Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  Generally the Durrell abodes on Corfu were sparsely furnished. All the rooms had bare floorboards which were scrubbed once a week in rotation and holystoned, and all the bedclothes were hung out of the windows each day to air. The furniture was mostly simple, rural and Greek, with the addition of a few exotic Indian items that Mother had brought out from England – deep blue curtains with huge peacocks on them; ornate round brass tables, intricately embossed and standing on elaborately carved teak legs; ashtrays decorated with peacocks and dragons.

  At a domestic level the family’s life on Corfu was simple, uncluttered, unhurried, unpressured. At a more exalted level, the island was gloriously beautiful, utterly unspoilt, a paradise on earth surrounded by an unpolluted crystalline sea. For Gerald, it was a revelation:

  Gradually the magic of the island settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen. Each day had a tranquillity, a timelessness about it, so that you wished it would never end … In those days I lived a curious sort of triple life. I dwelt in three worlds. One was the family, one was our eccentric friends, and the third was the peasant community. Through these three worlds I passed unobserved but observing.

  For Gerald, Corfu was a kind of Mediterranean Congo peopled with natives and crawling with wildlife, where every foray was a venture into the interior, and every bend in the track and view through the trees portended something utterly new, unexpected and absorbing.

  The family had decided on a six-month trial period to see if they liked Corfu and wanted to stay. Gerald remembered this as a time of pure freedom, a total holiday – no lessons, no duties, no set hours, just carte blanche to roam at will, exploring the wonders of his paradise island. As the weeks of that first enchanted summer of exploration and discovery went by he increased the range of his excursions away from the Strawberry-Pink Villa.

  Every day began with the rising sun striking the shutters of his bedroom windows, followed soon after by the smell of a charcoal fire in the kitchen, cock-crows, yapping dogs, goats’ bells clanging as the flocks wended their way to their grazing grounds. After a breakfast of coffee, toast and eggs under the tangerine trees Gerald would put on his Wellington boots – Mother, having been brought up to dread snakes in India, insisted he wore these in the early days – and saunter forth in the cool of the morning, his butterfly net in his hand, empty matchboxes in his pockets, following the black, bouncing form of Roger the dog, his constant and dearly beloved companion on all his forays.

  Within a six-mile radius of the villa Gerald became the local equivalent of the town crier, or a sort of itinerant human newspaper. In those days some of the peasant communities would only see each other once or twice a year at fiestas. So, travelling around as he did, it was Gerald who brought the news from village to village – how Maria had died and how Spiro’s potato crop had failed (that was Spiro with the blind donkey, not Spiro with the Dodge convertible). ‘Po! Po! Po!’ the villagers would cry in horror – ‘and he has the whole winter stretching before him, potatoless. St Spiridion preserve him.’

  It was in these early outings that Gerald got to know the Corfiot peasants of the locality, many of whom became his friends. There was the cheerful simpleton, an amiable but retarded youth with a face as round as a puffball and a bowler hat without a brim. There was rotund, cheerful old Agathi, past seventy but with hair still glossy and black, spinning wool outside her tumbledown cottage and singing the haunting peasant songs of the island, including her favourite, ‘The Almond Tree’, which began ‘Kay kitaxay tine anthismeni amigdalia …’. Then there was Yani, the toothless old shepherd, with hooked nose and great bandit moustache, who plied the ten-year-old Gerald with olives and figs and the thick red wine of the region (well-watered to a rosy pink).

  And then there was the Rose-beetle man, one of the most extraordinary characters of the island, a wandering peddler of the most extreme eccentricity. When Gerald first encountered him in the hills, playing a shepherd’s pipe, the Rose-beetle Man was fantastically garbed, wearing a battered hat that sprouted a forest of fluttering feathers of owl, hoopoe, kingfisher, cockerel and swan, and a coat whose pockets bulged with trinkets, balloons and coloured pictures of the saints. On his back he carried bamboo cages full of pigeons and young chickens, together with several mysterious sacks, and a large bunch of fresh green leeks. ‘With one hand he held his pipe to his mouth, and in the other a number of lengths of cotton, to each of which was tied an almond-size rose-beetle, glittering golden green in the sun, all of them flying round his hat with desperate deep buzzings.’ The beetles, the man mimed – for he was dumb as well as strange – were substitute toy aeroplanes for the village children.

