That bloody boy will kill us all!
. . . the war cry of Gerald Durrell’s exasperated brother when an angry pet scorpion ran amok at the lunch table – as revealed in our final magical extract from My Family And Other Animals
HIT television drama The Durrells has won millions of devoted fans. They’ve fallen in love with the eccentric British family who quit Britain for Greece. Here, in the concluding part from the classic memoir that inspired the series, young Gerald causes mayhem with the latest recruit to his menagerie — and, as a result, finds his blissful freedom curtailed by a new tutor.
LIFE On Corfu was good. So good, in fact, that my brother Larry wrote to all his friends back in England and invited them to come and stay. The fact that our villa was only just big enough to house the family and my growing collection of local wildlife seemed not to have occurred to him. ‘I’ve asked a few people out for a week or so,’ he said casually to Mother. ‘I thought it would do us good to have some intelligent and stimulating company around. We don’t want to stagnate.’
‘That will be nice, dear,’ said Mother, unthinkingly. ‘I hope they’re not too highbrow.’
‘good Lord, Mother,’ said Larry. ‘ Of course they’re not! Just charming, ordinary people. I don’t know why you have got such a phobia about highbrow people.’ Mother looked unconvinced.
‘I’m not asking you to discuss art with them,’ continued Larry tetchily. ‘But I do think you might try to conceal your revolting taste in literature. Here I am, filling the house with good books, and I find your bedside table groaning under the weight of cookery and gardening books and the most lurid-looking mystery stories. I can’t think where you get hold of them.’ He gave a short sigh.
‘You’d better let the hotel know when they’re coming,’ Mother remarked, changing the subject.
‘What for?’ asked Larry, surprised. ‘I’ve invited them to stay here.’
‘Larry! You haven’t!’ exclaimed Mother. ‘ Really, you are most thoughtless! There’s hardly enough room for us as it is!’
‘I do wish you’d stop fussing,’ said Larry irritably after the discussion had raged back and forth. ‘There’s quite a simple solution.’ ‘What?’ said Mother suspiciously. ‘Well, since the villa isn’t big enough, let’s move to one that is.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Mother. ‘Whoever heard of moving into a larger house just because you’ve invited some friends to stay? We are not moving.’ aS USUaL, Larry got his way. The new villa was enormous: a tall, square, Venetian mansion with faded daffodil-yellow walls, green shutters and a fox-red roof.
alongside it lay a sunken garden with an ancient, crumbling wall that teemed with local wildlife, providing me with endless opportunities to add to my everexpanding menagerie. a whole new paradise to explore.
The wall’s inhabitants were a mixed lot: geckos, crane flies, lizards, wasps, spiders, moths and beetles of all shapes and sizes. But the shyest and most self-effacing of the little community were the most dangerous.
Slide a knife blade carefully under a piece of the loose plaster and lever it gently away from the brick, and there, crouching beneath it, would be a little black scorpion an inch long, looking for all the world as though it were made out of polished chocolate.
I grew very fond of these scorpions. I found them to be pleasant, unassuming creatures. Provided you did nothing silly or clumsy (like putting your hand on one), they treated you with respect, their one desire being to get away and hide as quickly as possible.
By crouching near the wall at night with a torch, I managed to catch some brief glimpses of their wonderful courtship dances. I saw them standing, claws clasped, their bodies raised to the skies, their tails lovingly entwined; I saw them waltzing slowly in circles among the moss cushions, claw in claw.
But my view of these performances was all-too-short, for almost as soon as I switched on the torch, the partners would stop, pause for a moment, and then scuttle away, side by side. If I could only have kept a colony in captivity, I thought, I would probably have been able to see the whole of the courtship ritual.
But the family had forbidden scorpions in the house, despite my endless pleadings.
Then, one day, I found a fat female scorpion in the wall, wearing what appeared to be a pale fawn fur coat. Closer inspection revealed that this strange garment was made up of a mass of tiny babies clinging to the mother’s back. I was enraptured, making up my mind there and then to smuggle them up to my bedroom so that I could watch them grow up.
