Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  Mother had good reason to feel dejected. They all did. They were stranded in a strange country, whose language they did not speak and whose manners they did not understand, not knowing what they were doing or where they were going, and feeling confused, anxious and querulous. Worse, the bank in London hadn’t sent any money, so they were penniless, and Lawrence’s and Nancy’s baggage hadn’t turned up, so Lawrence was shirtless and bookless. Stuck in the stuffy recesses of the Pension Suisse, they survived by borrowing from the proprietor. Margaret, or Margo, as she was always known on Corfu, was homesick and cried; and Gerry howled in unison. Only the colours in the streets, he recalled, and the look of the sea down by the old fort gave any promise or hope.

  It was below the old fort during those early limbo days in Corfu town that Gerald made a crucial breakthrough in his island life, and finally entered a new dimension of existence, by learning to swim. During his brief time at prep school swimming lessons had filled him with dread and taught him nothing but a profound fear of drowning. But all that suddenly changed when he reached the island.

  ‘Mother and I,’ he recalled,

  accompanied by a bustling Roger, would go down to a small rocky cove beneath the great sandcastle-like Venetian fort that dominated the town. It was here that I learnt for the first time what a delicious, magical element water was. At first I was up to my knees, then up to my armpits and then, incredibly, I was swimming in the blue, warm, silky blanket, tasting the wonderful rind of salt on my lips, buoyed up by the water and rid of my fear. Soon I was swimming so far out in this liquid glass that Mother used to get alarmed and run up and down the shore like a distraught Sandpiper, imploring me to come back into the shallows.

  While the rest of the family hung about in the town, Lawrence and Nancy were soon fixed up with a small house on a hill near the Villa Agazini, the home of their friends the Wilkinsons at Pérama, along the coast to the south. From the hill they could look down on the great sweep of the sea and the comings and goings on the dirt road below them. A fortnight or so after moving Lawrence wrote to Alan Thomas:

  I’ve told you how unique it is up here, stuck on the hillside, haven’t I? Well, multiply that by four. Today we rose to a gorgeous sunlight and breakfasted in it. Our breakfast table looks out plumb over the sea, and fishing boats go swirling past the window. There is a faint mist over Albania today but here the heat is paralysing. Bees and lizards and tortoises are making hay … God the Sun.

  Shortly afterwards, while Mother was still scouting for a place to settle, Lawrence wrote again to Alan, unable to contain his enthusiasm for his new island home.

  I’d like to tell you how many million smells and sounds and colours this place is. As I sit, for instance. Window. Light. Blue grey. Two baby cypress lulling very slightly in the sirocco. Pointed and perky like girls’ breasts. The sea all crawling round in a bend as the coast curves away to Lefkimo with one sailing boat on it. In the road … the peasants are passing on donkeys. Raving, swearing, crashing colours, scarves and head-dresses. To the north nothing. Ahead Epirus and Albania with a snuggle of creamy cloud clotted on them. South mists and the mystery of the other islands lying out there, invisible, on the water.

  Mother meanwhile had decided to hire a car so that she and Leslie, Margo and Gerald could go and view a house in Pérama owned by the proprietor of the Pension Suisse. It was thus that the family came face to face with an outsize character who was to change their life on the island, or at any rate greatly facilitate the way they conducted it. Jostled and harassed at the taxi-rank in the main square by a crowd of grumpy taxi drivers who spoke only Greek, they were suddenly startled by a deep, vibrant, booming voice – ‘the sort of voice you would expect a volcano to have’, Gerald recalled – speaking in English, or at any rate a sort of English.

  ‘Hoy! Whys donts yous have someones who can talks your own language?’

  ‘Turning, we saw an ancient Dodge parked by the kerb,’ Gerald was to write, ‘and behind the wheel sat a short barrel-bodied individual, with ham-like hands and a great leathery, scowling face surmounted by a jauntily-tilted peaked cap.’

  ‘Thems bastards would swindles their own mothers,’ he roared. ‘Wheres you wants to gos?’

  This was the family’s first glimpse of Spyros Chalikiopoulos, better known as Spiro Americano on account of the eight years he had spent working in Chicago making enough money to come home, a great fire-eating fury of a man with a heart of gold who was to become the family’s fixer, philosopher and friend on a virtually permanent basis. To Gerald he was a ‘great brown ugly angel … a great suntanned gargoyle’; to Lawrence he resembled a ‘great drop of olive oil’.

