Love's Obsession (23 page)

His plans for a return to excavations in Cyprus would leave Basil, as usual, in charge of the department but Jim was annoyed. He had heard rumours of discussions between Basil and John Dunston, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and wrote to the Vice-Chancellor pointing out that Basil had no ‘mandate' to go above him. Jim complained that Basil was behind in his research obligations and told Basil: ‘I am appalled by your admission that you had been telling people inside and outside the University that I was impossible to work with and by the amount of mischief which this may have caused.
'
36

Jim left instructions. Ten years earlier he had listed the jobs Basil was to perform while overseas and their relationship remained one-sided. Jim refused to admit any change. The Vice-Chancellor, he told Basil, wanted Jim to keep his finger on departmental matters and Basil was to send everything to Jim in Cyprus for his instructions, despite the considerable delay this would create. Jim agreed to give Basil some leeway for his lecturing in the first year course but for Archaeology 2 decreed that: ‘you may give them general talks but these must follow my book [the Handbook to the Nicholson Museum] entirely and should perhaps take the line of explanation rather than fact giving, although I think you should start the year by giving a series of lectures on the geography of Cyprus. I feel that your main task is to give slides to illustrate my book.
'
37
He told Basil to report to him weekly.

Basil loved Jim and Mount Pleasant but had learned to measure his glass, to sip slowly and let it sit. He was thirty-five, married, a father with responsibilities and a career to pursue. Jim refused to loosen the tight leash and Basil came to resent the demands on his time. How could Jim expect him to come to Bathurst for the vacation? How could he simply leave Ruth and three children to manage alone?
38
Sometimes Jim's black moods frightened him, and his irrationality and bitterness corroded their friendship.

In late 1960 Jim, Eve, Betty Cameron and Robert Merrillees boarded the SS
Iberia
, Jim wondering who among them would first succumb to a nervous breakdown.
39
Jim and Eve were out of touch with the Cypriot scene and were returning to a new country, Cyprus having won independence from Britain on 16 August 1960. The team was laden with supplies—some of which Jim earmarked for Porphyrios Dikaios to help with his excavations at Enkomi—and two manuscripts for Eve to work on.

One much-delayed obligation was the editing of Vassos Karageorghis's thesis, which they had promised to publish over a year ago. It had caused them trouble because they both insisted on meticulous editing. ‘Work on your book,' Jim told Vassos, ‘is proving very much more difficult … largely because you so often quoted titles and excerpts from publications not quite correctly, so that every reference and every title is being checked'. He claimed to have four people working on the text, which was being progressively retyped.
40
Jim airily wrote that Vassos should not worry about the work and delay, and thought he would be cheered to know that they were finding many similar discrepancies in Jim's text on the Early Bronze Age for the Swedish Cyprus Expedition.
41
Some months later Jim explained they had not done much with Vassos's book because they were too busy with income tax and sheep shearing.
42

Jim's manuscript was much delayed. Gjerstad planned a single volume on the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age in Cyprus, and agreed that the Neolithic period should be tackled by Porphyrios Dikaios, leaving Jim to deal with the Early Bronze Age. But Jim and Dikaios could not agree on the chronology of the so-called Philia culture, both believing it belonged in their period. Dikaios suggested that their work should form two separate parts of a single volume and Jim was inclined to agree.
43
In the middle of 1959, Porphyrios Dikaios sent Gjerstad his manuscript for the Neolithic part, Swedish Cyprus Expedition, Volume IV, Part 1. Gjerstad waited for Jim's contribution to complete the volume. In January 1960 Jim assured him that his manuscript on the Early Cypriot period − Part 2 of Volume IV − would be finished ‘in the course of the next few weeks'.
44

Vassos Karageorghis met the group at Famagusta. Jim had asked him to purchase a car and they drove ‘BUG' to Tjiklos, but neither Jim nor Eve liked her as much as ‘MARY', their car in Australia.
45
Jim arrived with money to buy more material for the Nicholson and planned to ask Porphyrios if there was anything the Cyprus Museum would sell. He was also overjoyed to get his hands on his favourite cigarettes, Troodos A. He had already asked Vassos to buy 1000, which he hoped would last the six-month visit and wondered idly if he could arrange to import them into Australia.
46

