Chapter 8
Travels, 1955–56

The SS Oronsay lay at anchor at Suez, waiting in line to enter the canal. Sharing a beer in the ship’s glass-windowed lounge, Jim and Eve sat quietly, both lost in thought. Eve recalled family camping trips through the Egyptian desert as a child, her mother swathed in a long fur coat, her father at the wheel of their open-top car. How quaint it all seemed now, another world. When she had left Egypt as a child, she never expected it would be so long before she returned. Jim had met his company near here in 1941 and, in 1947, had passed through with Eleanor, both in sad and sullen silence.

At dawn Eve rose to watch the sun lighten the pink cliffs at the edge of the Eastern Desert, which seemed to rise directly out of the blue waters of the Red Sea. Later she sat with Jim as the great ocean liner entered the canal behind a group of tankers and freighters. A young boy leaned over the railing and shrieked with delight at his first site of a camel. Eve thought it possible to forget you were on a ship, the canal so narrow it gave the impression of sliding in graceful silence over the land. On one side of the liner was nothing but sand and on the other, a fringe of cultivation.1

Eight long and messy years after arriving in Australia, Eve mentally replayed the mad rush to finish work and her excitement at preparing for the trip back to the world she had left behind. Optimistic and upbeat, she hoped that if all went well they would bring back enough ‘loot’ to impress doubters and win over Sydney University. They might, she thought, get their institute after all.2 Although on leave from his job at Sydney University, Jim had obtained official support for these planned excavations from Melbourne University, although Melbourne gave little by way of financial backing and Jim seems to have covered most of the expenses himself. Plans that had once been attached to an Australian Cyprus Expedition now came under the aegis of the Melbourne Cyprus Expedition.

As she folded their clothes and packed suitcases in the cool Bathurst evening, Eve marvelled at how long it had been since she’d travelled. Although relieved to turn their backs on Sydney and their failed plans, leaving The Mount was not easy. They fussed over the house, worried at the decline in wool prices and A.A.’s health, and fired off detailed instructions to Basil.

Remember to smooge the house cats (Pooh, Bub, Fiz, Tabitha, and Chilly), try to coax Chilly back in to the drawing room, remember to shut the china cupboard doors as the cats are always anxious to explore, here is a list of hens to be eaten off, remind Callan to keep the lambs indoors during winter.3

In Sydney they boarded the Oronsay and were shown to their cabin. Built only four years earlier, the ship had become a regular visitor to Sydney Harbour as it plied the route between Australia and England; from September to December, in the off season, ‘boomerang’ trips were relatively cheap. When the liner berthed at Melbourne, Eve visited distant family and Jim renewed relations with Walter Beasley. After years of tension, he was surprised to find Beasley so affable, although still—he thought—‘utterly incompetent in Archaeology’. Jim felt sure he could easily get a job in Melbourne if he wanted.4 In Adelaide they paid a visit to fellow coin collector, Sid Hagley.

From Adelaide they sailed into the rough seas of the Great Australian Bight. White-faced passengers kept to their bunks or dragged themselves on deck to gaze dolefully toward the horizon as the ship rolled and bucked. Eve was a good sailor but suffered from a bout of food poisoning.

Although the Oronsay was new and luxurious, a boomerang ticket was not the sort of travel either Jim or Eve was used to. By 1955 Australians enjoying the country’s post-war prosperity were sailing for England in ever greater numbers at the same time as Europeans were hoping to emigrate. Travellers would normally take passage on a one-class tourist ship but were able to buy cheap tickets on the Oronsay in the off-season. ‘You ought to see the yokels’, Jim commented to Basil.5

Only in their early forties, both Stewarts were uneasy in this more open and democratic post-war world, and Jim for one pronounced himself disappointed with the failure of passengers to dress for dinner, which was especially galling because he surprised himself by fitting into his dinner jacket. ‘Afraid the old Malaga spoilt me for ships’, he told Basil. ‘Now one lays out one’s own clothes and cleans one’s own shoes. I suppose one must adapt oneself to the flitter and bustle of sewer rats’, but it made him feel ‘less sociable and more inclined to retreat within my own boundaries’.6 Jim was prepared to concede that the ship was efficient and well run, although it reminded him of a ‘highly painted platinum blonde, hair probably not the same colour all over’.7

Eve described shipboard life to her mother. Their starboard cabin had no porthole but was handy to bathrooms and the steward’s pantry. For meals they sat at the Chief Engineer’s table with an elderly couple from the Midlands and four New Zealanders.8 By the time they left Fremantle the boat had its full complement of passengers: 750 in their class and 750 travelling ‘tourist’.

