My family and other philandering feuding drunkards
As Gerald Durrell’s magical memoirs are turned into TV’s latest feelgood Sunday night drama, the spectacularly dysfunctional family you WON’T see
Forget the Night Manager, the latest sumptuous Sunday night extravaganza is the Durrells, ITV’s six-part series which whisks us off to Corfu in 1935, where the nature-writer gerald Durrell lived for four years as a boy with his family.
His experiences on that beautiful greek island were fictionalised in his book, My Family And other Animals, which became an immediate hit in 1956. the book has never been out of print and has sold more than a million copies.
that’s because it conveys a dream world where gerald roams free, swimming and sailing with no supervision, and befriending exotic animals, which he would bring home and install in the bath, to the annoyance of his frazzled mother and squabbling elder siblings: brothers Lawrence and Leslie, and sister Margo.
It is a world where greek peasants doff their caps to these eccentric english bohemians, and where adults — with their love affairs, money worries and everyday dramas — are viewed with bemused detachment by the child narrator.
A care-free existence with sunshine and endless animals, it has all the ingredients for the perfect Sunday night drama. of course, the book was previously turned into a ten-part BBC series in 1987 starring Brian Blessed and Hannah gordon. In 2005, the BBC again adapted it into a 90minute drama, this time with Imelda Staunton as Louisa, the Durrells’ mother. Now ItV has had a go, promising a drama ‘full of warmth, humour and fun’.
In the book, and on tV, gerald is a fearless ten-year-old with a fascination for animals. He makes friends with bats, spiders, and scorpions as well as a pigeon, Quasimodo.
the eldest of the four siblings, Lawrence, known as Larry, is pompous, neurotic and too self-important (and lazy) to help with any practical tasks. When he causes a fire by falling asleep while smoking, he lies in bed giving orders to the others to put it out.
Leslie, the second eldest, is quiet, brooding and obsessed with guns and hunting, while Margo is a moody teenage beauty, forever sunbathing on rocks and falling in love.
In real-life, the children possessed all these qualities, but what you won’t see is what became of the Durrells after Corfu, which is a rather less rose-tinted tale of alcoholism, failed marriages and bitter feuds.
gerald Durrell grew up to be a volatile drunk whose obsession with founding his own zoo ruined his first marriage, and led him to set up with a young zoologist half his age.
Drink was a big part of his mother’s life, too — a stint in India gave her a love of gin, which she would take to bed with her by the bottle — though champagne was her real passion, which she drank in huge quantities while pregnant with gerald.
Meanwhile, Lawrence Durrell became a famous novelist who wrote the Alexandria Quartet, a celebrated tetralogy from the Fifties, and Bitter Lemons of Cyprus. He too loved a drink, and married four times.
their sister Margo ended up running a boarding- house in
Bournemouth after two failed marriages. But it’s the middle brother Leslie, their mother’s favourite, who would cause the most upset, as we shall see.
We should start with Gerald, who was born in India in 1925, where his father, a distant and often absent figure, was a civil engineer.
Gerald was the couple’s fifth child — their second-born, Margery, died of diptheria in infancy — and his mother was drinking heavily by then.
As Gerald would write of her pregnancy: ‘As other women have cravings for ... extraordinary foods when they are in this state, my mother’s craving was for champagne, of which she drank an inordinate quantity until I was born. To this I attribute the fact that I have always drunk excessively, and especially champagne, whenever I could afford it.’
In 1928, when Gerald was just three, his father died of a suspected brain haemorrhage, possibly caused by over-working. His mother was shattered and took the family back from India to England.
But life in suburban Dulwich didn’t suit free-spirited Louisa. Her three eldest children went to boarding school, leaving her with only Gerald for company. She felt lonely and even considered putting her head in the gas-oven.
She consoled herself with gin, which she would take to bed with her youngest son. He would later recall waking ‘to find myself pressed up against her in a state of arousal’.
This unhealthy set-up — which began when Gerald was five and continued until he was ten — reached a crisis point when Louisa had a nervous breakdown and went into a clinic, and a governess was appointed for Gerald.
That governess — Miss Burroughs — was an unpleasant woman, who locked Gerald in his room at night without a bed pan, leaving him in great discomfort. His spaniel Simon was his only friend, but that came to a gruesome end when the creature was hit by a car, which ‘neatly crushed Simon’s skull, killing him instantly’.
