Villa Ariadne

by Dilys Powell

  I had heard of the welcome of the Cretan mountains, I had read about the generosity with which the British in the war had been sheltered and entertained. Now I saw for myself something of what it must have been like. I thought of Tom on his first reconnaissance trip over Ida and the meeting with the guerilla leaders celebrated, high on the mountain, with wine and the roasting of a sheep. I thought of him with Paddy and Xan Fielding on their four-day Christmas feast in the Amari villages. There was no longer the background of danger. But the food was the same, the rough gaiety was the same. Even the faces were the same. A passage from the past was being re-created.

  Then the moment of illumination passed. We were saying goodbye and taking messages which in England we should forget to deliver; we were stumbling downhill towards the place where our driver of the morning was to meet us. Michael had been called aside to advise in an argument. Two young people wanted to marry, but their parents had quarrelled; he was needed to arbitrate. He caught us up as we were passing a flock of sheep; half their number looked mournfully out from under red-branded foreheads. What, somebody asked, does the red mark mean?

  ‘Those,’ said Michael, ‘are the ones to be slaughtered.’

  One needed, perhaps, the reminder that life is rarely romantic for long.

  vi

  At Anoyia, after a drink under the plane tree with village elders and sociable citizens in dark suits, we shook hands all round, at his request left Michael behind, and drove homewards; George and a younger Xylouris, one of the ubiquitous cousins, crammed into the front, Mr Hurst, Micky and I sat thoughtful at the back.

  Why are you so silent? George asked, turning round, is something wrong? No, no, nothing wrong. But you are silent! We are tired, we said, after our walk. To relieve the tedium he set the car’s record-player going. ‘Get up, get up and dance!’ the disc urged. George is a very good dancer, said Micky, he is a champion.

  It was nine o’clock when we reached Herakleion. Disinclined, after the long exhausting day, to eat, I had a welcome glass of whisky with Mr Hurst at his hotel; paid, though he civilly demurred, my share of the car; and caught the bus back to Knossos. I made my way to the Villa to find Manoli and Ourania sitting up in the kitchen. What a pity, they lamented, that I had missed the show. Many visitors had come, many foreigners, and the Minoan play was beautiful; it had been a great day for the Villa. Then I arranged for an early breakfast, said goodnight and went down the dark garden to the Taverna. A solitary visitor, I unlocked the door and went in to the stealthy house. The owls were still calling in the pines as I plummeted into sleep.

  i

  THERE WAS SOMETHING dream-like in those few days spent at the Taverna. Before the war it had always been in the Villa itself that we stayed. The Taverna was for the Curator to live in, and though in the summers when Humfry and Alan Blakeway and James Brock were digging nothing stopped me from visiting the house at the end of the garden I always thought of it as strictly an archaeologist’s preserve. I suppose I must have looked in at some time or other. It no longer held for me the mystery which, enveloping the whole of the Evans domain in Crete, had made the very word Taverna enigmatic. In the lethargic summer days I walked past it every afternoon. But it still kept its distance. I was never on familiar terms with it.

  Now it was handed over entirely to me. At night amidst the scent of honeysuckle I climbed the steps to the verandah and took the key from its hiding-place. In my bedroom, two beds, a cupboard, shelves, a chair, a table, a wash-hand stand, a bit of carpet, an electric lamp by the bed. On the floor beneath, the kitchen and another room; there at ground level one went out to the courtyard and the door to the road. The whitewashed wall with its drapery of morning glory deflected the sound of traffic, and I slept without hearing the buses or the occasional lorry from Herakleion.

  In the morning Ourania brought a tray with tea, bread, butter and (mistakenly supposing that no English visitor could begin the day without it) a large, freshly opened jar of marmalade; everything was tranquil, orderly. In the library I recognised the archaeological books I had seen on shelves for half my life. On the walls, Arthur Evans as a young man, holding a vase; a photograph of his friend the American archaeologist Seager; a replica of a splendid steatite head of a Minoan bull. On the verandah where one looked out to the wire-enclosed patch of garden with the tall dry grass, the fading hollyhocks and the pithoi half-nourishing a few dark crimson geraniums there were the baskets of sherds inseparable from all archaeological residences. A little way beyond, a broken statue, the draped figure of a woman, stood in front of an outhouse, a workshop. Yes, it was an archaeologist’s preserve all right.

