by Dilys Powell
In the time which remained before the war he went on deepening his knowledge of the island. He ‘managed to do the three peaks of Dicte in one day’ (the optimists among us sometimes fancy themselves striding from one crest in the Greek mountains to another – until from some appalling height they see the nature of the terrain; only people like Pendlebury put the dream into practice). The same summer there was ‘a trip up Ida and down south to Melambes to visit a cave. A pure pleasure trip, largely, but I’ve done all the possible routes up Ida but one and that impassable for mules’ (it sounds like the one down which I crawled miserably sometime in the 1950s). ‘Record time to the summit too and a resultant waist measurement, pulled in a bit, of 22 1/2 inches.’ The fantastic feats of speed multiplied. After a break from work on the Tzermiadha dig he walked back from Pachyammos,
this being quicker than the car! I left Pachyammos at 4.30 by a route which I thought would bring me here by about 2–3 p.m. To my surprise I arrived here at 12.30 having sat down for a good hour all told on the way. At 12 Hilda rang up the folk here to say that I’d be arriving about 3–4. The Postmaster said – in an aside – ‘bet you a million he’s here within the hour!’ Sure enough I was.
In 1938 Hilda shared some of his expeditions. In 1939 it was understandable that he should leave her with the children in England and go out alone. ‘With the prospect of a good many pleasant seasons here,’ he wrote from Tzermiadha, ‘it would annoy one to have to begin trailing a pike in the Low Countries.’ Time indeed was shrinking, and the Pendleburys would not again spend a summer together in Crete. The last months, however, brought some startling archaeological news. While in Athens John heard that large numbers of inscribed tablets had been found in the American excavation at Pylos overlooking the Bay of Navarino, where in the Greek War of Independence an Allied fleet under Codrington defeated the Turks. Was there a connection with the tablets which nearly forty years earlier Evans had found at Knossos? The explorer Carl Blegen invited John to look.
Blegen has got a Palace apparently of the Homeric period – really Nestor’s! – and 185 clay tablets inscribed in a form of the Minoan script – though it seems to me probably not in the Minoan language, since the combinations of signs aren’t the same as in our Knossian ones.
‘Not in the Minoan language’: another decade and more would go by before a young architect, making a fresh approach to decipherment, would revive one of the controversies which have always echoed round the name of Arthur Evans. There was no leisure now to linger over the significance of the Palace of Nestor. It was April already, Hitler was in Czechoslovakia, Mussolini was on the point of invading Albania. John had made what private provision he could.
In case of trouble [he wrote from the Villa to his father] I purposely leave all arrangements with you at home. Is there any way of extending a Power of Attorney indefinitely? If so let me know and I will have an affidavit signed before the Consul. I’m not panicking but I do want everything absolutely straight.
Greece, so often a battleground, is the most tense, the most rumour-ridden of countries in times of international crisis, and though by May when he was about to set off for Tzermiadha the atmosphere was less electric one can understand what he felt when he wrote: ‘The worst feature to my mind is that one is beginning to wish to God it would come soon and not hang over our heads.’
Nevertheless the old enthusiasms ruled him. There were exhausting excursions (‘better get in all one can in case of trouble’). There were recognised sites revisited and new sites discovered (‘the book is well out of date already!’). And there was the dig. Some of the students from the Villa Ariadne went up to Lasithi to help him. The work went well. The workmen included a variety of picturesque characters: ‘two gigantic purple masons straight out of Chaucer’ and ‘two Albanian wife-murderers who escaped when Zog opened the gaols’. The finale of the season was celebrated on John’s name-day by the usual party.
It was the best we have had up to date. I really felt the village father! – pretty near 1000 people and dancing from 9–3! Total cost of making the whole village tight £7!
It was not, unluckily, quite the end. There was a spring on the heights. Before he left Tzermiadha that summer John built a fountain there; water would be piped down to the village, and in commemoration of the four years of excavation a marble plaque was designed and affixed. One morning he went up to the site to find the plaque chipped and the stone with which the damage had been done lying beside it. He reacted furiously: sent for the mayor, the schoolmaster, the police, refused to speak except on necessary business, declined all hospitality. He got no change out of anyone. Perhaps a village, however divided, if attacked will instinctively join forces against even the dearest outsider. Anyhow nothing was done; somehow in such circumstances nothing ever is done. There may have been a simple explanation for the arbitrary little act of violence. Probably a local family with a grudge against one of the masons were aggrieved that his name should, in accordance with custom, appear on one of the corner-stones; probably the wrong part of the fountain was chipped. John consoled himself with the thought that the story had spread throughout rural Crete. ‘Tzermiadha is in for a bad time.’
