My Family and Other Animals

by Gerald Durrell

  ‘What is it, dear?’ Mother asked me.

  I explained that it was an exceedingly interesting hawks-bill turtle, female, containing eggs.

  ‘Surely you don’t have to chop it up on the veranda?’ said Mother.

  ‘The boy’s mad,’ said Larry with conviction. ‘The whole place smells like a bloody whaling ship.’

  ‘I really think you’ll have to take it somewhere else, dear,’ said Mother. ‘We can’t have this smell on the front veranda.’

  ‘Tell him to bury the damned thing,’ said Leslie, clasping his blankets more firmly about him.

  ‘Why don’t you get him adopted by a family of Eskimos?’ inquired Larry. ‘They like eating blubber and maggots and things.’

  ‘Larry, don’t be disgusting,’ said Margo. ‘They can’t eat anything like this. The very thought of it makes me feel sick.’

  ‘I think we ought to go inside,’ said Mother faintly. ‘Perhaps it won’t smell as much in there.’

  ‘If anything, it smells worse in here,’ shouted Leslie from the French windows.

  ‘Gerry dear, you must clean this up,’ said Mother as she picked her way delicately over the turtle’s entrails, ‘and disinfect the flagstones.’

  The family went inside and I set about the task of clearing up the turtle from the front veranda. Their voices arguing ferociously drifted out to me.

  ‘Bloody menace,’ said Leslie. ‘Lying here peacefully reading, and I was suddenly seized by the throat.’

  ‘Disgusting,’ said Margo. ‘I don’t wonder Lugaretzia fainted.’

  ‘High time he had another tutor,’ said Larry. ‘You leave the house for five minutes and come back and find him disembowelling Moby Dick on the front porch.’

  ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean any harm,’ said Mother, ‘but it was rather silly of him to do it on the veranda.’

  ‘Silly!’ said Larry caustically. ‘We’ll be blundering round the house with gas-masks for the next six months.’

  I piled the remains of the turtle into the wheelbarrow and took it up to the top of the hill behind the villa. Here I dug a hole and buried all the soft parts and then placed the shell and the bone structure near a nest of friendly ants, who had, on previous occasions, helped me considerably by picking skeletons clean. But the most they had ever tackled had been a very large green lizard, so I was interested to see whether they would tackle the turtle. They ran towards it, their antennae waving eagerly, and then stopped, thought about it for a bit, held a little consultation and then retreated in a body; apparently even the ants were against me, so I returned dispiritedly to the villa.

  Here I found that a thin, whining little man, obviously made belligerent by wine, was arguing with Lugaretzia on the still-odoriferous veranda. I inquired what the man wanted.

  ‘He says,’ said Lugaretzia, with fine scorn, ‘that Roger has been killing his chickens.’

  ‘Turkeys,’ corrected the man. ‘Turkeys.’

  ‘Well, turkeys then,’ said Lugaretzia, conceding the point.

  My heart sank. One calamity was being succeeded by another. Roger, we knew, had the most reprehensible habit of killing chickens. He derived a lot of innocent amusement in the spring and summer by chasing swallows. They would drive him into an apoplectic fury by zooming past his nose and then flying along the ground just ahead of him while he chased them, bristling with rage, uttering roars of fury. The peasants’ chickens used to hide in the myrtle bushes and then, just as Roger was passing, they would leap out with a great flutter of wings and insane hysterical cackling right into his path. Roger, I was sure, was convinced that these chickens were a sort of ungainly swallow that he could get to grips with and so, in spite of yells of protest on our part, he would leap on them and kill them with one swift bite, all his hatred of the teasing summer swallows showing in his action. No punishment had any effect on him. He was normally an extremely obedient dog, except about this one thing, and so, in desperation, all we could do was to recompense the owners, but only on condition that the corpse of the chicken was produced as evidence.

  Reluctantly I went in to tell the family that Roger had been at it again.

  ‘Christ!’ said Leslie, getting laboriously to his feet. ‘You and your sodding animals.’

  ‘Now, now, dear,’ said Mother placatingly. ‘Gerry can’t help it if Roger kills chickens.’

  ‘Turkeys,’ said Leslie. ‘I bet he’ll want a hell of a lot for those.’

  ‘Have you cleaned up the veranda, dear?’ inquired Mother.