As the liner steamed north across the Indian Ocean, pods of dolphins surfed the bow wave and passengers moaned about the heat. Jim complained about the quality of the food:

The white fish is undoubtedly whale for nothing else could masquerade under five different names. It poisoned me last night, so now I’m living on fruit juice as being reasonably safe. But the ship is not crowded and one has plenty of free space. More people are dressing for dinner now, thank God. Service is quite good apart from the cabin. I’ve been feeling too tired to do much work.9

A delegation of academics returning from a Vice-Chancellors’ meeting in Sydney was on board and Jim took the opportunity to lobby them. He was unsurprised when their ideas, as he relayed them to Basil, agreed with his own. In general, he said, they declared Sydney University badly in decline, mentioning in particular the Nicholson Museum. They resented the fact that neither Jim nor Basil had been asked to show them around the museum and the person deputed to guide them was ‘considered amiable but third rate. I have spoken strongly on the subject’, Jim added, in case Basil was in any doubt.10

They went ashore at Singapore. Eve wore a long-sleeved blue suit with buttoned jacket and pearls, brooch and narrow-brimmed hat. She grabbed her brown leather handbag and urged Jim, dressed in an expensive but rumpled grey suit and a wide silk tie, to hurry as they made their way down the gangway. As they posed for the photographer at the bottom of the descent, Jim squinted into the tropical sun.

At Colombo, which they knew better than Singapore, they again went ashore, but the prices shocked them as they combed the markets. ‘Coins were quite ruinous, silk was limited, moonstones quite ridiculous.’11 They didn’t bother to go on any organised tours, but succumbed to purchasing stamps for their collections, and despite the prices, Jim picked up a silk shirt and Eve a silk petticoat.12

Familiar with sea travel and not interested in social activities, neither engaged in shipboard life. They followed their normal routines. Eve worked editing the first volume planned for publication by the Melbourne Cyprus Expedition. This was not a work of archaeology but a work reflecting Jim’s medieval interests, a 1938 translation by Richard Dawkins of a medieval manuscript ‘The Chronicle of George Boustronios’, a Hellenised Frenchman living in Cyprus in the fifteenth century. While Eve worked, Jim rested. They went briefly to the ‘Red Sea Races’ held on deck, where wooden horses ran along tracks raised on trestles, but after watching two contests, decided to place their bets more reliably on the cold beer in the lounge bar. A man from the Australian Broadcasting Commission was an excellent pianist and the younger passengers sang along to songs that, to Eve’s surprise, were the old familiar ones such as ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’. A fancy dress ball attracted Eve’s interest. She thought the men more imaginative dressers: ‘one very tall, thin man was a palm tree & a fat one was a stuffed olive.’ But, she wrote her well-travelled mother, ‘I don’t have to tell you about shipboard life’. Mostly they kept to themselves.

This short visit to Egypt was made easier by Eve’s father, who gave them £300 towards expenses and arranged a flat for their use. The flat, in the suburb of Zamalek, was owned by an English couple who had recently bought the Dome Hotel in Kyrenia and were holidaying in Europe. A neighbour arranged for a car and driver and Jim soon befriended an upstairs neighbour’s Siamese cat. He was amused to see that it gained access to the roof via its own personal ladder.

