by Judy Powell
Scarcely five feet tall, hair combed back from her face, Eve’s eyes lit up at the sight of animals. She knew the names of all the birds that inhabited the gullies in the bush along the cliff’s edge: noisy butcherbirds and small busy pardalotes, the red flash of a crimson rosella as it streaked across the tree line. Practical and deft, she could kill and pluck a turkey and once stitched up a mauled bird using baling twine and a hook used to sew hessian bags of grain. Later, when the bird was killed and trussed, no evidence of stitching or wound remained.1 She would like to have been a vet and nothing made her angrier than cruelty to animals.
Eve finally had to deal with the immense body of work that had so consumed Jim’s life, his ‘Corpus of Cypriot Antiquities’. Dozens of ring-bound binders confronted her, each containing details of pottery types collected over decades and endlessly reworked.
Paul Åström had offered to publish the corpus, suggesting at first that xerox copies might be sufficient, but neither Eve nor Basil thought this acceptable.2 Eve decided to pay for photos and drawings from her ‘research’ funds and enlisted Paul’s help to write to museum directors who would be more likely to take notice of a professor than ‘an unknown female’.3 There were so many references to check and she had to collect photos and drawings from museums around the world.
‘You may have heard that I am finalising my husband’s Corpus of Cypriot antiquities’, Eve wrote repeatedly to curators around the world. ‘All the types are listed in S.C.E., IV, 1A,4 and most are illustrated there, but they are not described because Jim intended to bring out the Corpus as soon as S.C.E. was published—as it turned out, he did not even live to see the latter in print. So people must find a large part of S.C.E. unintelligible … I apologise for giving you so much trouble’, 5 she always signed off. Each letter took her to a past she remembered vividly.
When she wrote to Claude Schaeffer she was back in Paris in 1959, waiting for Jim and Robert Merrillees to finish work in the hotel room. Correspondence with Dr Chehab took her to Beirut and her first visit to family there as a child in 1926. She knew little of the recent civil war in Lebanon but hoped that his beautiful museum had avoided destruction.6 The Royal Ontario Museum had Cypriot pots in their Lady Loch collection. She had only met Lady Loch once, she wrote, but remembered her charming house and garden in Kyrenia.7 She apologised to the curator of the Brussels Museum for not writing in French. ‘Forty years ago I would not have hesitated … but now I am out of practice although I can still read it easily.’8
The curator at the Manchester Museum wrote to say that Jim had taught his wife at Sydney University, the curator from the Fitzwilliam Museum knew Jim’s Cambridge tutor at Trinity Hall, Mary Cra’ster at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology was led to study archaeology after a visit to Jim and Eleanor in Bellapais as a child. Eve remembered Mary as a child when she had visited Nicosia to take part in a mounted paper chase on her pony.
You probably knew my aunt Ada who, with a friend, started the Kyrenia hospital. She went on living in Kyrenia after she retired from nursing. And I’m sure you knew my father. He was building a house at Eski Bakca, next to Mrs Houston, about a mile to the west of your grandfather’s house. After Mr Routledge died, my father sold Eski and went to live on Tjiklos.9
While waiting for photos and permissions for the corpus publication, Eve delved into Jim’s long-neglected manuscript on the Lusignan coinage. Jim had worked on the manuscript on and off for many years and when he died Eve sent it to Christopher Blunt, who took it on holiday. His rereading confirmed that it must be published but he could see why Jim had not been entirely satisfied with the manuscript ‘as it now stands’. He suggested various changes to the text, but they would all involve a lot of work. She was not qualified to do it,10 but after many years, the Cypriot numismatist Andreas Pitsillides offered to help and she started to tidy up the document, teaching herself the complex genealogies of the Medieval Lusignan family.11
In 1978 Eve paid a ‘flying visit to Cyprus’.12 Before leaving she wrote to Basil. She would fly out on 16 April and return a little over a month later. She wanted to make sure that, even though she was fit and healthy at sixty-four, if she did not return, Basil would know where things were and warned him that ‘clearing up here will be a helluva job’. Although neighbours and Laila Haglund, the latter now living in Sydney, could deal with some things, she was afraid that all the archaeological material ‘would be dumped on your head’.13 Palealona and Lapatsa were reasonably straightforward but she was afraid that under cartons of sherds there might be more things. The main problem, of course, would be the corpus. Few people other than Eve would understand the complex series of letters and numbers (in superscript and subscript) that Jim had used to try to make sense of Cypriot pottery.
