The Corfu Trilogy (the corfu trilogy)

by Gerald Durrell

  As a consequence of the owls’ arrival we sat down to lunch rather late.

  ‘I’m sorry we’re not earlier,’ said Mother, uncovering a tureen and letting loose a cloud of curry-scented steam, ‘but the potatoes wouldn’t cook for some reason.’

  ‘I thought we were going to have chops,’ complained Larry aggrievedly. ‘I spent all morning getting my taste buds on tiptoe with the thought of chops. What happened to them?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s the owls, dear,’ said Mother apologetically. ‘They have such huge appetites.’

  Larry paused, a spoonful of curry halfway to his mouth.

  ‘Owls?’ he said, staring at Mother. ‘Owls? What do you mean, owls? What owls?’

  ‘Oh!’ said Mother, flustered, having realized that she had made a tactical error. ‘Just owls… birds, you know… nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Are we having a plague of owls?’ Larry inquired. ‘Are they attacking the larder and zooming out with bunches of chops in their talons?’

  ‘No, no, dear, they’re only babies. They wouldn’t do that. They have the most beautiful eyes, and they were simply starving, poor little things.’

  ‘Bet they’re some new creatures of Gerry’s,’ said Leslie sourly. ‘I heard him crooning to something before lunch.’

  ‘Then he’s got to release them,’ barked Larry.

  I said I could not do this as they were babies.

  ‘Only babies, dear,’ said Mother placatingly. ‘They can’t help it.’

  ‘What do you mean, can’t help it?’ said Larry. ‘The damned things, stuffed to the gills with my chops…’

  ‘Our chops,’ Margo interrupted. ‘I don’t know why you have to be so selfish.’

  ‘It’s got to stop,’ Larry went on, ignoring Margo. ‘You indulge the boy too much.’

  ‘They’re just as much our chops as yours,’ said Margo.

  ‘Nonsense, dear,’ said Mother to Larry, ‘you do exaggerate. After all, it’s only some baby owls.’

  ‘Only!’ said Larry bitingly. ‘He’s already got one owl and we know that to our cost.’

  ‘Ulysses is a very sweet bird and no trouble,’ put in Mother defensively.

  ‘Well, he might be sweet to you,’ said Larry, ‘but he hasn’t come and vomited up all the bits of food he has no further use for all over your bed.’

  ‘That was a long time ago, dear, and he hasn’t done it again.’

  ‘And what’s it got to do with our chops, anyway?’ asked Margo.

  ‘It’s not only owls,’ said Larry, ‘though, God knows, if this goes on, we’ll start to look like Athene. You don’t seem to have any control over him. Look at that business with the turtle last week.’

  ‘That was a mistake, dear. He didn’t mean any harm.’

  ‘A mistake!’ said Larry witheringly. ‘He disembowelled the bloody thing all over the veranda. My room smelled like the interior of Captain Ahab’s boat. It’s taken me a week and the expenditure of about five hundred gallons of eau de cologne to freshen it up to the extent where I can enter it without fainting.’

  ‘We smelled it just as much as you did,’ said Margo indignantly. ‘Anyone would think that you were the only one to smell it.’

  ‘Yes!’ exclaimed Leslie. ‘It smelled worse in my room. I had to sleep out on the back veranda. I don’t know why you think you’re the only one who ever suffers.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Larry witheringly. ‘I’m just not interested in the suffering of lesser beings.’

  ‘The trouble with you is you’re selfish,’ said Margo, clinging to her original diagnosis.

  ‘All right,’ snapped Larry. ‘Don’t listen to me. You’ll all complain soon enough when your beds are waist-deep in owl vomit. I shall go and stay in a hotel.’

  ‘I think we’ve talked quite enough about the owls,’ said Mother firmly. ‘Who’s going to be in for tea?’

  It transpired that we were all going to be in for tea.

  ‘I’m making some scones,’ said Mother, and sighs of satisfaction ran round the table, for Mother’s scones, wearing cloaks of home-made strawberry jam, butter, and cream, were a delicacy all of us adored. ‘Mrs Vadrudakis is coming to tea so I want you to behave,’ Mother went on.

  Larry groaned.

  ‘Who the hell is Mrs Vadrudakis?’ he asked. ‘Some old bore, I suppose?’

