Chapter 3 / Cyprus

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'I wanted to share the secret of the powers with someone I didn't know too well' (Uri Geller, on his thinking aged 15)

One morning on the kibbutz, Margaret Geller arrived in her usual Sunday best (or Saturday best, this being Israel) for one of her slightly embarrassing visits. She was accompanied by a strange man Uri had never seen before. Heavily built and in his fifties, Ladislas Gero was another Hungarian Jew, a former concert pianist, who some years previously, with his wife had formed a cabaret team and gone on tour to Cyprus. The couple had liked the lively, cosmopolitan island and had the idea of opening a small hotel there, which, now widowed, he now ran on his own. The notable thing about Ladislas Gero for the children of Kibbutz Hatzor was that he was wearing a tie, something many of them had never seen before. 'What is that cloth hanging around his neck?' they demanded. It is not inconceivable that the older ones were being disingenuous - a cocky, kibbutznik way of demonstrating how different and inherently superior was their rural, communistic lifestyle to the fast and fancy ways of the city. What was notable about Ladislas Gero to Uri Geller, aged 11, was not his necktie - Uri was perfectly familiar with those, being a big city kid stuck in the country - but that his mother had fallen in love with the man, planned to marry him, to move to Cyprus and to take Uri to live there too.

For Uri, the plan immediately appealed, because it solved two problems at once, as well as opening some extremely important doors which he did not yet know were ajar. For the moment, he was delighted to see his mother happy for the first time, as well as to have an escape route from the kibbutz for himself. Not only did Ladislas seem a decent enough fellow, if perhaps a little dull compared to Uri's father, but he was also rather well off. The chance of end to poverty seemed to have arrived with Ladislas Gero, something Uri fully appreciated.

What the boy could not know was that the fluke of moving to Cyprus would entail him learning English in addition to the Hebrew and Hungarian he already spoke - and that having fluent, instinctive English would many years later be his open sesame to taking his powers to an international audience. By the end of his teenage years, he was even thinking in English. Because Cyprus was a British colony, he would also start to build up a great affinity with Britain, which would be an increasingly important part of his life. His early memories of his father were of him in British uniform, and now he would get used to seeing the Queen on stamps and banknotes and the Union flag flying. They all left a stirring impression on him.

The move to Cyprus would also benefit Uri in regard to his unusual abilities. At this stage, he was still uncertain whether his powers were an asset or an embarrassment. They were, he felt, too transient to rely on, failing as they did to be at his command at absolutely all times. His depression on the kibbutz, for example, had seemingly caused them to disappear, or at least put him in a frame of mind where he was unwilling to summon them up. Furthermore, he continued, as he still does, to insist he had no idea where the powers came from or how he produced them, and this inexplicable quality troubled him at quite a deep level. And even when he could make strange things happen, as he hinted he could do to his friend Eytan, and briefly succeeded with Avi, there was always the problem that children would either fail to see what was special - or, if they were more sophisticated, shrug and say it was a trick without really having the critical facility to be sure what it was. Uri needed an adult independent of his family to see what he could do, to believe it and to reassure him that he was not a freak. At Terra Santa College, a strict Catholic boarding school on a hill high above Cyprus's capital, Nicosia, he would find several such adults - as well as several children who worked out without his specifically having shown them anything that Uri Geller was a most unusual boy.

Establishing through third, preferably unrelated, parties that Geller had special abilities as a child, be they of a conjuring or a psychic nature, is crucially important in unravelling Uri Geller's life story. His major critics would one day assert widely and confidently in gossip, in articles, in interviews with journalists, in books and eventually on the Internet, that Geller's powers mysteriously manifested only in his early twenties, after he happed upon a magicians' manual with a teenaged friend, and the two together sensed the makings of a wonderful scam.

Since this assertion is so boldly made, indeed, is the one of the first precepts of Uri Geller's detractors, if it can be shown to be untrue, the process of at least re-assessing Geller, if not necessarily accepting him as a psychic, would clearly have to have begun. It is indisputable that evidence of peculiar abilities from Uri's early childhood days in Israel is a little hazy; witnesses were either too young to rely on, or related to Uri and hence bound (perhaps) to support him, or the accounts come from Uri himself. And while many of these latter pieces of testimony are often very interesting, and give a compelling appearance of being honest, a single corroborative witness has to be worth ten George Washingtons. In Uri Geller's Cyprus period, from 1957 to 1963 - which took him from the age of 11 to 18 - we begin to encounter such strong indications that he was a fully formed psychic, magician or something, long before his critics believe. Cyprus was also, inevitably, the scene for other major influences to come into his life. One of these was sex, the other, showbusiness. No wonder Geller looks upon his years in Cyprus as the time of his life.

It was Tibor, relieved, no doubt, that his ex-wife had found a new life, who drove Margaret and Uri to the docks at Haifa to board the ship to Larnaca, Cyprus. Behind Uri already was a traumatic parting with Tzuki the dog, who was sent to live with a friend of the Gellers who lived on a farm. Uri kissed and hugged the dog and cried as he left him. In front of him were worries about how he would get on with his new stepfather, Ladislas, and how he would survive in a country where Hebrew wasn't spoken. But Margaret told Uri that her new husband had already bought a dog for him, and Tibor assured his son that he would be able to visit him back in Israel, so by the time the Italian ship sailed out of Haifa, he was more excited than scared. At customs in Larnaca, a real surprise was awaiting Uri - a new name. 'The officer looked at my name Uri, and he said Uri in Russian is Yuri, and that is actually George. So on the spot, they wrote down George and that was my name at school for the next seven years.'

