Now a graduate just into her twenties, Jacquetta Hawkes resolved to carve her own distinction. Her First class degree from Cambridge in 1932 matched Christopher’s from Oxford, and he would have delighted in that. Personally, as she told her son years later, she was not sure it was her’s was a wholly deserved honour. But there was little doubt that Miss Hopkins, as she was then, had a form of originality and brilliance in her approach to archaeology.

At Mount Carmel in Palestine, under the luminary Newnam Professor, Dorothy Garrod, Jacquetta supervised the unearthing of the skeleton of an early hominid; this subject matter and the context of this desert landscape fired her imagination for years. It was the beginning of Jacquetta’s personal dialogue between arts and sciences.

These were exhilarating weeks. The Neanderthal skeleton was the first to be found outside Europe. It was an unexpected pleasure for Jacquetta to supervise its excavation; her own site assistant had uncovered the first clues to its existence after several millennia, in the form of a single human tooth amidst the dust.

Even as creative thoughts coursed through her, she was mindful to lead her team to excavate the skeleton in a proper, scientific manner. She perhaps remembered the words of an early tutor who, when told Jacquetta wanted to begin her studies with that of the science of archaeology, rather than a more “approachable” topic, remarked to her: ‘Rather strong meat, Miss Hopkins, rather strong meat’. Now, as Jacquetta practised her skills in the traditional manner learnt at Cambridge, she could let her imagination soar, privately eschewing the scientific pragmatism of the trench, for her unique form of lyricism. She was reading the past in her own way.

Jacquetta took wonderful, and now historic, photographs of the skeleton and the site, and they remained in her personal albums. She might have taken them out again, and mused over them, when developing her thoughts on the evolution of human consciousness. Indeed, her writings on the Neanderthal discovery and its significance, to Jacquetta’s mind as much a human find as a scientific one, surfaced later in several works, and in her poetry. In Man on Earth, she writes: `Perhaps of all men, the archaeologist must be most aware of time passing…So, while we uncovered the skeleton detail by detail, and then shrouded it in plaster of Paris, I often looked at it with sorrow'.

It was this passionate fusing of human emotion with the practice of a scientific discipline that was to define her as an original writer, but it made her sit somehow uneasily in archaeology's academic community, one which as her career progressed became ever more based in the sciences rather than the humanities.

As Jacquetta gazed down at the bones she was aware how close she and her colleagues were in fact to this person who once walked the lower slopes of the mountain: ‘Human consciousness had not been highly tempered when it was housed in that poor cranium, but now it was returning to discover, study and reflect upon ancient haunts…I was conscious of this vanished being and myself as part of an unspoken stream of consciousness, as two atoms in the inexorable process to which we all belonged…With an imaginative effort it is possible to see the eternal present in which all days, all the seasons of the plain stand in enduring unity…But there is also a terrible reality in that opening vision of the linear passage of time, of the continuous leaving behind which fills us with a cruel awareness of the wastage of brief lives..’. (The latter thoughts, published in Man on Earth, was surely a response to recent wars: her childhood memories of World War One, in which her mother worked at a military hospital, the still-recent traumas of the Second World War, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and in her fears for the new Atomic Age.)

It seemed that nothing about this find or its context escaped Jacquetta’s attention; it fuelled her words, and the stream of ideas linking them. Like Hamlet considering Yorick’s skull, she was inspired to complex ponderings from the evidence of a cranium. Leaping from the hard matter to human consciousness, she writes, again in Man on Earth: ‘The morning procession of Arabs was impelled, and that path worn, by ideas grown in the inquisitive minds of Europe and America. These minds, belonging to individual men and woman, were so caught up in the tide of curiosity about the physical universe that they pursued knowledge like a pack of hounds. They had seen everything from microbes to the Milky Way, and now were in full cry after the answer to the question about themselves: what was the history of their own self-consciousness, and how did the terrible and wonderful organ of thought, feeling and imagination come to be on earth? How on earth?’

These were deep thoughts indeed, and if moulded and crafted by adult experience, they had their first inklings in the desert and rock of Palestine. However, those crafted words came later – (and not least, Man on Earth was dedicated to Priestley). At this time, in the early winter of 1932, Jacquetta’s thoughts were of Christopher. It seems there was much around to fire her passions at this time. She took photographs, beautifully composed studies of the young Arab men and woman who laboured at the archaeological site, which are more than snapshots. Ethrographical in detail, Jacquetta photographed the labourers balancing baskets of spoil on their heads, beaming out at her, as they made their way across the site. She found them fascinating, writing in Man on Earth: ‘…they would sit in rings, the blues, pinks and greens of their cotton dresses and trousers giving each circle of girls the appearance of a flower’.

On Mount Carmel, Jacquetta experienced moments of great intensity, indeed once become literally ecstatic. One light she had what she would later described as a mystical experience:

“One night when the land was still fresh from the rain, I was wandering near our camp enjoying the moonlight, when an intense exaltation took possession of me. It was as though the white goddess of the moon had thrown some bewitching power with her rays ... the whole night was dancing around me.... It appeared that the moonlight had ceased to be a physical thing and now represented a state of illumination in my own mind ... it seemed that my thoughts and feelings had been given a quite extraordinary clarity and truth.’

