The Corfu Trilogy (the corfu trilogy)

by Gerald Durrell

  The novelty of this form of fishing greatly appealed to me, although I had the sneaking feeling that perhaps it was a little unsporting. It was rather like catching dogs by walking around with a bitch in season on the end of a long leash. Within an hour we had caught five male cuttlefish in a comparatively small area of the bay and it amazed me that there should be such a dense population of them in such a small area, for they were a creature that you very rarely saw unless you went fishing at night. The female cuttlefish, throughout this time, played her part with a sort of stoical indifference, but even so I felt that she should be rewarded, so I prevailed upon Kokino to let her go, which he did with obvious reluctance.

  I asked him how he knew that the female was ready to attract the males, and he shrugged.

  ‘It is the time,’ he said.

  Could you then at this time, I inquired, put any female on the end of a string and obtain results?

  ‘Yes,’ said Kokino. ‘But of course, some females, like some women, are more attractive than others and so you get better results with those.’

  My mind boggled at the thought of having to work out the comparative merits between two female cuttlefish. I felt it was a great pity that this method could not be employed with other creatures. The idea, for example, of dropping a female sea-horse over the side on a length of cotton and then pulling her up in a tangled entourage of passionate males was very appealing. Kokino was, as far as I knew, the only exponent of this peculiar brand of fishing, for I never saw any other fisherman employ it, and indeed, the ones I mentioned it to had never even heard of it and were inclined to treat my story with raucous disbelief.

  This tattered coast-line near the villa was particularly rich in sea life, and as the water was comparatively shallow it made it easier for me to capture things. I had succeeded in inveigling Leslie into making me a boat, which greatly facilitated my investigations. This craft, almost circular, flat-bottomed, and with a heavy list to starboard, had been christened the Bootle-Bumtrinket and, next to my donkey, was my most cherished possession. Filling the bottom with jars, tins, and nets and taking a large parcel of food with me, I would set sail in the Bootle-Bumtrinket accompanied by my crew of Widdle, Puke, and Roger and, occasionally, Ulysses, my owl, should he feel so inclined. We would spend the hot, breathless days exploring remote little bays and rocky and weed-encrusted archipelagoes. We had many curious adventures on these expeditions. Once we found a whole acre of sea-bed covered with a great swarm of sea-hares, their royal-purple, egg-shaped bodies with a neat pleated frill along the edge and two strange protuberances on the head looking, in fact, extraordinarily like the long ears of a hare. There were hundreds of them gliding over the rocks and across the sand, all heading towards the south of the island. They did not touch each other or display any interest in each other, so I assumed it was not a mating gathering, but some form of migration.

  On another occasion, a group of languid, portly, and good-natured dolphins discovered us riding at anchor in a small bay, and presumably attracted by the friendly colour scheme of orange and white in which the Bootle-Bumtrinket was painted, they disported themselves around us, leaping and splashing, coming up alongside the boat with their grinning faces, and breathing deep, passionate sighs at us from their blow-holes. A young one, more daring than the adults, even dived under the boat and we felt his back scrape along its flat bottom. My attention was equally divided between enjoying this delightful sight and trying to quell mutiny on the part of my crew, who had all reacted to the arrival of the dolphins in their individual ways. Widdle, never a staunch warrior, had lived up to his name copiously and crouched shivering in the bows, whining to himself. Puke had decided that the only way to save his life was to abandon ship and swim for the shore; he had to be restrained forcibly, as did Roger, who was convinced that if he was only allowed to jump into the sea with the dolphins, he would be able to kill them all, single-handedly, in a matter of moments.

  It was during one of these expeditions that I came across a magnificent trophy that was, indirectly, responsible for leading Leslie into court, although I did not know it at the time. The family had all gone into town, with the exception of Leslie, who was recovering from a very severe attack of dysentery. It was his first day’s convalescence and he lay on the sofa in the drawing-room as weak as a kitten, sipping iced tea and reading a large manual on ballistics. He had informed me, in no uncertain terms, that he did not want me hanging around making a nuisance of myself and so, as I did not want to go into the town, I had taken the dogs out in Bootle-Bumtrinket.

