by Dilys Powell
The visitor then had a cross with name and details set up in the cemetery. Not until after the war, however, did the body of John Pendlebury come to a final resting-place in the British military cemetery at Canea.
At the time of Hilda’s visit to Crete in 1947 there had been much talk of commissioning a bust of Pendlebury. An executive committee had been appointed with the Metropolitan of Crete as observer; information was to be collected and an estimate drawn up; and the bust when finished would stand in the gardens of the Herakleion Museum. Meanwhile an imposing wooden cross marked the hillside at Kaminia where the Englishman’s sudden appearance in battle had so much startled Polybios Markatatos. Captain John Pendlebury, said the inscription: ‘He fell fighting the 21/5/41.’ To squeeze ‘fighting’ into the upright bar of the cross the Greek word had with touching casualness been split and hyphenated. A memorial service was held there early that March. Prayers for the repose of the soul of John Pendlebury were chanted by the Metropolitan and his assistant; the Mayor of Herakleion placed a wreath; and the company included the Prefect, the Chief of Herakleion Police, several generals, an assortment of archaeological representatives, members of the Resistance movement and a party of John’s Cretan brothers-in-arms. Aristea and Theonymphe were there too, and behind Hilda in the photograph one can see among the eminent and the learned the figure of Kronis Vardakis, ‘the faithful muleteer’, as she wrote on the back, ‘of so many journeys’. Still more people, the Squire said drily, would have turned up if it had not been announced that the service would be in church; only at the last minute was it transferred to Kaminia.
When long afterwards I went to look the cross had gone. The outskirts of Herakleion were changing: houses being built, factories beginning to sprawl over the slopes. On a later visit the deserted cottage, the crumbling walls once stained by battle, they too had vanished. Forgetfulness was washing over the landscape; no bust of John was to be seen in the Museum gardens or anywhere else. But his name was remembered.
The year was 1959. In Rethymnon I had called on a former member of the Resistance, Theocharis Saridhakis. Two days later – two days of travelling by purgatorial bus and by donkey – I reached a remote village; I had letters to a Cretan who was to give me lodgings and act as guide next morning. He was away; he had gone, though in the opposite direction, to Rethymnon; but he would be back. At last he arrived and I gave him my letters. To my alarm he had a letter for me. I tore it open. It was from Saridhakis. ‘The day you left,’ it said, ‘I wrote this song for the hero John Pendlebury; perhaps I will publish it on the anniversary of the Battle of Crete as a memorial to him.’
The poem, in rhyming four-line stanzas, celebrated John’s work for Cretan archaeology and his fight for Cretan liberty. You earned, it said, the laurel wreath, your friends are happy in the belief that you sleep with the smile of triumph on your lips. But those wolves, it went on, grunting sought you out even in the tomb. ‘They plunder your sacred corpse and though you are dead THEY SHOOT YOU AGAIN.’
The Pendlebury legend was still alive.
i
‘HERE AM I, still alive,’ Evans is reported to have said, ‘and that young man with all his promise is gone.’ It was the summer of 1941, and the tales of John Pendlebury’s death already seemed only too well founded.
For the second time Evans had been cut off by war from Crete, from Knossos and the Villa which many of us still could not help thinking of as his personal estate. Now the break was final. He had just undergone an operation, the second in three years. Not that he had stopped working. A Roman road crossing his property had been discovered, and when friends called they found him sitting – Myres describes the occasion – in his library at Youlbury.
On his knees was a well-used Ordnance map, showing his Roman road, and in reply to a question he showed the fair-copy of his account of it, and said brightly, ‘It is finished, it will go to Oxoniensia.’ It was his last contribution to learning.
The visitors had come to congratulate him on his birthday; he was ninety years old. Three days later he was dead. Joan Evans has recorded that once when he was asked about his beliefs he answered, ‘I believe in human happiness.’ It was as good an epitaph as any for his life of confident endeavour.
But human happiness, particularly at Knossos, found the going hard during the next few years.
