Love's Obsession (22 page)

During 1959 Peter Megaw completed the transition to what would soon become a newly independent Department of Antiquities. He wrote to Jim, Terrence Mitford and Joan du Plat Taylor—all friends of Cyprus—canvassing their views on the future. Two sovereign zones—Akrotiri on the south coast and Dheklia on the east—would remain British, and Jim now offered to supply these areas with an antiquities service.
57
No one had as yet surveyed the zones and Catling's archaeological survey would soon wind up. They discussed again the idea of a permanent base of operations for foreign archaeologists
58
and Jim suggested a roundtable conference to consider the idea, perhaps along the lines of the Villa Ariadne on Crete, a house that had once belonged to Sir Arthur Evans and which now provided accommodation for visiting archaeologists. He proposed Basil could undertake the survey of the sovereign area
59
and thought that when Eve inherited Tjiklos it might serve as a research base.
60
Ever the optimist, Jim asked Peter ‘if any means could be found of working our special interests into the Treaty and the new Republic'.

Separately, Jim discussed the idea of a foreign research centre with Vassos Karageorghis, who thought a completely Australian institute might be more ‘politically acceptable than one with the English'.
61

Back in Sydney, Jim ran the Department of Archaeology as the
paterfamilias
of an extended family. He and Eve treated staff and students as friends or serfs, depending on the circumstances, but in general they cared for the staff and worked to make the department a happy one. When they descended on Sydney, they came laden with eggs or turkeys to distribute largesse to the masses and went out of their way to offer bountiful hospitality to visitors and students alike. Basil and Ruth had been married at The Mount and Robert Merrillees and other postgraduate students lived there for some time.

In her daily diary Eve recorded details of her turkey flock, the doings of sheep and dogs, together with the names of people who came for lunch, and the comings and goings of longer-term visitors. During 1959 the dairies record ‘J to S with Betty'; ‘J & B back' more frequently. Before working at the university, Betty Cameron, Jim's departmental secretary, had been married to a Bathurst doctor, Lloyd Cameron. Now widowed, she took the opportunity to drive between Sydney and Bathurst with Jim and became more and more an integral part of the household.

Despite the regular commute, Jim did not neglect his academic duties. Later gossip, promoted in the official history of the University of Sydney, has it that Jim ran the Department of Archaeology from Bathurst, steadfastly refused to come to Sydney and forcing students to work at The Mount.
62
Eve's daily diaries prove this to be incorrect. In 1958, before they left for overseas in October, Jim visited Sydney for nineteen weeks of the term and in 1959 it was twenty-three times, but Jim and Eve didn't arrive back in Australia until April of that year. In 1960 Jim was in Sydney from Monday to Thursday twenty-six weeks out of an academic year of not much longer. Small bundles of student ‘thank you' letters attest to visits, but not regular ones, by groups of undergraduate students.

Postgraduate students certainly stayed for lengthy periods, working on pottery or consulting Jim's library. Robert Merrillees moved up to The Mount to work on the Schaeffer Vounous material, and after his appointment as Jim's assistant was expected to stay for longer and longer periods. As he did to Basil, Jim now tried to control Robert. More perceptive, Eve thought it likely that Robert would not last two years, but would ‘want to go and find his feet overseas'.
63

But it is true that Jim came to resent more and more the weekly commute to Sydney. ‘I've got used to being with you these last six months', he told Eve as their daily notes resumed.
64
He tired of the repeated travel and hated leaving Eve every week for three days and nights.
65
Although conditions at the university were improving, he told friends he was seriously thinking of giving it up, although that would curtail their travel.
66
He looked forward to being able to write up his research and contemplated a more domestic life. Jim told his good friend Christopher Blunt:

We have had our usual busy Christmas, selling off the turkeys. The festivities were a complete failure this year, as our senior cat died on Christmas Eve and that has upset us considerably. The weather has settled down to a normal summer heat and everything is looking beastly.

In a rare expression of domesticity Jim added, ‘I have bought a petrol rotary mower to try to cut down some of the more obnoxious weeds but the outside of the house is a perfect disgrace. The place is not getting proper attention this year'.
67

On the days when Jim left for Sydney Eve rose early. While she waited for him to wake, she wrote notes he would find later. ‘Am getting so bored with filing—several years of it! But am beginning to see the table through the clutter. The world seemed so empty after you vanished on the platform yesterday. Your hound and I went for a stroll after tea, to cheer ourselves up, and found a nest of five eggs …
'
68
In the pockets of his pyjamas: ‘Taking pretty green pills regularly I hope?'

