by Dilys Powell
ii
The bus journey to Knossos was familiar as ever. True, the way out of Herakleion had a touch of sophistication now – more houses, an occasional public building along the road. But one still looked out on vineyards, and fig and olive and eucalyptus still bordered the fields. At Knossos itself, a few concessions to the tourist – a waiter, for instance, at the open-air tables, and a general air of expecting foreigners and cars which had not been detectable when I first went back to Crete in 1958. But there was still the same sense of a moment in time trapped between enormous dramas.
It was a sunny morning when I set out to walk to the road fork where Paddy Leigh Fermor and Stanley Moss had held up General Kreipe’s car. Lorries on their way to Arkhanes thudded past me; they lifted puffs of dust which settled on the drying grass and the herbs on the verges. A little way beyond the Palace entrance, at the point where an antique aqueduct spans a gorge on the right, I was hailed from a house. Two girls were working on the verandah. Come up and rest, they said, you will be tired. Later, I promised; I have an errand to do first. Here and there a neat villa, whitewashed behind its terrace wall, looked down on the road. The way was farther than I had thought, and surprised that I had not yet reached the junction (I began to think of it as something like the Schiste where Oedipus challenged the passage of his father) I stopped to ask if I was on the right track. A policeman was talking to the driver of a truck which had pulled up.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘keep on up the hill and bear right. Would you’, he added, offering a packet, ‘like a biscuit?’
A triangle of grass and a wide road, a main road, going back towards Knossos; a driver coming down the hill would have had to slow down. To make sure I was not mistaken I asked a girl who was passing, and a man came out of a field to join in. Delightedly he confirmed. Yes, yes, this was the very spot; why, he had been in the game himself, I must come to his home, it was just down the road. On my way up I had noticed a small workshop and factory. He had a job there, he had a house; and in the nakedly new living-room his wife made coffee and brought loukóumia and the summer hospitality of wedges of cucumber.
He had known the British in the war, he and his brother had worked with them and had decorations to show for it. Enthusiastically appearing, the brother brought out for my admiration an enormous round medal. The scene of the Kreipe adventure was still a landmark. I had unfolded the map in their minds.
But only for a moment. Time was blunting the sharp edges of history. When I passed the house by the aqueduct again I accepted the invitation to go up the steps and drink a glass of cold water. Yes, certainly the two girls knew the Akoumianakis family, Micky, Phyllia, all of them. And Manolaki who had been killed in the war? Their father – did I perhaps remember him? – would have known Manolaki better than they did. We sat looking over the plain, gold in the summer weather; down the road where at the bridge the Cretans, forbidden, had rebelliously brought flowers to lay on the graves of two British soldiers; across the valley to the green verge of the river beyond the slopes where generations of Minoans had built their fantastic palaces. Above the river the hills, pale and dry, ran in diminishing curves towards Herakleion and the sea. It was a landscape which through the centuries had been soaked in blood and veiled by the smoke of burning houses. The two girls were contentedly busy setting plants of basil in tiny pots. The verandah, shady, framed in leaves, smelt of peace.
iii
Thirteen years since I had first seen Crete after the war. It was with the feeling that I was retracing my own life that I went down the road and into the Palace of Minos.
The site looked more disciplined than before. More of the restored buildings and stairways, it seemed to me, had been roofed in with plastic. The fresco copies were all under glass and the swallows no longer nested behind them. Signboards in English and Greek made the labyrinth more manageable. All the same I still pulled up short on the edge of high walls. The summer flowers, mocking the schemes of the scholars, flaunted over the evidence so carefully left for future generations. Summer chrysanthemums, sprawling across the great central court, softened its severe rectangle. Plumbago trailed candid blue blossoms. Stonecrop rooted in the interstices of crumbling cement, and purple mallow and dusty white umbelliferous flowers crowded in forgotten pits. A sweet musky scent drifted from slopes dotted with spires of acanthus, spiny as a hedgehog.
There were no troops of tourists with guides that morning, but every hall, every corridor, every flight of steps had its visitors with their maps and plans and cameras. On my way out I passed an obviously more experienced group. One of them, scratching at the powdering walls of the deep cutting where they stood, was demonstrating some archaeological point. They were talking English, and I guessed, rightly as I learned later, that they were from the British School at Athens and living in the Taverna.