  But its status, and the status of the Villa of which it was an appendage, had changed.

  ii

  The signing of the German surrender did not quite end the rôle of the Villa Ariadne in the story of the war. Tom Dunbabin, having with Dr Yamalakis and the faithful band of Cretans checked less amiable elements in the guerilla movement by occupying the house, was presently installed there; he was among the officers appointed, in the aftermath of battle, for the protection of ancient monuments. The Palace, he reported to the Committee of the British School, needed ‘some repairs’. As for the Villa itself, though one could hardly have expected it to be immaculate there was general agreement that the German military had been careful enough tenants. Later on Piet de Jong told me that they had behaved with the utmost correctness, avoiding disturbance and, if they commandeered furniture from the village, scrupulously giving receipts – of which when the war was over the Cretans, he said, took full advantage. And between April 1946 and September 1947 the house was lived in by the Liaison Officer to the British Military Mission in Crete, and room was found also for a number of other Army and Air Force officers.

  The Squire, whose departure from Crete with his mother had been so reluctant and so precipitate, was kept late on war service in Egypt. He was still Curator of Knossos, he was longing to get back. At last he was allowed to make the trip; it was not long before his report on finds made ‘during agricultural operations in 1940’ bore witness to the tenacity of archaeological preoccupations. His appointment was extended; from the autumn of 1946 he was to be Curator for another three years. But a year later he resigned. In his final season at Knossos (it was six years since at Herakleion harbour John Pendlebury had taken farewell of the Hutchinsons) he showed himself a steadfast friend to Hilda Pendlebury on her one and only return to Crete. He was with her in her search for witnesses; he was with her at the enquiries into her husband’s last living days and at the memorial service on the hillside at Kaminia. Then he too left the island, retired to Cambridge – or rather to Harston, a few miles outside the city – and settled in the house which had been his home since childhood.

  When I visited him there his mother – a formidable woman by all accounts – was dead, and he was living alone in a state of academic disorder as endearing as it was incurable. The gate of the tangled front garden stood open; one had the sense of an abandoned orchard somewhere behind the slatey Victorian cube of the house. There was a damp breath of ice as one crossed the threshold. But the Squire exuded the warmth of a man who felt he was cushioned in comfort. Remote in the farther of two rooms opening to make one a tiny electric fire burned; when we moved in its direction for lunch I should not have been surprised if he had suggested turning the thing off to spare me from over-heating. We ate from a table half of which was laid with a doubled cloth. The other half was piled with books and papers; around us shelves, chairs, tops of furniture were stacked with periodicals, their edges brown with dust.

  ‘She cooks’ (that invisible She of the scholar’s bachelor establishment) ‘she cooks a joint for me sometimes,’ he said contentedly. ‘I think’ (sawing at a warmed-up disc) ‘this is veal.’

  And perhaps it was. I would not have risked judgement. But I knew that he was opening for me a treasured bottle of retsina. And as with enjoyment and a sense of drama he talked about Crete and the Villa and the approac
h of war, as his long serious face was illuminated by memory, I was affected myself. I began to feel happily warm. In fact I nearly missed my bus back to Cambridge, and should have missed it had he not rushed into the road, elbows and knees working in the action of a runner out of practice, to stop it for me. I could see that his long legs would have been at ease on those mountain walks with John Pendlebury.

  The Squire’s retirement to Cambridge had left the Villa Ariadne without superintendence. But another figure from the past history of the domain reappeared. Though Piet de Jong had worked with many archaeological enterprises, his distinguished work linked him especially with Knossos. Now he was appointed Curator. And to Piet and his resourceful wife Effie fell the job of restoring to order not only the Palace but the whole estate.

