The Durrells of Corfu

by Michael Haag

  Chapter 2: England

  THE FIRST VISIT THE DURRELLS ever made to England was in 1923, the year they brought Larry to start his schooling there. The family came again two years later and enrolled Leslie at Dulwich College in suburban south London, where he remained for only a year; when they returned in 1926 Louisa found that Leslie had been bullied at school and took him back to India, but not before Lawrence Samuel bought an eight-room house at 43 Alleyn Park in leafy Dulwich into which he intended they would eventually settle.

  To this large empty house, ‘sheltering behind a grim, dripping, choking laurel hedge’, as Gerry remembered, a house empty of her husband and of her children’s father, Louisa came when she arrived from India in 1928. But the empty house was haunted by ghosts.

  Louisa’s cousin Prudence, who everyone called Aunt Prue, was ‘one of our nicest relatives’, said Gerry; she had been living in England for some while and came round to help Mother settle in. Almost the first thing she said was, ‘Louie, dear, you oughtn’t to be living in a house like this alone – most unwise. We must get a man.’ An advertisement was placed in the press and eventually Stone was hired, a polite man in his fifties who polished the silver and cooked simple meals. But unfortunately he went home in the evenings, leaving the great empty house unprotected at night.

  ‘We must get a watchdog, Louie dear’, said Prue. So, early the next morning Louisa went out and by lunchtime, according to Gerry, recounting the family story, she returned triumphantly. Sitting next to her in the taxi was one of the biggest bullmastiffs ever bred. Mother named him Prince.

  At night Prince was stationed in the sitting room against anyone attempting to break in. One night, however, as Prince was being led to the room he growled menacingly, the hair on his hackles stood up, and he refused to pass through the door. Mother peered into the room but could see nothing. She switched on the lights but still there was nothing to be seen. But now Prince’s attention was riveted on the big empty armchair.

  Then Louisa placed Gerry just inside the darkened room. ‘What do you see?’ she asked. After a pause Gerry answered excitedly, ‘I see my Daddy!’ ‘What’s he doing?’ Mother asked. ‘He’s sitting in the chair, smoking,’ Gerry said, and went on to describe the smoking jacket his father always wore when he returned from work and was having his chhota peg, his after dinner malt whisky.

  With Prince still growling furiously at the door, Mother took Gerry and Prue to the kitchen and made tea. When they went back to the drawing room, Prince entered it without complaint. Gerry saw nothing; his father was gone.

  * * *

  Gerry’s stories of his time in Dulwich overlook the existence of his siblings. He gives the impression that the house was empty except for himself, his mother and for a while Aunt Prue; the others were away. This was probably the case, for Leslie and Margo were sent off to boarding schools around this time. Leslie, who was ten in 1928, was at some point enrolled at Caldicott Prep School in Hampshire; Margo, nine, was placed in Malvern Girls’ School in Worcestershire; and Larry, sixteen, who had left St Edmund’s at the end of the previous year, was boarding at Wratting Park in Cambridgeshire, where he was being coached for the Oxford and Cambridge entrance exams, and later, until about summer 1929, attended a military-run ‘crammer’ to the same end. Larry probably began living in Dulwich from that time, but otherwise the family only came together at holidays; for the rest of the year Louisa and Gerry mostly spent their days alone.

  Gerry in Dulwich, 1929.

  The arrival and the departure of Prince bracketed the two years that Louisa would live in Dulwich. Prince, who Gerry reckoned was ‘about the size of a Trafalgar Square lion’, dragged Louisa and Prue from tree to tree when they took him on walks. One morning Prince pounced upon an unescorted Pekingese. Louisa and Prue screamed in horror as Prince tossed the Pekingese into the air and gave it two great chomps in his jaws and tossed it aside dead. ‘I do hope he is not going to make a habit of that,’ said Louisa as she and Prue revived themselves with a brandy and soda.

  ‘Probably he did not consider them dogs’, thought Gerry, ‘because they were so small. He may have thought they were rats or small rabbits. Be that as it may, yells and screams from Mother and Prue, accompanied by belabouring with umbrellas and handbags, Prince merely took as encouragement.’ Prince went from one small dog to another, a Pomeranian one day, a Yorkshire terrier the next, a succession of Chihuahuas and toy poodles and other small breeds in the following weeks. After paying several stiff sums in compensation, Louisa decided to retire Prince to a farm in the country, where, in Gerry’s words, ‘he could pick on something more his size, like a bullock’.

