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.
Eight: A quiet paradise
The house Tony bought was typical of his extraordinary character. It was a manor house, a beautiful, historic home, parts of which dated back to the sixteenth century and the reign of Henry VIII. Called Stud House on account of the royal stables nearby, it lay in the exclusive confines of Hampton Court Park and possessed large reception rooms, eight bedrooms, a glass conservatory and extensive gardens.
The Georgiadises did not know at the time that the house had connections with South Africa: it had once belonged to Lady Sarah Wilson, daughter of the Duke of Marlborough and aunt of Winston Churchill. Her husband, Lieutenant-Colonel Gordon Wilson, was aide-de-camp to Colonel Baden-Powell during the Anglo-Boer War and in 1909, when she was living at Stud House, Lady Sarah wrote a book, South African Memories, recounting her adventures during that war. She met many of the leading figures of the day, including Cecil John Rhodes, whom she visited at Groote Schuur.
In London, Elita made a concentrated effort to improve her English. Elita has never been afraid to display ignorance on a subject or to ask penetrating questions. She employed a “teacher” who was able to improve her social as well as her language skills. “We had history lessons as well and in a way she taught me how to be a good hostess, because she taught me to read up on the background of whoever would be coming to dinner.”
So when the Georgiadises had German guests, their hostess was prepared. She knew that Germany was a federation and that the United States had a two-party system. Luckily, she admits, she was never in situation where she had to criticise or defend a political system of any kind!
She also remembered one of her mother’s rules for conversation. “By all means inquire after your table companion’s children, but first find out if he is actually married and does have children.” With her love of art, she would sometimes talk about painters and paintings and would quickly take note if the subject sparked no interest in her companion.
She also learned little tricks to evoke a response in people. Over time the Georgiadises were able to establish warm relations with Margaret Thatcher, but Elita initially felt that the Iron Lady preferred the company of men and hardly noticed other women. Her breakthrough came at a reception when she spontaneously said to the older woman, “You look lovely in that dress.”
Not perhaps what one should say to a politician of such stature, it was also not in Elita’s nature to make such a personal remark, but the formidable Margaret Thatcher immediately softened and a closer bond developed between the two women. “We even got to the stage where we could discuss world affairs”, laughs Elita.
Little Clio Georgiadis was born in April 1972, shortly after the move to Stud House. Tony quickly saw to it that staff were appointed, including a Portuguese couple, Alice and José. In spite of the excitement of a new baby and a new house and trying to establish a foothold in a new country, something worried Elita, something that she could not quite pin down.
From a casual remark made by Lady Crawford she suddenly realised that Katingo, who was the daughter of shipping magnate Nicos Pateras, seemed to feel much more at ease in the Georgiadis family that she did. Why, wondered Elita, does Katingo seem so at home and I do not?
Then, thanks to her sharp perceptions, she realised that the reason might be that she had brought no dowry with her. Katingo would definitely not have come empty-handed into the family. Rightly or wrongly, George Lanaras had a good laugh at his daughter’s “discovery”. He immediately acknowledged that the Lanarases were very thoughtless, even caddish in this regard. It was an extremely important and sensitive issue for Elita, but he continued to chuckle about it, He did however immediately transfer a considerable sum of money to her account.
There was something else that niggled. Alice, Elita’s housekeeper, agreed. In this peaceful, quintessentially English landscape of roses and lawns and the clip-clop of horses’ hooves they missed the constant roar of traffic.
This paradise is too quiet, the two women said to each other. Neither would ever feel completely at home in England.
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