But the incident was an affront to something more than his paternalistic relations with the villagers. His romantic feelings about the country were injured – those feelings which in all of us who care for the living Greece are a mixture of affection, enchantment and the gigantic spell of the past and which in John were strengthened by the inclination of his whole nature. The undergraduate at Cambridge sitting on a hard chair over The Forest Lovers, the young archaeologist at Amarna doodling, drawing figures from mediaeval chivalry – perhaps unconsciously he had formed a shining image of his rôle in life. All his adventures, his feats of stamina, his desire to extend himself in both work and athletics to the limits of endurance were an effort to fulfil the dream, an attempt to hasten its achievement. There was something, some goal of excellence he had to reach by himself. In spite of his jokes, his carousings, his friendships, in spite of the easy intimacy of his marriage, I see him as ultimately a solitary: the single horseman.
He left Greece in the July of 1939. He had a plan for a catalogue of ancient sites in the Cyclades, but though some of the preliminaries had been done that was for the future. For the present his job was complete – An Introduction to the Archaeology of Crete published and applauded; the excavation of Karphi rounded off; everything clear, everything tidy. When a few weeks later war broke out there was nothing to be interrupted except life itself.
vii
‘I love being a soldier. I’ve forgotten all about being an archaeologist.’ A common risk, danger, the sense of involvement in an adventure of universal importance – something in the atmosphere at the beginning of the Second War, something which a later generation has failed to understand, spoke instantly to the idealist in John Pendlebury. The disquiet in the air of the last year or two, the sourness which was invading casual human relationships, his own faintly lingering personal resentments, everything was wiped out. At last he knew exactly what he had to do.
Not that the soldier he became was an ordinary soldier; no ‘trailing a pike in the Low Countries’ for him. He had already in August been placed on the reserve of officers. When he came back from Greece he spent some time in Cambridge clearing up the last loose ends of work. That finished, he went with Hilda and the children to the Isle of Wight for a holiday; it was there that the family on the morning of Sunday September 3 heard the radio with Chamberlain’s declaration of a state of war.
They took a car and drove straight back to Cambridge. There was an interval when John served on a committee which interviewed candidates for commissions in the services. Then he was himself asked if he would prefer to join an infantry or a cavalry regiment. As one might expect he chose the cavalry, and towards the end of 1939 he was sent for training to the equitation school at Weedon. Perhaps, Hilda thought, hoping against hope, when he was posted abroad it would be to
Palestine.
He was happy at Weedon, happy enough, perhaps, to forget not only about being an archaeologist but – since cavalry could hardly be deployed in Lasithi or the foothills of Ida – about the seeming break of his ties with Crete. For a few months he could live in the simple pleasure of learning the business of peaceful soldiery. That winter we all held our breath, incredulous in the lull. Occasionally he spent a contented week-end leave with Hilda. For the rest he was at Weedon until the fall of Norway and Denmark, defeat on the familiar battlefields of the Low Countries and the invasion of France itself stirred the British out of a traditional reluctance to employ experts in expert fields. In May 1940 the War Office sent for him. ‘Here’, somebody said, ‘is this man who knows about Crete.’
Hilda once told me that some time that month John was flown over northern France. Beneath him he could see the jammed roads, the mortal debris of invasion, machine-gunning, bombing; he could see pitiful crowds of refugees driven as a screen in front of the advancing Nazis. A romantic view of history had always inclined him to admire the military peak-figures and the princes of the Renaissance, and when somebody pointed to their ruthless disregard of human suffering he would reply that this was ‘necessary policy’. Now he was confronted with the reality of ‘necessary policy’, and he could not endure it. ‘After this experience,’ Hilda wrote, ‘I saw him, his face set like a rock as he told me he could hardly wait to take his personal vengeance…’ Vengeance is not, I think, the word for the part he was to play in the war; it is too confining a word for his high-spirited patriotism. But the part was soon to be assigned, and his companions were soon to be chosen.
In my time in Athens I often heard of a student of the School who was an especially resolute traveller among the discomforts and the ferocious sheep-dogs of Epirus and Albania. Nicholas Hammond was to be known later as an authority on the history and archaeology of the district. At this juncture of the war, like John Pendlebury he was summoned to London, and there in ‘a dingy, dark and depressing basement room in the War Office’ the two men, friends from their days at the School (both had taken part in that famous all-night all-day walk to Thebes), met again. Both had volunteered for ‘special service’. Hammond says that his initial discouragement on a first encounter with official flummery and general vagueness was dispelled by the practical grasp which John immediately displayed.
In his mind’s eye he was planning the organisation of Crete for resistance with a clarity of purpose and a care of detail which were fully fledged … he talked to me of swordsticks, daggers, pistols, maps; of Cretan klephts from Lasithi and Sphakia; of hide-outs in the mountains and of coves and caves on the south coast; of the power of personal contacts formed by years of travel, of the geography of Crete, its mules and caïques, and of the vulnerable points in its roads.
One can see how confident, in the terrible uncertainties of that summer, John with his quick enthusiasms, his persistently youthful taste for adventure, above all with his dedication to the job in hand must have appeared to his companions. The news was disastrous: France cracking, the British in retreat to Dunkirk. Here was a man who was absolutely sure of himself, who looked forward with something like joy to his own field of battle. There was to be the minimum of preparation – a few days in London ‘learning the tricks of the trade’, a few embryonic and according to one participant faintly ridiculous experiences with explosives. Meanwhile the troop trains were arriving loaded with survivors from Dunkirk, and we all wondered how long it would be before Italy entered the war.