Jacquetta described how she climbed up on to a high outcrop of rock on top of the wadi, and knelt down: 'The moonlight swam around and in my head, as I looked across the plain to the shining silver bar of the Mediterranean.' From this fantastic almost-eyrie, she watched the slow procession below of a caravan of about twenty camels making their way across the wadi, a line stretching over time.

‘My memory of it is dreamlike, yet embodies one of the most intense sensuous and emotional experiences of my life.... I had the heightened sensibility of one passionately in love, and with it the power to transmute all that the senses perceived into symbols of burning significance. This surely is one of the best rewards of humanity. To be filled with comprehension of the beauty and marvellous complexity of the physical world, and for this happy excitement of the senses to lead directly into an awareness of spiritual significance. The fact that such experience comes most surely with love, with possession by the creative Eros, suggests that it belongs near the root of our mystery ... it grants man a state of mind in which, I believe, he must come more and more to live: a mood of intensely conscious individuality which serves only to strengthen an intense consciousness of unity with all being - this mind is one infinitesimal node in the mind present throughout all being, just as his body shares in the unity of matter. So, as the moon leapt and bounded in the sky, I took full possession of a love and confidence that have not yet forsaken me.’

This profound experience lay deep in Jacquetta's consciousness. In the early 1940s it inspired a long and beautiful descriptive poem, 'Man in Time’, as well becoming one of the most memorable passages in Man on Earth. Diana Collins, in her memoir of a friendship, wonders: ‘Maybe she would not, or could not, have written it as she did before, as a mature woman, she had fallen so deeply in love.’ While on Mount Carmel, the object of Jacquetta’s affection was Christopher; when she came to describe it in a manuscript, she was passionately in love with Jack.

But it was certainly Christopher who occupied her thoughts during those extraordinary weeks in Palestine. The photograph of him she had brought with her was certainly a sign of genuine affection, but was it one of love? She could not decide if Christopher was ‘the one’, as she frankly discussed in A Quest of Love.

`I was genuinely moved that Christopher wanted me so much, I admired and in most ways liked him; we shared an earnest involvement in our subject. Did I "love" him? How could I tell? I knew I had felt little pleasure in such kissing and embracing as we had practised - but might not bliss arrive with consummation?'

There was an implicit risk, but Jacquetta’s heart won over any doubts lingering in her head. On the 7th June, 1932, Christopher and Jacquetta became officially engaged to be married; no haste was spared for an autumn wedding. It appeared to be a perfect match on paper, but even in t he few months before marriage, there were already hairline cracks already showing. Jacquetta was just 22, young both in years and in emotional maturity, newly out of university and, although noticeably talented, having no distinct career path. Christopher’s career was continuing to progress at the British Museum, and so a family life beckoned. But Jacquetta showed little sign of being maternal.

There was also the question of religion. At Oxford, Christopher had become a practising Anglo-Catholic; in Jacquetta’s house there had been no religious upbringing at all. She had never been baptised, and she had not adopted a faith on her own accord. Indeed, her passions were very much self-driven and over the years would be transformed by life and experience. While she had picked up the austerity beneath scientific agnosticism, she had also embraced an almost overwhelming sense of ‘feeling’: her childhood trauma at being found to be a liar, and her shock at seeing her father cry at his own mother’s death, her passions at Newnham, her revelation on Mount Carmel – but she did not consider giving herself up to an institution such as the Church.

The pair had family backgrounds that were different in many and, as it would prove, significant ways. If both Jacquetta and Christopher were close to their fathers, their mothers were a different story altogether; where Lady Hopkins was delightful and congenial, Christopher’s mother was a redoubtable woman, and Jacquetta faced a problem from the start. Mrs Hawkes was extremely class-conscious and regarded the Hopkinses as inferior, no matter that Jacquetta’s father was an esteemed academic, a Nobel Laureate, (and within two years awarded the Order of Merit), the Hopkinses were not of the right social class, and Jacquetta was never allowed to forget it. Mrs Hawkes regarded her as unsophisticated and with no small talk. Not least, she had not “come out” as debutante in the London society season.

Jacquetta was scrutinised at every level, an appalling pre-nuptual situation. This same young woman who had stunned Newnham with her sophistication and beauty, who had soon developed what would be a life-long passion for fine clothes and all feminine accoutrements, did not pass muster with Mrs Hawkes. She set to work on remodelling Jacquetta: she sent a message to Christopher urging him to tell Jacquetta to use make-up. Years later, Jacquetta shared one damning quote with her friend, Diana Collins: From Mrs Hawkes to Christopher: 'She will be no use to you, she doesn't wear gloves. . . .' .

Whether they were suited in the eyes of society of not, they were emotionally out of kilter, not least because of the age gap, six years but at a formative time of life. Not least, Christopher had already suffered deep romantic setbacks. Before Jacquetta, he had been close to marrying two other women. He had actually become engaged to one before she broke it off. He was still nursing scars of heartbreak, and this time he had to be completely sure of the fascinating and vivacious, but complex and colt-like, Miss Jacquetta Hopkins. His mother, already dominating and possessive, thus became even more prejudiced and irrationally over-protective.

