‘I don’t do brooms, I do revolution’
Aliki Hadjigeorgiou met Loukia (in a church, quite randomly) about 12 years ago, shortly after the publication of her first book.
Aliki and Loukia – even their names are near-mirror-images of each other – had a good deal in common. Both were about the same age (Aliki is now 83) and were also linked, at the time, by a certain melancholy. Aliki had just lost her husband, while Loukia’s life was haunted by the memory of Alekos, the love of her life, whom she never married – a story that’s now the inspiration for Aliki’s third book To Nyfiko Pou Den Foresa, or ‘The Wedding Dress I Never Wore’.
That said, the similarities only go so far. Loukia was, and remains, a low-profile woman, unknown to the general public except through the book (which is actually a novel, a lightly fictionalised account of her story). Aliki, on the other hand, is well-known, not just as an author but also a guiding force behind the Association for the Prevention and Handling of Violence in the Family (Spavo, to quote its Greek acronym), which she presided over for many years, as well as a new NGO called Zoe Vs War Violence, raising awareness of rape as a weapon of war. “I’m active,” she tells me. “I take part in social issues. I don’t look my age.”
It’s true, she doesn’t, sitting in the airy Nicosia house where she’s lived since 1967. On the table between us is a sheaf of papers which turn out to be notes for her fourth book (she was writing for a couple of hours – as she does every morning – before my arrival). The title is going to be I Athlies, the female form of Les Miserables, stories of women who are all, in various ways, ‘miserable’ – unlike Aliki herself who’s full of energy, though one of her newfound pleasures is just sitting here writing (she’s also done an anti-war play, to be staged soon) and listening to classical music. “I was someone who didn’t know the meaning of being alone,” she marvels. “And now I love being alone.”
She was always a livewire, never much of a housewife. “I’m not right for you, mana mou. Get it through your head,” she recalls telling her late husband Savvas when he came courting. “I don’t do brooms, I don’t do mops. I do revolution.”
“I was already married to a woman who did brooms, and mops, and knitting,” he replied – he was 52 at the time, with three kids; she was 40, anti-marriage and “very independent” – “but I wasn’t happy. I want a woman like you – someone with a personality. Someone I can talk to.”
She was born in Paphos, to a very poor family. Both her parents had had difficult childhoods – especially her dad, an ironmonger, who’d been turfed out as a 10-year-old by an evil stepmother and forced to fend for himself. Aliki herself was a sickly child, frequently laid up with asthma – and, as often happens in such situations, became a fiery adolescent, especially in the 1950s which was also the time of Eoka.
“I started like all the other schoolgirls, handing out pamphlets,” she recalls – but, unlike most schoolgirls, graduated to more active duty. “I took part in an ambush. Without a gun, though!… I was opposite the team that was going to blow up the patrol.”
Her comrades laid mines by the side of a road, where the British soldiers would be passing. “I was opposite, in the yard of a house,” pretending to be knitting then getting up to water the flowers as the patrol approached. They’d already counted the distance in steps to where the mines had been laid; Aliki’s job was to keep an eye on the soldiers as they walked, counting down steps, then “put my hands up like this” – she demonstrates, making it look like she’s fixing her hair or something – “so they’d see it opposite and detonate the mine”.
Really? Just with hand signals? Sounds a bit amateurish.
“But we were kids!” she protests. “We were kids. What can I tell you.”
Aliki got the timing right – but the mine turned out to be a dud, and failed to explode (equipment was a problem in general). Still, she came very close to killing people; didn’t it bother her? Not at the time, she shrugs – “We were naïve” – but she’s changed her mind over the years.
“I’ve said many times that the Eoka struggle was a big mistake… I was one of the few who had the courage of my opinion, and dared to say it.” It shames her to claim that she ‘fought’ for her country: “I didn’t fight – I harmed my country. Because I can see the result today”. (Her second book, Ta Paidia tou Akama or ‘The Children of Akamas’, is a poignant account of three young boys she knew, all of whom were killed in the struggle.) The Eoka years divided us, she sighs – the British were far from blameless, of course – and led to our current problems; with hindsight, we could just have waited for independence, “like Malta was liberated, and became a perfectly nice country… But we wanted heroes”.
Whether it’s because she’s 83, or because she was always like this (probably the latter), Aliki Hadjigeorgiou has no filter: she names names, doesn’t beat about the bush or hide behind euphemisms. Her account of being a teenage girl during Eoka is honest, tinged with mixed emotions. Fraternising with the enemy wasn’t uncommon: “We were pretty girls – and you’d see all these military police hanging around outside our houses, and they’d flirt with us… Of course I’d have been sad to hear that one of those boys had been killed”.
