DARK SECRET OF THE DURRELLS
As the heartwarming television series The Durrells returns, Margo’s grandchildren reveal how she nearly died in a PoW camp, their memories of her madcap guesthouse and the huge impact she had on their lives
LIKE many British children, Tracy Breeze grew up with the stories of Gerald Durrell and his extraordinary family exile on the beautiful island of Corfu. But it’s no surprise she loved the madcap adventures of the characters and creatures in the author’s much loved book My Family And Other Animals.
For Tracy’s grandmother was Gerald’s older sister Margo Durrell and her childhood home, in 1960s Bournemouth, was Margo’s guesthouse which doubled as the site of Gerald’s first makeshift zoo.
“They kept the reptiles in the garage and the monkeys in the house, swinging from the curtains,” says Tracy. “My father helped Uncle Gerry build cages in the garden.”
On Sunday evening Tracy will join millions of others in tuning into the third series of the hit ITV adaptation, The Durrells. She will see her teenage grandmother continue her search for love and a cure for acne as the war – and the end of their island idyll – approaches.
Now those curious as to what happened next can read Margo’s own take on the family’s subsequent adventures in the newly republished book Whatever Happened To Margo, a story Tracy first discovered in her grandmother’s attic in 1995. In a family with quite so many stories – “Everything just seemed to happen to them” – many remain untold. Even now, just over a decade after Margo’s death, Tracy is still learning about her grandmother’s rich life.
Hearing the harrowing story of her own father’s birth – Gerald was the first of Margo’s two sons – in a prisoner-of-war camp in Ethiopia, was a moving moment, she says.
Margo had stayed in Corfu after her mother and two of her brothers, Leslie and Gerald, left at the outset of war. She went on to meet an RAF pilot called Jack Breeze who was stationed there and, after Jack convinced her of the danger she faced from the approaching Nazi troops, the pair escaped to South Africa where they married in 1940.
“Nan was in Ethiopia where we think Jack had been transferred and she ended up in an Italian-run PoW camp when she gave birth in October 1942,” says Tracy. “When she had to have an emergency caesarean section – for which there was no anaesthetic – she was bleeding to death. The nuns caring for her managed to smuggle her out and eventually she made her way to safety in Mozambique.” After the war the couple returned to collect a birth certificate for Gerald.
Margo, perhaps too scarred by the experience, did not speak of it for years but eventually told Tracy’s sister Sarah when she was pregnant.
Tracy herself only heard of it after Margo’s death: “I was so shocked. I remembered nan saying she had to return to the UK to have her second child Nick, as she could never have
a baby away again but she did not elaborate on why.”
Her grandmother, who divorced Jack after Nick’s birth and brought her sons up alone, was fiercely independent and, though she loved to hear and tell stories, “did not like to be the centre of attention”.
“As children we used to snuggle up to nan and she would tell us stories,” recalls Tracy. Included in Margo’s rich catalogue of subject matter were her childhood in India, the Corfu years – “her fondest memories” – a spell working on Greek cruise ships in her 50s and the comings and goings at 51 St Albans Avenue, the Bournemouth guesthouse she established in 1947.
Across the road at number 48 lived her own mother Louisa, the indomitable matriarch of My Family And Other Animals.
“Nan only attracted eccentrics and creatives,” says Tracy. “She embraced everything and everybody and you could talk to her about anything. She was a natural confidante.”
Tracy’s favourite lodgers were a gay couple. “One was a transvestite. We thought this was great. They would have drag parties and we children were always included. Nan was a Buddhist. There was always Greek music playing.”
FOR suburban Bournemouth in the 1960s, she concludes “this was not an everyday household, though it felt perfectly normal to us”. Unsurprisingly Tracy’s teenage friends all loved Margo.
“Nan drove a big blue Bedford van in which she would take ownership of the road,” recalls Tracy. “She would throw us kids in the back and set off camping in the New Forest. We slept on the wooden benches. We didn’t even have cooking things. We just got there and said, ‘Oh what will we do for food?’”
Later, Tracy occasionally skipped school with friends, heading instead for Margo’s beach hut. “She would just sit with us and chat. She never asked why we weren’t in school. I don’t think she really realised we were bunking off.”
Margo was much more than a grandmother, becoming Tracy’s “surrogate mother and best friend” after her own mother died when she was 11. “Without her my life would have been very different, very sad. She had a huge impact.”
Also a central figure in Tracy’s life was her Uncle Gerry, the famed naturalist and author. She spent a year in Jersey – where he founded his zoo in 1959 – in the late 1980s. “Like nan he was very down to earth and said everything how it was,” she says. “One minute he could be talking to royalty and the next he would have the dustman in for a cup of tea.”
Gerry and Margo remained extremely close until his death in 1995 and spending time with them together was “a joy”, recalls Tracy.
For Tracy’s younger brother Nick, now 43, born after his father remarried, life at “51” – as the family home was known – also revolved around Margo. She was a much loved provider of tea, biscuits, a well-stocked games cabinet and books. She was also a skilled arbiter of family disagreements. “If I had an argument with dad, another very strong character, I would explain it to her and then, later, I would get a phone call with a full U-turn,” he says. “I never understood how.”
Nick loved hearing about Uncle Gerry’s early animal collection. In particular, he recalls, the occasion when several monkeys escaped, their complicated recapture entering local folklore.
Visitors, of whom there were many, were often the source of more stories. “They would always spark new tales, from the Corfu days and beyond. I remember leafing through a book and mentioning some names and she would say, ‘Oh, he was a surrealist poet who knew Larry. He popped in a few weeks ago’.”
As a child, Nick was delighted to receive books in the post – and a hand-drawn picture of an owl sitting on a rat – from his Uncle Gerry. “The drawing is still on my bedroom wall,” he says.
In his teens – when a favourite pastime was to trawl the local second hand bookshops with Margo – Nick was heavily influenced by his Uncle Larry, Margo’s oldest brother, the novelist Lawrence Durrell. “I was very interested in Lawrence’s bohemian life in 1930s Paris and I loved reading his books.”
DESPITE a brief flirtation with tarantula ownership – bought from his cousin in his teens – Nick did not initially embrace Gerald’s passions in the same way. A spell of work experience at the Jersey Zoo later impressed on him his great uncle’s absolute devotion to the cause of conservation however.
“It was so lovely to be there,” he says. “Reading his biography too I realised how much he really put his life on the line to make Jersey work and try to save those endangered animals. It was pioneering work. The writing, the creation of the Durrell brand was really a means to fund that work. And now we know how prescient his views on conservation were.”
Like Tracy, Nick is proud of the affection in which the Durrells are held, though he points out that the TV series is a fictionalised account of the family’s real experiences. “People have often been very moved by the Durrells – maybe by Gerald’s book as a child or Lawrence’s in their teens – their lives have been touched and that is very nice.”
It is the fact they don’t judge – a trait shared by all the Durrells – which he and many Durrell fans most appreciate, he believes. “That is what really drives the Durrell eccentricity,” he concludes. “People identify so much with that slight craziness which is in every family.”
To order Whatever Happened To Margo? by Margaret Durrell (Penguin, £9.99), with free UK delivery call the Express Bookshop with your card details on 01872 562310. Or send a cheque/PO payable to Express Bookshop to: Margo Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth TR11 4WJ or order online at expressbookshop.co.uk
The Durrells begins on ITV tomorrow night at 8pm