It was not necessary to be psychic for even an 11 year-old to realise immediately that Cyprus was a deeply divided nation in a state of undeclared war. Margaret explained to Uri as he looked out of the taxi window on the drive to Nicosia that there were Greek and Turkish Cypriots who lived separately in different villages and were routinely involved in atrocities against one another. And although seeing a pervasive military presence was no shock to an Israeli boy, there were an awful lot of British troops around, as well as Americans stationed at their own base. The names and phrases which would be part of the background noise for Uri's stay in Cyprus now sound like part of the faint, scratchy soundtrack of ancient black and white newsreels; Enosis, the movement to integrate Cyprus with Greece, Archbishop Makarios, Colonel Grivas, the EOKA terrorist leader, Prime Minister Karamanlis of Greece ... Uri's teenage life would be touched tangentially by all these.

Ladislas's small hotel was a pleasant fourteen bedroom establishment at 12 Pantheon Street in the capital, Nicosia. It bore an ambitious name for a little place: Pension Ritz. Ladislas made sure Uri had quite an arrival at the Ritz. There was not one dog, but two waiting - a wire-haired fox terrier called Joker and a mixed breed terrier named Peter. Joker would be Uri's special companion. A package was also on a table inside for the young lad to open. It contained a blue model Cadillac, which he loved.

Uri was first sent to the American School in Larnaca, where he boarded and was not very happy. Most of his friends were English, and he quickly picked up the language. After a short time, the violence and fighting were bordering on civil war, there were frequent curfews, and Uri was brought back to the hotel for a few weeks. The Ritz catered almost exclusively for touring theatricals temporarily stationed in Nicosia to service its busy nightlife. Singers, musicians, acrobats, jugglers and dancers used the place as their digs, and Uri met and spent time with all of them during the curfews. He says he showed some his spoon bending and watch jumping, and they were duly impressed.

There was in the garage a bicycle which Uri coveted. His stepfather promised he could have it for a barmitzvah present, when he was 13, but Uri couldn't stop looking at it. The bike was immobilised with a heavy combination lock. Thinking about this, Uri wondered whether, since he could manage so many other apparent mind-over-matter feats, he could crack the lock. After a bout of intense concentration, he says he finally got the combination, opened the lock, took the machine out and learned to ride it in the car park. Ladislas was amazed he had unlocked the bike but, taking the path of least resistance, meekly said that Uri might as well have it now. He sees it today as the first practical, selfish use he had managed to put his powers to. (Uri's barmitzvah in 1959, incidentally, was a low key affair, held, in lieu of a synagogue, at the Israeli consulate in Nicosia. A Jewish friend called Peter was barmitzvah at the same time. With the bike already firmly in his possession, Uri received as presents several books and a leather pencil case, which he treasured.)

The bicycle, combined with Margaret and Ladislas' fairly laissez-faire attitude to bringing up Uri at this stage, opened up Cyprus to Uri. With his bike and the rickety local buses to Limassol, the Troodos mountains, Famagusta and Kyrenia, the island was a paradise to him. With one of the world's major political crises going on around him, and the frequent grim scenes of violence which that obliged him to witness, he nevertheless managed to enjoy a glorious, free, independent teenage of scuba diving on lonely beaches, cycling in the mountains, messing around in junk yards and with motor scooters, and, as he got older, of chasing girls 'I occupied myself with the things I loved, like my dog, Joker, but while I was doing that the war was going on,' Uri says now. 'So I somehow carved myself a path and a system, maybe to build some kind of entertainment into my life that would shield me from the death and the destruction that was going on around us.'

Unlike the American School, Terra Santa College was in a safe part of Cyprus, high in the hills a few miles from Nicosia. But it was not in any respect somewhere Uri might have been expected to be as happy as he was. It was very strict, was run by monks, had fairly primitive facilities and provided education of highly demanding, 1950s English standards, which came as a shock to many of the pupils, especially the few Americans. Yet Uri was content there almost from the start. One of the first things he noticed up at Terra Santa, and which he unaccountably warmed to, was that the pretty gardens at the modern school building's entrance were cut in the shape of crucifixes. The school had no other Jewish pupils, something which might have made him feel lonely, were it not for one incident.

'I was there because it was the best school in Nicosia, but one incident melted any fear I had away. One day, Father Camillo, who was the headmaster, called me into his office and he locked the door. He said, "Come close," and I didn't know what he was about to do to me. Suddenly, he started unbuttoning his collar, and then he pulled out a bunch of little trinkets on a gold chain, a cross and so on. But among them was a little star of David. He said, "Look at what I am wearing Don't be afraid of Christianity". He wanted me to be absolutely clear that he loved and respected the Jewish people. And that was it for me. All the barriers that had built up between Judaism and Christianity disappeared, vapourised, and I realised there were no real religions, there was only one God and that was the God I believed in. I knew I was going to be fine at the school. And years later, when I went back to Cyprus, I heard from one of the fathers that before he died, Camillo said his family back in Sardinia had Jewish origins.'

Uri made up for lost time, almost instantly regaining the popularity he enjoyed pre the disastrous Torah-stealing incident back at Ahad Ha'am School in Israel. But, just as at school and on the kibbutz, Uri was distinctly wary about what he did in the paranormal line - and whom for. A consistent characteristic of Geller begins to emerge even this early in his life; he seems to show different people quite different versions of his abilities. Leaving aside for the moment enemies and those who are intellectually opposed to what he does, who if they see him perform anything can always satisfy themselves it is a conjuring trick, even his friends report widely differing personal experiences of him. Some friends, like Eytan Shomron, will happily wait 40 years after first meeting Uri to see him bend a spoon, and then find themselves amazed and shocked by the experience; others will be shown things to astonish them the first time Uri meets them; others still will be his friend for decades without ever seeing him perform anything remarkable, even if they want to; another group of friends will make a point of never wanting to see him do anything paranormal, often explaining that they like him as a man with or without paranormal powers, and are worried that they might feel they have detected fraud if they see him perform, and that this would lessen their respect for him.

