My Family and Other Animals

by Gerald Durrell

  ‘Don’t you worries Mrs Durrells,’ said Spiro, who had overheard the remark. ‘I gots all the things that you tells me to get.’

  Sven, having examined his accordion with the utmost care to make sure that it had come to no harm, now lashed it round himself and ran an experimental series of fingers up its keyboard.

  ‘A rousing sea-shanty,’ said Donald. ‘That’s what we need. Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum.’

  I left them and made my way up into the bow of the benzina where I lay, staring down over the prow as it sheared its way through the glassy blue sea. Occasionally little flocks of flying fish would break the surface ahead of us, glittering blue and moon silver in the sun, as they burst from the water and skimmed along the surface, like insect-gleaning summer swallows across a blue meadow.

  At eight o’clock we reached our destination, a half-mile-long beach that lay under the flanks of Pandokrator. Here the olive grove came almost to the sea, separated from it only by a wide strip of shingle. As we approached the shore, the engine was switched off and we drifted in gently under our own momentum. Now that there was no engine noise we could hear the cries of the cicadas welcoming us to land. The benzina, with an enormous sigh, pressed its bow into the pebbles of the shallows. The lithe, brown boy, whose boat it was, came forward from the engine and leaped from the bow with the anchor, which he lodged firmly in the shingle. Then he piled a collection of boxes alongside the bow of the benzina in a sort of tottering staircase down which Mother and Margo were escorted by Kralefsky, who bowed elegantly as each reached the shingle, but somewhat marred the effect by inadvertently stepping backwards into six inches of sea-water and irretrievably ruining the crease of his elegant trousering. Eventually we and all our goods and chattels were ashore, and leaving our possessions under the olive trees, strewn haphazardly like something from a wrecked ship that had been disgorged by the sea, we made our way up the hill to Stavrodakis’ villa.

  The villa was large and square, faded red with green shutters and built up high so that the lower floor formed a spacious cellar. Streams of peasant girls were walking up the drive carrying baskets of grapes on their heads, moving with the lithe gracefulness of cats. Stavrodakis came scuttling among them to greet us.

  ‘So kind, so kind! Really so kind!’ he kept repeating as each introduction was made.

  He seated us all on his veranda under a great carnival-red wig of bougainvillæa and opened several bottles of his best wine. It was heavy and sharp and glowed a sullen red as though he were pouring garnets into our glasses. When we were fortified and slightly light-headed with this brew, he led us, skittering ahead like an amiable black beetle, down to his cellars.

  The cellars were so big that their dimmest recesses had to be lit by oil lamps, little flickering wicks floating in pots of amber oil. The cellar was divided into two parts, and he led us first to where the treading was taking place. Looming over everything else in the dim light were three gigantic barrels. One of them was being filled with grapes by a constant procession of peasant women. The other two were occupied by the treaders. In the corner, seated on an upturned keg, was a grey, fragile-looking old man who, with great solemnity, was playing on a fiddle.

  ‘That’s Taki and that’s Yani,’ said Stavrodakis, pointing to the two wine-treaders.

  Taki’s head could only just be seen above the rim of the barrel, whereas Yani’s head and shoulders were still visible.

  ‘Taki’s been treading since last night,’ said Stavrodakis, glancing nervously at Mother and Margo, ‘so I’m afraid he’s a little bit inebriated.’

  Indeed, from where we stood we could smell the heady fumes of the grape pulp and they were intoxicating enough, so their force must have been trebled when concentrated in the warm depths of the barrel. From the base of the barrel the crude young wine dribbled out into a trough, where it lay smouldering with patches of froth on top as pink as almond blossom. From here it was syphoned off into barrels.

  ‘This is, of course, the end of the harvest,’ Stavrodakis was explaining. ‘These are the last of the red grapes. They come from a little vineyard high up and produce, I venture to think, one of the better wines of Corfu.’

  Taki momentarily stopped his jig on the grapes, hooked arms over the side of the barrel and hung there like a drunken swallow on its nest, his arms and hands stained with wine and covered with a crust of grape skins and seeds.

  ‘It’s time I came out,’ he said thickly, ‘or I shall be as drunk as a lord.’

  ‘Yes, yes, in a minute, my Taki,’ said Stavrodakis, looking round him nervously. ‘In a minute Costos will be here to relieve you.’