Under the Hutchinson régime the Villa Ariadne had preserved during the first eighteen months of the war a vague scholarly calm. Neither the tasks of counter-espionage hinted at in the Squire’s reminiscences nor the occasion of an expedition to deliver arms to some loyal village or other ever quite broke that quiet surface. Even the visit of the Royal fugitives from Athens, dachshund and all, was accepted, at any rate by the Hutchinsons, with composure; and according to the Report of the British School the King and the Princess ‘expressed their appreciation of the beauty and comfort’ of the house. How did Kosti and the rest of the Villa staff take it all? I asked the Squire once. Oh, he said in his usual equable tones, they seemed to manage all right.
After the night of April 30 and the reluctant departure by destroyer of the two Hutchinsons the place was left without a Curator. But Manolaki as overseer and Kosti as house manager ‘gallantly’ says the Report ‘remained at their posts, and undertook to hand over the keys to HBM Consul, M. Elliadhi, when the Villa ceased to be occupied by the British or Greek authorities’. It was occupied all right. When the airborne invasion began the house was used as a British military hospital; soon it was taking in German wounded also. Once it was shelled by a German mortar, but the damage was not grave. Presently, when Crete was wholly German-controlled and it became clear that there was to be no handing the keys over to the British Consul just yet, Kosti went back to his village in the hills; that at any rate is where he spent most of the Occupation and where I found him long afterwards.
Manolaki’s story takes a different course.
A little before the turn of the century Manolis Akoumianakis had come from Yerakari in the Amari district among the western foothills of Mount Ida. He was a boy when he left his village; according to one of his sisters he was no more than fifteen. Yerakari is known for its cherry-crop – in particular morello cherries, which Greeks preserve and use to make a cool summer drink called visinádha; Manolaki, as he was called, came to Herakleion with cherries to sell. He did not go back to Yerakari. As Pendlebury found on taking him on an expedition to Amari, he rarely went back.
It was about the time when Arthur Evans had at last succeeded in buying land at Knossos for excavation. Presently the boy went to have a look at the dig. He was interested, he asked for a job, and together with the Maria who later became one of Evans’s servants at the Villa he was set to washing and cleaning the sherds which the excavation was producing. He soon showed that he was quick at distinguishing the different shapes and types of the fragmentary vases in his hands; and Evans, recognising the gifts of the young workman, put him in charge of the group of sherd-cleaners.
Clearly Knossos was the place for Manolaki; there he would settle, marry and bring up a family of seven children, sons and daughters. He had the instinct for archaeology sometimes found among shrewd and perceptive Greek country people. As one might expect the record is threaded with myth. One night, the story goes, he woke, got out of bed and went to look for a spade. Startled, his wife asked what he was doing. ‘I have had a dream,’ he said. ‘I must go up the hill and dig.’ Dreams of buried treasure are part of Greek folk-lore (and not only Greek). I cannot even say how much was previously known about the tiny Byzantine sanctuary called Hagia Paraskevi. But he did in fact carry out an excavation there. He was, you might say, an archaeologist in his own right.
Working for Evans, he was in time promoted to foreman. I have been told that when the moment came to build the Villa Ariadne he was sent to Athens to buy palms and shrubs for the garden. As the years went by his employer came to rely on him (in an exasperated mood a Cretan, remembering perhaps some high-handed British action, once s
aid to me: ‘I think he was Evans’s only friend in Crete’). When the excavation of Knossos was halted by the First War – I have the information from Micky, his eldest son, whom I had seen as a child carrying messages on the Fortetsa dig – it was Manolaki who diligently cared for the Palace and the Villa. And Micky says that as a boy he read letters to his father in which Evans gave instructions for the maintenance of the property. But war, which destroys so much, did not spare these small records, and they were lost when in the 1940s Knossos and the Villa were German-occupied.
