My Family and Other Animals

by Gerald Durrell

  But my mourning for Hiawatha was cut short by the arrival in our midst of something slightly more exotic than a hoopoe and much more trouble. Larry had suddenly announced that he was going to stay with some friends of his in Athens and do some research work. After the flurry of his departure, tranquillity descended on the villa. Leslie spent most of his time pottering about with a gun and Margo, who at that moment was not engaged in any hectic affair of the heart, had taken up soap sculpture. Ensconced in the attic, she was producing somewhat lopsided and slippery pieces of sculpture out of an acrid-smelling yellow soap and appearing in a flowered smock and an artistic trance at mealtimes.

  Mother, seizing on this unexpected period of calm, decided to do a job that had long wanted doing. The previous year had been an exceptionally good one for fruit and Mother had spent hours preparing various jams and chutneys, some from her grandmother’s recipes from India dating back to the early eighteen hundreds. Everything went fine and the big cool larder was a-glint with battalions of bottles. Unfortunately, during a particularly savage storm in the winter, the larder roof had leaked and in consequence Mother had come down one morning and found all the labels had come off. She was faced with several hundred jars, the contents of which were difficult to identify unless you opened the jar. Now, given a moment’s respite by her family, she determined to do this necessary job. Since it involved tasting, I offered to help. Between us we had got some hundred and fifty jars of preserves on the kitchen table, armed ourselves with spoons and new labels, and were just about to start on the mammoth tasting when Spiro arrived.

  ‘Good afternoons, Mrs Durrells. Goods afternoons, Master Gerrys,’ he rumbled, lumbering into the kitchen like a chestnut-brown dinosaur. ‘I’s gots a telegrams for you, Mrs Durrells.’

  ‘A telegram, Spiro?’ Mother quavered. ‘Who from, I wonder? I hope it’s not bad news.’

  ‘No, don’t you worry, it’s not bad news, Mrs Durrells,’ he said, handing her the telegram. ‘I gots the man in the post office to reads it to me. It’s from Master Larrys.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mother, with foreboding.

  The telegram said simply: ‘Forgot to tell you Prince Jeejeebuoy arriving eleventh short stay. Athens wonderful. Love. Larry.’

  ‘Really, Larry is the most annoying creature!’ Mother exclaimed angrily. ‘What does he go and invite a prince for? He knows we haven’t got the right rooms for royalty. And he won’t be here to entertain him. What am I supposed to do with a prince?’

  She gazed at us in a distraught fashion but neither Spiro nor I could give her any intelligent advice. We could not even telegraph Larry and demand his return, for, characteristically, he had gone off and omitted to give us his friends’ address.

  ‘The eleventh is tomorrow, isn’t it? He’ll be coming on the boat from Brindisi, I expect. Spiro, would you meet him and bring him out? And will you bring some lamb for lunch? Gerry, go and tell Margo to put some flowers in the spare room and to make sure the dogs haven’t put any fleas in there, and tell Leslie he must go down to the village and tell Red Spiro we want some fish. Really, it’s too bad of Larry… I shall give him a piece of my mind when he gets back. I can’t be bothered with entertaining princes at my age.’ Mother bustled angrily and aimlessly around the kitchen, banging saucepans and frying pans about.

  ‘I’ll brings you some of my dahlias for the tables. Do you wants any champagne?’ asked Spiro, who obviously felt that the prince should be treated properly.

  ‘No, if he thinks I’m paying a pound a bottle for champagne, he’s mistaken. He can just drink ouzo and wine like the rest of us, prince or no prince,’ said Mother firmly, and then added, ‘Well, I suppose you’d better bring a crate. We needn’t give him any and it always comes in useful.’

  ‘Don’ts you worrys, Mrs Durrells,’ said Spiro comfortingly, ‘I fixes anythings you wants. You wants I gets the King’s butler again?’

  The King’s butler, an ancient and aristocratic old boy, was dragged out of retirement by Spiro every time we had a big party.

  ‘No, no, Spiro, we’re not going to go to a lot of trouble. After all, he’s coming unexpectedly so he’ll just have to take us as he finds us. He’ll just have to take pot-luck… and… and… muck in. And if he doesn’t like it… well, it’s just too bad,’ said Mother, shelling peas with trembling hands and dropping more on the floor than into the colander. ‘And, Gerry, go and ask Margo if she could run up those new curtains for the dining-room. The material’s in my bedroom. The old ones don’t look the same since Les set fire to them.’