  ‘Now, don’t start,’ said Mother severely. ‘She sounds a very nice woman. She wrote me such a nice letter; she wants my advice.’

  ‘What on?’ asked Larry.

  ‘Well, she’s very distressed by the way the peasants keep their animals. You know how thin the dogs and cats are, and those poor donkeys with sores that we see. Well, she wants to start a society for the elimination of cruelty to animals here in Corfu, rather like the RSPCA, you know. And she wants us to help her.’

  ‘She doesn’t get my help,’ said Larry firmly. ‘I’m not helping any society to prevent cruelty to animals. I’d help them to promote cruelty.’

  ‘Now, Larry, don’t say things like that,’ said Mother severely. ‘You know you don’t mean it.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Larry, ‘and if this Vadrudakis woman spent a week in this house she’d feel the same. She’d go round strangling owls with her bare hands, if only to survive.’

  ‘Well, I want you all to be polite,’ said Mother firmly, adding, ‘and you’re not to mention owls, Larry. She might think we’re peculiar.’

  ‘We are,’ concluded Larry with feeling.

  After lunch I discovered that Larry, as he so often did, had alienated the two people who might have been his allies in his anti-owl campaign, Margo and Leslie. Margo, on seeing the owlets, went into raptures. She had just acquired the art of knitting and, with lavish generosity, offered to knit anything I wanted for the owls. I toyed with the idea of having them all dressed in identical, striped pullovers but discarded this as impractical and reluctantly refused the kind suggestion.

  Leslie’s offer of help was more practical. He said he would shoot a supply of sparrows for me. I asked whether he could do this every day.

  ‘Well, not every day,’ said Leslie. ‘I might not be here; I might be in town or something. But I will when I can.’

  I suggested that he might do some bulk shooting for me, procuring enough sparrows to last me a week, perhaps.

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ said Leslie, struck by this. ‘You work out how many you need for the week and I’ll get ’em for you.’

  Laboriously, for mathematics was not my strong point, I worked out how many sparrows (supplemented with meat) I would need a week and took the result to Leslie in his room, where he was cleaning the latest addition to his collection, a magnificent old Turkish muzzle-loader.

  ‘Yes… OK,’ he said, looking at my figures. ‘I’ll get ’em for you. I’d better use the air rifle; if I use the shotgun we’ll have bloody Larry complaining about the noise.’

  So, armed with the air rifle and a large paper bag, we went round the back of the villa. Leslie loaded the gun, leaned back against the trunk of an olive tree, and started shooting. It was as simple as target shooting, for that year we had a plague of sparrows and the roof of the villa was thick with them. As they were picked off by Leslie’s excellent marksmanship they rolled down the roof and fell to the ground, where I would collect them and put them in my paper bag.

  After the first few shots, the sparrows grew a little uneasy and retreated higher up until they were sitting on the apex of the roof. Here Leslie could still shoot them but they were precipitated over the edge of the roof and rolled down to fall on the veranda on the other side of the house.

  ‘Wait until I shoot a few more before you collect ’em,’ said Leslie, and so I dutifully waited.

  He continued shooting for some time, rarely missing, and the faint ‘thunk’ of the rifle coincided with the collapse and disappearance of a sparrow from the rooftop.

  ‘Damn,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’ve lost count. How many’s that?’


  I said that I hadn’t been counting either.

  ‘Well, go and pick up the ones on the veranda and wait there. I’ll pick off another six. That should do you.’

  Clasping my paper bag, I went around to the front of the house, and saw, to my consternation, that Mrs Vadrudakis, whom we had forgotten, had arrived for tea. She and Mother were sitting somewhat stiffly on the veranda clasping cups of tea, surrounded by the bloodstained corpses of numerous sparrows.

  ‘Yes,’ Mother was saying, obviously hoping that Mrs Vadrudakis had not noticed the rain of dead birds, ‘yes, we’re all great animal lovers.’

  ‘I hear this,’ said Mrs Vadrudakis, smiling benevolently. ‘I hear you lof the animals like me.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mother. ‘We keep so many pets. Animals are a sort of passion with us, you know.’

  She smiled nervously at Mrs Vadrudakis, and at that moment a dead sparrow fell into the strawberry jam.

  It was impossible to cover it up and equally impossible to pretend it was not there. Mother stared at it as though hypnotized; at last, she moistened her lips and smiled at Mrs Vadrudakis, who was sitting with her cup poised, a look of horror on her face.

