house we came to, up a slope (a cliff to me) and then to the main bridge with the river swirling below us.

First stop was at the baker with his many barefooted children for a loaf of warm bread followed by the railway station, also the post office, to pick up the mail. Then the general provisions store run by the mukhtar of the village, Mr. Kypris. The shop and stores were on the ground floor and there was an outside staircase leading to the house above where the family lived.

Kypris’ wife Sophia would invite us upstairs for coffee or lemonade but grandmother never accepted, she was always in a hurry. I tried to keep up as she dashed from place to place, ordering fertiliser, leaving a message for the Turkish gardener to come in and dig round the trees, calling in at one of the two coffee shops to find out why the man who had promised to deliver the diesel oil for the water pump had not turned up.

Back home she would put lunch to cook on two primus stoves and sit down with my mother for a coffee and the Dream Book. Grandfather would be in his workshop, digging yet another well or tinkering with the water pump.

This was mother and grandmother’s own time. My mother would describe her dreams of the night before and they would consult the Dream Book to see what they meant. Grandmother’s mother, Antonina Volotkina, had brought this book all the way from Russia years before. It was written in Ukrainian. Grandmother had known the language in her youth but had not spoken it for decades and the vocabulary of dream interpretation was sometimes beyond her.

The stumbling blocks would come when my mother had dreamt of something out of the ordinary. Grandmother would start riffling through the pages distractedly, muttering ‘hmmm’ and ‘tak tak’ and eventually ‘are you sure that’s what you saw?’

‘Maria Nikolaivna, what is it in Ukrainian?’ my mother would demand impatiently.

‘It must be here,’ grandmother would reply, still turning pages. In the end they would compromise on a general description rather than the specific object.

Interpreting dreams was no simple matter. First you had to find what you had seen: man sleeping, two women talking, three women quarrelling and so on, then where this had taken place, indoors, outdoors, up a mountain, in a house and finally the day on which you had seen it. Sometimes this was crucial because flying through the air on a Monday might mean great happiness, but on a Tuesday night it could foretell a death in the family. There was definitely some fudging here, especially if it was something bad.

‘Do you think it was just after you had gone to sleep or towards the morning? If it was towards morning then we can say it was Wednesday.’

The session would end when grandmother could smell that the food cooking on the primus stoves was ready. The table would be set quickly, the Dream Book put away just as grandfather would come in and sit down for lunch.

In summer everyone, except grandmother, would have an afternoon nap. She fussed around, preparing the chicken meal or stringing beans or sorting something out.

Later we would all converge in my grandparents’ bedroom to listen to the war news on the BBC or Radio Moscow, picked up by grandfather on his shortwave radio, followed by his military and political analysis.

Before supper the chickens had to be fed and the paraffin lamps prepared for the evening. They were collected from the two houses, put out onto the dining table and then each glass funnel had to be washed and polished, the wicks trimmed, the paraffin carefully poured into the lamps. Mother would take ours back to the bottom house whilst grandmother hung the others on their wall hooks.

The day ended with a large bowl of soup for all of us and tea and brandy for my mother and grandfather. If it was a day when the ‘goat-woman’ had brought in milk I had to drink a whole cup, boiled, something I disliked intensely.

Before I went to bed my mother or grandmother read me a story, there were goodnights all round and my mother would take up the lantern to light our way home.

There were mornings when my mother would do the shopping at Kypris and then go upstairs to have coffee with Sophia and her two daughters, Agni and Kaliroi, who were younger than my mother. They were not like the other women in the village; they wore short dresses and high heels, went to Lefka to have their hair permed and had a wind-up gramophone on which they played dance tunes. My mother taught them the foxtrot, the quickstep and the waltz. Sophia would smile indulgently and say it was time they got married. The records would be switched off the moment they heard Mr. Kypri coming up the stairs, instead they would put on a record of Greek patriotic songs sung by Sophia Vembo.

To get to Lefka, the nearest town though only three miles away, was no easy matter. The choice was donkey back, a hitch on a tractor or farm truck or the village taxi. We would take the taxi, ordered the day before. There was one great attraction about Lefka, it had a cinema housed in a former theatre with boxes for the privileged from a by-gone age when the town was an important provincial centre.

