by Dilys Powell
iv
From Cairo the Pendleburys came back in February to Greece, and for about a month they were based on Athens; in the intervals of work and travel John thought about the shape and scope of his guide to Knossos. It was in this spring that I first came to know him.
In Humfry’s first year as Director of the School I had not been able to persuade myself to give up my journalist’s job in London; I went out to Greece merely on holiday. Now it seemed foolish to hesitate any longer. I let the flat, packed my traps and took what was then a popular, reasonably fast and economical route to Greece – overland through Italy to Brindisi and by the Lloyd-Triestino line to Piraeus. By the end of January I was installed in the Director’s house with servants over whom, since as yet I could not speak their language, I had no control, and with a teasing desire to escape from the formalities of Humfry’s official position into the country.
The house was cold, and I fidgeted. In the mornings I took the tram (the bus was a later amenity) which plied between the Gennadeion Library opposite the School and the centre of the city; learned the way about; ran errands; mastered a few Greek phrases; and joined Humfry at the National Museum. His excavations at Perachora on the headland which, running westward from Loutraki and Mount Geraneia, separates the Corinthian from the Halcyonic Gulf would soon be entering on a second season. It was a remote, unfamiliar site, and of necessity the finds were brought to Athens for safe keeping; and morning after morning in one of the Museum store-rooms he was engaged on the endless task of sorting the pottery, thousands of fragments of it.
Sometimes from the dusty confusion on the shelves he would pick out two pieces which joined; and gradually the delicate patterns of rosettes and palmettes, the miniature designs of painted griffins and lions with their mock ferocity would match, and a whole vase would take shape.
I knew nothing, I did nothing. In a kind of petrified respect mixed with slightly resentful jealousy I watched the operations of wives better equipped as archaeological partners – and readier, I am ashamed to think, to set their own personal interests aside. In particular I watched the Pendlebury partnership, for though Hilda was working on a Mycenaean study of her own she was always wrapped up in the job John was doing. Sometimes when I arrived at the Museum I would find the two of them in the store-room with Humfry, for John gave generously of his time to photograph the Perachora material. In the afternoon the Museum closed. We would go by taxi – Athens taxis were cheap – back to the School for lunch; after lunch we played tennis. Husbands and wives played together, urging one another on with anxious cries. Somehow the conventional phrases which John addressed to Hilda were invested with a curious mixture of the familiar and the courteous. We never exchanged partners; I was glad of that, for though he always preserved an unruffled good temper I felt I should have failed to live up to his ideas of feminine reliability.
Presently my desire to get out of Athens was satisfied. Together with the Pendleburys Humfry and I were to make an excursion along the north coast of the Gulf of Corinth. We would begin with Delphi; cross a shoulder of Gkiona, the high mountain which carries westward the chain of Helikon and Parnassos, and follow the Mornos valley down to Naupaktos; and go on to Missolonghi.
Humfry had made trips with John and Hilda before. He was accustomed to their long timetables, and anyhow he was himself an indefatigable explorer. In my longing for the adventure of the country trip I had forgotten the discomforts of spring travel and uncertain weather. Delphi indeed was a delight. We climbed to the Corycian Cave. We expressed proper dismay at the taming of the tall slit in the rocks where the sacred spring emerges; ‘At Castalia,’ John wrote to his father, ‘they have made a very damnable cement path up the gorge so that the swine who go to the festival can go up to the fountain in bath chairs. They have quite ruined the place.’ We none of us felt that the infirm or the indolent had any business in Greece; and certainly none of us imagined the motor-roads which later – and here I join with John – would violate the majesty of the mountains.
But the high pass over Gkiona was not for us. Over twenty years later I carried out part of the original plan – it was a kind of pilgrimage for me – and walked alone down the Mornos valley. At that first attempt we were defeated. The month was March and the weather broke. The route over Gkiona was impassable, and I was spared what later commonsense tells me would have been a pretty killing trip. We changed our plans. We renounced the Mornos valley and Naupaktos. Instead we took a car, drove north to Lamia and Thermopylae, and walked over Mount Oeta to Drachmani, which my companions assured me was the ancient Elateia but of which I remember only sleeping in a private house and a dirty bed.