From Sydney Jim often wrote to Eve, sitting in bed at the beginning of the day. Taking up his fountain pen he would start, as usual, ‘Good Morning Darling' and continue with the minutiae of academic life. ‘Usual silly business at Andrews last night and slept badly. Not bleeding but don't feel well.
'
69
He wrote to her most days he was away, some notes written in the rush of a busy day, others more slowly at day's end. He signed off, as always, ‘Kiss me my Eve'.

Mount Pleasant cats sometimes found their way to Sydney. One of them—Kate—travelled to Sydney with Jim as a present for Betty Cameron. Often Betty brought Kate in to work and she had taken to lapping water off the dewy tops of milk bottles. ‘At the moment she's sitting on my slide box in front of me, washing',
70
Jim told Eve. When she lost a tooth Jim wrote to Eve on her behalf. ‘Thanc u for hafing me to stai. I loth my tooth and haf to go bac to the dentis nex tyim I cum up. Love Kate.
'
71

The next day he ordered a sterling silver pendant for Kate from his friend Ron Byatt. He asked for one side to be engraved ‘The Nicholson Museum', and on the other side Betty Cameron's address in Double Bay. Jim would pay for the present; Eve needn't know.
72
More and more, Jim stopped at Betty's place before returning to St Andrews for the night.

Chapter 10
Australia and Cyprus, 1960–62

Life at The Mount tentatively entered the twentieth century with the installation of a telephone, in Jim's favourite spot on the front verandah.
1
Eve used it to ring her cousin John at Bisterne on the day of his engagement. ‘It was,' he said, ‘a great thrill. Mummy was hanging over the staircase in the hall, Daddy was listening in the middle room and visualising your house'.
2

Jim's weekly commute to Sydney placed strains on his marriage. Professional and social commitments exhausted both Jim and Eve and their time was seldom their own.

From his university desk Jim wrote:

Good morning, I thought I'd get a quiet weekend fixed up as Betty is staying down. Then Basil wanted to come up. Then Lawrence wanted to come up to collect the venereal rams. Then Keep said Lawrence hadn't consulted him and he wanted to come with Lawrence. Then Alan said he wanted to come up. The upshot is that Alan is coming for Friday night only, Keep and Lawrence probably for Sunday night only but possibly Saturday night also.
3

The train trip to Bathurst was long and tiring. Often the weather was dreadful.

‘What a scramble it's been lately', Eve said. ‘Really I think I'd sooner drive to Lithgow in a blizzard than have our weekend wrecked with more visitors.' She reminded Jim it was his father's birthday, only to realise that this meant they should invite him for the weekend: ‘So maybe we won't have any peace at all.
'
4
Frequently Jim was sick and irritable and often her smiles were ignored. ‘You know,' said Eve, ‘I was wearing a cheerful face to greet you the other day, but you were too sick & miserable to notice'.
5

At forty-six, Jim had aged visibly. His once slender frame had ballooned from alcohol abuse and kidney disease, although he continued to dress stylishly, in silk shirts and immaculate suits, a short tartan tie above a paunch held in check by a leather belt. He had grown fat but it was not the comfortable rounding of a prosperous middle age. No precise diagnosis of Jim's illness is possible, and his symptoms—when described—can have many causes. He complained of profuse bleeding, sometimes from the tongue, and of lethargy and earache.
6
Sometimes he flew from Sydney to Bathurst to avoid the tiresome train trip but at other times his doctors forbade him to fly.
7
At the end of 1959 he told Peter Megaw that he was so sick of doctors he was applying his own remedies and felt happier and more cheerful than at any time since the war.
8
The following year he failed the medical test required by the university superannuation fund.
9
‘I don't think there is any danger of me dying in the immediate future,' he told Peter Megaw, ‘but once or twice in the last couple of weeks I have wondered how long I can go on. Nevertheless I have every intention of outliving all my contemporaries'.
10

Jim's doctor visited regularly, driving up from Bathurst to sit on the verandah for a congenial chat. They shared a brandy and Jim continued drinking alone or with company well into the early hours of the next morning. His doctor's warnings against excess were futile and he revelled in ignoring them. One day he returned from the doctor's. ‘He's told me not to eat salt', he laughed, and grabbed a handful from the salt dispenser beside the stove, swallowing it in one gulp.
11

Eve spent all her waking hours worrying about his health, working to keep him going and struggling to protect him.
12
She followed him with sad eyes. They had mellowed. Eve hoped for children and, although they were both ageing and Jim was often ill, she urged him to investigate medical options
13
but in their mid-forties, the hope was forlorn.

