Gerald Durrell: The Authorised Biography

Towards the end of 1937 Mother, Margo, Leslie and Gerald moved to another villa, their third, smaller and handier than the cavernous mansion at Kondokali, but in many ways more desirable and elegant, in spite of its decrepit state. It was a beautiful Georgian house built in 1824 at a spot called Criseda as the weekend retreat, in the days when the British ruled Corfu, of the Governor of the British Protectorate of the Ionian Islands. The new house was perched on a hill not so very far from the Strawberry-Pink Villa, and it was dubbed the Snow-White Villa. A broad, vine-covered veranda ran along its front, and beyond lay a tiny, tangled garden, deeply shaded by a great magnolia and a copse of cypress and olive trees. Lawrence and Nancy would sometimes come over for a few days when Kalami became too lonely for them, for as Lawrence put it: ‘You can have a little too much even of Paradise and a little taste of Hell now and then is good for my work – keeps my brain from stagnating. You can trust Gerry to provide the Hell.’

From the back the villa looked out over a great vista of hills and valleys, fields and olive-woods, promising endless days of exploration and a ceaseless quest for creatures great and small – from giant toads and baby magpies to geckoes and mantises. From the front, the villa faced the sea and the long, shallow, almost landlocked lagoon called Lake Halikiopoulou, along whose nearest edge lay the flatlands Gerald was to call the Chessboard Fields. Here the Venetians had dug a network of narrow irrigation canals to channel the salty waters of the lagoon into salt pans, and these ditches now provided a haven for marine life and a protective barrier for nesting birds. On the seaward side of the maze of canals lay the flat sands of the tide’s edge, the haunt of snipe, oyster-catchers, dunlins and terns. On the landward side lay a checkerboard patchwork of small square fields yielding rich crops of grapes, maize, melons and vegetables. All this was Gerald’s hunting ground, where he could roam at will in the orbit of seabird and waterfowl, terrapin and water snake. Here he was to stalk a wily and ancient terrapin he called Old Plop to his heart’s content, and in a roundabout way acquire a favourite pet bird, a black-backed gull called Alecko – Lawrence called it ‘that bloody albatross’ – which he claimed to have got from a convicted murderer on a weekend’s leave from the local gaol.

Gerald was in an ancient rural Arcadia here. There was no airport runway across the lake (unlike today), no busy road at the foot of the hill, no tourist developments, no mini-markets, next to no cars. One old monk still lived alone in the monastery on Mouse Island across the water, and there were still fisher families in the cottages there (now razed). Sometimes Gerald and Margo would go down to the beach at the foot of the hill and swim across the shallow channel to Mouse Island. There Gerald would search for little animals while Margo would sunbathe in her two-piece bathing costume – invariably the old monk would come down and shake his fist at the attractive, pale English girl and yell, ‘You white witch!’ The north European preoccupation with near nudity and sunburn was rather shocking to the devout, straitlaced Greeks.

Not long after Gerald’s thirteenth birthday in January 1938, his idyllic life on Corfu was given a severe jolt when his tutor and mentor Theo Stephanides decided to leave the island to take up an appointment with an anti-malarial unit founded by the Rockefeller Foundation in Cyprus. His departure was to mark the beginning of the end of the Durrell family’s utopian dream.

Leslie had begun to go native, drinking and brawling with the Greek peasant men whenever the opportunity offered. Larry and Nancy had kept themselves busy making improvements to their house in Kalami, but it was not enough. Holed up in the solitude of the north, the young couple had turned upon themselves, rowing vehemently and sometimes violently. It had not helped that in the summer of 1936 Nancy had become pregnant, and had had an abortion arranged by Theo, not something taken lightly in the moral climate of that place and time. Mother had been shocked to the core when she found out about it. The family edifice had begun to crack after that, and Lawrence had started to grow restless and bored in the narrow confines of paradise. When two young English dancers of his acquaintance came to stay, he slept between them on the beach at night, telling Nancy to find somewhere else to sleep. ‘He was going through a stage when he was tired of being an old married man,’ Nancy recalled with bitterness, ‘and so he tried to push me out of it, and snub me all the time, and was being rather beastly.’ Finally Lawrence had decided they should recharge their creative batteries in Paris and London, and leave the island for a while. Margo, now twenty, decided it was time she made her own way in the ‘real world’, and returned to England.

