My Family and Other Animals

by Gerald Durrell

  I said no thank you very much, I had had quite sufficient.

  The Countess sighed and looked at me soulfully. I think nothing would have pleased her more than to ply me with another two or three courses.

  ‘You don’t eat enough,’ she said. ‘A growing boy like you should eat more. You’re far too thin for your age. Does your Mother feed you properly?’

  I could imagine Mother’s wrath if she had heard this innuendo. I said yes, Mother was an excellent cook and we all fed like lords.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said the Countess. ‘But you still look a little peaky to me.’

  I could not say so, but the reason I was beginning to look peaky was that the assault of food upon my stomach was beginning to make itself felt. I said, as politely as I could, that I thought I ought to be getting back.

  ‘But of course, dear,’ said the Countess. ‘Dear me, a quarter past four already. How time flies!’

  She sighed at the thought, then brightened perceptibly.

  ‘However, it’s nearly time for tea. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to stay and have something?’

  I said no, that Mother would be worried about me.

  ‘Now, let me see,’ said the Countess. ‘What did you come for? Oh, yes, the owl. Mustapha, bring the boy his owl and bring me some coffee and some of those nice Turkish delights up in the lounge.’

  Mustapha appeared with a cardboard box done up with string and handed it to me.

  ‘I wouldn’t open it until you get home,’ he said. ‘That’s a wild one, that.’

  I was overcome with the terrifying thought that if I did not hurry my departure, the Countess would ask me to partake of Turkish delight with her. So I thanked them both sincerely for my owl, and made my way to the front door.

  ‘Well,’ said the Countess, ‘it has been enchanting having you, absolutely enchanting. You must come again. You must come in the spring or the summer when we have more choice of fruit and vegetables. Mustapha’s got a way of cooking octopus which makes it simply melt in your mouth.’

  I said I would love to come again, making a mental vow that if I did, I would starve for three days in advance.

  ‘Here,’ said the Countess, pressing an orange into my pocket, ‘take this. You might feel peckish on the way home.’

  As I mounted Sally and trotted off down the drive, she called, ‘Drive carefully.’

  Grim-faced, I sat there with the owl clasped to my bosom till we were outside the gates of the Countess’s estate. Then the jogging I was subjected to on Sally’s back was too much. I dismounted, went behind an olive tree, and was deliciously and flamboyantly sick.

  When I got home I carried the owl up to my bedroom, untied the box and lifted him, struggling and beak-clicking, out onto the floor. The dogs, who had gathered round in a circle to view the new addition, backed away hurriedly. They knew what Ulysses could do when he was in a bad temper, and this owl was three times his size. He was, I thought, one of the most beautiful birds I had ever seen. The feathers on his back and wings were honeycomb golden, smudged with pale ash-grey; his breast was a spotless cream-white; and the mask of white feathers round his dark, strangely Oriental-looking eyes was as crisp and as starched-looking as any Elizabethan’s ruff.

  His wing was not as bad as I had feared. It was a clean break, and after half an hour’s struggle, during which he managed to draw blood on several occasions, I had it splinted up to my satisfaction. The owl, which I had decided to call Lampadusa, simply because the name appealed to me, seemed to be belligerently scared of the dogs, totally unwilling to make friends with Ulysses, and viewed Augustus Tickletummy with undisguised loathing. I felt he might be happier, till he settled down, in a dark, secluded place, so I carried him up to the attic. One of the attic rooms was very tiny and lit by one small window which was so covered with cobwebs and dust that it allowed little light to penetrate the room. It was quiet and as dim as a cave, and I thought that here Lampadusa would enjoy his convalescence. I put him on the floor with a large saucer of chopped meat and locked the door carefully so that he would not be disturbed. That evening, when I went to visit him, taking him a dead mouse by way of a present, he seemed very much improved. He had eaten most of his meat and now hissed and beak-clicked at me with outspread wings and blazing eyes as he pitter-pattered about the floor. Encouraged by his obvious progress, I left him with his mouse and went to bed.

  Some hours later I was awakened by the sound of voices emanating from Mother’s room. Wondering, sleepily, what on earth the family could be doing at that hour, I got out of bed and stuck my head out of the bedroom door to listen.