By the time I first visited Crete Manolaki was a respected and well-known local figure. Indeed long before I ever went there I had heard praise of him from Humfry, who had not forgotten that in 1927 as a novice in excavation he had owed much to his foreman. Manolaki possessed the experience in field archaeology which Humfry lacked. He gave the newcomer some tips which, though science may by now have outdistanced them, were certainly useful then: how to judge from the soil and the vegetation the possibilities of an unexplored site. And Humfry drew for me a portrait which I fondly set against the background of my golden Knossos and the legendary Villa which I had imagined. I saw a tutelary figure climbing hillsides white and powdering in the sun. He was always a little ahead; now and then he stopped to prod a dry patch of earth or tug at some obstinately rooted plant. I had never seen a man’s Cretan costume, but I had been told about the cut of the breeches, and in my picture the voluminous pleats over the buttocks wagged steadily as the figure climbed. When he turned to his companion his face, bearded like the face of some bronze Zeus, was immensely benevolent.
When I met him in life I thought I had not been so far out. We exchanged greetings on that short first visit to Crete; of the occasion I recall a shrewd smiling face, a slightly grizzled moustache and an attitude of tolerant respect. Later, in the summers when Humfry and Alan and, in the second season, James Brock were digging I could watch him more closely.
He was in his fifties; to me he looked ageless. The face, wrinkled and walnut-coloured from sun and wind, with its vertically lined cheeks and the deep furrows of the forehead, was set in a mould of ironic amusement; he was, I felt, an observer. And at a time when regional Greek costume, especially in the more sophisticated villages, was beginning to lose ground to the drab suits of Western Europe, he stuck to Cretan dress – the huge bunchy breeches, the waistcoat with the decorative fringe of bobbles, the cummerbund and the high boots; in summer when I knew him best he always wore a wide-brimmed straw hat. Whether he ever thought of putting on conventional urban clothes I cannot say. Evans, I have been told, liked him to wear Cretan costume; it suited, I dare say, the feudal picture which the discoverer had of his domain. Anyhow Manolaki never changed his style. For formal occasions he would simply appear in the splendid braided, red-lined cloak which is Cretan festive dress. His children would adopt the ways of Western Europe; but not he.
Evans used to call him the Cretan wolf. Listening to the distant voice, ‘The wolf is howling,’ he would say. I never heard the voice raised. I was conscious, though, of an absolute self-confidence in Manolaki. He was reputed to have saved a tidy sum of money in his years as foreman. Certainly he was ambitious for his children. In Greece the professional classes are no more than one step away from the villages; Micky was educated as a lawyer. But at the dig Manolaki kept the look and the manner of a Cretan countryman.
On those July afternoons when I left the cool of the Villa and walked to the excavation I used to find him in cheerful charge of the workmen. Humfry and Alan and James stood by the tomb-chamber where the painted vases with the ashes of the dead had been stacked; sometimes among the objects deposited in the cinerary pithoi small decorative vases would be found, or scarabs, or daggers, or pins of silver or bronze or iron. Since Alan was lame a mule waited to carry him back to the Villa; its long ears added their shadow to the patterns of leaves and branches. Manolaki, smiling under his straw hat, saluted me amiably, then turned back to the job in hand. The afternoons were pale with sun; yet, moving without haste in his heavy clothes, he never looked hot. The scene with the waiting mule and the men shovelling the earth in the shade of the olives had an air of endless peace.
In 1935 we all left for England at the end of July. I had no special ties with Knossos, and though after Humfry’s death in the following year I went back to Greece several times before the outbreak of war I did not visit Crete. It was not until 1941 and the airborne invasion that I began thinking again about the people at the Villa.
ii
The Akoumianakis family were deeply involved in the war. Two of the sons were in the armed forces. Micky was serving on the Albanian front. His brother Minos was in the Navy; a prisoner of war for a year, he later escaped from Crete and trained in Southern Rhodesia for the Greek Air Force. Manolaki himself was among the Cretans with whom John Pendlebury was planning the organisation of a guerilla force; so much one knows. But the need for secrecy under which John was working meant that much of the plan and many of the names are not recorded. Manolaki’s story I have pieced together as best I could from the memories of his children.
