by Michael Haag
The
Durrells of Corfu
MICHAEL HAAG
The author with Eve Cohen Durrell in Alexandria
About the author
MICHAEL HAAG knew Lawrence Durrell (and met Gerry and Margo) and is currently writing a biography of Lawrence Durrell for Yale University Press. Yale also published his Alexandria: City of Memory, a definitive study of C.P. Cavafy, E.M. Forster and Lawrence Durrell in the city. Haag has also written widely on the Egyptian, classical and medieval worlds and is the author of a dozen books, including, for Profile, The Tragedy of the Templars and The Quest for Mary Magdalene.
michaelhaag.com
The
Durrells of Corfu
MICHAEL HAAG
First published in Great Britain
in 2017 by Profile Books:
3 Holford Yard, Bevin Way
London WC1X 9HD
www.profilebooks.com
Copyright © 2017 Michael Haag.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
e-ISBN 978-1782832294
To Kenneth and Maureen Maguire
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: India
Chapter 2: England
Chapter 3: The Crisis
Chapter 4: Corfu – the Strawberry-Pink Villa
Chapter 5: The Daffodil-Yellow Villa
Chapter 6: The White House at Kalami
Chapter 7: The Snow-White Villa
Chapter 8: The War and the Scattering
Epilogue: Family, Friends and Animals
Further reading
Acknowledgements
Sources and images
Index
The first edition of My Family and Other Animals.
Introduction: The Durrells of Corfu
IN 1935 LOUISA DURRELL AND HER FOUR CHILDREN – Lawrence (Larry), Leslie, Margaret (Margo) and Gerald (Gerry) – went to live in Corfu. The years that followed were made famous in Gerald Durrell’s much-loved My Family and Other Animals and in Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods, the other volumes of his Corfu Trilogy. Gerry’s older brother Lawrence, who achieved world renown with The Alexandria Quartet, also wrote his own beautifully observed book about Corfu, Prospero’s Cell.
‘We had arrived at a place that was to be of enormous influence over all of us,’ Gerry wrote of the family’s reaction to Corfu. ‘It was like being allowed back into Paradise.’
In My Family and Other Animals Gerry gives the impression that the family came to Corfu almost on a whim, selling up their house and sailing into the unknown to escape rainy summer days in England and stuffed-up noses. But what he does not mention, and neither does Larry in Prospero’s Cell, was the tragedy. They laughed and wrote beautifully of their island idyll, but nobody mentioned what had really brought them to the island – the sudden death of their father in India, the devastating effect it had on their mother, and the yearning to restore something lost.
But the brightness and colour and the freedom they discovered in Corfu lifted their spirits. The island possessed the softness of an Italian landscape, the warmth and fragrance of the Mediterranean, the idiosyncrasy of Greece – an intensity of sensations they had not known since leaving India. For the Durrells, after their years in England struggling with their family tragedy, it was a rebirth. Protective of their family unity, the children never pushed their disorder too far, allowing their mother to preside over a happy anarchy. For each of the Durrells, Corfu was a healing.
This book takes a fresh look at the story of the Durrells in Corfu. Individual members of the Durrell family, and the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust in Jersey, have provided the author with letters and reminiscences of their lives in India, England and Corfu, as well as later, and also many family photographs. These allow the family to speak for themselves, presenting a new and revealing narrative, and provide a detailed account of the family before Corfu, and during their stay on the island, and in the immediate aftermath of war. And not only the family but figures who played a crucial part in their lives, like Larry’s friend and Gerry’s mentor Theodore Stephanides; the outsized character of Spiro Americanos, taxi-driver and all-round fixer; and the American writer Henry Miller, who visited Larry in Corfu towards the end of the Durrells’ stay and began his own journey there, his discovery of Greece, which he recorded in the best book he ever wrote, The Colossus of Maroussi.
The Durrells of Corfu concludes with an epilogue which traces what happened to almost everyone who had been part of the story in Corfu and provides a summary of the remarkable careers of Larry and Gerry, including the realisation of Gerry’s childhood dream, the founding of his Jersey Zoo.
While the book is not a guide to the Durrells’ island, it can serve to allow the reader to follow in the footsteps of the family, discovering the villas and places they knew and wrote about. Larry himself described how he and Gerry returned years later to Corfu and retraced their own footsteps by joining a tour.
I don’t know how posthumous you can feel, but my brother and I put on dark glasses and funny hats and we went on one of these trips, and I’ve never heard so much misinformation about our family and in such strange French. I think they were all Syrians. Anyway, we drank Coca-Cola in our own honour and sneaked off back to town.
The Durrells themselves were masters of fabulation. All of the children were great storytellers and embroiderers of tales. They complained about Gerry’s My Family and Other Animals – Margo in particular – even as they happily appropriated each other’s stories and, where necessary, invented new ones. According to a close friend of Gerry’s, Birds Beasts and Relatives, the second volume of The Corfu Trilogy, was filled with leftover anecdotes so improbable that Gerry thought no one would believe them, while his third volume, The Garden of the Gods, was packed with stories which even if true, Gerald himself could not believe. As for the first volume, My Family and Other Animals, and also Larry’s Prospero’s Cell, Margo summed it up when she said, ‘I never know what’s fact and what’s fiction in my family’.