I stopped at the souvenir stall in the courtyard to greet the representative of the Akoumianakis clan. Yes, he said, Professor Platon was now in Salonika, but he would presently be back and exploring Zakros. Tourists? Not so many English this year, but crowds of Germans. And Knossos – yes, the British were digging this year; I should see them up at the Villa. Then I crossed the highroad and went to the kiosk to find my old friend.
‘Michael,’ I asked a waiter, ‘is Michael here today, Michael Vlakhakis?’
The man stared at me.
‘Michael is dead,’ he said.
Somehow I had counted on the twisted figure with the incongruously welcoming grin. If his injuries had not killed him surely nothing else could; I had looked forward to hearing more about the marriage so long delayed and the young wife whose capture had so much elated him. Too late, I thought, one leaves things too late.
‘His widow has the kiosk now,’ said the waiter. ‘Look, she is coming now.’
I looked round to see the young wife. A lean, rangy woman was galloping towards me. The rook-black hair was strained back over deep dark-rimmed eyes; the cheek-bones high, the face long, bony, the whole body in its black lustreless widow’s dress full of a desperate energy.
‘I knew you,’ she cried, taking my hands, ‘at once I knew you, he told me about you. A month ago he died, tomorrow I have the service, you know that after forty days we have a service for the dead… . He was in hospital, a month ago it was.’ The sharp-edged voice gave a gulp of melancholy, then quickly recovered itself. ‘A month ago it was, only a month.’
He was very happy when he married you, I said. I am so sorry for you, he was such a good man.
‘A good man, a very good man. The war it was which killed him, you saw how badly he was wounded. He was with Blebbery, as you know well. He suffered, terribly he suffered, but what could we do? That is life. Yes, I have two children, a boy and a girl, they are both at school. Fortunately I have the kiosk, otherwise how could I manage?’
Seeing the display of friendship, the waiter refused to let me pay for the coffee we were drinking. Presently the children, neat, well-dressed, under the instruction of their mother well-mannered, arrived from school. Lucky that she had a boy; he would work, no dowry would have to be found for him.
‘Next time’ – even her gestures of farewell were angular – ‘next time you come you must stay in my house. I have a house in the village, you must stay there.’ She darted to the kiosk, seized two coloured postcards and pressed them into my hands. ‘A week you will stay.’
When I walked up the road I saw, pinned to a tree, the black-bordered notice of the service for Michael.
The morning glory was in flower on the wall of the Taverna, but I did not try the door by the whitewashed courtyard. The main gate was open, and I went through it and up the drive.
From the Annual Reports of the School I knew that there had been changes in the buildings, that the Taverna had been enlarged and that a house for the caretaker and foreman had been provided. I did not stop to look. Instead I made my way straight to the Stratigraphic Museum. That too, I had heard, had been extended. Not that I should have noticed
the change. In 1966, a few months after the formal opening, I had walked round the outside. The building itself, Joan Evans had written, was simple, efficient, not ugly. ‘I think Arthur would like it.’ But that day everything had been closed, the approaches were ragged, and I retained no more than the impression of a square building impossible to see into. Now in 1971 I knew at least the name of the extension. Piet had seen the Museum opened. But he had seen it without his Effie; he had not bothered to last out much longer after her death. The extension was called the Piet de Jong Building.
On my way through the garden I met some uninvited English tourists with cameras and jocular comments. Do you live here? they asked, a little uncertain of their ground after my curt responses. Uninvited myself, I could hardly blame them for taking a look. But the encounter made me pause at the doorway of the Museum. Anybody there? I called in Greek. A Greek girl appeared, muttered nervously, disappeared; then an Englishman, one of the group I had seen in the Palace. It was Dr Peter Warren, the School’s Assistant Director.
I had not expected to find anybody working. Memories rushed back from the distant past – the chance, inquisitive, uninstructed visitor, the exasperation of the archaeologist interrupted on the job. Apologetically I introduced myself. And again the memories: three people at work, Dr Warren, his wife, another girl; a table covered with sherds; stacked shelves; the sense of concentration on identifying, piecing together, tabulating, noting. The functional building with its storage space and its workrooms enclosing a central courtyard – the amenities were beyond the dreams of the generation I had known. But the dedication was the same.