I heard the whispers days before, ‘She must see this’, ‘We must all go’, ‘Who would have thought it, a Russian film…’

And we all went, even grandfather who rarely accompanied us on ‘visits’. ‘What you are going to see is very special,’ he told me as he got into the front seat of the taxi as my mother, grandmother and I squeezed into the back.

The cinema was packed but I could see the screen clearly because I sat on a cushion on a chair at the front of one of the boxes. The lights went down, the music started and when the actors began talking I could understand them. It was the Russian fairy story, ‘The Stone Flower’. I sat entranced.

There were other excitements. My mother usually went to Nicosia by bus once a month to pick up my father’s army cheque and get our rations at the Naafi store. She would get up at dawn before I woke and return in the evening. It was only much later, when I must have been five or so, that I would accompany her and we would stay a few days with one or other of the Russian families mother was friends with, the Makedonskys, the Shnells or the Classens.

She was usually tired on her return and not always satisfied with what she had managed to get on her ration book. One evening, however, she practically danced through the door with her heavy bags.

‘Look what I got,’ she exclaimed as she tore off the brown paper. ‘Material, four pics of material.’

It was light blue men’s cotton shirting with a thin grey stripe. The dressmaker was called in the next day and with careful measuring and cutting produced a dress for my mother and one for me. Every single inch was used, the smallest leftover strips turned into cuffs and pockets and piping round the sleeves for me.

Just in time for Easter when Russians from Nicosia descended on Kalochorio by bus, motorcycle and jammed six to a car. They all brought something: cakes, fruit, tinned food, bottles of wine or Cyprus brandy. Several of the women baked both koulich (Russian Easter Bread) and paskha (a pyramid of sweet delights made out of soft cottage cheese and crystallised fruit) even though my mother and grandmother had spent days baking enough koulichi for an army, bickering about the exact time the yeast had to brew and the dough had to stay covered before being kneaded into round shapes which miraculously rose three times the height of the cake-tin, kept in by a tower of greaseproof paper with a pleasing small mushroom shape at the top. Sometimes, of course, they collapsed, a disaster leading to much recrimination about whose fault it was.

At the time, the Resurrection mass in the churches around Cyprus would start according to instructions sent by the individual bishops and not at midnight on Saturday night as grandmother believed it should. This would mean it could start at 30 minutes past midnight or as late as two o’clock in the morning. She would go backwards and forwards between two churches, one in the village of Ayios Georghios where I was baptised and the small church in Ayios Nikolaos above Kalochorio, pleading, cajoling and sometimes bullying the parish priest to start the service at midnight. Sometimes she would win over one, sometimes the other, depending on their own relationship with the regional bishop. She was the only one who would actually go to church but if any Russians arrived early on the Saturday they would join her. I would be fast asleep.

Easter Sunday lunch would start about one o’clock and continue throughout the day until lanterns were lit and hung outside the kitchen window and placed on the stones of the first level of the terraces. The large basket of red and yellow coloured eggs slowly emptied as everyone cracked eggs, always declaring me the winner through some quick sleight of hand.

The food was laid out on the dining table and the table in the verandah. Mr. Tsambris, who ran the timber yard in the village, sent us long planks of smooth wood which were placed on trestles in the open space in front of the house where everyone sat, whilst the women went back and forth from inside the house, carrying out full platters and bowls and then taking empty ones down to the large trough under an outside tap where I usually had my hair washed, the kitchen sink being far too small to be of any use.

Easter was a large, communal celebration, Christmas was a family affair, just grandfather, grandmother, my mother and Father Christmas or Dyed Moroz (Father Frost in Russian).

My first memory of Christmas was when I must have been coming up to my fourth birthday. It was Christmas Eve, grandfather had chopped down a small fir tree. We decorated it with walnuts wrapped in silver paper, crumpled from annual re-use, tangerines from our own trees, cotton wool for snow, a silver star grandmother unwrapped from a box stuffed with tissue paper and small candles in silver holders.