The purpose of the 1978 visit was twofold. She would work on pots in the Cyprus Museum and try to find out what was happening with Tjiklos. She stayed in Nicosia, paying expenses through what she called the Stewart Archaeological Research Trust, a financial fiction that she employed to separate her money and compartmentalise expenses.
I got a wonderful welcome from all my old friends and was so happy to be back in spite of the sadness of the situation. Two barbed wire fences stretch across the island from East to West; mainland Turkish soldiers are ensconced on the North, Greeks on the South, with U.N. forces between them. Virtually all the Greek Cypriots have been turned out of the North, often at a moment’s notice, with only the clothes they stood up in. Turkish Cypriots from the South were sent north, but there are far fewer of them so, in the Kyrenia district, there are several empty villages while many people in the South are still living in tents in refugee camps … With some difficulty I got a permit from the Turkish military authorities to stay with English friends in Kyrenia, but I was not allowed to visit Tjiklos, which is occupied by soldiers. There is an amazing difference between the two sides. The North is a sleepy Turkish province, the South is booming; factories, high-rise blocks of flats and hotels to cope with the increasing influx of tourists, are springing up everywhere. The cost of living has shot up, but so have wages; formerly all the Museum Attendants came to work by bicycle, now each has a car. Solar-heated water for houses is the rule rather than the exception.
I could go on forever about my beloved Cyprus …14
She organised a party for Tryphon, which she paid for herself, but the room heater she bought for him was paid—as Jim would have expected—out of the Research Trust. Like Jim she kept detailed lists of expenses. Tips, beer, matches and always cigarettes. Tryphon gave her two almonds, and back in Wentworth Falls, she planted them in pots and waited. In a southern hemisphere summer they germinated and when they were strong enough she planted them in her back garden, where they would remind her of Tryphon’s smile and his rough hands digging through the limey soil to pull up a small cup with the pattern of Kamares ware.
She returned again briefly in 1981, again to work in the museum. She spent two nights with friends in Kyrenia, but was unable to visit Tjiklos. Andreas Pitsillides remembered her visit fondly. She met an old friend from England but was anxious to return to her dog, Tammy, in Australia. When she left, Andreas felt he had lost a member of his family and he worried when he read of bushfires in Australia later in the year.15
A year after this visit, she wrote to Ino Nicolaou at the Cyprus Museum, wondering why the international money order she had sent had not been cashed. She had written to Vassos, but after many months she still had received no answer. ‘Is he ill again?’ she asked Ino. ‘I am well,’ she added, ‘and have plenty to keep me occupied: finishing Jim’s work, looking after my garden and, recently, making blackberry jam’. She wrote later asking for photographs but some of the pots she wanted photographed could not be found. ‘It is unfortunate,’ she replied, ‘because each pot is the only example of its particular type’—proof, if any were needed, of the tendency of the corpus to split pottery types into smaller and narrower categories.
After completing
work on Jim’s history of the Lusignan coinage she returned to the Bronze Age, where she felt more at ease.16 It was such a pity that so many of the pots she wanted drawn could no longer be found in the Cyprus Museum.17 ‘I can’t believe that I’m nearly 70’, she told her friend there, Elias Markou. ‘I feel 20 years younger.’ She was happy to hear Elias’s news—he had been working with Paul Åström in Greece and visiting grandchildren. It was summer for Elias, but a bitterly cold winter in Wentworth Falls. They exchanged Christmas cards. Byzantine icons and scenes of the Cypriot countryside for rural scenes of animals in the Australian bush.
