My Family and Other Animals

by Gerald Durrell

  ‘Well, in weather like this the sea will be very calm, so I should think you’ll be all right,’ said Margo.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ said Theodore, rocking on his toes, ‘that does not make any difference at all. I suffer from the… er… slightest motion. In fact on several occasions when I have been in the cinema and they have shown films of ships in rough seas I have been forced to… um… forced to leave my seat.’

  ‘Simplest thing would be to divide up,’ said Leslie; ‘half go by boat and the other half go by car.’

  ‘That’s a brain-wave!’ said Mother. ‘The problem is solved.’

  But it did not settle the problem at all, for we discovered that the road to Antiniotissa was blocked by a minor landslide, and so to get there by car was impossible. We would have to go by sea or not at all.

  We set off in a warm pearly dawn that foretold a breathlessly warm day and a calm sea. In order to cope with the family, the dogs, Spiro, and Sophia, we had to take the Bootle-Bumtrinket as well as the Sea Cow. Having to trail the Bootle-Bumtrinket’s rotund shape behind her cut down on the Sea Cow’s speed, but it was the only way to do it. At Larry’s suggestion the dogs, Sophia, Mother, and Theodore travelled in the Bootle-Bumtrinket while the rest of us piled into the Sea Cow. Unfortunately Larry had not taken into consideration one important factor: the wash caused by the Sea Cow’s passage. The wave curved like a wall of blue glass from her stern and reached its maximum height just as it struck the broad breast of the Bootle-Bumtrinket, lifting her up into the air and dropping her down again with a thump. We did not notice the effect the wash was having for some considerable time, for the noise of the engine drowned the frantic cries for help from Mother. When we eventually stopped and let the Bootle-Bumtrinket bounce up to us, we found that not only were both Theodore and Dodo ill, but everyone else was as well, including such a hardened and experienced sailor as Roger. We had to get them all into the Sea Cow and lay them out in a row, and Spiro, Larry, Margo, and myself took up our positions in the Bootle-Bumtrinket. By the time we were nearing Antiniotissa everyone was feeling better, with the exception of Theodore, who still kept as close to the side of the boat as possible, staring hard at his boots and answering questions monosyllabically. We rounded the last headland of red and gold rocks, lying in wavy layers like piles of gigantic fossilized newspapers, or the rusty and mould-covered wreckage of a colossus’s library, and the Sea Cow and the Bootle-Bumtrinket turned into the wide blue bay that lay at the mouth of the lake. The curve of pearl-white sand was backed by the great lily-covered dune behind, a thousand white flowers in the sunshine like a multitude of ivory horns lifting their lips to the sky and producing, instead of music, a rich, heavy scent that was the distilled essence of summer, a warm sweetness that made you breathe deeply time and again in an effort to retain it within you. The engine died away in a final splutter that echoed briefly among the rocks, and then the two boats whispered their way shorewards, and the scent of the lilies came out over the water to greet us.

  Having got the equipment ashore and installed it on the white sand, we each wandered off about our own business. Larry and Margo lay in the shallow water half asleep, being rocked by the faint, gentle ripples. Mother led her cavalcade off on a short walk, armed with a trowel and a basket. Spiro, clad only in his underpants and looking like some dark, hairy prehistoric man, waddled into the stream that flowed from the lake to the sea and stood knee deep, scowling down into the transparent waters, a trident held at the ready as the shoals of fish flicked around his feet. Theodore and I drew lots with Leslie as to which side of the lake we should have, and then set off in opposite directions. The boundary marking the half-way mark on the lake shore was a large and particularly misshapen olive. Once we reached there we would turn back and retrace our footsteps, and Leslie would do the same on his side. This cut out the possibility of his shooting us, by mistake, in some dense and confusing cane brake. So, while Theodore and I dipped and pottered among the pools and streamlets, like a pair of eager herons, Leslie strode stockily through the undergrowth on the other side of the lake, and an occasional explosion would echo across to us to mark his progress.

