MY FAMILY AND OTHER scandals
Their life in Corfu was portrayed as idyllic in ITV’s drama. But as the series returns, a new book about the Durrells tells the real story: breakdowns, booze, a secret abortion... and nudity galore
In My Family And Other Animals, the author Gerald Durrell gives the impression that his family went to Corfu in 1935 almost on a whim, selling their English house and sailing into the unknown to escape rainy summer days and stuffed-up noses. They laughed and wrote beautifully of their island idyll, but nobody in the family talked about what had really brought them to the island – the sudden death of their father in India, the devastating effect it had on their mother, and the yearning to restore something lost.
The youngest of the family’s four children, Gerald, whose love of animals drove him to become a famous zoologist, wrote in his 1956 book how the family stayed for five years in this Mediterranean paradise until the onset of World War II. ‘Living in Corfu,’ he concluded of the hilarious adventures he recounted, ‘was rather like living in one of the more flamboyant and slapstick comic operas.’
But a new book, The Durrells Of Corfu, by family friend Michael Haag, reveals for the first time the secret of why the Durrells really went to Corfu. By drawing on the family’s letters and an unpublished memoir by Gerald, it shows a darker tale than My Family – one cloaked in tragedy and driven by alcohol abuse and a nervous breakdown.
THE INDIAN DREAM TURNS INTO A NIGHTMARE
Louisa Durrell was not quite the serene matriarch portrayed by Keeley Hawes in the TV series. She was born in India – as were all her children – in 1886 and she had married an engineer who designed railway lines the breadth of the Raj, but in 1915, only months after her second child was born, she lost the baby girl to diphtheria. This had a profound and lasting effect on her and she started to drink excessively. Then, in 1928, her husband died of a stroke, which was attributed to overwork, and the family returned to England. Years later Louisa admitted she had thought of suicide after her loss, but went on living for Gerald’s sake.
Though their mother’s drinking is not mentioned in any of Gerald’s books, he left an unpublished autobiographical memoir on his death in 1995, in which he acknowledged the dark family secret. ‘Mother took to mourning the death of my father in earnest,’ he wrote, ‘with the aid of Demon Drink.’
‘She used to retire to bed,’ confirmed Larry Durrell’s girlfriend Nancy, a tall, slim, striking blonde who had dropped out of art college and who had travelled to Corfu with the family, ‘and take her gin bottle up with her.’
In his autobiographical jottings, Gerald also disclosed that his mother had had a ‘nervous break- down’. This would otherwise have remained a secret, too.
Louisa’s breakdown looks like an attempt to return to India where her infant daughter and husband lay buried. Her name and Gerald’s are listed as first-class passengers to India aboard the SS City Of Calcutta. But someone, possibly Larry, discovered her plan to cut and run to Asia, and prevented them from sailing.
The Durrells spent a couple more years living in Bournemouth, where Gerald was sent briefly to school. One day when he was nine he fought back against a bully but was punished with six of the best by the headmaster. Louisa responded by removing the boy from school. He never went back.
The hilarious opening pages of My Family And Other Animals have the family selling up simply because Larry tells them, ‘What we all need is sunshine.’ All this was avoiding the truth. As Gerald’s autobiographical fragments reveal, the real reason was that their mother was falling back into heavy drinking, and Larry ‘decided that decisive action must be taken’.
FIVEGOMADON THEISLANDOF ADVENTURE
The Durrells sold the house and all their belongings were boxed up. Gerald gave away his pet white mice to the baker, and his tortoise to his governess (27 years later, she was to ask him whether he wanted it back), and in March 1935 they set sail from Tilbury on the SS Hakone Maru, a Japanese cargo boat.
Corfu, wrote Gerald, ‘was like being allowed back into Paradise,’ though as the Durrells’ letters show, the family’s first impressions were not quite like that. Margo and Gerald, though 16 and 10 respectively when they arrived in Corfu in 1935, were miserable with homesickness. And Louisa’s search for a place to live revealed a discouraging lack of plumbedin toilets. ‘Don’t believe a word they say about this smelly island,’ she wrote in a letter. From their pension’s balcony, remembered Margo, ‘we saw a lot of funerals passing, and Mother was very alarmed. Mother was plagued by visions of epidemics.’
