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  Much later, Eve wrote that ‘certainly Cyprus was one of the British colonies, but we did not think of ourselves as “colonialists”, we were simply British people who happened to live in Cyprus’.16

  All her life Eve called the island her ‘beloved Cyprus’.

  By 1930 Tom Dray had retired from the Egyptian Survey and settled again in Cyprus, where he began amassing property in the north of the island. From England, Margery worried about the expense, but when later she joined him in Cyprus, she settled into a new and freer way of life. It suited her. Tom was building a house on land he had bought outside Kyrenia and he and Margery camped beside the building site. Margery made excursions to visit historic sites and compiled detailed botanical notes on the countryside, sending specimens to Kew Gardens and maintaining a lively correspondence with Eve, by now at school in England. From Kyrenia she wrote that they were ‘so used to being almost out of doors, all the time, in our camp, that we find a house or hotel frightfully “stuffy”—and mean to continue this sort of out of doors life as long as we possibly can’.17

  Tom and Margery joined a growing colony of English people on the north coast of Cyprus, living an English life but without its restrictions and restraints. Kyrenia housed the largest English community on the island. Eve’s Dray grandfather and aunts lived there, together with a small group of English occupying a clutch of hotels and stone houses. Many had retired from Beirut, recreating the congenial and familiar world of English society while continuing to enjoy the benefits of a Mediterranean climate and lifestyle. In 1930 there were perhaps a dozen English residents in the town.

  A quiet harbourside village hidden behind the mountains, Kyrenia offered picturesque scenery, easy access to Nicosia when needed, but a location at sufficient distance from this administrative centre to ensure both freedom and privacy.18 Before the First World War, only a thousand residents lived in the area and only nineteen of these were English. After the war, the Cypriot businessman, Costas Charalambous (or Catsellis), returned to Kyrenia from America, replete with New World prosperity and entrepreneurialism. He promoted tourism, and in 1930 his Dome Hotel opened for business. Tourists demanded services like taxis and public baths. They wanted places to stay and souvenirs to buy. They employed people to cook and clean and make their lives comfortable. Some visitors stayed. The population grew and Kyrenia prospered.19 Tom Dray’s family were part of this early development. Tom’s sister Ada Dray, together with her friend Miss Winnie Atthill, founded the first hospital in Kyrenia. The Old British Cemetery, originally established to serve the military presence in Northern Cyprus, became a civilian cemetery and on 7 November 1921 Tom’s father, Thomas Howard Dray, was the first civilian burial.20

  Some idea of the expatriate life of the English community in Kyrenia can be gleaned from the writings of a retired colonel with the unlikely name Franklin Lushington. In the early 1950s he wrote a novel, Cottage in Kyrenia. It was The Year in Provence of its day and records in amusing detail, and from the wife’s point of view, the life of a privileged expatriate community. The main characters, Henry and his wife, land in Cyprus en route to a new life in Kenya—but they never leave. They camp on the seashore, drink pink gins in the evening and enter into the life of the community.

  In Kyrenia one of life’s pleasures was to visit the English club’s bathing pool, a natural inlet on the shore to the east of Kyrenia Castle. It was here that the whole of social Kyrenia was to be seen.

  It was pleasant to drive down to the pool in the mornings and meet one’s friends without feeling under any obligation to stay longer than one wished nor to talk to those to whom one had nothing to say … However little inclined to snobbism one might be there was, too, something mildly gratifying in the sight of an ex-Governor General conscientiously sunning himself after his bathe like any ordinary being, and asking Timothy, in a voice at the sound of which thousands of black men had once trembled, for a large lemon squash.21

  At the urging of his wife, Henry decides to stay in Kyrenia and buys property from a Mr Roche, a thinly disguised portrait of Tom Dray, from whom Lushington had in fact bought land.

