Love's Obsession (11 page)

In his mind, Jim assumed absolute and single authority over what was clearly meant to be his military company. Although the document acknowledged that the Colonial Office might want to appoint a commanding officer who spoke Greek—which Jim did not—he conveniently assumed that they would not. At the beginning he talks of the CO and his role, but gradually slips into the first person. It is not entirely clear what role he saw for the commanding officer, although he stressed that the company should largely be free from regimental control and must be ‘free of routine military activities', a factor that persuaded him that the CO should be of the rank of lieutenant-colonel and not a major as he had originally envisaged. The corps would be independent of the Department of Antiquities in Cyprus and, although he recognised a role for Megaw and the Director of the Cyprus Museum, he believed that ‘the details of execution—subject to Megaw's approval—should be left to us'.

All administrative chores, work that Jim spent his life trying to avoid, would be the responsibility of the executive officer whose workload would be heavy. The men would be chosen by the CO and not only from the existing ranks of the Cyprus Regiment, despite his argument that the project was to address their needs. In his self-appointed role as commanding officer he made a special plea to engage Tryphon, his Bellapais foreman, who, he believed, was the only well-trained workman in Cyprus and who, although ‘a confirmed grave looter off duty … not only knows his job but is genuinely interested—and knows his pottery very well. He is an expert at getting ticklish digging done, and at mending pots … honest to his employer and faithful. Drinks a good deal in the winter, but that does not seem to matter', he added as an afterthought.

For surveying and drawing he suggested other people who were not part of the regiment: ‘I know two girls who have been trained in archaeological surveying and draughtsmanship, and one of them has lived in Cyprus, where her parents own land. Both have been in the A.T.S. but are now discharged.' Eve Dray was on his mind.

The style of the document moves from the formal to the flippant and finally to the surreal, as he creates his future and peoples it with officers, draughtsmen, architects, administrative officers and workmen. ‘It may, of course, prove necessary to saddle each officer with some nominal responsibility apart from his actual work, but in practice it should not be difficult to raise a smoke-screen to meet the nominal requirements', he notes. He muses that married officers could have their furniture sent out as company baggage—‘a racket but we should be able to work it'.

Finally, he presents detailed instructions on how to survey, excavate and record sites, noting aspects of the faunal and metallurgical research that will be concluded off site, and discusses the use of air photography, giving practical advice on managing workmen and overall direction.

The bogey which every director fears is ‘atmosphere'. One's whole aim is to keep things going smoothly, and to prevent grievances festering or people getting slack. One way is to keep to a rigid routine, and to this I would add a modicum of real comfort, good feeding, and plenty of books.

The third and final notebook contains personal reminiscences and musings. He mentions the need for skilled foremen and names some.

Simeon was a great athlete, but had an accident while racing Sjöqvist round Vouni, and has since not been too fit; he is honest and a lovable character, though he has been in jug on a charge of rape (which was faked) … [Tryphon] was sacked for theft of some gold earrings, but I am fairly sure he took the blame for his mother, an awful old woman, who is now dead (thank God).

He suggests the workmen should be employed in the proportion of seventy-five per cent Greek to twenty-five per cent Turkish and says that his custom ‘has been to go with Tryphon to the village coffee shops at night, and ask for men'. His advice is that:

old men are steadiest and I like to give them work … Beware of the talkative, those who speak English and men with narrow peaky faces. Have at least one man who is an obvious wit. Employ as many landowners as apply. Young men work best if their best friends are also employed.

He wants very few, if any, British NCOs and talks nostalgically of ‘Levantine loyalty' and the democracy of Cypriots. ‘Full ability to deal correctly with the men can only come from experience … Remember that the Cypriot has a lively mind, and nothing will shift the inertia of the East unless there is reason in it.
'
53

In summary, he expects he will need five officers—all to be provided with cars—and over three hundred other ranks. From prison Jim wrote to colleagues, sent complicated memos for Eleanor to take to the War Office, to members of parliament, to anyone who would listen. All an elaborate fantasy. In the cold winter of Germany, Jim had created a warm archaeological Cypriot escape.

