Villa Ariadne

by Dilys Powell

  In spring and summer, then, the Villa was at the service of archaeological students. They worked in it, they used it as a base for research, they left to travel about Crete, in the 1920s no centre of comfort, and came back thankfully for clean clothes and baths and palatable meals. But the imperious shadow of its creator still lay over it, and in Athens or wherever in Greece British archaeologists congregated you could hear talk of his descents on Knossos. They were growing rarer. The bulk of his work as an explorer was done. Now he had to publish. In 1928, seven years after the first, the second volume of The Palace of Minos appeared – or rather a pair of volumes, for the huge instalment was in two parts. The third volume came in 1930 – but it was still not the end of the book. It was not even all that Evans was writing. In those, as in all the other years, he produced an extraordinary list of studies, lectures and pamphlets – on numismatics, on the Glozel forgeries, on the Shaft Graves and beehive tombs of Mycenae, the centre of his running argument with Wace (he was never too busy for argument).

  Meanwhile there were changes at the British School. In 1929 Humfry became Director in Athens. In the same winter Mackenzie, his health failing, his nerves on the edge of a breakdown from which he was never to recover, retired and was succeeded as Curator of Knossos by John Pendlebury. Young men were moving into positions of command. At the Villa and especially at the Taverna, which had been reserved for the Curator to live in, John and his wife Hilda introduced an air which was a mixture of the domestic and the adventurous. Both archaeologists, they travelled enthusiastically and hardily in the island. But they were not only archaeologists, they were a family. Conversation in their company would turn from Minoan scholarship to topics – household furnishing, for instance – hitherto unfamiliar in the monastic setting of Evans’s Knossos. They were in fact nesting, and in 1932, in a letter from Youlbury to his stepmother, Evans remarked: ‘I was just writing to Mr Pendlebury to congratulate him on a son and heir. A Knossos nursery will be a new feature!’

  The next part of The Palace of Minos toiled on. ‘I have about 6 sections of Vol. IV practically finished – not quite half I think,’ he wrote in 1931. ‘The total pages might well be about 400.’ And there was life at Youlbury; work had to be done there too. The view from Boar’s Hill over Oxford – it had been celebrated by Matthew Arnold in ‘Thyrsis’ – was in danger from speculative building. The Oxford Preservation Trust had made an attempt at saving it, but Evans felt more was needed. He flung himself into the cause; urged the acquisition of land; himself bought with the help of a mortgage a necessary field, and undertook (‘with too light a heart’, as he said later) to enlarge the view by constructing a mound on the heights – Jarn Mound, it would be called after the local name of the spot.

  The job took him nearly three years: from January 1929 to November 1931. At the first attempt the structure collapsed; the clay suffered ‘a general slump’. He tried again with different material, with a motor hoist, trucks running up inclined rails and the employment of twenty men a day. This time, success. The Mound, fifty feet high, was crowned by a dial with a plan of the surroundings; at the base ‘for the benefit of future archaeologists’, as he slyly put it, ‘freshly minted coins of the realm’ were buried. And now he began planting at the foot of the Mound a wild garden which should contain not only local plants and shrubs and trees, not only the flowers mentioned in ‘Thyrsis’ and ‘The Scholar Gipsy’, but representatives of the flora of all Britain. A booklet he wrote telling the story of Jarn Mound bears witness not only to the success of the experiment but to the range of his botanical knowledge. And to his love; there is romantic fervour in his catalogue of Spindle and Guelder Rose, Pasque Flower and Monkshood, Grass of Parnassus and Elecampane.

