Villa Ariadne

by Dilys Powell

  There is an old Italian skipper here with two ships who is getting very annoyed at people – I’m afraid at my instigation at first – going up to him and asking how it is that with Italy mistress of the seas, he doesn’t go away!

  There is a touching note of nostalgia. Beneath the gaiety, the adventurousness, the nonchalance in his nature an enduring affection had taken root. The boy had felt it, the man knew it.

  I hope you got the wire on the anniversary of our wedding day (twelve years man and boy bless you!). I went down to Vianos that day and had a stroll on to Amira.

  Then the anxiety. By now he had moved out of the Villa and was established with Kronis as servant in the offices of the British Vice-Consulate in Herakleion. Hilda with the children was in what he hoped was safety in North Wales. But who in those days could be sure? He felt, as many soldiers in the nervous quiet before the storm must have felt, restless; even, though he of all men had no reason to feel it, left out of things. The longing for danger, action, heroism teased him.

  I hope everything has been peaceful in your part of Wales. It’s dreadful sitting here not knowing. I suppose I am doing some good. It makes me very jealous to hear of what people are having the honour to do in England and Africa.

  A month later Metaxas rejected the Italian ultimatum. Greece was at war, and in the bitter winter Greek troops were fighting in the snowy Pindus mountains.

  For John the need for pretence was over. Temperamentally he must have delighted in the excitement of his undercover activities. But he delighted in display too. Now he could take his captain’s uniform out of its box and wear it; the transformation satisfied a certain vanity in him, a pleasure in sartorial show. Or perhaps vanity is too sharp a word. An observer on the spot adds a comment. C. J. Hamson – brother of the late Denys Hamson, who played a gallant part in mainland Resistance, notably the destruction of the Gorgopotamos Bridge – had come to Crete as an SOE officer (later he was to be Professor of Comparative Law at Cambridge); the sartorial display, he writes, ‘had a quality of disarming innocence – a klephtic panache, a Byronic posture: pour encourager les autres, et pour s’encourager un peu soi-même. One could do with all the encouragement one got.’

  Pendlebury had fresh scope now for encouraging. With the entry of Greece into the war he could confer openly with people from his own country, working in his own kind of field – members of SOE among them. But the situation had disadvantages too. Since he was in uniform his ideas for guerilla action were subject to British military authority; for with the changed conditions the British had sent a Military Mission to Crete, and his job was that of Liaison Officer between them and the Greek military authorities. He was convinced that if attacked the island could be successfully defended. He knew the terrain. He knew the people. In the months since his arrival he had been working out a plan. He reckoned that for success – so I am told by Professor Hamson – he needed ten thousand rifles, and in November 1940 he asked for them.

  For the British this was a black moment in the war. London was under nightly air-raids; the country was grimly on the defensive. Arms were needed for Abyssinia. Egypt would be fought for, but an attack on Crete seemed a long way off. Some observers say that had his plan been adopted the island might have been saved. But John, so Hamson believes, lacked the final conviction needed to impose his will upon his superiors. ‘With his authority, his knowledge, he could have insisted. He could have refused to carry on in Crete. If he had insisted he would, I think, have won. He very nearly did win; he very nearly was a great man. He was a greater, certainly, than any I met on the island.’

  He did not get his rifles. Whether those desperate treks in the last months before the attack, those home-comings half-dead with exhaustion marked a struggle against frustration one cannot know. All one can say is that his few surviving letters of the period are all confidence.

  ‘Greece behaving grandly very proud of Crete’ says a telegram; there was a Cretan division fighting in Epirus. But the island itself waited. That Christmas the authorities – ‘they’ – allowed John and his kind to send a free letter home by air mail – ‘but one only and written only on one side’. He sent his message to Hilda but addressed it ‘To all it may concern’; it was a general despatch to his friends. I have seen the letter. It is written on the thinnest, the most transparent of paper, yellowing now, frayed, tattered, almost extinct. But the writer is gaily alive in it, up to his old jokes.