For Eve the trip to Egypt meant she could finally deal with the piles of boxes left by her family at Boulaq Dakrur. How strange to return now, middle-aged and married. Ahmet, their driver, drove her through the suburbs of Cairo, along a hideous new dual carriageway, past rows of shops and ugly blocks of flats. Her childhood house was no longer in the countryside; suburbs crept right to the doorstep. Although the house was shabby, the plaster peeling, the garden was the same and the gardener met her at the front door. He showed her the family trunks stored in the garage and with a sigh, she realised the job would take more than one day. The once-precious family memorabilia looked sad and shabby after all these years. She sorted through books, threw away most of the mysteries, tossed out her mother’s battered straw hat, but kept both her teddy bears. Then she found herself in a photo album stored in the great trunk. There she was, standing dutifully, weighted with a heavy silk kimono and holding an open fan ‘à la Japonaise’. In another she posed in the garden. She remembered the heavy white coat and ankle-length boots and the veiled hat she was made to wear as protection from the flies. Yet another showed the very teddy bear she was holding in her hands. She stroked his now flat and lifeless fur. She and Jim nearly argued over what to ditch—useless ‘bric-à-brac’ from the 1920s, he said. She was relieved that her mother couldn’t see the desolation.13

Jim’s friend, the London coin dealer Albert Baldwin, had written to introduce him to dealers in Cairo and Alexandria and Jim tracked down coinage. Not just his favourite Lusignan coins, but other Crusader coins, and Roman, Venetian, and Islamic ones as well.14 They visited museums and libraries and lunched at Gropis, just to boast they had been there. Jim thought the Cairo Museum and library a disappointment, but was charmed by the Coptic Museum. ‘What we liked best was a 6th century painting of a delegation of rats, waving a white flag and carrying flasks of wine and goblets, making overtures to a cat’.15 Often Eve strolled by herself through the city she had once loved. She set out alone to relish the fresh dates and figs in the street markets, leaving Jim to solve his arcane pottery puzzles. In the evenings they enjoyed their balcony amid the pot plants on the balustrade, morning glory climbing up its pillars. A charming place to write letters, or for a pre-dinner drink.

Jim wrote to his father extolling the virtues of Egyptian scholarship, the friendliness and courtesy of everyone they met, and his surprise at the popularity of the nationalist leader General Nasser. The city delighted him: ‘more modern than Sydney, and much better shops’, and he admitted they were both putting on weight.16 To Basil, however, Jim lamented how out of touch and isolated he had become in Australia: ‘one can’t possibly carry on archaeology at Sydney in vacuo, without very close contacts in the East … To work only from books is really quite hopeless.’ They met the Egyptologist Labib Habachi and Jim considered him charming, perhaps because they agreed on the internationality of culture. Both thought that museums should have the chance to acquire objects unfettered by questions of national ‘ownership’. They had long discussions on historical questions—the Hyksos in Egypt, Albright’s dating—and on donkeys.17 Jim was flattered that Egyptian scholars greeted him as a Medievalist. Professor Mustafa Ziada from the Department of History knew of Jim’s work on the Crusades and the Lusignan rulers of Cyprus and agreed with Jim that archaeology should reach out to the Medieval period, but knew nothing of Jim’s work on Early Bronze Age Cyprus. ‘Is this the onset of charlatanism?’ Jim asked Basil. ‘Perhaps it’s a good thing I have no vanity to feed, or at any rate not much.’18 They dined with Professor Ziada at Heliopolis and Jim mused about living in Egypt.

In only a little over a week they amassed quantities of books, all of which had to be checked through customs. Eve and Jim made endless trips to the post office with boxes of books that were wrapped and tied, but later unwrapped for customs. Fortunately a one-eyed customs officer recognised one of the volumes in the pile: ‘Ah … Tennyson’, he sighed, and stopped checking at box number three. There were twenty-eight!

Their last day in Egypt was at ‘Port Bloody Said’. Jim had a further nineteen boxes of books to post and lost his temper with the customs officers, who he was convinced expected bribes. ‘Venereal whores in whom Nasser should take an interest’, Jim quipped to Basil, in a reply to a letter containing the latest gossip from Sydney on the fate of archaeology at the university.19 The news from Sydney contributed to his anxieties and he collapsed on the Esperia, vomiting, bleeding and generally feeling like he’d been kicked by a horse. Jim had to be helped ashore in Beirut.

Most of the archaeologists they planned to visit in Lebanon were away, but they drove to the site of Byblos—a glorious jumble of tombs from the Late Bronze Age beside a Roman theatre, with a tangle of house foundations of all periods in between. What a stratigraphic nightmare, Eve thought. Their guide was patient when he realised that this odd couple were more interested in the burials below the Neolithic house floors than the impressive Roman theatre above.20

At last they landed in Cyprus. It had been eight years since they had left. Both they and the island had changed. Eve’s father Tom sent a car to collect them at Limassol and drive them north. Many more lights dotted the flat lands around Nicosia and the dark hills along the road to Kyrenia. Just after midnight they arrived at Tjiklos to find Tom Dray asleep on a sofa in the lounge room.