Their first spring on the island
‘Mother took to mourning the death of my father in earnest – with the aid of Demon Drink’
was unusually cold and disheartening, but then Spiro, the taxi driver who befriended them from the start, found them a villa with a garden blooming with bougainvillea and marigolds. He chased up Louisa’s funds from her bank in London so they had enough to live on. Soon the brightness, colour and freedom they discovered in Corfu lifted their spirits.
For the Durrells, after their years in England struggling with their family difficulties, it was a rebirth. It was Louisa’s ‘amused but loving tolerance that held them together,’ said a family friend, but the children’s understanding of their mother’s fragility meant they never pushed their disorder too far, allowing her preside over a happy anarchy.
For Gerald the villa’s garden was ‘a magic land, a forest of flowers through which roamed creatures I had never seen before’. He went about in a daze, his attention drawn to spiders, caterpillars and flights of butterflies. ‘He had an enormous patience,’ recalled Nancy, ‘and he would spend hours crouching or lying on his belly, looking into creatures’ private lives.’ Larry did not live with the family at the villa, he and Nancy taking a small hut looking out on two baby cypresses. Leslie, the 17-year-old middle son, meanwhile, was the ‘card, a loveable rogue’, in the words of his sister. He ‘always had a gun on his shoulder, and would go out and shoot this and that and something else’. He was so ‘mad about guns’ that he would head into the countryside with the father of Maria, the family’s maid, who ran the local police force, wearing a police uniform himself, ‘and no doubt arrest people who were poaching a rabbit or something’.
On one occasion Leslie was down by the lagoon when he became aware of someone watching him. The young man turned out to be a convict and murderer named Kosti who was out on weekend licence, and was even brought home to meet Louisa and drink a glass of beer. Gerald later stole this story for My Family And
Other Animals, claiming it was he who had met the man.
In Gerald’s book ‘there were things I objected to strongly’, said Margo. She felt her brother portrayed her as something of an airhead, forever worried about pimple cream: ‘Gerry took it for absolute granted that I would sanction everything he wrote, but I didn’t.’ Margo came to feel that Gerald ‘became very successful by libelling me a lot’.
THEREGOESTHE NEIGHBOURHOOD...
In 1936 Nancy became pregnant, but abortions were illegal and only with great difficulty did they persuade a doctor to justify one on health grounds.
A young British expatriate called Vivian Iris Raymond, then 10 years old, deplored the way they’d take friends ‘on their skinny-dipping excursions, including unaccompanied young ladies from England’, arousing indignation across the island. ‘I must go and bathe now,’ wrote Larry. ‘Naked, by God.’
The local Greeks, however, saw nothing godly about Larry and Nancy swimming in the nude. ‘We used to go and bathe naked together,’ Nancy remembered, ‘keeping out of view of the fishermen because we didn’t want to shock them too much – at that time peasants never even took their vests off in summer.’ On one occasion a priest, sitting on his porch with a full view of the beach, rallied the nearby youths to pelt the bathers with stones, and Larry and Nancy were forced to flee.
For Nancy and Larry, however, their naked contact with the air and light and waters of Corfu was a sacred immersion. ‘We were absolutely mad on taking off all our clothes,’ recalled Nancy. ‘I could never have enough. I wanted just to absolutely drown myself in the sun and the sea.’ And Larry agreed, claiming, ‘The Mediterranean is the capital, the heart, the sex organ of Europe.’
Vivian considered the couple ‘illdisciplined. ‘I had heard Mummy’s friends talk about degenerates, a term I had not understood.’ It was Larry and Nancy, she decided, they must have been referring to.
In 1939, the war drove the family from the island. On April 7 the Italians invaded Albania; less than a week later they were only two miles across the strait. Louisa’s bank in London warned she might be cut off from funds if she remained abroad, so in June, she closed the door on their villa – and the family left Corfu for England.
‘We were absolutely mad on taking off all our clothes. I just wanted to drown myself in the sun and the sea’