  Often there were week-end parties. In 1931 he writes to his half-sister to acknowledge some iris seed she has sent him; he will sow it, he says, and adds: ‘I am having the Paynes of the British School, Forsdyke and Miss Lamb [Winifred Lamb, then Keeper of the Classical Antiquities in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge] here for the week-end of October 17th – if you could join us it would be very nice.’ That was the first time I met Joan Evans, but not the first time I was invited to Youlbury. In the years between his appointment to the School Directorship in 1929 and his death in 1936 Humfry and I spent a number of week-ends in the house, and its owner was at last becoming to me something other than the fabulous being – a Daedalus, a King Minos – whom the stories from Knossos had conjured up. Not that I altogether lost the sense of awe. Evans was always kind to me, and perhaps if I had ever talked to him alone I should have recovered my nerve. But at those Youlbury visits the company itself was enough to overpower me. There were times when I was prevented by my job – I was employed as a kind of Editor’s dogsbody at the Sunday Times – from travelling down to Boar’s Hill with Humfry on Saturday. Joining the party on Sunday, I would make a timid entry into a drawing-room which seemed to me full of revered names: the prehistorian Gordon Childe, H. R. Hall, author of a standard Ancient History of the Near East, Leonard Woolley, excavator of Ur of the Chaldees – all amiable characters, I am sure, but not men to indulge in small talk. And once I had the misfortune to arrive on the very morning when some enterprising but uninstructed interviewer for the Sunday Times had implied that Woolley was claiming the discovery of Noah’s Ark. Both the famous archaeologist and his wife were among the visitors, and though the interview was nothing to do with me Mrs Woolley’s implacable pursuit of the subject completed the destruction of my self-confidence.

  Perhaps the house party sometimes included people as ill-qualified as I was for learned society. Perhaps the conversation at table was not exclusively academic and erudite. But my impression is of sitting nervously silent through talk about numismatics and the Ring of Nestor. Once I embarked desperately on some anecdote about an acquaintance who, I said, was ‘the kind of person who had a very good cook’. It was politely but not enthusiastically received, and later that evening Humfry added to my discomfiture by reminding me privately that our host himself was the kind of person who had a very good cook. I took, I suppose, a kind of terrified pleasure in those week-ends. Indeed my fright coloured my memories. I was persuaded, for instance, that I had seen Evans flavouring his boiled egg with strawberry jam. Thirty years later Joan Evans convinced me that I had been inventing my own Youlbury mythology.

  Yet some of the pictures which memory reflects are not imaginary: Evans at breakfast regally throwing over his shoulders the letters he had opened and read; Evans, a bit put out by H. R. Hall’s insistence on catching an inconveniently early train, showing displeasure by making no arrangements for the visitor to have breakfast before leaving. And the timetable I have not imagined. In such a well-run household a gong would signal the moment for guests to go to their rooms to change for the evening. Evans did not like unpunctuality. Humfry was careful in conforming to the rules of good manners, and I was terrified by the thought that the errancies of hair or hooks (one did not in those days rely on zip-fasteners) would make me late for dinner. The thought of coming down late in the morning was even more appalling. I envied Mrs Woolley (at that date her husband had not yet been knighted) the social aplomb which sustained her in saying that she had a headache and would have breakfast in her room.

  Evenings might give me another fright. Evans liked going to bed early, but courtesy would not let him retire before the women guests. At about ten o’clock, then, it fell to whoever was acting as hostess – Joan Evans, perhaps, or the senior among the wives – to make a move. But the distinguished characters who made up those scholarly house parties were apt to be unmarried, or if they had wives did not always bring them along. At any rate there was an occasion when I found myself the only woman there; I spent the hour after dinner half-paralysed with shyness and the thought that I should presently have to choose a moment to stand up, say I was going to bed, and take one of the candles which (though Youlbury of course had electric light) were arranged every night on a side-table, ready to see the
visitors upstairs.

  Once in the bedroom I could relax, read and wait for Humfry to join me. The wait would be fairly long. Our host would retire almost immediately, but the rest of the men would stay to talk and argue. Once, sitting up in bed with a thriller (there was always a supply of books in the bedrooms), I was startled to hear a sudden ringing of bells – not, as it seemed to me, a single bell, but bells everywhere in the house, deafening bells, an alarum. There were confused voices and running footsteps – not mine: perhaps in those frugal days I did not own a dressing-gown, perhaps I reflected that there were enough men in the house to deal with the emergency. Anyhow I stayed in bed and read on, and presently the alarum stopped. When Humfry came upstairs he told me that in the heat of argument and to demonstrate a point he had opened a glass-fronted case to take out one of a collection of Minoan gems; the case was wired, opening it set off the burglar alarm, and nobody except Evans knew how to stop the bell ringing. Probably, said Forsdyke, who enjoyed his host’s lordly ways, it was set to ring from Carfax tower down in Oxford, too.