  As I rowed along, I noticed on the smooth waters of the bay what I took to be a large patch of yellow seaweed. Seaweed was always worth investigating, as it invariably contained a host of small life and sometimes, if you were lucky, quite large creatures; so I rowed towards it. But as I got closer, I saw that it was not seaweed, but what appeared to be a yellowish-coloured rock. But what sort of rock could it be that floated in some twenty feet of water? As I looked closer, I saw, to my incredulous delight, that it was a fairly large turtle. Shipping the oars and urging the dogs to silence, I poised myself in the bows and waited, tense with excitement as the Bootle-Bumtrinket drifted closer and closer. The turtle, outspread, appeared to be floating on the surface of the sea, sound asleep. My problem was to capture him before he woke up. The nets and various other equipment I had in the boat had not been designed for the capture of a turtle measuring some three feet in length, so the only way I felt I could achieve success was by diving in on him, grabbing him, and somehow getting him into the boat before he woke up. In my excitement it never occurred to me that the strength possessed by a turtle of this size was considerable and that it was unlikely he was going to give up without a struggle. When the boat was some six feet away I held my breath and dived. I decided to dive under him so as to cut off his retreat, as it were, and as I plunged into the lukewarm water I uttered a brief prayer that the splash I made would not awaken him and that, even if it did, he would still be too dozy to execute a rapid retreat. I had dived deep and now I turned on my back and there, suspended above me like an enormous golden guinea, was the turtle. I shot up under him and grabbed him firmly by his front flippers, which curved like horny sickles from out of his shell. To my surprise even this action did not wake him, and when I rose, gasping, to the surface, still retaining my grasp on his flippers, and shook the water from my eyes, I discovered the reason. The turtle had been dead for a fair length of time, as my nose and the host of tiny fish nibbling at his scaly limbs told me.

  Disappointing though this was, a dead turtle was better than no turtle at all, and so I laboriously towed his body alongside the Bootle-Bumtrinket and made it fast by one flipper to the side of the boat. The dogs were greatly intrigued, under the impression that this was some exotic and edible delicacy I had procured for their special benefit. The Bootle-Bumtrinket, owing to her shape, had never been the easiest of craft to steer, and now, with the dead weight of the turtle lashed to one side of her, she showed a tendency to revolve in circles. However, after an hour’s strenuous rowing, we arrived safely at the jetty, and having tied up the boat, I then hauled the turtle’s carcass onto the shore where I could examine it. It was a hawks-bill turtle, the kind whose shell is used for the manufacture of spectacle frames and whose stuffed carcass you occasionally see in opticians’ windows. His head was massive, with a great wrinkled jowl of yellow skin and a swooping beak of a nose that did give him an extraordinarily hawk-like look. The shell was battered in places, presumably by ocean storms or by the snap of a passing shark, and here and there it was decorated with little snow-white clusters of baby barnacles. His underside of pale daffodil-yellow was soft and pliable like thick, damp cardboard.

  I had recently conducted a long and fascinating dissection of a dead terrapin that I had found and I felt this would be an ideal opportunity to compare the turtle’s internal anatomy with that of his fresh-water brother, so I went up the hill, borrowed the gardener’s wheelbarrow, and in it
transported my prize up to the house and laid him out in state on the front veranda.

  I knew there would be repercussions if I endeavoured to perform my dissection of the turtle inside the house, but I felt that nobody in his right mind would object to the dissection of the turtle on the front veranda. With my notebook at the ready and my row of saws, scalpels, and razor blades neatly laid out as though in an operating theatre, I set to work.

