Love's Obsession (20 page)

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.

Chapter 9
Mount Pleasant and Sydney, 1957–60

Jim and Eve returned to Australia in the middle of 1956. They had been away just under a year and returned with mountains of books and artefacts and promises they were unlikely to keep. This was Margery Dray's second visit to Mount Pleasant, the first for Paul and Laila.

At The Mount the household rituals resumed. The cats were Jim's domain, the turkeys Eve's. Sheep farmed by tenants underpinned the whole enterprise. Wool prices in Australia remained high during the 1950s and the price of wool loomed large in much of Jim's correspondence and his elaborate plans for archaeological expeditions.

Paul Åström was tall and elegant, an urbane young man who found himself flapping like a fish out of water in this strange new world. For a Swedish archaeologist from Lund, daily life in the Bathurst countryside was certainly novel. Paul attempted to make sense of it in a short essay ‘Glimpses from Australia, the great sheep-country'. ‘In Australia, they do not have shepherds but the sheep walk around on their own', he was surprised to report. He described shearing sheds and wool classing at the Sydney auctions and was astounded to discover that there were more than one hundred million sheep in Australia—yet only nine million people! Searching for comparisons, he thought the unshorn sheep looked somewhat like haystacks or perhaps English judges. After shearing they were etched with red cuts and scratches. At a wool auction in Sydney he sat listening to the bids, but commented that ‘an outsider hasn't a chance of understanding or following them; it feels like sitting in a room full of yapping puppies'.
1

Jim and Paul spent their days deep in discussions on Middle Cypriot pottery, the subject of Paul's doctoral dissertation. They developed a close friendship, although Jim happily declared Paul ‘useless in daily life'.
2
Meanwhile trestle tables in the ballroom groaned under pot sherds laid out in messy piles. Born north of the Arctic Circle and attuned to solitude, Laila Haglund found pleasure in Eve's calm and restful companionship as they sat for hours mending and drawing pots. Laila found an aptitude for technical drawing but was careful not to become just one of Jim's assistants. Eve, for her part, enjoyed teaching Laila—everything from technical drawing to an appreciation of children's literature. On one occasion a goose laid eggs but abandoned them and Eve persuaded Laila that she could hatch them herself. For several nights Laila went to bed nestling a goose egg in her bra and Eve was pleased to be proved right when a small gosling hatched. The landscapes and countryside suited Laila and she was keen to explore this new country. Basil's wife Ruth brought her a pineapple and mango from North Queensland to taste and investigated rules on the export of native plant seeds to Sweden.
3
As Laila walked the paddocks around Bathurst, she was struck by the numbers of stone tools lying in the fields. Jim airily dismissed them. She wondered whether anybody was interested in Australian archaeology.

Eve had looked forward to showing her mother her Australian life, but soon after their return from Europe, Margery fell critically ill. She was eighty. Eve and Laila took turns nursing her, the doctor prescribed medicine but there was little he could do. All who knew her adored Margery, and with her death Eve lost both her link to childhood and the person who loved her most. From England, Margery's sister Ethel wrote sadly. ‘She must have come to tell me herself … I was sitting in my bed reading and suddenly found myself crying tho' not knowing why. Just [about] the time she died.
'
4
From Cyprus, Tom replied to his daughter's sad letter: ‘poor mother she never had much of a life and you were her only joy.
'
5
Eve was grateful that her mother had not suffered and arranged for her mother's ashes to be returned to Bisterne, to the family cemetery, where she would lie beside the infant son whose death after only a few days had made her so protective of Eve.

In April 1957 Professor Gordon Childe, recently retired as Director of the Institute of Archaeology in London, returned to Australia. He was the most important theoretical archaeologist of the twentieth century and had not been back to Australia for decades.

Jim Stewart had known Childe in London. In fact it was Childe who had warned Jim that his plans for excavating tombs on Cyprus in the 1930s were misguided. They shared a nationality and a love of the Blue Mountains, but little else. Childe was avowedly Marxist, whereas Jim was decidedly conservative.