Tjiklos, Eve told her mother in England, had become quite a colony, with houses springing up on the plateau and a growing population of English residents. She reported on those her mother knew: Wing Commander Hubbard was back in his house and slowly going senile; Miss Darcy had moved down to town and an American now lived in her house; Mrs Duckworth was increasingly blind; Mrs Wallis has gone quite ‘queer’ and played bridge all day; Mrs Worcester, too, had been ‘difficult’ before she died; Polyxenos sent her best wishes. Tom had converted three army huts built during the war into houses and Jim and Eve stayed in one of these. Eve wished she knew more Greek so she could chat to Christallou who lived with her husband and three children next door. Tom Dray, although now seventy-five, couldn’t stop building. This time it was a house above a water tank, although heart problems kept him in bed once a week.

On that first morning they went to Nicosia to hire a car. The city now engulfed the nearby village and spread into the countryside. Ledra Street, within the Medieval walls, had been transformed by rebuilding. Tryphon met them and they visited Petro Colocassides, who, naturally, had coins for Jim to inspect. They visited the museum, where Porphyrios Dikaios greeted them and cheerfully showed off the new storage and work areas. After a long day they returned to Tjiklos to find that a small Morris car had been delivered and Tom Dray’s cat had already adopted them.21

In the centre of the old city, the Kumarcilar Khan remained derelict. A seventeenth-century ‘card players’ inn, the building had heavy stone columns and walls that supported a timber roof, now sagging and splintered. For some years Jim had stored his field equipment in the Khan and now, to his fury, he found that much of his equipment was lost and what remained was in a frightful mess. Eve thought this hardly surprising. Obviously Joan had used some of it for Myrtou-Pighades, and what could you expect after nearly ten years? When news of their return spread, old friends arrived and Jim and Eve were touched to be greeted so fondly. Jim had a happy encounter with Michaelaki, a friend from the Cyprus Regiment. Tryphon was put to work cleaning and preparing what equipment they could find, Dikaios lent them tools and hessian sacks for storing finds, and Jim and Tryphon haggled happily over wages. Jim wrote:

My dear Basil this is still the old Cyprus with all its friendliness and courtesy. Strangers are behaving in the old way and none of my village friends have been afraid to seek us out. I only hope nobody will spoil my feelings, for the spell of the island is beginning to come back.22

Detouring on the way home to Tjiklos, they visited Bellapais. It’s tempting to imagine they saw an Englishman sitting under the shading tree at the local café. They would have recognised the world he described although may not have approved of the sentiments. Lawrence Durrell worked as a teacher in Nicosia and knew Peter Megaw. A Greek speaker, he had romantic views of the Mediterranean and his attitudes towards the English expatriate community were acerbic.

The British colony lived what appeared to be a life of blameless monotony, rolling about in small cars, drinking at the yacht club, sailing a bit, going to church, and suffering agonies of apprehension at the thought of not being invited to Government House on the Queen’s Birthday. One saw the murk creeping up over Brixton as one listened to their conversations.23

Jim’s friend Costa was in charge of Bellapais Abbey and persuaded Jim to find money for conservation works that Peter Megaw had approved, but which the Department of Antiquities was unable to fund. Rashly Jim agreed to find the money.

Before leaving Australia, both Eve and Jim had read newspaper reports of ‘terrorist’ agitation against British rule in Cyprus but neither was especially concerned. Letters from old friends remained friendly and Jim for one had no intention of putting himself at risk. ‘I don’t like getting hurt and positively loathe being frightened’, he told Basil. ‘If the tension is too bad, we’ll move on.’24

British Army lorries filled the roads, the only visible army presence as far as either could tell. At Bellapais they were warned that no one knew exactly who was involved in terrorist action and it was as well not to antagonise anyone in the village.25 Jim reported that the locals were prone to throwing stones at the army convoys, but he thought even the English residents would have done the same. If anything, he thought, people seemed united in their antagonism to this military presence.