  So the villa was transformed into a hive of activity. The wooden floor of the spare room was scrubbed until it was a pale cream colour, just in case the dogs had put any fleas in there; Margo ran up the new curtains in record time and did flower arrangements everywhere; and Leslie cleaned his guns and boat in case the prince should want to go shooting or yachting. Mother, scarlet with heat, trotted frantically around the kitchen making scones, cakes, apple turnovers, and brandysnaps, stews, pies, jellies, and trifles. I was merely told to remove all my animals from the veranda and to keep them under control, to go and have my hair cut and to make sure I put on a clean shirt. So the following day, all dressed up by Mother’s orders, we sat on the veranda and waited patiently for the prince to be brought out to us by Spiro.

  ‘What’s he a prince of ?’ asked Leslie.

  ‘Well, I don’t really know,’ said Mother. ‘One of those small states the maharajas have, I expect.’

  ‘It’s a very odd name, Jeejeebuoy,’ said Margo, ‘are you sure it’s real?’

  ‘Of course it’s real, dear,’ said Mother. ‘There are lots of Jeejeebuoys in India. It’s a very old family, like… um… like…’

  ‘Smith?’ suggested Leslie.

  ‘No, no, not nearly as common as that. No, the Jeejeebuoys go right back in history. There must have been Jeejeebuoys long before my grandparents went to India.’

  ‘His ancestors probably organized the Mutiny,’ suggested Leslie with relish. ‘Let’s ask him if his grandfather invented the Black Hole of Calcutta.’

  ‘Oh, yes, let’s,’ said Margo. ‘D’you think he did? What was it?’

  ‘Leslie, dear, you shouldn’t say things like that,’ said Mother. ‘After all, we must forgive and forget.’

  ‘Forgive and forget what?’ asked Leslie, bewildered, not having followed Mother’s train of thought.

  ‘Everything,’ said Mother firmly, adding, rather obscurely, ‘I’m sure they meant well.’

  Before Leslie could investigate this further, the car roared up the drive and drew up below the veranda with an impressive squeal of brakes. Sitting in the back, dressed in black, and with a beautifully arranged turban as white as a snowdrop bud, sat a slender, diminutive Indian with enormous, glittering almond-shaped eyes that were like pools of liquid agate fringed with eyelashes as thick as a carpet. He opened the door deftly and leaped out of the car. His smile of welcome was like a lightning flash of white in his brown face.

  ‘Vell, vell, here ve are at last,’ he cried excitedly, spreading his slender brown hands like butterfly wings and dancing up onto the veranda. ‘You must be Mrs Durrell, of course. Such charm. And you are the hunter of the family… Leslie. And Margo, the beauty of the island, vitout doubt… And Gerry the savant, the naturalist par excellence. I can’t tell you how hot it makes me to meet you all.’

  ‘Oh… well… er… er… yes, we’re delighted to meet you, Your Highness,’ Mother began.

  Jeejeebuoy uttered a yelp and slapped his forehead.

  ‘Desh and demnation!’ he said. ‘My foolish name again! My dear Mrs Durrell, how can I apologize? Prince is my Christian name. A vhim on my mother’s part to make our humble family royal, you understand? A mother’s love, hm? Dream son vill aspire to golden heights, huh? No, no, poor voman, ve must forgive her, uh? I am plain Prince Jeejeebuoy, at your service.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mother, who having geared herself to cope with royalty, felt somewhat let-dow
n. ‘Well, what do we call you?’

  ‘My friends, of which I have an inordinate number,’ said the new arrival earnestly, ‘call me Jeejee. I do hope that you vill call me the same.’