  ‘A sparrow,’ Mother pointed out weakly. ‘They… er… seem to be dying a lot this year.’

  At that moment, Leslie, carrying the air rifle, strode out of the house.

  ‘Have I killed enough?’ he inquired.

  The next ten minutes were fraught with emotion. Mrs Vadrudakis said she had never been so upset in her life and that we were all fiends in human shape. Mother kept saying that she was sure Leslie had not meant to cause offence and that, anyway, she was sure the sparrows had not suffered. Leslie, loudly and belligerently, went on repeating that it was a lot of bloody fuss about nothing and, anyway, owls ate sparrows and did Mrs Vadrudakis want the owls to starve, eh? But Mrs Vadrudakis refused to be comforted. She wrapped herself, a tragic and outraged figure, in her cloak, shudderingly picked her way through the sparrows’ corpses, got into her cab, and was driven away through the olive groves at a brisk trot.

  ‘I do wish you children wouldn’t do things like that,’ said Mother, shakily pouring herself a cup of tea while I picked up the sparrows. ‘It really was most… careless of you, Leslie.’

  ‘Well, how was I to know the old fool was out here?’ said Leslie indignantly. ‘I can’t be expected to see through the house, can I?’

  ‘You should be more careful, dear,’ said Mother. ‘Heaven knows what she must think of us.’

  ‘She thinks we’re savages,’ said Leslie, chuckling. ‘She said so. She’s no loss, silly old fool.’

  ‘Well, the whole thing’s given me a headache. Go and ask Lugaretzia to make some more tea, Gerry, will you?’

  Two pots of tea and several aspirins later, Mother was beginning to feel better. I was sitting on the veranda giving her a lecture on owls, to which she was only half-listening, saying, ‘Yes, dear, how interesting,’ at intervals, when she was suddenly galvanized by a roar of rage from inside the villa.

  ‘Oh dear, I can’t stand it,’ she moaned. ‘Now what’s the matter?’

  Larry strode out onto the veranda.

  ‘Mother!’ he shouted ‘This has got to stop. I won’t put up with it.’

  ‘Now, now, dear don’t shout. What’s the matter?’ Mother inquired.

  ‘It’s like living in a bloody natural history museum!’

  ‘What is, dear?’

  ‘This is! Life here. It’s intolerable. I won’t put up with it!’ shouted Larry.

  ‘But what’s the matter, dear?’ Mother asked, bewildered.

  ‘I go to get myself a drink from the icebox and what do I find?’

  ‘What do you find, dear?’ asked Mother with interest.

  ‘Sparrows!’ bellowed Larry. ‘Bloody great bags of suppurating unhygienic sparrows!’

  It was not my day.

  5

  Fakirs and Fiestas

  The Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman.

  – SHAKESPEARE, King Lear

  It was always during the late spring that my collection of animals swelled to a point where even Mother occasionally grew alarmed, for it was then that everything was arriving and hatching, and baby animals are, after all, easier to acquire than adults. It was also the time when the birds, newly arrived to nest and rear their young, were harried by the local gentry with guns in spite of the fact that it was out of season. Everything was grist to their mill, these townee sportsmen, for whereas the peasants would stick to the so-called game birds – thrushes, blackbirds, and the like – the hunters from the town would blast everything that flew. You would see them returning triumphantly, weighed down with guns and bandoliers of cartridges, their game bags full of a sticky, bloody, feathery conglomeration of anything from robins to redstarts, from nuthatches to nightingales. So in the spring my room and that portion of the veranda set aside for the purpose always had at least half a dozen cages and boxes containing gape-mouthed baby birds or birds that I had managed to rescue from the sportsmen and which were recuperating with makeshift splints on wings or legs.

  The only good thing about this spring slaughter was that it gave me a pretty good idea of what birds were to be found in the island. Realizing I could not stop the killing, I at least turned it to good account. I would track down the brave and noble Nimrods and ask to see the contents of their game bags. I would then make a list of all the dead birds and, by pleading, save the lives of those that had only been wounded. It was by this means that Hiawatha came into my possession.