Abashed by the kindness of my reception, protesting, truthfully enough, my ignorance of the work in hand, I withdrew in haste and made off towards the Villa. The garden had come to life again. Where trees and shrubs once drooped thirsty and neglected, the palms, the olives, the pines now shone green. The leaves of the blossoming pink oleanders glittered. Bougainvillea swarmed irrepressibly over walls and woodwork, geraniums exhaled from rich damp earth. In the light wind sunlight wavered through the trees and freckled the statue of Hadrian. Everything was sweet, cool, gentle.
I circled the Villa. It was the same – but to me it was foreign. Poor Manoli had not lived to become the ‘next responsibility’ which Joan Evans had foreseen; he was dead these four years. Ourania had retired to a place of her own; no dog barked and bounced on his chain. The new caretaker-foreman and his wife lived in the new house; anyway I did not know them. Fifty times I had walked in that garden or sat listening while Humfry and Alan and James happily talked about the day’s exploration. Now James too was dead. Hilda Pendlebury would never read what I had written about her life at the Villa with John. The Squire, who so reluctantly had left Knossos in 1941 and so eagerly returned to it after the war, would never again run to stop a Cambridge bus for me. Tom Dunbabin had survived the fearful risks of the caves and the mountains only, little more than ten years later, to fall fatally ill in Oxford. Dr Yamalakis, defender of Evans, was dead. Michael Ventris, solver of the Linear B riddle, had been killed in an accident. Kosti and Maria, the indestructible ones, they too had vanished.
A stranger, I walked past walls heavy with creepers, past dark basement windows. A bed, a bath – the frugal furnishings of an archaeological establishment were as before. At the top of the stone steps the front door was open. The hall was bare as ever; only the plaque recording the ownership still hung on the wall by the replica of the head of the charging bull. All around, the dogged presence of the British diffused a scholarly energy. But the working life of the Villa seemed to have withdrawn. Temporarily at any rate it had taken up residence in the extended Taverna and the Stratigraphic Museum.
And yet, half-naked though it was, Evans’s house looked immortal.
iv
Ghosts walked with me that afternoon when I went up the hills on the opposite side of the valley. Irrigation work was going on by the stream, and the path I had once taken with Micky and Spiro was barred; I missed the way and, scrambling through scrub and thorn, I went straight up the steep slope. In the distance the valley widened into the glitter of the sea. The plateau with its memories of battle stretched featurelessly, and I could not see the ravine where I had watched the child climbing in search of snails. Women were reaping in a field. Hagia Paraskevi? One of them thought she knew the way, and with a tawny dog who suspiciously rejected my advances and gambolled ahead we hurried over the bristly earth with its bleached thistles until we came to a sudden drop.
‘There,’ she said, ‘I think Hagia Paraskevi is somewhere down there.’
We were looking down over a split in the line of the hills. I could see nothing familiar, but I began to clamber round the head of the gorge. My guide and her dog watched until I reached the other side. Opposite, the cliff hesitated and put out a ledge. And there was Hagia Paraskevi, tiny against its backdrop, solitary – I had not realised how solitary – in the enormity of the ravine. My guide waved and turned back; the dog bounded away; and I crawled down the spiny terraces of the slope and crossed to the shrine.
Metal votives hung on the wall under the arches of brick – miniature hands, legs, an ear; an ikon showed the holy one, the saintly Paraskevi, carrying a plate with, staring from it, a pair of eyes. On their spiked stands the candles drooped and melted in the sun. The low wall of the temenos was overgrown. The flowers of summer, mullein and sage, thyme, lucerne and carrot, scrambled and seeded; fig trees, grown tall, leaned over cracking masonry. Wasps clung luxuriating to the rim of the stone basin where the spring oozed and trickled. From the valley came a faint whisper of life. Once I heard the voice of a frog from the pit of the ravine; nothing else, only the sun shining on olive groves and vineyards, the dark belt of trees which hid the Villa, the curve of the road towards Arkhanes.