  ‘One must pee,’ Taki explained aggrievedly. ‘A man can’t work unless he pees.’

  The old man put down his fiddle, and presumably by way of compensation, handed Taki a lump of coarse bread, which he ate wolfishly.

  Theodore was giving Sven an erudite lecture on wines, pointing at both treaders and the barrels with his walking-stick as though they had been objects in a museum.

  ‘Who was it?’ said Max to Larry, ‘that drownded in a butt of malmsey?’

  ‘One of Shakespeare’s more sensible heroes,’ said Larry.

  ‘I remember once,’ Kralefsky said to Donald, ‘taking a lady round one of the biggest cellars in France. Half-way round the cellar I began to feel uneasy. I had a premonition of danger and so I escorted the lady out and at that moment fourteen of the barrels burst with a roar like cannons…’

  ‘Here, as you have seen, we do the treading,’ said Stavrodakis. ‘Now if you will just follow me this way, I’ll show you where the wine is stored.’

  He led us through an archway into the other gloomy section of the cellar. Here rank after rank of barrels lay on their sides and the noise was incredible. At first I thought it must have some outside source, until I realized that it emanated from the barrels. As the wine fermented in their brown bellies, the barrels gurgled and squeaked and growled at each other like an angry mob. The sound was fascinating, but slightly horrific. It was as though in each barrel there were incarcerated some frightful demon mouthing incomprehensible abuse.

  ‘The peasants say,’ said Theodore with macabre relish, tapping one of the barrels lightly with his stick, ‘the peasants say that it sounds like a drowning man.’

  ‘Malmsey!’ said Max excitedly. ‘Barrels and barrels of malmsey! Larry, we’ll get drownded together!’

  ‘Drowned,’ said Donald.

  ‘Most interesting,’ Mother was saying insincerely to Stavrodakis, ‘but if you will excuse us, I think Margo and I had better go back to the beach and see about lunch.’

  ‘I wonder what force it generates in there,’ said Leslie, glancing round moodily. ‘I mean, if it generated sufficient force to push one of those bungs out, I wonder what power it would have?’

  ‘Quite considerable,’ said Theodore. ‘I remember once seeing a man who was quite badly injured by the bung from a barrel.’ As if to demonstrate this, he tapped a barrel sharply with his stick and we all jumped.

  ‘Yes, well, if you will excuse us,’ said Mother nervously, ‘I think Margo and I had better be going.’

  ‘But the rest of you, the rest of you will come up to the house and have some wine?’ pleaded Stavrodakis.

  ‘Of course we will,’ said Larry, as though he were doing him a favour.

  ‘Malmsey!’ said Max, rolling his eyes in ecstasy. ‘We will have malmsey!’

  So while Margo and Mother went back to the beach to help Spiro in the preparations for lunch, Stavrodakis fussily hurried us back onto the veranda and plied us with wine, so that when it was time for us to go back to the beach, we were mellow, warm, and flushed.

  ‘ “I dreamt,”’ carolled Max as we walked through the olives, taking a delighted Stavrodakis with us to share our lunch, “‘I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls” with vessels and turfs by my side.’

  ‘He just does it to annoy me,’ Donald confided to Theodore. ‘He knows that song perfectly well.’<
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  Under the trees at the edge of the sea, three charcoal fires had been lighted and they glowed, shuddered, and smoked gently, and over them popped and sizzled a variety of foods. Margo had laid a great cloth in the shade and was putting cutlery and glasses on it, singing untunefully to herself while Mother and Spiro crouched like witches over the fires, larding the brown sizzling carcass of a kid with oil and squeezed garlic and anointing the great body of a fish – its skin bubbled and crisped enticingly by the heat – with lemon juice.

  Lunch we ate in a leisurely fashion, sprawled round the bright cloth, the glasses glowing with wine. The mouthfuls of kid were rich and succulent, woven with herbs, and the sections of fish melted like snow-flakes in your mouth. The conversation drifted and sprang up and then coiled languidly again, like the smoke from the fires.

