AN HISTORICAL NOVEL OF LOVE AND DEATH IN THE LAST DAYS OF COLONIAL CYPRUS

Life is all about change. Way back in another age, 1968, I was living in Kamloops, a growing town in British Columbia. We had a small cottage overlooking the Thompson River and there was a basement, where someone had built a nice long bench. It was a great place to write a novel. I had been a journalist for a lot of years, and really wanted to write a book.

I had left the Island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean five years earlier.I remember vividly having seen the people there, the Greek and Turkish Cypriots struggling for independence from British Colonial rule. Struggles are never easy and the campaign was frequently violent and all three parties – British, Greek and Turkish Cypriots lost lives in the violence that reigned in Cyprus from 1955 through to independence in 1960.

It provided a great background for a novel and so I developed my story. Supposing a young British Army officer, Gregory Sommerville was on Cyprus in 1940 waiting for a posting to the British Expeditionary Force. He has a very warm and loving relationship with a Greek Cypriot girl, named Eleni. The night before he’s posted out they make love on a beautiful sandy beach.

He gets badly wounded in Greece. Unbeknown to him, Eleni has a baby boy and her father, a Nicosia doctor of some distinction, feeling angry and embarrassed, disinherits her and forces her to leave home and change the family name. The father destroys all incoming letters and the two lovers lose contact with one another. Totally lost, she is unable to tell Gregory he has a son, Andreas.

Now, eighteen years later it’s 1958. Now a Colonel specializing in Intelligence, he’s posted into Cyprus to fill the place of an officer killed by terrorists. Unhappy in a strange marriage, he embarks on a frustrating search for his old love.

Then, a Greek Cypriot while on his deathbed in a military ambulance tells him he has a seventeen year-old son. Worse, the boy has joined the underground movement, EOKA and is attached to a Nicosia killer group responsible for the deaths of two British businessmen. On the run the boy joins a mountain based killer group planning to assassinate the Governor of Cyprus and an unidentified person known as Morrie.

Throughout the book the name Pentadaktylos meaning five fingers appears in the background. It’s a prominent but strange mountain in the Kyrenia Range which today attracts climbers from many overseas countries. The novel, although fictional is set in the real historic Cyprus of 1958 during its last tortuous days as a British Colony when Britons called the Greek Cypriot fighters “Terrorists” and the Cypriots called them “Patriots” and “Heroes.”

The story tells how Sommerville finds Eleni and together they challenge the British Army and the mountain assassination group to rescue their son, and that occurs on the slopes of Pentadaktylos minutes before a mortar attack. I didn’t realize it when writing in those days that the book with its dialogue is also an examination of patriotism and what it really means. Patriotism, like life, is changing.

Although written in 1968 and rejected by mainline publishers, the manuscript sat in a cardboard box for forty-three years until last spring when I picked up the fading pages and started to re-type and re-edite the text and put the book onto computer.

“PENTADAKTYLOS: Love, Promises and Conflict in the Last Days of Colonial Cyprus” by Robert Egby will be available in August 2011 as a book and on Kindle . The author’s own years in Cyprus are vividly described in his autobiography published earlier this year “Kings, Killers and Kinks in the Cosmos: Treading Softly With Angels Among Minefields.” Available as a book and also on Kindle. Take a look at Robert's Author Page: http://tinyurl.com/lc3v5a