  In the 1930s anybody from England who spent any time in Athens was bound to hear of Effie de Jong. Piet I knew from the start of my days in Greece, and his amused ironic presence was one of the sociable pleasures when Humfry was excavating on the mainland at Perachora. And from report and talk one was aware of his wife as somebody to be reckoned with in the British colony. Ah, Effie de Jong, people would say, she speaks Greek so well, you know; yes, you’ll be seeing her. But it was a little time before I met her. For a whole season, perhaps, instead of coming out to Greece she would stay alone at the cottage in the Norwich neighbourhood which was her home base. The de Jongs were unruffled by the long separations enforced by work which took Piet to quarters in Corinth, or Crete, or Turkey, or the expedition tents near the Perachora lighthouse.

  Nevertheless they were in some ways the most married couple I can remember. Avid observers of human eccentricities, they complemented one another. Piet, describing in the unwavering tones of his Yorkshire upbringing some incident, some character, was a spellbinder; his eyes behind the studious-looking spectacles would glint with mischievous pleasure in his own performance. And when he was with Effie he still described and enjoyed the remembered absurdity. But subtly he deferred to her reminiscences and anecdotes. One felt that he was proud of her and that she relied on his enjoyment; the pair of them glimmered quietly together.

  She looked like a homely little Scottish body; fading brown hair, short bunchy figure. But she could be formidably cynical, and the soft, precise, deliberate Scottish voice emanating from that unspectacular figure sometimes made her comments all the more appalling. ‘Oh,’ she said once, listening, after the Battle of Crete, to a romanticised account of some local hero’s honoured grave, ‘oh, I thought the dogs ate him.’ And from Piet, looking down his long, delicate, enquiring nose, came a subterranean murmur of laughter.

  In spite of this unsentimental turn of mind the de Jongs were kind. They were good friends; I think with gratitude of a cosseted week-end spent, at a time when I badly needed it, in their Norfolk cottage. It was an occasion which displayed their self-sufficiency. I will not swear that they actually drew water from a well, but I recall two people living quiet, solitary, economical, completely contented lives. Effie in the kitchen and the garden, Piet in his garage-workroom at a treasured lathe – I had the impression of a devoted practicality.

  It was a quality they were going to need at Knossos. The estate which Evans had bestowed on the School had understandably deteriorated. The olives were in fair shape, so was one of the two vineyards, but the other, neglected, had been given over to barley. Though structurally the buildings and, largely no doubt as a result of Professor Platon’s foresight, the Palace itself had survived the war, everything needed cleaning, tidying, rehabilitating. A start had been made. Recovery, though, needed time. Piet and Effie took up the job in the December of 1947. The house, the fields and the garden began to revive. As early as 1948 things were far enough advanced for the King and Queen of the Hellenes to visit Knossos, where they ‘took tea’, as the Report of the School reverently records, ‘at the Villa Ariadne’. The Palace was repaired, the routine of archaeological life was restored. Each year small-scale excavations were carried out.

  But changes were taking place in the outside world. Archaeology, once regarded with suspicion by a strict academic society which preferred textual evidence to the testimony and the aesthetics of excavation, was becoming fashionable. The number of students applying for admission to the British School swelled. Financially it was growing difficult to keep up a large establishment in Crete as well as in Athens. Most disquieting of all was the responsibility for the Palace. The fees charged for entrance went to the Greek authorities while the British School paid for keeping the site in order. Evans’s restorations were stoutly built, but there was always the fear – one had felt it before the war, in Humfry’s day as Director – that the walls and the handsome columns of painted cement would come crashing down in an earthquake. By 1951 the Committee had made a painful decision. They offered the Villa, the Taverna, the Palace site and the estate to the Greek Archaeological Service.

  The Greeks could hardly refuse the gift of a bit of Greece. The offer was accepted. The British would be allowed to use the Taverna indefinitely as a house where their students and their excavators could stay. But the Palace of Minos on its rounded hill, that soil wrested from obstructive Mahometans half a century earlier, would be surrendered. There would be no Curator haunted by the fear of a disease of the vines or a failure of the olive crop. The Villa would cease to be a foreign enclave.

