The Corfu Trilogy (the corfu trilogy)

by Gerald Durrell

  The King descended slowly. The atmosphere was tense with emotion. The corporal fumbled with his holster and then, at the crucial moment, drew his forty-five and fired five rounds approximately two yards away from the King’s right ear. It immediately became obvious that the fort had not thought to tell the Welcoming Committee about its signal and so the Committee, to say the least, was taken aback, as was the King and, indeed, as were we all.

  ‘My God, they’ve amputated him,’ screamed Margo, who always lost both her head and her command over English in moments of crisis.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, it’s the signal,’ snapped Leslie, training his field glasses on the fort.

  But it was obvious that the Welcoming Committee thought much the same as my sister. As one man, they fell on the unfortunate corporal. He, white-faced and protesting, was pummelled and thumped and kicked, his revolver was torn from his grasp and he was hit smartly on the head with it. It is probable that he would have come to some serious harm if at that moment the cannons had not blared out in an impressive cumulus cloud of smoke from the ramparts of the fort and vindicated his action.

  After this all was smiles and laughter, for the Corfiotes had a keen sense of humour. Only the King looked a trifle pensive. He climbed into the official open car and a snag made its appearance; for some reason the door would not lock. The chauffeur slammed it, the sergeant in charge of the troops slammed it, the band leader slammed it, and a passing priest slammed it but it refused to stay shut. The chauffeur, not to be defeated, backed up, and took a run and kicked it violently. The car shuddered but the door remained obdurate. They tried string, but there was nothing to tie it to. Eventually, since there could be no further delay, they were forced to drive off with the Nomarch’s secretary hanging over the back of the seat and holding the door shut with one hand.

  Their first stop was at St Spiridion’s Church so that the King could make his obeisances to the mummified remains of the saint. Surrounded by a forest of ecclesiastical beards, he disappeared into the dark depths of the church, where a thousand candles bloomed like a riot of primroses. It was a hot day and the chauffeur of the King’s car was feeling a bit exhausted after his fight with the door so, without telling anyone, he left the car parked in front of the church and nipped round the corner for a drink. And who is to blame him? Who, on occasions such as this, has not felt the same? However, his estimation of the time the King would take to visit the saint was inaccurate so when the King, surrounded by the cream of the Greek church, suddenly emerged from the church and took his place in the car, the chauffeur was conspicuous by his absence. As was usual in Corfu when a crisis was reached, everyone blamed everyone else for the chauffeur’s disappearance. A quarter of an hour passed while accusations were hurled, fists were shaken, and runners were sent in all directions in search of the chauffeur. There was some delay because no one knew which café he was honouring with his presence, but eventually he was tracked down and a stream of vituperation was poured on his head as he was dragged ignominiously away in the middle of his second ouzo.

  The next stop was the Platia, where the King was to see the march past of troops and bands and the exhibition by the Scouts. By driving cacophonously through the narrow back streets, Spiro got us to the Platia long before the King’s car.

  ‘Surely they can’t do anything else wrong,’ said Mother worriedly.

  ‘The island has surpassed itself,’ said Larry. ‘I had hoped they might get a puncture between the docks and the church, but that was asking too much, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, I’m not so sure,’ said Theodore, his eyes twinkling. ‘Remember, this is Corfu. They might well have something more in store for us.’

  ‘I do hope not,’ said Kralefsky. ‘Really! Such organization! It makes one blush.’

  ‘They can’t think up anything more, Theo, surely,’ Larry protested.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to be… er… um… bank on it… you know…’ said Theodore.

  As it turned out, he was perfectly right.

  The King arrived and took his place on the dais. The troops marched past with great vigour and all of them managed to be more or less in step. Corfu was rather a remote garrison in those days and the recruits did not get much practice but, nevertheless, they acquitted themselves creditably. Next came the mass bands – bands from every village in the island, their variously coloured uniforms glowing, their instruments so polished that the gleam of them hurt the eyes. If their delivery quavered a little and was slightly off-key, it was more than made up for by the volume and force of their playing.