  ‘I wept passionately at our parting and gave him a bag of peppermints to remember me by,’ lamented Gerry, though he soon enough forgot all about Prince in the excitement of moving from Dulwich to new quarters in Upper Norwood.

  * * *

  In 1930 Louisa decided that the Alleyn Park house was beyond her means, and until she knew more certainly what she wanted to do she let it out and moved into a service flat at the Queen’s Hotel on Church Road in Upper Norwood, a mile and a half away. The hotel, which is still there today, is a grandiose white stucco Victorian pile built specially to accommodate visitors to the Crystal Palace after it had been removed from the site of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park to the heights of Norwood in 1854, where it housed exhibitions, concerts, festivals, museums and schools of art and science.

  The Durrells’ flat was in the bowels of the hotel, a strange elongated affair, one room opening onto another. You first stepped into a large room that served as both a drawing room and a dining room; opposite this was Larry’s room; then farther along was a small room where Gerry kept his toys. Beyond this were a small bathroom and a kitchen; and finally you came to Louisa’s spacious bedroom. Gerry slept in his mother’s room and from his bed he could look along the entire length of the flat to the front door.

  In Gerry’s description there were no rooms set aside for Leslie and Margo, who stayed only during term holidays; but the flat was home to Larry, who had abandoned his studies and was discovering bohemian London, writing poetry and playing piano in a jazz band.

  Two ghosts inhabited the flat, one a woman whom Louisa saw standing silently smiling at the foot of her bed before fading away. A few weeks later, when Gerry’s cousin Molly was visiting, she came running to the kitchen, saying, ‘Auntie, Auntie, there’s a strange lady in your room.’ When they went to look there was nothing there, but when Molly was questioned she described exactly the appearance and costume of the woman who had appeared to Louisa.

  The other ghost was invisible but made himself heard in Larry’s room – which contained Lawrence Samuel’s great roll-top desk that had been made of teak to his own design. When the top was opened or closed, it screeched and roared. The sudden clatter of the desk one night startled Mother, who sat up in her bed. ‘Why, Larry must be in early,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and see if he wants anything to eat.’

  Drinking gin and smoking Balkan Sobranies in bed, Louisa would wait up for Larry to come in; Gerry stayed awake too, listening to his mother reading The Wind in the Willows to him over and over again, but also looking forward to the outrageous anecdotes of bohemian nightlife with which Larry regaled them when he got home.

  Louisa went to Larry’s room but he was not there. Puzzled, she returned to bed, telling Gerry, ‘I could have sworn I heard that desk,’ and at that same moment the desk opened and closed again. ‘I experienced it myself,’ said Gerry, recalling how his mother took him by the hand and walked back down the length of the hall, listening to the constant clacking of the desk opening and closing, which became deafening as they approached, but when she threw open the door the noise ceased as suddenly as it began and again there was nobody there.

  Queens Hotel in 1899 – photographed by the novelist Emile Zola, who lived there while in exile from France.

  Gerry held to these stories of the supernatural all his life. In his
expression he would challenge anyone to doubt these early encounters with ghosts. They bound him to his mother.

  ‘The hotel is crowded with ghosts’, Larry wrote, too. But this is in The Black Book, a novel that he wrote six years later in Corfu, which is largely set in what he calls the Regina Hotel in Upper Norwood, ‘this tomb of masonry’, a microcosm of an England inhabited by the walking dead. ‘I am dying again the little death which broods forever in the Regina Hotel: along the mouldering corridors, the geological strata of potted ferns, the mouse-chawed wainscoting with the deathwatch ticks.’ In Larry’s hands the genteel if faded hotel became home to prostitutes and gigolos, degenerates and perverts, the imbecilic and the decrepit. ‘His keeper will feed him and guard the old ladies from shameful remarks. Afterwards he will sit in the lounge, upright, staring at the wall, as if he were being rowed down the Styx, fighting motionless campaigns in his skull.’ But above all it is a world of cultural vacuity, what Larry called the English Death. ‘I am the average Englishman’, one of Larry’s characters says. ‘I have never left school and I am proud of it. I carry my virginity and my self-satisfaction on a string round my neck.’