  Larry removed a large handkerchief, drenched in eau-de-Cologne, which he had spread over his face. ‘Does it smell as though he’s cleaned up the veranda?’ he inquired.

  I said hastily that I was just about to do it and followed Leslie to see the outcome of his conversation with the turkey owner.

  ‘Well,’ said Leslie belligerently, striding out onto the veranda, ‘what do you want?’

  The man cringed, humble, servile, and altogether repulsive.

  ‘Be happy, kyrié, be happy,’ he said, greeting Leslie.

  ‘Be happy,’ Leslie replied in a gruff tone of voice that implied he hoped the man would be anything but. ‘What do you wish to see me about?’

  ‘My turkeys, kyrié,’ explained the man. ‘I apologize for troubling you, but your dog, you see, he’s been killing my turkeys.’

  ‘Well,’ said Leslie, ‘how many has he killed?’

  ‘Five, kyrié,’ said the man, shaking his head sorrowfully. ‘Five of my best turkeys. I am a poor man, kyrié, otherwise I wouldn’t have dreamed…’

  ‘Five!’ said Leslie startled, and turned an inquiring eye on me.

  I said I thought it was quite possible. If five hysterical turkeys had leaped out of a myrtle bush, I could well believe that Roger would kill them all. For such a benign and friendly dog, he was a very ruthless killer when he got started.

  ‘Roger is a good dog,’ said Lugaretzia belligerently.

  She had joined us on the veranda and she obviously viewed the turkey owner with the same dislike as I did. Apart from this, in her eyes Roger could do no wrong.

  ‘Well,’ said Leslie, making the best of a bad job, ‘if he’s killed five turkeys, he’s killed five turkeys. Such is life. Where are the bodies?’

  There was a moment of silence.

  ‘The bodies, kyrié?’ queried the turkey owner tentatively.

  ‘The bodies, the bodies,’ said Leslie impatiently. ‘You know, the bodies of the turkeys. You know we can’t pay until you produce the bodies.’

  ‘But that’s not possible,’ said the turkey owner nervously.

  ‘What do you mean, not possible?’ inquired Leslie.

  ‘Well, it’s not possible to bring the bodies, kyrié,’ said the turkey owner with a flash of inspiration, ‘because your dog has eaten them.’

  The explosion that this statement provoked was considerable. We all knew that Roger was, if anything, slightly overfed, and that he was of a most fastidious nature. Though he would kill a chicken, nothing would induce him to feed upon the carcass.

  ‘Lies! Lies!’ shrilled Lugaretzia, her eyes swimming with tears of emotion. ‘He’s a good dog.’

  ‘He’s never eaten anything in his life that he’s killed,’ shouted Leslie. ‘Never.’

  ‘But five of my turkeys!’ said the little man. ‘Five of them he’s eaten!’

  ‘When did he kill them?’ roared Leslie.

  ‘This morning, kyrié, this morning,’ said the man, crossing himself. ‘I saw it myself, and he ate them all.’

  I interrupted to say that Roger had been out that morning in the Bootle-Bumtrinket with me and, intelligent dog though he was, I did not see how he could be consuming the prodigious quantity of five turkeys on this man’s farm and be out in the boat with me at the same time.

  Leslie had had a trying morning. All he had wanted was to lie peacefully on the sofa with his manual of ballistics, but first he had been almost asphyxiated by my investigations into the internal an
atomy of the turtle and now he was being faced by a drunken little man, trying to swindle us for the price of five turkeys. His temper, never under the best of control, bubbled over.

  ‘You’re a two-faced liar and a cheat,’ he snarled. The little man backed away and his face went white.

  ‘You are the liar and the cheat,’ he said, with drunken belligerence. ‘You are the liar and the cheat. You let your dog kill everybody’s chickens and turkeys and then when they come to you for payment, you refuse. You are the liar and the cheat.’

  Even at that stage, I think that sanity could have prevailed, but the little man made a fatal mistake. He spat copiously and wetly at Leslie’s feet. Lugaretzia uttered a shrill wail of horror and grabbed hold of Leslie’s arm. Knowing his temper, I grabbed hold of the other one, too. The little man, appalled into a moment of sobriety, backed away. Leslie quivered like a volcano and Lugaretzia and I hung on like grim death.