When some friends of the Durrells moved to Bournemouth, Louisa decided she would follow them, and, in 1931, bought a large Victorian house there.
Gerald was sent to Wychwood Prep School, which he hated so much that, according to his biographer Douglas Botting, he would cling to the railings on the way, screaming and begging not to go. When he was wrongly accused of a misdemeanour and beaten by the headmaster, his mother decided enough was enough and took him out of school altogether — he would never attend another.
Meanwhile, Lawrence was living in London, where he led a dissolute lifestyle, ‘whoring and drinking’, according to Botting’s biography.
It was here he met his first wife Nancy Myers, a beautiful young art student, who recalled a visit to the Durrells: ‘You felt they weren’t forced into any mould like people usually are — every sort of meal was at a different time, and everybody was shouting at everybody else, no control anywhere.’
Louisa was happier in Bournemouth, but the family suffered from poor health. So when Lawrence and Nancy moved to Corfu, Louisa and the whole family went, too.
The ensuing four years form the basis of Gerald Durrell’s The Corfu Trilogy, of which My Family And Other Animals is the first book. Durrell never pretended it was anything other than a work of fiction, and many of the stories within it never took place. But the sibling rivalry was true.
The fights between the two eldest brothers were particularly fierce — Lawrence was the swaggering writer who enjoyed fame, money and had fashionable friends such as Henry Miller, the renegade American writer whose sexually explicit debut novel, Tropic Of Cancer, caused outrage.
Leslie, not as obviously clever as Lawrence, felt belittled by him, and channelled his anger into a love of guns and hunting.
But while Lawrence enjoyed huge literary success, his love-life was far less smooth.
After divorcing Nancy in 1947, he married Eve Cohen — the model for the character Justine in The Alexandria Quartet — and they had a daughter Sappho. (Eve later had a breakdown and Sappho killed herself in 1985).
After separating from his second wife in 1955, he married for a third time, in 1961, to a woman called Claude-Marie Vincendon. Durrell was heartbroken when she died of cancer in 1967. His fourth — and final — marriage was in 1973 to a gorgeous model called Ghislaine de Boysson. They divorced in 1979.
As for Leslie, while his siblings enjoyed publicity, and all wrote about their lives, he shunned the limelight, perhaps with good reason.
When he came of age, he put his entire inheritance into buying a fishing boat, but it sank in Poole harbour before its maiden voyage. Then he tried market gardening — growing fruit and veg to sell to restaurants and shops — but that failed. ‘However hard I try, nothing seems to go right for me,’ he once said. ‘I’ve got a sort of jinx on me.’
Later, he embarked on a series of mysterious semi- criminal enterprises involving luxury yachts and fraudulently called himself ‘Major-General Durrell’.
While living at home he had an affair with his mother’s Greek maid, Maria Kondos, who was ten years older. He was already dating Doris Hall, the young manageress of the off-licence where his mother bought her gin. In September 1945, Maria had a baby by Leslie, in whom he took no interest.
The family put Maria in a home for fallen women and, according to their sister Margo, Lawrence and Gerald were adamant that Leslie shouldn’t marry her. ‘Though they could both be very unconventional and wild,’ she recalled, ‘they could also be very prudish and correct.’
Their decision would shatter the life of Anthony Kondos, as the boy was named, who grew up knowing nothing about his father. ‘My main regret in life is that I never knew my father,’ he once said. ‘For many years I felt extreme animosity towards him and the rest of the family . . . Now I have only sadness that I was not one of them, the family . . . And oddly enough, I am proud of being a Durrell, albeit nameless.’
Leslie, meanwhile, married Doris Hall, from the off-licence, in 1952, and they moved to Kenya to run a hunting reserve.
This ended in disaster when they defrauded an elderly woman of a substantial amount of money. When caught, Gerald was expected to foot the bill. He refused, and from that point on wanted nothing more to do with Leslie, fearing his brother’s criminal activity could harm his literary reputation.
Lawrence also cut Leslie out of his life: on one occasion Leslie went to visit his brother, but Lawrence’s wife refused him entry, fearing he wanted to borrow money.
In 1968, Leslie and Doris returned to England from Africa, penniless, and ended up working as caretakers for a block of flats near Marble Arch. By the time he died in 1983, while drinking in a Notting Hill pub aged 65, he still hadn’t reunited with his siblings and none attended his funeral.