A large table with a samovar was the centre of our lives. Here is where grandfather read his English and Russian newspapers and translated items he considered newsworthy, grandmother sewed and darned socks, my mother read out letters from my father. This evening it had been spread with a white tablecloth. Grandmother had slaughtered one of our chickens and roasted it with our own potatoes. My mother had been to the Naafi store in Nicosia and brought back tins of Australian butter and horrible, smelly yellow cheese, canned condensed milk, a paper bag of raisins and currants, a narrow tin of biscuits looking and tasting like cardboard, her ration of cigarettes and a bottle of Camp Coffee. She and grandmother would wrinkle their noses but still drank it, whilst I remember the chicory smell. Grandfather only drank tea from a glass in a silver holder with a spoon of jam as sweetener.

The candles on the Christmas tree were lit, I was placed in front of it and recited a poem I had been taught, everyone clapped and my mother disappeared. Neither grandmother nor grandfather seemed to notice she had gone.

Grandmother went to the kitchen to bring the food to the table when there was a loud rapping on the outside door leading into the closed-off verandah.

Grandfather looked up, ‘I wonder who that is? Why don’t you go and find out, Svetik?’

‘It’s dark out there,’ I said.

‘I’ll light the lantern and we’ll go out together,’ he suggested. I shook my head. There were more loud raps on the door.

Then the outside door opened, heavy footsteps could be heard across the verandah and the rapping now started on the door into the dining room.

Grandmother came out of the kitchen and opened the door. There was an old man outside in a long gown and hood and white beard holding a heavy stick with which he had been banging on the doors.

‘Dyed Moroz’ cried grandmother bending over the proffered hand, ‘welcome, welcome. Come and sit down. Have you travelled a long way?’

‘A very long way and I am tired,’ came the muffled voice.

‘Please sit down. Let me help you with your bag.’ The old man was carrying a potato sack over his shoulder.

Dyed Moroz looked around. ‘Is there a little girl in this house?’

‘Yes,’ answered grandmother.

‘And is her name Svetlana?’

‘Yes.’

‘And where is she?’

I had wedged myself between the bookcase behind grandfather’s chair and the table. I knew who Dyed Moroz was, I had seen pictures in a book but I certainly never expected to meet him in the flesh.

‘Come, Svetik,’ the muffled voice said sweetly. ‘Come and help me with the presents I have in my bag.’

The voice sounded warm and somehow familiar. Packages were taken out of the potato sack and I was told to give them to my grandparents. ‘And this is for your mother,’ the old man said giving me a small package. ‘Where is your mother?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, wishing she was with us to enjoy the wonder of this visit.

‘Never mind,’ said Father Frost, ‘Give it to her when she comes … and this is for you.’

He handed over an oblong package wrapped in brown paper.

I started unwrapping the paper. Inside was the most beautiful mug I had ever seen. It had a thick handle and thin brown lines from top to bottom. My own mug. I don’t know why having my own mug was important but I can still feel the thrill of it.

By the time I looked up Father Frost had gone and grandmother was carrying in the steaming chicken for grandfather to carve. A few minutes later my mother rushed in looking flustered.

‘What’s going on?’ she panted.

‘Dyed Moroz was here,’ said grandmother. ‘You missed him.’

‘Oh dear, oh dear. How was he?’

‘Old and tired,’ I explained, ‘he had a sack of presents for all of us and he left one for you and look what he brought me.’ I lifted the mug for her to see.

‘Do you like it?’

‘Oh yes!’

Dyed Moroz came every year and every year my mother would miss him until the day came when he looked younger than usual, there was a wisp of dark hair under the hood and, fatal mistake, he had no gloves on and I could see he was wearing my mother’s wedding ring. But by that time I had already guessed why mother was never there when he came.

Whether it was after one of these quick changes and dashes across the garden or just during a cold spell in winter my mother came down with a bad cold. She wheezed and coughed and complained about pains in her chest. She lay in bed and was fed chicken soup by grandmother and drank cups of hot tea into which two lemons were squeezed and then topped up with brandy.

Grandmother disappeared into the village and returned with a jolly, plump woman carrying a battered leather bag out of which she carefully took a long, dark case and a spirit lamp. She clicked the case open to reveal a set of globular glasses.

‘Take the child out,’ my mother whispered. I went as far as the door to our room, screened by a heavy curtain to keep out draughts, and watched. No-one noticed.