I looked at the inscription on the stone slab with the cross which marked the grave of Manolaki. Name, age, date; he was killed on May 28, 1941; he was fifty-eight. I reflected on the chance by which John Pendlebury and Manolaki Akoumianakis and Arthur Evans had all died within a few weeks of one another. But even the memory of death could not disturb the serenity of the still afternoon.
About the Author
DILYS POWELL AND GREECE
In January 1926, Elizabeth Dilys Powell married Humfry Payne, a young archaeologist whose pursuits and enthusiasms were to shape her early life. For the next ten years, until his death in 1936, she perched on the edge of his world, an interested observer, watching him and his colleagues with a mixture of admiration and bemusement, and coming to share his love of the landscape and the people of Greece.
Powell met Payne while they were both studying at Oxford. In The Traveller’s Journey is Done she describes him as ‘a combination of the extravagant and the austere. He was extravagantly tall: six foot five, stooping slightly, with an air faintly remote, reflective. In compensating austerity nature had made him thin: long fine bones, long loping stride.’ Their love affair ‘was conducted in terms of escapades: the dance-hall out of bounds, the night picnic on the river, the scramble, for both of them, over the college walls.’ One such scramble led to her being ‘rusticated’ and her final year was spent living alone in lodgings in Oxford, where, motivated by her ejection, she worked hard and was awarded a first-class degree. Payne also took a first but was not offered the fellowship he might have expected because, according to Powell, ‘celibacy was still at a premium among teachers of Greek history.’
She goes on to say, ‘Had he stayed at Oxford his career might have been safer and smoother. But his life would have been denied its fulfilment.’ It was to be a short but glorious life for Payne, as it was for Pendlebury. And the glory was not long in coming: he had already been spotted by the eminent archaeologist J. D. Beazley while still an undergraduate and with him published a selection of Attic vases after graduation. A little later his work on the painted pottery of Corinth won him a major academic prize and established him as one of the leading young archaeologists of hi
s time. His appointment to the directorship of the British School at Athens in 1929, when he was still only twenty-seven, confirmed his standing and presaged a brilliant career at the heart of the archaeological establishment.
Contrary to the norms of her time, Powell chose not to be subsumed into her husband’s world. Her reaction to his moving to Greece confirmed what had been implicitly acknowledged between them: that while she was utterly committed to him and shared his love of the country, she would not sacrifice her own career as a writer. This career had become full-time in 1928 when she took a position as a book-reviewer at the Sunday Times, so she spent part of her life in London and visited Payne in Athens when she could.
In 1926, Sir Arthur Evans had placed the site of Knossos in Crete in the possession of the British School. This marked the end of the era of the wealthy archaeologist-visionary and gave the school a site to rival that of the French at Delphi, the Germans at Olympia and the Americans at Corinth. It was of this enhanced British School that Powell’s husband became director, and it was as the director’s wife that she scrutinised him and his fellow archaeologists as she travelled with him from site to site.
In Athens Payne was keen to establish himself. He carried out pioneering work in the collection of the archaeological museum while searching for a site to dig that would satisfy his ambition. In July 1929 he went to Crete to explore Eleftherna, a city perched between two gorges in the foothills of Mount Ida, but concluded his report with ‘it will be seen that these results do not encourage the undertaking of a second campaign on the site.’ The following year he prospected closer to home, this time making an exploratory excavation at the Heraion near Perachora, a village on the headland that protrudes into the Gulf of Corinth just northwest of the Isthmos. Here he quickly unearthed a small temple, a good deal of Corinthian pottery and a small bronze of Heracles: he had found the perfect site – rich in finds, purely Greek with no Roman overbuilding and as yet unexcavated. And then there was the location. Payne writes that ‘it is perhaps not only its extreme formal beauty, both in colour and in shape, but the present stillness and desertedness of the whole landscape to the north and east, subconsciously set against the life which it once contained, which makes the view from Perachora one of the most impressive in Greece.’ And to add further to the romance of the site, the temple which Payne had discovered was thought by some to be that of Hera Akraia (‘of the headland’) where Medea, in the final scene of Euripides’ play, takes the bodies of her dead children before soaring heavenwards to be united with her grandfather Helios.