Paradoxically, the fact that Jacquetta had no shortage of admirers almost certainly counted against her. Now, Jacquetta's beauty and cleverness posed too great a threat to her prospective mother-in-law; her son’s intended was little short of a Siren, there would be trouble. Years later Jacquetta could not lay the total blame for the failure of marriage with Christopher at Mrs Hawkes’s door, but the situation could not have helped. Jacquetta, who already had uneasy relationships with envious women at Newnham – not least those who were jealous she had snapped up Christopher – would have been aware of this emotional onslaught, but also quite unprepared to know how to deal with it. She would have remembered her distress at her mother’s attack of jealousy years before, but also acknowledged it had not been directed at her, per se, but at Emma Turner, who was taking her company. And, worse for Jacquetta, there was another female Hawkes to deal with, Christopher’s sister, Penelope who was at that time living at home. Christopher was apparently furious at the hostility simmering beneath the surface, complaining that his sister was ‘worse than icy’ towards Jacquetta.

As the criticism continued, the usually unruffled Christopher was moved to anger as he defended his prospective wife against the class-infested barbs shot out by his family. Even with all this, and perhaps in spite of it, Christopher was determined to go ahead and marry Jacquetta. However, his mother still had a trump card to play. The planning of the wedding.

The ‘tide of events’ which Jacquetta later related to Diana as signalling disaster was indeed the stuff of calamity. It began with that religious question. Still a devout Anglo-Catholic, Christopher was entrenched; he wanted a church wedding. Jacquetta said it was not just hypocritical, but wrong.

One day Christopher took Jacquetta to his alma mater, Winchester College, determined to make his fiancée give in. She described later: “ …he marched me weeping, round and round the cloisters, until I surrendered, and agreed to be married in my father's college chapel. Once committed to a conventional wedding, I was helpless' .

With Mrs Hawkes in full charge, whatever her feelings about Jacquetta she was determined to bully proceedings, Jacquetta’s satin and gold gown was made by a society name, Elspeth Fox Pitt. Her bridesmaids by Motley, the smart theatrical designers. Recording all this in A Quest of Love, Jacquetta reveals a frank detail that showed that there was at least one area in which she would retain control: “On my own initiative I was also fitted with a birth control device and had my hymen stretched”. (Jacquetta maintained a great respect for the work of Family Planning Clinics throughout her life.)

Fitted for a formal wedding gown, letters of thanks for 'unwelcome wedding presents'; hypocrisy piled upon hypocrisy for Jacquetta. And her astute mother also saw it too. Such was her daughter’s obvious turmoil, she asked Jacquetta several times if she 'really wanted' to marry Christopher.

If her daughter was beginning to have serious doubts, she felt utterly powerless. Not least she had to she had to dispel them because of her fiancé’s previous heart-breaks, the last so close to a wedding day. Her concern was a bitter irony in retrospect; Jacquetta felt should not inflict a third disappointment on Christopher, but the humiliation of the Priestley affair, not least her frankness about it in A Quest of Love, was a far, far worse prospect.

Thus, in October, 1933, the Hawkes-Hopkins wedding went ahead in the beautiful surroundings of Trinity College Chapel. The music was selected by Christopher. Of this much-anticipated event, captured in wonderfully distinguished wedding photographs, an emotionally exhausted Jacquetta wrote later: ‘I recall a sense of bewildered incredulity as I went up the chapel on my father's arm, my long train supported by six bridesmaids in their elegant gowns... I saw through my veil that Christopher was wearing spats. The knot was tied and we processed out into the glorious pale sunshine in Trinity Great Court. The reception in the college hall was crowded and well supplied with champagne . . . I floated through it all, lost in unreality.’ Whether Jacquetta was in some state of unreality akin to watching the camel caravan on Mount Carmel, or simply expressing a wish to be in some other reality, she does not specify. But later emergings in Jacquetta’s hand rather suggest the latter.

Throughout the reception, Jacquetta’s sense of dread continued: her father, although perfectly at ease at the esteemed Royal Society, was suddenly overtaken with shyness at this major event, and could not make his speech on behalf of the bride. Jacquetta’s new father-in-law, C.P., stepped in, fresh from quaffing champagne. Although possessing a fine wit, he rather missed his step on this occasion and instead of extolling the radiant new bride, as was the tradition, he said how fortunate Jacquetta was to be marrying such a splendid man as Christopher. ` The reception over, the new Mr. and Mrs Hawkes set off on honeymoon to the sunshine of Mallorca, where they could at least both enjoy the archaeology and the sea. After all the drama, what Jacquetta actually said to her new husband, and he to her, on the journey to the island she does nor record. But recalling her own thoughts a day later, her words have an ominous ring: 'That this expensive and conventional wedding had only a slender chance of lasting success will be obvious’.

Mallorca was 'neither a joy nor a disaster …’ reflected Jacquetta. And if simply left there, those words considered with the several photographs of the couple posing on the beach - to all intents, appearing to be enjoying each other’s company - one could assume that it was merely nerves that had taken the edge off Jacquetta’s nuptials. Her apparent ambivalence could, perhaps, be put down to a settling in to new ways after such a rapid courtship.

