‘A day doesn’t go by when I don’t think about something that happened to me on the island of Cyprus’
A quiet Sunday morning, a small three-star hotel in Yermasoyia on the ‘wrong’, suburban side of the highway. A modest swimming pool, an importunate cat that jumps on our table – seeking food or friendship, who can say – a Sunday-morning vibe and a frank confession by the middle-aged man sitting opposite me:
“Even now,” says Martin Clark, “even now – I’m 63 – I split my life up into ‘Before Cyprus’ and ‘After Cyprus’. Which is increasingly unbalanced!”
It is a bit unbalanced, the ‘After’ side of that mental ledger being considerably busier than the ‘Before’. The only period in his life when Martin lived on the island for any extended length of time was from 1970 to 1972, between the ages of eight and 10. Yet, as he tells me, “I don’t think there’s a day goes by when I don’t think, at some point, about something that happened to me on the island of Cyprus”.
It’s not like the rest of his life was unusually sleepy, either. He’s toured the world playing guitar with “various luminaries,” as he puts it, including a gig in front of 12,500 people at the NEC in Birmingham. He’s made a film (actually a series of short films) called Scars and Straw, first in Britain then remade, with a higher budget, in America.
And he’s also held a day job as a gas engineer – 28 years with British Gas, then self-employed from 2006 – mostly in the picturesque Midlands city of Lincoln, his brain being apparently one of those “unusual” brains that’s equally adept at repairing boilers as creating art and music.
One more achievement should be noted – the most recent, and the one that goes some way towards balancing the ledger. His childhood years in Cyprus have now been joined by another close encounter with the island: a book called Long Shadows in Cyprus, written as MJW Clark and published in the UK by Troubador – an account of a 10-day trek he made in 2018, walking east to west (200km, 380,000 steps) along the Green Line.
This was obviously his most consequential visit since those two years of childhood, though not the only one. He’d been back a few times, usually with his wife Gill and one or more of their kids (they have three, a son and two daughters) – including one visit when he went looking for RAF Berengaria, the British Army village near Polemidia where he’d lived in the 70s.
Martin tells the tale, waxing increasingly lyrical. He hadn’t laid eyes on his old haunts in decades, and got quite a shock: the village was “ring-fenced for destruction, because the buildings were made out of corrugated asbestos”. His memories stared back at him wistfully, penned behind a fence like captive animals.
He draws breath, to underline the magnitude of the moment. “I’ve always been a really good boy,” he says. “I’ve obeyed the law. If a policeman told me to do something, I would do it”… But this was different. This was more than a person could stand.
He leapt over the fence, he recalls with feeling, “dropped down on to the hot tarmac on the other side – and ran back, as it were, through 40 years. Back to when I was a boy: eight, nine and 10 years old. Past the Naafi. Past the Scout hut. Like a tombstone saying ‘Here lies your boyhood’.”
It’s a bit presumptuous, but I can’t resist. “Are you quoting from the book now,” I ask, “or is this your natural way of speaking?”
“A bit of both,” he admits. “But I’m very poetic in the way that I speak anyway.”
Martin is indeed quite poetic, with the verbal flair of the autodidact – he left school at 16, to do an apprenticeship – and an engineer’s insistence on making every word count. His description of his first arrival in Cyprus is memorable, the images he conjures dancing incongruously vividly in the quiet poolside area around us.
He was eight, the age when consciousness first appears, when a child becomes keenly aware of their place in the world. (Martin’s four siblings – two older, two younger – didn’t have the same experience; they were the wrong age.) It was the summer of 1970, “the age of the tie-dye T-shirt, the Chopper bike and that Coca-Cola advert: ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony’…
“I traded cold, frosty mornings in my little village in Lincolnshire – and blackbirds, and the water vole in the stream. I traded it for blue skies, warm Mediterranean waters, barbecues, and the scent of jasmine and mimosa, and the sound of cicadas. And I just thought: ‘Is this the same planet?’. Cyprus was just the most wonderful place to be, it was paradise.”
His school back in England had been “a Victorian ark of incarceration,” he writes in the book – but in Cyprus “my classroom blazed with daylight, and any dystopian shadows vanished under the weight of the sun, and its restoring rays were as thick as golden syrup”. The school day finished at 1, he tells me, then the family would drive to Lady’s Mile beach through the heady fragrance of citrus orchards. The rest of the time, “we just ran like feral cats, as children,” he and his fellow tykes roaming from house to house, riding their Choppers, and drinking “copious amounts” of 7Up and Orangina.
Memories abound, some of them recalled in his book: the vultures at Episkopi and the little frogs in a pond at Kolossi Castle. “Walking through St Andrew’s street [in Limassol], and smelling the leather… Driving along the hairpin bends on the coast road to Paphos – and in those days there was nothing at Paphos, except for a few small fishing boats and a pelican.”
Then you had the boys with slingshots, “the hunters in the almond trees” – but this is where it gets a little complicated, a fact Martin acknowledges without quite confronting.