Not all her correspondence was cordial. Eve lost patience with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. She was astonished to discover that their costs for photographs ranged between $70 and $100 and she certainly could not afford to send them two copies of the final publication. Although the three pots in the museum were the ‘only recorded examples of their respective types’, she would not now be able to illustrate them.18
After Mary Cra’ster retired, Eve’s letters to the Cambridge University Museum of Art and Archaeology went unanswered.
Where are my photographs? It is over a month since you wrote to tell me that you had given the pots to your photographer—so where are the photographs?
This is URGENT …
My eyesight is failing; I must get the final volumes of the Corpus published while I can still see what I am doing.
It is no use saying ‘hand the work on to someone else’. There is only one man still alive who could read my husband’s notes, and he has his own work to finish and publish.
I will wait one more week. After that, if the photos have not arrived, I will have to put in the Corpus: ‘Illustrations not obtainable from CUMAA’.19
Few people were prepared to give as good as they got. Eve demanded photos and drawings of material at the Nicholson Museum. Jim’s successor at Sydney University was Basil and Eve wrote to him in annoyance. Was she obliged to include an explanation in the corpus, ‘No illustrations available of the following types because Prof. J.B.H., of Sydney University, is sitting on the drawings of pots from our excavations’.20 Basil replied, equally irritated: ‘I have received your ill-mannered letter and the immediate reaction is to tell you to go to hell but I presume that won’t save time.’ As usual, he said, Eve thought that Jim and her work formed the centre of the universe, when in fact Basil had obligations to the university, his students and his own research. Any offers of help with Jim’s material were made simply for ‘old times sake’ and she should learn to be less demanding and more polite.21
Over the years Eve tinkered with the text of the corpus, adding material, correcting mistakes, replacing terms that were now outmoded. Gradually the manuscript became as much hers as Jim’s. By now she could confidently assert that what Jim had begun was in fact a ‘typology’, that it would never—could never—be a ‘corpus’ in the way that Trendall and others had produced scholarly catalogues of black figure ware or other decorative arts held in museums around the world. These Cypriot artefacts continued to be unearthed and she could see no end to it. Really, this was a reference guide—a list of types. An attempt to bring order. But by now she knew that the world was a messy place. Attempts to pin it down, like a butterfly in a collection, were futile.
In a dark blue memo book Eve recorded her ‘work’. She listed the letters written and postage costs. Blue entries were ‘personal’, red related to the foundation, and those marked ‘C’ were concerned with coins or the corpus. Entries for the foundation reached a peak in 1974 but petered out after the Turkish invasion. Letters concerning the corpus then took over. In 1984 Eve wrote eighty-eight letters to individuals or organisations seeking information for this monumental work.
While moving some boxes with pottery sherds from Karmi, she uncovered a mixed bag of sherds—from Cyprus, ’Ajjul, Megiddo, Ur and other places in Asia Minor. She wondered where they had come from? How had she missed them? She thought Basil might like them for the Nicholson, wrote to him straight away and in due course delivered Roman coin moulds, some Medieval bowl fragments and sherds, sherds and photos from Megiddo and Beth Shan, a fragment of Roman pavement she remembered collecting at Tjiklos, and some pots that had been bought from Petro (Type XIII F 3a a1 − according to the ‘corpus’ classification).22
In 1988 Paul Åström published the first volume of the corpus and the excavations at Ayia Paraskevi and Vasilia. Eve wrote the foreword for the latter. She remembered, with great fondness, a different Cyprus. ‘In those days Vasilia was a “mixed” village, with the bell-tower of the Orthodox church and the minaret of the mosque both pointing heaven-wards … I am glad that neither Jim nor my father (H.R. Dray of Kyrenia) who also loved Cyprus and her people, were alive in 1974, they would have been hurt and saddened.’23 Despite her dismay at events in Cyprus, Eve was ‘exhilarated to see Jim’s work beginning to appear in print, at last!’ She had taken time over the corpus, but it had taught her much.
Although I always worked with Jim, he made the decisions, I only acted on them. It was not until many years after his death that I felt competent to act on my own initiative; in 1962 I would have been incapable of producing the Corpus in its present form.24
In 1989, aged seventy-five, she began work on Part 2.