However, with Jacquetta, one has to factor in one major requirement. Passion. This coupled with an increasing need of physical fulfilment after so many years in which she was ‘simply not interested’. Given her earlier concerns about the very act of sex, and whatever what on at with her “pashes” at Newnham, her recollections of the wedding night and beyond are of little surprise. Written many years after Mallorca, and after her throes of ecstasy with Priestley, and her other lover, Walter Turner, and published in A Quest of Love, they are devastatingly frank. They hurt Christopher, deeply, when published prominently in 1980, and only served to widen the gulf between Christopher’s camp and her own loyal supporters.

Worse for Christopher, Jacquetta had an extraordinary means of self-expression that was also unbounded in terms of sensitivity. With a panoply of erudition at her disposal, she recalled simply this of the honeymoon: ‘While I came nowhere near to passion, it would not be just to say that I was frigid. I wanted to please my husband and even gained some small pleasure in the attempt'. Even before Mallorca was over, Jacquetta was recognising the awful truth; she simply did not, after all, truly love and desire Christopher. 'As it was’, she concluded in her indictment of a mis-matched and hasty marriage, 'we enjoyed the sun, the bathing and visiting antiquities - and were not unhappy. Similar words might be used to describe the following years of our marriage.'

How much Christopher sensed his wife’s feelings is unknown, but it would unfair to judge him simply by Jacquetta’s words after the event. He was, after all a young man of considerable artistic flair, a lover of music and actively musical – Jacquetta was tone-deaf - and had been regarded a considerable catch - one which she was warned off, much to her chagrin, by Christopher’s other would-be admirers as being too unattainable for her to pursue. If in Jacquetta’s eyes Christopher was less than some form of love-god, his own passions were represented in his aesthetic sensibility – he spoke often of loving ‘beautiful things’ – his fulfilment in his archaeology, and his utter commitment to his young wife.

Jacquetta and Christopher returned from Mallorca to their new home; a rented two-storey flat at Cleveland Gardens near Paddington station in west London. It was reasonably convenient for Christopher’s job at the British Museum, and Jacquetta would have room to continue her academic research and writing. She became more active in other ways, campaigning for the Labour Party during an election, sowing the seeds for her later activism in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

It was a quite comfortable start to married life in a reasonable area of London; they could have some domestic help and entertain a little. However, there were family expectations, again from the Hawkes side, and this presented another new problem – money. Given her father-in-law’s work as a London barrister and their new circle of family friends, Jacquetta and Christopher were expected to take part in the social sound. As much as this would have appealed to the young Mrs Hawkes’s sense of style, these elaborate affairs proved costly. It was yet another hypocrisy. Christopher’s British Museum job was impressive on paper, but his pay was not high, and even with an annual allowance of £250 from the Hopkins’s, they could ill afford the laundry bills for a dress code of starched white waistcoats.

Despite the wedding day speech debacle, C.P.Hawkes and his new daughter-in-law began to develop a good relationship. It was one of real affection and possibly Jacquetta was projecting onto the witty, erudite barrister a desire to have been closer to her own father. However, there was always the redoubtable Mrs Eleanor Hawkes to contend with. And contention is probably the word, as the disdain of her daughter-in-law’s apparently uncultured ways intensified. There was another ordeal ahead. Jacquetta had to be presented at court. If Jacquetta hoped she could avoid this on grounds of expense – she would have to appear in a stunning dress – this was effectively overruled; she would be able to wear her wedding gown. With yet another hypocritical event in prospect, Jacquetta was resigned to her fate until society itself handed her a convenient get-out card. The older Mrs Hawkes had reached the limit of the young ladies she could present. Jacquetta was relieved, to say the least.

But she was not through the storm entirely; Penelope Hawkes continued with her hostilities, while Christopher’s mother dripped further criticism on Jacquetta’s every best intention. It was all so different from the reception at his in-laws, and perhaps as respite from the storm, the couple often travelled to spend weekends at Grange Road. Perhaps inspired by her warm relationship with C.P., Jacquetta had grown increasingly close to her father. Meanwhile, Christopher, whose work commitments were growing enjoyed these visits a great deal. He particularly enjoyed his discussions with Sir Frederick, whose considerable intellect embraced both art and science, and with whom he could share the latest insights from the archaeological camp.

Jacquetta’s mother, however warm she was towards Christopher, detected something amiss with the relationship. It had been triggered by her daughter’s obvious trauma before the wedding, but there was something about Christopher that unnerved her. This was not the mother-in-law problem with which Jacquetta was presented, but more a sense that Christopher was simply not a good match for her daughter.

However, the pair were fully engaged in their passion for archaeology. And some element of their home life must have been settled enough for Jacquetta to apply herself to academic work. In March, 1934, she had her first publication: 'Aspects of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods in Western Europe' , which appeared in the highly-regarded, and peer-reviewed journal, Antiquity x 8 (29) March 1934 pp24-42.) It was a significant enough piece of work to be discussed by the eminent British archaeologist, Stuart Piggott, in a later volume, Antiquity 11, 1937.