On 14 April 1945, Oflag VIIB was bombed by American forces. Fourteen POWs were killed and over forty wounded. Two days later the Americans liberated the camp. The sudden transformation unsettled many of the prisoners. It was too sudden and most were not mentally prepared. ‘Now that this thing had really happened,' one prisoner wrote, ‘I hadn't the vaguest idea what to do next; I felt very strange and completely lost. I went back to my room where I muttered something or other about having to pack because I was going home. I found to my horror that I was quite incapable of packing. I did not know how or where to start and gave it up in desperation'.
54

Jim landed in England two weeks after his camp had been liberated and two weeks before Victory in Europe Day. He was admitted to hospital but released after only twenty-four hours and sent on leave. He returned to Eleanor at Park Cottage. He was thirty-one and weighed six stone.

Chapter 5
England and Cyprus, 1945−47

Eve enjoyed her time driving with the Auxiliary Transport Service, but she ended the war at the Admiralty, where she charted naval convoys, using miles of hat elastic and dozens of dressmaking pins.
1
She was a good driver and had enjoyed the camaraderie of her other ‘Fannies' in the ATS. But her uncle, Sir John Mills, now resident at Bisterne, was appalled to think of her working with large trucks and so, like her grandmother before, had interfered, although with the best of intentions. As usual, Eve acquiesced, but it rankled.

The widespread destruction of large parts of the city did provide some opportunities. On the southern bank of the Thames, at Southwark, Kathleen Kenyon from the Institute of Archaeology directed excavations of the remains of a Roman fort uncovered during demolition work. Volunteers worked from spring to autumn, during school holidays or in the evenings. Eve Dray joined Kenyon, supervising a motley group of volunteers from Holland and America in excavating a Roman rubbish pit. Two of the Americans had, until recently, flown missions over Germany and secretly planted a small clay pot from Woolworths in the trench as a joke.
2
Despite the harsh rationing, Eve invited them all to supper and managed to find enough to feed them. But there was little paid work for archaeologists.

The winter of 1945 was bitter, the most severe for fifty years. People queued to buy coal since only the wealthy could pay black market prices; others in heavy overcoats picked through the wreckage of their streets and towns and boys played soccer amid the rubble—the only playground they had ever known. More than the weather was bitter. After the initial celebrations of V Day, when lights flooded the city for the first time in five years and people danced in the streets and drank to the peace, a sullen gloom descended. People longed to break with the past and, after five years of Conservative government, the Tories were overwhelmingly rejected, with Labour's Clement Attlee taking office after a landslide election victory. Winston Churchill may have led the country through the war but no one wanted him to lead in peacetime.
3
Most wanted to forget the past, but not everyone could. Soldiers returned to homes and families who scarcely recognised them. For years these men had lived regulated and regimented lives, alternately full of danger and boredom. Domesticity was not easily resumed, nor was domestic life the same. This war had been an industrial one, factories re-tooled, energy redirected and manpower replaced. Machines were geared to war and the gears were greased by women. They staffed factories, drove trucks, wore uniforms. For many the experience was liberating and some found a return to the past difficult. Marriages struggled to adjust. Children learned to obey two parents, one of whom they barely knew. As soldiers returned, divorce rates rose.

POWs returned to a world they no longer recognised. Those like Jim who had been captured in 1941 knew little of the progress of the war and were shocked by the physical evidence of its aftermath. Rocket blasts had shattered the windows of St Paul's. Vegetables grew in the moat around the Tower of London. Waste bins collected scraps for pigs and food was rationed. But the wreckage of London and food shortages offered only a superficial understanding of what the country had endured. Returning prisoners were excited but fearful and fretful, unable to concentrate. Doctors warned they might be impotent and many worried they would shame themselves in public by swearing or forgetting to button their flies. Grown men shrank at the thought of meeting people, of entering a room full of strangers. Drink offered only temporary escape. A bottle of wine cost a staggering amount. Officers returned to their quiet dignified clubs to find a seething sea of grotesque, babbling Americans and flashy blondes.