  ‘I tell you,’ Larry was saying, ‘it’s a damned great poltergeist.’

  ‘It can’t be a poltergeist, dear,’ said Mother. ‘Poltergeists throw things.’

  ‘Well, whatever it is, it’s up there clanking its chains,’ said Larry, ‘and I want it exorcised. You and Margo are supposed to be the experts on the after-life. You go up and do it.’

  ‘I’m not going up there,’ said Margo tremulously. ‘It might be anything. It might be a malignant spirit.’

  ‘It’s bloody malignant all right,’ said Larry. ‘It’s been keeping me awake for the last hour.’

  ‘Are you sure it isn’t the wind or something, dear?’ asked Mother.

  ‘I know the difference between wind and a damned ghost playing around with balls and chains,’ said Larry.

  ‘Perhaps it’s burglars,’ said Margo, more to give herself confidence than anything else. ‘Perhaps it’s burglars and we ought to wake Leslie.’

  Half-asleep and still bee-drowsy from the liquor I had consumed that day, I could not think what the family were talking about. It seemed as intriguing as any of the other crises that they seemed capable of evoking at the most unexpected hours of the day or night, so I went to Mother’s door and peered into the room. Larry was marching up and down, his dressing-gown swishing imperially.

  ‘Something’s got to be done,’ he said. ‘I can’t sleep with rattling chains over my head, and if I can’t sleep I can’t write.’

  ‘I don’t see what you expect us to do about it, dear,’ said Mother. ‘I’m sure it must be the wind.’

  ‘Yes, you can’t expect us to go up there,’ said Margo. ‘You’re a man, you go.’

  ‘Look,’ said Larry, ‘you are the one who came back from London covered with ectoplasm and talking about the infinite. It’s probably some hellish thing you’ve conjured up from one of your séances that’s followed you here. That makes it your pet. You go and deal with it.’

  The word ‘pet’ penetrated. Surely it could not be Lampadusa? Like all owls, barn owls have wings as soft and as silent as dandelion clocks. Surely he could not be responsible for making a noise like a ball and chain?

  I went into the room and inquired what they were all talking about.

  ‘It’s only a ghost, dear,’ said Mother. ‘Larry’s found a ghost.’

  ‘It’s in the attic,’ said Margo, excitedly. ‘Larry thinks it followed me from England. I wonder if it’s Mawake?’

  ‘We’re not going to start that all over again,’ said Mother firmly.

  ‘I don’t care who it is,’ said Larry, ‘which one of your disembodied friends. I want it removed.’

  I said I thought there was just the faintest possibility that it might be Lampadusa.

  ‘What’s that?’ inquired Mother.

  I explained that it was the owl the Countess had given me.

  ‘I might have known it,’ said Larry. ‘I might have known it. Why it didn’t occur to me instantly, I don’t know.’

  ‘Now, now, dear,’ said Mother. ‘It’s only an owl.’

  ‘Only an owl!’ said Larry. ‘It sounds like a battalion of tanks crashing about up there. Tell him to get it out of the loft.’

  I said I could not understand why Lampadusa was making a noise since owls were the quietest of things… I said they drifted through the night on silent wings like flakes of ash…

&n
bsp; ‘This one hasn’t got silent wings,’ said Larry. ‘It sounds like a one-owl jazz band. Go and get it out.’

  Hurriedly I took a lamp and made my way up to the attic. When I opened the door I saw at once what the trouble was. Lampadusa had devoured his mouse and then discovered that there was a long shred of meat still lying in his saucer. This, during the course of the long, hot day, had solidified and become welded to the surface of the saucer. Lampadusa, feeling that this shred of meat would do well as a light snack to keep body and soul together until dawn, had endeavoured to pick it off the plate. The curve of his sharp amber beak had gone through the meat, but the meat had refused to part company with the saucer, so that there he was, effectively trapped, flapping ineffectually round the floor, banging and clattering the saucer against the wooden boards in an effort to disentangle it from his beak. So I extricated him from this predicament and carried him down to my bedroom where I shut him in his cardboard box for safe-keeping.