  Then it was the turn of the Scouts and we all clapped and cheered as Colonel Velvit, looking like an extremely nervous and attenuated Old Testament prophet in Scout’s uniform, led his diminutive troops onto the dusty Platia. They saluted the King and then, obeying a rather strangled falsetto order from the colonel, shuffled to and fro and formed the Greek flag. Such a wave of clapping and cheering broke out that it must surely have been heard in the remotest vastnesses of the Albanian mountains. After a short display of gymnastics the troop then went over to where two white lines represented the two banks of a river. Here half the troop hurried away and reappeared with planks necessary for making a pontoon bridge while the other half were busy getting a line across the treacherous waters. So fascinated were the crowd by the mechanics of this that they drifted closer and closer to the ‘river’, accompanied by the policemen who were supposed to be keeping them back.

  In record time, the Scouts, none of whom were more than eight-years-old, created their pontoon across the imaginary river and then led by one small boy blowing vociferously and inaccurately on a trumpet, jog-trotted across the bridge and stood to attention on the opposite side. The crowd were enchanted; they clapped, cheered, whistled and stamped. Colonel Velvit allowed himself a small, tight, military smile and cast a proud look in our direction. Then he barked out a word of command. Three small fat Scouts detached themselves from the troop and made their way to the bridge, carrying fuses, a plunger and other demolition equipment. They fixed everything up and then rejoined the troop, unwinding the fuse wire as they came. They stood at attention and waited. Colonel Velvit savoured his big moment; he glanced round to make sure he had everyone’s undivided attention. The silence was complete.

  ‘Demolish bridge!’ roared Colonel Velvit, and one of the Scouts crouched and pressed the plunger home.

  The next few minutes were confused, to say the least. There was a colossal explosion; a cloud of dust, gravel and bits of bridge was thrown into the air, to descend like hail upon the population. The first three rows of the crowd, all the policemen and Colonel Velvit, were thrown flat on their backs. The blast, carrying with it gravel and splinters of wood, reached the car where we were sitting, battered against the coachwork like machine-gun fire and blew Mother’s hat off.

  ‘Christ Almighty!’ said Larry. ‘What the hell’s that fool Velvit playing at?’

  ‘My hat,’ panted Mother. ‘Somebody get my hat!’

  ‘I’ll gets it, Mrs Durrells, don’ts you worrys,’ roared Spiro.

  ‘Most unnerving, most unnerving,’ said Kralefsky, his eyes closed, mopping his brow with his handkerchief. ‘Far too militant for small boys.’

  ‘Small boys! Bloody little fiends,’ cried Larry angrily, shaking gravel out of his hair.

  ‘I felt sure something else would happen,’ added Theodore with satisfaction, happy now that Corfu’s reputation for calamities was secure.

  ‘They must have had some sort of explosive,’ said Leslie. ‘I can’t think what Colonel Velvit was playing at. Damned dangerous.’

  It became obvious a little later that it was not the colonel’s fault. Having rather shakily lined up his troop and marched them away, he returned to the scene of the carnage to apologize to Mother.

  ‘I cannot tell you how mortified I am, Mrs Durrell,’ he said, tears in his eyes. ‘Those little brutes got some dynamite from some fishermen. I assure you, I knew absolutely nothing about it,
nothing.’

  In his dust-stained uniform and battered hat, he looked very pathetic.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, Colonel,’ said Mother, shakily lifting a brandy and soda to her lips. ‘It’s the sort of thing that could happen to anyone.’

  ‘Happens all the time in England,’ said Larry. ‘Never a day passes…’

  ‘Do come and have dinner with us,’ interrupted Mother, giving Larry a quelling look.

  ‘Thank you, dear lady, you are too kind,’ said the colonel. ‘I must go and change.’

  ‘I was very interested in the reaction of the spectators,’ said Theodore, with scientific relish. ‘You know… er… the ones who were blown down.’

  ‘I should think they were damned annoyed,’ said Leslie.

  ‘No,’ went on Theodore proudly, ‘this is Corfu. They all… you know… helped each other up, brushed each other down, and remarked on how good the whole thing was… er… how realistic. It didn’t seem to occur to them that there was anything strange in Boy Scouts having dynamite.’