  Lunch-time came and we assembled hungrily on the beach, Leslie with a bulging bag of game, hares damp with blood, partridge and quail, snipe and wood pigeons; Theodore and I with our test-tubes and bottles a-shimmer with small life. A fire blazed, the food was piled on the rugs, and the wine was fetched from the sea’s edge where it had been put to cool. Larry pulled his corner of the rug up the dune so that he could stretch full-length surrounded by the white trumpets of the lilies. Theodore sat upright and neat, his beard wagging as he chewed his food slowly and methodically. Margo sprawled elegantly in the sun, picking daintily at a pile of fruit and vegetables. Mother and Dodo were installed in the shade of a large umbrella. Leslie squatted on his haunches in the sand, his gun across his thighs, eating a huge hunk of cold meat with one hand and stroking the barrels of the weapon meditatively with the other. Nearby Spiro crouched by the fire, sweat running down his furrowed face and dropping in gleaming drops into the thick pelt of black hair on his chest, as he turned an improvised olive-wood spit, with seven fat snipe on it, over the flames.

  ‘What a heavenly place!’ mumbled Larry through a mouthful of food, lying back luxuriously among the shining flowers. ‘I feel this place was designed for me. I should like to lie here for ever, having food and wine pressed into my mouth by groups of naked and voluptuous dryads. Eventually, of course, over the centuries, by breathing deeply and evenly I should embalm myself with this scent, and then one day my faithful dryads would find me gone, and only the scent would remain. Will someone throw me one of those delicious-looking figs?’

  ‘I read a most interesting book on embalming once,’ said Theodore enthusiastically. ‘They certainly seemed to go to a great deal of trouble to prepare the bodies in Egypt. I must say I thought the method of… er… extracting the brain through the nose was most ingenious.’

  ‘Dragged them down through the nostrils with a sort of hook arrangement, didn’t they?’ inquired Larry.

  ‘Larry, dear, not while we’re eating.’

  Lunch being over we drifted into the shade of the nearby olives and drowsed sleepily through the heat of the afternoon, while the sharp, soothing song of the cicadas poured over us. Occasionally one or another of us would rise, wander down to the sea, and flop into the shallows for a minute before coming back, cooled, to resume his siesta. At four o’clock Spiro, who had been stretched out massive and limp, bubbling with snores, regained consciousness with a snort and waddled down the beach to relight the fire for tea. The rest of us awoke slowly, dreamily, stretching and sighing, and drifted down over the sand towards the steaming, chattering kettle. As we crouched with the cups in our hands, blinking and musing, still half asleep, a robin appeared among the lilies and hopped down towards us, his breast glowing, his eyes bright. He paused some ten feet away and surveyed us critically. Deciding that we needed some entertainment, he hopped to where a pair of lilies formed a beautiful arch, posed beneath them theatrically, puffed out his chest, and piped a liquid, warbling song. When he had finished he suddenly ducked his head in what appeared to be a ludicrously conceited bow, and then flipped off through the lilies, frightened by our burst of laughter.

  ‘They are dear little things, robins,’ said Mother. ‘There was one in England that used to spend hours by me when I was gardening. I love the way they puff up their little chests.’

  ‘The way that one bobbed looked exactly as if he was bowing,’ said Theodore. ‘I must say when he… er… puffed up his chest he looked very like a rather… you know… a rather outsize opera singer.’

  ‘Yes, singing something rather frothy and light… Strauss, I should think,’ agreed Larry.

  ‘Talking of operas,’ said Theodore, his eyes gleaming, ‘did I ever tell you about the last opera we had in Corfu?’

  We said no, he hadn’t told us, and settled ourselves comfortably, getting
almost as much amusement from the sight of Theodore telling the story as from the story itself.

  ‘It was… um… one of those travelling opera companies, you know. I think it came from Athens, but it may have been Italy. Anyway, their first performance was to be Tosca. The singer who took the part of the heroine was exceptionally… er… well developed, as they always seem to be. Well, as you know, in the final act of the opera the heroine casts herself to her doom from the battlements of a fortress – or, rather, a castle. On the first night the heroine climbed up onto the castle walls, sang her final song, and then cast herself to her… you know… her doom on the rocks below. Unfortunately it seems that the stage hands had forgotten to put anything beneath the walls for her to land on. The result was that the crash of her landing and her subsequent… er… yells of pain detracted somewhat from the impression that she was a shattered corpse on the rocks far below. The singer who was just bewailing the fact that she was dead had to sing quite… er… quite powerfully in order to drown her cries. The heroine was, rather naturally, somewhat upset by the incident, and so the following night the stage hands threw themselves with enthusiasm into the job of giving her a pleasant landing. The heroine, somewhat battered, managed to hobble her way through the opera until she reached the… er… final scene. Then she again climbed onto the battlements, sang her last song, and cast herself to her death. Unfortunately the stage hands, having made the landing too hard on the first occasion, had gone to the opposite extreme. The huge pile of mattresses and… er… you know, those springy bed things, was so resilient that the heroine hit them and then bounced up again. So while the cast was down at the… er… what d’you call them?… ah, yes, the footlights, telling each other she was dead, the upper portions of the heroine reappeared two or three times above the battlements, to the mystification of the audience.’

