Love's Obsession (19 page)

Jim sent Basil details of their ‘sensational finds' but Basil failed to arouse the
Sydney Morning Herald
's interest, wryly observing that ‘what excites you and me in matters archaeological leaves the rest of the world out here pretty cold'.
41

Vasilia was an important site, even if only a small number of finds were ‘sensational'. At the invitation of a British naval officer, Jim and Eve boarded a mine-layer to view the area from the sea, which prompted Jim to comment:

The obvious importance of Vasilia raises a question. It looks as if Vasilia commanded an excellent harbour for primitive craft, as well as a pass through the Kyrenia mountains, leading by an easy route to the valley of the Ovgos river and thence to the mining district round Lefka. It is possible that Vasilia was one of the main land terminals of a copper route, and that from it the metal was exported by sea. Perhaps it was even the main export centre of the copper trade for the land route to it is easier than around the shoulder of the Troodos range to the South coast. If so, the extent of the cemetery and the wealth of its occupants as shown by the alabasters is easy to understand. Yet the events which led to its abandonment remain lost to history.
42

Their last month on Cyprus was spent at the Kumarcilar Khan, cataloguing finds in the drearily bitter damp.
43
At Bellapais, where Jim and Eleanor had lived for eighteen months, the Vounous pots had been catalogued in parallel with the excavation. Much of the pottery taken from Ayia Paraskevi and Vasilia, however, would have to dry out in a Cypriot summer before it could be mended. They sorted, drew and catalogued what they could, but most of the work would have to wait another visit.

The weather affected their moods and health. Both Jim and Eve suffered from an allergic rash, although Jim refused to blame ‘Baby', the stray cat at Tjiklos they had adopted. Apart from one quick visit to Salamis and Enkomi they seldom left the Khan. On 18 December Porphyrios Dikaios arrived for the ‘division of finds'.
44
Cyprus kept the one good tomb from Vasilia, containing the large alabaster bowl, and the largest tomb from Ayia Paraskevi. As compensation for the poverty of their finds, Jim and Eve were offered another tomb group, from the Cyprus Museum's own collection.
45

After two months work Jim felt satisfied with this return to Cyprus and to excavations. They had found some beautiful pots and Jim bought more. He even managed to acquire three rare gold bands from Enkomi, which he could prove were found in 1936 and had not been stolen from the French. Dikaios granted export licences and judiciously Jim acquired whatever he could ‘in case the law gets changed in the future'.
46

Terence Mitford, the excavator of Kouklia in the south of Cyprus, visited the Stewarts at Tjiklos one night. They chatted long into the night, gossiping about colleagues and teasing out the idea of establishing a foreign institute on Cyprus, along the lines of the British School in Athens or the Institute in Jerusalem. Jim believed that such an institute would not just help visiting scholars, but could play an important political and conciliatory role on the island. Both agreed that the Department of Antiquities had few resources apart from those associated with the conservation of buildings. And the island had no university.

Before he left Cyprus, Jim met informally with Sir Christopher Cox from the Colonial Office to discuss the idea, but he sensed there was little support from officials. Should anything come of it, however, Jim planned to put Basil's name forward as director. ‘I think you have more tolerance than I do', he said, tongue in cheek.
47

At the beginning of the new year the Stewarts boarded a ship at Limassol. They said only brief goodbyes to friends and family, both expecting to return in a year or two. They sailed to Beirut, where they spent the day with the French archaeologist Maurice Dunand, who had been excavating Byblos for the past thirty years, and then sailed on to Alexandria and finally to Piraeus. A train took them to Athens, where they lunched with Sinclair Hood, Director of the British School. Jim visited a coin dealer and collected a hoard of Medieval Achaean coins that had been recommended to him. Sailing up the Adriatic in blustery weather they sorted coins in the writing room and a week after leaving Limassol landed in Venice. ‘Such a joy to have a bath', said Eve.
48

Jim remembered visiting Venice with his father one summer as a boy of thirteen.
49
This time he had to pay the bills, Jim told Basil, but although ‘wickedly expensive' they decided to lash out and ‘do' the city. ‘Eve fell for Murano beads, of which we seem to have a supply sufficient for the world', Jim said, but admitted that he ‘fell for glass animals and laid in a zoo'.
50