Childe was sixty-five, a solitary character, with a wizened face made uglier by thick round spectacles, and many thought him aloof, when he was simply shy. He enjoyed company but was used to his own. He visited Jim and Eve Stewart and stayed for a week in May and again in September. Laila found him captivating. They talked for hours about archaeology, sitting up long after Jim and Eve had retired for the night. Childe was amused by Laila's habit of smoking a pipe.

When not at Mount Pleasant Childe often stayed at the stately old Carrington Hotel in Katoomba. Basil Hennessy would drive down from Bathurst with books from Jim's library and frequently joined Childe bushwalking in the surrounding Blue Mountains, nervous at his tendency to walk too close to the edge of the sheer gorges. Although Gordon Childe had no personal interest in Australian prehistory, declaring it ‘boring unless you are a flint fanatic',
6
he tried to persuade Basil Hennessy to abandon Near Eastern archaeology and move into a scholarly area not yet treated seriously at any level of Australian life. Childe also tried to persuade Laila, and with more success.

Gordon had renewed his interest in geology and told the receptionist at the Carrington Hotel that he planned to write a book on the subject. On the night of 19 October 1957 Australia was in the midst of the spring racing season. Tulloch, most loved of Australian racehorses, had easily won the Caulfield Cup and was on track to win the Melbourne Cup. Talk in the bar of the hotel was mostly of the race, but a group of loud drinkers also had fun directing their taunts at the odd and ugly man drinking at the bar. Gordon moved away to chat with the receptionist. During the conversation he offered her his typewriter, that most personal of a writer's items. He insisted and she finally accepted, putting it into the hotel safe. The same day he wrote a letter and posted it to his successor at the institute in London, Professor Grimes.

On 20 October he drove to a famous walking spot and continued on to Govett's Leap. He took off his hat, pipe, mackintosh and spectacles, stepped back and fell from the cliff face. In the letter written to Grimes, a letter he asked not to be opened until 1968, he wrote that ‘Life ends best when one is happy and strong.
'
7

When news of his death reached England, gossip gripped the archaeological world. Was his death deliberate or an accident? The editor of
Antiquity
, O.G.S. Crawford, told Jim that a ‘chorus of laments' showed how much Childe had been liked.
8
Jim Stewart wallowed in gloomy fantasies and in a letter to Hector Catling said that Childe was murdered by ‘a certain political party', adding that an attempt had also been made on him and Eve ten days after Childe's death.
9
Eve long maintained that Childe's death was accidental and Basil and Laila agreed, none of them able to reconcile suicide with the cheerful, energetic and forward-thinking person whose company they had so enjoyed.

Paul and Laila decided to go their separate ways. Laila would remain another year at The Mount but Paul sailed for Europe in December 1957. He remained forever grateful for the opportunity to stay at Mount Pleasant and remembered Jim and Eve fondly for the rest of his life. Almost as soon as he boarded his ship, he and Jim began a detailed correspondence. Long lists of questions and answers—technical points on pottery typologies and relative chronologies—travelled between Sweden and Australia. Time delays were frustrating, misunderstandings unsurprising.

Their easy face-to-face conversation became less affable with distance. Disagreements were inevitable. Although Paul's English was excellent, he knew that careful editing would improve it and sought Eve's help. She reworked his sentences while Jim took time to guide, bully and berate Paul on the more technical aspects of his thesis. Paul worried that both Jim and Eve were spending too much time on his work, although he continued sending long lists of questions and sought Eve's editorial advice. He knew that Jim was frequently sick and hoped his demands did not contribute to this. Jim assured Paul that it was a pleasure to help him but that they couldn't do everything.
10

Paul suggested Jim might fly to Sweden to act as one of his thesis opponents. Jim was flattered and eager to go, but in the end Gjerstad considered it an unnecessary expense. Jim complained that he had been misled and felt he had been made look foolish in academic circles. ‘I had set my heart on coming to Sweden,' he told Paul, ‘I don't like getting my plans upset. At the present moment small annoyances are apt to set me off.
'
11
In any case, doctors had warned against air travel so the trip would have been impossible.
12
Paul supported the grant of an honorary doctorate for Jim, but warned it might prove difficult, pointing out that the decision to grant such a distinction would have to wait until his book appeared,
13
a less than subtle hint that Gjerstad was becoming anxious that Jim's Swedish Cyprus Expedition volume, promised a decade ago, might never eventuate.