As for Gerald, such childish innocence as he may have brought to the island – not much, doubtless, but some – was blown away with the onset of puberty, when other interests began to conflict with his earlier enthusiasm for non-human forms of life. From time to time he would play ‘mothers and fathers’ with a young female counterpart – an activity that was seen as a natural part of the curiosity of a highly intelligent boy – and in middle age he was to confide to a friend: ‘Before you knew where you were, the knickers were off and you were away.’

Though the remaining Durrells seemed content to drift aimlessly into the future on their paradise island, the world beyond Corfu’s shores had other plans. War was looming in Europe. In the north, Hitler’s Germany was preparing to march. In the south, Mussolini was loudly braying Italy’s claims to dominion over Albania and to territorial rights over Greece, Corfu included.

Lawrence and Leslie had always sworn to help defend the island against the Italians, but they were overtaken by events. By April 1939 Mary Stephanides and her daughter Alexia had already left Corfu to live in England. Gerald was sorry to see the young girl go, for she had become his best and closest playmate. As war in Europe grew more inevitable by the day, Louisa began to think it might be unwise to linger. In My Family Gerald was to claim that it was her concern for his future education that prompted Mother to leave Corfu. By now he was fourteen years old, and was, as Mary Stephanides recalled, ‘quite independent of adult control. Lawrence tried to be a father to him at times, but he was seldom living in the same home, and was in any case too indulgent towards his small brother. And Gerald always got his own way with his mother. Only Theodore maintained any form of control over him, and that was only once a week. So even if war had not started in 1939, the Corfu days of Gerald Durrell were by then strictly numbered.’

It was Grindlays Bank, Mother’s financial advisers in London, who gave the final push, warning her that when war came her funds might be cut off, and she would be stranded in Greece for the duration without any means of support. In June 1939, therefore, she left the island with Gerald, Leslie and the thirty-year-old Corfiot family maid, Maria Condos.

‘As the ship drew across the sea and Corfu sank shimmering into the pearly heat haze on the horizon,’ Gerald was to write of that decisive farewell, ‘a black depression settled on us, which lasted all the way back to England.’ From Brindisi the train bore the party – consisting of four humans, three dogs, two toads, two tortoises, six canaries, four goldfinches, two greenfinches, a linnet, two magpies, a seagull, a pigeon and an owl – northward to Switzerland.

At the Swiss frontier our passports were examined by a disgracefully efficient official. He handed them back to Mother, together with a small slip of paper, bowed unsmilingly, and left us to our gloom. Some moments later Mother glanced at the form the official had filled in, and as she read it, she stiffened.

‘Just look what he’s put,’ she exclaimed indignantly, ‘impertinent man.’

On the little card, in the column headed Description of Passengers had been written, in neat capitals: ONE TRAVELLING CIRCUS AND STAFF.

Now only Lawrence and Nancy were left – or so it seemed – clinging on in the White House on the edge of Kalami bay as the late summer sun burned down on them and the Germans marched into Czechoslovakia and the Italians occupied Albania, only a few miles across the water. But there was one last twist in the family’s Corfu saga, for one day Margo suddenly reappeared, having decided that the island was where her true home and friends were. She holed up in a peasant hut with a tin roof on the Condos family patch at Pérama, sleeping in the same big old wooden bed as her peasant friends Katerina and Renee, washing in a little basin outside the door, and hoping that she could sit out the war on her beloved island disguised as a peasant girl herself.

Lawrence and Nancy lingered a little longer, in some trepidation as to what the future would bring. The confusion of impending war had lapped as far as the north of Corfu now, and it was time to decide whether to go or to be marooned on the island. Margo received a secret note from Spiro, still loyally guarding the family’s interests: ‘Dear Missy Margo, This is to tell you that war has been declared. Don’t tell a soul.’ Lawrence recalled the day war was declared with anguish. ‘Standing on the balcony over the sea,’ he wrote to his friend Anne Ridler in October, ‘it seemed like the end of the world … It was the most mournful period of my life those dark masses murmuring by the lapping water like the Jews in Babylon; such passionate farewells, so many tears, so much language …’

Every able-bodied man and every horse had been mobilised. Corfu town was swarming with people looking for a way to escape, and huge naphtha flares burned on the boats that were unloading bullets and flour at the docks. In Kalami children were weeping in the garden, and Cretan infantry were marching about, ‘smelling like hell, but with great morale’. The local commander was planning to rig up torpedo tubes outside the White House and to mine the straits. Then all the men of the village were sent inland to a secret arms dump, including Anastassiou, ‘our suave, cool, beautiful landlord, too feminine and hysterical to handle a gun’. Only the women were left, weeping around the wells, and the uncomprehending children. ‘I had nothing to say goodbye to except the island,’ Lawrence wrote. ‘I ached for them all.’

