NO WONDER I PREFERRED THE ANIMALS
The sun-drenched TV drama enchanted millions. Now, launching a glorious summer series, the Mail presents Gerald Durrell’s timeless memoir about his madcap family — and the start of their magical adventure ...
ABITING wind had ushered in a leaden August sky. Along the Bournemouth seafront a sharp, stinging drizzle fell, billowing into opaque grey sheets whenever the wind caught it.
It was the sort of weather calculated to try anyone’s endurance, and brought with it the usual selection of ailments to which my family was prone.
For me, aged ten, lying on the floor and labelling my collection of shells, it was catarrh, which filled my skull like cement.
For my brother Leslie, 19, hunched and glowering by the fire, it was his ears, inflamed and bleeding delicately.
To my 18-year-old sister Margo the weather had delivered a fresh dappling of acne spots to a face that was already blotched like a red veil. And for my widowed mother Louisa there was a rich, bubbling cold, with a twinge of rheumatism to season it. Only my eldest brother, Larry, then 23, was untouched.
he had become increasingly irritable as the days wore on. ‘Why do we stand this bloody climate?’ he asked suddenly one afternoon, gesturing towards the rain-distorted window. ‘Look at it! And, if it comes to that, look at us!
‘There’s Margo swollen up like a plate of scarlet porridge,’ he went on, ‘ and Leslie wandering around with miles of cotton wool in each ear. And you,’ he said, turning on Mother. ‘Look at you! You’re looking more decrepit and hag-ridden every day.’
Mother peered over the top of the book she was reading. ‘ Indeed I’m not,’ she said indignantly. ‘ You are,’ Larry insisted. ‘ And your family looks like a series of illustrations from a medical encyclopedia.’
he was into his stride now. ‘What we all need is sunshine,’ Larry continued. ‘ A country where we can grow.’
‘Yes, dear, that would be nice,’ agreed Mother, not really listening.
‘I had a letter from [my friend] George this morning,’ said Larry. ‘he says Corfu’s wonderful. Why don’t we pack up and go to Greece?’
‘Very well, dear, if you like,’ said Mother unguardedly. Where Larry was concerned she was generally very careful not to commit herself.
‘ When?’ asked Larry, buoyed by this surprising co-operation. ‘Well,’ replied Mother, realising her tactical error, ‘I think it would be a sensible idea if you were to go on ahead, dear, and arrange things. Then you can write and tell me if it’s nice, and we all can follow.’
‘No,’ said Larry firmly. ‘If we’re going to Greece, let’s all go together.’
‘But I can’t go just like that,’ protested Mother. ‘I have to arrange something about this house.’
‘Arrange what, for heaven’s sake?’ retorted Larry. ‘Sell it!’ ‘I can’t do that, dear,’ said Mother, shocked. ‘Why not?’ ‘Because I’ve only just bought it.’ ‘Sell it while it’s still unspoiled, then.’
‘ Don’t be ridiculous, dear,’ said Mother firmly. ‘ That’s quite out of the question. It would be madness.’
And so in the summer of 1935 we sold the house in Bournemouth and fled from the gloom of the English summer like a flock of migrating swallows.
WE THREADED our way out of the noise and confusion of the Customs shed into the brilliant sunshine on the quay.
Around us the old town rose steeply, tiers of multi- coloured houses piled haphazardly, green shutters folded back from their windows like the wings of a thousand moths.
Behind us lay the bay, smooth as a plate, smouldering with the enamelled blue of a jay’s eye. Our life in Corfu had begun.
Nobody who has not been househunting with my mother can possibly imagine what it is like.
We drove around the island in a cloud of dust the following morning while Mr Beeler, the guide from our hotel, showed us villa after villa in a bewildering selection of sizes, colours, and situations. Mother shook her head firmly at them all.