  One of the Rose-beetle Man’s sacks was full of tortoises, and one in particular struck the boy’s fancy – a sprightly kind of tortoise, with a brighter eye than most, and possessed (so Gerald was to claim) of a peculiar sense of humour. Gerald named him Achilles. ‘He was undoubtedly the finest tortoise I had ever seen, and worth, in my opinion, at least twice what I had paid for him. I patted his scaly head with my finger and placed him carefully in my pocket.’ But before setting off down the hill he glanced back. ‘The Rose-beetle Man was still in the same place in the road, but he was doing a little jig, prancing and swaying, while in the road at his feet the tortoises ambled to and fro, dimly and heavily.’

  From the Rose-beetle Man Gerald obtained several other small creatures that took up residence in the Strawberry-Pink Villa, including a frog, a sparrow with a broken leg, and the man’s entire stock of rose-beetles, which infested the house for days, crawling into the beds and plopping into people’s laps ‘like emeralds’. Perhaps the most idiosyncratic of these creatures was a revolting-looking young pigeon which refused to learn to fly and insisted on sleeping at the foot of Margo’s bed. So repulsive and obese was the bird that Larry suggested calling it Quasimodo. It was Larry who first noticed that Quasimodo was partial to dancing around the gramophone when a waltz was being played, and stomping up and down with puffed-up chest when the record was a march by Sousa. Eventually Quasimodo surprised everybody by laying an egg, whereupon she grew wilder and wilder, abjured the gramophone, and finally, suddenly endowed with the gift of flight, flew out of the door to take up residence in a tree with a large cock bird.

  With Gerald rapidly turning into part of the fauna of Corfu, Mother decided it was time he had some sort of education. George Wilkinson was hired for this thankless task. Every morning he would come striding through the olive groves, a lean, lanky, bearded, bespectacled, disjointed figure in shorts and sandals, clutching bundles of books from his own small library, anything from the Pears Cyclopaedia to works by Wilde and Gibbon. ‘Gerry really did everything he could to escape lessons,’ Nancy recalled. ‘He was utterly bored with lessons and with George as a tutor.’ The only way George could gain his attention was to introduce animals into everything he taught, from history (‘Good heavens, look. A jaguar,’ remarked Christopher Columbus as he stepped ashore in America for the first time) to mathematics (‘If it took two caterpillars a week to eat eight leaves, how long would it take four caterpillars?’). It was George who persuaded Gerald to start a nature diary, meticulously noting everything he saw and did every day in a set of fat blue-lined notebooks – a compilation sadly later lost.

  Gerald was never at his best within the confines of a room, but outside – whether in a herbaceous border in the garden or a swamp full of snakes – he was a person transformed. Quickly realising this, George instituted a programme of al fresco lessons, out in the olive groves or down by the little beach at the foot of the hill overlooking Pondikonissi (Mouse Island). There, while discussing in a desultory way the historic role played by Nelson’s egg collection at the Battle of Trafalgar, they would float gently out into the shallow bay, and Gerald would pursue his real studies – the flora and fauna of the seabed, the black ribbon-weed, the hermit crabs, the sea-slugs slowly rolling on the sandy bottom, sucking in seawater at one end and passing it out at the other. ‘The sea was
like a warm, silky coverlet,’ wrote Gerald later, ‘that moved my body gently to and fro. There were no waves, only this gentle underwater movement, the pulse of the sea, rocking me softly.’

  George Wilkinson was an aspiring novelist, but Gerald was so bored by his English lessons that one day he suggested he should write a story of his own, just like his brother Larry (then busy on his second novel, The Black Book). Entitled ‘The Man of Animals’ and written in a wobbly and erratic hand and eccentric, nursery school spelling, the story relates, with uncanny prescience, the adventures of a man who was remarkably like the one Gerald would become:

  Right in the Hart of the Africn Jungel a small wite man lives. Now there is one rather xtrordenry fackt about him that is that he is the frind of all animals. Now he lives on Hearbs and Bearis, both of which he nos, and soemtimes, not unles he is prakticly starvyng, he shoot with a bow and arrow a Bird of some sort, for you see he dos not like killing his frinds even wene he is so week that he cann hardly walk!