Grandmother stripped off my mother’s nightdress and helped her lie on her front. The woman lined up the strange glasses on the bedside table then lit the spirit lamp on the floor. Quickly she held one glass after the other over the flame of the lamp and then plumped each one down on my mother’s bare back. The flesh inside the glasses swelled up and my mother moaned. My mother’s back was covered in these quivering globes. I was terrified but still kept looking from behind the curtain. After what seemed hours and hours the woman just as quickly removed the instruments of torture, leaving dark blue circles on the skin. She soaked some cotton wool in a clear liquid from a bottle, rubbed it over my mother’s back and then covered the back with a piece of woollen material grandmother handed her. Both women then put a fresh nightdress on my mother, pulled sheets and blankets over her and told her to go to sleep.

I stood by the door unable to move. Grandmother took my hand: ‘I’m going to make some coffee now, come with us.’

‘Will mama be all right?’

‘She’ll sleep and by tomorrow she will be as bright and healthy as ever.’

‘What were those things…?’

‘In Cyprus they are called vendouzes, they draw fever and illness out of the body.’

It was a kind of cupping procedure, I suppose, and it worked. The next morning my mother woke up fully recovered, though still a little weak.

All this time a war was going on. I knew this because people would say it was the reason why suddenly there was no sugar or grandfather’s newspapers did not arrive on time; the radio broadcasts we listened to and the maps on my grandparents’ bedroom wall also had something to do with war, but I didn’t know what.

It was because a war was going on that my mother’s two best friends on the island, Bertha Gunthner, a Russian-speaking Lithuanian Jew and Mette Wagner, a beautiful, dark-haired German, moved into the unused bedroom upstairs. Their German husbands had been sent to internment camp in Tanganyika by the British authorities as enemy aliens. My mother thought this was very unfair, especially in the case of Theo Gunthner who had been born and grew up in the German Colony in Haifa in Palestine. However his papers showed he had studied architecture in Germany ten years before and this was enough to label him an enemy alien.

Mette’s husband, Josef, had been in charge of the electrical engineering department at the American-owned Cyprus Mines Corporation in Skouriotissa where grandfather also worked. The mines director had done everything possible to persuade the British authorities that he was an essential employee but to no avail. Mette read out letters from her husband who wrote about the heat and the tents they lived in but seemed to be quite happy with an outdoors life and excited about a volleyball court they had hacked out of the trees around the camp.

Bertha worried about her husband. Theo was a quiet, unassuming architect working for a Greek Cypriot firm who preferred to read and listen to music rather than play volleyball. She scrutinised every one of his letters for hints of illness or unhappiness.

‘He says he is fine,’ she would tell my mother, ‘but is he getting the right kind of food and what if he gets malaria. Do you think there are doctors there?’

‘I am sure there are,’ my mother would assure her but Bertha did not look convinced.

By this time Aunt Vera had met and married Vsevolod Archipov, a sports teacher at the English School. They lived in Kyrenia where the school had been evacuated to ‘because of the war’ but then Vera returned to Kalochorio to give birth to my eldest cousin, Nikita. There were many conversations late into the night before she arrived, with grandfather getting increasingly agitated. He would disappear into the bedroom and come out with files and a determined look on his face as he cleared the table and set up his typewriter. At this point my mother would quietly take me by the hand and we would go to bed. [It was only when I was doing research for this book in the Cyprus State Archives that I came across documents throwing light on the bureaucratic nightmare my aunt and uncle were living through at the time and are described in another chapter.]

Grandfather adapted part of the tile factory he had built and run in the 1930s into a flat for Vera. I would climb over the concrete blocks in this vast space as builders put up walls and hung doors and windows until grandmother would come in search of me and take me home.

At last I was not the only child. There was Nikita, four years younger, who inherited my high wooden cot, then came baby Natasha. In the mornings we would set out on the long hike from our house, up the long winding path stretching all the way round the orange grove, onto the dusty road, past the water tank (sometimes used as a swimming pool by the men) to the tile factory. I would hang onto the hand of my mother, or Bertha or Mette. Grandfather, always inventive, eventually cut the journey by half by building some strong wooden steps from the first curve of the path straight onto the road, past large olive trees to Vera’s flower garden.

