My Family and Other Animals

by Gerald Durrell

  Here Theodore paused and rasped his beard again and delicately inserted the end of his cane into the moving column of elvers so that they writhed indignantly.

  ‘They seem to have a very um… you know… strong homing instinct,’ said Theodore. ‘We must be some two miles from the sea, I suppose, and yet all these little elvers are making their way across this countryside in order to get back to the same lake that their parents left.’

  He paused and glanced about him keenly and then pointed with his stick.

  ‘It’s quite a hazardous journey,’ he observed, and I saw what he meant, for a kestrel was flying like a little black cross just above the line of baby eels, and as we watched he swooped and flew away with his claws firmly gripping a writhing mass of them.

  As we walked on, following the line of eels, since they were going in the same direction, we saw other predators at work. Groups of magpies and jackdaws and a couple of jays flew up at our approach and we caught, out of the corner of our eye, the red glint of a fox disappearing into the myrtle bushes.

  When we reached the lake-side, we had a set pattern of behaviour. First we would have a prolonged discussion as to which olive tree would be the best to put some of our equipment and our food under – which one would cast the deepest and the best shade at noon. Having decided on this, we would make a little pile of our possessions under it and then, armed with our nets and collecting boxes, we would approach the lake. Here we would potter happily for the rest of the morning, pacing with the slow concentration of a pair of fishing herons, dipping our nets into the weed-filigreed water. Here Theodore came into his own more than anywhere else. From the depths of the lake, as he stood there with the big scarlet dragon-flies zooming like arrows round him, he would extract magic that Merlin would have envied.

  Here in the still, wine-gold waters, lay a pygmy jungle. On the lake bottom prowled the deadly dragon-fly larvae, as cunning predators as the tiger, inching their way through the debris of a million last year’s leaves. Here the black tadpoles, sleek and shiny as licorice drops, disported in the shallows like plump herds of hippo in some African river. Through green forests of weed the multi-coloured swarms of microscopic creatures twitched and fluttered like flocks of exotic birds, while among the roots of the forests the newts, the leeches uncoiled like great snakes in the gloom, stretching out beseechingly, ever hungry. And here the caddis larvae, in their shaggy coats of twigs and debris, crawled dimly like bears fresh from hibernation across the sun-ringed hills and valleys of soft black mud.

  ‘Aha, now, this is rather interesting. You see this, um… little maggot-like thing? Now this is the larva of the China-mark moth. I think, as a matter of fact, you have got one in your collection. What? Well, they’re called China-mark moths because of the markings on the wing, which are said to resemble very closely marks that potters put on the base of, er… you know, very good china. Spode and so forth. Now the China-mark is interesting because it is one of the few moths that have aquatic larvae. The larvae live under water until they are… um… ready to pupate. The interesting thing about this particular species is that they have, er… um… you know, two forms of female. The male, of course, is fully winged and flies about when it hatches and er… so does one of the females. But the other female when it hatches out has, um… no wings and continues to live under the water, using its legs to swim with.’

  Theodore paced a little farther along the bank on the mud that was already dried and jigsawed by the spring sun. A kingfisher exploded like a blue firework from the small willow, and out on the centre of the lake a tern swooped and glided on graceful, sickle-shaped wings. Theodore dipped his net into the weedy water, sweeping it to and fro gently, as though he were stroking a cat. Then the net was lifted and held aloft, while the tiny bottle that dangled from it would be subjected to a minute scrutiny through a magnifying glass.

  ‘Um, yes. Some cyclopes. Two mosquito larvae. Aha, that’s interesting. You see this caddis Iarva has made his case entirely out of baby ram’s-horn snail shells. It is… you know… remarkably pretty. Ah now! Here we have, I think, yes, yes, here we have some rotifers.’

  In a desperate attempt to keep pace with this flood of knowledge, I asked what rotifers were and peered into the little bottle through the magnifying glass at the twitching, wriggling creatures, as Theodore told me.