One of Geller's closest schoolfriends in Cyprus was a chubby Armenian boy, Ardash Melemendjian, who enjoyed dual renown at Terra Santa as a mechanical genius and a sexual prodigy. 'I was one for anything on wheels and anything in a skirt', he jokes. Melemendjian now lives near York, in northern England, where he works as a general repairman, is a prominent Freemason, is married to Janet, a local guide leader, and speaks in a broad adopted Yorkshire accent with an Armenian twang. He is also an amateur rally driver, having worked for the Czech Skoda car company for many years as a technical rep - he it was who undertook the considerable technical challenge of preparing Skoda's first successful rally car. Although he has not personally seen Geller since they were young, they remain in contact by phone. What surprises most about Melemendjian is that he has only ever seen his old pal bend a spoon on television. And yet he is perfectly satisfied, even as a supremely practical and rational engineer by trade, that what he sees is genuine. 'I have no doubts. I don't have to see it in real life, because of what I experienced with him at school,' he says.

'A lot of people will ask me if there is any trickery to it and I say, "You believe what you want to believe. I think it's genuine. I know it's genuine, but I can't explain how he does it because I don't know." It must be some sort of mental power that the rest of us are unable to exercise because we don't know these things.'
'George Geller,' Melemendjian continues, 'Would have been about 12-ish when I met him. What was my first impression? That you knew him the instant you met him. It was some sort of magic that you couldn't explain with this fella. You couldn't help but like him and get on with him. He had this grace of making things nice, and people liked being with him. You'd never wrong him in any way, or do anything against him. Uri Geller was the ringleader, if you like. He got people gelling together, and when you made friends you made friends for ever.'

'And, yes, certain little things happened. The college was built in an area they called the Acropolis, all stone quarries and caves. We used to go down to these caves, Uri and several other kids. They were quite dangerous, and we were told at school that some boys had got lost and died down there once. But we'd pinch the school toilet rolls, put a stick through them and use them as a thread. Then we'd put old bicycle tyres on sticks and light them as torches. But you'd run out of toilet paper. One time on our return from the deepest caves we got badly lost. We were faced with three ways to go in the pitch black. Someone started to say something and suddenly Uri said "Shhh," and everyone hushed. He thought for a minute and then say, "This way!" and we went straight on or to the left, whichever the case was, and then we walked a long way before anything happened. But suddenly, we saw a little circle of light, and it got bigger and bigger, and that was the exit. I'm sure the rest of us would have chosen another way. I don't how he did it.'

'There were other oddities which when you put them together, even back then, just made you wonder what was this guy,' Melemendjian continues. 'He never once got a puncture on his bike, and yet we used to ride through the same fields, the same thorn hedges. I'd get them all the time, and end up sat on the back of his bike, holding my bike while he was peddling. We'd go to the cinema to see X-rated films. I'd go to buy my ticket and get told, "No you're too young - out." He'd go to buy his ticket - and would be perfectly all right for him even though we are the same age and looked it.'

'Another thing that we used to take for granted, never give a second thought to - he never revised for anything. You'd find him sat down with a text book that we were supposed to be studying and he'd have a comic inside it. But when it came to overall results at the end of the term, you could bet your boots that he'd be top. I'm not very good at maths, and we were doing an algebra exam. In one question, I kept getting this astronomical figure that I know I shouldn't. Uri was sat next to me and said, "Just copy me." I said, "What if Archie sees me?" Because Archie, one of the masters, used to throw whatever came to his hand, whether it was a piece of chalk or the rubber for the blackboard or a book and every time it was bullseye. I didn't like being hit by missiles in classroom. But Uri said, "No, if he is going to see you, I'll give you a kick on your shin sideways with my foot." So I was looking at his paperwork and copying down what he wrote in a slightly different way so that the teacher wouldn't cotton on that I was cheating. At the time I never thought anything about it, but years later, I started wondering how did he know to kick me if Archie is going to look? He would have had to have some sort of premonition. But he wouldn't tell me that's how he was operating, and I wouldn't know because we never thought of these powers that he has.'

'Him and basketball was yet another thing. All right, he is tall, but basketball teams would always want him on their side. A group of fellas made two groups to play basketball, and whichever side Uri was on, the other side would say, "No, that's unfair, you've got him. Every time he touches that ball, it goes through the net." Yet he wasn't a keen basket ball player. He played it as and when, whenever it was there. He didn't practise to be good at it or anything.' (Uri maintains that he was able psychokinetically to edge the ball into the net. A Greek boy of Uri's time Andreas Christodoulou, who is still in Nicosia and works as a heating contractor at Terra Santa, confirms this, and adds that in his memory, Uri could also move the hoop to help it meet the ball. 'He would definitely move the the hoop in a way,' Andrea says. 'It looked as if it was vibrating without anybodt at all touching it. You could see it move, I believe, a couple of inches when George was shooting at it.')
Uri also became famous, Ardash recalls, as a storyteller. 'Mrs Agrotis, our English teacher, would get him to stand up and speak for ages, and he would make stories up on the spot. A war story, a ghost story, anything. And I would be thinking, wow, this is better than reading a book..' But as for metal bending and interfering with clocks, Melemendjian has no memory of Uri doing either: 'If he had those qualities at school then he never showed to me. I think he probably didn't because people would start getting dubious about him. Imagine two 12 year-old kids and one rubs a spoon and breaks it in half. What does the other one think? That there's something wrong with him. As it was, everything he did, we all took in our stride. It was only later on when you think about it, that you think how did he do that? Like this being ace in school, like finding his way out of the cave, like never getting a puncture, like the odd thing in the algebra exam ... it's too much for one fella.'
'The only one time I impressed him,' concludes Ardash Melemendjian, 'Was when there was a particular type of speedometer I wanted on this armoured car we used to pass in a scrapyard. I could see it from the fence, but inside the compound there were two alsatians, one of them a real mean junkyard dog. So started saving my sandwiches, and when I went past every afternoon, I would throw them over the fence. The dog would eat the brown paper bag, the sandwich, the tin foil - gone. This went on for three or four days and after that the dog would look at me going past at that time of the day and instead of snarling, the tail would waggle. I gained confidence. Then I'd pet the dog through the wire mesh, and finally I took enough sandwiches that the dog would take a few minutes to eat. And while he was at it, I jumped over the fence, stole the instrument and jumped back again. Uri stood there watching me, leant up against his bike. He just shook his head, astounded. "I would have never done that," he said.
Bob Brooks, now a criminal attorney in Los Angeles, gives a similar account of a charismatic, even if not necessarily psychic, young Geller. Brooks had come to Cyprus with his mother and stepfather, who was an entrepreneur. His stepfather had cut a deal with Brooks; if he stayed at the college a week, then he would have the option whether to stay on, or to try somewhere else. 'My first memory of Uri or George Geller was of him saving my life,' Brooks says. 'After crying for two solid days and being utterly miserable when I came as an immature 12 year-old from Sherman Oaks, California into this physically very harsh regime with its Arabic toilets and intimidating six-days-a-week British public school traditions, Uri befriended me. He was much older, at 14, and was nice and friendly and interested in me. And it worked. I liked him instantly. He invited me to his house, and all of a sudden, life was fun. Uri was the class monitor, who sat at the back and was held responsible for us. But he succeeded by strength of personality rather than bullying. He was taller and older than most of us, which helped.'