Jim tried once more to make contact with his own son and friends and family passed messages between Jim and Eleanor. Many of Jim and Eve's friends knew nothing of Peter's existence. Ron Byatt, Jim's best man when he and Eve married in 1952, was astonished to learn, during a visit to Albert Baldwin in London in 1957, that Jim was a father. There was bitterness and blame on all sides.

In January 1960, Eve received news that her father had died peacefully in Cyprus. Eve had lived with her father only intermittently and their letters were friendly but seldom intimate. Nonetheless his death severed another link to her childhood and to the island she loved.

Tom Dray's lawyer wrote with details. Tom had entered a private clinic in Nicosia but the noise of traffic disturbed him and:

he insisted on returning to Tjiklos a few days before Christmas where, I have no doubt, he was happier to end his days surrounded by his Kyrenia friends. Although his memory became at times weak he remained quite conscious until the last day of his life and was well aware of his approaching end to which he referred openly with his usual philosophical detachment.
14

Eve was the principal beneficiary. Tom Dray's bank account in Kyrenia held £16,000; he left a legacy of £4000 to Mrs Duckworth and £2000 each to his Turkish gardener and Greek cook. Beside the houses on Tjiklos, Tom left town properties in Kyrenia and an Egyptian villa. The lawyer warned that large duties might be levied on the Egyptian property ‘as your father ignored the advice of his former solicitor in Cairo to recast his Will in a form calculated to reduce the incidence of these'.
15
Jim told Megaw that the various tax-free legacies did not leave enough money to pay death duties owed.
16

By the middle of 1960, the status of archaeology at Sydney University was at last improving. In a letter to Paul Jim described his plans.

At the moment it looks as if I am to have an almost adequate department of two Senior Lecturers, one Lecturer, two Technical Assistants, a Museum Assistant and a secretary. The only position which causes me any worry are the two Senior Lectureships, which it will be difficult to fill with people of the necessary quality … I am now in a position to reorganise the department.
17

At the end of the year Jim finally achieved the recognition he craved. He asked Paul Åström, Kurt Bittel and William Albright to act as referees for his application to the inaugural Chair of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Sydney, a professorship endowed by a bequest from the philanthropist Sydney physician, Edwin Cuthbert Hall. Paul was a recent friend and colleague but Jim had not seen Bittel or Albright for decades. He was appointed on 2 August 1960. An announcement was published in the
Daily Telegraph
and contained multiple errors—Flinders Petrie's first name, Jim's imagined directorship of the British School at Athens—but they correctly named the cat he held in the photo. It was Kate.
18
‘I hope you'll not be kept waiting too long for the good news,' Eve said in a rushed note to Jim as he left for the train to Sydney, ‘Dominic's just hopped up on to the table to say he hopes so too; he's looking forward to having a Prof. around the place—it'll make a change from a Bish'.
19
Sir Marcus would be upstaged.

Soon after his appointment Jim wrote to the university's finance officer informing him that, although only £80 was allowed for carpeting a professorial room, he had spent over £100 and would take the extra money from another account. The university accountant, Mr Bongers, was appalled by Stewart's offhanded approach to money. In minor matters, however, Jim had a Scot's obsession with small change. A memo from his secretary seeks to explain why five and sixpence, the change from the cost of his lunch and cigarettes, went missing from his desk.
20

Once appointed professor, Jim approached the Acting Vice-Chancellor. Banging on an old drum, he pointed out that the Nicholson Museum was inadequate to support the current courses: ‘the Museum is as important to us as a laboratory is to Chemistry',
21
he stressed.

Jim expected to hand-pick staff, although none of the people he approached was keen to transfer to Australia. He wanted Chrysostomas Paraskeva from the Cyprus Museum as his technical person, but although tempted, Chrysostomas could not afford to jeopardise his Cypriot pension. Paul Åström's career had flourished. Now Director of the Swedish Institute in Athens, he was unlikely to move. Jim asked Joan, now working in the library at the Institute of Archaeology in London, about possible applicants for the new positions and tried to set up a lectureship for Veronica Seton-Williams, but that also was unsuccessful. He wondered if Megaw might be attracted if a Medieval position were found. Hector Catling did not want to leave England. Jim's requirements for staff were idiosyncratic and in a letter to Catling he said he wanted someone over thirty, perhaps with an army background, an easy character.
22
Possibly someone who fitted the image he had of himself. As he had done with Catling, Chrysostomas and Paul, Jim sounded out Vassos Karageorghis about moving to Australia and wrote magisterially, dismissing almost all the known world.