At last we had contemplated the tenth and final villa on Mr Beeler’s list, and Mother had shaken her head once again. Our guide mopped his face with his handkerchief. ‘ Madame Durrell,’ he said at last, ‘I have shown you every villa I know, yet you do not want any. Madame, what is it you require? What is the matter with these villas?’ Mother regarded him with astonishment. ‘Didn’t you notice?’ she asked. ‘None of them had a bathroom.’
Mr Beeler stared at Mother with bulging eyes. ‘But Madame,’ he wailed in genuine anguish, ‘ what for you want a bathroom? have you not got the sea?’
We returned in silence to the hotel.
By the following morning Mother had decided that we would hire a car and go out house-hunting on our own.
She was convinced that somewhere on the island there lurked a villa with a bathroom. We did not share her confidence, and so it was a slightly irritable and argumentative group that she herded down to the taxi rank in the main square in Corfu Old Town.
The taxi-drivers, registering our innocent appearance, scrambled from inside their cars and flocked round us like vultures, each trying to out- shout his compatriots. Their voices grew louder and louder and they began clutching hold of us as though they would tear us apart.
Not yet used to the local customs, we began to fear we were in danger of our lives.
At that moment everyone was startled into silence by a voice that rumbled out above the uproar, a deep, rich, vibrant sound, the sort of voice you would expect a volcano to have.
‘hoy!’ roared the voice. ‘ Whys donts yous have someones who can talks your own language?’
Turning, we saw an ancient Dodge parked by the kerb.
Behind the wheel sat a short, barrel-bodied individual with hamlike hands and a leathery, scowling face surmounted by a jauntily tilted peaked cap.
The man got out of his car and walked towards us. Then he stopped, scowling even more ferociously, and surveyed the group of now- silent cab drivers. ‘Thems been worrying yous?’ he asked Mother.
‘No, no,’ said Mother untruthfully; ‘it was just that we had difficulty in understanding them.’
‘ Yous wants someones who can talks your own language,’ repeated the new arrival. ‘Thems bastards . . . if yous will excuses the words . . . would swindles their own mothers. Excuses me a minute and I’ll fix thems.’
he turned on the drivers a blast of Greek that almost swept them off their feet.
Aggrieved, gesticulating, angry, they were ushered back to their cars by this extraordinary man. he turned to us again.
‘Wheres yous wants to gos?’ he asked. ‘ Can you take us to look for a villa?’ asked Larry.
‘ Sure. I’ll takes yous anywheres. Just yous says.’
‘ We are looking,’ said Mother firmly, ‘for a villa with a bathroom. Do you know of one?’
The man’s eyebrows twisted into a knot of thoughtfulness.’
‘Bathrooms?’ he said. ‘ Yous wants a bathrooms?’
‘ None of the ones we have seen so far had them,’ said Mother.
‘Oh, I knows a villa with a bathrooms,’ said the man.
‘Will you take us to look at it, please?’ asked Mother. ‘Sure. Gets into the cars.’ Our driver engaged his gears with a terrifying sound. We shot through the
twisted streets on the outskirts of the town, swerving in and out among the loaded donkeys, the carts, the groups of locals and innumerable dogs, our horn honking a deafening warning.
During this our driver seized the opportunity to engage us in conversation.
‘Yous English? Thought so. . . English always wants bathrooms. . . I gets a bathroom in my house . . .Spiro’s my name, Spiro Hakiaopulos . . .they alls calls me Spiro Americano on accounts of I lives in America . . .Yes, spent eight years in Chicago . . .That’s where I learnt my goods English . . . Wents there to makes moneys . . .Then after eight years I says, “Spiros,” I says, “yous mades enough . . .” sos I comes backs to Greece . . .brings this car . . .best ons the islands . . . no one else gets a car like this . . . All the English tourists knows me, theys all asks for me when theys comes here . . .Theys knows theys wonts be swindled . . .I likes the English . . .best kinds of peoples . . . Honest to Gods, ifs I wasn’t Greek I’d likes to be English.’
