Villa Ariadne

by Dilys Powell

  But his travels were bringing him new interests. Cretans, as with the born explorer’s pleasure he had noticed on his first visit, pronounced Greek differently from their compatriots. Their vocabulary too can differ, and he had the idea of collecting local words which ‘thanks’ as he put it ‘to “education”’ were dying out. ‘I believe I could go to the mainland of Greece – speak correct Greek and yet be quite unintelligible!’ Soon he began noting down snatches of songs about Cretan villages. He was making friends everywhere. By now he had travelled on foot from one end of the island to the other. It was only natural that its people should feel affection and respect for the tireless young Englishman, his fair skin burned dark, his hair the colour of stubble, who turned up everywhere, slept anywhere, drank with them, talked with them, spoke their own kind of language. His letters are full of stories of welcome. And he began to be conscious of a special responsibility.

  There are various things I’d like to say about Crete – speaking as one who I think I can say knows the island better than anyone in the world – and I have been asked to get my opinions as to various matters such as roads into English newspapers.

  By the mid-thirties international discomforts were invading all our lives, even the most private of them. Back from Cairo one spring John foresaw trouble there. ‘Fuad is ill – desperately. Farouk is 14 and a miserable lad. If God wills we – or the Sudan – will take over Egypt.’ Even his incorrigibly boyish jokes would presently take on a political colour.

  I sent round to the police station here today a bogus arrival form of Benito Mussolini – parentage unknown – religion Σατανολατρεία [devil-worship], profession white slaver. The commandant tells me that it took him in for a quarter of an hour and has fined me a dinner to pay for the cost of a wire to all the ports for information.

  Nevertheless there was still a breathing-space. The spot in which he had established such forgivingly friendly relations with the local authorities was Tzermiadha in the central district of Crete called Lasithi. Here on the slopes of Mount Dicte is the rich, mysterious Lasithi plain, its flat expanse irrigated by thousands of windmills with sails flickering like a field of white blossom. At Psychro, south-west of the plain, is the Dictæan Cave down which tourists today are uncomfortably conducted; legendary birthplace of Zeus, it was excavated by Hogarth, who had just retired as Director of the Athens School at the beginning of this century when Evans was making his first discoveries at Knossos. In 1935 John, exploring the Lasithi area, had looked at a cave on the opposite, the northern rim of the plain. Evans had seen it years before, but though it contained early Minoan remains it had never been excavated. John decided to dig; and in 1936, with finance from various sources and a permit obtained through the British School, he and Hilda started work.

  The cave had been in use before the sanctuary at Psychro; the deposit it contained stopped at the period when the Psychro deposit began. John was soon finding pottery and bone figurines of a local and hitherto unknown type. Some rewriting of his book, he realised, would be needed. Presently he knew that this was just the beginning.

  We’ve got a programme for years here. It is so cut off a place that it has all sorts of queer survivals. Even nowadays they use more Arabic words than anywhere else and have Turkish gestures.

  Next summer he was back, though without Hilda, who with her usual stoicism was undergoing a serious operation in London. The reports from the dig were cheerful: Neolithic burials, ‘the first ever to be found in Crete’; a Middle Minoan building; quantities of pottery – in fact ‘stuff of every period except classical and Roman’. And Marinatos, the Director of the Herakleion Museum with whom he had clashed at the beginning of his curatorship of Knossos, was now on the best of terms with the British explorers, and apparently prepared on his own authority to extend their permit to include not only Tzermiadha but the whole of Lasithi. Before the end of the season John had discovered ‘a sub-Minoan Protogeometric Temple on a peak about 4500 [feet] up with all sorts of cult-figures – dove goddesses etc. which show the continuity of culture up here’. The site was called Karphi. On its rocky perch it disclosed what there was every reason to identify as one of the castles of the ‘robber barons’ thought to have taken over Crete when the great Minoan civilisation was disintegrating. And there were mysterious finds. Among the clay statuettes recovered (one was pieced together from 489 fragments) were figures crowned with discs and birds and equipped with feet separately moulded and appearing through openings in the front of their bell-skirts. ‘The goddess’, John commented in The Archaeology of Crete, ‘must have needed them to reach her lofty shrine.’

