Villa Ariadne

by Dilys Powell

  In 1927, however, John was writing home long, detailed, factual letters about his own personal affairs – the possibility of a studentship in Egyptology and the knowledge of language which might be required; or the ten miles of ancient road he had traced at Mycenae; or the interminable delay in getting a consignment of English cigarettes through control after control. ‘I had the pleasure of telling them they were the worst postal service in the world and I believe I signed a paper to that effect.’ He was taking lessons in modern Greek; or playing tennis; or going to a carol service at the English church on Christmas Eve but failing to find a seat on Christmas Day at any service anywhere (‘It’s rather depressed me’). His mother had died when he was a boy of seventeen, his father had remarried – a fact which John accepted with likeable tolerance and understanding; his letters are full of joking messages to ‘Dickie’, his stepmother, and his young stepbrother Robin. But there was no child of the second marriage, and the hopes of the elder Pendlebury were fastened on his son.

  On the father’s side the relationship showed a possessiveness which the boy, made financially independent by a legacy through his mother from his grandfather, the shipping magnate Sir Thomas Devitt, was perhaps fortunate to elude. But John was always dutiful, always grateful, always affectionate. He wrote every week. ‘Dear Daddy’, the letters begin. ‘Love to all from John’, they end. For twelve years every aspect of the months spent in Greece was described – work, controversies, expeditions, discoveries, encounters, jokes, tragedies. Not as a rule with eloquence. The thing was to get everything down, to convey precisely what had been achieved, walked, demonstrated; by example to assure his father of a constant industry, energy and resolution. Nevertheless from these undecorated accounts of jobs done, miles covered, sites found, the character of the writer emerges with clarity: ceaselessly active, concentrated on the work in hand, yet suddently blazing with confidence, physical exuberance and English arrogance.

  And even in the first months when the style has the flatness and shapelessness of youth, now and then there is a moment of observation, a flash of recognition of the magic inherent in a country which may have had ‘the worst postal service in the world’ but which would capture John Pendlebury and hold him and never let him go. He is at Mycenae; there is a village dance round a bonfire.

  A man very ugly but a beautiful mover was leading the dance, he suddenly jumped into the crowd and pulled out a little boy whom he made to take his place. The child was just like a faun, leaping about and eluding him.

  Meanwhile in Athens he keeps up his athletic skills. He plays hockey – ‘outside left and managed to score all right’. He joins an athletic club, and of his first day on the track observes: ‘Very fit and all the spring in the world, though I didn’t try it. I think that I shall have a good chance of the Greek record, it is only 6 ft or just under I think.’ And he is beginning the long expeditions which a few years later were to make his most important work possible.

  Students at the British School in those years would be found not merely visiting the famous sites but exploring remote areas. While concentrating on the districts relevant to a particular subject of research they would make forays into unrelated fields and absorb something of the light and the landscape and the rustic society of Greece. In the 1920s and sometimes into the 1930s a good deal of discomfort might be experienced in the process. Roads were spine-wrenchers, buses when they operated bounced from rut to rut, and more often than not the most practicable method of getting from one place to another was to hire a muleteer with a pack animal for luggage and to walk. You were lucky if at the end of a killing trudge you found an inn with clean beds and food you could eat. Today comfortable buses cover the main routes and modern hotels welcome you at nightfall. But devoted travellers will still take to the goat-tracks.

  It is a deeply satisfying way of ‘learning the mountains’, as the country people used to say. Indeed there is no substitute, and John Pendlebury belonged by temperament to the band of explorers who would never have needed one. By temperament and by generation. It was almost a matter of honour in his day for students to come back to the School with stories of trekking all day and bedding down with the mule. The times and the circumstances were made for him. Physique and training enabled him to finish journeys which would have exhausted even the toughest of normal walkers, and a natural pride in his athletic prowess (it was, Pierson Dixon wrote, ‘his only vanity’) egged him on. In his first months on the Greek mainland he is trying himself out. He walks from Kalyvia (a little station before Eleusis) to the convent at Daphni and along the coast to the Salamis ferry. He returns from a Peloponnesian trip with a brief reference to ‘one walk that has not been done for 100 years or more, Poros to Hermione’.