  Although he was quite different from what I had expected I liked Mr Roche. He was a big, tall man with a drooping moustache and drooping, slightly bloodshot eyes, not unlike a melancholy St Bernard, but he was very kind and friendly … He and Henry got on very well together, chiefly because they were both keenly interested in cricket, a game about which I know absolutely nothing, except that it is the only thing the English get excited about and is responsible for some of the more incomprehensible English idioms.22

  Cyprus was an English Crown Colony. The British authorities had established a Legislative Council but with no intention of giving Cypriots—either Greek or Turkish—much say in affairs. Greek Cypriots agitated for enosis or union with Greece, and the English authorities, with experience gained in other parts of their Empire, played Greeks off against Turks, while feigning impartiality. Only a few decades before the Drays settled in Kyrenia an Englishman living in Karmi was surprised to be taken to task for beating a Cypriot with a stick: ‘Why not? They’re only serfs,’23 he said.

  A revolt against English rule erupted in 1931. Six people died, Government House was burnt to the ground, but the revolt was speedily put down. ‘Ringleaders in Cyprus have been arrested,’ Margery wrote in her diary in England, ‘and I expect it will soon be quiet’.24

  Although Eve had briefly attended a day school in Egypt, most of her early education came from a Swiss governess, her first real friend. At twelve she entered Redmoor, a boarding school in Bournemouth on the English south coast, close to Bisterne. Eve kept a daily diary and in 1929 and 1930 she recorded, in cramped script filled with adolescent abbreviations, the daily routines of school life. She listed, in 1929, her team’s netball matches (they only lost three times), lacrosse (they only won twice) and games of tennis. She kept a record of exam results for English, French, Latin, Arithmetic, Science, Algebra, Geometry and Music. She was a consistent A student in Latin and French but her other results covered the full range.25

  In 1928, aged fourteen, her class composition for the day was: ‘What I intend to do when I retire’. Eve toyed with the idea of buying a yacht with her friend Kay Brown and sailing, perhaps to the south of France. Another prospect was to go to Egypt to ‘dig about in the ruins of the old tombs and temples. They have always had a great attraction for me [and] I have longed to go and make a name for myself there, by discovering a new language, or something equally striking’. She worried about the heat but happily imagined herself grovelling in the sand ‘with a crowd of natives round to do the dirty work’.26 Such was ‘archaeology’ for an upper middle class girl in the 1920s.

  For part of the seven years that Eve spent at Redmoor, Margery Dray returned to England to be close to her daughter and to act as a buffer between Eve and Grannie Mills. Although she knew that her grandmother loved her, Eve resented her control. Animals were Eve’s passion and she hoped to train as a vet, but Grannie thought it ‘no job for a lady’. Eve was only allowed the friends Grannie considered acceptable. Once a year Grannie organised a tennis party and Eve prepared a list of the friends she wanted to invite. Sternly checking the list, Grannie struck out those she considered unsuitable. Though outwardly placid, Eve seethed. Not until her late teens did she learn to feign headaches and so avoid unpleasant duties and escape on her own.27

  One further reason for Margery’s return to England was that it was decided that Eve should try for Oxford. Whose decision this was is unclear, but it was remarkable. Redmoor was a small provincial school and the Oxbridge exams required more preparation than such a school could give. Eve sat the School Certificate exams twice in 1931, in the hope of increasing her credit and at the end of 1932 sat the Oxford exam. There is no record of her result, but in the middle of 1933, she left Redmoor for good and—her mother felt—with some regret.

  Having failed the Oxford exams, Eve entered Royal Holloway College, the women’s
college attached to the University of London, in November 1933. Between 1933 and 1937 she studied for a general Bachelor of Arts, majoring in French and Mathematics. Student life meant greater freedom and new friends. She joined the university theatrical group, performing in The Cherry Orchard and The Taming of the Shrew. She joined friends skating or cycling and returned to college late at night. Her ‘family’ consisted of ten girls, a large group of students for the time. They were a sporty crowd who played lacrosse and hockey and enjoyed harmless pranks. They dressed the statue of Queen Victoria in cap and gown and ‘ventilated’, a method of climbing through the transom window above the door to their study.28

  Aged twenty, Eve appeared a serious young woman, beautiful but reserved, with an expression that gave little away until you took in those expressive dark eyes. Hair loosely rolled back from her face replaced childish long plaits. Short and with a tiny waist, she looked more delicate than she was. Although now an adult and free of her grandmother’s rule, the habits of a lifetime were established. Eve’s thoughts were always her own.