  I had spent an interesting and energetic morning with the dogs. We had been up early and out in the olive groves while everything was still dawn-chilly and misted with dew; I had found this an excellent time for collecting insects, for the coldness made them lethargic and unwilling to fly, and thus more easily acquired. I had obtained two butterflies and a moth new to my collection, two unknown beetles, and seventeen locusts which I collected to feed my baby birds with. By the time the sun was well up in the sky and had gathered some heat we had unsuccessfully chased a snake and a green lizard, milked Agathi’s goat (unbeknownst to her) into a collecting jar as we were all thirsty, and dropped in on my old shepherd friend Yani who provided us with some bread and fig cake and a straw hat full of wild strawberries to sustain us.

  We made our way down to a small bay where the dogs lay panting or crab-hunted in the shallows while I, spread-eagled like a bird in the warm, transparent water, lay face downwards holding my breath and drifting over the landscape of the sea. When it grew close to midday and my stomach told me lunch would be ready I dried off in the sun, the salt forming in patches on my skin like a silky pattern of delicate lace, and started off home. As we meandered through the olive groves, shady and cool as a well between the great trunks, I heard a series of explosions in the myrtle groves away to the right. I moved over to investigate, keeping the dogs close to me, for Greek hunters were jumpy and would in most cases shoot before stopping to identify what they were shooting at. The danger applied to me too so I talked loudly to the dogs as a precaution. ‘Here, Roger… heel! Good boy. Puke, Widdle! Widdle, come here! Heel… that’s a good boy. Puke, come back…’ I spotted the hunter sitting on a giant olive root and mopping his brow and, as soon as I knew he had seen us, I approached him.

  He was a plump, white little man, with a moustache like an elongated black toothbrush over his prim little mouth, and dark glasses covered eyes as round and as liquid as a bird’s. He was dressed in the height of fashion for hunting – polished riding boots, new breeches in white cord, an atrociously cut hacking jacket in mustard and green tweed, beset with so many pockets that it looked like the eaves of a house hung with swallows’ nests. His green Tyrolean hat, with its bunch of scarlet and orange feathers, was tilted to the back of his curly head, and he was mopping his ivory brow with a large handkerchief that smelled strongly of cheap cologne.

  ‘Kalimera, kalimera,’ he greeted me, beaming and puffing. ‘Welcome. Houf
! It’s a hot day, isn’t it?’

  I agreed, and offered him some of the strawberries that remained in my hat. He looked at them rather apprehensively, as if fearing they were poisoned, took one delicately in his plump fingers and smiled his thanks as he popped it into his mouth. I got the impression that he had never before eaten strawberries out of a hat with his fingers and was not quite sure about the rules.

  ‘I’ve had a good morning’s hunt,’ he said proudly, pointing to where his game bag lay, bulging ominously, blood-bespattered and feathery. From the mouth of it protruded the wing and head of a lark, so blasted and mangled it was difficult to identify.

  Would he, I inquired, mind if I examined the contents of his bag?

  ‘No, no, of course not,’ he said. ‘You will see I’m quite a marksman.’

  I did see. His bag consisted of four blackbirds, a golden oriole, two thrushes, eight larks, fourteen sparrows, two robins, a stonechat, and a wren. The last, he admitted, was a bit small but very sweet to eat if cooked with paprika and garlic.

  ‘But this,’ he said proudly, ‘is the best. Be careful, because it’s not quite dead.’

  He handed me a bloodstained handkerchief and I unwrapped it carefully. Inside, gasping and exhausted, a great, hard seal of blood on its wing, was a hoopoe.

  ‘That is not, of course, good to eat,’ he explained to me, ‘but the feathers will look good in my hat.’

  I had long wanted to possess one of these splendid, heraldic-looking birds, with their fine crests and their salmon-pink and black bodies, and I had searched everywhere for their nests so that I could hand-rear some young ones. Now here was a live hoopoe in my hands or, to be more exact, a half-dead one. I examined it carefully and found that it in fact looked worse than it was, for all it had was a broken wing, and this was a clean break as far as I could judge. The problem was how to get my proud, fat hunter to part with it.

  Suddenly I had an inspiration. I started by saying that it made me feel bitter and annoyed that my mother was not there at that moment for she was, I explained, a world-famous authority on birds. (Mother could, with difficulty, distinguish between a sparrow and an ostrich). She had, in fact, written the definitive work on birds for the hunters of England. To prove it, I produced from my collecting bag a battered and much-consulted copy of A Bird Book for the Pocket by Edmund Sanders, a book I was never without.