We sped down a white road covered in a thick layer of silky dust that rose in a boiling cloud behind us, past vineyards and cane plants. At last we roared to the top of a hill, and Spiro crammed on his brakes and brought the car to a dust-misted halt.
‘ Theres you ares,’ he said, pointing with a stubby forefinger. ‘ That’s the villa with the bathrooms, likes yous wanted.’
Mother, who had kept her eyes firmly shut throughout the drive, now opened them cautiously and looked. Spiro was pointing at a gentle curve of hillside that rose from the glittering sea.
The hill and the valleys around it were an eiderdown of olive groves that shone with a fishlike gleam where the breeze touched the leaves.
Halfway up the slope, guarded by a group of tall, slim cypress trees, nestled a strawberry-pink villa, like some exotic fruit lying in the greenery.
The cypress trees undulated gently in the breeze, as if they were busily painting the sky a still brighter blue for our arrival.
We felt as if we had come home.
HAVING lumbered so unexpectedly into our lives, Spiro now took over complete control of our affairs. It was better, he explained, for him to do things, as everyone knew him, and he would make sure we were not swindled. ‘Donts you worrys yourselfs about anythings, Mrs Durrells,’ he had scowled. ‘Leaves everythings to me.’ It was Spiro who, on discovering that our money had not yet arrived from England, took it upon himself to go and speak severely to the bank manager about his lack of organisation.
It was Spiro who paid our hotel bill, who arranged a vehicle to carry our luggage to the villa, and who drove us out there himself, his car piled high with groceries that he had purchased for us.
Within a few hours he had changed from a taxi driver to our champion, and within a week he was our guide, philosopher, and friend. He became so much a member of the family that very soon there was scarcely a thing we did in which he was not involved.
So we were installed in the villa, and each adapted ourselves to our surroundings in our respective ways.
Margo, merely by donning a microscopic swimsuit and sunbathing in the olive groves, swiftly collected an ardent band of handsome local youths who appeared like magic from an apparently deserted landscape.
Larry would spend the whole day in his room with his typewriter, working on his novel and only emerging dreamily for meals.
Leslie, meanwhile, had unpacked his beloved revolvers and startled us all with an apparently endless series of explosions while he fired at an old tin can from his bedroom window.
For myself, the garden was a magic land, a forest of flowers through which roamed creatures I had never seen before.
Among the thick, silky petals of each rose bloom lived tiny, crablike spiders that scuttled sideways when disturbed.
On the rose stems, encrusted with greenflies, ladybirds moved like newly painted toys.
Carpenter bees, like furry, electric- blue bears, zigzagged among the flowers, growling fatly and busily.
Humming bird hawk-moths, sleek and neat, whipped up and down the paths with a fussy efficiency, pausing occasionally on misty wings to lower a long, slender proboscis into a bloom.
And as an accompaniment to all this there came from the olive groves the incessant shimmering cries of the cicadas.
If the curious, blurring heat haze produced a sound, it would be exactly these insects’ strange, chiming cries. In the company of my adored dog Roger, I would spend hours squatting on my heels or lying on my stomach watching the private lives of the creatures around me, while my shaggy companion sat nearby, a look of resignation on his face. Perhaps the most exciting discovery in this multi-coloured Lilliput was that of an earwig’s nest. I had long wanted to find one and had searched everywhere without success, so the joy of stumbling upon one unexpectedly was overwhelming, like suddenly being given a wonderful present.
I moved a piece of bark and there beneath it was the nursery, a small hollow in the earth that the insect must have burrowed out for herself. She squatted in the middle of it, shielding underneath her a few white eggs.
She did not move when the flood of sunlight struck her as I lifted the bark. I could not count the eggs, but there did not seem to be many, so I presumed that she had not yet laid her full complement. Tenderly I replaced her lid of bark.
From that moment I guarded the nest jealously. I put up a protecting wall of rocks round it, and as an
ON MONDAY: FLIRTY GIRLS AND A PIGEON THAT REFUSED TO FLY
additional precaution I wrote out a notice in red ink and stuck it on a pole nearby as a warning to the family.
