The Corfu Trilogy

by Gerald Durrell

  Then Mother and I were invited to spend a week-end with some friends in the extreme south of the island, and I found myself in a quandary. I longed to go, for the sandy, shallow coasts of the south were a fine place for finding heart-urchins which, in fact, looked not unlike baby hedgehogs. Heart-shaped, they were covered with soft spines which formed a tufted tail at one end and a spiky Red-Indian-like head-dress along the back. I had found only one of these, and that had been crushed by the sea and was scarcely recognizable, but I knew from Theodore that they were found in abundance two or three inches under the sand in the south of the island. However, I had my brood of hedgehogs to consider, for I could not very well take them with me, and as Mother was coming too, there was nobody I really trusted to look after them.

  ‘I’ll look after them,’ offered Margo. ‘Dear little things.’

  I was doubtful. Did she realize, I asked, the intricacies of looking after the hedgehogs? The fact that, for example, the cotton wool in their box had to be changed three times a day? That they must have only diluted cow’s milk? That the milk had to be warmed to blood heat and no more? And most important of all, that they were allowed only half a bottle of milk each at every feed? For I had very soon found out that, if you let them, they would drink themselves comatose at every meal, with the most dire results that entailed the changing of the cotton wool even more frequently.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Margo. ‘Of course I can look after them. I know about babies and things. You just write down on a piece of paper what I am supposed to do, and they’ll be quite all right.’

  I was torn. I desperately wanted to search for heart-urchins in the golden sands covered by the warm, shallow sea, and yet I doubted Margo’s proclivities as a nursemaid. However, Margo grew so indignant at my doubting her that eventually, reluctantly, I gave in. I had prevailed upon Larry, who happened to be in a good mood, to type out a detailed list of do’s and don’t’s for hedgehog-rearers and I gave Margo a practical course in bottle warming and cotton wool changing.

  ‘They seem awfully hungry,’ she said as she lifted each writhing, squeaking baby out of the box and pushed the end of the teat into its groping, eager mouth.

  I said that they were always like that. One should take no notice of it. They were just naturally greedy.

  ‘Poor little things,’ said Margo.

  I should have been warned.

  I spent an exhilarating week-end. I got myself badly sunburnt, for the fragile spring sun was deceptive, but I came back, triumphant, with eight heart-urchins, four shells new to my collection, and a baby sparrow that had fallen out of its nest. At the villa, after I had suffered the barks and licks and nibbles of greeting that the dogs always bestowed upon you if you had been away for more than two hours, I asked Margo eagerly how my baby hedgehogs were.

  ‘They’re doing all right now,’ she said. ‘But really, Gerry, I do think you ill-treat your pets. You were starving those poor little things to death. They were so hungry. You’ve no idea.’

  With a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, I listened to my sister.

  ‘Ravenous, poor little dears. Do you know, they’ve been taking two bottles each at every feed?’

  Horrified, I rushed up to my bedroom and pulled the cardboard box out from under my bed. In it lay my four hedgehogs, bloated beyond belief. Their stomachs were so large that they could only paw feebly with their legs without making any progress. They had degenerated into pink sacks full of milk, frosted with spines. They all died that night and Margo wept copiously over their balloon-like corpses. But her grief did not give me any pleasure, for never would my hedgehogs trot obediently at my heels through the olive groves. As a punishment to my overindulgent sister, I dug four little graves and erected four little crosses in the garden as a permanent reminder, and for four days I did not speak to her.

  My grief over the death of my hedgehogs was, however, short-lived, for at that time Donald and Max reappeared on the island, triumphantly, with a thirty-foot yacht, and Larry introduced into our midst Captain Creech.

  Mother and I had spent a very pleasant afternoon in the olive groves, she collecting wildflowers and herbs and I collecting newly emerged butterflies. Tired but happy, we made our way back to the villa for tea. When we came in sight of the villa, she came to a sudden halt.

  ‘Who’s that man sitting on the veranda?’ she asked.

  I had been busy throwing sticks for the dogs, so I was not really concentrating. Now I saw, stretched out on the veranda, a strange figure in crumpled white ducks.

