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CHAPTER 1
Partant pour la Syrie

In a few weeks’ time we are starting for Syria!

Shopping for a hot climate in autumn or winter presents certain difficulties. One’s last year’s summer clothes, which one has optimistically hoped will ‘do’, do not ‘do’ now the time has come. For one thing they appear to be (like the depressing annotations in furniture removers’ lists) ‘Bruised, Scratched and Marked’. (And also Shrunk, Faded and Peculiar!) For another—alas, alas that one has to say it!—they are too tight everywhere.

So—to the shops and the stores, and:

‘Of course, Modom, we are not being asked for that kind of thing just now! We have some very charming little suits here—O.S. in the darker colours.’

Oh, loathsome O.S.! How humiliating to be O.S.! How even more humiliating to be recognized at once as O.S.!

(Although there are better days when, wrapped in a lean long black coat with a large fur collar, a saleswoman says cheeringly:

‘But surely Modom is only a Full Woman?’)

I look at the little suits, with their dabs of unexpected fur and their pleated skirts. I explain sadly that what I want is a washing silk or cotton.

‘Modom might try Our Cruising Department.’

Modom tries Our Cruising Department—but without any exaggerated hopes. Cruising is still enveloped in the realms of romantic fancy. It has a touch of Arcady about it. It is girls who go cruising—girls who are slim and young and wear uncrushable linen trousers, immensely wide round the feet and skintight round the hips. It is girls who sport delightfully in Play Suits. It is girls for whom Shorts of eighteen different varieties are kept!

The lovely creature in charge of Our Cruising Department is barely sympathetic.

‘Oh, no, Modom, we do not keep out-sizes.’ (Faint horror! Outsizes and Cruising? Where is the romance there?)

She adds:

‘It would hardly be suitable, would it?’

I agree sadly that it would not be suitable.

There is still one hope. There is Our Tropical Department.

Our Tropical Department consists principally of Topees—Brown Topees, White Topees; Special Patent Topees. A little to one side, as being slightly frivolous, are Double Terais, blossoming in pinks and blues and yellows like blooms of strange tropical flowers. There is also an immense wooden horse and an assortment of jodhpurs.

But—yes—there are other things. Here is suitable wear for the wives of Empire Builders. Shantung! Plainly cut shantung coats and skirts—no girlish nonsense here—bulk is accommodated as well as scragginess! I depart into a cubicle with various styles and sizes. A few minutes later I am transformed into a memsahib!

I have certain qualms—but stifle them. After all, it is cool and practical and I can get into it.

I turn my attention to the selection of the right kind of hat. The right kind of hat not existing in these days, I have to have it made for me. This is not so easy as it sounds.

What I want, and what I mean to have, and what I shall almost certainly not get, is a felt hat of reasonable proportions that will fit on my head. It is the kind of hat that was worn some twenty years ago for taking the dogs for a walk or playing a round of golf. Now, alas, there are only the Things one attaches to one’s head—over one eye, one ear, on the nape of one’s neck—as the fashion of the moment dictates—or the Double Terai, measuring at least a yard across.

I explain that I want a hat with a crown like a Double Terai and about a quarter of its brim.

‘But they are made wide to protect fully from the sun, Modom.’

‘Yes, but where I am going there is nearly always a terrific wind, and a hat with a brim won’t stay on one’s head for a minute.’

‘We could put Modom on an elastic.’

‘I want a hat with a brim no larger than this that I’ve got on.’

‘Of course, Modom, with a shallow crown that would look quite well.’

‘Not a shallow crown! The hat has got To Keep On!’

Victory! We select the colour—one of those new shades with the pretty names: Dirt, Rust, Mud, Pavement, Dust, etc.

A few minor purchases—purchases that I know instinctively will either be useless or land me in trouble. A Zip travelling bag, for instance. Life nowadays is dominated and complicated by the remorseless Zip. Blouses zip up, skirts zip down, ski-ing suits zip everywhere. ‘Little frocks’ have perfectly unnecessary bits of zipping on them just for fun.

Why? Is there anything more deadly than a Zip that turns nasty on you? It involves you in a far worse predicament than any ordinary button, clip, snap, buckle or hook and eye.