  ‘Bathrooms?’ Spiro brooded. ‘Yous wants a bathrooms? Oh, I knows a villa with a bathrooms.’

  Seated in Spiro’s Dodge, they shot off through the maze of streets and out along the dusty white prickly-pear-lined road into a countryside of vineyards and olive groves.

  ‘Yous English?’ Spiro bawled, swivelling round to address the family in the back as his Dodge swayed from one side of the road to the other. ‘Thought so … English always wants bathrooms … I likes the English … Honest to Gods, if I wasn’t Greek I’d likes to be English.’ Spiro, it seems, was an anglophile to his very guts. ‘Honest to Gods, Mrs Durrell,’ he informed Mother later, ‘you cuts me opes you find the Union Jack inside.’

  They bowled along the edge of the sea, then sped up a hill. Suddenly Spiro jammed his foot on the brake and the car juddered to a halt in a thick cloud of dust.

  ‘Theres you ares,’ he said, jabbing with a stubby finger; ‘that’s the villa with the bathrooms, likes you wanted.’

  They saw a small, square, single-storeyed, strawberry-pink villa, situated only a stroll away from Larry and Nancy’s place. It stood in its own minuscule garden, guarded by a group of slim, gently swaying cypresses, with a sea of olive trees filling the valley and lapping up the hill all around. The tiny balcony at the front was overgrown with a rampant bougainvillaea and the shutters had been faded by the sun to a delicate, cracked green. They loved the place, instantly and totally. ‘The warm air was thick with the scent of a hundred dying flowers,’ Gerald recalled, ‘full of the gentle, soothing whisper and murmur of insects. As soon as we saw it, 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.’

  Moving day came, and the family’s baggage was carted up the hill, the shutters opened, floors swept, linen aired, beds made, charcoal fire lit in the kitchen, pots and pans arrayed, a home slowly formed amid much babble and commotion. To keep out of the way Gerald absconded to the garden, a strange garden with tiny flowerbeds laid out in complicated geometrical patterns of stars, half-moons, triangles and circles. That garden was a revelation – ‘a magic land,’ he remembered, ‘through which roamed creatures I had never seen before.’ Never had he seen such fecundity in nature. Under every stone he found twenty different creatures, on every plant stem twenty more: ladybirds, carpenter bees, hummingbird hawk-moths, giant ants, lacewing-flies that laid eggs on stilts, crab-spiders that changed colour like chameleons. Bewildered by the profusion of life on his doorstep, he wandered round the garden in a daze, then spent hours squatting on his heels watching the private lives of the creatures around him. ‘It wasn’t until we moved into that first villa,’ Gerald was to tell a friend years later, ‘that suddenly we realised we had been transported into paradise … For me it was like being pushed off the Bournemouth cliffs into heaven. From then onwards, just like that, I was home.’

  So the family settled in, with the thunderous Spiro attending to their every need. It was Spiro who took them shopping down in the town, bargaining fiercely over the smallest purchase. It was Spiro who chivvied and harassed the bank manager about Mother’s missing funds and hectored the customs officials over confiscated baggage. It was Spiro who, ‘bull-voiced and scowling’, advised them on everything they needed to know about day-to-day life on the island and te
nded to their smallest whim. Mother he adored, hovering over her like a guardian angel, and he was horrified one day when Leslie told him: ‘She’s really not much good as a mother, you know.’ Spiro leapt instantly to her defence. ‘Donts says that!’ he roared. ‘Honest to Gods, if I hads a mother like yours I’d gos down every mornings and kisses her feets.’

  Each member of the Durrell family adapted to their new environment according to their temperament and needs. Margo’s adaptation was the quickest. Short, blonde and attractive, by simply donning a revolutionary two-piece swimsuit and sunbathing in the olive groves she soon attracted an admiring band of peasant youths who appeared ‘like magic’ out of an apparently empty countryside. Or so Gerald was to claim in the best-selling account of Corfu he wrote twenty years later, My Family and Other Animals, a book which gives much of the essence of the Durrells’ years on Corfu, though only the barest outline of the chronology. Margo saw herself differently. ‘Gerald thought of me as a totally idiotic girl who was only interested in boys,’ she complained years later. ‘Gerry never saw the real me, the depth of character I consider I have. Looking back, I see myself as having been a romantic, sensitive person who wanted to understand the spirit of the Greeks. I’m the one who got to grips with the reality of Corfu.’