  What a show the Greeks are putting up. Did you see that Mussolini has complained that a) the sword and bayonet are barbarous weapons which only Greeks would use and b) that they have been sending savages from Crete! But I’m sure nothing to the savages that can be sent.

  With the war coming closer he no longer feels out of things. He is active in a new way now, not only tramping the mountains to organise guerilla bands but receiving numerous visits from compatriots; everyone, he says, who comes to Crete has heard of his presence and been instructed to get in touch with him. There has even been an Old Wykehamist dinner. Of the Cretans – his Cretans, already indulging a taste for the brigand aspect which characterised the andartes, the guerilla fighters, during the Occupation of Greece – he writes with amused affectionate delight. ‘All old friends here are going well, either twirling their moustaches (the vine disease got into mine and I had to have it out) or relating catastrophes.’ He is even playing – it is significant in view of what was to happen – a brigandish game of his own. ‘On his more nefarious expeditions,’ a friend reports, ‘he used to take out his glass eye and wear a black eye-patch. He would leave the eye on the table by his bed – if you found it there you knew he was away on some excursion or other.’

  Frustrated or not he must have been enjoying himself. Romance was waiting round the corner. When the time came he would fight beside his island friends with the twirling moustaches; Crete would be his battlefield. And now one sees the man – different from the efficient administrator, the scholar and traveller of the letters to his father, different again from the husband gratefully remembering his wedding aniversary of the letters to Hilda – whom Patrick Leigh Fermor met when Crete was truly threatened at last and John visited the HQ cave outside Herakleion.

  His florid handsome face, his single sparkling eye … his slung guerilla’s rifle and bandolier and his famous swordstick brought a stimulating flash of romance and fun into that khaki gloom.

  A few more months went by before the crisis, and as his round-robin letter shows he wasted no time.

  I have been carried shoulder-high round five towns and villages and have been blessed by two bishops and made a number of inflammatory speeches from balconies.

  Meanwhile the anti-bureaucratic irreverence which had marked all his adult life burst out. His position in Crete was still anomalous. The regular services, as Nicholas Hammond was to point out, had not yet fully recognised the groups of experts to which both he and John belonged. The man on the spot had ‘to win the personal confidence of the local naval and military officers, who at first regarded his nose as false and his schemes as harebrained’. On this level John won the confidence all right. His unique knowledge of the island, his command of language and dialect, the absolute loyalty of his Cretan friends – he was irreplaceable. His relations with higher authorities were acrimonious.

  I am making a grand collection of ‘tickings off’ usually beginning ‘In future you should not repeat not …’ Every Government cypher or code has obviously been made up on the assumption that the recipient of any original either has been, is, or will be doing something wrong. My best rebuke was for using the word ‘bastard’ in a wire to the Minister. In reply I pointed out that as it was in the code book the word was obviously meant to be used, and that the Minister was old enough to know the facts of life and that it was the only word that fitted the individual referred to.

  But the self-felicitating disrespect serves to cover a passionate concern about the war.

  This is hardly a Christmas letter but do know that I am t
hinking of you and hoping that you will have as happy a one as you can. Goodness knows where I shall be. However since we shall win – mainly owing to you people and the Greeks – it doesn’t matter.

  Still, life went on in comparative quiet. Sometimes he fretted over the difficulties of communicating with his family; letters from Hilda in Wales came in batches after long delays and in the wrong order. But the trickle of telegrams with their comments and their scraps of gossip continued. Hilda must have heard some fragmentary wireless despatch: ‘Not me on radio though present,’ he cables back. He is regularly in touch with Knossos, for he relays a message not only from his servant Kronis but from the staff at the Villa: ‘Kosti Manoli Maria all send love to you and children.’

  Meanwhile the Squire and his mother pursue their calm career. There are occasional visitors to the Palace, the Villa and the Taverna must be attended to, and the Committee of the School, so far as one can make out, never reflect that with war blazing in the Mediterranean Crete is a risky refuge for an elderly lady suffering, as Mrs Hutchinson suffered, from severe rheumatoid arthritis.