Again, through Brooks, we hear of an unusually popular boy, with an amazing imagination, of adventures in the caves, of going to the Pension Ritz to meet Uri's mother, of encountering Joker the dog . But of paranormal events, pretty well nothing; Brooks is yet another illustration of the strange way in which different people have perceived Geller. It is almost as if Bob Brooks was at school with a different Uri Geller from Ardash Melemendjian. 'I do remember him complaining that watches would always stop on him,' Brooks says. 'One time he just nonchalantly took his watch off and said, "That's another one that's quit on me."' But of metal bending, Brooks shakes his head: 'I can't say I saw anything like that, no.' and of Geller's basketball prowess? 'Sure, I remember him shooting hoops, but not bending anything.'

And here, another consistent element in Geller's story forms out of the mist. Bob Brooks, while being delighted to confirm his great and continuing affection for Uri, is by no means an acolyte or a total believer. A lawyer with the sceptical view of the human condition which that profession can encompass, he cheerily refers to his late stepfather as 'a conman, basically' and keeps a book on conmen on the living room shelves of his California home. He couldn't help recalling, as he watched Uri's career develop in subsequent years, his friend's affinity with the showbusiness people who stayed at the Pension Ritz. Yet, no, he is anxious to emphasise, he does not think Geller is a conman; 'I'm not saying what he does is magic to my mind,' he says. But neither is he keen to commit himself to a view of Geller as an out-and-out paranormalist. It is probably fair to interpolate that Brooks still does not know what his friend is.

'Uri visited me at the office in the early seventies and bent a spoon for me at that time, which was witnessed by four other co-workers,' Brooks says. 'Then he visited my home this past winter and bent a spoon for my daughter. This was done in our kitchen, near the washing machine - Uri said being near metal helped him - in front of Samantha, Linda and myself. The way he did it appeared to be without any obvious use of force and without any attempt at sleight of hand. If it was a trick, it's the best one I have ever seen executed. Frankly, I'm still amazed by how he did this. All of this stuff is contrary to my understanding of the physical universe and, while I do not wish to dismiss it all as merely a trick, I cannot find any other acceptable explanation.'

Given these perspectives from two of Geller's closest adolescent schoolfriends, it is not hard to guess which of the two Uri has kept more closely in touch with. It has to be Ardash rather than Bob. Not so; it is Bob Brooks whom Geller has remained closer to, to whom he wrote frequently throughout his twenties and thirties, whose home he has visited, whom he goes out to dinner with when he is in LA. And Geller admits he has a tendency to cleave to people who don't quite believe in him. 'It's often those people I feel close to,' he says. 'The ones I feel I have yet to convince, and would dearly love to but can't. I don't really know why that is.'

The thoroughly convinced Ardash, meanwhile, has had to resort to some fairly irregular methods over the years to keep up contact with Uri. 'About eight years ago I saw a newspaper spread about him, and he hadn't rung or written in a long time, so I thought I am going to test your powers, mate. And I got the paper with his picture in front of me, his eyes looking at me, and I stared for about five minutes and said, "If you've got anything about you, you get in touch with me." The following evening, I get a phonecall. "What's the matter? What do you want me for?" It was Uri I said, 'Nothing's the matter, I just want to say hello.'

Joy Philipou, a teacher at Terra Santa, had no contact at all with Uri for 40 years, until she wrote to him recently after seeing a newspaper article on him. Yet Mrs Philipou, now in retirement in the London suburbs, is as strong an independent witness for Geller's early psychic prowess as could be found, someone whose account would have to provide a powerful dissenting note, to say the least, in any sceptical assessment of Geller - if anyone researching such an assessment had troubled to find her.