The group arrived in Cyprus with the general intention of investigating the earlier phase of the Bronze Age on the north coast.
47
Jim complained to Peter Megaw that looting seemed worse than he had ever known it, but added with no sense of irony that he didn't know where the pottery was going ‘since I cannot find it on the market'.
48
Within a week Jim had formally applied to Porphyrios Dikaios to excavate an area known as Lapatsa near the village of Karmi.
49
While waiting for landowner approval and departmental permits, Jim, Eve and Robert worked in the Cyprus Museum on material from their earlier excavations at Vasilia and Ayia Paraskevi. When the weather turned wintry they felt homesick and Jim declared himself fed up with English expatriate life.
50

Mary Ann Meagher, a Sydney University archaeology student holidaying in England decided to visit Cyprus on her return trip to Australia. Tall, blond, smart and self-assured, she wore enormous Sophia Loren dark glasses and a long fur coat that gave her an air of sophistication. Soon after arriving in Nicosia she visited the museum to see for herself the objects she had studied in the Nicholson Museum's handbook. Those oddly shaped pots from Vounous were mesmerising—and she mentioned to an attendant that Jim Stewart, who had dug them, was her lecturer in Sydney. ‘Oh,' the attendant said, ‘he's downstairs in the store-rooms'.
51

And so, almost by accident, Mary Ann joined the small group of Australians working at Karmi. Jim and Eve and Betty—a jealous squabbling and uneasy trio—moved into the big house on Tjiklos, where Tom Dray had lived. Mary Ann joined Derek Howlett and Robert Merrillees in a smaller house nearby. Derek had been offered the position of technical assistant at the Nicholson Museum—he applied for the job from Norwich, was appointed with few formalities, and travelled to Cyprus to work on the excavations. He would return to Australia with the group later in the year. Slight, with unruly shaggy black hair squashed flat by a multi-coloured beanie, he had a brooding expression, having left his girlfriend Sonja behind in England. Robert Merrillees was, apart from Jim and Betty, the only other ‘official' Sydney University team member. Derek found Robert irritating and criticised his lack of practical surveying skills.
52
Well over six feet tall, gangly and with an infectious grin, Robert towered over Derek in more ways than physically.

The other Australian member of the group, Robert Deane, joined only for a short while. Jim had arranged for Bob Deane to work in the Sudan with the Egyptologist Professor W.B. Emery. At this site each day's work was meticulously recorded in a series of dig books at the end of the day, and then every week each trench supervisor gave a summary of the work that had been accomplished, at which time the students discussed issues and problems. Bob Deane was frankly appalled at the lax approach taken by Jim Stewart at Karmi and shocked when Jim laughed at his request for a dig book.

Despite Bob Deane's recollections, Jim and Eve did maintain detailed accounts of excavation funds, which makes their presumed lack of dig records surprising. Marion Stevens from New Zealand had contributed a small amount of funding and Sydney University paid the salaries of university staff for six months. Few archaeological excavations would include in their costing the value of wool, but this was during the boom years for wool, and Jim's wool cheque of £5926/9/9 was duly added to the Melbourne Cyprus Expedition Fund.
53
Passage from Australia to Cyprus cost £1832/10/0 and Derek Howlett's fare from London to Australia a further £136/2/6.

Base expenses itemised in the account book include wages, postage, the wood account, tools and, finally, the costs for packing. Each cup of coffee was accounted for, beside general supplies, entertainment and even money paid to beggars or donations to the blind school. Cigarettes were a regular cost. Occasionally there is an entry for ‘baksheesh'. One such record says ‘pyxis', which suggests that Jim may have followed Flinders Petrie's practice of rewarding workmen for particularly important finds.