Jim was ill for much of 1957. Conflict threw him into physical paralysis and he told Paul that on one occasion, when he threw a visitor out of the house for ‘unmitigated rudeness', he was ‘only semi-conscious' and for the next three days Eve had to help him bathe and dress.
14
At one stage his doctors thought he might die
15
and Jim came to believe it as well. Unable to travel to Sydney to lecture, a loyal Basil once again stood in for him, but the university was irritated. Jim was seldom well enough to work and Basil might be forced to seek more secure employment—his latest idea involved working on Ruth's family cattle property in Queensland.

Convinced he was doomed to an early death, Jim wrote himself a new role, believing he should now act as a ‘guide to other people, an organiser rather than an executive'. But, he added, ‘other people have to be willing to be guided'.
16
Paul wrote about his personal problems and Jim attempted fatherly advice. ‘My first marriage,' he admitted, ‘was an awful failure, and much of the blame lies on me because I put my career and my work first and my wife second. That broke my heart and has darkened all my life since'.
17
He had learned through experience that a wife was an equal and advised Paul to learn this lesson as he had: ‘I am not ashamed to admit my youthful errors.
'
18
He had come to realise that the things most difficult to obtain are worth most.

The summer of 1957 was a scorcher. ‘We had all hell over Christmas', Jim told Paul.

Now we have a real heat wave—97 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, and not a drop of rain since you left. All the vegetables are dying, despite irrigation … Everyone is miserable, even the cats. Poor old Pooh-ewe has taken to eating violets to keep cool. Twirp demands a lettuce every evening.
19

He and Basil were trying to finish photographing pots, but even water from the cold tap was 85 degrees.

In correspondence with colleagues across the world, Jim swapped archaeological theories and tested ideas. He aired opinions with little thought that people might compare notes. He wrote to Olaf Vessberg that Paul Åström's knowledge of general Near Eastern archaeology was poor, and then criticised Vessberg to Paul.
20
Archaeologists made up a small community and it was inevitable that people would talk.

Work piled up, obligation upon obligation—and much of it came to Eve. Jim had promised to help Paul Åström complete his doctoral dissertation on the Middle Cypriot period; his contribution to a history of the Crusades was still outstanding; the recently excavated material from Ayia Paraskevi and Vasilia had to be mended, drawn and studied; the volume on the Early Cypriot period for the Swedish Cyprus Expedition was promised but hardly begun; Jim's corpus of Cypriot antiquities and his personal coin collection grew, with no end in sight, and there was both a farm and a university department to run. So much of what was promised—the editing, the mending and drawing, the running of the garden—were jobs for Eve. She willingly supported Jim's ventures but wondered if he realised what each involved.

Eve was a meticulous editor, but slow. She edited papers written by both Paul Åström and later by his wife Lena Söderhjelm, checking sources and improving their English. Publication of the Dawkins translation of ‘The Chronicle of George Boustronios' involved work that also fell to Eve, who prepared the index and slowly saw the volume through the complicated publishing process. All references had to be double-checked and she spent hours in Jim's library. As work progressed, she checked proofs, found illustrations, decided on layout. Everything was finalised by hand and the manuscript typed and retyped.

Constant demands on their time took their toll. Jim's grand schemes weighed Eve down with endless obligations and Jim felt trapped on a treadmill that would not stop. ‘I only wish that I could get rid of archaeology completely for two or three years', he told a newly married Paul, advising him to ‘go and get drunk in a taverna, as I am sure it would do you both a world of good and I would love to be with you. Do you remember the night we drank all those bottles of whiskey with the help of the haggis?
'
21

Jim grizzled about work to Porphyrios Dikaios. Since their 1955 excavations he felt the need to add forty new types to his massive pottery corpus and realised the Swedes were unlikely to publish it, given its size. He had recorded over 10,000 pots but was still unable to see the patterns he longed for. ‘Just at the moment,' he declared, ‘I never want to see another Early Cypriot pot again'. Convinced that publication must be definitive, he was surprised that the Swedes planned to publish their Late Cypriot volume of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition even before Dikaios had finalised the publication of the Late Bronze Age site of Enkomi. It was ‘sheer insanity'.
22