  ‘The early naturalists used to call them wheel-animalcules, because of their curious limbs, you know. They wave them about in a very curious fashion, so that they almost look like, um… you know, um… er… like the wheels of a watch. When you next come to see me I’ll put some of these under the microscope for you. They are really extraordinarily beautiful creatures. These are, of course, all females.’

  I asked why, of course, they should be females?

  ‘This is one of the interesting things about the rotifer. The females produce virgin eggs. Um… that is to say, they produce eggs without having come into contact with a male. Um… er… somewhat like a chicken, you know. But the difference is that the rotifer eggs hatch out into other females which in turn are capable of laying more eggs which… um… again hatch out into females. But at certain times, the females lay smaller eggs, which hatch out into males. Now, as you will see when I put these under the microscope, the female has a – how shall one say? – a quite complex body, an alimentary tract, and so on. The male has nothing at all. He is really just, er… um… a swimming bag of sperm.’

  I was bereft of speech at the complexities of the private life of the rotifer.

  ‘Another curious thing about them,’ Theodore continued, happily piling miracle upon miracle, ‘is that at certain times, er… you know, if it is a hot summer or something like that and the pond is liable to dry up, they go down to the bottom and form a sort of hard shell round themselves. It’s a sort of suspended animation, for the pond can dry up for, er… um… let us say seven or eight years, and they will just lie there in the dust. But as soon as the first rain falls and fills the pond, they come to life again.’

  Again we moved forward, sweeping our nets through the balloon-like masses of frogs’ spawn and the trailing necklace-like strings of the toad spawn.

  ‘Here is, er… if you just take the glass a minute and look… an exceptionally fine hydra.’

  Through the glass there sprang to life a tiny fragment of weed to which was attached a long slender coffee-coloured column, at the top of which was a writhing mass of elegant tentacles. As I watched, a rotund and earnest cyclops, carrying two large and apparently heavy sacks containing pink eggs, swam in a series of breathless jerks too close to the writhing arms of the hydra. In a moment it was engulfed. It gave a couple of violent twitches before it was stung to death. I knew, if you watched long enough, you could watch the cyclops being slowly and steadily engulfed and passing, in the shape of a bulge, down the column of the hydra.

  Presently the height and the heat of the sun would tell us that it was lunch-time, and we would make our way back to our olive trees and sit there eating our food and drinking our ginger beer to the accompaniment of the sleepy zithering of the first-hatched cicadas of the year and the gentle, questioning coos of the collared doves.

  ‘In Greek,’ Theodore said, munching his sandwich methodically, ‘the name for collared dove is dekaoctur – “eighteener,” you know. The story goes that when Christ was… um… carrying the cross to Calvary, a Roman soldier, seeing that He was exhausted, took pity on Him. By the side of the road there was an old woman selling… um… you know… milk, and so the Roman soldier went to her and asked her how much a cupful would cost. She replied that it would cost eighteen coins. But the soldier had only seventeen. He… er… you know… pleaded with the woman to let him have a cupful of milk for Christ for seventeen coins, but the woman avariciously held out for eighteen. So, when Christ was crucified, the old woman was turned into a turtle dove and condemned to go about for the rest of her days repeating dekaocto, dekaocto – “eighteen, eighteen.” If ever she agrees to say deka-epta, se
venteen, she will regain her human form. If, out of obstinacy, she says deka-ennaea, nineteen, the world will come to an end.’

  In the cool olive shade the tiny ants, black and shiny as caviare, would be foraging for our left-overs among last year’s discarded olive leaves that the past summer’s sun had dried and coloured a nut-brown and banana-yellow. They lay there as curled and as crisp as brandy-snaps. On the hillside behind us a herd of goats passed, the leader’s bell clonking mournfully. We could hear the tearing sound of their jaws as they ate, indiscriminately, any foliage that came within their reach. The leader paced up to us and gazed for a minute with baleful, yellow eyes, snorting clouds of thyme-laden breath at us.

  ‘They should not, er… you know, be left unattended,’ said Theodore, prodding the goat gently with his stick. ‘Goats do more damage to the countryside than practically anything else.’