  ‘Well, if you live long enough in Corfu, you cease to be surprised at anything,’ said Mother with conviction.

  Eventually, after a prolonged and delicious meal in town, during which we tried to convince Colonel Velvit that his bridge demolition had been the high spot of the day, Spiro drove us home through the cool, velvety night. The scops owls called ‘toink toink’ to each other, chiming like strange bells among the trees; the white dust billowed behind the car and remained suspended like a summer’s cloud in the still air; the dark cathedral groves of the olives were pricked out with the pulsing green lights of fireflies. It had been a good, if exhausting, day, and we were glad to be home.

  ‘Well,’ said Mother, stifling a yawn as she picked up her lamp and made her way to the stairs, ‘King or no King, I’m staying in bed until twelve tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh…’ said Larry contritely, ‘didn’t I tell you?’

  Mother paused halfway up the stairs and looked at Larry, the wavering lamplight making her shadow quiver and leap on the white wall.

  ‘Tell me what?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘About the King,’ said Larry. ‘I’m sorry I should have told you before.’

  ‘Told me what?’ said Mother, now seriously alarmed.

  ‘I’ve asked him to lunch,’ said Larry.

  ‘Larry! You haven’t! Really, you are thoughtless…’ Mother began, and then realized that she was having her leg pulled.

  She drew herself up to her full five foot.

  ‘I don’t think that’s funny,’ she said frigidly. ‘Anyway, the laugh would have been on him for I’ve only got eggs in the house.’

  With great dignity, ignoring our laughter, she made her way to bed.

  7

  The Paths of Love

  Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples for I am sick of love.

  SONG OF SOLOMON 5

  It had been one of those prodigious, desiccating, earth-cracking summers that was so hot it even bleached the sky to a pale end-of-summer, forget-me-not colour and flattened the sea so that it lay like a great blue pool, unmoving, warm as fresh milk. At night you could hear the floors and shutters and beams of the villa shifting and groaning and cracking in the warm air as the last juices were sucked out of them. The full moon would rise like a red coal, glowering down at us from the hot, velvety sky, and in the morning the sun was already too warm to be comfortable ten minutes after it appeared. There was no wind and the heat pressed down on the island like a lid. On the hillside in the breathless air, the plants and grasses withered and died until they stood there, bleached and blonde as honey, crisp as wood shavings. The days were so hot that even the cicadas started singing earlier and siestaed during the heat of the day, and the ground was baked so that there was nowhere you could walk without shoes.

  The villa represented to the local animal life a series of large wooden caves which were perhaps half a degree cooler than the surrounding olive, orange and lemon groves, and so they flocked to join us. At first I was naturally blamed for this sudden influx of creatures but eventually the invasion became so comprehensive that even my family realized I could not be responsible for quite such a large quantity and variety of life forms. Battalions of black ticks marched into the house and beset the dogs, massing in such numbers on their ears and heads that they looked like chain-mail and were just as difficult to remove. In desperation we had to douse them with kerosene, which made the ticks drop off. The dogs, deeply insulted by this treatment, slouched, panting, round the house, reeking of kerosene, shedding ticks in vast quantities. Larry suggested that we put up a notice saying ‘Danger – inflammable dogs’ for, as he rightly pointed out, if anyone lit a match near one of them the whole villa was liable to go up in flames like a tinder box.

  The kerosene only gave us a temporary respite. More and more ticks marched into the house until at night one could lie in bed and watch rows of them performing strange route marches around the room. The ticks, fortunately, did not attack us but confined themselves to driving the dogs mad. However, the hordes of fleas that decided to take up residence with us were another matter. They arrived suddenly, out of nowhere, it seemed, like the Tartar hordes, and over-ran us before we realized what was happening. They were everywhere and you could feel them hopping on to you and running up your legs as you walked around the house. The bedrooms became untenable and for a time we took our beds out on to the broad verandas and slept there.