  ‘You have to be in love with a piece of stone,’ said Sven solemnly. ‘You see a dozen pieces of stone. You say, “Pah! That’s not for me,” and then you see a piece, delicate and elegant, and you fall in love with it. It’s like women. But then comes the marriage and that can be terrible. You fight with it and you find that the stone is hard. You are in despair, then suddenly, like wax, it melts under your hands and you create a shape.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Theodore, ‘being asked by Berlincourt – you know, that French painter who lives over at Paleocastritsa – being asked by him to go and look at his work. He said, er, you know, quite distinctly, “come and see my paintings.” So I went one afternoon and he was most hospitable. He gave me, um, you know, little cakes and tea and then I said I would like to see his paintings, and he pointed to one large canvas which was on the, um, what is it, that thing that painters use? Ah, yes, easel. It was quite a pretty painting, really. It showed the bay at Paleocastritsa with the monastery quite clearly and when I had admired it, I looked round to see where the rest of his work was, but there didn’t appear to be any. So I, um, asked him where the rest of his paintings were and he pointed to the easel and said, um, “under there”. It appeared that he couldn’t afford canvases and so he painted one picture on top of another.’

  ‘Great artists have to suffer,’ said Sven lugubriously.

  ‘When winter comes, I’ll take you over to the Butrinto marshes,’ said Leslie with enthusiasm. ‘Masses of duck there and damned great wild boars up in the hills.’

  ‘Ducks I like, but vild boars I think are a bit big for me,’ said Max, with the conviction of one who knows his limitations.

  ‘I don’t think Max is up to it,’ said Donald. ‘He’d probably cut and run at a crucial moment. A foreigner, you know.’

  ‘And then,’ said Mother to Kralefsky, ‘you put your bay leaf and sorrel in just before it starts to simmer.’

  ‘So I says to him, Misses Margos, I says, I don’t care if he is the French Ambassador, he’s a bastard.’

  ‘Then, at the edge of the marsh – it’s a bit difficult walking, of course, because the ground’s so mushy – you can get woodcock and snipe.’

  ‘I remember once I visited a village in Macedonia where they did very curious, um, you know, wood sculptures.’

  ‘I knew a lady once who used to make it without the bay leaf, but with a pinch of mint.’

  It was the hottest hour of the day when even the cicadas seem to slow down and falter occasionally in their song. The black ants moved busily across the cloth, gathering the crumbs of our food. A horse-fly, its eyes gleaming like malevolent emeralds, settled for a brief moment on Theodore’s beard and then zoomed away.

  Slowly, full of food and wine, I got up and made my way down to the sea. ‘And sometimes,’ I could hear Stavrodakis say to Margo, ‘sometimes the barrels really shout. They make a noise as if they were fighting. It keeps me awake.’

  ‘Oh, don’t,’ said Margo, shuddering. ‘It makes me creepy just to think of it.’

  The sea was still and warm, looking as though it had been varnished, with just a tiny ripple patting languidly at the shore. The shingle scrunched and shifted, hot under my bare feet. The rocks and pebbles that made up this beach were incredible in shape and colour, moulded by the waves and the gentle rubbing and polishing one against the other. They had been sculptured into a million shapes. Arrow-heads, sickles, cockerels, horses, dragons, and starfish. Their colouring was as bizarre as their shapes, for they had been patterned by the earth’s juices millions of years before and now their decorations had been buffed and polished by the sea. White with gold or red filigree, blood-red with white spots, green, blue, and pale fawn, hen’s-egg brown with a deep rusty-red pattern like a fern sprawled across them, pink as a peony with white Egyptian hieroglyphics forming a mysterious, undecipherable message across them. It was like a vast treasure trove of jewels spread along the rim of the sea.

  I waded into the warm shallows and then dived and swam out to cooler water. Here, if you held your breath and let yourself sink to the bottom, the soft velvety blanket of the sea momentarily stunned and crippled your ears. Then, after a moment, they became attuned to the underwater symphony. The distant throb of a boat engine, soft as a heart-beat, the gentle whisper of the sand as the sea’s movement shuffled and rearranged it and, above all, the musical clink of the pebbles on the shore’s edge. To hear the sea at work on its great store of pebbles, rubbing and polishing them lovingly, I swam from the deep waters into the shallows. I anchored myself with a handful of multi-coloured stones, then, ducking my head below the surface, listened to the beach singing under the gentle touch of the small waves. If walnuts could sing, I reflected, they would sound like this. Scrunch, tinkle, squeak, mumble, cough (silence while the wave retreats) and then the whole thing in different keys repeated with the next wave. The sea played on the beach as though it were an instrument. I lay and dozed for a time in the warm shallows and then, feeling heavy with sleep, I made my way back into the olive groves.