  Leslie’s acclimatisation was the noisiest. The moment he arrived he unpacked his guns, cleaned, oiled and loaded them, then blazed away at an old tin-can from his bedroom window. Mother meanwhile pottered about all day in the kitchen, tending the bubbling pots on the charcoal fires amid an aroma of garlic and herbs. ‘Mother Durrell and I had a lot of fun cooking,’ Nancy recalled. ‘She was very keen on making tremendously hot things that nobody else could really eat. We made all kinds of lime chutneys, and tomato jam and marrow jam, and we ate loquats in the season, and lots of prickly pears.’

  As for Lawrence, he was, Gerald recorded later, ‘designed by Providence to go through life like a small, blond firework, exploding ideas in other people’s minds, and then curling up with cat-like unctuousness and refusing to take any blame for the consequences’. Though My Family and Other Animals gives the impression that Lawrence shared the same house as the rest of the family, in fact he and Nancy lived under a separate roof for most of their time on Corfu. Equally, though Lawrence liked to declare publicly that he never saw the family on the island except at Christmas, in fact he and Nancy saw them a great deal. This was easy in the first months, when they were near neighbours at Perama, but relatively more difficult when they moved to the north of the island later. Nancy was to recall her association with the family all too clearly.

  Larry used to needle Leslie mercilessly, telling him what a fool he was, how he’d wrecked his life, slapping him down all the time. Leslie had three or four different sorts of guns and when he got angry with Larry he used to point one at him and threaten to shoot him. I really thought he possibly would, and sometimes he used to take my side – used to rush in and point his gun at Larry when Larry and I were quarrelling. Poor old Leslie, he just marched across the fields with the field police, a very low category of person, with rifles over their shoulders. He had a pierced eardrum, so he didn’t enjoy all the swimming and things we did. It wasn’t much of an existence for a nineteen-year-old boy.

  The villa only had three bedrooms, so though Gerald no longer passed his nights curled up in the same bed as his mother, he still had to share a room with her, squeezing into a cot in the corner. To Lawrence fell the role of father figure, then and for ever more. Lawrence was old enough to appear to the boy as someone from an earlier, more fatherly than brotherly generation, and he was all-knowing and authoritarian enough to fulfil the boy’s expectations of a father substitute.

  Gradually the family came to grips with the fact that, Spiro apart, virtually nobody they ever encountered spoke to them in an intelligible tongue. Greek was not an easy language to learn, and the Durrells’ struggle to master it was long and dogged. For the younger members of the family it was a struggle slowly but surely won, less by a process of formal learning than a kind of osmosis, so that gradually they turned – linguistically speaking – into Corfiot peasant Greeks, retaining the language more or less intact till the end of their lives. ‘Gradually I came to understand them,’ Gerald remembered. ‘What had at first been a confused babble became a series of recognisable separate sounds. Then suddenly, they took on meaning, and slowly and haltingly I started to use them myself.’

  Corfu was arguably the most beautiful of all the Mediterranean islands, and in the Durrells’ time it was virtually untouched by modern development. It was also one of the most sophisticated regions of Greece, and successive rulers of the island, including the Venetians, the French and the British, had all made contributions of one sort or another to how it looked and how its people lived. The Venetians had contributed an island aristocracy, much of Corfu town and many of the finest buildings, while the British, who had departed in 1864, had introduced ginger beer, a postal service and the game of cricket. It helped the Durrells hugely that the British were highly regarded by the islanders, who still believed that every Britisher they met was a lord and a paragon of all civilised virtues. Gerald was often greeted as ‘the little English lord’ by the local peasantry, and all doors were almost always open to him.