  For two more years excavation went on. With knowledge and experience acerbity sometimes crept into his rejoinders. Once in the foundations of a house he came on a clay figure of a dolphin with, he remarked, on its back a man carrying a child. The presence of the child meant that the reference could not be to the legend of Arion, the musician-poet rescued from would-be murderers by one of the benevolent sea-creatures, and John was open to suggestions. Presumably the idea of a man carrying not a child but a musical instrument was put forward. At any rate a few weeks later he wrote: ‘By the way tell E – that when I see a cithara with a navel and testicles I’ll believe my find represents Arion.’

  But in general the exploration of Karphi stirred no conflicts. The finds, especially the mountaineering cult figures, were notable enough, but the most satisfying results of the four seasons in the Tzermiadha district was the light shed on the prehistory of Crete, ‘the real Dark Ages’, as some have called them, when long after disaster overtook Knossos the arrival of a people familiar to students of Greek history, the Dorians, may have driven whole townships of the island’s inhabitants to take refuge in the hills. Forty years after Evans’s first revelation of a glittering Minoan culture John was filling in the gaps in the story.

  The Lasithi interlude strengthened his ties with the Cretans. He made more and more friends. In 1938 when he and Hilda arrived at Tzermiadha they were greeted by ‘five village elders – who had suitably liquored up for the occasion – with a gallon of wine and a set speech on the benefits we had conferred on the district’. At the end of the season there was a civic banquet in a garden in the plain, and the following afternoon they were accompanied by the Mayor and town council as far as the next village, where more refreshment was offered, while on their further journey towards Knossos they met two policemen who, refusing to let them eat their own food or drink their own wine, gave them yet another party. John was a proper recipient of the fierce proud hospitality of the island. As Patrick Leigh Fermor has recorded, he could drink even the Cretans under the table, could walk even the Cretans off their legs. And there was a kind of piety, as of a son for a father, in some of the relationships he formed. The famous Dictaean Cave at Psychro had, it is said, been discovered by a Lasithiot. In 1939 he died; John spent one of his free Sundays in visiting the grave of his old friend.

  Savage political divisions have always been common in Greece, and at the end of the first season at Tzermiadha the Pendleburys, following a good old archaeological custom and holding a party in celebration, found that many of their acquaintances could not be expected to meet one another on a social occasion. But in the second half of the 1930s a new kind of unease was spreading. On a trip to Western Crete John and his party were taken by a policeman for spies. However on the impudent English suggestion that he should ring up the King or the British Consul to check, the man sensibly remarked that to telephone would cost twenty-five drachmas and it was cheaper in the long run to let the visitors take what photographs they wanted. Once later on, walking down alone from Lasithi to Knossos (‘26 miles over filthy country in 6 hrs 25 m.’) to get a document signed by the consul John was accosted by another local policeman.

  You know we’ve just got a new law that all strangers coming through must show their credentials. But we know all about you and as long as that – little lawyer doesn’t see you it’s all right … He’s go
t a feud on with the Inspector and will try to get him into trouble if he hears of your passage.

  At that moment the lawyer himself appeared – and turned out to be an old acquaintance of John’s.

  How dare you stop famous friends of Crete – and mine. I hope the Kyrios will complain – and I’ll back his complaint and you’ll get sent off to the islands!

  There were inconveniences not so easy to circumvent. Currency restrictions, for instance. In Greece, John remarked, posting ‘an English cheque to an English bank to pay English cash for an English bill in England’ was treated as sending money out of the country. To write to an English bank at all a special permit from the Bank of Greece was needed; otherwise the letter was automatically destroyed. His comments on financial affairs grew more and more acid. Exasperation over the difficulties of getting on with a simple job mounted.