  Everyone lay about disjointedly, sleeping round the ruins of our meal. It looked like the aftermath of some terrible battle. I curled up like a dormouse in the protective roots of a great olive and drifted off to sleep myself.

  I woke to the gentle clinking of tea-cups as Margo and Mother laid the cloth for tea. Spiro brooded with immense concentration over a fire on which he had set a kettle. As I watched drowsily, the kettle lifted its lid and waved pertly at him, hissing steam. He seized it in one massive hand and poured the contents into a teapot, then, turning, he scowled at our recumbent bodies.

  ‘Teas,’ he roared thunderously. ‘Teas is readys.’

  Everybody started and woke.

  ‘Dear God! Must you yell like that, Spiro?’ asked Larry plaintively, his voice thickened by sleep.

  ‘Tea,’ said Kralefsky, waking up and glancing round him, looking like a dishevelled moth. ‘Tea, by Jove. Excellent.’

  ‘God, my head aches,’ said Leslie. ‘It must be that wine. It’s got a kick like a mule.’

  ‘Yes, I’m feeling a bit fragile myself,’ said Larry, yawning and stretching.

  ‘I feel as though I’ve been drowned,’ said Max with conviction. ‘Drowned in malmsey and then brought back by artificial inspiration.’

  ‘Must you always massacre the English tongue?’ said Donald irritably. ‘God knows it’s bad enough having thousands of Englishmen doing it, without you foreigners starting.’

  ‘I remember reading somewhere’ – began Theodore, who had awakened instantly, like a cat, and who, having slept like one, looked as immaculate as though he had not been to sleep at all – ‘I remember reading once that there’s a tribe up in the mountains of Ceylon that speaks a language that nobody can understand. I mean to say, not even expert linguists have been able to understand it.’

  ‘It sounds just like Max’s English,’ said Donald.

  Under the influence of tea, buttered toast, salt biscuits, watercress sandwiches, and an enormous fruit-cake as damp and as fragile and as rich-smelling as loam, we started to wake up. Presently we went down to the sea and swam in the warm waters until the sun sank and pushed the
mountain’s shadow over the beach suddenly, making it look cold and drained of colour. Then we went up to Stavrodakis’ villa and sat under the bougainvillæa watching the sunset colours blur and mingle over the sea. We left Stavrodakis, who insisted on giving us a dozen great jars of his best wine to commemorate our visit, and made our way back to the benzina.

  As we headed out to sea we left the shadow of the mountain and came into the warm glow of the sun again, which was sinking, smudged blood-red behind the bulk of Pandokrator, casting a shimmering reflection across the water like a flaming cypress tree. A few tiny clouds turned pink and vine-yellow, then the sun dipped behind the mountain and the sky turned from blue to pale green and the smooth surface of the sea became for a brief moment all the magical colours of a fire-opal. The engine throbbed as we edged our way back towards the town, unrolling a white bale of lace wake behind us. Sven played the opening of ‘The Almond Tree’ very softly and everyone started to sing.

  ‘She shook the flowering almond tree one sunny day

  With her soft little hands,

  The snowy blossoms on her breast and shoulders lay

  And in her hair’s dark strands

  The snowy blossoms on her breast and shoulders lay

  And in her hair’s dark strands…’

  Spiro’s voice, deep, rich, and smooth as black velvet, harmonizing with Theodore’s pleasant baritone and Larry’s tenor. Two flying fish skimmed up from the blue depths beneath our bow, skittered along the water, and were lost in the twilight sea.

  Now it was getting dark enough to see the tiny green coruscations of phosphorus as our bow slid through the water. The dark wine glugged pleasantly from the earthenware pitchers into the glasses, the red wine that, last year, had lain snarling to itself in the brown barrels. A tiny wind, warm and soft as a kitten’s paw, stroked the boat. Kralefsky, his head thrown back, his large eyes full of tears, sang at the velvet blue sky, shuddering with stars. The sea crisped itself along the sides of the boat with the sound of winter leaves, wind-lifted, rubbing themselves affectionately against the trunks of the trees that gave them birth.