Hilda knew, of course, that he was being sent to Crete. The wives of that heroic band of buccaneering adventurers always knew – and always kept silent. When John learned the date of his departure – he was at the War Office for no more than a fortnight – he sent for her. She left the children with her mother, went back to Cambridge, packed some things he needed and came up to London. His luggage included a swordstick. He had, Hilda said, an idea – fantastic, absurd, who, since the outcome was to be at once glorious and obscure, can say? – that it would be the ideal weapon against parachute troops. Then one night at the beginning of June husband and wife dined together at the Oxford and Cambridge Club. After dinner they were joined by two men who were strangers to her. Time was urgent, ‘So,’ as with her own special brand of laconic courage she put it, ‘quite soon John came out with me and we actually said goodbye on the pavement outside the Club.’ Next day he left on his last journey to Greece.
Nicholas Hammond was in the party which set off that morning for the Middle East. They were, he said, ‘sent off from London by a staff officer in full-dress Guards’ uniform, a spectacle which even in those days struck us as incongruous’. They made a roundabout journey by air via Corsica, Bizerta, Malta and Corfu; John, asking questions about roads and harbours in Albania, was busy preparing himself for the possibility of fighting on the Epirot frontier. But Greece was not yet involved. The Albanian campaign was still to come, and when the party, undercover but suspiciously military, arrived at Athens the authorities looked understandably askance. John was allowed to land. Nicholas Hammond, the Albanian expert, was among those sent on to Egypt. It was nearly a year before the two men met again. For the interval one has to rely on a few scattered letters from John to Hilda, on the piecemeal accounts of eye-witnesses, on one’s own knowledge of his character and his relationship with the Cretans, and on the myths which have accumulated round his name.
He was not able to write often. There were four letters home, three to Hilda, one a round-robin which he invited her to share with his friends. The first mentions the Villa Ariadne; it is written from Knossos. He must have gone almost immediately from Athens to Crete, and for some time he lived at the Villa. Here a bizarre fact emerges; I had quite forgotten it. The date is June. Europe is ablaze, Britain awaits the Luftwaffe – but archaeology must go on, or at any rate appear to go on, and the Squire is still in residence, together with his elderly mother, as Curator of Knossos. He did not wish to leave the Villa and the Palace without supervision. At the same time he was concerned to prepare for the storm, and with two representatives of Cable and Wireless in Herakleion he worked part-time on compiling a list of Cretans who were reliably pro-Ally and Cretans suspected – these, one feels, must have been few – of being pro-Nazi.
John himself had to wear his civilian hat. His captain’s uniform, as his amused friends knew well enough, was kept ready in a box. He was working for Military Intelligence. But ostensibly he was Consular representative, Our Man in Herakleion. ‘Elliadhi’, he writes in that first letter (the name is that of the affable practical joker who once entertained Humfry and Alan Blakeway and myself to an embarrassing lunch) – ‘Elliadhi is being very nice and helpful in instructing me how to be a Vice-Consul.’ The disguise cannot for a second have deceived the watching Germans. John, the Squire reported, said of himself that he was the most bogus Vice-Consul in the world. Certainly though Greece may have still been officially neutral there was not much neutrality in Crete, as he found when he began to travel about the island.
I had a short but very nice trip in the West – going up to Omalos and spending a night at Anoyia and going up to Nidha [the plain high on Mount Ida] – though not to the top.
Anglophily is rampant!
The job of Vice-Consul was a disguise accorded only the faintest observance. It is clear that from the start he was busy recruiting and organising guerillas against the possibility of attack; I have heard stories of his expeditions through the island in 1940 and the beginning of 1941, expeditions from which he returned blindly exhausted, to drop and sleep where he lay. It is clear also that the desperate situation of the times – the first letter is dated June 20, and France had already fallen – merely stirred defiant impulses in him.
I hope things aren’t too depressing at home. Here we sadly lack news but at all events the one thing we know is that we shall never give in. First Θὰ πάρωμεν τ’άρματα νά φύγωμεν στά Мαδάρα [we will take
our arms and flee to the White Mountains]. If England was overrun we’d fight from the colonies I know.
The letter was taken by the Squire to be posted in Athens. Communications were difficult, and for much of the time the Pendleburys relied on telegrams. Three months later John himself was on a thirty-six-hour visit to Athens, and from there despatched a fond, gossiping letter, the kind of letter which with its scraps of trivial news and its undertones of anxiety must have been typical of a thousand letters from soldiers serving abroad to their families during the Luftwaffe attacks on England. He had met old acquaintances in the street in Athens. In Crete there had been a heat wave. He had bought a puppy from his muleteer Kronis (for many years the Pendleburys’ faithful servant); it was black with white legs and was to be given the Cretan name for a dog with stockings, Kaltsoni. For a moment the old mischief peeps out. The date is September 16 and Greece is not yet at war.