Love's Obsession (5 page)

By 1936 Kathleen was dead, Routledge had inherited her considerable wealth, and he was looking for somewhere to retire. Tom left the family home and moved with Routledge into a comfortable three-storeyed house on the outskirts of Kyrenia. While each continued separately to accumulate land and property, they agreed that whoever died first would inherit the other's estate.
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Routledge died in 1939 and Tom Dray moved to Tjiklos, a forty-acre property situated on a plateau overlooking Kyrenia.

Eve's mother lived at one end of the town and Tom at the other. It was, Eve thought, an amicable separation.

Joan continued to assume more responsibilities at the museum and was by now an experienced excavator. She had spent four seasons working with Mortimer and Tessa Wheeler in England, had worked alongside Porphyrios Dikaios at the Neolithic site of Khirokitia in the south of Cyprus and had wide and varied experience undertaking rescue digs across the island. Now she would direct excavations on the northern shore of the remote Karpas Peninsula, where the discovery of a patterned marble floor near a small church had held up plans for tourist developments in the area. For three seasons, Joan was the Department of Antiquities representative at the excavations at Ayios Philon, work that was sponsored by the Cyprus Museum and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Both institutions would share the excavated finds.

The Orthodox church of Ayios Philon sits facing a small ancient harbour and the setting sun. Along the shoreline the remains of a Roman jetty enclose a tiny harbour and stone blocks fitted together with sockets for iron clamps lie just above the high tide mark. Rock-cut tombs from all periods line the shoreline to either side. This is the site of Carpasia, said to be founded by the Phoenician, Pygmalion of Sidon. Archaeological investigations would span periods from the Bronze Age to the fifteenth century CE but primarily focus on the Early Christian basilica.

In the spring of 1937 Eve joined Joan for the third season of excavations. Judith Dobell teamed up with the two friends and with another of Eve's pals from London and Maiden Castle, the Australian Margaret (Kim) Collingridge. For the girls this was a great adventure. They lived in a two-storeyed house that was let out to English holiday-makers in the summer, furnishing the downstairs room with camp beds and tables and chairs. The ceiling was made of matting and an odd assortment of small creatures, centipedes or spiders, often dropped onto them at night. There was an outside ‘convenience' and in the evenings their cook brought a large tin tub of hot water to their bedrooms so they could bathe.

Judith worked with Joan at Ayios Philon, while Eve and Kim worked at a nearby site, Aphendrika, excavating Hellenistic tombs. They rode to the site each morning on their donkeys, with bundles of fresh lucerne attached to their saddles. The return trip, with cardboard boxes full of pots tied onto the wooden saddles, was decidedly less comfortable.
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Eve and Kim excavated with twelve workmen who had, they laughed, ‘improbable-sounding names such as Sophocles'. The girls giggled at the incongruity of instructions to their workmen. ‘Pericles, your work is very bad!
'
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On the last day at Ayios Philon the boxes of pots and the beds and other furniture from the camp were loaded on a truck for Nicosia, while the girls spent their last night in the inn at the village of Rizokarpasso. As honoured guests they were given the best hand-woven sheets whose geometric patterns in green, red and yellow camouflaged the fact that the beds harboured fleas. As Judith crossed the landing to get the tin of Keating's Powder (in those days used for protection from fleas) from Joan, she found the landing outside their room ‘carpeted' with half a dozen sleeping men!
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As she had in London, Eve found work drawing archaeological material. Her drafting was skilful and in demand. Soon she began drawing for a young couple excavating a large cemetery called Vounous, near Bellapais, only a few miles from Kyrenia. Jim Stewart was Australian, his wife Eleanor English. The Stewarts were both aged twenty-four and well travelled. This was their second visit to Cyprus. In 1935, en route to Turkey, they had stopped to visit friends. Both fell in love with the island, its history and landscapes and they left determined to return. When not travelling or working abroad, Jim and Eleanor lived not far from Eve's English family, at Park Cottage in Somerset. Now in Cyprus, Eve and her mother became the couple's friends.