  But for Gerry the Queens Hotel was an awakening. He liked their new flat because it had a side entrance that opened onto the hotel grounds with its shrubs and flowers and a pond which was a home to snails. But it was the sparrows and the pigeons that Gerry liked best and he wanted to have one as a pet. Someone told him that the only way to catch birds was to put salt on their tails, so he spent many fruitless hours stalking birds or hiding in the bushes and falling on them as they were feeding, a salt cellar in one hand, a paper bag to hold them captive in the other.

  One morning as he was trailing after birds he became aware of someone walking slowly by, a pretty young woman with long glossy hair, who stopped and said, ‘Hello. What are you trying to do?’ Gerry explained about the salt on their tails and how difficult it was. ‘It looks exhausting,’ she said with twinkling eyes. ‘Why don’t you come to my place and have something to drink to refresh you, and you can meet my goldfish and my cat.’

  After taking Tabitha to meet his mother, Gerry went round to his new friend’s flat, where she introduced him to Cuthbert her black and white cat and her two goldfish, Mr Jenkins and Clara Butt. As Tabitha was boiling the kettle for tea, she sang a song which enchanted Gerry,

  Is he an Aussie, is he, Lizzie?

  Is he an Aussie, is he, eh?

  Is it because he is an Aussie

  That he makes you dizzy, Lizzie?

  By the time they had finished tea, Gerry had mastered the lyrics and they joyously sang the song as a duet.

  ‘I know lots of songs like that. I will teach them to you’, Tabitha said. ‘You like music, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, my ayah always used to play the gramophone for me.’

  ‘Well, I have a gramophone too, and I’ve got some records, and I’ll teach you to dance if you like.’

  Two days later Gerry was back, and Tabitha had brought out her wind-up gramophone and a pile of records, some by Harry Lauder and Jack Buchanan. They put on the Jack Buchanan record and sang along with him; it was a Charleston, so they cleared away the furniture and Tabitha taught Gerry how to dance.

  ‘I loved the days I spent with Tabitha,’ recalled Gerry. ‘She was not only very sweet and kind but very funny. She taught me all sorts of songs and she taught me not only the Charleston but how to do the waltz and at times we went round and round so fast that eventually we would collapse on the sofa, she with peals of laughter and me giggling like an hysteric. These were wonderful days, only marred by the fact that occasionally a gentleman would arrive to talk business with Tabitha and so she would leave me in charge of the gramophone while she took the gentleman into the bedroom and locked the door so that they could discuss their important business.’

  Leslie, Louisa and Gerry in Bournemouth.

  Then one day Louisa caught wind of the gentleman callers and forbade Gerry to go, telling him that Tabitha was too busy to have him in and out of her flat. Gerry disagreed: ‘I knew she was busy because she had so many men coming to discuss business with her, but it never seemed that I interfered with the process. But Mother was adamant. I loved Tabitha very much. She was so gentle and gay, her smile engulfed you with love. She smelt gorgeous too, which was most important to me, since Mother smelt gorgeous as well. Now I mourned the fact that I could no longer waltz and Charleston and sing silly songs with the enchanting girl.’

  * * *

  Among the residents at the Queens Hotel were old Mrs Richardson and her daughter and granddaughter, Mrs Brown and Dorothy. All were English but they had lived for long in America and now, rather like the Durrells, they had returned to the mother country. While they were looking for somewhere permanent to settle they had taken a flat, which, like Louisa’s, let onto the garden of the hotel. Here the Browns and the Durrells soon discovered one another and became close friends. Dorothy, eleven at the time, recalled that when their cat had kittens, Gerry, then five, would come to their doorstep again and again clamouring to see them. Dorothy also observed that Gerry ‘was very much a mother’s boy and always terribly fond of her. As far as he was concerned she could do no wrong.’