  So Jeejee took up residence and during the short time he was there created greater havoc and endeared himself more to us than any other guest we had had. With his pedantic English, his earnest, gentle air, he took such a deep and genuine interest in everything and everyone that he was irresistible. For Lugaretzia he had various pots of evil-smelling sticky substances with which to anoint her numerous imaginary aches and pains; with Leslie he would discuss in grave detail the state of hunting in the world and give graphic and probably untrue stories of tiger and wild boar hunts he had been on. For Margo he procured some lengths of cloth and made them into saris and taught her how to wear them; Spiro he would enthral with tales of the riches and mysteriousness of the East, of bejewelled elephants wrestling with each other and maharajas worth their weight in precious stones. He was proficient with his pencil and as well as taking a deep and genuine interest in all my pets completely won me over by doing delicate little sketches of them for me to stick in my natural history diary, a document which was, to my mind, considerably more important than a combination of the Magna Carta, The Book of Kells and the Gutenberg Bible, and was treated as such by our discerning guest. But it was Mother that Jeejee really charmed into submission, for not only did he have endless mouth-watering recipes for her to write down and a fund of folklore and ghost stories, but his visit enabled Mother to talk endlessly about India, where she had been born and bred and which she considered her real home.

  In the evening we would sit long over our meal at the big, creaking dining table, the clusters of oil lamps in the corners of the great room blooming in pools of primrose yellow light, the drifts of small moths fluttering against them like snow; the dogs lying in the doorway – now their numbers had risen to four they were never allowed into the dining-room – would yawn and sigh at our tardiness, but we would be oblivious to them. Outside the ringing cries of the crickets and the crackle of tree frogs would make the velvety night alive. In the lamplight Jeejee’s eyes would seem to grow bigger and blacker like an owl’s, with a strange liquid fire in them.

  ‘Of course, in your day, Mrs Durrell, things vere different. You could not intermingle. No, no, strict segregation, vasn’t it? But now things are better. First the maharajas got their toes in the doors and nowadays even some of us humbler Indians are allowed to intermingle and thus accrue some of the advantages of civilization,’ said Jeejee one evening.

  ‘In my day,’ said Mother, ‘it was the Eurasians that they felt most strongly about. We wouldn’t be allowed even to play with them by my grandmother. Of course we always did.’

  ‘Children are singularly insensitive to the correct civilized behaviour,’ said Jeejee smiling. ‘Still there vere some difficulties at first, you know. Rome, however, vas not built in a day. Did you hear about the Babu in my town who vas invited to the ball?’

  ‘No, what happened?’

  ‘Vell, he saw that after the gentlemen had finished dancing with the ladies they escorted them back to their chairs and fanned them with the ladies’ fan. So, having conducted a sprightly valtz with a European lady of some eminence he conducted her safely back to her seat, took her fan, and said, “Madam, may I make vind in your face?” ’

  ‘That sounds the sort of thing Spiro would say,’ said Leslie.

  ‘I remember once,’ said Mother throwing herself into reminiscence with pleasure, ‘when my husband was Chief Engineer in Rourki. We had the most terrible cyclone. Larry was only a baby. The house was a long, low one and I remember we ran from room to room trying to hold the doors shut against the wind. As we ran from room to room, the house simply collapsed behind us. We eventually ended up in the butler’s pantry. But when we had the house repaired the Babu contractor sent in a bill which was headed “For repairs to Chief Engineer’s backside”.’

  ‘India must have been fascinating then,’ said Jeejee, ‘because, unlike most Europeans, you vere part of the country.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mother, ‘even my grandmother was born there. When most people talked of home and meant England, when we said home we meant India.’

  ‘You must have travelled extensively,’ said Jeejee enviously. ‘I suppose you’ve seen more of my country than I have.’

  ‘Practically every nook and cranny,’ said Mother. ‘My husband being a civil engineer, of course, he had to travel. I always used to go with him. If he had to build a bridge or a railway right out in the jungle, I’d go with him and we’d camp.’

  ‘That must have been fun,’ said Leslie enthusiastically, ‘a primitive life under canvas.’

  ‘Oh it was. I loved the simple life in camp. I remember the elephants used to go ahead with the marquees, the carpets and the furniture, and then the servants would follow in the ox-carts with the linen and silver…’

  ‘You call that camping?’ interrupted Leslie incredulously. ‘With marquees?’

  ‘We only had three,’ said Mother defensively. ‘A bedroom, dining-room and a drawing-room. And they were built with fitted carpets anyway.’

  ‘Well, I don’t call that camping,’ said Leslie.