  Not that either the Squire or his mother would for a moment have considered leaving unless obliged. Years afterwards I asked him what they had proposed to do if the war reached Crete. ‘Oh’, he said airily, ‘my mother would have gone up to the mountains.’ In the meantime he went on being Curator of Knossos. The references in John’s letters, however, show that he also travelled about the island. Was he, I asked once, engaged on some kind of official job? Not exactly, said the Squire. But there was his work with the Cable and Wireless representatives in Herakleion. And on John’s behalf he was doing a certain amount of reconnoitring as well.

  By 1941 the telegrams were growing scarcer, but early in March there was a reassuring message: ‘Can again cable all well delay unavoidable.’ A few days later a letter came. ‘My own darling’, it began; after thirteen years of marriage all his letters to Hilda began with an evidence of devotion which from his outward manner one might not have divined. It had the usual ending: ‘With all my love from your loving husband.’ He was, he said, still getting letters from home written in September and October; obviously he longed for news. Had the publication of Karphi, his dig at the Lasithi fortress-site, come out yet? Were his staff allowances and pay as Captain, to which since his despatch to the Middle East he had been entitled, being properly credited to his bank account? How were Evans (‘little Arthur’), Myres, Mercy Money-Coutts ‘and all the vogue of yesteryear’? He had given up trying to keep a diary because for the present so much had ‘to stay unwritten’. He had nearly but not quite got over his fears of caïques ‘but not of rowing boats’ – a feeling which will be shared by many people with experience of the Aegean or the Cretan Sea. His letters, he admitted, had been irregular, but so had his life. Occasionally, though, he managed ‘to get a peaceful day up at the Villa and have a bath’.

  Questions, messages, fragments of news – the last paragraph had a warning note. ‘At present we seem as safe as you, though by the time this gets to you we may not be so!’ The date was March 7. There was still nearly a month to go before Germany joined Italy in the attack on Greece and sent in tanks from the north. But John recognised the approach of trouble. He had, it seems, from the start intended, whatever happened, to stay in Crete and lead the Resistance; ‘He never’, Nicholas Hammond wrote, ‘talked as if any other course was possible.’ As Hammond has remarked, this was very much a personal decision.

  … On the Greek mainland, where plans for forming nuclei for guerilla warfare were too late to be effective, it was not intended that English personnel should remain behind; nor, so far as I know, was this either contemplated or done in Yugoslavia. John’s plan was therefore original and daring, and given his personal qualities as a leader in a limited area with a more or less homogeneous population the plan was full of promise. It required more resolution in an Englishman to stay behind voluntarily and be submerged by the German tide than to return later as many did when the ebb was likely to set in. But for John the choice did not exist; he felt himself a Cretan and in Crete he would stay until victory was won.

  At last there was to be no watching from the sidelines. Ahead of him John saw the romantic adventure which had lived in his imagination – dangerous, bloody, but to be entered upon in the company of people who trusted him: a noble adventure, a debt of honour to his friends, perhaps to himself. After March 7, 1941, no more letters came; perhaps there was no time for letters. But there was one more cable. It was dated March 17. Did he feel that the adventure was to be both his crown and his finale? Hilda believed that he knew he was going to be killed. Certainly the last words of his last cable, the last words she ever had from him, were valedictory. ‘Love’ he wrote ‘and adieu.’

  From that moment the stream of letters, telegrams, reports, the jokes, the anecdotes, the accounts of everyday life, the records of exploration, the timetables, the traveller’s tales in the minuscule handwriting with the tiny spidery illustrative maps, everything stops, and a life so precisely documented suddenly becomes a matter of other people’s memories.

  viii

  On April 6, three weeks after John’s last telegram, Germany moved into Yugoslavia and Greece. By April 22 the Greek armies in Epirus and Macedonia had been forced to surrender, and a day later, with the British and Commonwealth troops in retreat and headed for evacuation, the Greek Government announced that it had moved to Crete.

