There was a girl in Umbria whose name was Inachis, meaning Butterfly in some language or other, so she told me. Sanskrit, maybe. I explained to her that I wanted to get to Greece. Surely it ought to be possible to get a place as a helper on an archaeological dig in Greece? If perhaps she knew any archaeologists …? She said plaintively, ‘I thought it was for myself alone that you …?’
‘It was, it is,’ I assured her, ‘but I love Greece too.’
‘You know Hellas of course?’ she asked me. ‘Andreas Hellas?’
‘Of course,’ I said. I found out afterwards that he was the man, professor of classical archaeology in Athens. Or Cairo? I’m not sure if that was his correct name, but something like that.
‘You are a millionaire?’ she pressed.
‘Yes.’
‘Then there is no problem.’
When these details had been seen to, we set out and reached Euthalia, which is a tiny village on a sheltered bay, three sardine boats, but there had been a city there once, a thriving Greek city of a thousand souls.
We had been there only a short time when Inachis took me aside and spoke very seriously. It had begun to strike her that archaeology was not as glamorous as she had hoped, that archaeologists were expected to get down on their knees and actually get their hands dirty. So she spread her dainty wings and departed to more civilized places and pursuits, leaving me broken-hearted. To my surprise, however, my heart mended within a day or two, with considerable help from Peacock. Peacock was an interesting girl, silent for the most part, but able to say plenty with her dark lustrous eyes; when she did speak, it was in a wonderful mixture of demotic Greek (very demotic), what I took to be Persian, and her weird version of New York slang.
When last year I visited Euthalia again, a sentimental journey, I found that one of her phrases was still used by the citizens in times of stress, though none of them seemed to be clear about its meaning, they just liked the sound of it – ‘Chiffeta astoni.’ They certainly didn’t know they were quoting Peacock. I was pretty sure I knew the meaning, but I wanted the local opinion. The innkeeper when questioned remembered the diggers, but could throw no light on the origin or meaning of the words. ‘Ask the harbour-master,’ he advised, ‘he knows everything.’
The harbour-master put on his peaked cap and a face of great seriousness, as befitted his office and reputation. He said, yes, it might have originated with ‘the diggers’. ‘It’s Italian, of course, and has something to do with melons. I am sorry I cannot be of more help – I have matters to attend to.’
To return, however, to my first visit to Euthalia: our director was a Cretan who smoked aromatic Egyptian tobacco in a curvy pipe that complemented the curves of his magnificent moustache. He had been a builder of pyramids, I feel sure, but had come down in the world. No whip now, and instead of Hebrew slaves he had a motley gang that included two boisterous young Italians, both called Tony, which could be confusing at times; a rather surly Bulgarian; three or four Greek girls from the university – Melissa, Penelope, Sybil, names like that; the dark, warm girl whose name was Peacock and who may have been Persian; a young lad from the village and two older men who were employed to do the heavier work. There was also one other, from the outer parts of the world, from ‘where the Atlantic raves outside the western straits’; I felt very much the outlander, but they accepted me, and from them I learned a lot of useful everyday Greek, which was of course the language of the group. I tried my lame Italian on them once, but the two Italian boys hooted with laughter, while the others kept a polite silence. I used English; they shook their heads; I thought I heard the word Byron but it may have been some other word. Then I spoke to them in Irish. They smiled; for one throb of the artery I wondered if some old, old memory had stirred in their collective subconscious, some race-memory from thousands of years past. But no, I could see by their faces that it was all Greek to them.
We trowelled through earth and shards and history, and because our Cretan had mellowed with the years (there were flecks of grey in his moustache), we stopped often to drink from the well, to look out across the blue to where my drowsy ship rode at anchor near the cape, or to swim in the wine-dark sea.
Evenings, from the western rocks, we watched suns sizzle down into the Mediterranean; we drank the tarry wine; some-one played lonesome things on a pipe. We laughed a great deal, and sang, and our Cretan was suspicious of us, though of what exactly he suspected us I don’t know. Perhaps of being young and happy. It was a golden time, every day the sun shone without fail from a clear sky, I was nineteen years of age, and everything was possible.