This book ventures into those magical days in Corfu before the war, and in trying to address Margo’s problem sheds new light on old stories and uncovers fresh stories that are often just as strange and fascinating and funny.
* * *
The wedding of Lawrence Samuel Durrell and Louisa Dixie in Roorkee, 1910.
The Durrell family with visiting relatives in Jamshedpur, c.1920: Lawrence Samuel (far left), Louisa (far right), Larry (in shorts, standing), Margo and Leslie (sitting on the steps); Gerry was not yet born.
Chapter 1: India
THE DURRELLS WERE COLONIALS, all of them born in India. England was their cultural homeland, but Louisa in particular thought of India as her real home. Louisa – ‘Mother’ in My Family and Other Animals – was born Louisa Dixie in Roorkee in the Punjab, in 1887, and was raised in a large extended family there, all long settled in India. Her parents had been born in the Punjab, and she would marry Lawrence Samuel Durrell, also Indian-born, a brilliant and ambitious civil engineer, and travel with him across the Raj. All the Durrell children were born in India, too, and the colours, scents and sounds of the subcontinent would shape their sensibilities.
In India, however, Louisa suffered two tragedies. First, the loss of Ma
rgery, her second child, from diphtheria. Then in 1928 the catastophe of her husband’s sudden death from a brain haemorrhage. Advised by friends in the British community that India was no place to raise a young family, Louisa set sail within weeks of her husband’s death for ‘home’, bereaved and lost, with a fatherless family to raise.
* * *
Lawrence Samuel Durrell’s father was a country boy, born out of wedlock, who had left Suffolk when he was eighteen and rose to the rank of major in the British Indian Army. Louisa Dixie’s family had been in India a generation longer. Her grandfather came to teach at Thomason College of Civil Engineering in Roorkee – the first college of engineering in the British Empire (and now the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology). Her father was head clerk and accountant for the workshop and foundry that maintained the Ganges Canal, a vast British-built irrigation project that transformed the Punjab into the breadbasket of India.
Lawrence Samuel was eighteen when he first met Louisa at the Dixies’ home in Roorkee; he knew her older brother John Dixie from studying at Thomason College and would join the Dixie family in tennis, dancing and amateur theatricals. There he found himself attracted to John’s sister, a dreamy girl, barely sixteen, with a mischievous sense of fun, who stood at least a head shorter than her tall and earnest visitor.
After leaving Thomason College in 1904, Lawrence Samuel went to work for the North Western Railway as an assistant engineer, supervising the construction of a bridge across the Sutlej, the greatest of the Punjab’s five rivers, a difficult but successful task which, in 1909, when he was just twenty-five, won him promotion to district engineer at Karnal in the Punjab, where he had responsibility for almost every construction project in the area. In 1910, with growing confidence in his career, he married Louisa and took her to Jullundur, astride the main railway line towards the Khyber Pass and Afghanistan, where he had been appointed the Railway’s district engineer. It was there, a year later, that their first child, Lawrence George Durrell – Larry – was born.
Thomason College of Civil Engineering, Roorkee, India.
For the next two decades, Lawrence Samuel and Louisa and their growing family would migrate from one railway project to the next across the breadth of the Raj, which in those days included all of present-day India as well as Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma – from Jullundur in the Punjab to the jungles of Arakan Burma on the far side of the Bay of Bengal; from Mymensingh on the flood plain of the Brahmaputra River up to Kurseong in the forested hill country below Darjeeling perched among the snow peaks of the Himalayas.
* * *
Larry’s earliest memories were of the monsoon rains at Buthidaung, at the head of the Mayu River, deep in the interior of Arakan, a region in western Burma, a thousand miles east of his birthplace at Jullundur. He was nine months old when he travelled there with his parents – by rail across the breadth of India and then by steamer across the Bay of Bengal. At the Burmese coast they boarded a side-paddler which meandered upriver through a shifting alluvial landscape of paddy fields and forests and swamps and flimsy reed huts where everything seemed hidden and remote. As the sun went down they landed at Buthidaung, a village of three or four thousand people, its main street a dirt path leading off into the paddy fields, its houses of wood and reed clinging to the riverbank.
Here Larry would remain until he was three, living with his mother and a Buddhist ayah or nanny, while his father, still only twenty-eight years old, mastered a labour force of Pathans, a rugged people from the warlike tribes of the North-West Frontier Province of British India, to build a railway through the mountains. Assailed by leeches, flies and mosquitoes, they cleared their way through jungle inhabited by deer, tigers and wild boar, carved miles of gradients out of the mountain flanks and cut two railway tunnels through the rock, connecting the interior directly with the coast as part of the British project which was developing Arakan into one of the major rice exporting regions in the world.
Larry with his ayah in Burma.