  ‘Who is he? Can you see?’ asked Mother, agitated.

  At that time she was suffering under the delusion that the manager of our bank in England was liable, at any moment, to pay a flying visit to Corfu for the express purpose of discussing our overdraft, so this unknown figure on the veranda fermented her fears.

  I examined the stranger carefully. He was old, almost completely bald, and what little hair he had adhering to the back of his skull was long and as white and wispy as late summer thistle-down. He had an equally unkempt white beard and moustache. I assured Mother that, as far as I could see, he bore no resemblance to the bank manager.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Mother, annoyed. ‘He would arrive now. I’ve got absolutely nothing for tea. I wonder who he is?’

  As we got nearer, the stranger, who had been dozing peacefully, suddenly woke up and spotted us.

  ‘Ahoy!’ he shouted, so loudly and suddenly that Mother tripped and almost fell down. ‘Ahoy! You must be Mother Durrell, and the boy, of course. Larry told me all about you. Welcome aboard.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ whispered Mother to me, ‘it’s another one of Larry’s.’

  As we got closer, I could see that our guest had a most extraordinary face, pink and as carunculated as a walnut. The cartilage of his nose had obviously received, at one time or another, so many severe blows that it twisted down his face like a snake. His jaw too had suffered the same fate and was now twisted to one side, as though hitched up to his right ear-lobe by an invisible thread.

  ‘Delighted to meet you,’ he said, as though he owned the villa, his rheumy eyes beaming. ‘My, you’re a better-looking wench than your son described.’

  Mother stiffened and dropped an anemone from the bunch of flowers she carried.

  ‘I,’ she said with frigid dignity, ‘am Mrs Durrell, and this is my son Gerald.’

  ‘My name’s Creech,’ said the old man. ‘Captain Patrick Creech.’ He paused and spat accurately and copiously over the veranda rail into Mother’s favourite bed of zinnias. ‘Welcome aboard,’ he said again, exuding bonhomie. ‘Glad to know you.’

  Mother cleared her throat nervously. ‘Is my son Lawrence here?’ she inquired, adopting her fruity, aristocratic voice, which she did only in moments of extreme stress.

  ‘No, no,’ said Captain Creech. ‘I left him in town. He told me to come out here for tea. He said he would be aboard shortly.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mother, making the best of a bad job, ‘do sit down. If you will excuse me a moment I’ll just go and make some scones.’

  ‘Scones, eh?’ said Captain Creech, eyeing Mother with such lasciviousness that she dropped two more wildflowers. ‘I like scones, and I like a woman that’s handy in the galley.’

  ‘Gerry,’ said Mother frostily, ‘you entertain Captain Creech while I get the tea.’

  She made a hurried and slightly undignified exit and I was left to cope with Captain Creech.

  He had reslumped himself in his chair and was staring at me with watery eyes from under his tattered white eyebrows. His stare was so fixed that I became slightly unnerved. Conscious of my duties as host, however, I offered him a box full of cigarettes. He peered into it, as though it were a well, his jaw moving to and fro like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  ‘Death!’ he shouted so suddenly and so vigorously that I almost dropped the cigarettes. He lay back in his chair and fixed me with his blue eyes.

  ‘Cigarettes are death, boyo
,’ he said. He felt in the pocket of his white ducks and produced a stubby pipe as blackened and as gnarled as a piece of charcoal. He stuck it between his teeth, which made his jaw look even more lop-sided than ever.

  ‘Never forget,’ he said, ‘a man’s best friend is his pipe.’

  He laughed uproariously at his own joke and dutifully I laughed too. He got up and spat copiously over the veranda rail and then flopped back into his chair. I searched my mind for a topic of conversation. Nothing seemed to present itself. He would surely not be interested in the fact that today I had heard the first cicada, nor that Agathi’s chicken laid six eggs the size of hazel-nuts. Since he was nautically inclined, I wondered whether the news would excite him that Taki, who could not afford a boat, had been night-fishing (holding a light above his head with one hand and a trident in the other) and had successfully driven the trident through his own foot, imagining it was an exotic form of fish? But Captain Creech, peering at me from behind the oily fumes of his pipe, started the conversation himself.