  I found that the soft yellow plastron came away quite easily, compared with the underside of the terrapin, which had taken me three quarters of an hour to saw through. When the plastron was free, I lifted it off like a cover off a dish and there, underneath, were all the delicious mysteries of the turtle’s internal organs displayed, multi-coloured and odoriferous to a degree. So consumed with curiosity was I that I did not even notice the smell. The dogs, however, who normally considered fresh cow dung to be the ideal scent to add piquancy to their love life, disappeared in a disapproving body, sneezing violently. I discovered, to my delight, that the turtle was a female and had a large quantity of half-formed eggs in her. They were about the size of ping-pong balls, soft, round, and as orange as a nasturtium. There were fourteen of them, and I removed them carefully and laid them in a gleaming, glutinous row on the flagstones. The turtle appeared to have a prodigious quantity of gut, and I decided that I should enter the exact length of this astonishing apparatus in my already blood-stained notebook. With the aid of a scalpel I detached the gut from the rear exit of the turtle and then proceeded to pull it out. It seemed never-ending, but before long I had it all laid out carefully across the veranda in a series of loops and twists, like a rather drunken railway line. One section of it was composed of the stomach, a rather hideous greyish bag like a water-filled balloon. This obviously was full of the turtle’s last meal and I felt, in the interests of science, that I ought to check on what it had been eating just prior to its demise. I stuck a scalpel in the great wobbling mound and slashed experimentally. Immediately the whole stomach bag deflated with a ghastly sighing noise and a stench arose from its interior which made all the other smells pale into insignificance. Even I, fascinated as I was by my investigations, reeled back and had to retreat coughing to wait for the smell to subside.

  I knew I could get the veranda cleaned up before the family got back from town, but in my excitement with my new acquisition, I had completely overlooked the fact that Leslie was convalescing in the drawing-room. The scent of the turtle’s interior, so pungent that it seemed almost solid, floated in through the French windows and enveloped the couch on which he lay. My first intimation of this catastrophe was a blood-curdling roar from inside the drawing-room. Before I could do anything sensible, Leslie, swathed in blankets, appeared in the French windows.

  ‘What’s that bloody awful stink?’ he inquired throatily. Then, as his glance fell upon the dismembered turtle and its prettily arranged internal organs spread across the flagstones, his eyes bulged and his face took on a heliotrope tinge. ‘What the hell’s that?’

  I explained, somewhat diffidently, that it was a turtle that I was dissecting. It was a female, I went on hurriedly, hoping to distract Leslie by detail. Here he could see the fascinating eggs that I had extracted from her interior.

  ‘Damn her eggs,’ shouted Leslie, making it sound like some strange medieval oath. ‘Get the bloody thing away from here. It’s stinking the place out.’

  I said that I had almost reached the end of my dissection and that I had then planned to bury all the soft parts and merely keep the skeleton and shell to add to my collection.

  ‘You’re doing nothing of the sort,’ shouted Leslie. ‘You’re to take the whole bloody thing and bury it. Then you can come back and scrub the veranda.’

  Lugaretzia, our cook, attracted by the uproar, appeared in the French windows next to Leslie. She opened her mouth to inquire into the nature of this family quarrel when she was struck amidships by the smell of the turtle. Lugaretzia always had fifteen or sixteen ailments worrying her at any given moment, which she cherished with the same loving care that other people devote to window-boxes or Pekingese. At this particular time it was her stomach that was causing her the most trouble. In consequence she gasped two or three times, feebly, like a fish, uttered a strangled ‘Saint Spiridion!’ and fell into Leslie’s arms in a well-simulated faint.

  Just at that moment, to my horror, the car containing the rest of the family swept up the drive and came to a halt below the veranda.

  ‘Hello, dear,’ said Mother, getting out of the car and coming up to the steps. ‘Did you have a nice morning?’

  Before I could say anything, the turtle, as it were, got in before me. Mother uttered a couple of strange hiccuping cries, pulled out her handkerchief and clapped it to her nose.

  ‘What,’ she demanded indistinctly, ‘is that terrible smell?’

  ‘It’s that bloody boy,’ roared Leslie from the French windows, making ineffectual attempts to prop the moaning Lugaretzia against the door jamb.

  Larry and Margo had now followed Mother up the steps and caught sight of the butchered turtle.

  ‘What…?’ began Larry and then he too was seized with a convulsive fit of coughing.

  ‘It’s that damned boy,’ he said, gasping.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said Mother through her handkerchief. ‘Leslie’s just told me.’