  ‘Excreta of a pig,’ roared Leslie. ‘Illegitimate son of a diseased whore…’

  The fine Greek oaths rolled out, rich, vulgar, and biological, and the little man turned from white to pink and from pink to red. He had obviously been unaware of the fact that Leslie had such a command over the fruitier of the Greek insults.

  ‘You’ll be sorry,’ he quavered. ‘You’ll be sorry.’

  He spat once more with a pathetic sort of defiance and then turned and scuttled down the drive.

  It took the combined efforts of the family and Lugaretzia three quarters of an hour to calm Leslie down, with the aid of several large brandies.

  ‘Don’t you worry about him, kyrié Leslie,’ was Lugaretzia’s final summing up. ‘He’s well known in the village as a bad character. Don’t you worry about him.’

  But we were forced to worry about him, for the next thing we knew, he had sued Leslie for not paying his debts and for defamation of character.

  Spiro, when told the news, was furious.

  ‘Gollys, Mrs Durrells,’ he said, his face red with wrath. ‘Why don’ts yous lets Masters Leslies shoot the son of a bitch?’

  ‘I don’t think that would really solve anything, Spiro,’ said Mother. ‘What we want to know now is whether this man has any chance of winning his case.’

  ‘Winnings!’ said Spiro with fine scorn. ‘That bastard won’t wins anythings. You just leaves it to me. I’ll fixes it.’

  ‘Now, don’t go and do anything rash, Spiro,’ said Mother. ‘It’ll only make matters worse.’

  ‘I won’ts do anything rash, Mrs Durrells. But I’ll fixes that bastard.’

  For several days he went about with an air of conspiratorial gloom, his bushy eyebrows tangled in a frown of immense concentration, only answering our questions monosyllabically. Then, one day, a fortnight or so before the case was due to be heard, we were all in town on a shopping spree. Eventually, weighed down by our purchases, we made our way to the broad, tree-lined Esplanade and sat there having a drink and exchanging greetings with our numerous acquaintances who passed. Presently Spiro, who had been glaring furtively about him with the air of a man who had many enemies, suddenly stiffened. He hitched his great belly up and leaned across the table.

  ‘Master Leslies, you sees that mans over there, that one with the white hair?’

  He pointed a sausage-like finger at a small, neat little man who was placidly sipping a cup of coffee under the trees.

  ‘Well, what about him?’ inquired Leslie.

  ‘He’s the judges,’ said Spiro.

  ‘What judge?’ said Leslie, bewildered.

  ‘The judges who is going to tries your case,’ said Spiro. ‘I wants you go to over there and talks to him.’

  ‘Do you think that’s wise?’ said Leslie. ‘He might think I’m trying to muck about with the course of justice and give me ten years in prison or something.’

  ‘Gollys, nos,’ said Spiro, aghast at such a thought. ‘He wouldn’t puts Master Leslies in prison. He knows better than to do thats while I ams here.’

  ‘But even so, Spiro, don’t you think he’ll think it a little funny if Leslie suddenly starts talking to him?’ asked Mother.

  ‘Gollys nos,’ said Spiro. He glanced about him to make sure that we weren’t overheard, leaned forward, and whispered, ‘He collects stamps.’

  The family looked bewildered.

  ‘You mean he’s a philatelist?’ said Larry at length.

  ‘No, no, Master Larrys,’ said Spiro. ‘He’s not one of them. He’s a married man and he’s gots two childrens.’

  The whole conversation seemed to be getting even more involved than the normal ones that we had with Spiro.

  ‘What,’ said Leslie patiently, ‘has his collecting stamps got to do with it?’

  ‘I will takes you over there,’ said Spiro, laying bare for the first time the Machiavellian intricacies of his plot, ‘and yous tells hims that you will get him some stamps from England.’

  ‘But that’s bribery,’ said Margo, shocked.

  ‘It isn’t bribery, Misses Margos,’ said Spiro. ‘He collects stamps. He wants stamps.’

  ‘I should think if you tried to bribe him with stamps he’d give you about five hundred years’ penal servitude,’ said Larry to Leslie judiciously.

  I asked eagerly whether, if Leslie was condemned, he would be sent to Vido, the convict settlement on a small island that lay in the sparkling sea half a mile or so from the town.

  ‘No, no, dear,’ said Mother, getting increasingly flustered. ‘Leslie won’t be sent to Vido.’