She was soon at work on another paper, on a more specific theme. She and Christopher visited Alexander Keiller’s first year of excavations at Avebury, and nearby Windmill Hill, which was producing fascinating evidence of an ancient cultural mindset. At some time Jacquetta decided this should be the subject for her next paper, and she began work on it. It was published in 1935 as:'The Place of Origin of the Windmill Hill Culture' in another venerable journal, the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. It was a well received article, and it helped to place Jacquetta on the map of British academic archaeology. Christopher, naturally, was delighted for her success, and the seeds were perhaps sown at this time for their own book together, one which would further augment his young wife’s position as an original archaeological thinker in her own right.

To an outsider, then, all appeared well. Christopher and Jacquetta spent their free time immersed in the past, meeting with other archaeologists, visiting sites and museums, and taking holidays which invariably combined the pleasure of their work with some relaxation. In the summer of 1934, they spent two weeks in France, helped to excavate the important hill fort of Gergovie, or Gergovia, close to mountains near Clermont-Ferrand in France. It was a happy meeting of couples; the director was Olwen Brogan, working with her husband, Denis, who was Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. It was all quite idyllic. The setting was beautiful, the weather good, the French colleagues convivial. Not least the archaeology was significant; the hill-fort echoed with the personality of the great Gaul leader, Vercingetorix, who, like Boudicca in Britain, had repelled Roman invaders. The stronghold was a key site in the Gauls’ campaign against the might of Caesar’s forces. After a fortnight of excavating, Jacquetta and Christopher travelled south on an extended holiday, visiting ancient cities including the beautiful walled city of Carcassonne, and rejoicing in the countryside. The trip resulted in yet more memorable images for the album.

The pair were consumed by their projects. Christopher was working on a major book on prehistoric Britain, The Prehistoric Foundations of Europe, which would help make his name at the highest order of archaeology. Jacquetta was working on her first, and by no means a diminished book, the final part of The Archaeology of the Channel Islands. She was honoured to be tackling Volume II: The Bailiwick of Jersey, and aiming to match the high standard set for the first volume, on The Bailiwick of Guernsey, by Christopher’s colleague, Tom Kendrick.

Christopher had to work on his book at night, after an arduous day at the British Museum. He was nothing less than a workoholic. His young wife recognised the symptoms; she had seen her father in a similar stressful state years before, and must have been gravely troubled to see history repeated. Not least, far from finding the intimacy in their everyday life in which to resolve the troubling of their earliest days of their marriage, most nights saw Jacquetta taking her husband tea around 11 pm, and going to bed alone. Christopher’s almost fanatical approach to the subject which had brought him and Jacquetta together, now looked to be setting them apart.

The crisis came to a head when Christopher, already struggling at work and threatened with losing his job, suffered a breakdown. It was a shock to his colleagues but it was caused simply by overwork. His crisis is recorded in letters at the time. Christopher was forced to take a break from the Museum; but even if he personally feared he might ever not return to his desk there, he continued with his utter commitment to archaeology. Fieldwork provided some respite; from July 14th to August 5th , he and Jacquetta travelled back to Wessex to work on the site at Buckland Rings near Lymington, Hampshire. Christopher directed the excavation, and Jacquetta took all the photographs and assisted in other ways, this being recorded in the Papers and Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club (x XIII.2 1936).

Whatever own fears, the British Museum realised it could not lose such a superb archaeologist as Christopher Hawkes; two years later he was promoted to the position of first-class keeper, with a significantly increased salary.

Before returning to his old post at the Museum, Christopher and Jacquetta took a holidays to Czecho-slavakia and Brittany, more archaeology, but at time away from the desk when they could develop their ideas and restore the easy companionship of their early time together.

In 1936, there was more opportunity for travel, and a change of scene. They were both invited to read papers at an international archaeological congress in Oslo and, by all accounts, it was a successful trip. Jacquetta again captured it in photographs, while Christopher write home to his parents. He and Jacquetta were charmed by Copenhagen, 'a really charming, human, civilised, easy-to-enjoy, happy, carefree sort of city. The museum is marvellous, and its staff most friendly,' he wrote. Of the business of the congress he reported back: ‘Jacquetta's paper was extremely good - clear, controlled and assured. Mine was less good in that 1 had rather too much to say and exceeded my time!' The post-conference excursion was splendid sight-seeing and the pair were lavishly entertained. They were taken up the coast by steamier, visiting Norwegian fjords. They had excellent weather, Christopher's only complaint to his parents being the cost of everything, 'e.g. laundry 1/6d for a shirt'. He wrote excitedly about swimming in the fjords, and a spectacular journey across the mountains.’

After more museums and sight-seeing, in Stockholm, the pair had a proper holiday at Visby, a fine old Hanseatic city on the island of Gotland, in the Baltic Sea. This proved to be the perfect holiday place, Christopher’s letters relate. If they found the Baltic icy, they enjoyed the long sandy beach, the sunshine, and Visby’s modest night-life. They were so energised – and Christopher obviously so well recovered – that at one point contemplated undertaking the 75 mile island tour on foot. They did eventually use bicycles, battling the wind as they did.

The undoubted happiness the couple found at last in these frequent breaks from the routine of work, had a further delightful outcome: in the autumn of 1936, Jacquetta became intentionally pregnant. Important to recognise here how much she wanted have a child, given her resistance at the start of her marriage. Pregmancy provided another sensory experience that she had to put into words, again in Man on Earth, as her physique changed over time: '…now the slave of some great and marvellous and absolutely tyrannical purpose of which neither she nor he who launched the sperm has been vouchsafed any understanding'.