  PART THREE

  Criseda

  This place is wonderfully lovely. I wish you could see it; if you came I could put you up beautifully, and feed you on ginger-beer and claret and prawns and figs.

  – EDWARD LEAR

  8

  Hedgehogs and Sea-dogs

  When spring came, we moved to a new villa, an elegant, snow-white one shaded by a huge magnolia tree, that lay in the olive groves not far from where our very first villa had been. It was on a hillside overlooking a great flat area marked out like a gigantic chess-board by irrigation ditches, which I knew as the fields. They were in fact the old Venetian salt-pans used long ago for collecting the brine that floated into the channels from the big salt-water lake on whose shores they lay. The lake had long since silted up and the channels, now flooded by fresh water from the hills, provided a grid-work of lush fields. This was an area overflowing with wildlife, and so it was one of my happiest hunting grounds.

  Spring in Corfu never seemed to be half-hearted. Almost overnight, it seemed, the winter winds had blown the skies clean of clouds, so that they shone a clear delphinium blue, and overnight the winter rains had flooded the valleys with wildflowers; the pink of pyramid orchids, yellow of crocus, tall pale spikes of the asphodels, the blue eyes of the grape hyacinths peering at you from the grass, and the wine-dipped anemones that bowed in the slightest breeze. The olive groves were alive and rustling with the newly arrived birds: the hoopoes, salmon-pink and black with surprised crests, probed their long, curved beaks at the soft earth between the clumps of emerald grass; goldfinches, chiming and wheezing, danced merrily from twig to twig, their plumage glowing gold and scarlet and black. In the irrigation ditches in the fields, the waters became green with weed, interlaced with the strings of toad spawn, like black-pearl necklaces; emerald-green frogs croaked at each other, and the water tortoises, their shells as black as ebony, crawled up the banks to dig their holes and lay their eggs. Steel-blue dragon-flies, slender as threads, hatched and drifted like smoke through the undergrowth, moving in a curious stiff flight. Now was the time when the banks at night were lit by the throbbing, green-white light of a thousand glow-worms and in the day-time by the glint of wild strawberries hanging like scarlet lanterns in the shade. It was an exciting time, a time for explorations and new discoveries, a time when an overturned log might reveal almost anything from a field-vole’s nest to a wriggling glitter of baby slow-worms, looking as though they were cast in burnished bronze.

  I was down in the fields one day, endeavouring to catch some of the brown water-snakes that inhabited the irrigation ditches, when an old woman, whom I knew slightly, called me from some six fields away. She had been digging up the ground with her short-handled, broad-bladed hoe, standing up to her ankles in the rich loam, wearing the thick, ungainly sheep’s-wool stockings the peasants put on for this operation.

  ‘I’ve found you something,’ she called. ‘Come quickly.’

  It was impossible for me to get there quickly, for each field was surrounded by an irrigation ditch on all four sides and finding the bridges across these was like finding your way through a maze.

  ‘Quickly! Quickly!’ screamed the old woman. ‘They are running away. Quickly!’

  I ran and leaped and scuttled, almost falling into the ditches, racing across the rickety plank bridges, until, panting, I reached her side.

  ‘There,’ she said, pointing. ‘There. Mind they don’t bite you.’

  I saw that she had dug up a bundle of leaves from under the earth in which something white was moving. Gingerly I parted the leaves with the handle of my butterfly net and saw to my delight four fat, newly born, baby hedgehogs, pink as cyclamen, with soft, snow-white spines. They were still blind and they wriggled and nosed at each other like a litter of tiny pigs. I picked them up and put them carefully inside my shirt, thanked the old woman, and made my way homewards. I was excited about my new pets, principally because they were so young. I already had two adult hedgehogs, called Itch and Scratch because of the vast quantities of fleas they harboured, but they were not really tame. These babies I thought would grow up differently. I would be, as far as they were concerned, their mother. I visualized myself walking proudly through the olive groves, preceded by the dogs, Ulysses, and my two magpies, and trotting at my heels, four tame hedgehogs, all of which I would have taught to do tricks.

