Love's Obsession (3 page)

For much of her childhood Eve lived with her mother, grandmother and aunt at Lymington, a genteel tourist town on the south coast of England. Hers was a world of cloying feminine gentility ruled by an overbearing Grannie Mills in severe long black skirts. Almost every word was its diminutive—nannies, piggies, bunnies—and servants were simply Cook or Nurse. A dull household with little to leaven the discipline of obligation, whether religious or secular, although everyone was kind.
14

Eve was the centre of interest for this clutch of women, who competed for her attention and spoiled her. Solitary and pampered, she never knew the rough and tumble of a life shared with siblings. She never had to compromise. She learned to do what was expected, handing around cakes and tea on social occasions, playing with children her grandmother approved of, learning to ride because her mother liked to hunt. Often alone, she escaped into books and used her weekly pocket money to buy children's newspapers.

At six years of age Eve paid her first visit to her mother's family home at Bisterne.
15
Many years later she could remember vivid details of this visit and recorded them in case anybody might be interested in the ‘trivial, day-to-day details of life in a more leisurely and more gracious age'. She travelled to Bisterne with her mother and two aunts in her grandmother's new Austin, driven by the chauffeur Davis who, much to her surprise kept a potato on the seat beside him. Cars had no windscreen wipers in those days and when it rained, he cut off a piece of potato and rubbed it onto the windscreen. ‘This seemed to make the rain run off more easily.'

They drove through farmland and open forest until finally at the end of a long curving driveway, they arrived at the grey two-storeyed house. The manor house lay in the middle of a park on the edge of the New Forest. Wild daffodils grew under cedar trees beside formal flowerbeds and tennis courts. There was a story that only white rabbits, as in
Alice in Wonderland
, were allowed to crop the green lawns; brown or multicoloured rabbits were shot. Mr Purtain, the gardener, spent most days tending the lawn with a broad mower pulled by Mole, the pony, who wore leather boots over his hooves to protect the grass.

The house itself had been remodelled and restored over the centuries, an odd mix of grand and domestic styles. It was built over various levels and Eve found its ‘geography' complicated. At the front, two stone stairways passed under triple-arched doorways emblazoned with a coat of arms. Two stone creatures, the Bisterne dragons, sat atop each entrance, guarding the doors but in a domesticated, indolent fashion. Eve thought they looked more like dogs. She and her mother were welcomed by the housekeeper who curtsied and bustled around in an ankle-length dress and apron. Spicer, the butler, opened the door in tails and the footman in plum-coloured livery resplendent with the Mills family crest, showed her mother and two maiden aunts to their rooms. Years later Eve remembered:

Spicer escorted me back into the stone-flagged hall, down the stone steps, past the study and through the door … into the kitchen regions; down a long, stone-flagged, rather dark passage, past doors leading to the kitchen, pantry, scullery, butler's pantry (where the footman spent hours polishing silver and glasses—wearing woven cotton gloves so as not to leave smeary finger marks—and sharpening the table knives on an emery board) and so on—right at the end was the House keeper's Room, where I was entertained to tea by Mrs Wakenell (nobody would have presumed to call her by her Christian name: Harriet), a lady of uncertain age, in an ankle-length, close-fitting black dress.. I did not think it unusual that I should be sent off with the housekeeper. Most of my life I had spent in the nursery with my nurse and only briefly been ‘in company' with grown-ups and visitors.

To the family's surprise, her parents' marriage was not over and when Eve was eleven they were reconciled. The family travelled in Belgium, France and Cyprus, visiting aunts and cousins, the extended Dray family. Summers meant dress-up parties and days of swimming or archery. Finally Eve was with young people her own age and revelled in it.

In 1926, aged twelve, Eve made her first trip to Cyprus, travelling by train to Marseille and continuing by sea to the port of Limassol on the south coast and on to Kyrenia, where the Dray family lived. North from Nicosia, the road travels through a narrow pass in the Kyrenia Range, guarded by the castle of St Hilarion. Against a cloudless blue sky the castle tumbles down the mountain spurs and ridges. Carobs with green fleshy leaves emerge from the rocks and in small flat areas the ancient twisted trunks of olives cling. The castle's 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 on the shore to the east of Kyrenia Castle. It was here that the whole of social Kyrenia was to be seen.