  But like all unspoiled Edens, the island had its drawbacks. ‘The peasants are incorrigible thieves and liars,’ Lawrence noted soon after his arrival at Perama, ‘but make up for it by having the dandiest arse-action when they walk. This is due to always carrying huge weights on their heads.’ Lawrence soon changed his opinion of the Corfiots, and the family grew very close to many of them. But the Corfiot world took some getting used to, as Gerald was later to explain:

  Corfu was wonderful because it was so lunatic, so insane. When a man in a shop said, with the Corfiot’s gentle charm, he would have a thing ready for you tomorrow, he was working in a world that would have mystified Einstein. The word tomorrow might mean half an hour later or two weeks or two months hence or, indeed, never. The word tomorrow had no normal meaning. It became yesterday, last month, the year after next. It was an Alice in Wonderland world.

  Greece was not a mass holiday destination in those days – too far, too rough – and the few tourists who could afford to go abroad tended to make for Italy. Greece, therefore, remained a primitive backwater by European standards, and a foreigner contemplating setting up residence there confronted some hefty practical problems, even on Corfu.

  Corfu before the discovery of DDT, Lawrence was later to point out, was ‘one large flea – one enormous hairy gnashing flea – and several kinds of bedbug as well, mostly elephant-sized’. In some ways, he reckoned, the island was almost as primitive as Africa, what with the insects, the malaria, the heat in summer and the rough going underfoot. In a remote Greek village a visitor was deep in the Middle Ages as far as medical matters were concerned, and if you fell ill it was up to the local ‘good women’ – masseuses, cuppers, bonesetters and specialists in herbal cures – to pull you round. Though there were qualified medics in the more civilised parts, going to see a Greek doctor, Gerald was to recall later, was ‘like going over Niagara in a barrel’. Roads were few, mostly dirt and caked in three inches of white dust; those that led up to the north were hard going even in summer and sometimes washed away in winter. Transport to the remoter parts of the island’s coast was best left to the passenger fishing boats called caiques, but in winter if the sea was rough the caiques stopped sailing.

  For the Durrells, living a short car ride from Corfu town, life was less primitive. Fruit and vegetables – potatoes, corn, carrots, tomatoes, green peppers, aubergines – were cheap and abundant in season, and there was a rich variety of fresh fish to be had every day. But even at the best of times there was no butter, and the milk was goats’ milk. Chickens were thin and scrawny, beef was non-existent, though there was always good lamb and sometimes pork. Almost the only tinned food was peas and tomato paste, and the bread was heavy, grey, coa
rse and sour. There was no gas, electricity or coal. Heating for cooking was mostly charcoal, so that it took twenty minutes to boil a kettle for a cup of tea, and the ironing was done by maids using huge black charcoal irons. Light came from oil lamps, which filled the room with their distinctive smell, and oil stoves were used in winter to warm the rooms, along with wood fires. On special occasions the family would buy huge church candles for the veranda and garden, and set hollowed-out tangerines on the dining table with a little wick in oil inside. There were no refrigerators on Corfu, but Mother had an icebox which Spiro would refill with a huge block of ice he brought from town. Otherwise the best place to keep foodstuffs cool was the bottom of a deep well, or failing that a sea cave. ‘Sometimes it was so hot,’ Lawrence recalled, ‘that we carried our dinner table out into the bay and set it down in the water. It was cool enough if you sat with the water up to your waist while you dined. The water was so still and clear that the candles hardly moved on such summer nights. And the bronze moon was huge.’

  Corfu’s compensations enormously outweighed any drawbacks. Their rent was cheap (£2 a month for a large house overlooking the sea), and so was food. ‘There is a good peasant wine,’ Lawrence reported to Alan Thomas, ‘which tastes and looks like iced blood. It costs 6 drachs – 3d per bottle. What more does one want? In England I couldn’t buy a bottle of horse-piss for 3d. Yesterday we dined very royally on red mullet – as you know a most epicurean dish – it cost Iod.’ Clothes were casual for the most part. Gerry wore shorts throughout his time on the island, and usually kept his hair very long, as he hated going to the barber in town. When an admirer gave Margo a large silk shawl she did not care for, Gerald appropriated it and pinned it round his neck like a cloak when he went out riding on the village pony. The shawl had a pattern in gold, green, red and purple, and a long red fringe. ‘I thought I cut a hell of a dash,’ he recalled, ‘as I galloped round the countryside.’