  Not all the excursions are directly related to his field of study, but there are always museums to visit, there is always the chance of material for the work he is planning, a catalogue of Egyptian objects found in Greece, together with as much information as possible about their provenance. His letters are made up of athletics, expeditions and Egyptology, and accounts of long walks jostle requests to his father to look up a reference in some archaeological book presumably not available in the School.

  At the end of two months he was restless. He was at a standstill in his work; he needed to move farther afield. It was only natural that his choice of subject should now take him to that part of Greece which by its art was most closely linked with Egypt.

  He arrived in Crete in February 1928. It was a cold wet introduction to the island. The little party of students crossed, as we all used to cross, by sea and at night; it was horribly rough (somehow it always was horribly rough). Nevertheless no sooner had they arrived than they set off for Knossos. ‘Very confusing’, John found the Palace, ‘spoilt in some places by Evans’s restorations. However a marvellous spot.’ Next day – the Villa was not open and they were staying in a hotel in Herakleion – they went back; it poured with rain. They set off on a strenuous expedition by car and on foot to eastern Crete; the roads were so bad that they often had to get out and push. They were drenched to the skin at Sphaka; snow overtook them on a pass over Mount Dicte; at their first attempt to reach the islands of Mochlos and Pseira where Seager had dug it was too rough to cross and at the second the boat leaked in the storm and they were half-preparing to swim (‘I got as far as undoing my puttees once,’ John said). And a night in Sitia provoked him to write.

  Some talk of being bitten and some of being bit

  By wasp or bee or hornet, or by the humble nit,

  But of all the world’s best biters you can commend to me

  The best of all is what we call the homely little flea.

  Still, he was drawn to Crete, ‘a wonderful country – much richer than Greece – the peasants finer men – more upstanding’. He was already enjoying the country talk. ‘Their dialect is very nice. K before an ee sound goes to ch as in Italian, so does χ always.’

  Once more in Athens (after, of course, ‘a frightful crossing’) he decided that he would have to go back in the spring. But he had not yet recognised the ties which would bind him to the island. ‘Next year there is to be a dig at Knossos again, but I would sooner get really into Egypt.’ Possibly his next visit made him think again. It was in May of the same year – 1928. Evans was in residence and invited both John and Pierson Dixon to stay at the Villa; Mackenzie also was there, and Hilda White, who was staying at the Herakleion hotel, recorded her impressions of him. She said that Mackenzie had a very gentle manner. A snapshot taken about this time shows a tall figure with glasses and grizzled moustache and the crumpled wardrobe of a British archaeologist long expatriate – cardigan, dark baggy trousers, battered felt hat and mackintosh over arm. The expression is one of reserved irony, and Hilda recalls that, looking at some area of the excavations, ‘I don’t mention this to Sir Arthur,’ he would say in his soft Scottish voice, ‘but I have my own ideas about it.’

  She found him always charming, always helpful. Perhap
s, though, the end of his Curatorship was already casting its shadow; at any rate about now Evans was hinting (‘secretly of course’) that John might undertake a dig either on the south coast or at Knossos itself. Certainly, the young archaeologist writes, there are chances. He even shows signs of softening on the controversial question of restoration. ‘Evans seems to be rebuilding the palace completely in the most spendid style!’ Nevertheless the letters give no indication that he is thinking especially about Crete. In between the two trips to the island he takes part for the first time in an excavation. It is conducted by Walter Heurtley, Assistant Director at the School; the search is for prehistoric remains in Macedonia; and the finds are of a type which classical archaeologists are apt to find dispiriting. But in spite of ‘appalling rain and cold’ John is stirred. Perhaps it is worth noting that with the ferocity typical of the newcomer he comments on a dig being carried out by a member of an older generation and another country:

  He has destroyed a fine prehistoric site containing just what everyone wanted to know in the way of stratification. He is merely out for what will look well in a museum, employing over 100 men with no one to look after them. Twice a day he goes round asking the workmen – through an interpreter, of course – what they have found! and where! It is probably the worst dig in history.