  After some exploration, Mrs Brown and her mother decided to buy a house in the salubrious seaside resort of Bournemouth in southwest England. The area was ideal, they told Louisa; the sea air was bracing and the surrounding countryside beautiful. They also told her, Margo said, that ‘the sun shone more there than anywhere else in England’, which is not quite true but at least it rains less in Bournemouth than most other places. Moreover, along with Eastbourne and Cheltenham, Bournemouth was the preferred retirement spot of military officers and civil servants, many of whom had seen service in the Indian Army or the Indian Civil Service and who had strong ties to friends and family who remained in India. Above all, Mrs Brown told Louisa, properties there cost very much less than they did in London. Leaving Gerry in the care of Tabitha (for this happened before Mother had discovered the worst), Louisa went down to Bournemouth to see for herself.

  ‘Needless to say, Mother’s delusions of grandeur could not be confined,’ Gerry recalled. In about March 1931 ‘we became the proud possessors of what can only be described as a mini-mansion, Berridge House, lurking in some two acres of grounds’, part woodland, part orchard, a lawn on which two games of tennis could be played at once ‘and a herbaceous border slightly wider than the Nile’. The house had gigantic attics, an immense cellar, a parquet-floored drawing room running the whole length from front to back, a huge dining room and kitchen and ‘an incredible number of bedrooms’. When asked by someone if the house was a little large for a widow and one small boy, Louisa answered vaguely that she had to have room for her children’s friends. But Leslie and Margo were away at school and, as Gerry observed, ‘the fact that they never brought any friends in the holidays passed unnoticed’.

  As for Larry, he briefly lived in Bournemouth until his mother tired of his habits and said, ‘You can be as bohemian as you like but not in the house. I think you had better go somewhere where it doesn’t show so much.’ And so sometime in 1931 Larry began living on his own in London, working for an estate agent and collecting rents in the dismal purlieus of Leytonstone in east London by day and writing poetry by night in his room in Bloomsbury.

  Bournemouth in the 1930s – ‘a living graveyard’, according to Larry.

  * * *

  Gerry was too engrossed in his new environment to be aware of his mother’s deteriorating condition. ‘To me, the vast overgrown garden was a world to explore and delight in. To have an orchard where you picked the pink-cheeked apples and felt the sharp juice trickle down your chin, plucked ripe sun-warmed apricots from a tree that sprawled across the sunny flank of the house – fruit golden as honey, soft as velvet – all this was to me bliss.’

  To celebrate moving into Berridge House Mother bought Gerry his first dog, which he named Simon, a honey-coloured
cocker spaniel, a good-natured creature with limpid eyes and an overwhelming desire to please. Seeing Mother digging and weeding the herbaceous borders and hearing her bemoaning the fact that she could never get them to look like the pictures on the seed packets, Simon’s understanding was that the plants were the cause of Mother’s distress and he would dig them up. But the unearthing of grasshoppers, spiders, woodlice and earwigs, which fascinated Gerry, confirmed Simon’s suspicion that the world was full of evil and danger. The awful truth, as Gerry discovered, was that Simon, so admirable in many ways, was a coward. The sight of an ant or the flush of the toilet terrified him; the hissing garden hose was as deadly as a cobra; the lawn-mower was determined to pursue him and chop him up in little pieces; and when he unexpectedly came upon a snowman Gerry had made, Simon was so shocked at encountering this stranger on the lawn that he went into a nervous decline lasting days.

  Simon was otherwise an amenable creature who went along with games that Gerry would invent. ‘Sometimes, miraculously, he would become a pride of lions and I a lone Christian in the arena. As I prepared to strangle him, he would behave in the most un-lionlike way, slobbering over me with his moist, velvet-soft mouth and crooning endearments. Although basically a coward, he would hunt imaginary tigers or elephants with me with great skill and cunning and when our prey (my teddy bear) was captured, we would sing a rapturous duet together. I tried without success to teach him the Charleston but he could waltz fairly successfully on his hind legs if I held his front paws in an iron grip.’

  * * *

  Lawrence Samuel’s mother, Dora Durrell, was in England in the summer of 1932 when Louisa’s children were out of school and living at home; and Dora’s daughter Elsie Rickwood was there too, with her husband and their two children, Molly and Phyllis. In contrast to the kindliness of Aunt Prue, who was born in India and on the Dixie side of the family, these paternal Durrell relations could take a harder view, disapproving of Louisa’s impracticality and carelessness with money, the lack of order in her household, and the undisciplined behaviour of her children who said and did whatever they liked.