'Uri was one of 30 children in my form,' Mrs Philipou recounts. 'He stood out. You can't have gifts like that and remain anonymous. As he was a child he used this thing he had for pranks, for fun. For example, he did this clock moving thing, not just on me but on other teachers as well. But for me, it took a long, long time before I put two and two together and realised that it was him that was doing it. I wasn't into the supernatural or anything like that, and I couldn't make out what it was. But whenever it was my turn to ring the 12 o clock bell, I would have Uri fidgeting in the class, wanting to get out for lunch. The clock was behind me, an electric wall clock, about a foot in diameter. The class was in front of me, Uri sitting among them and he would be looking at the clock.. I would check with my watch to make sure it was 12 o clock, and it said the same. But as soon as I got into the staff room, they would say, "Why have you rung 20 minutes early?" I would say, "It can't be, look, my watch says 12 o'clock. But all theirs would be a quarter of an hour earlier than mine. It wasn't until I began to hear stories from other teachers that I began to find that Uri had something to do with this. One teacher had made him stay half an hour after every one else. She said, "You won't go home until the clock says 4.30. So he started to get up and leave, and she said, 'What are you doing? I told you 4.30." And he said, "But it is 4.30," and she looked at the clock, and it was.

'He also became famous because of his basketball playing. He guided the ball. He could shoot from almost anywhere. It never, ever missed the basket. Now that is a feat for an 11 year old. From one end of the court to another, over and over again. I thought it must be my imagination, but several people began to talk about it. Then I realised that this child really did have some peculiar power, particularly during matches which it was important to win. Suppose he would shoot and his aim wasn't quite 100%, and the ball was just about 2 inches from the basket. He would definitely do something. We all saw the ball sway when there was no-one near it, or sometimes the post would sway a few inches to the left or the right, whichever way he wanted it for the ball to go in. In truth, it was really scary. There's be a great deal of talk and argument. People would say, "Ah, no, it's just a fluke, someone must have pushed it." But then you'd see it happen over and over again. We had very little contact with Father Camillo in the staffroom. We mostly dealt with Father Kevin Mooney, who was head of the British section, and when we mentioned this extraordinary George, he brushed it aside somehow. It was difficult to convince him that something supernatural was going on. But most of us could see what he was doing wasn't sleight of hand, and that this child had something extraordinary.'
It is clear from Mrs Philipou's recollection that it was the adults at Terra Santa who were more struck by the unconventional nature of Uri's apparent powers than the children. 'I suppose when something like that happens, children don't necessarily understand it,' she reflects. 'They either make a joke of it, or they start bullying whoever it is. In Uri's case, it was the former. They would laugh at it. It was the children mostly who alerted me to the clock business. In the playground I seemed to see clusters of kids around him, and he would be doing something which they would be going ha ha ha at. But for them, it was a game. They didn't realise that there was anything beyond the ordinary. It was, like, he can jump five metres and I can't. What blew peoples mind in the staffroom was this ball business and the clocks moving. But also, he could read other people's thoughts. If they played cards or guessing games, it was impossible to keep it from Uri, simply impossible. They just could not win. If people were planning something that wasn't to his liking, he would know. Of course, the children would say he guessed.'

'As with all exceptional children,' Joy Philipou summarises, 'Some people loved him and others were jealous. But it wasn't like a persecution, as it is now, with everyone saying he is a charlatan, because he had nothing to prove then. He was just being himself. Every day he went to school and something new cropped up, and he just played about. I think he was discovering his own powers, and every time a new situation arose, he experimented with what would happen. Little by little you establish some sort of reputation. He didn't appear to use his powers to make people like him. The gut feeling that Uri brought out in many people was that they felt he did have something special. If nothing else, there was that intensity in his eyes. He has the same eyes now as he had then. I thought maybe he was going to be a fantastic poet, because along with this intensity, there was an understanding that was far beyond his years. If you are sensitive to Uri's powers, this is a very powerful man.'

The young Mrs Philipou's fascination with Uri was probably exceeded by that of the more senior Julie Agrotis, an English woman in her forties married to a Greek, and who taught English at Terra Santa. By Uri's account, Mrs Agrotis took a more pro-active interest in him, and he grew quite close to her.

Mrs Agrotis's interest was sparked when a story was going round the staffroom that Uri's test papers in maths bore a striking resemblance - mistakes and all - to those of a German boy, Gunther Konig, whom Uri sat behind. Uri says he simply saw Gunther's answers 'on this greyish TV screen in my mind' by looking at the back of the blond boy's head. Uri had first noticed this 'TV screen' during his mother's card games back in Tel Aviv; it continues to be his description of how he senses the conventionally un-seeable and un-knowable. He says images tend to 'draw themselves' on the screen rather than appear in a flash. The teachers, naturally, assumed he was copying by normal means, and made him sit in a far corner for exams, under individual guard. To the teachers' bafflement, the copying continued; whoever was top in a particular subject Uri was weak in would find his answers mirrored in Uri's. Mrs Agrotis was a popular teacher, renowned as a softie who never punished children. She, nevertheless had to do her turn of guarding the habitual exam 'cheat'. It was while she was doing so that Uri forgot himself one day and asked her about some incident in the market in Nicosia which was troubling her from the day before. She was alarmed, as she happened to be thinking about it at that moment. On another occasion, he says, he saw the word 'doctor' on his screen and for a fleeting moment, saw her in a doctor's surgery. He asked (a little cheekily, one would imagine) if everything had been OK at the doctor's.

Mrs Agrotis and Uri started to have long talks together after class. It was some while before he felt confident enough to do it, but eventually, he showed her how he could bend a key and a spoon, and she was astonished. She did a series of telepathy experiments with him, to what standard of rigorousness we will never know, but they left her baffled and wondering more than any of her colleagues just what made the boy tick. He would confide in her all his secrets, going right back to when he was a toddler and played with bullets, imagining they were spacecraft taking him off to distant stars. He told her about the episode in the Arabic garden, and insisted, with a conviction which she may well have found oddly eerie and disturbing, that he knew instinctively there was life on worlds far beyond our solar system. She would get Uri to retell his space travel stories for the younger children. One of the teachers, Geller recalls, brought in four broken watches one day, which he was able to get ticking by passing his hands over each. Occasionally, when Uri was sent to the stationary supply room on some errand, he would hear the teachers discussing him in the staffroom. One, he recalls, would say he was supernatural. Another would insist that whatever happened was pure co-incidence. Other would say it was all trickery. He got a huge kick out of listening to them arguing and asking "What is he?", since, he says, he hardly knew himself. 'I was just a normal boy with friends, except I had a bizarre weird energy coming from me which seemed really to be mainly for entertainment purposes.'