Eve had brought an 8-mm film camera and, with no photographic experience, planned to make a film of the excavation. Her film log provides an idea of how the work progressed, although in the end not all the film footage was usable. Work began at Lapatsa on 27 February 1961 and finished on 24 March. For several weeks two sites—Lapatsa and Palealona—were dug simultaneously.
54

As usual, the quiet and efficient Tryphon Koulermos was dig foreman. Unlike many foreign archaeologists, Jim always hired a Cypriot foreman and the men appreciated this.
55
Tryphon had first worked for Jim and Eleanor at Vounous in 1936, was a close friend and had been a part of Jim's earliest plans for a grand survey of Cyprus. He continued to be Jim's most trusted workman, someone he could—and often did—leave in charge.

Yiannis Cleanthous became another trusted member of the team and was the Department of Antiquities' official representative at the excavations. He remembered the first time he had seen Eve, some time in the 1940s. At the age of eighteen Yiannis worked for the department at St Hilarion, where he spent most of his time studying for the government exams. One day he looked out of his office to see a ravishingly beautiful woman dismount from a horse, which she tied to a carob tree beside his donkey. Now, many years later, he would work for her.

In 1961 Yiannis, a gregarious storyteller, was the departmental officer responsible for Kyrenia Castle—‘the king of the castle' he boomed to all who asked. Derek, Robert and Mary Ann often visited him there and he was amused at the competition for Mary Ann's attention but complained loudly that they drank too much of his brandy.
56
Dark-haired and handsome, Yiannis roared up to the excavation each day on his black motorbike.

The tombs the Stewarts planned to excavate at Lapatsa near Karmi were on land owned by Yiannis's father-in-law and where he farmed carobs. Only when Jim agreed that no trees would be harmed did Yiannis persuade his father to let the Australians dig. His uncle owned the other potential site, Palealona. Jim was shrewd about employing people with useful contacts; paying Yiannis ensured that his father-in-law and uncle remained on side.
57

Other friends volunteered. Two former British Army nurses, Phyllis Heyman and Betty Hunter-Cowan—both with the rank of major—lived together on Tjiklos. Locals knew them as the Cave Ladies and they were famous for their English eccentricity. Phyllis cooked; Betty was the wealthier of the two. Whenever invited for dinner, they separated for the evening, so that the stories and gossip each collected could be shared later during many weeks of companionable solitude. Local children remember with horror the enormous bloomers billowing from their clothesline.
58

Jim was ill for most of the excavations and bad-tempered. ‘The alcohol seems to have killed a lot of his sense,' Yiannis reflected years later, ‘and he was getting angry so easily and was becoming eccentric. He didn't like to hear the noise of my motorcycle approaching the excavation so I had to turn off the engine from 200 yards away so as not to make any noise approaching'. Yiannis remembers on one occasion offering Jim sage tea—a folk remedy—for his illness. ‘This is pig's urine', Jim shouted flinging it on the ground.
59

Jim found walking difficult and was often led to the site on a donkey. Black and white negatives were stored in numerous empty packets of Veganin, a painkiller containing paracetamol, codeine and caffeine.
60
Overdoses of paracetamol cause kidney and liver damage, codeine causes drowsiness and constipation, and neither should be consumed in large doses or with alcohol.

Gjerstad was still waiting for the promised manuscript proofs. He was sympathetic but couldn't wait forever and even considered completing the editing himself. In confidence he asked Dikaios to find out about Jim's health and was told that ‘Stewart was not in very good health … as far as I understand it was his heart or blood-pressure or both which were giving trouble. Although advised to stay in bed for a fortnight he never did'.
61
Dikaios thought the delays to work on the proofs were as much the result of the excavations as of ill health.
62
Perhaps Jim had cried wolf once too often.

Over five weeks thirty-five tombs were gouged out of the slope below the village of Karmi. Eve remembered the dust and dirt as she squatted by each tomb, balancing a board on her lap and drawing site plans. She had known many of the workmen for years. Tryphon of course—an experienced excavator, a square of a man, with a face chiselled into lines like those sculpted in the compacted soil by the shovel and pick. He and Yiannis kept the men in line. Eve pacified them when Jim's outbursts or demands threatened to break the thin thread of respect tying them together. Mounds of pottery sherds piled up beside each emptied tomb, later to be shovelled into hessian bags tied and labelled for transport back to Australia. An immense amount of work remained.