With domestic help, Jacquetta continued working. The Jersey volume was an important one. She received a grant to spend time on the island and, even as the war-clouds were gathering over Europe, Jacquetta was able to spend her early pregnancy in agreeable company in a charming continental atmosphere. She was well entertained by the society of the Channel Islands, and to her tally of overheard compliments, she could add the words of one hostess who demurred: 'She wears her weight of learning like a flower'.

As well as her own observations on Jersey, Jacquetta had inherited huge amounts of Kendrick’s writings and other collected research papers with seemingly indecipherable notes. These included a lengthy correspondence with H.L. Stapleton, dating back to 1934, on Jersey finds of Roman and Gaulish coins, with N.V.L. Rybot of the Societe Jersiase, and her husband’s Museum colleague, Derek Allen, on the St. Brelade’s coin hoard. There was also a hand-written compilation of notes on various Channel Island antiquities, made early in the 20th century, and the letters of a Jerseyman, Philippe Langlois on various aspects of the island’s archaeology between 1871 and 1875.

Preparing to write this important work, Jacquetta started in the way she would continue fort the rest of her writer’s life. She marked up a title on a green exercise book "Jersey arch. Notes", and filled it with words and sketches. It set the standard for her books, visualising the structure, including the illustrations, and starting a draft of the text in a grand style, in this case: "On the wave of the present the living sweep onward through time".

The volume was published by the Societie Jersiase in 1939, and is oddly pre-emptive of the German Occupation of the Channel Islands the following summer. There is a sense that as Jacquetta was gathering her ideas about the island's several prehistoric relationships with the continental mainland, she was aware of the storm gathering. In 1940, the islands were Occupied by the Germans and many of the strategic cliff-top archaeology sites visited and recorded by Jacquetta became the sites of gun emplacements.

Even without the hindsight of this perspective on occupation, Jacquetta’s first book contains a genuine broad-brush verve. She is cogniscant of changes in her own field since Kendrick’s Guernsey work was published less than 10 years before, in 1928. 'Since Volume One … a spate of fresh knowledge and ideas has changed the face of European archaeology; a shifting and uncertain flood indeed, but still one that cannot be ignored.' She had an ideal terrain to make her own: Jersey was an island of 44 sq miles, to Guernsey's 24 1/2 sq miles; it boasted an extraordinary tidal system and, unlike its fellow Channel Islands, the island once formed part of the Breton mainland of Northern France. She notes sagely: 'Contact with the outside world was relatively as significant a force in the cultural development of Jersey in prehistoric times as today when she lies an hour's journey from London by air...'.

The volume is strewn with indicators to Jacquetta’s future approaches to the past: noting her volume was more hypothetical than Kenrick's she also celebrates ‘provoking contradiction’ as a way of highlighting Jersey's cultural relationships. She provides a lyrical introduction, and in fact the book, a serious piece of research which also certainly won her election to the Fellowship of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1940, is shot through with the stylish flair she developed in later works.

Here, as ever, she is always conscious of relationships - between land and sea, between past and present, the strata of geology and the many shades of prehistory; Jacquetta delivers the evidence and makes sense of it for the reader. In some cases, her observations provide a primer of basic archaeology for a general reader: 'The thickness of the occupation deposit in La Cotte de St.Brelade and the vast number of implements contained in it suggest that Neanderthal Man must have lived and hunted in the Jersey area for a long period of time, but when his stock died out or migrated he had no immediate successor' .

Elsewhere the implications of what she described as 'a new human highway, the sea route along the Atlantic coasts' are developed further for her colleagues within the discipline: '..this development can only be justly viewed as firming a small element within the infinitely wider change which was substituting Neolithic civilisation for the primitive 'food gathering' economic system of the nomadic hunting life of Paleolithic and Mesolithic Europe'. She ponders who built the island’s megaliths, and who comprised a native population of Jersey when Iberian explorers arrived. Was there a re-population by settlers from Brittany to the south-west, or from a newly-established Morbihan centre?

She concludes her introduction: 'Graves, weapons, tools, and pots, all the surviving material possessions of the prehistoric inhabitants, have been use as documents to tell the story of Jersey from a time when the island was peopled by creatures differing from modern man even in the structure of their bodies, down to the first contact with written history and the humanising breath of remembered names: Gaul, Roman, and Norseman. If during the many thousands of years covered the narrative has often run thin and sometimes been lost, it is still hoped that this chapter has served to show how the patient efforts of modern Jerseymen to recover the relics of former islands from the soil, has not merely meant the filing of museum cases, but has provided the material for a history, already intelligible, which the future will make better and more vivid.'

The island map was almost out-of-date when the volume was published; certainly by the end of the war in 1945, the marks left by Occupation had redrawn some of the better known sites.

Jacquetta would have understood this continuum from prehistory through to medieval and modern history. La Hougue Bie, she writes, was - 'fully famed beyond any other prehistoric monument in Jersey...(possibly) one of the finest memorials of its time surviving in Western Europe' is one dramatic example.