It was pleasant to drive down to the pool in the mornings and meet one's friends without feeling under any obligation to stay longer than one wished nor to talk to those to whom one had nothing to say … However little inclined to snobbism one might be there was, too, something mildly gratifying in the sight of an ex-Governor General conscientiously sunning himself after his bathe like any ordinary being, and asking Timothy, in a voice at the sound of which thousands of black men had once trembled, for a large lemon squash.
21

At the urging of his wife, Henry decides to stay in Kyrenia and buys property from a Mr Roche, a thinly disguised portrait of Tom Dray, from whom Lushington had in fact bought land.

Although he was quite different from what I had expected I liked Mr Roche. He was a big, tall man with a drooping moustache and drooping, slightly bloodshot eyes, not unlike a melancholy St Bernard, but he was very kind and friendly … He and Henry got on very well together, chiefly because they were both keenly interested in cricket, a game about which I know absolutely nothing, except that it is the only thing the English get excited about and is responsible for some of the more incomprehensible English idioms.
22

Cyprus was an English Crown Colony. The British authorities had established a Legislative Council but with no intention of giving Cypriots—either Greek or Turkish—much say in affairs. Greek Cypriots agitated for
enosis
or union with Greece, and the English authorities, with experience gained in other parts of their Empire, played Greeks off against Turks, while feigning impartiality. Only a few decades before the Drays settled in Kyrenia an Englishman living in Karmi was surprised to be taken to task for beating a Cypriot with a stick: ‘Why not? They're only serfs,
'
23
he said.

A revolt against English rule erupted in 1931. Six people died, Government House was burnt to the ground, but the revolt was speedily put down. ‘Ringleaders in Cyprus have been arrested,' Margery wrote in her diary in England, ‘and I expect it will soon be quiet'.
24

Although Eve had briefly attended a day school in Egypt, most of her early education came from a Swiss governess, her first real friend. At twelve she entered Redmoor, a boarding school in Bournemouth on the English south coast, close to Bisterne. Eve kept a daily diary and in 1929 and 1930 she recorded, in cramped script filled with adolescent abbreviations, the daily routines of school life. She listed, in 1929, her team's netball matches (they only lost three times), lacrosse (they only won twice) and games of tennis. She kept a record of exam results for English, French, Latin, Arithmetic, Science, Algebra, Geometry and Music. She was a consistent A student in Latin and French but her other results covered the full range.
25

In 1928, aged fourteen, her class composition for the day was: ‘What I intend to do when I retire'. Eve toyed with the idea of buying a yacht with her friend Kay Brown and sailing, perhaps to the south of France. Another prospect was to go to Egypt to ‘dig about in the ruins of the old tombs and temples. They have always had a great attraction for me [and] I have longed to go and make a name for myself there, by discovering a new language, or something equally striking'. She worried about the heat but happily imagined herself grovelling in the sand ‘with a crowd of natives round to do the dirty work'.
26
Such was ‘archaeology' for an upper middle class girl in the 1920s.

For part of the seven years that Eve spent at Redmoor, Margery Dray returned to England to be close to her daughter and to act as a buffer between Eve and Grannie Mills. Although she knew that her grandmother loved her, Eve resented her control. Animals were Eve's passion and she hoped to train as a vet, but Grannie thought it ‘no job for a lady'. Eve was only allowed the friends Grannie considered acceptable. Once a year Grannie organised a tennis party and Eve prepared a list of the friends she wanted to invite. Sternly checking the list, Grannie struck out those she considered unsuitable. Though outwardly placid, Eve seethed. Not until her late teens did she learn to feign headaches and so avoid unpleasant duties and escape on her own.
27

One further reason for Margery's return to England was that it was decided that Eve should try for Oxford. Whose decision this was is unclear, but it was remarkable. Redmoor was a small provincial school and the Oxbridge exams required more preparation than such a school could give. Eve sat the School Certificate exams twice in 1931, in the hope of increasing her credit and at the end of 1932 sat the Oxford exam. There is no record of her result, but in the middle of 1933, she left Redmoor for good and—her mother felt—with some regret.

Having failed the Oxford exams, Eve entered Royal Holloway College, the women's college attached to the University of London, in November 1933. Between 1933 and 1937 she studied for a general Bachelor of Arts, majoring in French and Mathematics. Student life meant greater freedom and new friends. She joined the university theatrical group, performing in
The Cherry Orchard
and
The Taming of the Shrew
. She joined friends skating or cycling and returned to college late at night. Her ‘family' consisted of ten girls, a large group of students for the time. They were a sporty crowd who played lacrosse and hockey and enjoyed harmless pranks. They dressed the statue of Queen Victoria in cap and gown and ‘ventilated', a method of climbing through the transom window above the door to their study.
28