Her account of her years at the Bank of Cyprus in Nicosia, after independence – where she “raised the flag of equality” – is equally honest. “One fine morning,” as she puts it, she walked into the manager’s office and made a complaint: “‘I and [name elided] who sits next to me process customers all day. I do six, he does three, maybe four. So why does he make £100 more than me?’. The manager sat there looking at me, then he goes: ‘My dear Aliki, aren’t you forgetting you’re a woman?’.”
Later – much later – the bank grew to appreciate Aliki, even placing her in charge of so-called ‘red loans’ (the hopeless ones, where the debtor is facing bankruptcy). “I think I left behind a good reputation,” she says mildly – but that doesn’t mean she’ll let bygones be bygones, or soft-pedal what happened in the 60s and 70s.
She joined Etyk, the bank workers’ union, and became a thorn in the bosses’ side. She was transferred to the cash tills “to lift bags of coins, to ‘prove’ I had the same strength as a man”. Aliki was a small, fine-featured woman. Her hands sprouted blisters, male colleagues tried to help but she wouldn’t let them – and meanwhile “the personnel manager would walk by every day and call out: ‘How do you like it, little man?’. And I’d reply: ‘Just fine, Mr. Nicos’”. In 1974 she was transferred out of town as a punishment, to Famagusta. “I’m happy to go,” she told them, “so I can organise the women there too” – though of course she didn’t stay long, driven back by the invasion.
As already mentioned, she was independent in those years, living the kind of life many women secretly envied. “I dressed how I wanted. I played tennis. I drove a car, at a time when there weren’t that many cars in Nicosia… I got into unionism, I became involved in women’s rights.”
She was always pugnacious, from fighting the Brits to fighting the system. “They all know that equality, and equal pay – they owe that to me,” she says of her former colleagues. A shelf in her living room holds the plaques and awards she’s received over the years – and they include one from Etyk, who honoured her lifetime contribution just a few months ago.
That said, when I ask for her happiest time she cites married life – the 30 years with her husband, even though she was doing three jobs for much of it. Two of those were Bank of Cyprus and Spavo, battling the often-hidden but large (and growing) problem of domestic violence on the island. Her third job was looking after Savvas, who was sick with cancer – actually four different cancers – for 18 of their years together, though “he had a dignity,” she says: “He never troubled me, and I’m grateful to him”. They never had kids together, which she freely admits is her big regret; “I didn’t like the idea of having a child who’d be younger than his grandchildren,” she explains, even though he encouraged her. “It would be my security now,” she points out with her usual candour.
Like Loukia, the subject of her new book, there’s a simmering regret in her life – and in fact it goes even further because Aliki, too, had her own ‘Alekos’, an intense love affair in her 30s that remained unconsummated (at least in marriage). “I feel no fear,” she replies when I ask what defined her in life. “I have a lot of confidence, a lot of courage. I’m direct, I’m an honest person. If I have something to say, I’ll say it.”
I’m impressed. Was she born this way?
No, she replies: “I was re-born this way. After I hung up my own wedding dress.”
Aliki’s been through two crushing depressions in her up-and-down life. One was in her late teens, occasioned by the pain of her fallen comrades in Eoka – and healed through a pair of chance meetings, a therapist in Athens and an old Indian lady on the plane back to Cyprus who pierced her soul with words of wisdom. (“I believe that God sends angels sometimes, to give us a helping hand,” she says quietly.) The second was in her 30s, after she’d loved and lost – and this time there were no angelic meetings, she had to heal herself.
“I had died,” she tells me. “I’d died, as a person. Till one fine morning I stood there and put Aliki opposite me, and I said to her: ‘Do you want to live or die? Because if you want to live…’” She stares hard, as if addressing her inner self 50 years ago: “‘If life gave you a slap in the face, give it two slaps back! Can you do it? Don’t expect anyone else to do it for you’.
“And so death brought a rebirth,” she explains now. “From the moment I decided to live, I had to become a different person. So I did.”
That said, it’s unclear if she really became a different person or just reverted to the person she’d always been – a livewire, a fighter. “You have the fire there in front of you,” she muses later, “and most people turn away. Well, I never turned away. I went through it – right through the fire! And I made it. I didn’t get burned.” The metaphor sounds a little dubious, but it’s actually true: if you go hard and fast through a fire – if you don’t linger in fear – “you may get scorched,” as she says, “but you’ll survive”.
Aliki Hadjigeorgiou has made a habit of plunging through the fire – and survived, though she’s been through some pain and is now, at 83, semi-happily alone, writing books and raising awareness but also nostalgic (like most 83-year-olds) for the half-remembered past. “What wouldn’t I give,” she says wistfully, “to see the Cyprus of the 50s again”. The plaques on the shelf speak of triumphs and accomplishments – but regrets also float in the air, as they do in Loukia’s story. The various iterations of the bridal gown she never wore.