Jim saw little enmity between Turks and Greeks in the village where they planned to work, although troops had recently been called to quell trouble and they heard rumours that the police feared entering the village. ‘Despite a few threats to kill our people we have had no trouble and I have insisted on employing Greeks and Turks … we are doing our bit to restore sanity’,26 Jim assured Basil. Some political disturbances escaped their notice altogether: on one day in Nicosia, the wireless reported a bombing that neither Jim nor Eve noticed. Certainly bombs were thrown, but Jim thought them primitive and ‘not many people get more than a fright. The Cypriots are more scared than we are. Our Turkish workmen won’t let Eve walk down to the road alone—one of them escorts her. Which is very sweet, but not necessary’.27 When the Post Office in Nicosia was blown up, it interrupted mail deliveries for a while, but nothing in the political situation caused Jim or Eve much concern. ‘It is so easy to commit sabotage and murder here that only Cypriot inefficiency makes life relatively safe. The British are just too incompetent for words in dealing with a very simple situation.’28 Jim blithely assured his father that the recently declared state of emergency would not worry them. And to Basil he commented:

I’m getting bloody cantankerous with the nerves of the Greeks and British. The Greeks are even afraid to go to the cinema. The whole situation is ridiculous, and made worse by the lying newspaper people … The Times correspondent is a Hun, usually drunk, so you can guess his reliability. God castrate the whole bloody lot! We drive around after dark without worry, and the state of emergency has made no difference.

He was shocked to discover that Peter Megaw had five guards at his house and preferred the attitude of their neighbour, the Admiral, who refused guards and wouldn’t even keep his barbed wire in position, ‘but then he’s a Canadian’, Jim added.29

To his father he admitted to shame at the panic the British were in, although he thought the Navy seemed calm and unworried and even went as far as to write a letter to The Times condemning the failure of the British to protect pro-British Cypriots.30 As he told his father, he doubted they would publish the letter, since he ‘advocated the immediate execution of those terrorists who are already under sentence of death. The troops should be allowed to shoot on the spot anyone caught with arms’.31

As soon as possible they drove their small hired Morris to the area they planned to excavate—a site Jim had chosen eighteen years before, a large cemetery like Vounous and, like Vounous, heavily pilfered. Vasilia was situated only fifteen minutes walk from Judith and Andreas Stylianous’s house, and their friends offered the house as a base. Eve and Judith had worked together on the Karpas excavations before the war and Andreas had worked with Jim and Eleanor at Bellapais. Andreas agreed to work at Vasilia, although he had to take time out to drive his young son to school most days and would take time off from excavations when the partridge season began. Eve’s last excavation work had been in England after the war, but Jim had not done any excavations since 1938.

Jim thought the cemetery might be even larger than Vounous and although many of the tombs had been robbed he saw evidence that some had not. He recognised three different tomb types, including one type of rock-cut tomb with no entrance (dromos). This type was named after the site where it was first found, Philia. The Philia period intrigued Jim: was it a precursor to the first phase of the Early Bronze Age or was it, as he suspected, a regional style limited to areas in the northwestern part of Cyprus and coexisting with other developments elsewhere on the island? He and Dikaios could not agree. It was hoped that this excavation would solve the puzzle.

No excavation work could occur without the permission of the Department of Antiquities and the agreement of the landowners. Gregoris Michaeli was the village representative on the Greek Ethnarchy Council and he and Ramadan Ali, one of the Turkish landowners, alternated as night watchmen at the site. Another Turkish landowner, Bayram Riza, was employed to carry excavation equipment and lunch to the site on his donkey. Both Ali and Riza had served with Jim in the Cyprus Regiment; Riza had been captured at Kalamata and Ali was a fellow prisoner of war. Andreas Stylianou worried that employing Turks might give the village a bad name. He was convinced that the village was a hotbed of terrorists and claimed the police from Lapithos were reluctant to go there. Andreas said there were threats to kill anybody who worked for them,32 but Jim stood his ground33 and in the end half the workmen employed on the excavation were fellow prisoners of war. He had few concerns about their loyalty.34

Work began on 17 October, only a week after their arrival. Vasilia was a pretty site, situated on the first set of hills that rose behind the coastal plain, with a higher fir-covered ridge behind, and rising beyond, the twisted rope of the Kyrenia Range. The landscape was a monochrome watercolour world, each layer of wash fading into a softer blue. The site sloped down toward the coastal plain, carob and olive trees falling away in khaki lines toward the sea. Far off, the low coast of Turkey hovered on the horizon. At seven each morning they arrived at the site to begin work. By the middle of the day, even in October, the temperature had risen. After lunch the workmen lay on the ground in the shade of the olive trees, while Jim and Eve sat side by side on a rocky ledge, balancing notepads on their laps to write letters home. They agreed this was a heavenly place.