In the early days of Zips, my mother, thrilled by this delicious novelty, had a pair of corsets fashioned for her which zipped up the front. The results were unfortunate in the extreme! Not only was the original zipping-up fraught with extreme agony, but the corsets then obstinately refused to de-zip! Their removal was practically a surgical operation! And owing to my mother’s delightful Victorian modesty, it seemed possible for a while that she would live in these corsets for the remainder of her life—a kind of modern Woman in the Iron Corset!

I have therefore always regarded the Zip with a wary eye. But it appears that all travelling bags have Zips.

‘The old-fashioned fastening is quite superseded, Modom,’ says the salesman, regarding me with a pitying look.

‘This, you see, is so simple,’ he says, demonstrating.

There is no doubt about its simplicity—but then, I think to myself, the bag is empty.

‘Well,’ I say, sighing, ‘one must move with the times.’

With some misgivings I buy the bag.

I am now the proud possessor of a Zip travelling bag, an Empire Builder’s Wife’s coat and skirt, and a possibly satisfactory hat.

There is still much to be done.

I pass to the Stationery Department. I buy several fountain and stylographic pens—it being my experience that, though a fountain pen in England behaves in an exemplary manner, the moment it is let loose in desert surroundings it perceives that it is at liberty to go on strike and behaves accordingly, either spouting ink indiscriminately over me, my clothes, my notebook and anything else handy, or else coyly refusing to do anything but scratch invisibly across the surface of the paper. I also buy a modest two pencils. Pencils are, fortunately, not temperamental, and though given to a knack of quiet disappearance, I have always a resource at hand. After all, what is the use of an architect if not to borrow pencils from?

Four wrist-watches is the next purchase. The desert is not kind to watches. After a few weeks there, one’s watch gives up steady everyday work. Time, it says, is only a mode of thought. It then takes its choice between stopping eight or nine times a day for periods of twenty minutes, or of racing indiscriminately ahead. Sometimes it alternates coyly between the two. It finally stops altogether. One then goes on to wrist-watch No. 2, and so on. There is also a purchase of two four and six watches in readiness for that moment when my husband will say to me: ‘Just lend me a watch to give to the foreman, will you?’

Our Arab foremen, excellent though they are, have what might be described as a heavy hand with any kind of timepiece. Telling the time, anyway, calls for a good deal of mental strain on their part. They can be seen holding a large round moon-faced watch earnestly upside down, and gazing at it with really painful concentration while they get the answer wrong! Their winding of these treasures is energetic and so thorough that few mainsprings can stand up to the strain!

It therefore happens that by the end of the season the watches of the expedition staff have been sacrificed one by one. My two four and six watches are a means of putting off the evil day.

Packing!

There are several schools of thought as to packing. There are the people who begin packing at anything from a week or a fortnight beforehand. There are the people who throw a few things together half an hour before departure. There are the careful packers, insatiable for tissue paper! There are those who scorn tissue paper and just throw the things in and hope for the best! There are the packers who leave practically everything that they want behind! And there are the packers who take immense quantities of things that they never will need!

One thing can safely be said about an archaeological packing. It consists mainly of books. What books to take, what books can be taken, what books there are room for, what books can (with agony!) be left behind. I am firmly convinced that all archaeologists pack in the following manner: They decide on the maximum number of suitcases that a long-suffering Wagon Lit Company will permit them to take. They then fill these suitcases to the brim with books. They then, reluctantly, take out a few books, and fill in the space thus obtained with shirt, pyjamas, socks, etc.

Looking into Max’s room, I am under the impression that the whole cubic space is filled with books! Through a chink in the books I catch sight of Max’s worried face.

‘Do you think,’ he asks, ‘that I shall have room for all these?’

The answer is so obviously in the negative that it seems sheer cruelty to say it.

At four-thirty p.m. he arrives in my room and asks hopefully:

‘Any room in your suitcases?’

Long experience should have warned me to answer firmly ‘No,’ but I hesitate, and immediately doom falls upon me.

‘If you could just get one or two things—’

‘Not books?’

Max looks faintly surprised and says: ‘Of course books—what else?’

Advancing, he rams down two immense tomes on top of the Empire Builder’s Wife’s suit which has been lying smugly on top of a suitcase.

I utter a cry of protest, but too late.