  Suddenly Knossos was in the thick of things. The Greek King arrived at the Villa Ariadne, where he slept in one of the stone-floored basement bedrooms which Evans had built against the heat of Cretan summers. His agreeable friend Mrs Brittain-Jones and his sister the Princess Katherine had lodged themselves at Neapolis in Eastern Crete, but almost immediately joined him; his servants found rooms in the village. The Squire, calm as ever, took the opportunity of showing the party round the Palace; Otto, the royal dachshund, celebrated the occasion by nosing out on the site a family of hedgehogs. But soon, with German troops already in Athens, the women were hurried to Egypt and the King moved on to Canea; and from there, accompanied by the British Minister, the Greek Prime Minister and a group of New Zealanders, he undertook the tough and indeed risky trek across the White Mountains to the south coast and eventual exile.

  By now the pressure of events was getting too much for even the Hutchinsons, and on April 30 they left the Palace, the Villa and the Taverna for the duration. They were to be taken off by destroyer. That night they went down to the harbour at Herakleion. Mrs Hutchinson did not feel inclined for unfamiliar company, and while her son dined at the Officers’ Club John Pendlebury stayed to talk with her. When the time came to say goodbye he made another valedictory gesture. He had £10 in English money; he gave it to the Squire, who later in the war used it to send parcels to prisoners in Germany. That was the last of their exchanges. The rendezvous was with a destroyer about a quarter of a mile away. In the April night a launch took the English pair out; Hutchinson recalled with amusement that when they reached the ship he was the only person who had any sort of light to signal with. Somehow the arthritic but indomitable Mrs Hutchinson was got up the usual rope-ladder. The party were aboard; beleaguered Crete faded in the distance; and the journey began to Alexandria, to Port Said, at last to Cairo, where the Squire settled down to work for the rest of the war.

  The story is now taken up by Nicholas Hammond, who was in the group which left England in the June of 1940 but who was refused permission to land in Greece and went on to Egypt and later to Palestine and Cyprus. After the war he contributed to a memoir privately printed for Hilda and John’s father; and it is mainly on this memoir that I rely for the interval, or at least much of the interval, between John’s March cable and the Battle of Crete.

  After the voyage to the Middle East Hammond had heard reports from Naval Intelligence officers in Alexandria of Pendlebury’s efficiency and resource. At last – it was in March 1941 – he was himself allowed into Greece. He was stirr
ingly and heroically involved in the retreat to the southward-looking ports; reached the Cretan naval harbour of Souda Bay; joined the company of HMS Dolphin, an armed caïque captained by Mike Cumberlege, another of the adventurous heroes of the war in the Mediterranean; and on arriving at Herakleion went up from the harbour to see John. It was the first time they had met since June 1940. John, he writes,

  had a much clearer sense of impending crisis than we whose nerves had relaxed after experiencing the evacuation from Greece … The loss of the entire Cretan division in Epirus, as a result of the Greek armistice, was particularly galling and he spoke of it with the same warmth as the Cretan people, who had approved the assassination near Canea of the divisional commander for escaping without his men. If only the older generation of Cretans could be armed, they would give a good account of themselves; but the arms were not available, and even his own men, who were organised for guerilla warfare in the event of Crete being overrun, were far from adequately armed.

  Nevertheless John, in spite of the frustrations which beset him, looked to the future with the mixture of resolution and robust gaiety which Patrick Leigh Fermor saw on the occasion of that visit to the headquarters cave. He had already made a reconnaissance raid on Kasos, the nearest of the Dodecanese islands. Now with Cumberlege and the Dolphin crew he planned an operational raid to bring back Italian prisoners and perhaps learn what preparations were in hand for an invasion of Crete.

  There were matters to be cleared up first. The Dolphin party had the job of finding beaches suitable for landing troops and supplies on the south coast of Crete; and Cumberlege for his part was already looking for concealed inlets handy for bringing in small groups should the island be completely overrun. John drove with the explorers from Herakleion to the top of the hill where, midway across Crete, you look towards Gortyna, Phaistos, Hagia Triada and the Mesara plain; discussed his own scheme for mining this strategic road; suggested sites to be considered; and left the party with an introduction to one of his own men – ‘Pendlebury’s thugs’, as more conventional belligerents called them.