  The de Jongs had the task of dismantling – a task likely in any country, and especially in Crete with its genius for fabrication, to stir rumour. As I had been told, Effie spoke Greek with enviable assurance and with none of the fumbling for a gender or a case-ending which affects less confident foreigners. Whether or not she spoke with absolute correctness she was immediately understood. But she did not like the Cretans. And though they liked Piet they did not like her. Perhaps they were conscious of her feelings. She was, they said, using a colloquial Greek word, very nervy.

  The de Jongs set about clearing the Villa. The library was moved into the Taverna; so was some of the furniture. A few pieces were sent to Athens, a few were left in the house. The tedious and thankless job was done with the efficiency which characterised both Piet and Effie. But nothing prevented the birth of a malevolent local myth, and one or two of the more cantankerous among the Villa hangers-on insisted that the de Jongs were selling up the place. A decade later I was to hear the story – and with embellishments.

  In 1952 the keys of the Villa were handed over, and Effie was included in the Committee’s acknowledgement of its debt to the Curator, as a result of whose ‘energy, perseverance and careful husbandry’ the neglected estate and the buildings had been transformed and the Palace recovered from the traces of war. ‘Proud to hand over to the Greek Archaeological Service a site which bears such evidence of skilled administration and scholarly care’ – the School’s expressions of gratitude read like a citation. And indeed the end of a famous campaign had been reached. At last the deed of transfer was formally signed, and the house and the land where the great Evans had celebrated so many triumphs passed out of the hands of his countrymen. It was 1955 – almost half a century since he had planned and built and named the Villa Ariadne.

  iii

  Melancholy shadowed the surrender of the outpost of adventurous scholarship. The School felt it. Many of the Cretans felt it, in particular those who had known Evans and had been connected, in however modest a capacity, with his work at Knossos. A great mistake, several of them remarked glumly to me when in 1958 I first went back to the Villa, to part with the place. Naturally the former servants of the estate were especially despondent. They had worked all their lives at the Villa. Why should they stop now? After all, they said stubbornly, the British School had not stopped digging.

  Manoli, as a matter of fact, was still in employment. Whenever the British carried out excavations at Knossos he now worked as foreman. And with their two children he and Ourania, who acted as cook, were allowed to go on living in the servants’ quarters. He was not consoled. I thought of him as I had k
nown him before the war, a good-looking dark boy in black trousers and white shirt serving, deftly enough, at table. Reappearing at Knossos after more than two decades, I saw a middle-aged man with blunted features, a moustache, deep wrinkles round the eyes; the grey check shirt dusty and torn by work on the site; on his head a peasant’s straw hat, the wide brim saucer-shaped, frayed. I was hailed, of course, as belonging to the glorious past of the Villa. I was ‘one of the old ones’; I would understand. And though I knew well enough that the School Committee with cramped funds had done what it felt possible, giving each retiring employee a lump sum, I found it hard not to be affected by the laments of the Knossos dependants.

  The absence of a pension was the first complaint. Manoli had others. For many of the people who had helped during the war, he said, Tom Dunbabin had found jobs. There had been jobs in banks, jobs in Athens or Herakleion, and he would have done better to snatch at such a chance. Instead he had remained at the Villa. Tom had said someone was needed who knew the place, Tom had asked him to stay; and he had stayed. Had he taken a job elsewhere he might have been entitled to a State pension. Now he had no pension, nobody to look after him.

  ‘The golden years of my life are spent!’ he cried. ‘Where can I go now, what can I do?’

  Difficult to harden one’s heart against a man who talks about the golden years of his life, even when one knows that he has in fact been found a perfectly good job. Emotionally I was trapped.

  ‘People say’, he went on, ‘that the servants at the Villa were able to save money. But a man has expenses; I have educated my children, I have a son, I have a daughter; there was the war; it was all expenses.’