  And in almost the same breath he is asking his father to enter him for the High Jump in the Middlesex, Southern and AAA Championships and to secure a copy of the second volume of The Palace of Minos. Life is an exuberant confusion of travel, friendship, weather, museums, photography, plans to bring out the catalogue of Egyptian finds in the autumn, urgent messages about the transport to London of a dress suit, and what is the verdict on The Vagabond King?

  Yet in spite of the excited range of interests the character is stable and the emotions are strong and constant. During his first winter and spring in Greece John Pendlebury had found a companion, like himself an archaeologist, gripped by the same enthusiasms and ready to undergo the same tests of endurance. Hilda White, in the early letters the subject of references which though engagingly off-hand betray a growing interest, was thirteen years older than John, and the disparity of age made it difficult at first for his family to accept her with the welcome she deserved. She was also a good many inches slighter, and the excursions which she shared with him taxed her hard. She was unconquerably game. From the start she was under the spell of his boyish absurdities, his intense but amiable vitality. As for him, he knew he was lucky, and to the initial protests of his father he wrote obstinately ‘Hilda and I cannot live without one another.’ One might not have expected from this confident, light-hearted young man with the airy English jokes of his class and his breeding an attachment beneath its casual facade truly devoted. When a year after their first meeting he married Hilda it was the beginning of a relationship happy on both sides.

  ii

  They went out to Greece together in the autumn of 1928, and characteristically spent their honeymoon on a strenuous expedition which in a week took them from Mycenae via Stymphalos, the plain of Pheneos and the falls of the Styx to the Gulf of Corinth at Xylokastro, now a popular camping site but in those days a quiet little place with pine woods fringing an empty beach. Most of the trip was done on foot with mules for the luggage and with the camp beds which, as John remarked, enable the traveller to sleep out on fine nights or to dispense with doubtful accommodation indoors. As guide they took a figure from Mycenae known, until his early death, to many Philhellene visitors – Spiro, one of the sons of the Belle Hélène family. It was a tough week.

  Next morning we got up in the cold dark. We followed the path down to the Styx; crossed it by a bridge of trunks and branches; and climbed the steep side of the amphitheatre of mountains by the path leading to the plains of Xerokampos and Kalavryta. We did it quickly, for the cold was intense, and arrived panting at the top, 2,000 feet up; paused for a quick look back at Solos and across at Chelmos in the early sun. Xerokampos is a frozen waste of snow in winter and keenly cold in September. We were glad to put on coats and walk briskly in the biting wind.

  Humfry and I had walked over much of that country. I know the precipices of Chelmos, I know Xerokampos; the names call up memories of long breathless climbs and the company of implacable mountains. Hilda Pendlebury’s record – for this time it is Hilda who is writing – recaptures the excitement of those desperate journeys as well as their discomfort and exhaustion. It is amusing to compare the account (it was written after the passage of a good many years, but one recognises its accuracy) with a terse passage in one of John’s letters.

  We started at about 6.30 and had a terrific climb up a ridge below the huge Mt Chelmos. We then crossed a tableland about 5,600 feet above sea level and in about 4 hours reached Kalavryta.

  John always knew and always recorded the times, the distances, the heights. But one must not be deceived. The letters were a hasty summary, a willing token of family devotion. The timetables which he regularly kept were the skeleton of writing to come when his feeling for the country and the people would be expressed with affection. ‘Our last advice’ – I quote from an article called ‘Travelling Hints’, and though it was written about 1930 (it was posthumously published) and conditions have changed since, not necessarily for the better, it still holds its value for the novice:

  Our last advice is, learn a word or two of modern Greek, think of a nice-sounding name, look it up on the map and go there. Take to the hills and thank heaven for the fine tall gentlemen you meet. Eat and drink with them; ask what they think of the ruins and their history; and in a week you will learn more about Greece than twenty people who have motored everywhere for a month.