  ‘It’s disgusting,’ wailed Margo, fanning herself with her handkerchief. ‘It looks like a railway accident.’

  ‘What is it, dear?’ Mother asked me.

  I explained that it was an exceedingly interesting hawks-bill turtle, female, containing eggs.

  ‘Surely you don’t have to chop it up on the veranda?’ said Mother.

  ‘The boy’s mad,’ said Larry with conviction. ‘The whole place smells like a bloody whaling ship.’

  ‘I really think you’ll have to take it somewhere else, dear,’ said Mother. ‘We can’t have this smell on the front veranda.’

  ‘Tell him to bury the damned thing,’ said Leslie, clasping his blankets more firmly about him.

  ‘Why don’t you get him adopted by a family of Eskimos?’ inquired Larry. ‘They like eating blubber and maggots and things.’

  ‘Larry, don’t be disgusting,’ said Margo. ‘They can’t eat anything like this. The very thought of it makes me feel sick.’

  ‘I think we ought to go inside,’ said Mother faintly. ‘Perhaps it won’t smell as much in there.’

  ‘If anything, it smells worse in here,’ shouted Leslie from the French windows.

  ‘Gerry dear, you must clean this up,’ said Mother as she picked her way delicately over the turtle’s entrails, ‘and disinfect the flagstones.’

  The family went inside and I set about the task of clearing up the turtle from the front veranda. Their voices arguing ferociously drifted out to me.

  ‘Bloody menace,’ said Leslie. ‘Lying here peacefully reading, and I was suddenly seized by the throat.’

  ‘Disgusting,’ said Margo. ‘I don’t wonder Lugaretzia fainted.’

  ‘High time he had another tutor,’ said Larry. ‘You leave the house for five minutes and come back and find him disembowelling Moby Dick on the front porch.’

  ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean any harm,’ said Mother, ‘but it was rather silly of him to do it on the veranda.’

  ‘Silly!’ said Larry caustically. ‘We’ll be blundering round the house with gas-masks for the next six months.’

  I piled the remains of the turtle into the wheelbarrow and took it up to the top of the hill behind the villa. Here I dug a hole and buried all the soft parts and then placed the shell and the bone structure near a nest of friendly ants, who had, on previous occasions, helped me considerably by picking skeletons clean. But the most they had ever tackled had been a very large green lizard, so I was interested to see whether they would tackle the turtle. They ran towards it, their antennae waving eagerly, and then stopped, thought about it for a bit, held a little consultation and then retreate
d in a body; apparently even the ants were against me, so I returned dispiritedly to the villa.

  Here I found that a thin, whining little man, obviously made belligerent by wine, was arguing with Lugaretzia on the still-odoriferous veranda. I inquired what the man wanted.

  ‘He says,’ said Lugaretzia, with fine scorn, ‘that Roger has been killing his chickens.’

  ‘Turkeys,’ corrected the man. ‘Turkeys.’

  ‘Well, turkeys then,’ said Lugaretzia, conceding the point.

  My heart sank. One calamity was being succeeded by another. Roger, we knew, had the most reprehensible habit of killing chickens. He derived a lot of innocent amusement in the spring and summer by chasing swallows. They would drive him into an apoplectic fury by zooming past his nose and then flying along the ground just ahead of him while he chased them, bristling with rage, uttering roars of fury. The peasants’ chickens used to hide in the myrtle bushes and then, just as Roger was passing, they would leap out with a great flutter of wings and insane hysterical cackling right into his path. Roger, I was sure, was convinced that these chickens were a sort of ungainly swallow that he could get to grips with and so, in spite of yells of protest on our part, he would leap on them and kill them with one swift bite, all his hatred of the teasing summer swallows showing in his action. No punishment had any effect on him. He was normally an extremely obedient dog, except about this one thing, and so, in desperation, all we could do was to recompense the owners, but only on condition that the corpse of the chicken was produced as evidence.

  Reluctantly I went in to tell the family that Roger had been at it again.

  ‘Christ!’ said Leslie, getting laboriously to his feet. ‘You and your sodding animals.’