‘Nonsense,’ says Max, ‘lots of room!’ And forces down the lid, which refuses spiritedly to shut.

‘It’s not really full even now,’ says Max optimistically.

He is, fortunately, diverted at this moment by a printed linen frock lying folded in another suitcase. ‘What’s that?’

I reply that it is a dress.

‘Interesting,’ says Max. ‘It’s got fertility motifs all down the front.’

One of the more uncomfortable things about being married to an archaeologist is their expert knowledge of the derivation of the most harmless-looking patterns!

At five-thirty Max casually remarks that he’d better go out and buy a few shirts and socks and things. He returns three-quarters of an hour later, indignant because the shops all shut at six. When I say they always do, he replies that he had never noticed it before.

Now, he says, he has nothing to do but ‘clear up his papers’.

At eleven p.m. I retire to bed, leaving Max at his desk (never to be tidied or dusted under the most dire penalties), up to the elbows in letters, bills, pamphlets, drawings of pots, innumerable potsherds, and various match-boxes, none of them containing matches, but instead odd beads of great antiquity.

At four a.m. he comes excitedly into the bedroom, cup of tea in hand, to announce that he has at last found that very interesting article on Anatolian finds which he had lost last July. He adds that he hopes that he hasn’t woken me up.

I say that of course he has woken me up, and he’d better get me a cup of tea too!

Returning with the tea, Max says he has also found a great many bills which he thought he had paid. I, too, have had that experience. We agree that it is depressing.

At nine a.m. I am called in as the heavy-weight to sit on Max’s bulging suitcases.

‘If you can’t make them shut,’ says Max ungallantly, ‘nobody can!’

The superhuman feat is finally accomplished by the aid of sheer avoirdupois, and I return to contend with my own difficulty, which is, as prophetic vision had told me it would be, the Zip bag. Empty in Mr Gooch’s shop, it had looked simple, attractive, and labour-saving. How merrily then had the Zip run to and fro! Now, full to the brim, the closing of it is a miracle of superhuman adjustment. The two edges have to be brought together with mathematical precision, and then, just as the Zip is travelling slowly across, complications set in, due to the corner of a sponge-bag. When at last it closes, I vow not to open it again until I get to Syria!

On reflection, however, this is hardly possible. What about the aforementioned sponge-bag? Am I to travel for five days unwashed? At the moment even that seems preferable to unzipping the Zip bag!

Yes, now the moment has come and we are really off. Quantities of important things have been left undone: the Laundry, as usual, has let us down; the Cleaners, to Max’s chagrin, have not kept their promises—but what does anything matter? We are going!

Just for a moment or two it looks as though we aren’t going! Max’s suitcases, delusive in appearance, are beyond the powers of the taximan to lift. He and Max struggle with them, and finally, with the assistance of a passer-by, they are hoisted on to the taxi.

We drive off for Victoria.

Dear Victoria—gateway to the world beyond England—how I love your continental platform. And how I love trains, anyway! Snuffing up the sulphurous smell ecstatically—so different from the faint, aloof, distantly oily smell of a boat, which always depresses my spirits with its prophecy of nauseous days to come. But a train—a big snorting, hurrying, companionable train, with its big puffing engine, sending up clouds of steam, and seeming to say impatiently: ‘I’ve got to be off, I’ve got to be off, I’ve got to be off!’—is a friend! It shares your mood, for you, too, are saying: ‘I’m going to be off, I’m going, I’m going, I’m going…’

By the door of our Pullman, friends are waiting to see us off. The usual idiotic conversations take place. Famous last words pour from my lips—instructions about dogs, about children, about forwarding letters, about sending out books, about forgotten items, ‘and I think you’ll find it on the piano, but it may be on the bathroom shelf’. All the things that have been said before, and do not in the least need saying again!

Max is surrounded by his relations, I by mine.

My sister says tearfully that she has a feeling that she will never see me again. I am not very much impressed, because she has felt this every time I go to the East. And what, she asks, is she to do if Rosalind gets appendicitis? There seems no reason why my fourteen-year-old daughter should get appendicitis, and all I can think of to reply is: ‘Don’t operate on her yourself!’ For my sister has a great reputation for hasty action with her scissors, attacking impartially boils, haircutting, and dressmaking—usually, I must admit, with great success.