Eve, Jim and Eleanor were close in age and background. Except that one was blonde and the other brunette, Eve and Eleanor might have been sisters, both short and slim waisted, quietly spoken, well mannered and educated. Jim was the boldest of the three. Short and gangly he had the sort of Celtic complexion that suffers in the Australian climate, or in a Cypriot summer. A square jaw gave him a seriousness that his grin dispelled. Like Eve, he loved animals and adopted cats wherever he went. He knew his mind and did not take kindly to orders.

Chapter 3
England, Cyprus and the Near East, 1930–38

Jim Stewart sat with his luggage in the foyer of the Grand Hotel in Bombay, waiting for the Thomas Cook guide to take him to the railway station. After Jim's bags had been loaded into the car they sped through crowds of men, women, children, cows and goats towards that grand building. People spilled over into the street and the guide pushed men and children aside, with Jim clutching his bags to his chest as they both leapt into the railway carriage. He gasped with delight when he saw the beautifully outfitted first class cabin on the
Gujerat Mail
. This was English Imperial India at its best, he thought, as he ran his hands over the leather seats and investigated the reading lights and fan, toilet, shower and adjoining accommodation for servants. But no bedding! His Trinity Hall scarf and overcoat across the seat became his bedding and his attaché case his pillow. Unorthodox certainly, but comfortable. He sat down, opened his writing case, and filed away the train's menu to be included later in a letter to his father.

At Karachi he added photos, which he cross-referenced, and a list of his luggage, all forty-four pounds of it, including pyjamas, plus fours and dinner suits. As the train rattled through a landscape of peacocks and monkeys Jim noticed that the fences were stone, unlike the familiar timber ones he knew in Australia. A scrabbling at his window shutter alarmed him and he was glad he carried a pistol to scare off intruders. Jim Stewart was ready for anything.

Born in Australia, Jim Stewart had spent much of his childhood in Europe, his adulthood in England, and was well versed in travel between Australia and Europe. His family had money and influence, and as an only child Jim enjoyed the benefits of both.

After completing secondary school in Australia he had enrolled in 1930, aged seventeen, at The Leys School in Cambridge, where he spent two summer terms in preparation for entry to the University of Cambridge. Both his father and uncle were old boys of the school and had business connections with one of the school's founders. Jim brought with him a reference from the headmaster of his Australian school, who recommended Jim as ‘a boy of excellent character and of more than average ability',
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although his school report from The Leys provides a more measured view of his abilities. His history master thought that ‘for one so widely read, such work of his as I have seen, has been a little disappointing', adding that ‘one has seen enough of it to be sure that he will do well at the Varsity and later on'. According to his English teacher, his writing was ‘clumsy' and he was ‘far too confident and slapdash in his literary judgements … If he read more receptively and were a little humbler in his attitude, his work would gain immensely'.
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Jim's life at The Leys scarcely rated a mention in the school's records. He shot at the rifle competition in Bisley in 1931 but his personal score was the lowest of the team.
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Having passed the matriculation examination for entry into the University of Sydney, both Jim and his father assumed he could avoid the Cambridge entrance exam, but the headmaster of The Leys demurred. The whole affair seems ill considered and chaotic. In a letter to Trinity Hall, The Leys headmaster admitted that he had not yet received information from Mr Stewart as to which Tripos his boy would be taking at the university, and the boy himself did not seem to be sure.
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Jim entered Trinity Hall to read history and archaeology, a choice that is likely to have been his, rather than his businessman father's.

Now in his first year at Cambridge, at the end of January 1932 Jim's mother died suddenly in a hotel in Edinburgh. He was nineteen. Florence Stewart's estate was valued at £8652 and £7000 was set aside for her only son.
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The newspaper notice of his mother's death makes no mention of other family members and it is not clear whether anyone accompanied her remains to Australia, but she was buried at Wentworth Falls, in the Blue Mountains, in April of that year. Jim was certainly in Australia later for the university holidays.