  But I must not give the impression that the learned talk went on without a stop. On Sunday mornings guests would be taken for a walk through the grounds, past the lake where the Boy Scouts had permission to camp, up Jarn Mound for the view over Oxford and the soft languorous counties. In the afternoon there might be an excursion by car – in two cars, usually. Sitting beside the driver of the leading car, Evans enjoyed the impression of speed, or what in those quiet days passed for speed; there was a facetious rumour that from time to time he would hiss ‘Faster, faster!’ The second car, a hired vehicle which some of us felt lacked the agility of the first, panted in anxious pursuit along the country roads; married couples schemed to travel in one and the same car, preferring, they said privily, to die together. Meanwhile Evans, racing ahead, looked out on the hedgerows and the shrinking passers-by. ‘There seem’, he once remarked with more than a touch of exasperation, ‘to be a lot of pedestrians about today!’

  But there were no mishaps. Indeed there were rewards. One of these excursions gave me my first look at Cirencester. I remember a visit to Wayland’s Smithy and to Inkpen Beacon, where the remains of a gibbet still stood on the naked turf; on foot as well as on wheels Evans was in the lead, and we followed him breathlessly up the hillside. I think, but am not sure, that this was the day when on our return to Youlbury he began talking at tea about the encroachments of the armed services on the countryside; he was always the opponent of the despoilers.

  ‘They’ve been using a stretch of downland for dropping bomes …’ – the soft, elegant, rather high voice hesitated – ‘er, for dropping booms …’ – at last, firmly and without embarrassment, ‘for dropping bombs.’ It was the only time I ever knew him to betray indecision about anything.

  But though he now spent most of the year at Youlbury Knossos was never far from his mind. And getting to Crete had grown easier. He welcomed the possibility of travel by air (he was a wretched sailor), and in 1926 he described with delight ‘a record flight to Paris – 245 miles in an hour and 29 minutes, which works out at over 150 miles an hour’. Not that sea voyages could be entirely eliminated or that the journey to Crete was always simple. But his reaction to difficulties was as stoic as ever. In 1931, held up on his way by a freak April snowstorm, he took ‘an opportunity for stirring them up like bees at Athens by sending to the Estía – the paper that Venizelos reads – a full account of the bad treatment … experienced both on landing at Piraeus and on attempting to depart from it, at the hands of the “Pirates of Piraeus”’. In those days when the island steamers still anchored out in the harbour and passengers were ferried by rowing-boat, most of us timidly endured the tyranny of the boatmen. But not Evans.

  … A boatman had tried to prevent my entering the saloon, demanding four times the fare, 100 instead of 25 drachmas – though, as the weather was bad, I had tendered him 50. Next he pursued me into the small Saloon, where among the passengers seated – all of whom knew me – was the Greek Minister of War and other officials, who all looked away terrorised by this representative of the Piraeus Camorra! In my letter I took occasion to mention this … I understand that Venizelos took the matter up at once, so much so that I have just received a letter from the Captain of the Port at Piraeus expressing fulsome regrets and saying that the chief culprit had been made an example of, so I hope that something will really have been done.

  Justice done (and the Minister of War presumably having taken to the hills) Evans continued his journey by air. But the seaplanes which in the 1930s made the trip to Crete used to touch down at Spinalonga off the east coast.

  I had to cross about 7 miles of open sea to reach St Nicholas, the nearest port, in a motor-boat. This was too small for its job and, though the English Captain was very plucky, a gale blowing from just the wrong quarter made the sea so rough that we were beaten back three times in trying to make the headland that we had to pass, and returned ignominiously to the little hamlet of Elunda whence we had started.