  For the time being his interests, at any rate his archaeological interests, were divided. He had been busy on his catalogue of Egyptian finds. For a few weeks he went north to Salonika, where he and Hilda worked for Heurtley on the Macedonian finds. When he came back he found Athens agreeably cool and the School pleasant to stay in: ‘We are almost sorry to be leaving for Egypt so soon.’ For now he was to have a second experience of excavation, beginning at Armant, burial place of sacred bulls, on the Nile banks opposite Luxor, then moving on to Tell el-Amarna. City of Akhenaten, Amarna had been originally dug by Flinders Petrie nearly forty years earlier; later, German archaeologists found the celebrated head of Nefertiti there. At the time of the Pendleburys’ first visit exploration was sponsored by the Egypt Exploration Society and conducted by Hans Frankfort with his wife Yettie – names, again, which call up memories, for the Frankforts had been fellow-students with Humfry at the Athens School, and when we were first married we spent a wedding cheque on travelling from Greece to stay with them on their dig at Abydos, north of Luxor: a gift was never better employed.

  In most of the years which followed John spent the winter months in Egypt and moved north again across the Mediterranean in spring. He always came back to Greece. He and Hilda were there in the spring of 1929, carrying out one of the Aegean tours, nine islands in thirteen days, which the trading and passenger steamers of the times made possible. Appointed Director of the British School that year, Humfry did not take up the job until the autumn, but in the spring he was in Greece and planning for his Cretan dig in June at Eleutherna. He invited the Pendleburys to go with him to look at the place. Evans with his retinue – Mackenzie and Gilliéron the fresco-restorer – was at the Villa Ariadne, but there was still room for the visitors, and John and Hilda joined Piet, who was working as draughtsman for operations at the Palace, in the Taverna.

  For Hilda it was a first experience of the old régime with its touches of grandeur; Evans’s chauffeur was down at the harbour to meet the ship. It was, she remarked, a good thing for one site at any rate to be reconstructed to give an idea of what a Minoan palace was really like; after all there were plenty of unrestored sites. Indeed Knossos was becoming positively habitable. ‘I do think’, she added mischievously, ‘Sir Arthur ought to live there in the end.’

  S
taying at the Taverna was a new experience too. The Villa had by now been handed over to the School, and during the months when it was open students would stay in it rather than put up at a hotel in Herakleion. But when Evans was in Crete it was still indefinably his house and run by his servants, though senior visitors and students might enjoy its hospitality and everybody went up for meals to the big house where Sir Arthur held court. An extremely generous court, as Humfry and the Pendleburys recognised on their expedition to Eleutherna. Provisions for the trip included a variety of tins from the Evans larder. Possibly these delicacies gave John the idea for some sybaritic suggestions in his ‘Travelling Hints’.

  Of provisions I personally recommend a few idiotic luxuries; caviare, asparagus tips, pâté de foie gras. These are the unessentials that make life worth living in a world of hard-boiled eggs and hacked meat.

  Being an athlete never made him a puritan.

  He still had no job, but archaeology had a few grants in its gift, and when the Cambridge studentship came to an end another benefit, the Macmillan Studentship, carried him on. It meant roughly eight months in the year in Greece, so in the winter of 1929 there could be no Egyptian interlude. But of course he was thinking about a job and corresponding with his father about it. The subject of a lectureship had come up, and with all the force and ingenuity of which a young and adventurous mind is capable he was putting up arguments against the idea. He could not get back to England early enough. He would not have time to compose a course. He was out of practice with suitable themes. He had been urged to apply for a permit for an excavation in Crete and a lectureship would mean abandoning that. At last out it came: ‘I don’t want an academic life.’ He had recognised practical archaeology as his real interest. Before he was twenty-five he was sure of what he wanted.