  The family were arranged on the veranda under the grapevine, each occupied with his or her own affairs. Mother was knitting, counting the stitches audibly at intervals to herself and saying ‘damn’ periodically when she went wrong. Leslie was squatting on the flag-stones, carefully weighing gunpowder and little piles of silver shot as he filled shiny red cartridge cases. Larry was reading a massive tome and occasionally glancing irritably at Margo, who was clattering away at her machine, making some diaphanous garment, and singing, off key, the only line she knew of her favourite song of the moment.

  ‘She wore her little jacket of blue,’ she warbled. ‘She wore her little jacket of blue, She wore her little jacket of blue, She wore her little jacket of blue.’

  ‘The only remarkable thing about your singing is your tenacity,’ said Larry. ‘Anybody else, faced with the fact that they could not carry a tune and couldn’t remember the simplest lyric, would have given up, defeated, a long time ago.’

  He threw his cigarette butt down on the flag-stones and this produced a roar of rage from Leslie.

  ‘Watch the gunpowder,’ he shouted.

  ‘Leslie dear,’ said Mother, ‘I do wish you wouldn’t shout like that, you’ve made me lose count.’

  I produced my hedgehogs proudly and showed them to Mother.

  ‘Aren’t they sweet,’ she said, peering at them benignly through her spectacles.

  ‘Oh, God! He hasn’t got something new has he?’ asked Larry. He peered at my pink progeny in their white fur coats with distaste.

  ‘What are they?’ he inquired.

  I explained that they were baby hedgehogs.

  ‘They can’t be,’ he said. ‘Hedgehogs are all brown.’

  My family’s ignorance of the world they lived in was always a source of worry to me, and I never lost an opportunity of imparting information. I explained that female hedgehogs could not, without suffering the most refined torture, give birth to babies covered with hard spines, and so they were born with these little rubbery white spikes which could be bent between the fingers as easily as a feather. Later, as they grew, the spines would darken and harden.

  ‘How are you going to feed them, dear? They’ve got such tiny mouths,’ said Mother, ‘and they must still be drinking milk, surely?’

  I said that I had seen, in a shop in the town, a complete do-it-yourself baby outfit for children, which consisted of several worthless items such as a celluloid doll, nappies, a potty, and so forth, but one article had caught my attention: a miniature feeding bottle with a supply of tiny red teats. This, I said, would be ideal for feeding the baby hedgehogs with, but the potty, doll, and other accoutrements could be
given to some deserving peasant child. There was only one slight snag, and that was that I had had some rather heavy expenses to meet recently (such as the wire for the magpie cage) and so I had overspent on my pocket-money.

  ‘Well, dear,’ said Mother doubtfully, ‘if it isn’t too expensive I suppose I could buy it for you.’

  I said it was not expensive at all, when you considered that it was more like an investment, for not only would you be getting an invaluable feeding bottle which would come in useful for other animals, but you would be rearing four tame hedgehogs and getting a grateful peasant child into the bargain. What finer way, I asked, of spending money? So the outfit was purchased. A young peasant girl, whom I rather fancied, received with the most satisfactory joy the doll, potty, and other rubbish, and I went about the stern task of rearing my babies.

  They lived in a large cardboard box, full of cotton wool, under my bed, and at night, in order to keep them warm, I placed their box on top of a hot-water bottle. I had wanted to have them sleeping in the bed with me, but Mother pointed out that this was not only unhygienic, but that I risked rolling on them in the night and killing them. I found they thrived best on watered cow’s milk and I fed them assiduously three times a day and once in the middle of the night. The night feed proved to be a little difficult, for in order to make sure that I woke up I had borrowed a large tin alarm clock from Spiro. This used to go off like a rattle of musketry, and unfortunately woke not only me but the entire family as well. Eventually, so vociferous were the family in their complaints, Mother suggested I give them an extra feed late at night when I went to bed, in lieu of the feed at two o’clock in the morning that woke everybody up. This I did and the hedgehogs thrived and grew. Their eyes opened and their spines turned from snow-white to grey and became firmer. They had now, as I anticipated, convinced themselves that I was their mother, and would come scrambling onto the edge of the box when I opened it, jostling and pushing for first suck at the bottle, uttering tiny wheezy squeaks and grunts. I was immensely proud of them and looked forward happily to the day when they would trot at my heels through the olive groves.