We visited Chaeronea, where the marble lion which marks the grave of the Thebans killed in battle against Philip of Macedon was, as usual, rakishly crowned by a stork’s nest. We saw Livadia and Orchomenos and Thebes; at the monastery of Hosios Loukas the almond trees were veiled in pink blossom, and over supper an ecclesiastical dignitary roguishly recommended me to try, in the traditional Greek phrase, to make some children. Once, I recall, I was insecurely perched on not a mule but a small horse which slid sideways down a slope, leaving the pair of us mercifully unhurt but in an undignified tangle. Strangely, of the whole trip, ten days or so of it, I retain no more than such sporadic images, and even these are recovered only by reading John’s record of our itinerary.
Perhaps my memory was temporarily frozen, for the weather was often cold and, as I have reason to remember, wet. I had no mackintosh. Idiotically I did not possess such a thing. I had set out in an overcoat – I suppose it was the only one I had – trimmed, absurd and even inhumane as it may sound, with monkey fur. One day there was a plan for an expedition to Gla, an ancient site on what was once an island in Lake Copais. The rain was pouring down, and the general feeling, in particular my own feeling, was that my clothes were unsuitable and that I had better not go.
Humfry felt he could not desert me, and for a couple of hours we sat in the local café, drinking village coffee and listening to the clatter of village backgammon. Hilda, I morosely reflected, would never have drifted into such a situation. Presently the Pendleburys returned with streaming mackintoshes and glowing faces. Gla, John wrote to his father, was an amazing prehistoric fortress rather bigger and more imposing than Tiryns. What was more, they had seen the Great Katavothra, one of the sinister outlets through which a lake will sometimes, foaming and gurgling, vanish into the earth, and which in this case helped to drain Lake Copais. I have seen other katavothrae, but I still regret the one near Gla.
But though I remember so little of those ten days I well remember my impressions of John Pendlebury: the figure – it was always ahead on any walk – fairly tall but compact, with an energy austerely disciplined. You would see him jump straight to the top of some little wall where anybody else would have stepped up. At our evening halts or during our picnic meals I observed his way of talking, clear, vivacious, quick without haste, the syllables precisely enunciated. One felt his glance fixed on one. Sometimes I found his manner daunting, but that, I fancy, was merely due to his looking at the world with one eye instead of two.
It was obvious that an excursion of the sort we had undertaken was a happy background to his private image of life. Each day took in some monument or some district associated with antiquity; that occupied the archaeologist and the historian in him and satisfied his desire, half-scholarly, half-romantic, for a relation with the past. The conditions of travel added a flavour of uncertainty. The discomforts of the trip were minimal, indeed non-existent in comparison with the exhaustion he would later inflict on himself in long walks in Crete. But everything joined to strengthen his idea of himself as an explorer, a figure in a continuing adventure.
v
A week or two later I saw John in another setting. The Pendleburys had moved to Knossos for their second season, and Humfry was paying an official visit to the site and the estate. I had never been to Crete before. Now for the first time I saw the Villa
Ariadne, for so long a legend to me, and its appendage the Taverna. No students had arrived yet, and we had the Villa to ourselves. In the chilly March evenings fires were lit in the living-rooms; friendly but respectful figures swept the hall and served the meals. Gradually the Villa, from being in my imagination a mirage in a golden haze, a lodge to the Palace, perhaps, an annex to the Minotaur’s lair, settled down as a sturdy stone house with an imposing balustraded flight of steps to the front door, standing amongst palms and olives and exotic shrubs on a slope with a drive down to the gate by the road.