  But the fleas were not the most objectionable of the lesser inhabitants of the house. The tiny scorpions, black as ebony, infested the bathroom where it was cool. Leslie going in late one night to clean his teeth was ill-advised enough to go barefoot and was stung on the toe. The scorpion was only half an inch long but the agony of the bite was out of all proportion to the size of the beast and it was some days before Leslie could walk. The larger scorpions preferred the kitchen area, where they would quite blatantly sit on the ceiling looking like misshapen aerial lobsters.

  At night when the lamps were lit, thousands of insects appeared; moths of all shapes, from tiny fawn-coloured ones with wings shaped like tattered feathers, to the great big, striped, pink and silver hawk moths, whose death dives at the light were capable of breaking the lantern chimney. Then there were the beetles, some as black as mourners, some gaily striped and patterned, some with short, club-shaped antennae, others with antennae as long and thin as a Mandarin’s moustache. With these came a multitude of lesser forms of life, most of them so small that you needed a magnifying glass to make out their incredible shapes and colours.

  Naturally, this conglomeration of insects was marvellous as far as I was concerned. Each evening I hung about the lights, my collecting boxes and bottles at the ready, vying with the other predators for choice specimens. I had to look sharp, for the competition was brisk. On the ceiling were the geckoes, pale, pink-skinned, spread-fingered, bulbous-eyed, stalking the moths and beetles with minuscule care. Alongside them were the green, swaying, hypocritical mantis with their mad eyes and chinless faces, moving on slender, prickly legs like green vampires.

  On ground level I had to contend with enormous chocolate-coloured spiders like lanky, furry wolves, who would lurk in the shadows and scuttle out and snatch a specimen almost from my very fingers. They were aided and abetted by the fat map toads in their handsome patchwork skins of green and silvery grey who hopped and gulped their way, wide-eyed with astonishment, through this largesse of food, and the swift, furtive, and somehow sinister scutigera. This form of centipede had a body some three inches long and as thick as a pencil and flattened; around the perimeter was a hedge, a fringe of long, slender legs. When it moved, as each pair of legs came into action, these fringes appeared to undulate in waves, and the animal progressed as smoothly as a stone on ice, silent and unnerving, for scutigera were among the most ferocious and skilful of hunters.

  One evening, the lights had been lit and I was waiting patiently to see what they were going to add to my c
ollection; it was still fairly early so that most of the predators, apart from myself and a few bats, had not put in an appearance. The bats whipped up and down the veranda as fast as whiplashes, taking the moths and other succulent dainties from within inches of the lamp, the wind from their wings making the flames shudder and leap. Gradually, the pale dragon-green afterglow of the sunset faded, the crickets started their prolonged musical trills, the gloom of the olive trees was lit by the cold lights of the fireflies, and the great house, creaking and groaning with sunburn, settled down for the night.

  The wall behind the lamp was already covered by a host of various insects which, after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, were clinging there to recover themselves before trying again. At the base of the wall, from a minute crack in the plaster, emerged one of the smallest and fattest geckoes I had ever seen. He must have been newly hatched for he measured only about an inch and a half in length, but obviously the short time he had been in the world had not prevented him from eating prodigiously for his body and tail were so fat as to make him appear almost circular. His mouth was set in a wide, shy smile and his large dark eyes were wide and wondering, like the eyes of a child that sees a table set for a banquet. Before I could stop him he had waddled slowly up the wall and started his supper with a lacewing fly; these creatures, with their transparent wings like green lace and their large green-gold eyes, were favourites of mine and so I was annoyed with him.

  Gulping down the last bit of gauzy wing, the baby gecko paused, clinging to the wall, and mused for a bit, occasionally blinking his eyes. I could not think why he had chosen the lacewing, which was a bulky thing to handle, when he was surrounded on all sides by a variety of small insects which would have been easier for him to catch and eat. But it soon became apparent that he was a glutton whose eyes were bigger than his stomach. Having hatched from an egg – and, therefore, lacking a mother’s guidance – he was under the strong but erroneous impression that all insects were edible and that the bigger they were the quicker they would assuage his hunger. He did not even seem to be aware of the fact that for a creature of his size some insects could be dangerous. Like an early missionary, he was so concerned with himself that it never occurred to him that somebody might look upon him simply as a meal.