  The leader uttered a short sardonic ‘bah’ and then moved away, with his destructive troop following him.

  We would lie for an hour or so, drowsing, and digesting our food, staring up through the tangled olive branches at a sky that was patterned with tiny white clouds like a child’s finger-prints on a blue, frosty, winter window.

  ‘Well,’ Theodore would say at last, getting to his feet, ‘I think perhaps we ought to… you know… just see what the other side of the lake has to offer.’

  So once more we would commence our slow pacing of the rim of the shore. Steadily our test tubes, bottles, and jars would fill with a shimmer of microscopic life, and my boxes and tins and bags would be stuffed with frogs, baby terrapins, and a host of beetles.

  ‘I suppose,’ Theodore would say at last, reluctantly, glancing up at the sinking sun, ‘I suppose… you know… we ought to be getting along home.’

  And so we would laboriously hoist our now extremely heavy collecting boxes onto our shoulders and trudge homeward on weary feet, Roger, his tongue hanging out like a pink flag, trotting soberly ahead of us. Reaching the villa, our catches would be moved to more capacious quarters. Then Theodore and I would relax and discuss the day’s work, drinking gallons of hot, stimulating tea and gorging ourselves on golden scones, bubbling with butter, fresh from Mother’s oven.

  It was when I paid a visit to this lake without Theodore that I caught, quite by chance, a creature that I had long wanted to meet. As I drew my net up out of the waters and examined the tangled weed mass it contained, I found crouching there, of all unlikely things, a spider. I was delighted, for I had read about this curious beast, which must be one of the most unusual species of spider in the world, for it lives a very strange aquatic existence. It was about half an inch long and marked in a rather vague sort of way with silver and brown. I put it triumphantly into one of my collecting tins and carried it home tenderly.

  Here I set up an aquarium with a sandy floor and decorated it with some small dead branches and fronds of water-weed. Putting the spider on one of the twigs that stuck up above the water-level, I watched to see what it would do. It immediately ran down the twig and plunged into the water, where it turned a bright and beautiful silver, owing to the numerous minute air bubbles trapped in the hairs on its body. It spent five minutes or so running about below the surface of the water, investigating all the twigs and water-weed before it finally settled on a spot in which to construct its home.

  Now the water-spider was the original inventor of the diving-bell, and sitting absorbed in front of the aquarium, I watched how it was done. First the spider attached several lengthy strands of silk from the weeds to the twigs. These were to act as guy ropes. Then, taking up a position roughly in the centre of these guy ropes, it proceeded to spin an irregular oval-shaped flat web of a more or less conventional type, but of a finer mesh, so that it looked more like a cobweb. This occupied the greater part of two hours. Having got the structure of its home built to its satisfaction, it now had to give it an air supply. This it did by making numerous trips to the surface of the water and into the air. When it returned to the water its body would be silvery with air bubbles. It would then run down and take up its position underneath the web and, by stroking itself with its legs, rid itself of the air bubbles, which rose and were immediately trapped underneath the web. After it had done this five or six times, all the tiny bubbles under the web had amalgamated into one big bubble. As the spider added more and more air to this bubble and the bubble grew bigger and bigger, its strength started to push the web up until eventually the spider had achieved success. Firmly anchored by the guy ropes between the weed and the twigs was suspended a bell-shaped structure full of air. This was now the spider’s home in which it could live quite comfortably without even having to pay frequent visits to the surface, for the air in the bell would, I knew, be replenished by the oxygen given up by the weeds, and the carbon monoxide given out by the spider would soak through the silky walls of its house.

  Sitting and watching this miraculous piece of craftsmanship, I wondered how on earth the very first water-spider (who wanted to become a water-spider) had managed to work out this ingenious method of living below the surface. But the habit of living in its own home-made submarine is not the only peculiar thing about this spider. Unlike the greater majority of species, the male is about twice the size of the female, and once they have mated, the male is not devoured by his wife, as happens so frequently in the married life of the spider. I could tell from her size that my spider was a female and I thought that her abdomen looked rather swollen. It seemed to me she might be expecting a happy event, so I took great pains to make sure that she got plenty of good food. She liked fat green daphnia, which she was extraordinarily adept at catching as they swam past; but probably her favourite food of all was the tiny, newly hatched newt efts which, although they were a bulky prey for her, she never hesitated to tackle. Having captured whatever titbit happened to be passing, she would then carry it up into her bell and eat it there in comfort.