In their first season the Pendleburys had been chiefly occupied with the Palace site and the reorganisation of the estate. This year in a breathing-space before the arrival of Evans they were struggling with the living quarters, getting ‘the place in order and having the walls colour washed’. Domesticities mingled with the archaeological severities; for years Humfry and I used as a catchphrase a question repeatedly overheard: Has the soap-dish come? Through everything John wore an air of contented authority. He was not only the explorer. He was the explorer with – I am sure he liked to feel – a solid family background.
The Guide to Knossos was taking shape in his mind.
A Preface. An Introduction. An architectural history – with a few plans, a ceramic and ‘frescoic’ history. The guide proper to the Palace. Four reconstruction sketches and the big plans on canvas at the end. Guide to outlying parts …
But a struggle was ahead. Evans wanted something far less ambitious. A few weeks later Macmillans, Evans’s publishers, took a hand; the guide was to be described as based on The Palace of Minos. In exasperation John wrote to his father.
My name should be on the title page as author and I should receive a sum down for my contribution. This seems to me to be the very negation of what I intended, and in such a case I won’t do it. First as I shall point out to him the actual guide part is entirely my own, secondly such a description on the title page would debar me from any personal opinions or disagreements, thirdly if that is what is intended any précis writer could boil down the P. of M.
Why nobody should be allowed to write about Knossos but Evans I don’t know. Of course all future work must be to a certain extent based on him, but to maintain that a completely original guide should be dismissed as a sort of necessary work on the part of a devoted slave to be paid off seems to me to be folly. I should much rather have all the plans redrawn at my own expense and publish elsewhere.
There was no mollifying the young Curator.
I heard from Macmillan, who says that the partners don’t see any profit in a guide. He wants to talk it over when we get back. Of course I’d like the CUP [Cambridge University Press] to do it but it would mean a lot of trouble about plans etc. The point I’m fighting for is that I shan’t be too much associated with Evans and his reconstructions. I can’t afford it!
Like many of his contemporaries he took a purist view of restoration, just as he took an austere anti-modernising view of Greek roads. It is amusing to find that while this battle of the generations was going on he was engaged as Curator of Knossos in supervising excavations for Evans. The year was 1931, and the founder of Minoan archaeology was almost at the end of his explorations. Four years later he would make a final visit to Crete, but there would be no more serious digging, and The Palace of Minos still had another volume to go. Nevertheless 1931 brought a triumph.
We have got what certainly looks like a royal tomb with side chapels and pillared halls. We are still a good six feet from the bottom and the top of a door leading farther into the hill has just appeared. It will be about the highest piece of ancient walling preserved and should be a magnificent monument.
The tomb in fact turned out to be the great complex of sanctuary and sepulchre which Evans named the Temple Tomb.
Once more John wrote about the Knossos guide and the argument with the publishers. Macmillans were represented by George Macmillan, at the time Chairman of the British School Committee, a dry old gentleman whose kindly efforts to adapt his hospitality to the needs of the School’s young Director and the Director’s wife caused us acute embarrassment. Once he took us in a family party to the theatre to see one of the jovial musicals, all canikin-clinking, of the time, White Horse Inn. ‘I hear’, he said in patrician tones as we were conspicuously ushered into the front row of the stalls, ‘that it is quite delightful.’ I remember him chiefly for his habit of calling in the butler after dinner at his Yorkshire home, where he had been good enough to invite us for the week-end, and giving instructions before the guests about the suit of clothing to be laid out for wear next morning. His Victorian self-confidence could be intimidating, at least in my anxiety not to injure Humfry’s relations with the Committee I found it so. But John was not to be rattled.
My point [he reiterated] is that if I do as Macmillan wants I shall really have to write it absolutely under Evans’s direction which as I know well will mean one eulogy of reconstruction after another … I wouldn’t have gone to Macmillan only there was the question of the plans.
