Love's Obsession Read online

  Dorothy Evelyn Dray was born in the dying days of Edwardian England, as an Indian summer gave way to the catastrophe of the Great War of 1914. Eve was a hybrid, one part English gentry, one part eastern Mediterranean. From her mother she learned duty, obedience and rectitude; from her father a wry sense of humour, a love of travel and of animals. The deadpan poker face she perfected all on her own.

  Eve’s mother, Margery Mills, belonged to a family of modest wealth in late Victorian England, her world a slow and gentle round of country picnics, garden parties and visitors coming to stay for weekends in the country. Days distinguished themselves one from another by little more than the weather or the book lying in one’s lap, but seldom by any change in routine. Rituals of shopping or tennis flowed with the rhythms and certainty of a broad slow-moving stream with few eddies to disturb the smooth grey passage of time.

  The course of Margery’s life was determined by men. The Mills family had occupied landed estates in Hampshire since the eighteenth century, but only the men ever owned Bisterne Manorhouse and the thousands of acres attached to it. Wives and daughters might live there but could never be certain of tenure. Margery grew up in this house with two older brothers, two younger sisters, and a mother who would dominate her life for years to come. Her father, a vicar with a passion for carpentry but little interest in the church, left the running of the parish to his wife. Domineering, devout and humourless, her household regimen was rigid and unbending. The family was dutiful and loyal, but undemonstrative. Margery seldom heard laughter or felt the warmth of a spontaneous embrace.2

  In 1901 Margery Mills, aged twenty-five, travelled to Cyprus to visit relatives who had lived there for eleven years. Her uncle, Hugh Nichols, was a road engineer. With only one decent road from the port of Larnaca to the inland city of Nicosia, he had no shortage of work. Unlike her Aunt Flo, who disliked riding, Margery was a keen horsewoman and travelled with Uncle Hugh on surveying trips, riding a horse named Selim Pasha to places with equally foreign names and exotic inhabitants: Limassol, Famagusta, Paphos, Kyrenia. They stayed with district commissioners or at local police stations to avoid the fleas and bedbugs of the local village inns.3

  Perhaps it was on one of these trips she first met a young Tom Dray, who arrived like a warm breeze through an open window into her cold and musty English life.

  Tom Dray was born in 18794 with the privileges of an English birthright, though he spent little time in England. For most of his life he lived in the Near East, enjoying advantages not available in Victorian England’s world of rigid hierarchies, where minute gradations of class were the warp and weft of society’s fabric. Like many younger sons of relatively well-to-do but by no means wealthy families, Tom found more opportunities as a colonial son than in England. There, Tom was merely the youngest son of a doctor, but in Egypt or Lebanon or Cyprus he joined an exclusive expatriate world of administrators and government officials. If, as the Mills family believed, his mother was Syrian, that would have been further reason to avoid England.5

  A premature baby and the youngest of six, he was spoilt and coddled in childhood which he described years later:

  I was born in London, a seven months child [premature] brought up in an incubator and told by the doctors that I was to do no work. I took full advantage of this until I was about ten and considered too old to start school. I was therefore supplied with tutors, a Frenchman, an Italian, an Englishman and a Syrian. By this time I had been sent out to Beirut where my father had gone as a doctor. My last memory of England was riding on Jumbo at the Zoo.6

  Tom effortlessly absorbed languages in polyglot Lebanon, where his father practised medicine and where the family lived in a large house in the picturesque hills of Broumanna outside Beirut. Tom learned French of course—from a tutor who stole the best stamps from his grandfather’s album. He studied ancient Greek and Latin, languages that formed the basic education of all English schoolboys of a certain class, and Arabic from a Syrian Jew who, he remembered, fed him figs. At the small English school in Beirut which he finally attended with his sisters, cricket and football were the main attractions, not schoolwork. In early childhood he began his love affair with horses, and he and his sisters all rode well.

  Tom’s father knew that as the younger son Tom would have to make his own way in the world. He tried to direct Tom towards a financial career, but office work and banking held no attraction for his tall and energetic youngest son. When the Boer War began, a patriotic Tom was eager to enlist. The army offered prospects of adventure and travel, but his father scoffed. Tom was, he said, ‘too young to join up, too big a target & far too big a fool’. In the end, Tom found work as Inspector of Irrigation on the island of Cyprus. The only prerequisite for the job appears to have been an ability to play polo, at which Tom excelled.