The ‘road’ we had to cross was really an unasphalted dirt track wide enough for one car, leading to two houses set in their own large gardens. They were known as the ‘Congreve’ house and the ‘Pengelly’ house, built sometime in the early 1930s by two Englishmen who chose the village in its picturesque valley to make their homes.

Congreve, whose first name I never found out because he was always referred to as just ‘Congreve’, was a tall, thin man with round glasses who wore khaki shorts and safari jacket summer and winter. A direct descendant of the English Restoration playwright he was a Socialist and introduced my father, who was about his age, to Fabian Society pamphlets and books.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out he became increasingly frustrated and angry by the stance of England and other European countries and through letters from his friends in England learnt about the volunteers preparing to go over to Spain to fight Franco’s fascists. After long nights fuelled by Cyprus brandy and cigarettes, he and my father decided they would volunteer for the International Brigade. The plan came to nothing in the end but my father was one of the first volunteers in World War II.

The Pengelly house, further up the road, was a typical British colonial bungalow with thick stone walls and a verandah running all the way round. It would not have looked out of place in India or Kenya. The Pengellys had far more land than Congreve and the place was run as a prosperous farm.

Mr. Pengelly experimented with different crops and was one of the first people to grow strawberries, this back in the 1940s, much to the wonder of the village children who would find various excuses to go up to the house to see the unusual red fruit. Mrs Pengelly, a tall, formidable-looking woman never seen without a wide-brimmed dark blue straw hat jammed hard on her head, would invite the children onto the verandah and carefully divide the strawberries into paper bags she would give to them with strict orders to carry them carefully home to their mothers. Though little of the fruit would actually reach its destination.

Mrs Pengelly was an avid reader and had books sent to her from England. When my mother arrived in Cyprus in 1939 she knew no English and my father had patiently taught her to speak and read the language. She practised her stumbling spoken English with the Congreves and Pengellys but it was Mrs Pengelly who suggested that the best way of learning the language was to read as much as possible and started lending her books, mostly novels, which my mother devoured.

Officially our property came under the jurisdiction of the village of Ayios Georghios, but everyone who lived on the north side of the river considered themselves residents of the far larger and more important Kalochorio with its railway station, railway hotel, two coffee shops, timber yard, mukhtar’s large provision store, bakery and the one-man taxi office. Most of the people worked for the Cyprus Mines Corporation in Skouriotissa, Mavrovouni or Xeros.

Though never properly defined as in other mixed villages, upper Kalochorio was where most Greek Cypriots lived on both sides of the main road leading from Petra to Lefka, whilst Turkish Cypriots had their fruit gardens and houses further down in lower Kalochorio closer to Lefka, the district administrative centre and a real town with government offices, technical school, doctors, dentists and lawyers as well as the cinema and various shops.

Even with a war going on life itself was as quiet and productive as in any small rural community. Whether the men worked in the mines or at a trade they all had fields and trees to tend, producing either cash crops, like oranges, lemons and tangerines as well as olives, gathered and sold to men who would arrive with their lorries to take them to market, or just enough to sustain a family or be used for barter.

Grandmother was in charge of our garden: besides watering the trees herself she brought in a gardener to dig around them and spread manure when needed, a ‘smelly’ two days when I was not allowed to wander outside. The day she declared ‘the fruit is ripe’ was always exciting. A lorry would arrive early the next morning with half a dozen women on board who would then fan across the garden with large, deep baskets. They laughed and chatted as they filled up the baskets with the golden fruit then shouldered them all the way up to the lorry. Grandmother and I were kept busy filling kouzes, earthenware pitchers, with fresh water for them to drink. Promptly at twelve midday they would all sit down under the trees, undo chequered cloths in which they had brought their lunch of bread, cheese, tomatoes and olives and call out Kopiasté to me to join them. Mother would demur about my eating their frugal provisions but grandmother insisted it would be rude if I refused so I would sit with them as they passed me slices of bread topped with cheese, tomatoes and a handful of olives.

At the end of the day grandmother counted the baskets, the lorry driver would sign the chit she presented to him and then she would thank each woman and hand them the coins they had earned. As they drove off shouting goodbye and ‘Tou chronou, kyria Matóff’ (See you next year, Mrs Matoff) grandmother and I would walk down through the terraces, looking at the trees now free of their heavy burden.