  At university, as at school, Eve’s academic success was modest but her French was excellent and she had a grasp of the spoken language that her lecturer thought ‘exceptionally good … so much so, that for a time she attended Prose and style lectures for Honours students’.29 She regularly visited France or Belgium and spoke French fluently, idiomatically, and with a good accent. Despite these undoubted skills and a keen intelligence, she worked slowly and her exam results suffered. As she had the School Certificate, Eve sat her final exams twice and her results were disappointing, although the Principal assured her it was ‘a good III’. She took mathematics because it ‘amused her’,30 but she struggled with the subject. ‘I wish you could have had a second. I think you know quite enough for a second’, wrote one of her teachers. The school principal’s reference suggests a solid student, but one who is in no way outstanding:

  Miss D.E. Dray is a student in her third year of residence. She passed the Intermediate Arts examination in 1934 and has since read for the B.A. General degree with French, Pure and Applied Mathematics … her French is very good, [and] … in Mathematics she works hard, but slowly, producing a small quantity, of satisfactory quality. Her teachers lay stress on her quick intelligence.

  Miss Dray is personally attractive and a pleasant and intelligent companion. She has travelled more widely than most students and has a large range of interests outside her work. She is a good lacrosse player and a member of the college team. She is interested in art and archaeology and has some practical knowledge of the latter. I conceive that she will prove valuable in museum work, while her cultivated background, her charm of manner and her savoir faire seem to fit her admirably for the work of a private secretary.31

  It was in London and Dorset that Eve discovered a penchant for practical archaeology. In 1937 Mortimer and Tessa Wheeler had founded the Institute of Archaeology in London. Mortimer Wheeler was one of the most celebrated British archaeologists of the early twentieth century, having worked at the National Commission for Historic Monuments, the National Museum of Wales, and as Keeper of the London Museum. For many years the Wheelers had hoped to create an institute for the study of practical archaeology but without funds, their plans remained in limbo. An anonymous donation of £10,000 to the Egyptologist Sir Matthew Flinders Petrie unexpectedly solved the problem. Flinders Petrie agreed to fund Wheelers’ institute if the institute, in turn, would take responsibility for Petrie’s archaeological collections from Palestine.32 Mortimer Wheeler believed the institute would professionalise the discipline of archaeology. It would, he hoped, give wings to the creature only just emerging from its chrysalis.33

  Eve attended a series of lectures given by Mortimer Wheeler at the Institute of Archaeology and learned to mend pots and to draw them. Her tendency to slow, careful, methodical work now proved an asset. The institute provided archaeologists with space to work on their collections, and many recognised that this young woman had exceptional technical drawing skills. Wheeler asked her to draw some delicate and beautiful metalwork and she enjoyed the challenge of bringing it to life.34

  The institute was one arm of Wheeler’s strategy to professionalise archaeology. The other was to increase public support for the discipline, thereby helping to raise funds for the systematic and scientific excavation work he planned to promote. Excavations at the site of Maiden Castle, an Iron Age hill fort in the county of Dorset, became his vehicle for both. The excavation would become an immense training dig where students and public volunteers would learn the principles of the grid-based stratigraphic methods that Wheeler had developed with Kathleen Kenyon. Work began in 1934 and for four seasons hundreds of volunteers and students carefully burrowed long narrow trenches across the massive oval earth mound, stripping away layers to uncover ditches and fortification walls—all clearly evident in the trench walls. Gradually a neat mosaic of grassy strips between chalky excavation pits patterned the slopes. The general public was encouraged to visit the excavations, where student volunteers guided them around the site. Visitors could purchase mementoes of their visit and over 64,000 postcards and 16,000 interim reports were sold, together with ‘trivial oddments such as beach-pebble slingstones, fragments of Roman tile, Roman oyster-shells, scraps of surface-pottery, all marked in Indian ink with the name of the site’.35