  We made a reservoir down by Famagusta, the surface of which made a most excellent polo field although it turned out to be useless as a reservoir.7

  From irrigation Tom moved casually into surveying. He met the head of the Land Registry Office while riding one day and was invited to his office to discuss a new system of land registration. Both knew little about how the system worked, but they enjoyed riding. So it was agreed that Tom would join the office where, he was delighted to discover, ‘there was still plenty of polo and shooting’.

  Tom lived the good life as a young man on Cyprus and remembered it fondly. He rode, played polo, and moved in a circle of young and privileged colonial civil servants. Cyprus was English but not England, familiar and comfortable but warm and exotic. It was England without the straight jacket, the East without the muddle.

  His world was outwardly Middle Eastern but inwardly Hampshire. In the streets wiry moustachioed men wandered the narrow stone alleys and courtyards in baggy trousers, while Turkish Cypriot women were veiled from head to foot. Shepherds picked their way across rocky ledges along the shoreline with small flocks of scruffy long-haired sheep, and bearded Orthodox priests sat in the cafes drinking coffee and nibbling Cypriot sweets. The call to prayer rang out on Fridays, bells tolled on Sundays and a cacophony of voices squabbled at the outdoor markets every other day. Indoors it was strictly the Home Counties. In Tom’s Nicosia house, lace tablecloths covered cane tables and family portraits stared down from wooden frames. Beside a roll-top desk a standard lamp shone weakly beneath its tasselled shade onto an English newspaper lying on the divan. Cyprus became Tom’s home for much of his adult life and finally the source of his considerable wealth. It was also to be central in the life of his daughter Eve.

  The island of Cyprus emerges uneasily from the blue waters of the eastern Mediterranean, geographically closer to Turkey and Lebanon than to Greece. For thousands of years it has been within the orbit of great powers—Greece, Rome, Byzantium, the Ottomans—but never at their centre. The island’s position at the edge of the Eastern Mediterranean makes it strategically important, so it has rarely been the ruler of its own fate.

  Cyprus is dry and barren limestone country with white beaches looped around the coasts and a wide open plain, the Mesaoria, which cuts the island in two from east to west. In the middle of this windswept and featureless fertile central plain squats the walled city of Nicosia, or Levkosia, a medieval city of moats, walls and gateways. Built by a mathematician, Nicosia is a circular city with twelve bastions, its geometry only apparent in plan view. The city looks inwards. No navigable river, harbour or natural feature determines its placement, other than its position at the centre of the rich agricultural Mesaoria.

  Two mountain ranges stretch across the island from east to west. In the north, the narrow Kyrenia Range roars up out of the plain and looms over the northern coastline. In huge unlikely humps the mountain ropes along the top third of the island. The country is stripped bare, bones bleached, flesh cut away. The Kyrenia Range sprouts castles like the Mesaoria sprouts wheat. Leaning against the jagged rocks you are never sure if they are part of the mountain or the remains of a wall. In the south, the Troodos Mou
ntains rise above nearly a quarter of the island. This is a greener, gentler landscape. Monasteries nestle in the mountain folds among forests of native cedar. The minerals of this area have been the source of the island’s wealth for four thousand years and the slopes weep red copper mining slag.

  When alloyed with tin, copper makes the metal that gave its name to the Bronze Age. Copper ingots from Alashiya, as the island was called, are drawn on the walls of Egyptian tombs, and ships wrecked off the southern coast of Turkey were laden with copper ingots from Cyprus, along with trade goods from all over the Eastern Mediterranean. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, emerged from the sea near Paphos on the island’s southwest coast. Her consort, Hephaestus, was a metalworker crippled, as were most such workers, by the poisonous fumes of the furnaces and kilns of their trade.