“There was an almond grove behind my house,” he recalls, “and one day I was hunting lizards, head down… And when I looked up I was surrounded by these boys, with catapults, and they were hunting songbirds”. The boys were teenagers, dwarfing the tousle-haired eight-year-old. Around each one’s midriff, slung on belts, were rows of dead birds.
Martin loved birds, and didn’t like to see them killed. “I didn’t have enough emotional wit to be angry,” but it did upset him. Yet he couldn’t have fought the boys, even if he’d wanted to – not just because they were bigger but because they were physically standing in a different world, “on the other side of the Nato fence” from his own sheltered village.
In short, his eight-year-old self lived in a bubble – not just the bubble of idyllic childhood but also the bubble of life in the Bases, unaware of the Cyprus of Eoka B, or intercommunal violence, or the Brits’ own chequered colonial past.
“You knew that you didn’t belong here,” he admits. “You were borrowing this beautiful island.” But then, why define your life around a bubble? And why go on this 10-day trek, trying to recover a sense of what was never real in the first place?
Practically speaking, the walk was straightforward. He was already 57 in 2018, but “I was fit as a flea. I’ve climbed Kilimanjaro, I’ve done the three-peaks challenge in the UK… My father taught me how to navigate”. He started just south of Famagusta and finished in Kato Pyrgos, chicaning his way around the buffer zone and crossing the Green Line four times, the book detailing his encounters as well as a sense – via poems and reminiscences – of what it all meant to him.
That’s the point, of course: not the walk itself, but what it meant. Note, for instance, that he did it in June – an impractical time for a 200-kilometre trek, but “there was no way I could walk through Cyprus at any other time than the summer. Because the summers in Cyprus have stayed with me for half a century”. Note also that he focused on the buffer zone – for the simple reason that the buffer zone is largely unchanged since the 70s.
“I mean, there’s a deserted petrol station just before you cross over to Morphou – and the patination, and the colours, and the letters of the Mobil [logo], is all exactly as I remember… I wanted to place my adult self in a place unchanged since I was a boy, and compare and contrast the man that I’ve become with the boy that I was.”
It’s no good, of course; time won’t flow backwards. Martin agrees, and quotes AE Housman (“The happy highways where I went / And cannot come again”) – but an elegy, a musing on life, doesn’t need to be ‘successful’.
“I wrote the entire book to one piece of music: Allegri’s Miserere,” he tells me – and it’s absolutely no surprise that Allegri’s Miserere is a melancholy piece of Gregorian chanting. Many people go on long, arduous treks as a physical challenge, an extreme sport – but Martin Clark’s walk had a spiritual dimension. And ‘spiritual’, it turns out, is very much the word to describe him.
Is he annoyed by all the changes to the island? I ask at one point (we’ve already agreed that Limassol is now “unrecognisable”) – but he shakes his head. “No, not really. I’m distant from it. I feel cocooned because my memories are so entrenched, they’re so solid… And also, as a man, I’m very much at peace with myself.” He nods, as if to reinforce the point: “I’m very much at peace with myself”.
Just recently, or was he always like that?
Always, he affirms. “If you really want to know,” he goes on, veering into the poetic again, “at the age of eight, in my front garden at RAF Berengaria, I prayed a prayer. As an eight-year-old… And I said: ‘God, if You made the universe and everything that is in it, then surely the best thing to be is Your friend. Can I be Your friend?’.
“And it’s a relationship that has lasted my whole life.”
That’s the final piece in the puzzle, the presence of God in his life – because, for instance, Scars and Straw, his film project, was actually a series of vignettes about the Nativity, and he actually toured the world playing guitar with Christian outfits like the Grapevine Worship Team (though the standard was high; he was the only amateur among professional musicians). Martin’s religious faith isn’t in the book, per se – but it’s there “between the lines”, above all in the implicit meditation on mortality, juxtaposing boy and man to wonder how (if at all) everything fits together, what (if anything) it all means.
And of course there’s the book itself, Long Shadows in Cyprus, written over five years (mostly in the evenings, after he came home from repairing boilers) in his tiny village in Lincolnshire. He rewrote extensively, being a bit obsessive by nature – “My personality is, I’m a bit of a fusspot,” as he charmingly puts it – and is now delighted to have seen it on the shelf at Waterstone’s next to Bitter Lemons by Lawrence Durrell, another colonial (but sincere) chronicler of Cyprus.
Did it help? Did it exorcise something? “I thought I would exorcise something,” he replies candidly. “I thought I might achieve some kind of epiphany… But I’d have to say ‘Not really’.”
There was an epiphany of sorts, the realisation – as he says – that the child we used to be still survives, in some way. Mostly, though, it was just a lovely walk. “The sound of my boots on the road, and birdsong, and just time to think” – and meeting people, and catching a faint glint of memories (things like that old Mobil sign), and just being at peace. The last line of MJW Clark’s list of acknowledgements, at the very end of his book, is especially touching. “To Cyprus… peace, perfect peace. Thank you.”
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