  One of his favreret pets is a Big gray baboon, wich he named ‘Sotine’. Now there are surten words this Big cretcher nows, for intenes if his master was to say ‘Sotine I want a stick to mack a Bow, will you get me one?’ then the Big ting with a nod of his Hede would trot of into the Jungel to get a bamboo fo the Bow and Arrow. But before Brracking it he would bend it so as to now that it would be all right, then breacking it of he would trot back to his master and give it to him and wight for prase, and nedless to say his master would give him a lot …

  So far, so good. But now, obviously not averse to experimental writing, the youthful author suddenly switches from the third to the first person, and the adventure continues not from the narrator’s but from the Man of Animals’ point of view.

  One day wile I was warking in frount of my porters in Africa a Huge Hariy Hand caught my sholder and I was dragged of into the Jungel by this unseen figer. At last I was put down (not to gently) and I found my self looking into the eyes of a great baboon. ‘Holy mackrarel,’ I egeackted, ‘what the devel made you carry me of like this, ay?’ I saw the Baboon start at my words and then it walked over to the ege of the clearing, beckning me with a Big Hairy Hand …

  As well as writing extended narratives in those early Corfu days, Gerald was also trying his hand at verse. At first this shared the simplicity – and the spelling – of his more ambitious works, but combined his passion for natural history with the conventions of pastoral verse:

  That coulerd brid of incect land

  floating on the waves of light

  atractd by the throbing hart

  and pulsing viens

  this winged buaty

  hovers then swops down

  siting on the downey pettles

  sucking the honey greedly

  while the pollen

  fall softly

  on its red and yelow wings

  its hunger qunched

  it cralls up the slipry dome

  and flys away

  to its home

  in the skelaton

  of a liveing tree!

  It was the discovery of a series of mysterious small silken trapdoors set into the floor of a neighbouring olive grove, each about the size of an old shilling piece, that led to an encounter that was to change for ever the direction of Gerald’s life. Puzzled by the trapdoors, he made his way to George Wilkinson’s villa to seek his advice. George was not alone. ‘Seated in a chair was a figure which, at first glance, I thought must be George’s brother,’ Gerald remembered, ‘for he also wore a beard. He was, however, immaculately dressed in a grey flannel suit with waistcoat, a spotless white shirt, a tasteful but sombre tie, and large, solid, highly polished boots.’

  ‘Gerry, this is Dr Theodore Stephanides,’ said George. ‘He is an expert on practically everything you care to mention. And what you don’t mention, he does. He, like you, is an eccentric nature-lover. Theodore, this is Gerry Durrell.’

  Gerald described the tiny trapdoors in the olive grove and Dr Stephanides listened gravely. Perhaps, he suggested, they could go together to look at this phenomenon, since the olive grove lay on a roundabout route back to his home near Corfu town. ‘As we walked along I studied him covertly. He had a straight, well-shaped nose; a humorous mouth lurking in the ash-blond beard; straight, rather bushy eyebrows under which his eyes, keen but with a twinkle in them and laughter-wrinkles at the corners, surveyed the world. He strode along energetically, humming to himself.’

  A quick inspection revealed that each trapdoor concealed the entrance to a burrow from which a spider emerged to catch passing prey. The mystery solved, Dr Stephanides shook Gerald’s hand and prepared to go on his way. ‘He turned and stumped off down the hill, swinging his stick, staring about him with observant eyes. I was at once confused and amazed by Theodore. He was the only person I had met until now who seemed to share my enthusiasm for zoology. I was extremely flattered to find that he treated me and talked to me exactly as though I was his own age. Theodore not only talked to me as though I was grown up, but also as though I was as knowledgeable as he.’

  Gerald did not expect to meet the man again, but clearly his enthusiasm, high seriousness and powers of observation had made an impression on Theodore, for two days later Leslie came back from town carrying a parcel addressed to Gerald. Inside was a small box and a letter.