  The Phoenicians, Egyptians and Persians all at different times coveted the island. In the first century BCE, Cyprus became a Roman province with the city of Paphos its capital. The wealthy built magnificent buildings on the seashore, with lavish mosaics strewn like carpets on the floors of their villas. Cicero governed here for a time, a peaceful provincial appointment for a reflective senator, although he missed the political turmoil and intrigue of Rome. Later St Paul landed at Paphos to preach his new-fangled Christian religion.

  On his way to the Third Crusade, the English king, Richard the Lionheart, conquered the island almost by accident, and sold it a year later to the Knights Templar. They in turn on-sold it to Guy de Lusignan, who had lost his grip on the city of Jerusalem. The Lusignans were Franks, from Poitou in western France, and the family ruled Cyprus for the next three hundred years. It is their medieval imprint that studs the mountain with castles—St Hilarion, Buffavento, Kyrenia, Famagusta. The castles cling like limpets to a foreign landscape.

  In 1570 the Turks conquered the island and, like the Lusignans, ruled the island for a further three hundred years. When Tom Dray moved to Cyprus, the island was English and when Turkey entered the First World War on the side of the Germans, the British formally annexed the island.

  Five years after first meeting on Cyprus, Tom and Margery’s paths again converged, this time in Egypt, where Margery was visiting her elder brother, Jack. Cyprus had ended in professional disappointment for Tom. Denied promotion because he was too young, he had sat Greek and Turkish examinations concurrently—something no one had ever done before—only to be refused once more. He lost his temper with the governor, applied to leave the country and sailed for Egypt, where he tendered his resignation, having found work with the Egyptian Survey.

  Tom and Margery became engaged. She was thirty-one,8 three years older than her fiancé, and they married in August 1907 in the family church at Bisterne. They returned to Egypt, but the following year Margery was back in England awaiting the birth of her first child. A son, Francis, was born on the morning of Wednesday 16 July. Her diary records events: Thursday was a ‘bad day’. The baby was quickly baptised on Friday and the same afternoon he ‘left us’. Margery and Tom buried Francis in the churchyard at Bisterne and she wrote nothing in her diary until eleven days later, when the entry simply reads: ‘Downstairs pm’. She could put no words to her grief.

  For the next seven years Margery and Tom Dray lived in Alexandria or Cairo, travelling in the Middle East and to Cyprus, where Tom’s father and two of his sisters had retired. When Margery, aged thirty-eight, became pregnant for the second time she returned to England for the confinement.

  Eve’s birth in August 1914 coincided with the outbreak of war in Europe. Restless, Tom returned to Egypt, where he was seconded to Political Intelligence with the rank of Captain, with both Sir Harry Chauvel and General Allenby later writing appreciatively of his services during the war.9 Margery remained in England. Having lost one child, Margery took particular care with her second, recording Eve’s progress in detail in her diary. Perhaps she had cause for concern: at twelve months Eve would not crawl and she only began to walk unaided at eighteen months. She could be wilful and Margery wrote that she ‘has taken to screaming when she does not get what she wants’.10

  After a little over a year Margery returned to Egypt with Eve and for the next four years the family lived in the fashionable Cairo suburb of Heliopolis in a large two-storey house, the Villa de Martino. Often alone, toddler Eve found companionship with cats and dogs and other animals. When the family moved to Boulaq Dakrur in the countryside outside Cairo, pigeons, rabbits—Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter—and sheep joined the household. There was a cat called Miss Mewkins and a puppy named Pickle. Her father’s horse was Trotsky. This period was one of the few times she lived with her father.

  At the end of the war, Tom Dray was promoted to Director of Administrative Services in the Survey of Egypt; the King awarded him the Order of the Nile (3rd Class) in 1924.11 Now in his forties, Tom’s career was at its height, but his marriage had sunk to its lowest point. Margery and Eve, aged five, returned to England. Tom visited but was visibly bored and restless, and Margery’s mother was a hard wedge between them.12 In her diary Margery records her sadness. In 1919, on her twelfth wedding anniversary she doubted that Tom would remember the day, and a year later she confessed: ‘it has come to this—that I daren’t remind him of our wedding anniversary because I feel he regrets it, and hates and despises me!’13 Apart from one year in 1921, Margery and Eve spent every Christmas between 1919 and 1924 in England, without Tom.

  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.