Digging started in the area with circular, beehive-shaped tholos graves, and quite soon they had excavated down to bare rock. One entranceway looked like it might lead into what they called Tomb 1. Planning and photographing step by step was dull work. Jim moved the men on to more tombs, and although the pace of excavation was fierce he quickly became dispirited. Most of the tombs had been looted in a manner he thought excessive, even for Cyprus.35 A local woman from Vasilia told Eve that when they were minding sheep and goats on the hills they amused themselves by picking up sherds and throwing them through the hole in the roof of one of the tombs, making it next to impossible to be sure that the pottery belonged to the tomb where it had been found.36 The graves were impressive architecturally, but there seemed little prospect of finding whole pots, which both Jim and Eve felt were needed to win over Sydney University and were important if they were to please their financial backers, including the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which had subsidised the dig on the understanding that they receive objects from dated tombs. The museum had no interest in domestic material from habitation areas, which they thought unsuitable for exhibition.37 Hot weather made working in the humid tombs unbearable, and the compacted earth was like cement. Any pots prised from this mortar were unlikely to remain intact, especially given the speed with which they worked with picks and shovels and buckets. Jim spread his workers out, sending Tryphon and Bayram Riza hunting for more tombs and, with long experience, Tryphon found one. Tomb 2 finally produced an almost mint 1890 coin at floor level, which scarcely boded well. And then it rained. Jim’s spirits sank.

By 27 October he had declared Vasilia a ‘washout’.38

Peter Megaw agreed and suggested they try another site. He offered one located between Myrtou and Morphou, from which the Museum had obtained a useful group of pots. He thought it might prove more lucrative. In the end Jim opted for a site suggested by Dikaios, a site more or less within the sprawling city of Nicosia and which Peter Megaw told them would soon be destroyed by building developments. In just a single day they obtained permits from the Department of Antiquities and permission from the landowners, and began work at Ayia Paraskevi. Leaving a group of workmen to finalise work at Vasilia, they took others to this new site thirty miles away, and proceeded to excavate both sites simultaneously, hurtling along the rough dirt roads between each in the tiny Morris. In between times they also excavated a tomb an extra mile away: ‘started at 10.30 am, went through 6 feet of earth and 2 of rock, photographed and drew the burial, and had the pottery out on the roadside by 5 pm, just as darkness fell.’39 It is hardly surprising that the field notes for the work—not published until 1988—were ‘less than ideal’.40

At the last minute Tryphon discovered that Tomb 103 at Vasilia was relatively untouched and phoned Jim urgently. Jim and Eve raced back from Nicosia. Many of the pots in this tomb were, they believed, deliberately broken at the time of burial. This ‘killing’ of an object was common for metal objects but not seen before in pottery. One large pot or pithos was found intact, together with a magnificent alabaster bowl, the earliest discovery yet of alabaster in Cyprus.

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

Both Jim and Eve were ill during the voyage, perhaps the result of overwork and strain. Even so, they made themselves work during the mornings; there was always something pending. Duty and obligation fought with their obsession with detail and precision. One or other had to be sacrificed if the work was ever to end.

Eve looked forward to Mount Pleasant and to spending time with her mother. Jim was torn. He loved The Mount and his cats, but the trip reminded him of all that he had lost by leaving Europe. ‘The utter barbarism of Australia will be hard to bear now’,72 he told Basil. The messiness of Near Eastern politics contributed to his depressed and dispirited mood. ‘The wogs are fortifying the canal,’ he told Basil, ‘but it doesn’t look remotely like war yet or for a long time to come. If Israel is bankrupt, so is Egypt’.73

When their ship was involved in a mid-ocean collision with a tanker it simply underlined his foreboding.