Eager for adventure, Jim decided to take a side trip on his return to England, leaving his ship to travel by bus, train, and plane overland from Bombay to Port Said. Well travelled, confident and energetic, Jim had not only the exuberance and confidence of youth, but the services of Thomas Cook to pre-arrange details and his family's money to prop him up should things go wrong.
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In Karachi Jim boarded a small bi-plane called the Kannibal for the flight to Persia. There were only two other passengers, an Italian on his way home from Kabul and an army officer on leave. Sitting with large-scale maps on his lap, Jim tracked their progress, scanning the landscape laid out below. Baluchistan looked an awful place, he thought, bare of vegetation. He traced the shadow of the plane across its vast baked sand plain. They landed to collect another passenger and ate lunch soon after take-off:

Beautiful asparagus, cold chicken and ham, peaches and cream, cheese and a bottle of beer, Imperial Airways do you well. It seems so funny to be having this over the desert wastes of Baluchistan.

He spent the night at Jask on the shores of the Persian Gulf. With the other passengers, Jim went swimming in the Gulf, naked ‘as an anti shark remedy' and they slept on the beach ‘under [the] moon with a hot breeze which was very refreshing and with the noise of the uneasy Persian Gulf beating on our ears … It is amazing. Breakfast in India, lunch in Baluchistan, evening swim in Persia'. Jim wrote home, ‘Oh Dad how you would love this trip. I am just lost in wonder and interest'.
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At the end of the First World War, Britain had assumed control of areas previously part of the defeated Ottoman Empire. In what is now Iraq, British Arabists like Gertrude Bell promoted the region's history and archaeology. She became the unpaid Director of the Department of Antiquities in Iraq and founded the Baghdad Museum. In the same way that classical texts led scholars to investigate the archaeology of ancient Rome and Athens, biblical writings provided the impetus for much archaeology in the Near East.

In 1922 Sir Leonard Woolley began excavating the ancient biblical city of Ur, sponsored by the British Museum and the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania.
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A prodigious talent, Woolley originally trained as a theologian and hoped that his excavations would shed light on the Old Testament by providing evidence for the life of Abraham and the Biblical Flood. In 1925 a young Max Mallowan joined his excavation team and, together with hundreds of local labourers, they discovered a royal cemetery containing over two thousand graves. All were excavated and recorded in exemplary fashion. Woolley understood the importance of popularising archaeology and regularly reported the results of his excavations in the
Illustrated London News
. These reports fed popular fascination with the area and its archaeology. In 1928 Margery Dray had joined the milling crowds at the British Museum to view the exhibit of material from Ur and three years later both Margery and Grannie Mills attended a public lecture given by Woolley himself in Bournemouth.
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In 1929 Woolley had uncovered evidence of human sacrifice. Bodies of men and women, gorgeously clothed in golden head-dresses, together with fantastic objects of gold and lapis lazuli, alabaster, silver and marble, were discovered lying at the entrance to the king's tomb beside their slaughtered horses. This was something Jim longed to see.

Irresistibly close to Ur, Jim insisted on taking a side trip and walked with an Arab guide to the diggings. ‘The surface is covered with shards of pottery and shells', Jim told his father. ‘We climbed the ziggurat …' Jim was in his element. He passed Woolley's bungalow (‘built of bricks from Ur!') and the guard laid out a rug in the shade and they squatted, Arab-wise, to drink hot sweet tea.

It was wonderful, this dream tea in the court of a house of bricks from Ur in the desert and nearby was a dog kennel addressed ‘Mrs Leonard Woolley, Basra' and a case of what was once beer.
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The train to Baghdad was full of desert sand and Jim advised future travellers to go by river! Thomas Cook was efficient as always, although Jim disputed the cost of the hotel. It was hot and he slept on the rooftop. He was disappointed with the Baghdad Museum and visits to mosques were forbidden. Nonetheless he visited local markets, where he bought a goat's hair rug, which proved its worth during cold nights in the desert. ‘Please don't think I used my letter of credit for it, for I paid for it myself', he assured his father.

From Baghdad Jim travelled by bus to Damascus and Aleppo, making a detour to visit the ruins at Baalbeck. His overland adventure was complete when he passed through the Alicia Gates in the Taurus Mountains.

It is more beautiful than the Alps, not so fierce, for everything seems to smile from the little peaked shaped bridges to the very rocks themselves, towering above us … This pass has seen more history than any other.
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Jim's love affair with the Near East had begun. He returned to Trinity Hall in Cambridge at the end of his visit to Australia, fired with determination to become an archaeologist. The Near East and archaeology were inextricably linked, and for Jim archaeology was always and only ever associated with exotic places.