Weighed down with pots, coins and souvenirs, they boarded the night train for Paris, where they had arranged meetings with colleagues and where Jim was overjoyed to find wine at 2 shillings a pint! They booked into the hotel where Jim had often stayed with his mother.
51

The aim of their visit to Paris was to meet with Claude Schaeffer, the grand old man of archaeology. Schaeffer was now fifty-seven. Excavator of Enkomi and Vounous on Cyprus and Ugarit in Syria, Schaeffer had spent four years with the Free French during the war and had lost much of his personal library when the Gestapo occupying his house had burnt his books for heating. When Jim and Eve visited, they heard of the unusual arrangements that applied at Vounous. Apparently the agreement with the Cyprus Department of Antiquities gave Schaeffer half of all the material that Dikaios excavated, and Schaeffer thought this explained why Dikaios no longer worked at the site. At this meeting in Paris, Schaeffer agreed to hand over all his Vounous finds to Jim, who promised that it would be mended and studied at Bathurst. Schaeffer would fly out to see them when work was completed.
52
Jim enjoyed the opportunity to thrash out details of little interest to all but a small group of archaeologists, telling Basil that their esoteric discussions ‘remind me of the description of a Highland regiment as kilted gentry preening to each other in Gaelic'.
53

Everywhere he went Jim was at pains to report that Australia's reputation stood high. In Athens he ‘gathered that the Athenian press had played up the alabaster' and in Paris he decided that the Nicholson compared favourably with the Louvre and the National Archaeological Museum at St Germain-en-Laye. ‘There is no doubt,' he told Basil, ‘that the Nicholson can be one of the ranking museums'.
54

From Australia, Basil sent Jim and Eve regular updates. One event at The Mount he feared might worry Jim: ‘Your father fell down the stairs at the Mount on Xmas Eve while chasing a possum. He broke a rib and was in St Vincent's here until four days ago. He was quite wonderful and must be very tough.
'
55

Jim didn't doubt his father's robust good health, but warned Basil that A.A. might not just be after possums. ‘I'm suspicious when I hear he was getting the gun to shoot possums inside the house—that is sheer lunacy and worried me, for it would do hundreds of pounds worth of damage … How are the cats?
56

From Paris Jim wrote to Basil with details of baggage that could be expected to arrive in Sydney. This was on top of the twenty-three boxes already dispatched from Egypt. This consignment included ‘7 cases pottery, 1 small box of stone and bronze objects, 3 gold headbands, 2000 ancient coins—all from Cyprus, no commercial value, usual formula about display and teaching and research purposes. Also 1 small parcel of ancient pottery and metal objects from Lebanon—same guf'.
57
How many of the objects were for the Nicholson and how many for his personal collection at The Mount remains a mystery. In Jim's mind the two were inextricably entwined.

From Sydney, Basil kept Jim up to date with university gossip. All sorts of backroom deals were playing out, and Dale Trendall—now at the Australian National University—made a special visit to discuss the future of archaeology with the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Roberts. Basil thought the university a ‘cess pool' and felt that, in the end, a new independent institution might remain the only way ahead. But he knew Jim too well and warned: ‘please, when you return be careful of the corns on which you tread; for a lot of the toes around this place are very sensitive.
'
58

News from Basil was compounded by the twists and turns in Basil's own plans, caught as he was between a love of archaeology and responsibilities to his family. Jim found it impossible to follow ‘the wanderings of his brain. It exhausts me'.
59
One minute Basil was living in Bathurst, the next in Sydney; for some time he studied law, at other times found himself working in the Toohey's Brewery or investigating business opportunities. He told Jim he had finished writing up the result of the dig at Stephania, but then admitted it was not ready for publication.
60

Basil's problems lay with the precarious state of archaeology as both a subject and a department at Sydney University. Unlike Jim, Basil could not afford simply to follow his whims. He had a wife and children, and although Ruth's property kept them from penury, Basil took his family responsibilities seriously. Jim had no understanding and little sympathy for these dilemmas. He complained about Basil's indecision and worried that he would be returning to an ‘administrative muddle'.
61