With infinite care I manoeuvred the mother and family into a matchbox and hurried back to the villa. It was rather unfortunate that just at that moment Mother was calling us for lunch. I placed the match- box carefully on a mantelpiece and joined the family at the table.
DaWDLIngover my food, feeding our dog Roger under the table, I completely forgot about my exciting new captures. at last Larry, having finished his meal, fetched his cigarettes and reached for the nearest matchbox.
now I maintain to this day that the female scorpion meant him no harm. She was agitated and a trifle annoyed at being shut up in a matchbox for so long, and so she seized the first opportunity to escape. She hoisted herself out of the box with great rapidity, her babies clinging on desperately, and scuttled across Larry’s hand.
There, not quite certain what to do next, she paused, her sting curved up at the ready. Larry, feeling the movement of her claws, glanced down to see what it was, and from that moment things got increasingly confused.
He uttered a roar of fright that made Lugaretzia, who had been enlisted by Mother to help us around the house, drop a plate and brought Roger out from beneath the table, barking. With a flick of his hand, Larry sent the scorpion flying down the table, where she landed between my sister Margo and my brother Leslie, scattering babies like confetti.
Margo, in a vain attempt to stop the scorpion’s advance, hurled a glass of water at it. The shower missed the animal completely, but drenched Mother. Meanwhile the scorpion, by now thoroughly enraged, sped towards Leslie, her sting quivering with emotion.
Leslie leaped to his feet, overturning his chair, and flicked out desperately with his napkin, sending the scorpion rolling across the cloth towards Margo, who let out a scream any railway engine would have been proud to produce.
‘ It’s that bloody boy again!’ bellowed Larry. ‘He’ll kill the lot of us!’ The scorpion had now gone to ground under Leslie’s plate, while her babies swarmed wildly all over the table. Roger, mystified by the panic, ran round the room, barking hysterically.
Since no one had bothered to explain things to him, he seemed to be under the mistaken impression that the family were being attacked, and it was his duty to defend them. as Lugaretzia was the only stranger in the room, he came to the logical conclusion that she must be responsible, so he bit her on the ankle. This did not help matters very much.
The results of this incident were numerous. Larry developed a phobia about matchboxes and opened them thereafter with a handkerchief wrapped round his hand. Lugaretzia limped round the house, her ankle enveloped in yards of bandage, for weeks after the bite had healed, and came round every morning to show us how the scabs were getting on.
But, from my point of view, the worst repercussion was that Mother decided I was running wild, and it was time I received a proper education. With a sinking heart, I heard her announce she was looking for a full-time tutor for me. My days of joyous freedom with Roger and my other animals, it seemed, were numbered. IT WaS after the scorpion drama that the family gave me a large room on the first floor in which to house my beasts, in the vague hope this would confine them to one particular portion of the villa.
To me, it was a delightful place, smelling pleasantly of ether and methylated spirits, and home to not only my wildlife collection but
my dissecting instruments, nets, microscope, collecting bags and various other treasures, including a bat which I had stuffed myself.
It looked, I thought, very much like a live bat. But when summer came, alas, the poor creature appeared to feel the heat greatly. It began to sag a little, its coat no longer glossy, and a new and mysterious smell started to make itself felt above the ether and methylated spirits.
Poor Roger was wrongly accused at first, and only later did a thorough investigation trace the odour to my bat. My new tutor Peter, a delightful young man straight from Oxford who had recently come to live on the island, offered to help me find a new one.
Our attempts were unsuccessful, but did result in the arrival of another new and welcome addition to the household.
Still on my quest for a bat, I thrust my arm one afternoon into a hole in a gnarled olive tree. My fingers closed round something small and soft, something that wiggled and squeaked as I extracted it. At first sight it appeared to be an outsize bundle of dandelion seeds, furnished with a pair of enormous eyes. Closer inspection proved it to be a young Scops owl, still clad in its baby down.
We regarded each other for a moment before the creature dug his tiny claws into my hand and we both fell out of the olive tree.
I carried him home in my pocket and introduced him to the family with trepidation. To my surprise, he was greeted with unqualified approval, and no objection was raised to my keeping him. We named him Ulysses, and from the first he showed he was a bird of great strength and character. Although he would have fitted into a tea cup, he showed no fear and would unhesitatingly attack anything and anyone.