The notice read: ‘ BEWAR. EARWIG NEST. QUIAT PLESE.’ This was remarkable only in that the two correctly spelled words were the biological ones.
Every hour or so I would subject the mother earwig to ten minutes’ close scrutiny.
Eventually the pile of eggs beneath her grew, and she seemed to have become accustomed to my lifting off her bark roof. I even decided that she had begun to recognise me, from the friendly way she waggled her antennae.
To my acute disappointment, after all my efforts and constant sentry duty, the babies hatched out during the night.
I felt that, after all I had done, the female might have held up the hatching until I was there to witness it.
However, there they were, a fine brood of young earwigs. They moved gently under their mother’s body, walking between her legs, the more venturesome even climbing onto her pincers. It was a heart-warming sight.
The next day the nursery was empty: my wonderful family had scattered over the garden.
I saw one of the babies some time later; he was bigger, of course, browner and stronger, but I recognised him immediately.
HE WAS curled up in a maze of rose petals, having a sleep, and when I disturbed him he merely raised his pincers irritably over his back.
I would have liked to think that it was a salute, a cheerful greeting, but honesty compelled me to admit that it was nothing more than an earwig’s warning to a potential enemy. But I forgave him.
He had, after all, been a lot younger when I had first seen him. Alongside my insect kingdom, I got to know the local girls who passed the garden every morning and evening.
Riding side- saddle on their slouching, drooping- eared donkeys, they were shrill and colourful as parrots, their chatter and laughter echoing among the olive trees.
In the mornings they would smile and shout greetings as their donkeys pattered past, and in the evenings they would lean over the hedge, and hold out gifts for me — a bunch of amber grapes still sun- warmed, or a giant watermelon with an inside like pink ice.
As the days passed, I came gradually to understand them. What had at first been a confused babble became a series of recognisable separate sounds.
Then, suddenly, these took on meaning, and slowly and haltingly, I started to use them myself.
Our neighbours were delighted, as though I had conferred some delicate compliment by trying to learn their language.
They would lean over the hedge, their faces screwed up with concentration, as I groped my way through a greeting or a simple remark, and when I had successfully concluded they would beam at me and clap their hands.
I learned their names, who was related to whom, which were married and which hoped to be, and other details.
I learned where their cottages were, and should Roger and I chance to pass that way the entire family, vociferous and pleased, would tumble out to greet us, to bring a chair, so that I might sit under their vine and eat some fruit with them.
In those heady early days we would eat breakfast out in the garden, under the small tangerine trees. The sky was fresh and shining, not yet the fierce blue of noon, but a clear milky opal. The flowers were half asleep, roses dew- crumpled, marigolds still tightly shut.
Breakfast was a leisurely and silent meal, for nobody was very talkative at that hour. By the end of the meal the influence of the coffee, toast, and eggs made itself felt, and we started to revive, to tell each other what we intended to do, that day, and then argue earnestly as to whether each had made a wise decision.
I never joined in these discussions, for I knew perfectly well what I intended to do, and would simply concentrate on finishing my food as rapidly as possible.
‘Must you gulp and slush your food like that?’ Larry would inquire in a pained voice, delicately picking his teeth with a matchstick. ‘Eat it slowly, dear,’ Mother would murmur. ‘There’s no hurry.’
No hurry? With Roger waiting at the garden gate, an alert black shape, watching for me with eager brown eyes?
No hurry, with the first sleepy cicadas starting to fiddle experimentally among the olives? No hurry, with the island waiting, morning cool, bright as a star, to be explored? Already I wished the days would never end.
Adapted from MY FAMILY AND Other ANIMALS by Gerald Durrell, published by Penguin at £8.99. © Gerald Durrell to order a copy for £7.19 (offer valid to 28/8/18) visit www.mailshop.co.uk/ books or call 0844 571 0640.