Plenty of strange things were happening to Uri when he was alone, and he learned not to tell anyone, not even Mrs Agrotis, about them. It was as if life was taking him down a quite extraordinary path, but making his experiences so bizarre that he dared not speak about them for fear of being called a liar again. Uri would argue that what was happening now was only a taster of the weird things that would start invading his life soon. He even speculates on whether he was being tested in some way (or maybe testing himself) to see if he could cope with more and more inexplicable events around him, and still maintain some credibility when he did, selectively, make some of them known. Once, he says, he got lost on his own in the caves and this time could not navigate his way out. He remembers praying to God for help, and then hearing a distant barking of a dog. He followed the barking, to find Joker had somehow made his way the three or four miles from the Pension to find him. Another time, he was out driving in the mountains with a Hungarian friend of his parents, who was putting a new MG through its paces. While his companion stayed in the car, he wandered off on his own, only to find himself being held on the ground by men with guns. He had, it seemed, stumbled upon Colonel Grivas's secret EOKA guerrilla hide-out. He was taken to see Grivas, who, he noted quite correctly, spoke Athenian Greek rather than the local variety. He told the terrorist, who had a large reward on his head, he was Israeli, and seemed to strike a chord with Grivas. He approved of the Hagannah, which Uri's father had served in, for its struggle against the British. He, too, had fought in British uniform originally, and was now obliged by nationalist politics to oppose his former comrades. Trusting the boy, Grivas sent him on his way. The Hungarian was angry and worried when Uri appeared back at the car. Where had he been? Uri told him, but he accused him of making the story up. Uri kept his cool; it did, after all, sound ridiculous. Why should anyone believe it? Why were all these things happening to him? And was he destined to spend his life either keeping secrets, or suffering the frustration of being disbelieved at every turn?

It was in the middle of his time at Terra Santa College, when he was 15, that Uri's stepfather died. He remembers one of the brothers, Fr. Bernard, taking him out of a class to tell him something had happened, and then receiving the news from a friend of his mother that Ladislas had suffered a heart attack and was not expected to live. In the car back to Nicosia, he cried, not for his stepfather, who he had only a passing emotional bond to, but for Margaret. He realised that his mother being on her own yet again would mean he could no longer board, and would have to become a dayboy like Ardash. He was happy about coming to live at home, but was immediately aware that he would become effectively the man of the family. And he did. It was Uri who arranged to sell his father's half of a music shop in the city, and plough the money into a starting a smaller but better Pension Ritz in a modern villa he located on his bicycle. He organised the financial side and the minutiae of the move, all in the middle of a civil war, and while still a schoolboy who pedalled his cycle to school every morning. It was little wonder that Uri Geller matured so quickly - nor that he lived to such a large extent inside his own busy head.

Like Mrs Philipou, Mrs Agrotis lost touch with Uri after he left Cyprus and went back to Israel at 18 - yet another of Uri's 'converts' whom, the job done as it were, he did not feel anxious to write to. But when Geller's fame started to be reported outside of Israel, in 1973, she wrote to a British newspaper from Nicosia. The letter is another compelling clue that Geller was active at whatever it was he did much earlier than is generally credited. 'Dear Sir,' the teacher, who has since died, wrote, in response to an article which had reached her in Cyprus. 'Uri Geller was a pupil of mine for five years in Cyprus. Even while so young, he astonished his friends at the College with his amazing feats, i.e., bent forks, etc. The stories he told of the wonderful scientific things that could, and would, be done by him, seem to be coming true. I for one do believe in him. He was outstanding in every way, with a brilliant mind. Certainly, one does not meet a pupil like him very often. Yours sincerely, (Mrs.) Julie Agrotis.'

Of course, few teenage boys or young men could countenance for very long the idea of having psychic powers and not using them in the pursuit of the impulse which drives most such lads most of the time. Did Uri Geller use it - paranormal powers? oversize charisma? gift of the gab? - to help launch him into his sexual career? Or did he not need to, nature having been especially kind to him in not spoiling his childhood good looks during adolescence? He is not normally one to downplay his psychic abilities, but he accords them a pretty low priority in his account of these adventures. Perhaps saying that as far as women were concerned, he could do very nicely on his own without paranormal intervention was no more than macho teenage vanity on his part; perhaps it just happens to have been true. Or perhaps he felt he would be taking unfair advantage of girls if he used whatever it was he possessed to overcome them.
Whatever, by his mid teens, Uri was simultaneously in love with two girls, neither of them quite prepared to sleep with him. The first was called Patty, and was the slim, blonde daughter of the coach of a baseball team he joined down on the American military base. He was too shy to speak to her, but she approached him, said she liked the way he played baseball, and asked him out to a movie at the American Club. Both in shorts, they got to the cinema late that evening and had to sit close together on a window sill to watch a film whose name he still can't remember. She put her hand on his leg, he put his arm round her. He was in love. They would swim together, dance and kiss, go bowling and eat hamburgers and hot dogs. He formed a lifelong attachment, concurrent with his love for Britain, to all things American, from the easy going lifestyle to the material cornucopia of the PX store.
At home, meanwhile, he was infatuated with a Greek American girl over the road called Helena, who was dark and tanned rather than blonde, but as pretty and intelligent as Patty, and more intellectual, which appealed to Uri. He had also been too shy to speak to Helena, and had eventually faked a ball-over-the-fence incident while he was playing with Joker. The two got on really well. Whereas with Patty, things barely got beyond kissing, with Helena, he pressed his case a little further, although she, as he puts it, 'was very successful at stopping me.' As happens with forces families, Patty's dad was called home a year or so into their romance, and Uri did not hear from her again. He was happier with Helena anyway. And then Eva, a German dancer with short, black hair fashionably cut and expensive perfume, happened to check in to the pension Ritz.
Late one hot afternoon, with his mother away, Eva set about seducing the handsome, tall Israeli boy, who was listlessly watching television. She told him it was so hot, she was going to her room to change into a swimsuit. After a few moments, he heard her calling to him through her closed door. She was standing he recalls, in a brief swimsuit and asking for some assistance with a bra catch she simply couldn't close. As he was struggling, with uncharacteristic lack of success, bearing in mind the clasp was metal, the dancer discarded the bra entirely and pulled him down with her onto the bed. From that point on, he relied on what he had seen on the movies and heard around and about. He admits he was awkward. 'Please don't tell my mother about this,' he remembers blurting out. 'I had become a man, but my emotions were those of an adolescent,' he says today.