Adjustment was no easier for their families. ‘I was very happy to have him home,' said one wife, ‘and then you realised that you've not got the same man back … He still had a lot of the prisoner of war in him. Even now you can't touch his things. In the prison camp they only had a certain limited space and what was theirs was their own and nobody touched it. It's continued all his life and I have to be very, very careful. He wasn't like that at all before he left.' ‘Then the drinking started', said another. ‘The war changed him. And what I still remember was him butting his cigarette out on the floor like he was still in the prison camp. He was just a completely different person to what he was.
'
4

Jim had spent years reading archaeology and planning for a future that he thought would mirror the past but the mirror had shattered. Imprisoned for four years, he had no sense of the changes wrought by years of war. England was impoverished and in debt. ‘Archaeology is pretty much at a standstill … I am not too optimistic', lamented O.G.S. Crawford, who warned Jim there were few job opportunities. After years of confinement, Jim could not sit still. He had spent his internment gestating great plans for a survey of Cyprus, conceived in the months before the war. Not for the first time Jim's fantasy overstretched reality.

Within a month of returning to England he bombarded friends and colleagues with ideas and letters and requests for support. He sent them long essays outlining the details and justification for the expense of his elaborate Cyprus proposal. Winifred Lamb congratulated him on the detail.
5
A.W. Lawrence, Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge and brother of T.E. (Lawrence of Arabia), thought the military language ‘superb',
6
but Donald Harden from the British Museum warned against being ‘overbold' and doubted there would be sufficient numbers of trained archaeologists to conduct excavations. He spoke to Woolley about the proposal but warned Jim that ‘he is a bit choosy in his patronage of such activities!
'
7
Sir John Myers thought the proposal a ‘counsel of perfection' but noted that Jim had made no estimate of cost.
8
Myers sent the memo to the Archaeological Joint Committee and suggested that Jim also forward it to the Colonial Office and the War Office. Myers cautioned against creating a program that overlapped the functions of the Department of Antiquities in Cyprus, a recipe for potential conflict. From this distance it is hard to imagine that a poor and war-weary England would look on the proposal favourably, and the letters of support may well have been written out of concern for Jim's state of mind, but Jim was not the only one convinced. Peter Megaw thought his idea a ‘promising' one and had no doubt that a site survey of the island and site conservation works were needed. He did, however, have reservations, as he explained when writing from England to the Governor in Nicosia:

It was not possible for Stewart in Germany, where he prepared his memorandum, to picture accurately the present situation in Cyprus, and I suggest that if his scheme is approved in principle by all concerned it would be useful if Stewart went out to Cyprus to size it up before details of establishment, equipment and functions are finally fixed. If he did that I could work with him, when I return to London, on final terms of reference etc. … Stewart's memorandum was considered last week by the Archaeological Joint Committee, a body on which the C.O. and the Treasury are represented and I understand that from the archaeological side they are giving it full support. I hope that the War Office will be equally sympathetic.
9

The War Office was not. English officials had little faith in the Cyprus Regiment. Over seven hundred Cypriot Communists had eventually joined the regiment and the War Office doubted they could be trusted.
10
‘In view of the way in which ammunition, explosives and equipment has melted away when anywhere near Cyprus Forces, have we any guarantee that what is found will not disappear in the same way?
'
11

The War Office dismissed Jim's proposal but not before observing that the project would be excellent ‘if it were not so remarkably naïve', noting that a rough estimate of the annual cost would come to around £75,000. Jim still clung to the idea even as it sank. As late as October 1945 he wrote to Eve Dray, by then back in Cyprus, suggesting there might be work for her as part of the programme.
12

Jim's mind sped along roads built on flimsy foundations, unable to stand still or take stock. Confined for so long, with only his thoughts and reading for company, Jim had no idea how the landscape had changed. Jack Hamson knew how he felt. Both men were mentally and physically exhausted, indecisive, but Jack was old enough to know it wise to postpone important decisions. The ‘bogey that sits on one's shoulder and whispers in one's ear' afflicted them both and they felt older and sour. Jim was restless. More philosophical, Jack told Jim: ‘we paid our penny and took our choice by going into the army.
'
13
They felt bitter towards those who had not. Both wanted to rake over the burning embers of Crete and mourned Pendlebury's death. ‘To have perished in failure four years ago is to be truly dead.
'
14
They discussed work possibilities in Athens. Would Jim be tempted by the offer of a consulship? Alan Wace urged Jim to consider the job of Assistant Director at the British School at Athens, but Jim seemed reluctant. Would he think it over again if it were offered to him?
15
Despite the setbacks, Jim's colleagues supported and encouraged him. The Craven Fund gave him a grant of £150 to complete work on Vounous but a second grant was unlikely and he needed a job.