  The traveller was nearly eighty, but a mere gale was not going to stop him. ‘I managed’, he goes on with the mixture of resource and Olympian self-confidence to which all who knew him would testify, ‘to secure a larger motor-boat which took us through.’

  That year he stayed into the heat of summer, and once more the Villa roused itself from routine.

  We have had a burglary here, but I only lost about £10, representing some over from weekly payments placed in a drawer of my bureau. But the strange part was that it was accompanied by a letter in printed writing giving a false name and saying that if the police were put on the writer’s track he would ‘slaughter me like an ox’ … However, though the police have been trying to find out who the thief was ever since, I am still un-slaughtered! Our household have been examined twice over, and I have no reason to suspect anyone. I think the man must be partly out of his mind.

  In archaeological affairs there was still greater drama. Convinced that the Palace was the home of Priest-Kings, Evans in the early years had hoped to find their royal burial place. Legend said that the body of Minos, murdered when he pursued Daedalus to Sicily, had been brought back to Crete and buried in a vault with a temple over it; what Evans had looked for was a kind of double monument. But time passed without luck; he had almost forgotten. Now he had a fresh clue. In a vineyard south of the Palace a village boy had found a gold signet-ring. The site looked promising. Evans decided, as he puts it in The Palace of Minos, ‘to organise a massed attack’, and with John Pendlebury as director in the field and Piet de Jong at hand as draughtsman he dug. And there it was (‘where I looked for it’, he writes home) – horns of consecration, column-bases, double axe signs, the lot: an upper sanctuary, a pillar crypt and a sepulchre cut in the rock. Perhaps to call the strange complex the Tomb of Minos would have been going a bit far. He contented himself with naming it the Temple Tomb. Thirty-one years after his first epoch-making discoveries he had not lost his luck or his cunning.

  This was his last exploration of any consequence, though a subsequent letter spoke of beginning ‘a slight dig to investigate a stone passage that has come to light, near the Temple Tomb …’ That was four years later, and in the same breath he said he would not attempt ‘any considerable dig at present’. He had not visited Knossos in the intervening period. The seasons floated over the Villa and the garden, bringing scholars and travellers. In spring solemn eager students set out with notebooks for the Museum and the sites; in early summer the tourists, stunned by heat, antiquity and their own exertions, swarmed over the Palace; not until July – when in 1933 Humfry and Alan Blakeway carried out their first joint excavation – did the land fall silent. And yet the Villa, committed though it was to the general needs of the British School, still seemed a house in which, though the host was absent, one was a guest. It still bore itself as if it were Evans’s house.

  And so indeed, whenever the host appeared, it was; and in 1935 he made the grandest of his reappearances
. On his way through Athens he was fêted. ‘Six large entertainments in four days!’ But he found time to gauge the political situation. Spring that year with an anti-Venizelist Government in power was darkened by a pro-Venizelist revolt and its aftermath: troops in the Athens streets, units of the Greek Navy, which was traditionally liberal, steaming rebelliously away to Crete and

  … the state of affairs, consisting mainly of arrests and examinations of prisoners, being very unsatisfactory, especially as the opportunity has been seized to shut up many of the quite moderate people who had nothing whatever to do with the insurrection.

  ‘However,’ Evans adds, ‘I was not shut up!’ Far from it. The Cretans had long recognised the excavator and restorer of the Palace of Minos as their unending benefactor. Now they were to make a grand public achnowledgement. A bronze bust was to be set up within the Palace precincts and unveiled with suitable ceremony.

  I am only just recovering from no end of a function regarding my brazen image, raised in the West Court of the Palace here. I was accompanied to it by the Metropolitan and found an immense concourse – all the Court and upper floor of the Palace packed with people, others on the trees and crowds outside … and I had to listen to seven addresses and to compose a discourse myself in the proper mixture of old and new Greek. I was made, among other things, an honorary citizen, with all kinds of privileges – exemption from all dues – and even ‘right of asylum’!