'The great circular mound crowned with two medieval chapels', is vividly described by Jacquetta who recounts the 'fantastic framework of medieval legend' surrounding it, involving dragon-slaying and a servant's treachery. She then provides an explanation for the site arising 'among a people cut off by the curtain of time from any knowledge of their prehistoric forerunners, but who felt the need for some heroic explanation of the great monument which stood among their fields'. During German Occupation, La Hougue Bie had a new chapter in its history when an underground bunker was dug deep into the site, and concreted it, with an entrance door at odds with the megaliths. It still survives at the site today, as part of its modern archaeology.

The Archaeology of the Channel Islands: Volume II was published in 1939, and was regarded as a particularly well-written work of scholarship destined for the archaeological community, where it was able to find its permanent place. In many ways, it has yet to be superseded.

Buoyed by their archaeology researches and by impending parenthood, Jacquetta and Christopher took another holiday that hot summer, to Cornwall; a family photo shows Jacquetta looking radiant despite the heat and her advanced state. Her mother, Lady Hopkins, came to stay with them at Cleveland Gardens during the latter weeks of her daughter’s pregnancy. Christopher was delighted, and wrote to his parents: 'She has been so nice with us these tedious, hot-weeks.” A son, Charles Nicolas Hawkes, weighing 8 1/2lbs, arrived on the 9th of August 1937, in a private nursing home two doors from their home. The spelling of Nicolas – without the ‘h’ - harked back to Christopher’s classical background. The birth was not an easy one, but all went well otherwise. Jacquetta thought her son rather plain, but Christopher wrote to his parents that Nicolas 'looks a thoroughly agreeable and friendly sort of baby, and has nice little hands and feet'. Jacquetta told her son years later that she had been cheered by an omen - a black cat ran across his path on the way back from the nursing home.

Jacquetta quickly recovered from the arduous birth. Her new role in womanhood would be discussed and revelled about in Man on Earth but at this time she must have been wondered whether she would ever find the requirements necessary to be a mother. When, in her 80s, she talked with Diana Collins about her childhood doll-smashing incident, she put it down to a lack of any maternal instinct. Diana had instead thought the reason to be ‘rebelliousness’ and countered: ‘When Jacquetta finally had a child I don’t think she was without maternal love, and when it came to grandchildren, she surprised herself by her strength of her grandmotherly feelings’. Certainly, Jacquetta was not what might be termed a hands-on mother. Presented with archive material from his mother’s home, Nicolas was surprised by the fact she had kept a hand-written chart of his height and weight.

Shortly after Nicolas was born, Jacquetta, Christopher, the baby and monthly nurse, went for a holiday in Winchester, a place in the midst of the prehistoric landscape of Wessex; it was business as usual. The following summer, 1938, Jacquetta and Christopher took part in another joint excavation in Hampshire, Nicolas and his nursery maid completing their party. The same year saw publication of another paper: 'The Significance of Channelled Ware in Neolithic Western Europe' in The Archaeological Journal Vol. XCV (x 1938, Pt I. Pp 126-173) Jacquetta was congratulated on this major piece of work, another which was fast establishing her reputation. Meanwhile she and Christopher were busy with other publications, books of their own, and planning a collaboration which would be called, with little surprise: Prehistoric Britain.

Now juggling domestic concerns with family and work, the couple had to maintain their busy lives. Christopher’s promotion at the British Museum was highly welcomed, not least because the rise on salary meant that they could move somewhere larger. Another addition to the family was not ruled out: Jacquetta perhaps wanted to have a daughter. Certainly, as Diana Collins notes: ‘Had it not been for the outbreak of war they had intended to have another child as a companion for Nicolas’ .

They began to look for a new home. In a letter to his wife, who was again away on a site, Christopher reports on negotiations to secure number 39 Fitzroy Road, London NW1, for a rent of 50s a week. The location was close to the unexpected green mound of Primrose Hill, then topped with trees, and its exhilarating views across London, and prximity to London Zoo, meant it was perfect for Nicolas. It was also convenient for Christopher, being just across Regent’s Park from Bloomsbury, and the British Museum.

They moved in April. It was a congenial and modest area, later to be a fashionable habitat of writers, and it retained a well-developed community which had lived in their neighbourhood all their lives. As a young boy, W.B.Yeats had lived for a short while just a few doors away from the new home, a fact which would have thrilled Jacquetta, who regarded his work highly.

Despite Christopher’s promotion, the couple were still of relatively modest means. Undaunted, Jacquetta, who had such a keen visual eye, set to with brushes and tried to make the place into a home. Again she fell foul of her mother-in-law who had become even more resentful and jealous of the still-young woman who had presented her with her first grand-child.

