In 1947, the BBC sent MacNeice to report on Indian independence and partition, and he continued to produce plays for the corporation, including a six-part radio adaptation of Goethe's "Faust" in 1949. 1948's collection of poems, "Holes in the Sky", met with a less favourable reception than previous books. In 1950 he was given eighteen months' leave to become Director of the British Institute in Athens, run by the British Council. Patrick Leigh Fermor had previously been Deputy Director of the Institute, and he and his future wife, the Honourable Joan Elizabeth Rayner (née Eyres Monsell), became close friends of the MacNeices. "Ten Burnt Offerings", poems written in Greece, were broadcast by the BBC in 1951 and published the following year. The family returned to England in August 1951, and Dan (who had been at an English boarding school) left for America in early 1952 to stay with his mother, to avoid national service. Dan would return to England in 1953, but went to live permanently with his mother after a legal battle with MacNeice.