Memoirs of GD Fell

After I had seen the family take off in the Hercules I had to make my way back to Ayios Nikolaos. The journey back was horrendous as all the traffic on the road was going in one direction, taking up the whole of the road. Most of the time I was driving in the fields by the side of the road but I eventually managed to get back to work in one piece.

Once again we had to find somewhere to sleep but this time I had brought with me in the car a sunbed which I was able to put up in my office. At the back of 9th Signals regiment there was a large wadi which is a stretch of uncultivated land and coming across the wadi towards us were a number of Turkish tanks. The colonel of the infantry regiment attached to 9th Signals went in a jeep with an interpreter to meet the tank commander and apparently told him in no uncertain terms that if he carried on in the same line he would be invading British territory and that it would be taken as an act of war against Britain. He must have been pretty persuasive as the tanks altered course, making their way towards Famagusta.

It was deemed advisable to destroy all Secret and Confidential documents and this was done by putting the material into a bin with acid in it rather than the conventional method of burning. The only problem with this of course was that later all reports had to be compiled from memory with no reference back to previous reports. Somehow or other we managed.

After a few days the Turkish forces had occupied the whole of the northern end of the island, stopping their advance just north of the Sovereign Base Area on a line from the new town of Famagusta (Varosha) which was the area where we lived and which still remains unoccupied, to north of Ayios Nikolaos, thence through to Pergamos, the village being in the occupied zone but the RAF camp where the families had been evacuated to remaining in the Greek zone. The line of occupation continued through Nicosia to the western coast.