Paphos tea lady: the expats’ dame
DEATH, observed WH Auden, “is like the rumble of distant thunder at a picnic”.
When Margaret Mary O’ Neil, known to everyone in Paphos as Peggy, died on May 3 that rumble was particularly loud.
For 25 years she had reigned supreme in a small, but well-positioned, café offering proper pots of tea back in a time when not even the few hotels then in existence could offer a drinkable brew. Her reward was that she became the grand dame of the expat community.
This elegant, tall, straight-backed woman could seemingly stretch herself just that little bit more to meet almost any emergency life threw at her. True, she came fitted with a fierce temper. She certainly didn’t suffer fools gladly, but she was blessed with a great deal of moral and emotional courage.
She had enough confidence in her own sex to let the opposite sex ‘believe’ they were the boss. This difficult balancing act is one that few women can carry off, but Peggy managed it for over two decades, no mean feat for a widow intent upon running a café in what was then a small town stuck in a 1950s’ timewarp.
Paphos in the 1970s was a place where lone foreign ladies weren’t always accepted on a par by fellow traders, but Peggy was determined to stay put and ensure her café was a success.
Often mistaken by locals as English, she was in fact Irish, born in the seaside village of Sneem in County Kerry in 1921. It’s now famous for Steve Casey or ‘The Crusher’, who was born there 12 years before Peggy and went on to become Ireland Tug of War champion, All-England Rowing champion and World Champion Wrestler in 1939-1941, thus maintaining the reputation for tough breeding found in ‘the men of Kerry’.
Peggy and her family came from the same resilient stock. Peggy was born at the tail end of the Irish war of Independence and it was a hard, often dangerous, unrelenting life for all Catholic families like the O’ Neil parents, as they struggled to bring up a family of nine siblings in a tiny four bedroom farmhouse.
The village sits within the glorious scenery of the Ring of Kerry, but beautiful land and seascapes never put food on the table, and like many of her contemporaries Peggy had to leave her homeland to seek a new life and earn a living elsewhere.
By the late 1930s Peggy was living in London dealing with the outbreak of the Second World War. It was here she met and married Michael, her Cypriot-born husband.
By the 1950s the couple were running an antiques’ business in the Fulham Road. In terms of age Peggy missed out on London’s young Swinging Sixties’ scene, but photos of the 30-something Peggy show a remarkably cool, rather strikingly beautiful woman, a perfect lookalike for Nina Van Pallandt, the Danish singer who was the female part of the famous 1960s’ folk duo Nina and Frederick.
From living a life in the epicentre of 1960s London to moving with her husband to his small, slow, very conservative home town of Paphos must have been a major culture shock.
In 1971 she opened the Miranda café on the corner of Makarios Avenue near the police station, and the café quickly became the sole watering hole for expats and visitors desperate for a pot of tea.
Michael died only a year after she opened the Miranda and she was left to negotiate the complexities of life in Paphos without her husband and business partner, or any children.
Her Catholic faith must have helped her through those dark days, and she is now credited with being instrumental in establishing a thriving Roman Catholic church in Paphos.
Although her temper was legendary, Peggy also had a gift for friendship, wise counsel, and concern for others. That she remained a ‘private person’ was the refrain of countless testimonials from those at her funeral last week.
Although she spent her final years in a nursing home, the amazing turnout at the funeral was testament to the effect she had on people. She is now a respected part of the town’s history and will be remembered by many as the embodiment of traditional values, hard work, community, family and faith.
From one Celt to another I offer my Epitaph to Peggy courtesy of Scotland’s Bard Robert Burns.
An honest lass here lies at rest,
As e’er God with her image blessed,
The friend of man the friend of truth,
Few hearts like hers, with virtue warmed,
Few heads with knowledge so informed,
If there’s another world she lives in bliss;
If there is none, she made the best of this.
