The Durrells of Corfu

by Michael Haag

  ‘Hoy!’ roared the voice. ‘Yous wants someones who can talks your own language. Thems bastards, if yous will excuses the words, would swindles their own mothers. Excuses me a minute and I’ll fix thems.’ Nearly knocking the drivers off their feet with ferocious imprecations in Greek, he turned to the Durrells and asked them, ‘Wheres you wants to go?’

  ‘We are looking’, said Mother, ‘for a villa with a bathroom. Do you know of one?’

  ‘Bathrooms? Yous wants bathrooms? Sure, I’ll takes you,’ he said as he waved them into his Dodge open touring car. Off they shot, honking and twisting through the narrow streets, swerving in and out of carts and donkeys and peasant women, and out into the country, the car swooping wildly from one side of the road to the other as he turned his head to talk to the family.

  ‘Yous English? Thought so. English always wants bathrooms. Spiro’s my name, Spiro Halikiopoulos, they alls calls me Spiro Americano on accounts of I lives in America. Yes, spent eight years in Chicago. That’s where I learnt my goods English.’ After eight years Spiro had made enough money to return to Corfu and brought the Dodge, ‘best ons the islands, no one gets a car like this’.

  Careering down the narrow winding coast road south of Corfu Town, Spiro kept up the chatter, reassuring them that all the English liked him, ‘they knows they won’t be swindled. I likes the English. Best kinds of peoples. Honest to Gods, ifs I wasn’t Greek I’d likes to be English.’

  Dipping up and down against the backdrop of the Aya Deka range, passing cottages and gardens and patches of wild strawberries, the great Dodge reached Perama, six miles south of town, and roared up a hill covered in olive trees, where Spiro jammed on the brakes. ‘Theres you ares, thats the villa with the bathrooms, likes you wanted.’

  Behind them the sea sparkled. Pontikonisi (‘Mouse Island’) floated beneath them, while on the gentle rise before them, set amidst cypress trees, its creamy green shutters faded by the sun, was a small pink villa blinking in the light, awakening in an overgrown garden blooming with flaming red roses, others delicately moon-white, luxuriant bougainvillaea and bright marigolds. ‘As soon as we saw it’, writes Gerry, ‘we wanted to live there; it was as though the villa had been standing there waiting for our arrival. We felt we had come home.’

  Spiro in his taxi, with Margo, Gerry and Louisa in the back, probably photographed by Leslie, who took most of the family photos in Corfu, and was also a gifted artist and raconteur.

  * * *

  The villa had no name. It was simply home. Afterwards the family would call it the first villa. Only when Gerry wrote My Family and Other Animals, twenty years later, did he give it the name of the Strawberry-Pink Villa. Built in 1931 as a rental property by the owner of the Pension Suisse, it was arranged as a square with three large bedrooms and a kitchen off a central hallway. It had a washroom and an outdoor toilet, not a proper bathroom. But that was good enough and Louisa took a six-month lease, a trial to see if she and the family liked Corfu and wanted to stay. Margo, who would turn sixteen in May, and eighteen-year-old Leslie each had a bedroom, while ten-year-old Gerry slept as he had always done in his mother’s bedroom.

  (The villa still remains in Perama but it is so altered that only the original footprint remains. Even the gable roof is an alteration – originally it was a flat terrace with a balustrade running round its four sides – while the Victorian garden, with its beds laid out in complicated geometric patterns of stars, half-moons, triangles and circles, has been covered by a stone terrace with a swimming pool. Today, too, the hillside is largely built up; a paved road leads there from just south of the Aegli Hotel on the coast road.)

  The family had found their first home in Corfu but also they had found Spiro, or he had found them. He knew everyone, he knew how things were done, and if anyone caused trouble, ‘I fixes thems.’ From the day of their arrival at the Strawberry-Pink Villa, Spiro took complete control over the family’s affairs. He berated the bank manager for the late arrival of Mother’s funds from England; he wrested the family’s luggage from the overzealous customs officials; he took them shopping in town and bargained fiercely over every drachma on their behalf; and he kept them regularly provided with fresh food – ‘We ate what Spiro brought us from the market,’ Margo said. The Durrells trusted Spiro completely and he remained devoted to them throughout their years in Corfu. Or, as Gerry put it, in My Family and Other Animals: ‘Donts you worries yourselfs about anythings, Mrs Durrells, leaves everythings to me.’

  Gradually the family settled in and adjusted themselves to the sometimes primitive conditions of their new island home – made easier because they had brought so little with them that their rooms were almost bare. Corfu was largely untouched by modern development. To the Venetian impress the English added schools, bridges, a postal service and some good roads extending from the town, though not too far – longer-distance travel was better done along the coast by boat. Perama was close enough to get a variety of fresh food from Corfu Town, but even so the range was limited. There was no fresh butter on the island (it came in tins) and the milk was from goats. Beef was nonexistent, chickens were scrawny, pork you had to search for, but lamb was plentiful and good. Heating depended on the charcoal fire in the kitchen or from oil heaters and wood fires in the bedrooms. For lighting, the family used paraffin with its peculiar smell.

  Spiro Halikiopoulos, photographed by one of the Durrells in Corfu.

  Their first spring was unusually cold and grey, remembered Nancy, and disheartening. But as the weather got warmer the lack of refrigeration was solved by filling the ice box with blocks of ice that Spiro brought from town, ‘though the best refrigerator I know’, recalled Larry, ‘is a deep well; and for most of my island life we lowered our bottles and tinned butter down the well in a basket with a long length of line’.

  In the kitchen, Margo remembered, Mother introduced local ingredients to her curries and ‘adapted to the Greek style’. But what Louisa never really adapted to was the Greek language, with unfortunate consequences, as on the occasion she had spent all morning making a special soup. ‘The dialogue at lunch’, wrote Gerry in his memoirs, ‘went something like this’:

  Larry: I thought we were going to have that delicious soup for lunch.

  Mother (flustered): We were, dear, but unfortunately it got … er … thrown out.

  Larry: Thrown out?

  Mother: Yes dear. Katarina threw it out of the window.

  Larry (staring at her in disbelief): Why? Is the girl mad?

  Mother: No, no. It’s not really her fault. I gave her the soup and told her to bring it in here. I said ‘Exo, to soupa’.

  Larry (in exasperation): Really, Mother, you’re impossible. Don’t you know that ‘Exo’ means ‘Throw it out’?

  Mother (with dignity): I know it now, dear.

  In another fragment of Gerry’s unpublished memoirs, he reflected on the strange properties of Corfu and his childhood there:

  In those days I lived a curious sort of triple life, which I was totally unaware of, and only looking back on it now do I realise how very curious it was. To begin with, I dwelt in three worlds. One was my family, one was our eccentric friends, and the third was the peasant community. Through these three worlds, I passed unobserved but observing and learning, not knowing that I was doing either, but greatly enjoying the process.

  In fact everyone was eccentric: ‘My family has always shown symptoms of flamboyant idiocy as far back as I can remember, so Corfu was the ideal greenhouse to bring this to full fruition. The whole atmosphere of the island and the people themselves encouraged the eccentric in one to emerge and spread its wings.’ Though Gerry does not mention it in his Corfu Trilogy, he knew a man who kept the elegant skull of his former mistress on his desk – bequeathed to him by her. And he knew an enchanting lady who collected empty tin cans which she kept in a Red Indian canoe hung from the ceiling in her room.

  The Strawberry-Pink Villa by Gerry. The drawing was made from memory, some time after
publication of My Family and Other Animals, in the 1950s.

  For both Gerry and Larry, the eccentric, the strange, the marvellous were aspects of the enchantment they discovered in Corfu, a place magical, where spirits mingle with mortals. Larry opens Prospero’s Cell with a quotation from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: ‘No tongue: all eyes: be silent’, the words spoken by Prospero as he invokes the spirits. (There was a nineteenth-century tradition associating The Tempest with Corfu, which Larry adopted with enthusiasm.) For Gerry the magic of Corfu began at the Strawberry-Pink Villa, and it began with the immense and improbable figure of Spiro Americanos/Halikiopoulos; and it continued with other eccentric but no less real characters. There was the Rose-Beetle Man; and George Wilkinson, Gerry’s tutor; and during that same first summer Dr Theodore Stephanides.

  * * *

  For Gerry the garden of the Strawberry-Pink Villa was ‘a magic land, a forest of flowers through which roamed creatures I had never seen before’. At first he was so bewildered by the profusion of life that he went about in a daze, his attention drawn to one creature, then distracted by another, from spiders and caterpillars to flights of butterflies. ‘He had an enormous patience’, recalled Nancy. He would spend hours crouching or lying on his belly, looking into creatures’ private lives, while Roger, gasping a sigh of resignation, flopped down nearby. ‘In this way I learnt a lot of fascinating things.’

  From this garden Gerry and Roger set off on their adventures. Though the house has changed and the garden has been paved over, the old pathways followed by Gerry can still be followed down to the Halikiopoulou Lagoon in one direction and through the olive groves in the other, emerging on the coast opposite Pontikonisi, Mouse Island. The landscape remains beautiful even though the ubroken groves of olives are gone, the airport lurks behind, and tourists now fill the small beaches where Gerry and Roger once ventured alone.

  These were the times when Gerry first heard the haunting music of the old peasant songs, taught to him by Agathi, a woman in her seventies, who would leave off spinning wool when he appeared and have him sit with her eating grapes or pomegranates in the sun. There was the love song they would sing together called Falsehood, rolling their eyes adoringly at one another, Agathi trembling with emotion, clasping her hands to her great breasts. In his memoir Gerry writes the lyrics in Greek and gives a translation, though in My Family and Other Animals he leaves out the last line.

  Gerry exploring Corfu with Roger. Note the Wellington boots, insisted upon by Mother in case of snakes.

  Lies, lies.

  It is my fault for teaching you

  To walk around the countryside

  Saying that I love you.

  If I had loved you, you would have driven me crazy

  And our marriage would have been bitter.

  ‘What fools we are,’ Gerry remembers Agathi saying to him, ‘sitting here in the sun and singing of love. I am too old for it and you are too young. Ah, well, let’s have a glass of wine, eh?’

  One day on his travels Gerry met the Rose-Beetle Man, a weird and fascinating figure who gave all the appearance of having stepped straight out of a fairy tale. Tall and thin, wearing a long coat patched in many colours, he was a pedlar whose pockets bulged with combs and balloons and coloured pictures of the saints, while on his back he carried bamboo cages full of pigeons and young chickens, several mysterious sacks and a bundle of fresh leeks. On his head he wore a battered and floppy broad-brimmed hat stained with wine, burnt by cigarettes and smeared with dust; feathers of owls, hoopoes and cocks fluttered from the band around its crown and a great white feather that may have come from a swan.

  He heralded his approach by playing on his flute, but up close Gerry noticed that his eyes were dim and had a vacant look as though blind with cataracts, and he answered Gerry’s greetings with only grunts and squeaks. Gerry suddenly realised that he was mute but they continued their conversation by making pantomime gestures in the middle of the road. Strangest of all were the rose-beetles flying in circles about his head: they were tied by threads of cotton to his hat or he launched them from his hands. He sold them to children as whirling, buzzing model aeroplanes.

  The Rose-Beetle Man – another remembered drawing by the adult Gerry, for a special edition of My Family and Other Animals in the 1960s.

  On another day the Rose-Beetle Man revealed the mystery in one of his sacks: it was filled with tortoises. Gerry bought one, took it home and named it Achilles; its weak spot proved not to be its heel but its passion for strawberries, which led him to topple down a well, a tragedy marked by Larry, who wrote and delivered in a trembling voice a suitable funeral oration. The Rose-Beetle Man also sold Gerry a pigeon, so repulsive and obese that Larry suggested they name it Quasimodo. Not that Quasimodo thought he was a pigeon; he never left the house, walked everywhere and refused to fly, enjoyed listening to Larry’s gramophone, dancing to waltzes and marches, and at night he slept in Margo’s bed. But then one day Quasimodo laid an egg – he turned out to be a she, and gave herself over to a cooing admirer, who coaxed her to his tree and then they were gone.

  The Rose-Beetle Man would pass by the villa from time to time, stocking Gerry’s growing menagerie with a frog or a sparrow, but the sight of all those tethered rose-beetles so distressed Gerry and Mother that in a ‘fit of extravagant sentimentalism’ they bought up his entire stock and released them into the garden – from where they made their way into the house: ‘For days the villa was full of rose-beetles, crawling on the beds, lurking in the bathroom, banging against the light at night, and falling like emeralds into our laps.’

  * * *

  The family despaired of Gerry’s consuming interest in animals. ‘He’s been in this phase since the age of two’, said Mother, ‘and he’s showing no signs of growing out of it.’ But where to find a tutor on the island? It was Larry who, though least in favour of putting Gerry through any kind of formal education, came up with the solution – his friend George Wilkinson, whose letters had drawn Larry to Corfu and who now lived with his wife Pam, also in Perama, in the Villa Agazini not far from the Strawberry-Pink Villa.

  What Gerry does not say in My Family and Other Animals is that, when the family left the Hotel Suisse, Larry did not join them at the Strawberry-Pink Villa; instead he and Nancy took a small two-room hut close by the Wilkinsons. From there he wrote to Alan Thomas:

  I’d like to tell you how many million smells and sounds and colours this place is, but my stock of superlatives would give out. As I sit, for instance. Window. Light. Blue grey. Two baby cypresses lulling very slightly in the sirocco. Pointed and perky like girls’ breasts.

  Larry was happy. But he did keep an eye on things at the Strawberry-Pink Villa and in particular maintained a special responsibility for Gerry’s education, though that could take unorthodox forms, as when he started him on reading the bawdy writings of Rabelais.

  Gerry with the beginnings of his menagerie at the Durrells’ first villa. He is holding Quasimodo, the obese pigeon, in his left hand, while on his lap is Achilles the tortoise – both of them acquired from the Rose-Beetle Man.

  ‘All the boys were forced into schools really,’ recalled Margo, ‘and they all objected to it.’ But Corfu, which she called an escape, gave Leslie ‘a liberty, a spiritual liberty, to get around and do what he wanted to do. He always had a gun on his shoulder, and would go out and shoot this and that and something else. He was mad about guns. Leslie was great, a card, a lovable rogue. He integrated like I did with the local scene, and he used to go with the Condos family papa out in a policeman’s uniform and check the countryside, and no doubt arrest people who were poaching a rabbit or something like that.’

  Leslie in his Corfu police uniform, gun at the ready, out ‘on patrol’.

  But Mother was adamant that her youngest should receive a proper education and she leapt at Larry’s suggestion that George be Gerry’s tutor. ‘That’s a brainwave. Will you go over and see him? I think the sooner he starts the better.’ The fo
llowing morning when George and Gerry were introduced, ‘we regarded each other with suspicion’. Gerry noted his pointed brown beard and large tortoiseshell eyeglasses; he was very tall and extremely thin and moved awkwardy like a disjointed puppet. Thereafter at nine each morning he would come stalking through the olive trees in shorts and sandals and an enormous straw hat with a frayed brim, swinging a walking stick, and carrying a clutch of books under one arm.

  Margo, aged around fifteen, shortly after arriving in Corfu.

  George Wilkinson tutoring – and fencing – by Gerry. Another drawing from the special edition of My Family and Other Animals.

  George found that he could get more out of Gerry if he introduced animals into every possible situation. This worked well enough in geography, where maps of deserts were illustrated with camel humps, Australia was decorated with sheep and kangaroos, and tangled jungles were home to Gerry’s drawings of jaguars and gorillas and snakes. Gerry took to history in the same way: when studying about Hannibal crossing the Alps, Gerry knew the name of every elephant, just as he knew the first words of Christopher Columbus when he discovered the New World – ‘Great heavens, look, a jaguar.’ George tried the same technique with mathematics. Instead of asking how long it would take six men to build a wall if three could build it in a week, George would ask how long it would take four caterpillars to eat eight leaves if it took a week for two. But no number of caterpillars made mathematics comprehensible to Gerry, nor was it made easier that, as he agonised over the caterpillar problem, George was leaping and lunging round the dining room practising fencing with his walking stick or practising Greek country dancing, for which he had a passion.