‘A good crop,’ said grandmother, ‘they even managed to fill a whole basket with lemons, I didn’t expect that.’ She looked tired but satisfied.

Collecting the olives was a much smaller operation because we didn’t have that many olive trees. Grandmother would call in two or three women from the village who would spread sheets under the trees and knock down the olives with sticks. They would be put into sacks and sent to the crushing plant. Several days later demi-johns of pure olive oil would be delivered with the man running the plant keeping one for himself as payment.

We were sitting on our verandah overlooking the river, my mother, Mette and me, for the most dramatic moment of my childhood. My mother was reading Mette’s fortune from her coffee-cup when there was a terrible scream from the grandparents’ house.

Grandmother ran out waving her arms: ‘Lialia, Lialia (the short form of my mother’s name, Larissa) Roosevelt is dead. Roosevelt is DEAD! They just said it on the radio.’ She then raced up the path to pass on the terrible news to Vera.

At least I can put a date to this memory. It was 12 April 1945. In four days time I would be five years old.

Soon afterwards, Bertha and Mette returned to Nicosia to wait for the return of their husbands and I started accompanying my mother on her monthly visits to the capital. We would get up at dawn to be ready for the 6 a.m. mail bus, the ever-smiling Armenian driver Paulo always keeping the bench seat next to him for my mother and me. As the bus pulled away grandmother would thrust a lemon into my hand, ‘If you feel sick, suck on the lemon.’ I never felt sick but the moment I had the lemon in my hand a wave of nausea would overcome me. Fortunately there were many stops as the mail was picked up from Petra, Angolemi, Astromeritis (where we had a 15-minute stop during which all the passengers got out at the coffee shop and I sipped from the glass of cool water which came with my mother’s coffee). Then on to Peristerona, Akaki, Kokkinotrimithia and the village of Ayios Dhometios, before reaching the bus depot at the end of Ledra Street in Nicosia. From there we would take a horse carriage to my godmother’s, Maria Alexeivna Makedonsky, in Ayii Omoloyites, on the road to Government House. I was left there whilst my mother did her chores.

My godmother’s house was fascinating, a large stone-built townhouse set back from the road with a garden in front and a large yard at the back with outhouses, laundry room, chicken coop, water tank and towering prickly pear cacti. There was a large square verandah in the front with niches to hold potted plants on both sides, where we sat in the evening. Inside there was both a living room and a dining room with heavy furniture and gloomy dark curtains, but we spent most of our time in the large central hall with chintz-covered armchairs and a forest of plants in ornamental pots on spindly-legged tables. Behind a double door in the hall there was Maria Alexeivna’s workshop where girls sat at sewing machines making fur coats and jackets; beyond that there were several bedrooms, one of which we slept in.

My father boarded with the Makedonskys when he was at the English School and would also stay the night when he would come up for the weekend as a bachelor and he said the highlight before the war would come at Christmas, always celebrated on 7th January by the Russian community. They would all gather at the Makedonskys. There would be much eating and drinking in the dining room and then everyone would move to the living-room where Jenya Schakh-Boudagoff would sit at the piano whilst the others gathered around to sing old Russian songs.

My godmother was tall, good-looking and fifteen years younger than her husband Anatoly. She was always stylishly dressed, her hair permed in smooth waves around her face and wore high heels even around the house. She was very popular with the British colonial set and years later showed me the invitation cards she kept in an album: ‘The Governor and Lady Storrs request the honour of the company of Mr and Mrs Makedonsky at Government House on Tuesday, May 24th at 9.15 o’clock’.

At the bottom there was an indication of what awaited the guests and what to wear, Dancing, on the left, meant full-length evening dresses for the women and Decorations on the right meant dress uniforms for army officers and formal suits with obligatory bow-ties for civilians.

The Makedonskys were also often invited to spend summer in the government houses in Troodos when the entire government moved to the mountains. Maria Alexeivna would wax lyrical about those summers, long-gone because of the war. There were bridge games and picnics and walking in the forest, though it was a shame that her husband could only join her at the weekends because he was a clerk at the Ottoman Bank and had to slave away in the Nicosia heat.

