Love's Obsession Read Online Free Page B

arches frame the view to the distance—of the Kyrenia plain and township and the Kyrenia Castle. Looking out to sea, low clouds hang over the south coast of Turkey and at the sea’s edge Kyrenia Castle sits grey and solid against the fluid, aqua-green waters of the harbour below.
    Much later, Eve wrote that ‘certainly Cyprus was one of the British colonies, but we did not think of ourselves as “colonialists”, we were simply British people who happened to live in Cyprus’. 16
    All her life Eve called the island her ‘beloved Cyprus’.
    By 1930 Tom Dray had retired from the Egyptian Survey and settled again in Cyprus, where he began amassing property in the north of the island. From England, Margery worried about the expense, but when later she joined him in Cyprus, she settled into a new and freer way of life. It suited her. Tom was building a house on land he had bought outside Kyrenia and he and Margery camped beside the building site. Margery made excursions to visit historic sites and compiled detailed botanical notes on the countryside, sending specimens to Kew Gardens and maintaining a lively correspondence with Eve, by now at school in England. From Kyrenia she wrote that they were ‘so used to being almost out of doors, all the time, in our camp, that we find a house or hotel frightfully “stuffy”—and mean to continue this sort of out of doors life as long as we possibly can’. 17
    Tom and Margery joined a growing colony of English people on the north coast of Cyprus, living an English life but without its restrictions and restraints. Kyrenia housed the largest English community on the island. Eve’s Dray grandfather and aunts lived there, together with a small group of English occupying a clutch of hotels and stone houses. Many had retired from Beirut, recreating the congenial and familiar world of English society while continuing to enjoy the benefits of a Mediterranean climate and lifestyle. In 1930 there were perhaps a dozen English residents in the town.
    A quiet harbourside village hidden behind the mountains, Kyrenia offered picturesque scenery, easy access to Nicosia when needed, but a location at sufficient distance from this administrative centre to ensure both freedom and privacy. 18 Before the First World War, only a thousand residents lived in the area and only nineteen of these were English. After the war, the Cypriot businessman, Costas Charalambous (or Catsellis), returned to Kyrenia from America, replete with New World prosperity and entrepreneurialism. He promoted tourism, and in 1930 his Dome Hotel opened for business. Tourists demanded services like taxis and public baths. They wanted places to stay and souvenirs to buy. They employed people to cook and clean and make their lives comfortable. Some visitors stayed. The population grew and Kyrenia prospered. 19 Tom Dray’s family were part of this early development. Tom’s sister Ada Dray, together with her friend Miss Winnie Atthill, founded the first hospital in Kyrenia. The Old British Cemetery, originally established to serve the military presence in Northern Cyprus, became a civilian cemetery and on 7 November 1921 Tom’s father, Thomas Howard Dray, was the first civilian burial. 20
    Some idea of the expatriate life of the English community in Kyrenia can be gleaned from the writings of a retired colonel with the unlikely name Franklin Lushington. In the early 1950s he wrote a novel, Cottage in Kyrenia . It was The Year in Provence of its day and records in amusing detail, and from the wife’s point of view, the life of a privileged expatriate community. The main characters, Henry and his wife, land in Cyprus en route to a new life in Kenya—but they never leave. They camp on the seashore, drink pink gins in the evening and enter into the life of the community.
    In Kyrenia one of life’s pleasures was to visit the English club’s bathing pool, a natural inlet