  I felt this was rather a pity. I already had one convict friend, serving a sentence for the murder of his wife, who lived on Vido. He was a ‘trusty’ and so had been allowed to build his own boat and row home for the week-ends. He had given me a monstrous black-backed gull which tyrannized all my pets and the family. I felt that, exciting though it was to have a real murderer as a friend, it would have been better to have Leslie incarcerated on Vido so that he too could come home for the week-ends. To have a convict brother would, I felt, be rather exotic.

  ‘I don’t see that if I just go and talk to him it can do any harm,’ said Leslie.

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ said Margo. ‘Remember, there’s many a slip without a stitch.’

  ‘I do think you ought to be careful, dear,’ said Mother.

  ‘I can see it all,’ said Larry with relish. ‘Leslie with a ball and chain; Spiro too, probably, as an accessory. Margo knitting them warm socks for the winter, Mother sending them food parcels and anti-lice ointment.’

  ‘Oh, do stop it, Larry,’ said Mother crossly. ‘This is no laughing matter.’

  ‘All you’ve gots to dos is to talks to him, Master Leslies,’ said Spiro earnestly. ‘Honest to Gods you’ve got to, otherwise I can’t fixes it.’

  Spiro had, prior to this, never let us down. His advice had always been sound, and even if it hadn’t been legal, we had never so far come to grief.

  ‘All right,’ said Leslie. ‘Let’s give it a bash.’

  ‘Do be careful, dear,’ said Mother as Leslie and Spiro rose and walked over to where the judge was sitting.

  The judge greeted them charmingly and for half an hour Leslie and Spiro sat at his table sipping coffee while Leslie talked to him in voluble, but inaccurate, Greek. Presently the judge rose and left them with much handshaking and bowing. They returned to our table where we waited agog for the news.

  ‘Charming old boy,’ said Leslie. ‘Couldn’t have been nicer. I promised to get him some stamps. Who do we know in England who collects them?’

  ‘Well, your father used to,’ said Mother. ‘He was a very keen philatelist when he was alive.’

  ‘Gollys, don’t says that Mrs Durrells,’ said Spiro, in genuine anguish.

  A short pause ensued while the family explained to him the meaning of the word philatelist.

  ‘I still don’t see how this is going to help the case,’ said Larry, ‘even if you inundate him with penny blacks.’

  ‘Never yous minds, Masters Larrys,’
said Spiro darkly. ‘I said I’d fixes it and I will. You just leaves it to me.’

  For the next few days Leslie, convinced that Spiro could obstruct the course of justice, wrote to everybody he could think of in England and demanded stamps. The result was that our mail increased threefold and that practically every free space in the villa was taken up by piles of stamps which, whenever a wind blew, would drift like autumn leaves across the room, to the vociferous, snarling delight of the dogs. As a result of this, many of the stamps began to look slightly the worse for wear.

  ‘You’re not going to give him those, are you?’ said Larry, disdainfully surveying a pile of mangled, semi-masticated stamps that Leslie had rescued from the jaws of Roger half an hour previously.

  ‘Well, stamps are supposed to be old, aren’t they?’ said Leslie belligerently.

  ‘Old, perhaps,’ said Larry, ‘but surely not covered with enough spittle to give him hydrophobia.’

  ‘Well, if you can think of a better bloody plan, why don’t you suggest it?’ inquired Leslie.

  ‘My dear fellow, I don’t mind,’ said Larry. ‘When the judge is running around biting all his colleagues and you are languishing in a Greek prison, don’t blame me.’

  ‘All I ask is that you mind your own bloody business,’ cried Leslie.

  ‘Now, now, dear, Larry’s only trying to be helpful,’ said Mother.

  ‘Helpful,’ snarled Leslie, making a grab at a group of stamps that were being blown off the table. ‘He’s just interfering as usual.’

  ‘Well, dear,’ said Mother, adjusting her spectacles, ‘I do think he may be right, you know. After all, some of those stamps do look a little, well, you know, second-hand.’

  ‘He wants stamps and he’s bloody well going to get stamps,’ said Leslie.

  And stamps the poor judge got, in a bewildering variety of sizes, shapes, colors, and stages of disintegration.

  Then another thing happened that increased Leslie’s confidence in winning the case a hundredfold. We discovered that the turkey man, whom Larry constantly referred to as Crippenopoulos, had been unwise enough to subpoena Lugaretzia as a witness for the prosecution. Lucretia, furious, wanted to refuse, until it was explained to her that she could not.