Jim's career prospects were poor and his situation became critical when Eleanor became pregnant. She was unwell for much of the pregnancy and had to be careful, given an earlier miscarriage. Twelve months after his release from prison, on 28 April 1946, their son Peter Hugh was born. Friends and colleagues sent congratulations. Winifred Lamb wrote to ‘welcome' him, adding a pencil sketch of a cat: ‘Jim the cat will be a bit surprised when Peter Hugh comes home'.
16
From Cyprus Peter and Elektra Megaw sent best wishes, hoping that Eleanor's worries were now over. ‘She has had a time', they said.
17

At last Jim finally accepted his plans for Cyprus were dead. Where could he turn for support? One answer might be the Swedes.

Jim and Westholm were friends and it was to Alfirios that Jim had written in 1940 in despair at the madness of the world and revealing his plans to volunteer. It was time to renew connections and, although Peter Hugh was only two months old, he left England for a visit to Sweden.

Friends welcomed Jim warmly. He visited Alfirios and met Einar Gjerstad for the first time. They discussed the idea of collaboration and possibilities looked promising. Arne Furumark, the Swedish archaeologist and specialist of Bronze Age art, discussed Jim's ideas on chronology and advised:

If I were you, I would draw up my own classification and stick to it. After all, Gjerstad and the Cyprus Committee are dependent on you, and you may very well insist on doing things in your own way, so long as it does not clash too much with the general lines of the publication. But don't repeat my words!
18

When he returned to England, Gjerstad wrote to tell Jim that ‘the Swedish Crown Prince is very keen on your collaborations with us, and I shall talk to him about the economic question, when I see him in Jan'.
19
‘England is dreary after Sweden', Jim complained.
20

A further possibility was Australia. Before the war, Jim had met another antipodean at the British School at Athens, Dale Trendall.
21
Trendall was four years older than Jim and they had overlapped at Cambridge. Originally from New Zealand, Trendall's was a formidable intellect and he was well on the way to a brilliant career both as scholar and university administrator. In 1939 Trendall took up the chair of Greek at Sydney University when the incumbent, Englishman Enoch Powell, left to enlist. During the war years Trendall worked with another Greek scholar and a mathematician in the cryptographic unit at Victoria Barracks in Melbourne.
22

Trendall now wanted Jim at Sydney University. He was supported in this by Walter Beasley, who had met Jim in Australia in 1935 and was one of the sponsors of the Vounous excavations. Beasley was fifty-seven, a devout Christian, skilful businessman and Managing Director of Young's Transport Agency. While travelling in the Near East in the 1930s, he had visited excavations at Jericho and become convinced that archaeology would one day prove the truth of Biblical events. In 1946 he established an independent Australian Institute of Archaeology in Melbourne to further this aim.

Since his release from Germany, Jim had written regularly to both Trendall and Beasley and in the middle of 1945 an offer arrived from Sydney. In his reply Jim mentions £2000 budgets and excavation plans.
23
Trendall told Beasley that Jim hoped to return to Sydney as Director of the Nicholson Museum and occasional lecturer at Sydney University, but also wanted the opportunity to mount excavations. At the end of the year Trendall made a firm offer, a job at Sydney University as Assistant Director of the Nicholson Museum. The Nicholson was the oldest antiquities museum in Australia, established in 1860 through a bequest by the inaugural Chancellor of Sydney University Sir Charles Nicholson. It was a teaching museum, although no Department of Archaeology existed until 1949.The offered position would be partly funded by Beasley, who would pay for Jim's travel expenses and cover part of his salary. In exchange, Jim was to provide Beasley's newly established institute with professional advice during university vacation time.
24
Jim dithered, and Beasley worried that his ‘nervousness seems to be increasing with regard to Australian conditions'.
25
Whether this nervousness was real or feigned in order to obtain better employment conditions is unclear. Undoubtedly Jim was strongly attached to England and knew that archaeology conducted from Australia would be difficult. At the same time he was not above negotiating on the basis of exaggerated claims of alternative job offers.