Lawrence Samuel was away for weeks at a time, leaving Louisa and Larry on their own. In the evening the village was shrouded by a dense mist rising from the river; in the morning it would clear and the day became as bright and shimmering as a watercolour, but that was outside the rainy season. For five months of the year, from June to October, it rained so continuously and hard that it seemed the whole world would be washed away. ‘The ground was rapidly becoming a living clot of humidity, and the ravines mere waterways for the passage of such debris as the wind had torn from the hillsides,’ Larry recalled of the onset of the monsoon. ‘At the approach of that season the forests began to huddle together and grip the disintegrating earth more firmly with their roots.’ Louisa knew the monsoon in the Punjab but here the rainfall was fifty times greater and there were no canals to control the floods, yet according to Larry his mother was happy here, and he himself was a confident and robust boy, able to withstand the perils of disease and extremes of climate in Arakan Burma.
* * *
Towards the end of 1915, Lawrence Samuel took up a new engineering post, this time in East Bengal (now Bangladesh), and settled Louisa, eight months pregnant, and Larry, who was nearly four years old, into their new home. This was in Mymensingh, at that time a backwater town of twenty thousand Muslims and Hindus situated on the west bank of a silted-up and barely navigable channel of the Brahmaputra.
The district was a vast alluvium planted with fields of jute and rice which was dependent on poor roads trafficked by pack animals or on the old channel of the Brahmaputra River, which was navigable only during the rainy season, when daytime temperatures were torrid and the atmosphere was sodden. Motor cars and electricity were unknown. Lawrence Samuel’s task was to carry a railway line across the Brahmaputra that would connect the district to Calcutta and other major ports and markets, contributing immensely to the development of the region.
In November, just after the monsoon had passed, Louisa gave birth to a baby girl, Margery. The following March, a month after Larry turned four, and as temperatures were rising and the rains were starting again, the baby became ill with a mild sore throat; within days she was overwhelmed by fever, her neck swelling until she could no longer swallow and could barely breathe. She was gripped by the full force of diphtheria. In those times before the discovery of antibiotics, the Medical Officer could do nothing and, two days later, cradled by her mother, watched by Larry, the child suffocated to death.
The shock of the death had a lasting effect on Louisa and also on Larry, who despite his naturally ebullient nature would always feel the vulnerability of his own existence and the ease by which the world around him could be undermined. ‘Why do people die?’ he would write in a little-known early autobiographical novel of a boy growing up in India called Pied Piper of Lovers, a novel he wrote in England just before going to Corfu. The boy in the novel is a strong, healthy child, yet he is aware that people not unlike himself become ill and die and their parents can do nothing.
* * *
Lawrence Samuel’s work continued to take him away from his afflicted family for long stretches of time and Louisa took to the habit of drinking too much gin and began to seek comfort in the world of lost spirits. And when the following year Louisa gave birth to a second son, Leslie, in the midst of a cholera epidemic, she was terrified of losing him. She would always be over-protective towards Leslie and always willing to indulge him.
Relief for the young family, however, came when Lawrence Samuel accepted the position of executive engineer of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway in the healthier climate of Kurseong, amidst tea plantations in the foothills of the Himalayas where Margaret, the Margo of Gerry’s My Family and Other Animals, was born in 1919.
Though Leslie and Margaret were too young to remember anything at all of Kurseong, the place was Larry’s childhood home from the age of six to nearly nine. The town was a centre of the tea trade and clung to the lower slopes of the Himalayas, where the native growth of forest and scrub was bei
ng cut away by tea gardens which wrapped round the hillsides in terraces. Kurseong’s elevation at nearly five thousand feet introduced Larry to flora and fauna he had not known when living in the plain. ‘The garden was full of all manner of strange flowers that he had not seen before’, he recalled in Pied Piper of Lovers his early autobiographical novel:
Half a dozen different varieties of beetle, ranging from the walnut-sized coproghagous one, to the sheeny grey-green rose-beetles. Caterpillars were enormous, banded with every colour of the rainbow; moths and butterflies, blue, brown, slate-coloured, and bright yellow, busied themselves all day about the corners of the bushes. He explored these mysteries as thoroughly as he was able, wandering all day long through the deserted pathways, upon the carpets of moss, whispering to himself or talking to his companion, the ayah.
The Batasia Loop, built by Lawrence Samuel, reduces the gradient on the approach to Darjeeling in the Himalayas.
The pleasure Larry drew from his surroundings and his acute observation of flowers and insects would later be repeated in Corfu by his youngest brother Gerry, who would be encouraged and guided by his older brother. ‘As he neared home,’ Larry wrote of his alter ego in his novel, ‘a huge Colombian moth, furred blue, and measuring about six inches from wing-tip to wing-tip, fluttered across his path and away into the evening. He cursed himself bitterly for a fool. He should have brought his butterfly net.’
* * *
A photo taken near the Durrells’ home at Kurseong in the Himalayas.
Railway building in the mountains did not hold Lawrence Samuel for long. In 1920 he resigned his position and brought his family down from Kurseong to the hot plains at Jamshedpur, 150 miles west of Calcutta, where the soil, red with iron ore, was feeding the beginning of India’s industrial revolution. Here he founded his own civil engineering and construction company, Durrell & Co.