Cambridge studies were hardly onerous. The archaeologist Glyn Daniel, one of Jim's class of 1932, described the study of archaeology at Cambridge in the early 1930s:
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there was no formal supervision in either archaeology or anthropology and the Disney Professor of Archaeology, E.H. Minns, never expected students to come to his lectures and they obliged. Fortunately, there were other more successful teachers: Miles Burkitt lectured on the Old Stone Age and Toty de Navarro taught the Bronze and Iron Age in Europe, although it stretches credulity to think this was done effectively as he did not believe in using illustrations. By the time Jim graduated, Alan Wace had been elected as Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology. The Director of the British School at Athens from 1914 until 1923, excavator of Mycenae and Deputy Keeper in the Victorian and Albert Museum, Wace brought a wealth of professional archaeological and museum experience to the department. Jim looked to Wace for support and guidance, and Wace thought highly of him.

One of the Research Fellows at Glyn Daniel's college was Louis Leakey, who would work at Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, and revolutionise our understanding of human evolution. Daniels remembers a field trip taken by a group of students to investigate flint mines near Brandon in Suffolk:

We were being driven back at breakneck speed by my contemporary, James Stewart … Louis, who was sitting in the back with me, leaned forward after a while and said ‘When the inevitable accident occurs, as it will do if you go on driving like this, could you see I am not killed? I have a great deal of important work to do in Africa'. We arrived back in Cambridge safely.
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Reports on Jim's university life filtered back via the old boy network to his former school, The Kings School in Sydney. He coxed the Trinity Hall first boat
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but a year later, at ten stone, had become ‘a spectator on the tow-path, having outgrown a coxing weight'.
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He took his degree in Archaeology and Anthropology in 1934
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and was said to be leading a halcyon existence. The ‘old boy correspondent' for The Kings School magazine wrote laconically that for Jim, ‘doing research amounts to rising at 10 a.m. and spending week-ends in Devon and places; and as a reward for these labours he wins a scholarship, just recently announced'. Stewart was, it seems, a golden-haired boy.

Jim's weekends were spent in Somerset, not Devon. Eleanor Neal's family owned property in the parish of Kingsdon and Jim was friends with her brother at university.
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Eleanor was a graduate of the Gloucester School of Domestic Science and a few months older than Jim. Sometime in the early 1930s she taught at a school in Birmingham but the details are lost.
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During university holidays Jim had his first opportunity to join an archaeological excavation, and Eleanor went with him.

In 1933 Sir Flinders Petrie, a towering figure in the history of archaeology, was aged eighty and undertaking what was to be his last excavation, at the ancient mound of Tell el 'Ajjul in present-day Gaza in Palestine. Sir Matthew Flinders Petrie was named for his grandfather, Matthew Flinders, the great seafarer, navigator and cartographer who sailed with William Bligh, and who between 1801 and 1803 was the first person to circumnavigate the continent of Australia. Matthew Flinders did not invent the name ‘Australia' but was certainly the first to encourage its use for this new continent. Matthew Flinders died in 1814 aged forty, and ten years later his widow and daughter were belatedly voted a pension by the Government of New South Wales. Although the pension arrived too late for his widow, now dead, his daughter announced that she would use the money for the education of her son. This son, Flinders's grandson, was Matthew Flinders Petrie who went on to become one of the earliest and most prolific of Egyptologists.

The 'Ajjul excavations, however, were not a success. Petrie's methods were out of date, he did not understand the stratigraphy of the site, and he had no interest in what other excavators in the same area were doing. Although he published material promptly, most archaeologists now disagree with his chronology for the site and his findings. To condemn all this, however, is churlish. Even the British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, someone only too happy to denounce poor excavation methods as ‘digging for potatoes', recognised the unfairness of judging by the standards of a different age. In 1936 he had visited the Near East and would have written more but ‘The intricacies of the law of libel are beyond my ken … It will suffice to say this: that from the Sinai border to Megiddo and on to Byblos and northern Syria, I encountered such technical standards as had not been tolerated in Great Britain for a quarter of a century'.
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Nonetheless Wheeler acknowledged Petrie's formidable powers: