by Michael Haag
Goodbye to Larry and Nancy and Henry, who joined the general rush to get away, but you will find no mention of Margo remaining on the island in Gerry’s My Family and Other Animals, no mention of Margo at all in Larry’s Prospero’s Cell nor in Henry’s The Colossus of Maroussi. As Margo said, ‘I never know what’s fact and what’s fiction in my family.’
* * *
Larry, Nancy and Henry went to Athens carrying introductions from Theodore to his literary friends, among them George Seferis, the future Nobel Prize-winning poet, and George Katsimbalis, publisher and editor of Nea Grammata, the leading literary magazine in Greece, and a spellbinding raconteur. Their encounter was the beginning of Henry’s great journey round Greece with Katsimbalis and the best book Henry Miller ever wrote, The Colossus of Maroussi (Katsimbalis, an outsized man in every way, lived in the Athens suburb of Maroussi).
Henry and Theodore and Nancy on the Acropolis 1939.
But Henry’s journey with Katsimbalis was not immediate. Larry and Theodore found temporary posts with the British Embassy in Athens, working for its Information Services, translating Greek newspaper articles into English and writing and printing an official bulletin to counter the propaganda emanating from the German Embassy. Henry meanwhile was cross with himself for having needlessly, as he saw it, interrupted his island holiday, and after about ten days in Athens felt a longing to return to Corfu. Though war had been declared against Germany, the Italians announced their intention to remain neutral, so Henry ‘saw no reason why I should not return and make the most of the remaining days of summer.’
Henry went to stay at the White House in Kalami, where Spiro sent his son Lillis to give him some Greek lessons. When Lillis finally went back to town, Henry was left alone. ‘A wonderful period of solitude set in … It was the first time in my life that I was truly alone.’
Larry in Athens with George Katsimbalis, the Colossus of Maroussi, 1939.
Not quite alone, according to Margo. ‘Lawrence asked me to look after him, and he said, “Don’t let anybody swindle him”, which I thought was a typical Lawrence remark at that point. I did look after Henry, and I found him very charming. He did use a lot of bad language, but then, you know, I was used to that language. He just was very genial. He came swimming, and was absolutely like a grandfather. Lawrence said I was safe because I was one of the family.’
As autumn came to Corfu the rains set in. In those days only a goat path connected Kalami with the road above, the road into Corfu Town, and day by day the path was becoming muddier and more difficult to climb, and even the road itself would become occasionally impassable when severe storms touched off landslides of rocks and trees.
Henry was thinking it was time to leave Kalami before he was marooned there for the winter when Nancy showed up to collect some household belongings; she was returning to Athens on the same boat that afternoon, and on a sudden impulse Henry joined her. That was the last time either of them ever saw Corfu.
* * *
Margo remained in Corfu, going into town at night from Perama, mixing with people, among them the crews of the Imperial Airways flying boats. They were flying up from Africa, stopping in Corfu, then continuing over Italy and eventually to their home base in England – which from 1 September had been transferred from Southampton to the greater safety of Poole harbour, within view of Bournemouth. On one of these nights in town she met Jack Breeze, an Imperial Airways flying boat chief engineer.
Margo at a crossroads in southern Africa with her husband Jack Breeze, flying boat chief flight engineer, whom she met in Corfu.
‘And he said that it was absolutely ridiculous thinking that you could hide yourself as a peasant and work in the fields and you won’t be found out. And he said, if you’re going to marry me you have to go back to your mother immediately. And actually in the end I did flee, although I didn’t really want to go.’
Just after Christmas 1939, Margo boarded one of the last Imperial Airways flying boats out of Corfu and by the New Year she was home in Bournemouth with Mother and Leslie and Gerry.
* * *
On 28 December 1939, Henry Miller sailed from Piraeus, the port of Athens, for New York, where he immediately began writing The Colossus of Maroussi. There he had a letter from Lillis, Spiro’s son, from which he learnt that during his last days in Greece, as he was saying goodbye to friends and waiting to board his ship for America, ‘Spiro was getting ready to die’ in his vine-wreathed house on Nausicaa (Nafsika) Street in Canoni.
‘My poor father died with your name in his mouth which closed forever. The last day, he had lost his logic and pronounced a lot of words in English as: “New York! New York! where can I find Mr Miller’s house?” He died as poor as he always was. He did not realise his dream to be rich.’
* * *
Nancy gave birth to a daughter, Penelope, on 4 June 1940 in Athens. After attempting to get a posting in naval intelligence, Larry accepted a job from the British Council in Kalamata, deep in the Peloponnese. His purpose there, apart from teaching, was to show a British presence in a port town which relied heavily on agricultural exports to Germany and was a target for German propaganda, not least from the German School whose director was secretly an army officer.
That autumn on 28 October the Italians, who had already declared war on Britain in June, gave Greece an ultimatum to hand over its principal defences or face invasion. The Greek prime minister General Ioannis Metaxas famously said ‘Oxi’ (‘No!’) and when the Italians launched their attack the out-gunned and outnumbered Greeks resisted fiercely and drove the Italians scuttling back into Albania. But as everyone realised the Greek victory could only be a prelude to a brutally effective German intervention.
It came in April 1941. Leaving Corfu to the Italians, the Germans overran the whole of Greece within weeks. From Kalamata there was no escape except by sea. Fleeing in an overloaded caique, sailing by night to avoid German dive bombers, hiding in island coves by day, Nancy and Larry and their infant daughter survived the perilous three-day voyage and arrived in Crete, from where they were taken by a military vessel to safety in Egypt.
Larry with Penelope at Kalamata, from where they escaped the German occupation of mainland Greece by taking a boat to Crete.
As Larry recalls in these last lines of Prospero’s Cell, which he wrote in Alexandria, the images he held in his mind during their escape from Kalamata, memories of their lost world, were of Corfu:
In April of 1941, as I lay on the pitch-dark deck of a caique nosing past Matapan towards Crete, I found myself thinking back to that green rain upon a white balcony, in the shadow of Albania; thinking of it with a regret so luxurious and so deep that it did not stir the emotions at all. Seen through the transforming lens of memory the past seemed so enchanted that even thought would be unworthy of it. We never speak of it, having escaped: the house in ruins, the little black cutter smashed. I think only that the shrine with the three black cypresses and the tiny rock-pool where we bathed must still be left.
* * *
When Mother returned to England with Leslie and Gerry, she rented a flat off Kensington High Street in London. The Germans had not yet begun their bombing offensive and the family settled into a routine of sorts. They saw Aunt Prue and various friends, among them Veronica Tester, who remembered their flat as ‘uncomfortable’, and her brother the actor Desmond Tester. Gerry found London fascinating, and dressed for the first time in trousers, not in shorts, he set about exploring the city.
In an autobiographical fragment Gerry recalled seeing Charles Laughton in The Private Lives of Henry VIII, a tell-all biography which runs through each of the King’s five marriages. ‘Entrance – Bed room – even now remember things I do for England and pan down to tiny feet,’ Gerry wrote. This scene that had attracted Gerry’s attention followed Henry’s short-lived happiness with Jane Seymour, who dies in childbirth. Reluctantly the King is now about to consummate his political marriage to the German princess Anne of Cleves. He stands outside her
bedchamber and sighs, ‘The things I’ve done for England,’ while the camera pans down to his stockinged feet. ‘Saw Henry 5 or 6 times and each time learned something new from it,’ Gerry wrote.
As well as frequently going to the cinema, Gerry regularly visited the nearby Museum of Natural History or would go off to the zoo. Soon he got a job as a junior assistant in a well-stocked pet shop where he demonstrated such a caring knowledge of the fish, the tortoises, the snakes, the lizards and the rest that he was quickly promoted. But it was pale fare to what he had known in Corfu, and in another of his unpublished autobiographical fragments he contrasts in an impressionistic way his inner life with the lives of English boys his age:
The bright caiques like dishevelled kingfishers, flashing in the bay below nuzzled by the tiny Mediterranean tide. Every day was Christmas – unlucky him, disgruntled urchin jealous from the English waterlogged muffin on which he lived. One can only assume that his childhood – if he had one – was trailing behind him like some sort of English ectoplasm – whereas I was trailing behind me something he could not understand – a childhood like a magic carpet.
For Mother, London was only temporary; she was drawn to Bournemouth, the one place she had ever felt settled in England, and by the end of the year had bought a house at 52 St Albans Avenue. It was here that Margo arrived when she returned from Corfu at the very end of 1939 and where, early in the new year, Leslie gave her away in marriage to Jack Breeze. Jack had been flying the Africa run via Corfu from Poole harbour, a few miles away, which by then had become the only point where civilians could arrive by air in Britain or depart, with special non-stop trains running between London and Bournemouth West station. In April 1940 Britain’s passenger air services were reorganised; Imperial Airways was merged with British Airways which had operated solely within Europe, and the two became British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC). Now the airline posted Jack to South Africa and he took his young bride Margo with him.
Leslie with a firm grip on Mother at Bournemouth during the War. Gerry, now a head taller than the others in the family, is on the right.
From South Africa over the coming years Jack and Margo moved northwards, first to Mozambique, then to Ethiopia, from which the British were dislodging the Italians who had occupied it in 1935. By some mischance she fell into Italian hands and gave birth by Caesarean section, without anaesthetic, to their first son, named after her brother Gerry, in an Italian-run prisoner-of-war camp. Finally, towards the end of the war, Jack and Margo were posted to Egypt and lived in Cairo, but though Larry was working only a three-hour train journey away in Alexandria, they never met up.
Margo in Mozambique, on the Zambezi river.
Also in Egypt during the war was Pat Evans (Gerry’s tutor ‘Peter’ in My Family and Other Animals), whose ‘homeric love’ for Margo, as Larry described it, had evolved into a ‘huge emotional mess’. Though the son of devout Quakers, Pat served in the Royal Tank Regiment during its desert contests with Rommel in Egypt. Then in 1943 he joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret organisation set up to conduct espionage and sabotage in occupied Europe. Pat served in northern Greece in 1943–44, working with the Greek resistance against the Germans, and ending the war with the rank of major.
* * *
Theodore Stephanides joined the British Army in Greece and as a medical doctor with the rank of lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps stayed with the British forces throughout the battle of Crete until the island’s fall at the end of May 1941, when he was among the last to be evacuated to Egypt. Posted to a military hospital in Cairo, Theodore soon tracked his friend down at the ‘Lunatic Park’, as Larry called the Luna Park Hotel, ‘a rather ramshackle place that the authorities had requisitioned to house British refugees; a terrible place and terrifically overcrowded’, though at least Larry and his family had a room to themselves.
Theodore and Larry had last seen one another on a November day in Athens in 1939 after their temporary work as translators at the British Embassy came to an end. There was much to talk about: remembered friends and recent adventures, not least the hair-raising escapes each had made from the Greek mainland to Crete, Stephanides in an antiquated Greek merchantman that was dive-bombed three times en route, Larry and his family dodging the Luftwaffe in an overloaded and listing caique. ‘But their luck held’, said Theodore, and after arriving safely at Alexandria they were taken to Cairo, where Larry soon found employment in the British Embassy publicity section.
The following summer the German Army, under the command of General Rommel, advanced across the desert out of Libya and stood within striking distance of Cairo. Early in July 1942, in the panic that followed called ‘the Flap’, Nancy and Penelope, along with other British women and children, were evacuated to Palestine. A month or so later Larry had a letter from Nancy in Jerusalem saying she was not coming back. Their marriage was over.
That autumn, as the guns of the Battle of Alamein were shaking the ground beneath people’s feet, Larry was posted to Alexandria as British Information Officer. His task was to keep his eyes open and to ensure that the local newspapers, published in English, French, Greek, Armenian and Arabic, were fed with leads for appropriately upbeat stories, which often meant writing the copy himself. ‘Lawrence was now in his element,’ observed Theodore, who was soon transferred to a military hospital at Amriya immediately west of Alexandria; in a city whose atmosphere owed so much to its numerous Greek population, ‘he was now his own boss and he was able to make good use of his knowledge of Greek’. Here Larry began filling notebooks with material that would eventually find its way into his Alexandria Quartet, and here he met a dark and sultry Alexandrian girl, Eve Cohen, who would become the model for his mysterious character Justine.
Theodore visited Larry several times in Alexandria, once for two weeks in December 1943: ‘where I spent one of the nicest Christmases I had ever enjoyed. By this time Lawrence knew all about Alexandria, and he showed me the sites of some of its ancient monuments, including that of the Library and the famous Pharos. It was very interesting to look at the places where these famous monuments had once been, but, alas!, no ruins even of them still existed.’
* * *
Theodore might have said almost the same thing about Corfu. Just a few months earlier, on the night of 13 September 1943 and all through the following day, the Germans bombed Corfu and destroyed large parts of the town. The Italians, who had occupied the island, had surrendered to the Allies on 3 September after British and American troops landed in Sicily and on the mainland at Salerno; now the Germans were taking over Corfu to stop it passing into British hands.
Theodore (left) in a makeshift medical centre in North Africa.
German incendiary bombs destroyed churches and municipal buildings, Venetian houses and whole neighbourhoods, especially targeting the Jewish quarter. They bombed the Pension Suisse where the Durrells had first stayed, and they killed many people, including Gerry’s tutor Mr Kralefsky (whose real name was Krajewsky) and his mother, as well as his birds, and they killed the father and mother of Theodore Stephanides. Corfu Town burnt for three days; the rubble from the devastation was used to build the runway of Corfu’s airport, built on land reclaimed from the Halikiopoulou Lagoon.
Theodore did not return to Corfu again for twenty-four years, until 1967, when he helped Gerry make the BBC’s Corfu, Garden of the Gods.
* * *
Towards the end of 1942, as Gerry was approaching eighteen, he received his call-up papers; from his appearance he seemed an entirely fit and healthy young man. Margo and Leslie took after their mother, who was small, and Larry, who stood no more than five feet two inches, took after Louisa too. Gerry was the one member of his family who took after his father in height; he now stood nearly six feet tall. But his old problem from the days before he went to Corfu had returned; he was continuously plugged up with catarrh – or, as the military medical examiner put it, according to Gerry, ‘Your sinuses look like the Black Hole o
f Calcutta.’
Instead of being taken into the Army, he was offered a choice: to work in an armaments factory or on the land. Taking to his bicycle, Gerry looked for a suitable farm, not one that grew crops but one with animals, and soon, just north of Bournemouth, he found a farm with a few cows and twenty-two horses. Gerry spent the rest of the war mucking out the cows and grooming the horses and giving lessons to young ladies wanting to learn to ride. And all the while fixing on his childhood plan, to have a zoo of his own.
With the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, Gerry wrote to the Zoological Society of London, whose zoo housed the largest number of animals in the world. He was invited to an interview. At length he told the superintendent of London Zoo about his own zoo in Corfu, about collecting animals and displaying his intimate knowledge of animal habits, to which he was listened with the greatest patience and respect. And afterwards received a letter saying there were no vacancies at London Zoo – but he was offered the job of Relief Keeper at the Society’s country zoo at Whipsnade, with the title of his position aptly renamed Student Keeper; Gerry’s exceptional background had been recognised and now he was to be given structured training, a sort of university of animals, that would confirm him on the course he had chosen for his life since he was a child.
Leslie’s photo of Maria Condos, on the back of which he wrote ‘Jolly nice’.
* * *
At the outbreak of the war, when Leslie was getting on for twenty-three, he attempted to enlist in the Royal Air Force but a damaged eardrum he suffered in a fight as a child at Dulwich College caused the medical board to rule him unfit for military service. Instead he was assigned to a humdrum job working in a local aircraft factory.