When she finally complained about Jacquetta being over-extravagant, and too slow, in making the home comfortable, Christopher, perhaps mindful of the hurdles they had overcome as a couple, could not contain himself. He wrote this to his mother:

‘It is really time I stepped in and begged you to be more careful of your language - I mean this - your fatal passion for controlling others will lead to serious and irreparable harm if you do not check it where we are concerned. Your being 'horrified', and saying and writing these disagreeable things is extremely painful. . . . More than that, coming as it does on the top of a great deal of previous exhibitions of the same kind, and accompanied with language to Jacquetta on the telephone and whenever you come here by yourself to see things has upset her more than I can say. . . . Jacquetta happily is not easy to rouse, and we are both resolved to be as easy and sympathetic as we can for the sake of everyone concerned. But I warn you that your behaviour since Nicolas was born has been making me very uneasy. . . . I do not expect you ever to be fond of Jacquetta - that hope you killed a long while ago - but I do expect you to keep a proper hold on yourself and treat both of us with the good manners and consideration which Daddy and you yourself set before me as a rule of life when I was young . . . you are gradually antagonising me from you by your ill-nature against my wife. . . you know we are both devoted to Daddy, and he is to you. Serious trouble between us would tear him in two. And as for Nicolas, it might well mean that he might never come to know his grandparents . . . we simply mustn't let it come to our facing that. But it is I who would have to decide, and a man's wife, and family come inevitably first.’

How this letter was received is not recorded, but it was a brave move on Christopher’s part which would have surely proved the passion of his devotion to Jacquetta and their child. Sadly, he never showed it to her, probably from protectiveness. But Diana Collins shares the view that this was a mistake on his part: such words laid out what Christopher was not have been expressing elsewhere.

Unknowing of her husband’s campaign on her behalf, Jacquetta simply got on with things. She used the new sewing-machine provided by her mother-in-law to make curtains, and also a new dressing-gown for Christopher, a rather symbolic act in the circumstances of their diminishing intimacy.

However, Jacquetta’s career continued in the right direction. In the summer of 1939, with Nicolas in the charge of a nanny, Kathleen O’Toole, she travelled on her own to Ireland to be in charge of her first excavation. The site was not an unusual one by Irish standards; it was a large Megalithic tomb in County Waterford. But history was conspiring. In order to dig she had to get permission from Ireland’s chief archaeologist, Adolf Mahr, a German. He was a fellow professional, and so of course there was no problem. But she discovered Mahr and his wife busily packing all their books into crates and preparing to move. She wrote anxiously to Christopher of her fears: 'There is certain to be a war, because the Mahrs are packing up everything, and are obviously leaving in a hurry.' It later transpired that Mahr was also head of Nazi intelligence gathering in Ireland; at that time permission to dig an ancient tomb was the least of his concerns.

Despite her personal doubts about the marriage, and lonely away from her husband and child at such an uncertain time, Jacquetta still felt a duty to her work. The site presented itself as a catalogue of problems, ranging from an apparently completely unskilled, and unhelpful, labour force recruited from an unemployment scheme, to bad food and an equally unpleasant hotel full of Roman Catholic teaching priests, who apparently disapproved of prehistory, and of women. A woman doing prehistory, therefore, was an unspeakable combination.

The Megalithic tomb, at least, offered much interesting archaeology. It had a large central corridor with a number of smaller ones off it. Jacquetta found an interesting little stone axe, a fine Bronze Age funeral urn, and a number of smaller urns designed to hold the bones of the dead. She told a story to Diana: “The evening after these finds she was late at the dig, and all her workmen had gone home; she carefully covered the urns, and secured the tomb. But as she bicycled back to the dreary hotel she was met to her surprise by a long procession of people making their way to the tomb. This she discovered was because rumour had spread that a magical hare, the guardian of the tomb, had been disturbed, and that a crock had been discovered which, on the stroke of midnight, would prove to be full of golden coins - the mythical `Crock of Gold'.” Jacquetta's paper on the excavation was published in the leading Irish archaeological journal, The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, in December, 1941. It was to be evidence of her last significant fieldwork.

With war now inevitable, Christopher’s mind was on the security of the British Museum. He and Tom Kendrick had to pack up as many treasures as possible in preparation for removal to a safer place. Jacquetta joined him in this sad and laborious task, nodoubt wondering when these archaeological delights would see light again. She also nursed concerns about the future of Britain and, much closer to home, had other preoccupations. The family went for a brief holiday near the coast in Chideock, Dorset. She played with her small son on the beach and again, to an onlooker this should have seemed the perfect small family making the most of peace. But Jacquetta was unhappy. Christopher was overworking again, and archaeology, which have them so much shared joy, was fracturing the composure of the year or two before.

Years later she wrote this of her marriage; ‘In all things social and intellectual it was admirably balanced and free. Yet it was also, I suppose, becoming every year more lifeless and stultifying. I will not say the lack was in our sexual life, that would be far too simple, but it was certainly in our union as man and woman. If we had ever known real passion together, everything else might have been well - but why had we not attained it? I now understand that all delight and intensity of love-making depend upon the mind and the imagination. That is true, but it only moves the explanation of our failure to another point. For the imagination to be kindled some profound psychological polarity between the individual man and the individual woman is evidently necessary. I could say that Christopher's instinctive life had been damaged by his dominating and possessive mother and by Winchester, while I went from becoming a late developer to becoming a case of arrested emotional development. Yet essentially the trouble lay in the absence of that polarity: it is a mystery and I hope will be allowed to remain so.’

A new home, glittering promotion, academic attainment, the promise of real material comfort – perhaps Jacquetta’s restlessness by the coast in Devon, as the sirens were tested and the rations stowed, was an articulation of the thoughts of thousands who had made compromises in love, while harbouring spiritual and emotional doubts. The war when it came, was a catalyst for irredeemable change.

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