  Luckily he had his father in England to act as steward; and the extraordinary series of letters in which year after year, week after week he recounted the details of work and play, of digging and walking and joking and reading bore witness also to a relationship in which even money, among the English most private of subjects, held no secrets. To Hilda, no doubt – understandably she never quite forgot the elder Pendlebury’s initial disapproval of her marriage – the unchanging interdependence of father and son must often have seemed less than a blessing. But if once or twice John betrayed a shade of impatience with the paternal demands, if he rebutted with a touch of asperity some complaint about a date unavoidably changed, about the ‘tone’ of a telegram, it really was only once or twice. For the rest the desire to please, to be worthy, was paramount. If the father found, as Hilda once told me he found, in the son his chief interest in life, the son at an age when most men have long since slackened the first parental ties responded with an exemplary duty and affection. There was an occasion when the older Pendlebury received some minor honour. ‘It couldn’t’, John writes, ‘make me prouder of my father, but it makes me more pleased that he is honoured as he deserves … Your very proud son …’

  Sometimes news of another sort reached the archaeologists in their far retreat during the Lasithi summers. In 1936 Humfry died of a relentless, a galloping infection of the blood. He was only thirty-five; none of us had thought that death could strike at our own generation. The Pendleburys knew him as a friend. They had made arduous expeditions with him, they had walked with him down to the headland in the Gulf of Corinth when the decision had been taken to make the Heraion of Perachora the next major School dig.

  We shall miss him a lot. Our friendship throve on insult and abuse. I’m very glad to have known him, particularly on trips. ‘My God, to think we’re paid to do this!’ on a very good day when we had found Perachora and were sitting on the hills above.

  Always direct in his responses, John was deeply and truly grieved; again and again his letters return to the theme. But the news had another side to it. The sudden death of the Director threw the School into confusion. Peter Megaw, later Director of Antiquities in Cyprus, was Assistant Director at the time; resourceful, considerate and a kind friend to me, he took immediate charge. Alan Blakeway, who a year earlier had been digging in Crete with Humfry, presently secured leave from his Oxford Fellowship and came out as Acting Director. The Committee then began to look outside the list of obvious candidates.

  Middle-aged men on retirement often have a romantic fancy to take up archaeology, but Gerard Mackworth-Young was different. He had been a distinguished Indian Civil Servant; he was also a good classical scholar; and he was determined. Engagingly modest, ready in the pursuit of his aims to accept an inconspicuous position, he had consulted Humfry on the steps to take. He was advised to master a craft which would make him valuable in any archaeological enterprise – in fact to specialise in photography. As a photographer, then, after enrolling as a student at the School, he came out to Athens; and when in the last years of his life Humfry was engaged on a catalogue of the archaic marble sculpture of the Acropolis Gerard joined the undertaking and produced the fine pictures for the book which resulted. In 1935 and 1936 he was gaining practical experience of another sort; together with James Brock he was excavating in the island of Siphnos.

  The Committee had the answer to their problem. He was free; he had authority; and he was well-to-do, willing to take on a post paid at the rates available to a learned institution. When the next School session began he had been appointed Director, and he held the job until the Second War drove the British out of Greece.

  In the months after Humfry’s death when I was still within earshot of archaeological politics John was often spoken of as a candidate for the Directorship. I did not think he was the right man. The superficial flippancies, the persistence in undergraduate jokes seemed to me to unfit him for the formal, official encounters of Athens. Perhaps I was allowing an unacknowledged prejudice to affect my judgement. Certainly he was a far more complex nature than I was at the time capable of realising. Superficially tough, under attack he brooded. Arrogant in his views, in human relationships he could be forbearing and sensitive. His aesthetic tastes were undiscriminating. In his letters one finds references to books by Rose Macaulay and Robert Graves; a biography of Cromer stirs him; then he will describe some unremarkable popular novel as ‘a first-rate book’; the best creative literature of the times seems to have passed him by.