On the day of the invasion the Akoumianakis family saw parachutists dropping in the direction of the Herakleion airfield. It was afternoon. The first attack was concentrated on the Canea district, and through a mysterious failure in communications the defenders of Herakleion had until 3 p.m. no idea that the battle was on and had been on since early morning. No doubt even the ancient masonry, even the restorations of the Palace of Minos looked safer than a house in the village of Knossos. At any rate it was among the pillars and walls of the site that Mrs Akoumianakis and her children spent the first night.
Less than a month went by between the surrender of the Greek armies on the mainland and the airborne attack on Crete, and amidst the confusion of the German advance and the British evacuation there can have been small chance of accurate news about individual soldiers. But somehow the story had seeped back to Knossos: Micky had been killed. It was, then, believing that his cherished, his first-born son was dead that Manolaki prepared to fight. I fancy that like John Pendlebury he did not think of a future; he had committed himself to death. But first he had to see to the safety of his family. In the hills seven or eight miles to the south there was a village called Katalagari where Mrs Akoumianakis had relations; he would send them there. And his daughter Phyllia – she was presently to give proof enough of cool courage – refused to go.
Thirty years later her sister Evangelia described the scene to me. ‘My father implored her. “I beg you,” he said – he had tears in his eyes – “I beg you, do me this last favour.”’ At last she was persuaded. Manolaki despatched his wife and children to Katalagari. Now he could make ready for action.
iii
When the assault on Crete began Greeks who, survivors of the surrendered armies in Epirus and Macedonia, had evaded capture were already straggling homewards. Among them was Micky Akoumianakis.
It was not an easy journey for any of the islanders; especially not for the Cretans. The sea crossing was long. There could be no open transport. Everything had to be done in secret. Nevertheless, when the Battle of Crete was over, singly or in little groups, dangerously, by caïque, some of them were trickling back. Micky reached Knossos in July. He had landed somewhere east of Rethymnon; it was the middle of the night. He had had no news of his parents; in his anxiety he began almost to run towards Knossos. About four hours later he was nearly there. Ahead of him on the path he could see a boy; it was his youngest brother Alex. When the boy saw Micky he burst into tears.
‘They have killed father,’ he said.
iv
From the Palace of Minos you look east across the valley of the Kairatos to pale chalky heights; climbing, you reach a plateau, dry, featureless, here and there softened by patches of cultivated land. It commands the road from Herakleion southwards; important to the defence of the island, it was the scene of a forlorn skirmish in the Battle of Crete.
It was Phyllia
– she was a girl still in her teens – who when the fighting had died down and families were returning to their homes went up the hill to look for her father. She found him lying on his face; he was dead. A little earth from the explosions of battle was scattered over his body and its Cretan clothes. His hands were at his sides, slightly curled, palms upward. One hand still held his summer straw hat.
For some time the Cretans were forbidden by the Germans to bury those civilians who had taken up arms against the invader. Phyllia tried to cover her father’s body with earth. Later, a party of Greeks under the direction of Germans from the hospital which had been established in the Villa Ariadne came up the hill, perhaps to search for wounded, perhaps to bury German dead; and they finished what Phyllia had begun. But there was still no question of a proper burial. The days, the weeks went by.
‘You know’, Micky, telling the story, said to me, ‘that in our church we have a service forty days after the death.’ When he came home it was not forty, it was forty-four days after; and as eldest son he felt called on to perform an act of piety. He must attend to the burial.
There had been no rain in the weeks since Manolaki had been killed; so nothing he had carried with him was damaged. His watch and his money were untouched; even the keys of the Villa and its storehouses were there. In the pocket Micky found a letter. It was from John Pendlebury; it was dated May 21, the second day of the airborne assault; John was wounded later that day. The Englishman had recognised the military value of the ridge above the valley, and he asked Manolaki to go to Skalani, a village a mile or two south-east of Knossos; to collect armed supporters; and to hold the plateau against the enemy. But the letter, it seems, came too late. The Germans had already occupied the heights.