There are no candidates from England who are acceptable and Australians are too inexperienced and are, as a rule, lacking in initiative and imagination. Americans are quite hopeless and we are more or less agreed at the University that we will not take any more. There is nobody in India or Pakistan who would be the slightest use to me and in Ceylon archaeology does not exist for practical purposes. There is nobody in Europe worth considering and altogether I feel rather desperate since I am faced with the introduction of new courses which Basil Hennessy and I simply cannot handle on our own.
23

At the beginning of the year Jim appointed Robert Merrillees as his research assistant, whose duties and responsibilities were:
24

to assist me in my research work, in any way that I may direct … As I told you before, I shall expect you to contribute one pound a day for your keep, but this does not include personal laundry, cleaning and toilet materials … I trust you will put yourself in my hands and let me guide you along what I consider to be the proper paths … humility is a valuable asset.
25

Ongoing plans to collaborate on excavations with Paul Åström were repeatedly shelved and they continued to disagree on the type of site to excavate, Paul preferring test digs at a settlement site, Jim preferring tombs, always his natural preference. Jim calculated that the planned 1961 excavation season would cost around £12,000, an extraordinary expense for only five weeks of excavating and four months in Cyprus.
26
He was grateful that Sydney University would cover the salaries for himself, Robert and Betty Cameron as he planned to train both Robert and Betty, although why he felt the need for a departmental secretary to be trained in field archaeology is never explained.

Jim clung to his old obsessions and appealed to Dikaios, soon to be Director of an independent Department of Antiquities, for special consideration to have free rein.

Would it be possible for me to have a rather wide permit allowing me to excavate over a specific area of country instead of being tied to a given site? I hope to be able to dig during February and March on a fairly large scale, but it would suit me if we could work on more than one site in order to get a variety of pottery. You must also bear in mind that to a certain extent this is a training dig for my Research Assistant and my Departmental secretary, neither of whom have been in the field before.
27

The request was similar to one he had made of Megaw in 1936 and for which he criticised Paul Åström in the mid-1950s.
28

Jim's numismatic friend Christopher Blunt planned a visit to Cyprus in 1960 and Jim wrote him letters of recommendation. One was to Petro Colocassides, ‘my general agent for antiquities in Cyprus and the best of the coin dealers. Don't you go swiping anything that he is keeping for me!' he warned, ‘he is perfectly reasonable about prices, or at any rate used to be, although I expect he will charge you more than I would have to pay. However I don't think you will find very much since I have a standing order for all the Lusignan coins that come in'.
29
Silver coins, were simply ‘tumbling in and so far we have 479 gros and half-gros'.
30

Blunt was unable to visit Tjiklos but reported on a possible Venetian coin hoard held by Petro Colocassides. Jim told Christopher that this was ‘probably the tag end of the Ledra Street find, which included quite a lot of gold. I rounded up everything I could for the Cyprus Museum in 1955 but I fear that Petro was not particularly honest over the deal since some of the gold has found its way into other hands in recent years'. Even as he continued to collect, Jim apologised to Dikaios for keeping for so long coin hoards that he had borrowed from the Cyprus Museum years earlier for study. The urge to collect was strong but Jim's capacity for completing research was weak.

Karageorghis reported that unemployment was the cause of an immense amount of looting at Dhenia and Jim asked Vassos to act as his agent and buy anything that the Cyprus Museum did not want. ‘You have a perfectly free hand to act on my behalf up to about £100.
'
31
Jim's acquisitive streak remained undiminished.

Jim's tendency to gossip continued to make colleagues wary. ‘In confidence', he criticised Vassos Karageorghis to Peter Megaw and Megaw, ‘in confidence' to Vassos. He complained to Vassos that Megaw's actions made the University of Sydney hostile. ‘The division of finds in 1955 was not really a very fair one', he complained and explained that ‘it was Megaw's friendliness in 1935 which led me to specialise in Cyprus. Things only began to get bad when Megaw came in 1936 or 1937 and from that time on the Cyprus Museum never had quite the old friendly atmosphere. Since the war Dikaios has been consistently difficult and sometimes deliberately hostile'.
32
Yet he wrote to Dikaios congratulating him on his appointment as Director of Antiquities—‘a fitting crown to a distinguished and successful career
'
33
—and continued to offer financial support for Dikaios's publication of the Late Bronze Age site of Enkomi.
34
Jim told Megaw that Vassos's thesis would not have received even a bad second class Honours at Sydney and, in relation to Vassos's work at Salamis, he said he deplored the ‘vast expenditure … when there are more urgent tasks to hand'. All in all he felt Vassos needed ‘a good hard kick in the bottom'.
35
Jim's comments were ill considered or duplicitous or both.