Later, when he grew older and had lost his baby down, he would often accompany Roger and me down to the beach for our late evening swims, clinging tightly to the dog’s shaggy black coat.
Down at the shore, Ulysses would perch on my shoulder, upright as a guardsman, while Roger and I splashed around. Sometimes, if he thought we were taking too long, he would skim past us back up the hill to the garden, sounding an indignant ‘tywhoo’.
Swimming at night had become a favourite occupation for the family that summer. As soon as the moon had risen and the air cooled, we would make our way down through the trees to the creaking wooden jetty and clamber onto our little boat, the Sea Cow.
With Larry and Peter on one oar and Margo and Leslie on the other, and Roger and myself as lookouts, we would drift down the coast for half a mile or so to a small bay with a lip of white sand and a few sunwarm boulders to sit on.
We might never, however, have seen the display of porpoises and fireflies if it had not been for the affair of Mother’s bathing costume.
For some time she had envied us our swimming trips but, as she pointed out when we suggested she join us, she was far too old for that sort of thing.
EVenTUALLY,under pressure from us, Mother paid a visit into town and returned coyly bearing a mysterious parcel. Opening it, she astonished us all by holding up an extraordinary, shapeless garment of black cloth, covered with hundreds of frills and pleats.
‘ What is it?’ asked Larry, eventually.
‘It’s a bathing costume, of course,’ said Mother. ‘ What on earth did you think it was?’
‘It looks like a badly skinned whale,’ said Larry, peering at it.
To celebrate Mother’s first entry into the sea, we decided to have a moonlight picnic down at the bay. The day for the great immersion finally arrived: food and wine were prepared and the boat was cleaned and filled with cushions.
We spread the rugs on the sand, arranged the food, placed the battalion of wine bottles in a row in the shallows to keep cool, and, amid much cheering, Mother stepped out of the boat and stood revealed in all her glory.
Roger, however, seemed to be under the impression that the bathing costume was some sort of sea monster that had enveloped Mother. Barking wildly, he flung himself to the rescue as she stepped into the water, grabbed one of the frills dangling plentifully round the edge of the costume and tugged with all his strength.
With a squeak of dismay, Mother lost her footing and sat down heavily in two feet of water, while Roger tugged so hard that a large section of the frill gave way.
elated by the fact that the enemy appeared to be disintegrating, Roger, growling encouragement to Mother, set to work to remove the rest of the offending monster from her person.
We WRITheD on the sand, helpless with laughter, while Mother sat gasping in the shallows, making desperate attempts to regain her feet, beat Roger off, and retain at least a portion of her costume.
In the end, the angry dog was shooed away and Mother was helped to her feet while Roger crouched nearby, growling ominously at the costume.
The phosphorescence was particularly good that night. By plunging your hand into the water and dragging it along, you could draw a wide golden-green ribbon of cold fire across the sea, and when you dived, as you hit the surface, it seemed as though you had plunged into a frosty furnace of glinting light.
Because of our honoured guest, we lingered long that night. Later, as if by arrangement at the end of our meal, a few fireflies appeared in the olives behind us — a sort of overture to what would prove a remarkable show.
First of all there were just two or three green specks, sliding smoothly through the trees, winking regularly. But, gradually, more and more appeared, until parts of the olive grove were lit with a weird green glow.
never had we seen so many: they crawled on the grass, the bushes and the olive trunks. They drifted in swarms over our heads.
Glittering streams of them flew out over the bay, swirling over the water, and then, right on cue, the porpoises appeared, swimming in line into the bay, rocking rhythmically through the water, their backs as if painted with phosphorus.
In the centre of the bay they swam round, diving and rolling, occasionally leaping in the air and falling back into a conflagration of light. With the fireflies above and the illuminated porpoises below, it was an unbelievable sight.
What a welcome for Mother. A glorious display so thoughtfully provided for my beloved mother, brothers and sister by the wildlife I adored so much. Just for once, for one magical hour, both were in perfect harmony — my family and other animals.