Review: Vivien Horler
Letters from Elena, by Anne Hamilton (Legend Press)
Two little girls find great friendship, until they’re untimely ripped apart.
So sudden is the departure that Elena, the 10-year-old Greek Cypriot, isn’t allowed to say goodbye to her friend.
April is a lonely 10-year-old in an English village, an only child with somewhat elderly, very proper parents. Life tends to be a bit black and white until a Greek Cypriot family move in above the chippy, taking over the shop.
There are three daughters, Elena being the middle one, and to April’s great joy she is welcomed by the family, invited to stay over on Friday nights, eating fishcakes and watching television.
The sisters tease her, but she loves it, knowing that’s what happens in families. The girls talk about the future, how one day they will get together on Elena’s island, at what Elena describes as the tree houses. That’s where they will meet.
And then suddenly they are gone.
It’s July 1974, and Cyprus is about to be engulfed by civil war. But Elena’s family have opted to return.
Elena is good at writing, and April expects a letter of explanation, but nothing comes. Life is pretty bleak after that glorious year of colour.
Years later, April, now in her 40s, is a professional concert pianist, good but not brilliant. Her parents have recently died, and her third long-term relationship (she has two failed marriages behind her) has fallen apart.
At her parents’ funeral Mrs Gale – the woman who taught both April and Elena in the one year Elena’s family was in England – tells April Elena did write a letter, posted to the school. At last Mrs Gale gives it to her.
April has a contact in Cyprus – her parents were in the same care home as a Cypriot woman whose nephew runs a small hotel on the island.
She decides nothing is keeping her in England, and turns down an opportunity to play a season with a major Berline orchestra. She will go to the island for a holiday and see if she can find Elena, or at least what happened to her and her family.
On the island she becomes immersed in a community of artists and restaurateurs, along with an improbable trio of Irish brothers, to one of whom April is irresistibly drawn – as is he to her. Yet there are complications.
She also bonds with Nicole, whose artist husband wants to paint April.
All these people are sympathetic to her quest to find Elena, or at least what happened to her. But of course, once again, there are complications, not least the problems of crossing the border into Turkish Cyprus.
Interspersed with April’s story are Elena’s letters, mostly written in her head, about the first weeks and months of her family’s return to an island riven by civil war. Elena and her sisters are happy to be home, yet they are kept on the move as they go from one refuge to another ahead of the fighting, seeing some horrendous scenes on the way.
This novel illuminates a major news event that despite my remembering the name of Bishop Makarios, more or less passed me by, an eruption that politically slashed an island in half (and still does) and splintered communities that had lived in harmony for centuries.
It could have been more tightly edited, but it’s a great read about a quest, a sunlit island, and a woman finding a new community.