  ‘It was,’ said Mother. ‘It was right out in the jungle. We could hear tigers and all the servants were terrified. Once they killed a cobra under the dining table.’

  ‘And that was before Gerry was born,’ said Margo.

  ‘You should write your memoirs, Mrs Durrell,’ said Jeejee gravely.

  ‘Oh no,’ laughed Mother, ‘I couldn’t possibly write. Besides, what would I call it?’

  ‘How about “It Took Fourteen Elephants”?’ suggested Leslie.

  ‘Or, “Through the Forest on a Fitted Carpet”,’ suggested Jeejee.

  ‘The trouble with you boys is you never take anything seriously,’ said Mother severely.

  ‘Yes,’ said Margo, ‘I think it was jolly brave of Mother to camp with only three marquees and cobras and things.’

  ‘Camping!’ snorted Leslie derisively.

  ‘Well, it was camping dear. I remember once one of the elephants went astray and we had no clean sheets for three days. Your father was most annoyed.’

  ‘I never knew anything as big as an elephant could go astray,’ said Jeejee, surprised.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Leslie, ‘easily mislaid, elephants.’

  ‘Well, anyway, you wouldn’t like it if you were without clean sheets,’ said Mother with dignity.

  ‘Of course they wouldn’t,’ put in Margo, ‘and I think it’s fun hearing about ancient India, even if they don’t.’

  ‘But I do find it most educational,’ Jeejee protested.

  ‘You’re always making fun of Mother,’ said Margo. ‘I don’t see why you should be so superior just because your father invented the Black Hole or whatever it was.’

  It says much for Jeejee that he almost fell under the table laughing, and all the dogs started barking vociferously at his mirth.

  But probably the most endearing thing about Jeejee was his intense enthusiasm for anything he happened to take up, even when it was demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that he could not achieve success in that sphere of activity. When Larry had first met him he had decided to be one of India’s greatest poets and with the aid of a compatriot who spoke little English (‘he vas my compositor,’ Jeejee explained) he started a magazine called Poetry for the People, or Potry for the Peeple or Potery for the Peopeople, depending on whether Jeejee was supervising his compositor or not. This little magazine was published once a month, with contributions from everyone that Jeejee knew, and some of them made strange reading, as we discovered, for Jeejee’s luggage was full of blurred copies of his magazine which he would hand out to anyone who displayed interest.

  Perusing them we discovered such interesting items as ‘The Potry of Stiffen Splendour – a creetical evaluation’. Jeejee’s compositor friend apparently believed
in printing words as they sounded, or, rather, as they sounded to him at that moment. Thus there was a long and eulogistic article by Jeejee on ‘Tees Ellyot, Pot Supreme’. The compositor’s novel spelling combined with the misprints naturally to be found in such a work, made reading it a pleasurable though puzzling occupation. ‘Whye Notte a Black Pot Lorat?’, for example, posed an almost unanswerable question, written apparently in Chaucerian English; while the article entitled ‘Roy Cambill, Ball Fighter and Pot’, made one wonder what poetry was coming to. However, Jeejee was undaunted by the difficulties, including the fact that his compositor never pronounced the letter ‘h’ and so never used it. His latest enthusiasm was to start a second magazine (printed on the same hand-press with the same carefree compositor), devoted to his newly evolved study of what he called ‘Fakyo’, which was described in the first copy of Fakyo for All as ‘an amalgum of the misterious East, bringing together the best of Yoga and Fakirism, giving details and tiching people ow’.

  Mother was greatly intrigued by Fakyo, until Jeejee started to practise it. Clad in a loincloth and covered in ashes, he meditated for hours on the veranda or else walked in a well-simulated trance through the house, leaving a trail of ashes behind him. He fasted religiously for four days, and on the fifth day worried Mother to death by fainting and falling down the stairs.

  ‘Really, Jeejee,’ said Mother crossly, ‘this has got to stop. There’s not enough of you to fast.’

  Putting him to bed, Mother concocted huge strength-giving curries, only to have Jeejee complain that there was no Bombay duck, the dried fish which was such a pungent and attractive addition to any curry.

  ‘But you can’t get it here, Jeejee; I’ve tried,’ Mother protested.