The Fruit of a Bitter Lemon

Paul Philippou

1974

The date is the 15th of July 1974. I, then a boy not yet eleven years old, run from the kitchen of my family home up floral carpeted stairs towards the bathroom wherein my father is bathing. I am possessed with a desperate need to recount that which I have just heard on the BBC World Service - to tell my father the latest news from Cyprus. I, then, not now, am described as small for my age - well below the median height and weight for ten years. Now, as then, I possess an olive complexion and dark-brown hair that displays my half-Greek origin, whilst masking the other half of my ethnicity. That day, there is only one country on my mind; and, then, as now, it lies at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

My father is in the only bathroom in a house which began life as a standard 1930s three-bedroom galley-kitchen semi-detached construct in the pre-war North London suburban growth burst. Thirty years later, the house, transformed into a five-bedroom double-extended property, with through lounge and enormous kitchen is the physical realisation of the Greek Cypriot motto: 'Eat like you might die tomorrow, but build your house as if you might live forever'. It is occupied only by my mother; I have grown to adulthood and left home; my father is dead; his coffin traditionally anointed with olive oil and water is covered with both London's clay soil and a handful of earth brought back from our land in the north of Cyprus. ... (continues)