  ‘You’re wondering about my face, aren’t you boyo?’ he said accusingly, and I noticed that the skin on his cheeks became pinker and more shiny, like satin, as he said it. Before I could voice a denial, he went on.

  ‘Wind-jammers. That’s what did it. Wind-jammers. Going round the Horn. Tearing wind, straight out of the arsehole of the earth. I fell, see? The canvas flapping and roaring like God’s thunder. The rope slipped through my fingers like an oiled snake. Straight onto the deck. They did what they could with it… of course, we hadn’t a doctor on board.’ He paused and felt his jaw meditatively. I sat riveted in my chair, fascinated. ‘By the time we got round to Chile the whole thing had set as hard as Portland,’ he said, still fondling his jaw. ‘I was sixteen years old.’

  I wondered whether to commiserate with him or not, but he had fallen into a reverie, his blue eyes blank. Mother came onto the veranda and paused, struck by our immobility.

  ‘Chile,’ said the Captain with relish. ‘Chile. That was the first time I got gonorrhoea.’

  Mother started and then cleared her throat loudly.

  ‘Gerry, come and help me bring out the tea,’ she said.

  Together we brought out the teapot, milk jug and cups, and the plates with golden-yellow scones and toast Mother had prepared.

  ‘Tucker,’ said Captain Creech, filling his mouth with scone. ‘Stops your belly rumbling.’

  ‘Are you, um, staying here long?’ asked Mother, obviously hoping that he was not.

  ‘Might retire here,’ said Captain Creech indistinctly, wiping scone crumbs off his moustache. ‘Looks a pretty little place. Might go to anchor here.’

  He was forced, because of his jaw, to slurp his tea noisily. I could see Mother getting increasingly alarmed.

  ‘Don’t you, um, have a ship?’ she asked.

  ‘No bloody fear,’ said Captain Creech, seizing another scone. ‘Retired, that’s me. Got time now to look a little more closely at the wenches.’

  He eyed Mother meditatively as he spoke, masticating his scone with great vigour.

  ‘A bed without a woman is like a ship without a hold,’ he observed.

  Mercifully Mother was saved from having to reply to this remark by the arrival of the car containing the rest of the family and Donald and Max.

  ‘Muzzer, we have come,’ announced Max, beaming at her and embracing her tenderly. ‘And I see we are in time for tea. Strumpets! How lovely! Donald, we have strumpets for tea!’

  ‘Crumpets,’ corrected Donald.

  ‘They’re scones,’ said Mother.

  ‘I remember a strumpet in Montevideo,’ said Captain Creech. ‘Marvellous bitch. Kept the whole ship entertained for two days. They don’t breed them with stamina like that nowadays.’

  ‘Who is this disgusting old man?’ asked Mother as soon as she had an opportunity of backing Larry into a corner away from the tea-party, which was now in full swing.

  ‘He’s called Creech,’ said Larry.

  ‘I know that,’ said Mother, ‘but what did you bring him here for?’

  ‘He’s an interesting old boy,’ said Larry, ‘and I don’t think he’s got a lot of money. He’s come here to retire on a minute pension, I think.’

  ‘Well, he’s not going to retire on us,’ said Mother firmly. ‘Don’t invite him again.’

  ‘I thought you’d like him,’ said Larry. ‘He’s travelled all over the world. He’s even been to India. He’s full of the most fascinating stories.’

  ‘As far as I am concerned he can go on travelling,’ said Mother. ‘The stories he’s been telling up to now aren’t what I call fascinating.’

  Captain Creech, once having discovered our ‘anchorage,’ as he put it, became a frequent visitor. He would arrive generally, we noticed, just in time for a meal, shouting, ‘Ahoy there! Can I come aboard and have a chin-wag?’ As he had obviously walked two and a half miles through the olive groves to reach us, it was difficult to deny him this privilege, and so Mother, muttering evilly, would rush into the kitchen and water the soup and bisect the sausages so that Captain Creech could join us. He would regale us with tales of his life at sea and the names of the places that he had visited. Names that I knew only from maps would slide enticingly out of his disjointed mouth. Trincomalee, Darwin and Durban, Buenos Aires, Wellington and Calcutta, the Galapagos, the Seychelles and the Friendly Islands. It seemed that there was no corner of the globe that he had not penetrated. He would intersperse these stories with prolonged and exceptionally vulgar sea-shanties and limericks of such biological complexity that, fortunately, Mother could not understand them.