Finally honour seems to have been satisfied, and in 1933 he writes from the Villa recording the arrival of A Handbook to the Palace of Minos, Knossos. The courtesies had been decently observed. Evans had contributed a Foreword, and in his Preface John had said: ‘Without restoration the Palace would be a meaningless heap of ruins, the more so because the gypsum stone, of which most of the paving slabs as well as the column-bases and door-jambs are made, melts like sugar under the action of rain, and would eventually disappear completely. The accuracy of the restorations has been ensured by careful study of the evidence during the course of excavation.’ And this happy agreement was rewarded. The Knossos stock of copies was soon almost sold out; Macmillans had to be cabled for more; and when a batch of Hellenic Travellers visited the site they would, John said, have bought another fifty had there been any to buy. A last note will bear quoting. As usual a party of the Travellers were entertained to lunch at the Villa.
Among our guests … was Harold Macmillan, MP, a nephew and luckily I – by mistake – happened to mention in his hearing the stupidity of sending out here so few (copies). He said rather shamefacedly later that he would talk about it to the firm on his return!
In this academic struggle Macmillans bear the brunt of the attack of the new generation. Really, though, in the years of the Pendlebury curatorship it is the figure of Evans – little Arthur, as John took to calling him in a mixture of disrespect, admiration and liking – which looms over the whole scene: Evans who makes unscheduled additions in page proof to the Handbook; Evans whose restorations are ceaselessly argued over; Evans whose excavations keep everyone working beyond their time; Evans who rejects solicitude (‘My dear Mrs Pendlebury,’ he says, taking Hilda’s arm, ‘don’t worry, I like losing my temper!’); Evans who is obstinate, demanding, interfering – and generous. His table-talk is part of the background of life at the Villa.
Have you ever seen a geranium growing half-way up a fir tree without any roots in the earth? Evans’s theory is that the gardener treed it when it was trying to escape!
His jokes are cherished. Nearly forty years later Hilda would describe dinner at the Villa – the warm, scented summer evenings, the rats scuttling blamelessly along the roof by the terrace, and Evans laughing delightedly at his own stories and stretching a hand over the top of his head to scratch the far side. There was even a certain gaiety of routine. On Saturday nights at this time, she said, they all drank champagne.
Keeping up with the indefatigable octogenarian (he was in his eightieth year when the Temple Tomb was discovered) was a job in itself. Nevertheless time was found to note the bizarre or the tragic event. The kitchen-boy had eloped with a girl from the village; a week after the wedding, John drily observed, the christening took place. Or there was the painful case of the English boy who went out for a walk at Delphi and disappeared. The accident, for accident it turned out to be, caused a good deal of stir in English newspapers, and a letter in
The Times talked alarmingly of brigandage, murder and the perils of travel. ‘A most extraordinary libel on Greece,’ John called the letter, ‘obviously written by one who has never been there or who if he has has never taken the trouble to know anything of the country.’ (A fair amount of solitary travel since then has put me firmly on his side.) Like many Englishmen of his period he alternated between exasperation with the occasional delaying tactics of country Greeks and a total infatuation with Greece. But as time went on his affection for the Greek people grew.
The work of general reorganisation continued. By 1932 he had got those famous boxes of sherds from past years of excavation properly stored and plotted on the plan of the Palace. The boxes themselves, two thousand of them, had to be catalogued; afterwards he set out first with Hilda and later with two students, Edith Eccles and Mercy Money-Coutts, to catalogue the contents. Evans did not come out to Crete that year nor indeed in the succeeding years of John’s curatorship: ‘We are very peaceful here without little Arthur.’
The Pendleburys could settle down to a routine of work, excursions and domesticity. They made a tennis court in the Villa grounds. And there was an addition to the family. ‘A Knossos nursery’, Evans had observed with amiable interest, ‘will be a new feature.’ David Pendlebury was brought out to Crete when he was still a baby, and with a son and heir about the place John could feel that his picture of himself as the adventurous head of a solid family was complete. He was a proud rather than a doting parent. Joan, the daughter who was born a couple of years after David, does not remember her father often playing with his children, to whom in a self-consciously off-hand manner he always referred as ‘the brats’. She recalls gestures of affection, and certainly the idea of fatherhood gratified him. It gave him the sense of an achieved manhood.