Losing his virginity, as so often happens, was a mixture of triumph and let-down. He was just as enamoured with Helena before as after. 'Ay,' recalls Ardash Melemendjian forty years later in his Yorkshire Armenian accent, 'It's true. He fell in love with his next door neighbour. She was slightly older. Maria? Anna? Anyway, he was madly in love with her. I used to say, "Oh come on for goodness sake, in love. What does that mean?" He'd say, "Don't you think she's pretty?" And I'd say, "Oh all right man everybody's pretty." I said to him, "You save your pocket money and I'll take you to a real pretty lady. So come the time when we had a guinea each. We peddle up on our bikes towards the American Embassy, where there were some blocks of flats. We park our bikes underneath there, into the lift, fourth floor, along the corridor and press on the doorbell. an old lady comes and opens the door and says "Good afternoon boys, come in, sit down."

'Next thing, an old boy comes out with a hat with two feathers in the side, says, "Have a good time boys," and takes his hat off and bows to us, cheerio and off he goes. He was Greek. Obviously he'd paid Lola, had his fun and off he went. So the next thing I know, Uri is sat there, and his knees are shaking with nerves. I could almost hear his kneecaps rattling. It's August, scorching hot, so he can't be cold. "What are you doing that for?" I ask. "I can't help it. I know where we are I know what's going to happen." Next thing Lola comes through, a big buxom blonde with lot of hair and blue eyes. "Get inside there and undress yourself. I will be two minutes." Uri says, "You go first. I'll see you when you come out." I'd already paid my guinea to the madame, and so off I went. I said to him before I went, "If you're not here when I come back , I'll have your guts for garters, you'll be in big trouble." "Right, OK," he says. Two minutes later I am out and he's in. Two minutes later, he's out with the biggest cheesy grin on his face. "Yes," he says, "I can't wait to save my next guinea." We can't have been more than 14, 15 years old. She must have been old enough to be my mum. But you don't think about those nitty gritty things when you're that age, do you? An anyway, he wasn't in love after that with the girl next door, the one called Maria or Anna. I think about it sometimes and the only conclusion I come to is that we had a very happy childhood.'

The encounter with Lola - which Uri's account of is almost identical to Ardash's, apart from Uri thinking it was a year or so later and remembering Lola's fee as ten shillings, not a guinea - affected Uri quite deeply. 'Helena and Patty they were the girls I really loved, but they were not really women that I would remember clearly. They really left no impression. Funnily, it was Lola, the prostitute who left an impression. Also, the German girl who seduced me. Having real sex was the first time I felt passion and the real, sexual urge. Those are the moments you don't forget.'

So did the young Uri use his talents to help him with women? 'I don't think I could quite understand my powers then. If I knew then what I know today through life and experience, I would have probably sent my powers of telepathy to their mind and tried to seduce them and try and alter their thinking towards me. I would have tried at least to use it. I didn't need to, though, because I was basically a relatively good looking guy. There was a stage when I was heavy, but I was always courteous and polite and nice to everyone, and they liked me for what I am. Now, I did telepathy, and I would bend things for their parents, who would instantaneously take a liking to me. So I would use my powers to impress not only girls but generally people around me, because I knew that the result was always positive. When you are surprised and astonished and bewildered about someone, you tend to want to talk to that person more, or be around that person more, find out about that person more. And that was very easy for me to achieve.'

There was a whole other side to Uri's extraordinary teenage activities on that all-liberating bicycle, which Uri's friend Ardash was not privy to. After Uri and his mother had moved to the new pension, the hotel business took a downturn. The warfare was becoming so intense and the curfews so frequent that foreign entertainers and theatrical companies were giving Nicosia a miss for the meanwhile. The new pension was, however, close to the Israeli consulate, and attracted a few business visitors from Israel. One such was a tall, well-built man in the grain buying business, Yoav Shacham. Uri became friendly with Shacham. He enjoyed speaking Hebrew with an interesting man, who also knew judo and offered to teach him some. But while they were practising moves, Uri says he had the feeling that Shacham was more than a grain buyer. He used to get mail from all over the world, and moreover, Uri believed he could see on his mental screen his friend practising with firearms and working with documents in some way. it occurred to the teenager that Shacham was a spy - something which appealed intensely to his cinema-honed imagination.

One afternoon, Uri had to go into the loft, and found himself above Shacham's room, from where he could hear a conversation with definite espionage overtones. Through a peephole in the ceiling, he saw Shacham with a middle aged Egyptian, who he gathered from the conversation lived in Israel. The two were poring over and photographing documents, which Uri could see were in Arabic. The men were speaking quietly about such matters as the Egyptian Army, something happening in the Sudan and some business concerning agricultural machinery. Uri was thrilled and excited. The dramatic Israeli connection stirred him, and somehow, knowing Shacham was a secret agent made Uri want to tell him all the more; confiding in nice Mrs Agrotis was one thing, but telling a real Mossad agent was the stuff of his dreams come true. 'I wanted to share the secret of the powers with someone I didn't know too well,' he explains.