  Then came the never-to-be-forgotten day when Captain Creech arrived, uninvited, for tea as we were entertaining the local English minister and his wife, more out of a sense of duty than of religion. To our amazement, Captain Creech behaved remarkably well. He exchanged views on sea-serpents and the height of tidal waves with the padre and explained the difference between longitude and latitude to the padre’s wife. His manners were exemplary and we were quite proud of him, but towards the end of tea the padre’s wife had, with extreme cunning, managed to steer the conversation onto her children. This subject was all-absorbing to her. You would have thought that not only was she the only woman in the world to have given birth, but that they had been immaculately conceived as well. Having treated us to a ten-minute monologue on the incredible perspicacity of her offspring, she paused momentarily to drink her tea.

  ‘I’m a bit too old to have babies,’ said Captain Creech.

  The padre’s wife choked.

  ‘But,’ he went on with satisfaction, ‘I have a lot of fun trying.’

  The tea-party was not a success.

  Shortly after this, Donald and Max turned up one day at the villa.

  ‘Muzzer,’ said Max, ‘we are going to carry you away.’

  ‘Yacht party,’ said Donald. ‘Fabulous idea. Max’s idea, of course.’

  ‘Yacht party where?’ inquired Mother.

  ‘Round ze island,’ said Max, throwing out his long arms in an all-embracing gesture.

  ‘But I thought you didn’t know how to sail her,’ said Leslie.

  ‘No, no. We don’t sail her. Larry sails her,’ said Max.

  ‘Larry?’ said Leslie incredulously. ‘But Larry doesn’t know the first thing about boats.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Donald earnestly. ‘Oh, no. He’s quite an expert. He’s been taking lessons from Captain Creech. The Captain’s coming along too, as crew.’

  ‘Well, that settles it then,’ said Mother. ‘I’m not coming on a yacht with that disgusting old man, apart from the danger involved if Larry’s going to sail it.’

  They tried their best to persuade her, but Mother was adamant. The most she would concede was that the rest of the family, with Theodore, would drive across the island and rendezvous with them at a certain bay where we could picnic and, if it was warm enough, bathe.

  It was a bright, clean morning when we set off and it
looked as though it were going to be ideal for both sailing and picnicking; but by the time we reached the other side of the island and had unpacked the picnic things, it began to look as though we were in for a sirocco. Theodore and I made our way down through the trees to the edge of the bay. The sea had turned a cold steel-grey and the wind had stretched and starched a number of white clouds across the blue sky. Suddenly, along the rim of the sea, three water-spouts appeared, loping along the horizon like the huge undulating necks of some prehistoric monsters. Bowing and swaying, graceful as swans they danced along the horizon and disappeared.

  ‘Aha,’ said Theodore, who had been watching this phenomenon interestedly, ‘I have never seen three of them together. Very curious. Did you notice how they moved together, almost as if they were… er… you know, animals in a herd?’

  I said that I wished they had been closer.

  ‘Um,’ said Theodore rasping his beard with his thumb. ‘I don’t think water-spouts are things one wants to get on… er… um… intimate terms with. I remember once I visited a place in Macedonia where one had… er… you know, come ashore. It had left a trail of damage about two hundred yards wide and a quarter of a mile long, that is to say inland. Even quite big olive trees had been, er, you know, damaged and the smaller ones were broken up like matchwood. And of course, at the point where the water-spout finally broke up, the ground was saturated by tons of salt water and so it was… you know… completely unsuitable for agriculture.’

  ‘I say, did you see those bloody great water-spouts?’ asked Leslie, joining us.

  ‘Yes, very curious,’ said Theodore.

  ‘Mother’s in a panic,’ said Leslie. ‘She’s convinced they’re heading straight for Larry.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any danger of that,’ said Theodore, ‘they look too far out to me.’