  My dear Gerry Durrell,

  I wondered, after our conversation the other day, if it might not assist your investigations of the local natural history to have some form of magnifying instrument. I am therefore sending you this pocket microscope, in the hope that it will be of some use to you. It is, of course, not of very high magnification, but you will find it sufficient for field work.

  With best wishes,

  Yours sincerely,

  Theo. Stephanides

  P.S. If you have nothing better to do on Thursday, perhaps you would care to come to tea, and I could show you some of my microscope slides.

  With the doctor and naturalist Theo Stephanides as his mentor, Gerald was to journey through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces and phenomena, entering the orbit of Zatopec the poet and the ex-King of Greece’s butler, the microscopic world of the scarlet mite and the one-eyed cyclops bug, the natural profligacy of the tortoise hills, the lake of lilies, the phosphorescent porpoise sea. In the course of his travels he was to become transformed, learning the language and gestures of rural Greece, absorbing its music and folklore, drinking its wine, singing its songs, and shedding his thin veneer of Englishness, so that in mind-set and social behaviour he was never to grow up a true Englishman – a handicap which, like his lack of a formal education, was to prove a tremendous boon in later years.

  Theodore Stephanides had just passed forty when Gerald first encountered him. Though the Stephanides family originated from Thessaly in Greece, Theo (like Gerald) was born in India, thus qualifying him for British as well as Greek nationality. At home in Bombay he and his family spoke only English, and it was not until his father retired to Corfu in 1907, when Theo was eleven, that he began to learn Greek properly. After serving in the Greek army in Macedonia in World War One and in Asia Minor in the ensuing war against the Turks, Theo went to Paris to study medicine, later returning to Corfu, where he established the island’s first x-ray unit in 1929, and shortly afterwards married Mary Alexander, a young woman of English and Greek parentage and the granddaughter of a former British Consul on Corfu. Though Theo was a doctor he was never well off, mainly because much of his work he did free of charge, and he and his wife lived in the same rented house in Corfu town throughout the period of their stay on the island.

  Theo was a man of immense integrity and courtesy, behaving in the same way to old and young, friends and strangers. He was shy socially, except with close friends, but he had a highly developed sense of humour and loved cracking a good joke, or even a really silly one, at which he would chuckle mightily. He loved Greek dances, and would sometimes perform a kalamatianos by himself.
He travelled all over Corfu in his spare time, by car where there were roads and on foot where there were not, singing almost every inch of the way. Whenever Gerald was with him he sang a nonsense song of which he was very fond, in a kind of pantomime English:

  There was an old man who lived in Jerusalem

  Glory Halleluiah, Hi-ero-jerum.

  He wore a top hat and he looked very sprucelum

  Glory Halleluiah, Hi-ero-jerum.

  Skinermer rinki doodle dum, skinermer rinki doodle dum

  Glory Halleluiah, Hi-ero-jerum …

  ‘It had a rousing tune,’ Gerald recalled, ‘that gave a new life to tired feet, and Theodore’s baritone voice and my shrill treble would ring out gaily through the gloomy trees.’

  Theo held views on ecological matters that were very advanced for their time, particularly in Greece, and these planted the germs of a way of thinking in young Gerald’s head that was to stand him in valuable stead in future years. If Theo went for a drive in the country he would throw tree seeds out of the window, in the hope that a few would take root, and he took time off to teach the peasants how to avoid soil erosion when they were tilling the ground, and to persuade them to restrain the goats from devouring everything that grew. As a good doctor he did his best to improve public health on the island, encouraging the villagers to stock their wells with a species of minnow which fed on mosquito larvae and thus helped eradicate malaria.

  For Gerald, being tutored by Theo was like going straight to Oxford or Harvard without the usual intermediary steps of primary and secondary schools in between. Theo was a walking, talking fount of knowledge, not only breathtakingly wide-ranging, but deep, detailed and exact. Born before the age of ultra-specialisation, he knew something – sometimes a great deal – about everything. In the course of a day he could engage the young Gerald in an advanced tutorial that would hop effortlessly through the fields of anthropology, ethnology, musicology, cosmology, ecology, biology, parasitology, biochemistry, medicine, history and much else. ‘I had few books to guide and explain,’ Gerald was to write, ‘and Theodore was for me a sort of walking, hirsute encyclopaedia.’