  In 1936 one of the site supervisors was Joan du Plat Taylor from the Cyprus Museum. On her day off she visited friends from Cyprus, Margery and Eve Dray. ‘Why don’t you come over and see if you like archaeology?’ Joan suggested to Eve.36

  Eve discovered a flair for the work. Her younger cousin Giles visited the excavations during his school holidays. He made his way past workmen pushing barrows of soil and carrying baskets of pottery sherds to the processing area, teetering on the top of narrow baulks dividing the excavation squares. When he finally tracked Eve down he was astonished to discover his cousin, gentle well-mannered Eve, sitting happily in a muddy trench with a pick and shovel and a row of forty grinning skeletons propped up beside her.37

  Chapter 2

  England and Cyprus, 1936–39

  In 1937, at the end of her university studies, Eve returned to Cyprus to visit her mother. She followed her principal’s advice and volunteered at the Cyprus Museum, where she joined her friend Joan du Plat Taylor. Eve spent the weekends in Kyrenia with Margery and lived in Nicosia during the week with Joan and her mother. Joan was eight years older than Eve, thirty-one to Eve’s twenty-three. Although she had no formal academic training, Joan was well read and enthusiastic and had arrived in Cyprus in 1926 as archaeological work came to life after the war. At the Cyprus Museum Joan guided tourists through the exhibitions and manned the souvenir shop, putting out duplicate pots for sale to the general public. Gradually she took on more important roles, working closely with the newly appointed Assistant Curator Porphyrios Dikaios. Together they spent hours cataloguing museum objects, Joan typing catalogue cards to Dikaios’s dictation. Frequently they were called to investigate reports of finds or newly discovered tombs.

  Every morning before breakfast the two young women saddled their horses to go riding before driving to the museum, where Eve worked with two other English volunteers, Judith Dobell and Rowena de Marchemund. The girls helped with ‘rescue’ digs or worked on the collection, checking photos, recording and cataloguing stone tools and pottery. Once a week they went to the Club, taking a gramophone and a pile of country dance records. Occasionally there were small dinner parties, and once there was a fancy dress ball. It was a close-knit group and they were a bit suspicious when a new Director, Peter Megaw, arrived to direct the Department of Antiquities.1

  Although Eve was new to archaeology, the discipline itself was well established, albeit in a form unlike that practised today. For hundreds of years the standing ruins of the ancient world had beckoned European travellers and scholars clutching battered copies of Homer or Virgil. Everywhere around the shores of the Mediterranean, marb
le column bases propped open wooden doors of barns, and elegant, if broken, torsos lay in peasant fields. Strange writing on slabs of stone drew philologists to Egypt, Palestine and Persia and copies of these exotic scripts—cuneiform, hieroglyphics—made their way to London or Paris. Collectors scoured the world, buying or stealing whatever they thought valuable or interesting or important: the Elgin Marbles, the Nineveh winged bulls, Sumerian clay tablets, sculptures and pottery of every shape and style. Some of this activity was legal; much of it was not. All of it took little account of local sentiment.

  Widespread amateur archaeology and antiquarianism continued well into the early twentieth century, fuelled by popular reports in the Illustrated London News and the enthusiasm with which wealthy upper class young men, schooled in the classics, made the Grand Tour to the Mediterranean or the Near East. Even in the nineteenth century, however, a more scientific approach was expected, and many European powers, together with the Americans, established archaeological ‘schools’ in Rome and Athens to support scholars and set standards. These and other learned societies attempted to guide the energies of these well-travelled and educated gentlemen. The British Government established an Archaeological Joint Committee, chaired by the British Museum and with representatives from most of the major archaeological societies in England, to provide the government with advice on archaeological issues throughout the Empire. In 1920, on the committee’s recommendation, the British Museum published a guide, How to observe in archaeology; Suggestions for travellers in the Near and Middle East. The Director of the British Museum, Frederick Kenyon, explained the handbook’s aim and stressed that travellers should respect the laws of the countries they visited.