  Then came the great day when I saw that she was adding an extension to the bell. She did not hurry over this and it took her two days to complete. Then one morning, on peering into her tank, I saw to my delight that the nursery contained a round ball of eggs. In due course these hatched out into miniature replicas of the mother. I soon had more water-spiders than I knew what to do with and I found, to my annoyance, that the mother, with complete lack of parental feeling, was happily feeding off her own progeny. So I was forced to move the babies into another aquarium, but as they grew they took to feeding upon each other and so in the end I just kept the two most intelligent-looking ones and took all the rest down to the lake and let them go.

  It was at this time, when I was deeply involved with the water-spiders, that Sven Olson at last turned up. Larry, to Mother’s consternation, had developed the habit of inviting hordes of painters, poets, and authors to stay without any reference to her. Sven Olson was a sculptor, and we had had some warning of his impending arrival, for he had been bombarding us for several weeks with contradictory telegrams about his movements, which had driven Mother to distraction because she kept having to make and unmake his bed. Mother and I were having a quiet cup of tea on the veranda when a cab made its appearance, wound its way up the drive, and came to a stop in front of the house. In the back was seated an enormous man who bore a remarkable facial resemblance to the reconstructions of Neanderthal man. He was clad in a white singlet, a pair of voluminous brightly checked plus fours, and sandals. On his massive head was a broad-brimmed straw hat. The two holes situated one each side of the crown argued that this hat had been designed for the use of a horse. He got ponderously out of the cab, carrying a very large and battered Gladstone bag and an accordion. Mother and I went down to greet him. As he saw us approaching, he swept off his hat and bowed, revealing that his enormous cranium was completely devoid of hair except for a strange, grey, tattered duck’s tail on the nape of his neck.

  ‘Mrs Durrell?’ he inquired, fixing Mother with large and childlike blue eyes. ‘I am enchanted to meet you. My name is Sven.
’

  His English was impeccable, with scarcely any trace of an accent, but his voice was quite extraordinary, for it wavered between a deep rich baritone and a quavering falsetto, as though, in spite of his age, his voice was only just breaking. He extended a very large, white, spade-shaped hand to Mother and bowed once again.

  ‘Well, I am glad you have managed to get here at last,’ said Mother, brightly and untruthfully. ‘Do come in and have some tea.’

  I carried his accordion and his Gladstone bag and we all went and sat on the balcony and drank tea and stared at each other. There was a long, long silence while Sven munched on a piece of toast and occasionally smiled lovingly at Mother, while she smiled back and desperately searched her mind for suitable intellectual topics of conversation. Sven swallowed a piece of toast and coughed violently. His eyes filled with tears.

  ‘I love toast,’ he gasped. ‘I simply love it. But it always does this to me.’

  We plied him with more tea and presently his paroxysms of coughing died away. He sat forward, his huge hands folded in his lap, showing white as marble against the hideous pattern of his plus fours, and fixed Mother with an inquiring eye.

  ‘Are you,’ he inquired wistfully, ‘are you, by any chance, musically inclined?’

  ‘Well,’ said Mother, startled, and obviously suffering from the hideous suspicion that if she said ‘Yes’ Sven might ask her to sing, ‘I like music, of course, but I… can’t play anything.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Sven diffidently, ‘you wouldn’t like me to play something for you?’

  ‘Oh, er, yes, by all means,’ said Mother. ‘That would be delightful.’

  Sven beamed lovingly at her, picked up his accordion and unstrapped it. He extended it like a caterpillar and it produced noise like the tail-end of a donkey’s bray.

  ‘She,’ said Sven, lovingly patting the accordion, ‘has got some sea air in her.’