  And yet his own writing is not only direct and strong; it has on occasion a personal vividness. Half of him belonged to the society of scholars and artists. The other half lived in a world – empire-building, chauvinist – foreign to me. I saw the second half, and thought of him as an anti-intellectual. No doubt I was taking a conventional view, and now, reading the letters to his father with their severe undertones, I wonder if I was wrong anyway. It is true that they make no mention of a desire for the British School job. There is, however, a reference to the reappointment of Gerard in 1937; and here another name relevant to the story of the Villa Ariadne reappears: ‘I expect the Committee are keeping him as a warming pan for Dunbabin whom the Oxford members are determined to have sooner or later.’

  Tom Dunbabin – the quiet, handsome Tasmanian whom I had first seen, a powerful but temporarily bewildered figure, amidst the confusion of the Athens police headquarters – in the next decade would be contributing to a chapter in Cretan history. In the late 1930s he was a prospective Oxford contender for the British School post, and I dare say the rivalry between Oxford and Cambridge helped to colour the reference in Pendlebury’s letter. Apparently John himself adopted an ambivalent attitude towards the Directorship. He blew, according to Hilda, hot and cold; he made no definite move to show he was in the running. His father insisted that he would have got the job if he had let people know he really wanted it. Anyhow he was passed over. He did not feel deeply about it, though he was disappointed or rather, perhaps, injured that he should not have been given the chance before someone such as Gerard Mackworth-Young who was not by first training an archaeologist.

  But if he was merely disappointed about the British School his feelings about another rebuff were keen. From 1930 he had divided his energies between Crete and Egypt: spring and summer based on Knossos, then, after an interval in England, winter in Egypt. For seven seasons he directed the excavations at Amarna, and directed them with success. But no papyri were being found, and according to Hilda the Egypt Exploration Society hoped for papyri. Anyhow the Committee decided to move their operations. Hilda’s view may well have been prejudiced, and the decision may not have been as sudden or as surprising as she represented. But whatever the circumstances, the first John heard was that Amarna was being abandoned and that a new director had been appointed to dig elsewhere.

  In the first years after Humfry’s death, though I travelled in Greece and cherished Greek friendships, I was inclined to lose touch with archaeological society, which in any case I had often found intimidating, and though I certainly should not have lumped them in with its austere ranks somehow I did not see the
Pendleburys. I thus had no opportunity of judging for myself how John had been affected by his series of setbacks. But affected he certainly was. The curatorship of Knossos withdrawn from his reach; no hint of an offer of the Athens School – those two might have seemed injuries enough. But the loss without warning of the Egypt Exploration Society post really hurt him. To a naturally ambitious man – and he was ambitious – it might have seemed calamitous. Not to John. The self-confidence of the golden boy was not undermined. But he was embittered; Hilda saw that he was embittered. She had known only the bursts of anti-bureaucratic exasperation which interrupted, though never for long, his usual gaiety. For a time she was concerned about this new dark mood.

  Possibly disappointment induced him to think willingly at last of a settled job. In 1935 before setting out from Knossos on a long expedition he had written

  The fact is of course that I am more of a topographer than an archaeologist! I think my length of leg needs a mountain rather than a test pit to step over!

  But in 1937 he was putting in for a post in Palestine, and though he was inclined, perhaps vaingloriously, to congratulate himself when he failed to get it (‘I’d gathered it was a pure office job not adapted to longish legs still in their prime’) the attempt shows a change in his attitude. Two years later still he applied for the Disney Chair of Archaeology at Cambridge. No luck again. But in defeat he was generous. About Dorothy Garrod, the successful candidate at Cambridge, he wrote: ‘… a very good appointment. A very nice person and a most sound excavator.’ He had been temporarily embittered but not soured. After all he had enjoyed great success in a life still young. He had established a reputation based on both field work and published material in two areas of archaeology. He had produced a handbook and guide to Knossos which long years later, after all the intervening wrangles of the learned world, would still stand firm. And with the publication in 1939 of An Introduction to the Archaeology of Crete, evidence of a devoted scholarship in keeping with the endurance and tenacity of purpose it modestly displayed, he had joined the famous company of modern traveller-observers whose work in Greece began in the nineteenth century. He was the successor of Leake and Pashley and Spratt.