Though Margo’s life was also far from glamorous, she remained closest to Leslie and married twice, first to Gerry Breeze, a pilot with whom she travelled round Africa and had two sons. Her second brief marriage was to a trombonist called Max Duncan.
Twice divorced and with two young children, she used her small
inheritance to open a boarding house in Bournemouth, where ‘lodgers would mark my life like milestones’. These included jazz trumpeters, a battered wife and a Maltese transsexual. She later wrote: ‘My dream of wealth accumulating in the bank was forgotten as I came face to face with reality.’ She remained in Bournemouth until her death, aged 87, in 2007.
Lawrence and Gerald, however, did lead the lives they yearned for.
In 1951, aged 26, Gerald married Jacquie Wolfenden, a hotelier’s daughter whom he met while cavorting with three different ballerinas who were staying at her father’s hotel.
Eight years later, Gerald launched the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and, in 1964, the Durrell Wildlife Park on Jersey, which continues to attract thousands of visitors a year.
This same year, his dear mother Louisa died after a short illness, aged 78. She was, by this stage, lonely and wanted to die, according to her daughter Margo. Her last words were: ‘Is that brandy on the sideboard for medicinal purposes, dear?’
His mother’s death had a profound effect on Gerald, according to Jacquie, who believed he was never quite the same again. ‘He never came to terms with it, he was utterly unable to accept it,’ she later reflected. ‘When something untoward happened, he just couldn’t cope. He would run away from problems, and just drink, or take drugs such as tranquilisers, or combinations of both.’
Work also took its toll. Jacquie helped build up his writing career and encouraged him to open the zoo, which she ran with him. But as his television career took off, their marriage fell apart, Jacquie feeling more like a stooge than a wife.
In 1976, he returned from a trip to Mauritius to find her packing to leave. Their divorce was finalised in 1978, and Gerald remarried, this time to Lee McGeorge, a 27-year-old zoology student from Memphis, whom, he calculated, would make the ideal co-regent of his zoo. Jeremy Mallinson, who worked for Durrell for 35 years, saw Lee as ‘a little bit of heaven coming into his life. I’m sure she gave him at least another ten years of life’.
But even his new young wife couldn’t stop Durrell from drinking, leading to his long and painful death. He suffered seizures and abdominal pain, and was diagnosed with liver cancer in January 1994. A replacement liver was found, and he was flown from Jersey to London for the operation, sipping whisky on the plane. The operation was a success, but his pancreas had given up, and he died of septicaemia in January 1995, just after turning 70.
It was a sad end to an extraordinary life, and a far cry from those halcyon, if somewhat idealised, days on Corfu.
The Durrells starts on ITV tomorrow at 8pm.
Hard-drinking Hemingway is said to have sunk 12 mojitos in one hour at the tiny La Bodeguita del Medio bar, but we enjoyed just one or two, to the sounds of a Latin band, before moving on to Hotel Ambos Mundos.
THERE, Room 511 has been preserved as an atmospheric museum to the author who lived there for seven years, complete with his typewriter and fishing rods. En route, I was suddenly approached by two comely women in colourful dresses who planted their luminously painted lips on my cheeks. Their kisses did not come cheap, as they promptly demanded two pesos (£1.40) each for the privilege.
For a taxi back to our hotel, what better than one of the 60,000 or so classic American cars that survive from before the embargo? Ours was a 1958 cherry- red Dodge Regent, whose driver, Carlos, was old enough to remember life before the revolution. ‘People were so poor in the countryside,’ he told us. ‘Castro improved their lives.’
For 20 pesos (£14), he took us on an idiosyncratic tour of some of Havana’s lesser-known attractions, including John Lennon Park, where an elderly lady is employed to give tourists a pair of metal-rimmed glasses to put on the bronze statue of the late Beatle. The government gave her the job after fans kept pinching the Lennon specs.
What struck me most during our week was that people seemed determined the place wouldn’t lose its unique character.
‘Don’t think this visit means we are going to have Cuba filled with McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken in a year’s time,’ said our guide, earnestly. ‘We will never let that happen.’
However, as thousands of freespending Americans begin to descend on ten antiquated airports, the pressure to change will be overwhelming. All the more reason to go now.