  The robin, who had hopped nearer during the telling of the story, took fright and flew off again as we exploded in a burst of laughter.

  ‘Really, Theodore, I’m sure you spend your spare time making up these stories,’ protested Larry.

  ‘No, no,’ said Theodore, smiling happily in his beard; ‘if it were anywhere else in the world I would have to, but here in Corfu they… er… anticipate art, as it were.’

  Tea over, Theodore and I returned to the lake’s edge once more and continued our investigation until it grew too shadowy to see properly; then we walked slowly back to the beach, where the fire Spiro had built pulsed and glowed like an enormous chrysanthemum among the ghostly white lilies. Spiro, having speared three large fish, was roasting them on a grid, absorbed and scowling, putting now a flake of garlic, now a squeeze of lemon-juice or a sprinkle of pepper on the delicate white flesh that showed through where the charred skin was starting to peel off. The moon rose above the mountains, turned the lilies to silver except where the flickering flames illuminated them with a flush of pink. The tiny ripples sped over the moonlit sea and breathed with relief as they reached the shore at last. Owls started to chime in the trees, and in the gloomy shadows fireflies gleamed as they flew, their jade-green, misty lights pulsing on and off.

  Eventually, yawning and stretching, we carried our things down to the boats. We rowed out to the mouth of the bay, and then, in the pause while Leslie fiddled with the engine, we looked back at Antiniotissa. The lilies were like a snow-field under the moon, and the dark backcloth of olives was pricked with the lights of fireflies. The fire we had built, stamped and ground underfoot before we left, glowed like a patch of garnets at the edge of the flowers.

  ‘It is certainly a very… er… beautiful place,’ said Theodore with immense satisfaction.

  ‘It’s a glorious place,’ agreed Mother, and then gave it her highest accolade, ‘I should like to be buried there.’

  The engine stuttered uncertainly, then broke into a deep roar; the Sea Cow gathered speed and headed along the coastline, trailing the Bootle-Bumtrinket behind, and beyond that our wash fanned out, white and delicate as a spider’s web on the dark water, flaming here and there with a momentary spark of phosphorescence.

  17

  The Chessboard Fields

  Below the villa, between the line of hills on which it stood and the sea, were the Chessboard Fields. The sea curved into the coast in a great, almost landlocked bay, shallow and bright, and on the flat land along its edges lay the intricate pattern of narrow waterways that had once been salt pans in the Venetian days. Each neat little patch of earth, framed with canals, was richly cultivated and green with crops of maize, potatoes, figs, and grapes. These fields, small coloured squares edged with shining waters, lay like a sprawling, multicoloured chessboard on which the peasants’ coloured figures moved from place to place.

  This was one of my favourite areas for hunting in, for the tiny waterways and the lush undergrowth harboured a multitude of creatures. It was easy to get lost there, for if you were enthusiastically chasing a butterfly and crossed the wrong little wooden bridge from one island to the next you could find yourself wandering to and fro, trying to get your bearings in a bewildering maze of fig-trees, reeds, and curtains of tall maize. Most of the fields belonged to friends of mine, peasant families who lived up in the hills, and so when I was walking there I was always sure of being able to rest and gossip over a bunch of grapes with some acquaintance, or to receive interesting items of news, such as the fact that there was a lark’s nest under the melon plants on Georgio’s land. If you walked straight across the chessboard without being distracted by friends, side-tracked by terrapins sliding down the mud banks and plopping into the water, or the sudden crackling buzz of a dragon-fly swooping past, you eventually came to the spot where all the channels widened and vanished into a great flat acreage of sand, moulded into endless neat pleats by the previous night’s tides. Here long winding chains of flotsam marked the sea’s slow retreat, fascinating chains full of coloured seaweed, dead pipe-fish, fishing-net corks that looked good enough to eat – like lumps of rich fruit cake – bits of bottle-glass emeried and carved into translucent jewels by the tide and the sand, shells as spiky as hedgehogs, others smooth, oval, and delicate pink, like the finger-nails of some drowned goddess. This was the sea-birds’ country: snipe, oyster-catcher, dunlin, and terns strewn in small pattering groups at the edge of the sea, where the long ripples ran towards the land and broke in long curving ruffs round the little humps of sand. Here, if you felt hungry, you could wade out into the shallows and catch fat, transparent shrimps that tasted as sweet as grapes when eaten raw, or you could dig down with your toes until you found the ribbed, nutlike cockles. Two of these, placed end to end, hinge to hinge, and then twisted sharply in opposite directions, opened each other neatly; the contents, though slightly rubbery, were milky and delicious to eat.