If Basil were to leave, Jim decided Hector Catling would be a suitable replacement, but whether Catling could be persuaded to leave England was quite another matter.
62
Jim had met Catling in Cyprus, where he was working on a systematic survey of Cyprus, the sort of survey Jim had once hoped to conduct himself. Hector joined Jim and Eve on an excursion along the northern coast investigating sites. Jim was unaware that one event in particular disturbed Hector. Jim—a collector—had bought a pair of Roman coins, which he had made into earrings for Elektra Megaw. She adored them and loved wearing them, but the potential conflict of interest in the wife of a Director of Antiquities wearing coins of possibly dubious origin disturbed Hector and infuriated Peter Megaw.
63
Caesar's wife, Hector thought, should be above suspicion.

In Paris Jim and Eve boarded the train for Copenhagen, from where they would travel on to Stockholm. Although Jim had flown as a young man, he used planes infrequently, preferring the leisurely pace of ships and trains. Anyway, on occasions his doctor forbade him to fly on the grounds of fragile health. Jim was violently ill travelling through Germany. Hamburg station brought back memories of his last visit there, fifteen years before, and he had to force himself to be polite to the ‘Huns'.
64

In Copenhagen they visited the museum. Eve particularly liked the Eskimo collection and they were shown around by Hans Helbeck, who remembered Eve fondly from his time at the Institute of Archaeology in London. He thought Jim and Eve a companionable couple, and tried to imagine them in the ancient house they had described to him—full of turkeys and cats. A natural depressive, like Arne Furumark, perhaps he saw a fellow sufferer in Jim.

Paul Åström met them in Stockholm as planned. Tall and handsome, Paul was twenty-six and brimming with enthusiasm for Cypriot archaeology. He had assumed responsibility for writing the Middle Cypriot section of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, and was looking forward to working with Jim, who was to publish on the earlier period. Their research would, inevitably, overlap. Jim had invited Paul to Mount Pleasant to enable their close collaboration, and Paul and his girlfriend arranged to sail back to Australia with Jim and Eve. Eve was amused but flattered when his girlfriend, who spoke little English, curtseyed on meeting them. She was young and pretty, slightly built, but feisty and determined. Eve remembered all her life this first meeting with Laila Haglund.

They drove to Uppsala to visit Arne Furumark. Eve escaped the endless talk of pottery and took Paul and Laila to the cinema.
65
In what spare time she had, she continued work on the Achaean coins but looked forward to England and family reunions. They planned to stay for a time with Eve's mother at Milford-on-Sea and Jim would meet other family members, although only briefly. Eve remembered her cousin Giles's attempt to engage Jim in conversation, but Jim had no interest in small talk. If the discussion wasn't about archaeology he could be infuriatingly imperious and aloof.
66

By the time Jim and Eve boarded their ship for the return to Australia, the political situation on Cyprus had deteriorated, as Andreas Stylianou wrote to explain. Two of their workmen at Vasilia—George Vasiliou and the Turkish Muktar—had been wounded in a knife fight and others in the village had been beaten up and had broken limbs and other injuries. Andreas felt vindicated. ‘Perhaps you will realise now why I was so worried during the excavation … Well I am glad it did not happen then and the excavations were not the excuse for the fight!
'
67
A few months later, the situation worsened, with reports of regular kidnappings and tit-for-tat reprisals. Jim began to have real concerns for Eve's father, who lived on remote Tjiklos. Would Tom come to Australia, he wondered?
68

The return to Australia saw a veritable retinue on board. Jim and Eve were joined by Eve's mother Margery, together with ‘our Swedes', Paul Åström and Laila Haglund. Steaming down the west coast of Greece, Jim thought of the sixteenth-century battle at Navarino and wondered if one day the wreckage of this event would be visible from a plane flying overhead. He was in a querulous mood and speculated that the uncomfortable weather they were experiencing might be the result of atomic testing.
69
At Patras, Greek migrants joined the ship and Jim complained to his father that they were ‘a dirty scruffy lot of evil-looking rogues'. He was shocked to find them travelling first class.
70
The luggage Eve had left on Cyprus had been held up by a strike and when they arrived at Port Said, ‘tired after a hectic scramble', they had no summer clothes!
71