Frantically Lawrence and Nancy prepared to leave, destroying papers and drawings, packing the few books they could carry. The little black and brown Van Norden would have to be left behind, and Nancy’s paintings – ‘lazy pleasant paintings of our peasant friends’ that hung on every wall. In weird, autumnal weather, clouds piled high over Albania, the narrow straits like a black sheet, the thin rain falling ‘like Stardust’, they boarded a smoky little Athens-bound steamer at Corfu quay and fled the island. ‘I remembered it all,’ he was to write, ‘with a regret so deep that it did not stir the emotions … We never ever speak of it any more, having escaped.’

Only Margo was left. Before his departure Lawrence had advised her that, should trouble come, she should sail the Van Norden down the Ionian Sea and into the Aegean to Athens – no mean voyage, especially as she had never handled a boat in her life. But she had no fears for her future: ‘I was young, and when you’re young you’re not frightened of anything.’ She had taken to going into Corfu town to hear the news reports and war bulletins relayed to the populace in the Platia, the central square. There, over a coffee or iced drink, she sometimes met up with the Imperial Airways flying-boat crews who were still operating the Mediterranean leg of the Karachi-UK air link. The airmen were aghast at her plan to ride out the war in the Corfu hills, and urged her to leave before the island was invaded and all communications with the outside world were cut. She became friendly with one officer in particular, a dashing young flight engineer by the name of Jack Breeze, and it was he who finally persuaded her to pull out and provided her with the means of doing so. Shortly after Christmas Margo was packed on to one of the last British aircraft flying out of Corfu, and left the island of her young womanhood for ever.

In October 1940 Italian forces entered Greece, and the following year they occupied Corfu. The White House at Kalami lay abandoned, and Larry’s little cutter sunk. Below the Strawberry-Pink Villa, where the boy Gerald had first strode out to explore the wild interior, the Italians built a huge tented camp, where they kept their ration store and marched their soldiers up and down. Later the Germans moved in, strafing the causeway and the chessboard fields of the Venetian lagoon where Gerald had once stalked Old Plop the terrapin, and bombing the old town, killing Theo Stephanides’s parents and Gerald’s tutor Krajewsky and his mad mother and all his birds. What fate befell the boy Gerald’s great manuscript novel of the flora and fauna of the world will never be known.

The Durrell family had been driven from Eden, swept away by the fury and folly of war. All they were left with from their island years were a few crumpled photographs and the memories of a magic life that for long afterwards continued to burn in their minds as vivid and bright as the sun itself.

It was in large part Corfu that made Gerald the person he was to be. But on the island he had known only love and affection, happiness and ease. As a result he was to be ill-equipped for the vicissitudes of real life, which one day would do their best to cut him off at the knees.

Looking back from the hard world beyond the walls of that enchanted garden, Lawrence was to observe many years later: ‘In Corfu, you see, we reconstituted the Indian period which we all missed. The island exploded into another open-air time of our lives, because one lived virtually naked in the sun. Without Corfu I don’t think Gerry would have managed to drag himself together and do all he has achieved … I reckon I too got born in Corfu. It was really the spell between the wars that was – you can only say paradise.’

FIVE Gerald in Wartime England 1939–1945 (#ulink_3f918b7e-3a8b-55fa-9aa2-2b104814467d)

Mother, Leslie and Gerald were back in England before war was declared on 3 September 1939. The dogs were put in quarantine the moment they landed, and the rest of the animals Gerald had brought back from Corfu, plus a marmoset and some magpies he had acquired in England, were housed on the top-floor landing of a London lodging house which Mother rented while she looked around for a more permanent home. Before long they had moved to a flat in a terraced house off Kensington High Street. Mother hankered to return to Bournemouth, where at least she had roots of a kind, and whenever she went off on one of her many forays into various part of the countryside in search of a house, the fourteen-year-old Gerald – now wearing his first pair of long trousers – was free to explore the capital. ‘I found London, at that time, fascinating,’ he would later recall. ‘After all, the biggest metropolis I was used to was the town of Corfu, which was about the size of a small English market town, and so the great sprawling mass of London had hundreds of exciting things for me to discover.’