When Uri told Shacham what he suspected he was, the agent, as might be expected was horrified, and probably quite ashamed that he had failed so amateurishly to cover his tracks. He confirmed that Uri was correct, and appealed to his young countryman's patriotism to keep it totally to himself. Heaven knows what Shacham thought when the boy he had just been obliged to entrust his deadly important secret to, said that he for his part was the possessor of inexplicable, magical powers. The Mossad man did not seem too pleased.

Uri asked him to think of numbers, which he guessed correctly each time. He made Shacham's watch hands move. Shacham invited him out for a walk. Uri told him as they walked that he would do anything to spy for Israel too. Shacham explained that he was far too young, but then truly put his life in Uri's hands and said, 'You can help me.' There started a routine whereby, whenever Shacham was away from Cyprus, Uri would cycle to the Post office in Nicosia to pick up his friend Yoav's mail from the post restante box and deliver it to a specific party at the Israeli consulate. He loyally told no one what he was doing, but made the possible mistake for a spy, albeit a schoolboy one, of beginning to wear while on his missions an Israeli insignia his father had won. The consulate contact zoomed in on it, asking gently whose it was. Uri merrily told him about his father being a sergeant in the Tank Corps. The contact smoothly extracted every detail from Uri. Back in Israel, Tibor came home to find his apartment had been almost taken apart by intruders, although nothing was stolen. He had no idea what had happened. The Mossad, it seemed, had wanted to warn Uri gently through his father that everything was OK - but that he was playing with the big boys, now. Yoav and Uri, his unpaid courier, meanwhile became close friends. Uri met his fiancee, Tammi, and he promised Uri that when he had finished his military service at 21, he would gladly help him get into the secret service.

If it was completely impossible for Uri to reveal any of this to his friends or family, one arena at least did present itself in which he could show off. It became known in Nicosia not that George Geller could bend spoons with the power of his mind, but that he had uncommon motivational skills. 'The pension was also used sometimes by football managers and one of them was a Hungarian trainer who came from Hungary to train a local Cypriot team. And he used to take me every Saturday to the dressing room to psyche the football players up. When I learned I could influence a football team, that was great because it meant to me that I could also teach people. I also think I helped motivate a Cypriot basketball team I played for. The first time I got into a newspaper was with that team. My name appeared about a millimetre high, George Geller, with a picture of me running. It was a big deal to have your name in the paper. I think they felt that part of my powers rubbed onto them and that when they ran out there they had the energy. Who knows?'

As with all Israelis as Uri approached 18 and the end of school, there was no doubt what the next three years would bring for him - army service. He was more than happy about this. Although he had only been to Israel to see his father twice during the seven years in Cyprus, father and son were still close, and Uri's twin male role models were now his father and Yoav Shacham, both men of action. After Margaret was widowed, Tibor had been over to stay in the new hotel, and husband and ex-wife were on quite good terms too. While Uri's immediate ambition, therefore, was to be a soldier, and then serve Israel as a spy, Margaret inevitably had more conventional hopes for her only child. 'I would have very much liked him to become either a singer, or a lawyer,' she says today. 'But as the main occupation, a lawyer. For he is certainly eloquent enough, thank God.'
But would the Israeli secret service be too covert, too low profile for a boy whose biggest thrills came from hearing himself talked about in the school staffroom, and seeing his name in microscopic type in the local paper? His excitement since childhood at performing in front of an audience, his naturally extrovert personality and his contact with showbusiness types at the pension combined to give him a strong impetus, curious alongside the desire to be a secret agent, to be a performer in adulthood. Additionally, the violent circumstances of Cyprus in the Fifties and early Sixties had triggered in Geller a quirky (although hardly unusual) interest in the ghoulish.

'Seeing death everywhere, seeing people being blown up and shot and body parts interfered a lot with my psyche,' he admits. One of his first experiences in Cyprus was of seeing a young British soldier walking along a street with his young daughter on his shoulders, and a Greek gunman coming out of a doorway and shooting the man in the back. He was deeply sorry for the man and the child, but was equally affected by seeing the tragedy in a less predictable way. 'Witnessing someone getting killed when you are only 12 or 13, and daily waking up and opening the papers and seeing pictures taken in morgues becomes a very powerful influence on your mind. There is one picture that haunts me even today. A whole Greek family was slaughtered in a village, and their bodies were thrown into a bath tub.'

Because of this slightly macabre tendency, he was fascinated by another picture in a book of a half rotted-away ancient Egyptian mummy. Much later, when he was in the army, he took a photograph, along with all the usual soldier's mementoes of his friends atop tanks and so on, of the top half of an Egyptian soldier in the desert, blown apart and burned black, his hands clawing at the air. He still has the tiny print among dozens of bags and boxes of family photos.

'My dream as a young man was to become a horror film actor. there was a whole morbid side to my fantasises. I loved monster movies. My favourite one was Tarantula [a 1955 black and white film about scientists creating a giant spider which rampages through the desert] When I was a boarder at Terra Santa, they took us to see it. For weeks afterward, I was frightened to death in the dormitory by the monsters I thought were lurking in there. It was something that I built in my mind. It went to such an extent that I saw a comic at the American Club with an advertisement for these rubber horror masks and I ordered one from America. It took ages to come, but when it did, it was my most important possessions. It had big bulgy eyes, big white teeth, blood dripping on its face and warts and all that. I used to scare people. I loved scaring my mother's friends. I even went to one of those automatic photo machines with it on. It was a real fascination with horror. Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre were my heroes, in a way. That was what I thought would make me famous - being a horror actor. I knew there was something that could make me well known, and it was not necessarily my powers.'