Marks Club, she still seemed nervous. Elita was struck by the degree of attention FW (which she pronounces “Efwia”) paid his wife during the meal. She also noticed how relaxed he appeared, both in his style of dress and in his manner. His suit and tie were less formal and he was also warmer and more approachable than the European businessmen that she knew. He seemed without conceit or a desire to impress. Almost naïve, in an appealing way and very genuine, was how she summed him up.
His eyes, of an almost unnaturally deep blue, also struck her, as did his schoolboyish charm. He chatted easily with her and “he really showed an interest in what I thought”, she recalled afterwards.
He in turn remembers his first meeting with her: “I was surprised and charmed by this young, intelligent woman who possessed a wisdom beyond her years”. (Elita, who was thirty-seven at the time of their meeting, is sixteen years younger than FW.)
The Georgiadis brothers were extremely interested in FW’s political vision and asked him penetrating questions. His replies made it clear to Elita that this was a man determined to bring about radical changes in his country. She saw him as someone who was embarking on a difficult and risky crusade and instinctively felt that she wanted to help him.
Pinned to her underwear, she always wore a porcelain button, known as an “evil eye”, a traditional Middle East talisman against misfortune and evil. Going quickly to the ladies’ cloakroom, she unpinned the button, clenched it in the palm of her hand and gave it to a somewhat surprised and embarrassed FW.
He had no idea of its significance. Elita laughingly explained that it was a good luck charm. “It’s an eye that will help to ward off bad luck and bring you good luck – or so we Greeks believe”. Later she would often wonder why she had been so impulsive in giving a strange man such a personal object.
From FW’s reaction she judged him to be a conservative man, but her gesture seemed to have given Marike pleasure. Elita noted again how comfortable Marike and FW seemed together and how heartily Marike joined in the laughter at his awkwardness over the unexpected gift.
FW later lost the button, but he was to become thoroughly acquainted with Elita’s superstitions. In years to come, he himself would never travel without similar talismans in his briefcase – an ocean pebble set in a gold heart, a silver cross and a miniature folder with her photo — although he professed to attach no superstitions to any of these.
This little incident brought some jollity to the table, but Marike soon became tense again. Did she not like them? Elita wondered. Or was she too anxious about FW’s mission in London?
So tangible was Marike’s reserve that late that night on the way home the Georgiadises said to each other: “Charming man, complicated wife”.
Shortly afterwards, the two couples met once again, in London, and very soon became firm friends. Tony was keenly aware that FW was travelling around the world in order to broaden his contacts and, mindful of his business interests in South Africa, he invited the De Klerks to various functions. FW and Marike were also assured of a warm welcome in the Georgiadis house in London.
What was initially regarded simply as a contact, gradually developed into a friendship. Although FW was firmly resolved to have no involvement in Georgiadis business ventures, the two men enjoyed long discussions over a wide range of topics. As an industrialist and international investor, Tony could test his views against FW’s legal and political insights. They also shared a weakness for tobacco and would smoke and talk far into the night.
On the Georgiadises’ first visit to South Africa after the London meetings, FW and Marike were their hosts in Cape Town. Both couples found that they had many South African friends in common. They began to meet regularly, in England and in South Africa.
Gradually they also began to do those things that good friends do; calling each other late at night, having one another’s children to stay, shopping together, eating out together, discussing art acquisitions, spending holidays together. They would make an effort to make time and space for one another and over the next three years they would get to know one another extremely well.
FW would learn about Elita’s privileged childhood in Greece; he would also learn of the loneliness of a sensitive child who could even at times have been called a “poor little rich girl”.
Two: A daughter of Kolonaki
Elizabeth Lanaras was born on 11 March 1952 in Kolonaki, an affluent suburb of Athens. Her parents, George and Helen (known as Nitsa), belonged to the younger generation of Greeks who were rebuilding their lives after the Second World War.
Elita, their first child, was a plump, healthy baby, enthusiastically welcomed by her grandmothers, grandfather and a collection of aunts, uncles and cousins, all of whom were present at all the rites attendant on the birth of a Greek infant. Old-fashioned snapshots show the baby in her bath, in her cot, at her christening, her first steps, her first baby party, sitting on granny’s lap, stiffly held by grandpa, a round-tummied toddler hand in hand with her father on the beach.
None of these photos give any hint of the desperate, turbulent world beyond this close-knit circle who met so often and posed so cheerfully for the camera. These smiling images of family and friends, arm in arm around birthday cakes and daintily laid tables, tell a great deal about the indestructibility of the Greek spirit. Around Kolonaki, Athens was still largely a city in ruins. The devastation of a world war, followed by a civil war, had transformed “Beautiful Greece” into a wasteland of poverty and famine.
After the initial success the Greek forces had enjoyed in October 1940 against Mussolini’s Italian invasion, Hitler sent his own troops and the German SS, with tanks and Stuka bombers, into Greece in 1941. The whole country was occupied until 1944, when the Nazis were finally routed.
In spite of their position of privilege, young Greeks such as George and Nitsa also suffered under the deprivation and terror which gripped the country during the German occupation. Even before the war, divisions in Greece ran deep; but in resisting first the Italians and then the Germans, these differences were put aside. There was a temporary collaboration between the militant, pro-Communist National Liberation Front and the pro-government forces of the Greek Democratic League that supported the monarchy.
Immediately after the German withdrawal, this coalition collapsed when the pro-Communist forces attempted to take over the government. A bitter civil war ensued, bringing another four years of suffering to the country. At least one eighth of the Greek population was wiped out during the two wars. Greek morale was further undermined by the so-called pedomasoma, during which about 28 000 children were kidnapped by pro-Communist guerrillas and taken to neighbouring Communist countries. There they were adopted and completely indoctrinated into communism; only a few would ever be reconciled with their parents.
George Lanaras had only just completed his studies when he went to fight on the side of the Greek Democratic League. He served in the northern regions of the country, where he drove heavy vehicles through the dangerous mountainous areas. Here, guerrilla snipers of the National Liberation Front inflicted heavy losses on pro-government forces, but George would later tell of how he had enjoyed driving those perilous roads because they lay in the Naussa region from which the Lanaras family had originally come. This daredevil attitude, typical of George, would also colour his later business career.
After these two devastating wars, a severely traumatised Greek population was further reduced by the large-scale emigration of young people to other countries. For many young men who could find no means of livelihood in Greece, this seemed the only option. But Greece was to rise from the ashes, as it had done so often before throughout its long history of victory and defeat.
To a large degree, those who lived in Kolonaki were spared the worst miseries of the two wars, the extremes of poverty, the loss of homes, the desperate struggle to survive. Here there was a spirit of commitment to the future and it was at this time that George Lanaras, still in uniform but no longer on active service, met the young Nitsa Zotiadis. She was the daughter of the wealthy, dynamic Menelaos Zotiadis and his popular, intellectual wife, Martha.
George was earmarked to join the family firm, the long-established