  One afternoon, having nothing better to do, I decided to take the dogs and visit the fields. I would make yet another attempt to catch Old Plop, cut across to the sea for a feed of cockles and a swim, and make my way home via Petro’s land so that I could sit and exchange gossip with him over a watermelon or a few plump pomegranates. Old Plop was a large and ancient terrapin that lived in one of the canals. I had been trying to capture him for a month or more, but in spite of his age he was very wily and quick, and no matter how cautiously I stalked him when he lay asleep on the muddy bank, he would always wake up at the crucial moment, his legs would flail frantically, and he would slide down the mud slope and plop into the water like a corpulent lifeboat being launched. I had caught a great many terrapins, of course, both the black ones with the thick freckling of golden pin-head spots on them, and the slim grey ones with fawny-cream lines; but Old Plop was something I had set my heart on. He was bigger than any terrapin I had seen, and so old that his battered shell and wrinkled skin had become completely black, losing any markings they may have had in his distant youth. I was determined to possess him, and as I had left him alone for a whole week I thought it was high time to launch another attack.

  With my bag of bottles and
boxes, my net, and a basket to put Old Plop in should I catch him, I set off down the hill with the dogs. The Magenpies called ‘Gerry!… Gerry!… Gerry!’ after me in tones of agonized entreaty, and then, finding I did not turn, they fell to jeering and cackling and making rude noises. Their harsh voices faded as we entered the olive groves, and were then obliterated by the choir of cicadas whose song made the air tremble. We made our way along the road, hot, white, and as soft as a powder-puff underfoot. I paused at Yani’s well for a drink, and then leaned over the rough sty made from olive branches in which the two pigs lived, wallowing with sonorous content in a sea of glutinous mud. Having sniffed deeply and appreciatively at them, and slapped the largest on his grubby, quivering behind, I continued down the road. At the next bend I had a brisk argument with two fat peasant ladies, balancing baskets of fruit on their heads, who were wildly indignant at Widdle. He had crept up on them when they were engrossed in conversation and after sniffing at them had lived up to his name over their skirts and legs. The argument as to whose fault it was kept all of us happily occupied for ten minutes, and was then continued as I walked on down the road, until we were separated by such a distance that we could no longer hear and appreciate each other’s insults.

  Cutting across the first three fields, I paused for a moment in Taki’s patch to sample his grapes. He wasn’t there, but I knew he wouldn’t mind. The grapes were the small fat variety, with a sweet, musky flavour. When you squeezed them the entire contents, soft and seedless, shot into your mouth, leaving the flaccid skin between your finger and thumb. The dogs and I ate four bunches and I put another two bunches in my collecting bag for future reference, after which we followed the edge of the canal towards the place where Old Plop had his favourite mud slide. As we were drawing near to this spot, I was just about to caution the dogs on the need for absolute silence when a large green lizard flashed out of a wheat-patch and scuttled away. The dogs, barking wildly, galloped in eager pursuit. By the time I reached Old Plop’s mud slide there was only a series of gently expanding ripples on the water to tell me that he had been present. I sat down and waited for the dogs to rejoin me, running through in my mind the rich and colourful insults with which I would bombard them. But to my surprise they did not come back. Their yelping in the distance died away, there was a pause, and then they started to bark in a chorus – monotonous, evenly spaced barks that meant they had found something. Wondering what it could be I hurried after them.