Читать книгу Elita and her life with F.W. de Klerk - M Meiring - Страница 11

Tony Georgiadis was born of Greek parents but grew up as an Englishman. That was part of his attraction, and also one of the things that made him different to the young men in Elita’s circle. “He’s mysterious. You can’t get the measure of him,” Elita told her bosom friend Maria – and Myrto — and her other girlfriends. He was her Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights.

It soon became clear to one and all that Elita was madly in love, but Tony, who had graduated from Oxford and gone to Columbia University, USA, to continue his studies, was in no hurry to press his suit. He had, however, shown a photograph of sixteen-year-old Elita to his American university friend Larry Pressler and said, “See this girl? I’m going to marry her one day.”

Elita had just turned seventeen when she accepted an invitation to a cousin’s party, to the surprise of her friends, who knew her extreme shyness and dislike of parties. But Elita had a secret plan: she knew that Tony Georgiadis had also been invited. He was there and openly gave Elita his exclusive attention. But he was not to be allowed even the smallest kiss; the protocol of their upbringing was too strict for that.

Courtship was slow and painfully correct, as Greek courtships had to be. Tony had first to win the favour of both George and Nitsa, proceeding step by step through a series of formal visits and dinners to the point where he could ask for Elita’s hand in marriage. Nitsa was quick to give her tacit approval, but George hesitated, perhaps because he knew that marriage to Tony would mean that his daughter must leave Athens and live in London.

Tony went to great lengths to impress his future in-laws. He invited them to accompany him to the Poseidon festival, a spectacular and extremely popular event, held biannually on the Sounion coast to honour the sea god of the ancient Greeks. While George and Nitsa were thoroughly aware of the feelings the two youngsters had for each other, it was never discussed openly – conversations were always about every subject under the sun except Tony and Elita!

A short while later, Tony was once again in Athens and because Elita’s parents were travelling in Afghanistan, she, with her secret delight in rebellion, went out alone with him – definitely not the sort of thing a well-brought-up girl would do in Athens at that time. George and Nitsa had scarcely arrived home, in December 1971, when Tony came calling with a formal invitation to invite the Lanaras family to spend five days at the ski resort of Zermatt with his mother, Lady Clio Crawford, and his older brother Alexander and his wife Katingo. The invitation was ostensibly from Lady Crawford.

An almost comically formal set of arrangements was drawn up for this family get-together. As official hostess, Lady Crawford entertained her guests in her usual ultra-lavish style. Later she would delight in hinting that it was she who, during that skiing holiday, had persuaded George to give his blessing to Tony and Elita’s engagement.

At the beginning of the holiday, in between skiing runs, Tony was able to make an appointment with Elita for dinner in the restaurant. There he proposed to her and after dinner he went to see George and Nitsa and formally asked for their consent. For Tony and Elita the whole complicated ritual was a ridiculous charade, but the two families, after pretending to be suitably astonished, celebrated the engagement with real enthusiasm.

Then began the intensive preparations demanded by a Greek wedding. Arrangements for guests and menus and protocol — and more arrangements, because such a wedding must be planned minute by minute with almost military precision. Just nineteen, Elita would be married in the grand tradition necessary for a daughter of Kolonaki.

First, though, there would have to be a British civil ceremony because they would be going to live in England. This was to take place in May at London’s Caxton Hall, but first Elita had to go through what was – for her – an exhausting marathon of shopping for her trousseau with her enthusiastic mother. There were flying visits to Paris, Milan, London and Geneva for endless purchases.

As is to be expected before a wedding, mother and daughter fought and made up, fought and made up, before reaching a final weary agreement on clothes, colours, accessories and jewels.

The days flew and before long Elita found herself at Caxton Hall, where Alexander and Katingo acted as witnesses for the civil ceremony. Alexander also arranged the reception afterwards and it was then that the young Elita realised how different things in London could be compared to Greece. It was her first real experience and by no means her last of the gulf between Greek thinking and English doing. Neither she nor her parents had thought that the civil ceremony would be anything more than just that and had made no provision for a party afterwards. Nitsa attended the reception, which was lavish and jovial, but Elita was overwhelmed with homesickness, especially because her father could not be there.

The magnificent Greek wedding took place in June at the Golf Club in Athens. Four hundred guests were present at a long, spectacular Greek Orthodox ceremony, splendid with rich religious symbols, and accompanied by Greek emotion.

For Elita her marriage secretly represented an opportunity to escape from her mother. However, when the young couple were about to depart on honeymoon and her girlfriends came to say goodbye with mischievous jokes, the reality of leaving home suddenly struck her forcibly. Her child-like disconsolateness evaporated however when she and Tony arrived in Rome. They went on to spend a few days in the Algarve and then flew to Harare to visit her new mother-in-law and Sir Frederick.

This was Elita’s first visit to Africa. Tony had been born in Uganda where his parents, Vassos and Clio, had run a thriving tobacco farm and export business in Kampala. His father Vassos was the third son of Hippocrates and Annie Georgiadis, prominent citizens of Smyrna in Asia Minor, where a wealthy Greek community had been established for centuries. There Hippocrates had been involved in the tobacco business, but in 1920, when the Turks invaded Smyrna and destroyed it, the Greek population fled en masse. Many Greeks from the region had also arrived in Athens at the same time as Menelaos and Martha Zotiadis.

Annie Georgiadis died and Hippocrates brought his family to live in Cairo where they became part of a large Greek community. There, as was the custom at that time, a marriage was arranged for Vassos with young Clio Colocotronis. The young couple set off for Uganda with two of the Georgiadis brothers, and in time Vassos built up the largest tobacco business in East Africa.

When their father died of a heart attack, Tony and Alexander were sent to school in Nairobi. The two boys were safe in their environment, but they were only too aware of the Mau Mau rebellion and the regular murders of white colonists. Tony was sent to continue his schooling at King’s School in England, and from there went on to study at Oxford and Columbia.

Tony is a restless, dynamic man, who developed a keen business sense very early on in his life. By the time he and Elita married, he had business interests around the world and an almost feverish travelling schedule was part of his life. Elita was a seasoned traveller but found trips with Tony very exciting, because she enjoyed new and strange places.

In her new life as a married woman she wore luxurious furs and Tony taught her to drive his Mercedes sports car. She also sewed on a button for the first time in her life – on a pair of Tony’s shorts – a breakthrough which Tony photographed for posterity!

A bond soon developed between Elita and her sister-in-law Katingo, partly because they needed to form a united front against their indefatigably social mother-in-law. As pretty young women married to sophisticated and attractive men, they were soon categorised as trophy wives.

After a somewhat hectic honeymoon the couple moved into Tony’s one-bedroom apartment in Carlyle Lodge in Chelsea, then to a larger apartment in Basil Place, a stone’s throw from Harrods. But Elita was pregnant and Tony was anxious to find a permanent home before the baby was born. So he bought a house.