On 19 April 1990, Eve sat at her kitchen table, papers layered across its white painted surface, her feet barely touching the linoleum. Her crepe-paper face was soft, with laughter lines at her eyes, silver hair stained nicotine yellow. She crushed a butt into the ashtray beside her typewriter as a draft stole through a crack in the window and the boats on her faded curtains rocked. She pulled her parka close, took up the magnifying glass, adjusted the angle of the lamp and leaned closer.
When she had finished she reached for a folder marked ‘British Museum’ and filed the letter she’d been reading with others in chronological sequence. What a nuisance that only four photos had arrived instead of the five she had ordered, but at least Dr Tatton-Brown had replied promptly and seemed clear and efficient. Which could not be said for all the people she dealt with. How many times was she obliged to remind them of earlier letters that she could only assume had been lost in the post. Sometimes the staff changed—too often she thought—and her letters fell into limbo. She slid a page of paper into the typewriter.
Dear Veronica, I don’t think we need go on being so formal, do you? Thank you so much for your letter of 30 March, it was kind of you to take so much trouble over the bowls from Fenitshes. The photo of Yortan A62 has not arrived. Could you please investigate? I’d really much rather have a photo than a Refund!’25
She signed the letter and reached for the blue memo book to record the day’s work. Today’s postage would be entered as ‘C’ because it was a research cost associated with the corpus. This month she had read over the proofs of the book on Lusignan coinage and posted three boxes of coin casts to Michael Metcalf at the Ashmolean Museum. She was no numismatist and much happier dealing with pots—even Yortan ones.
Eve covered the typewriter and stood up. Tammy, the nondescript black and tan dog at her feet, pulled herself up and padded along the hallway, where Eve collected a lead from on top of the sandouki, a heavy wooden trunk in the hallway. Today Tammy could come with her to the post office and afterwards they would ramble along the edge of the bush and perhaps see the lyrebird they had surprised yesterday.
At the post office, she collected her mail, a few circulars, a card from Giles but no business letters. They drove back across the highway and turned right into Armstrong Street where Eve helped the dog from the back of the van. Old age slowed both of them and they had to content themselves with shorter walks. Together they set off down the path, Eve treading carefully on a new hip and Tammy slowed by arthritis. She wondered again about the Yortan pots. Jim thought they were important but she could not recall the details and would have to look back over his letters from Turkey and the notes he kept when he had dug at Kusura. Some of these letters should go to
Cyprus. She was a widow without dependants but could hardly throw them away.
They found their lyrebird and Tammy sat still while Eve’s clouded eyes followed the bird picking silently through the undergrowth. The wind from last night meant good tree fall and she collected twigs and branches for the fire on their way home. This afternoon she might work in her potato patch or make jam. Later she would sit and flick through Georgette Heyer, whose stories were so familiar that, despite her failing eyesight, she could read with ease.
In the evening she turned on the radio to listen to the news and sat with a brandy by the fire, Tammy asleep at her feet and the Cypriot rug on the armchair for warmth. The Red Polished pot on the mantelpiece was one from Karmi that she particularly liked. Part 1 of the corpus had been published and parts 2 and 3 were with Paul; she was now concentrating on the next volume—‘currently wallowing in knob-lug bowls (they may well drive me round the bend)’, she told Robert.26 She was proud of the book, although it was such a pity that Paul had not waited for her corrected proofs. After so many years, a little longer would have made no difference and it took a lot of effort to type up the addenda and corrigenda.
She remembered the first time she met Paul Åström. After months of excavations on Cyprus, Jim suggested they visit Sweden. Eve liked Alfirios Westholm very much, and glanced at the little red Dala horse he had given her, which now sat on her mantelpiece. Eve smiled when she remembered how Laila had curtseyed when introduced.
She had begun to sort through the layers of her life, going through Jim’s files, returning some letters to their authors, selecting others to send to Cyprus. She put them in order, filed by name or place, arranged chronologically. Neatly. Other objects she stored in cardboard boxes. She fingered the rectangular square of metal, a dog tag attached to a greying piece of string. Beneath her thumb she could read it as if she were blind—Oflag X/C 3700.