Anatoly had a straight back, always wore a suit and bow-tie and could be quite fearsome, snapping at his wife or the housemaid. His afternoon siesta was sacrosanct: the sewing machines fell silent, everyone walked around on tip-toe and spoke in whispers. After an hour he would come out of the bedroom, have a shower, change, drink a cup of tea and return to the bank and life continued as before.

Father was very fond of Maria Alexeivna. ‘She practically brought me up when I was a boy and she has always been generous, in spirit as well as in money,’ he told me.

Which she was, they both were. They showered me with presents, the fur coat and hat in which I was photographed as a toddler were made by Maria Alexeivna, every Christmas there were fur slippers for the whole family plus a discreet envelope of money for my mother.

The trips my mother and I took to Nicosia started to lengthen. We would stay for one night, then two or three and then a week at the Makedonskys.

These visits were cut short when the Makedonskys rented out a room to Mrs Yushkin, and her daughter, Galya, who was enrolled as a day pupil at St. Joseph’s convent school. Mrs Yushkin was a card player as was Maria Alexeivna who was openly happy to have her company. My mother never played cards (though she would tell fortunes with them) and kept apart.

There was room for us all when we came to Nicosia for a few days and I adored Galya, ten years older than me, tall and pretty, though rather aloof. Teenage girls had little in common with five-year-olds. But my mother decided it was too much for Maria Alexeivna to cope with us as well as her tenants.

The next time we went to Nicosia we walked from the bus depot through the narrow streets of the Old Town to Ayia Sophia cathedral (turned into a mosque during Ottoman times), then plunged into a warren of narrow streets to a 15th century mansion where the Classens had their carpet and curtain factory on 1 Yeni Djami Street.

The Classens were so-called Baltic Germans, descendants of German craftsmen brought to Russia by Peter the Great to build St. Petersburg. The wife, Capitolina Victorovna, was a tall, well-built woman with fair hair in a thick plait coiled round her head like a crown. Her husband, August Classen, was tall and thin with a long, narrow face making him look austere, though he was, in fact, very kind and gentle. She ran the factory, he did the sales and accounts.

If the Makedonskys’ house seemed large, this was a fortress rising above the street with a stone-arched Gothic entrance topped by a Lusignan era coat-of arms, thick double gates with massive round iron handles, wide enough to allow a donkey, piled high with bales of wool and cotton, through it. There were small, latticed windows high up in the walls on the ground floor, above that on the first floor were larger windows, also latticed and a traditional Ottoman ‘kiosk’ above the entrance.

Inside, the building was L-shaped, the longer side fronting onto the street, the short one overlooking a large inner courtyard with palm trees and a fountain in the centre. The carpet factory was on the ground floor in high-ceilinged rooms leading one into the other, the first one where the spinning wheels whirred as the women turned the rough cotton and wool into thread, and then the rooms with the looms, loud and exciting.

A wide stone staircase led upstairs from the paved entrance to a long room or corridor with windows out onto the courtyard. A table with a samovar and chairs stood under one of the windows where we had our meals, there was a small everyday sitting room and a large reception room with a decorated stone fireplace I could stand in and a carved wood ceiling. The windows here were deep, set into the stone walls, with cushions one could sit on and look outside. The Classens’ bedroom was also vast with a high four-poster bed and a resident ghost, a hodja (Muslim cleric), who never bothered anyone but could sometimes be seen sitting on a chair looking out of the window. The guest rooms including ours were on the shorter side of the L, reached by an open verandah. Most of them were empty but one was furnished and had men’s clothes in the wardrobe (I peeked). This belonged to the Classens’ son, George, who like my father was in the army somewhere.

I spent most of my time downstairs in the weaving rooms with the Turkish girls who worked there. They would let me sit with them on the loom bench as they threw their shuttles through, working the patterns on pedals with their feet. After a while I found out how they did it. One pedal would lower every fifth thread, another every fourth thread and so on; when the shuttle with the same or another colour whizzed through it created diamonds or zig-zags or complicated patterns like flowers and birds.

They made carpets and curtains on the large looms and there was a small loom for tablecloths and place mats. The Classen carpets and curtains were considered top quality and were very popular. They lasted for years.