Sometimes he would spend the afternoon in the Coronet cinema round the corner, absorbed in the illusory adventure and romance on the silver screen before him – a lifelong passion. At other times he would go to the Natural History Museum or the zoo, which only strengthened his belief that working in a zoo was the only real vocation for anyone.

It was in the London of the so-called ‘Phoney War’ – no air raids as yet, no nights spent in cellars or bomb shelters – that Gerald started his first job, as junior assistant in a pet shop called The Aquarium, not far from where he was living. It was a remarkably well-stocked shop, with rows of great tanks full of brilliant tropical fish, and glass-fronted boxes containing grass snakes, pine snakes, big green lizards, tortoises, newts with frilled tails like pennants and gulping, bulbous-eyed frogs. His job was to feed all these creatures and clean out their tanks and cages, but it soon became clear that he knew a great deal more about their needs and habits than the shop’s owner, who was astonished by the boy’s detailed knowledge and instinctive feeling for the animals’ welfare.

Before long Gerald had introduced a change in the creatures’ previously unvarying diet, forgoing his lunchtime sausage and mash in order to collect woodlice in Kensington Park for the reptiles and amphibians, and tipping pots of little water fleas into the fishtanks as a change from the fishes’ usual fare of tubifex worms. Then he began to improve the animals’ living conditions, putting clumps of wet moss into the cages of the large leopard toads so that they had some damp and shade, bathing their raw feet with olive oil and treating their sore eyes with Golden Eye ointment. But his pièce de résistance was the redecoration of the big tank in the shop window, which contained a large collection of wonderfully coloured fish in what looked like an underwater blasted heath.

I worked on that giant tank with all the dedication of a marine Capability Brown. I built rolling sand dunes and great towering cliffs of lovely granite. And then, through the valleys between the granite mountains, I planted forests of Vallisneria and other, more delicate, weedy ferns. And on the surface of the water I floated the tiny little white flowers that look so like miniature water-lilies. When I had finally finished it and replaced the shiny black mollies, the silver hatchet fish, the brilliant Piccadilly-like neon-tetras, and stepped back to admire my handiwork, I found myself deeply impressed with my own genius.

So was the owner. ‘Exquisite! Exquisite!’ he exclaimed. ‘Simply exquisite.’ Gerald was promptly promoted to more responsible tasks. Periodically he was sent off to the East End of London to collect fresh supplies of reptiles, amphibians and snakes. ‘In gloomy, cavernous stores in back streets,’ he remembered, ‘I would find great crates of lizards, basketfuls of tortoises and dripping tanks green with algae full of newts and frogs and salamanders … and a crate full of iguanas, bright green and frilled and dewlapped like any fairytale dragon.’ On one such jaunt 150 baby painted terrapins escaped from the box in which he was carrying them on the top of a double-decker bus. But for the help of a Blimpish, monocled colonel who also happened to be on the bus and who crawled up and down the aisle ‘heading the bounders off,’ Gerald would have experienced the first catastrophe of his professional career. ‘By George!’ cried the colonel. ‘A painted terrapin! Chrysemys picta! Haven’t seen one for years. There’s one going under the seat there. Tally-ho! Bang! Bang!’

By the time Mother had found what she was looking for, a family-sized house at 52 St Alban’s Avenue in the Bournemouth suburb of Charminster, much of the family was dispersed to the four winds. Lawrence and Nancy were in Athens, where their daughter Penelope was born in April 1940. Early that year Lawrence got word that his sister Margaret had married her flier, Jack Breeze, in Bournemouth, with Leslie (who was living in the house in St Alban’s Avenue) giving the bride away. When Jack was posted to South Africa with Imperial Airways, Margaret went with him, and she was to spend the whole of the war in Africa, moving gradually north, first to Mozambique and then to Ethiopia, till, like Larry, she ended up in Egypt.

When the German armies crossed the Greek border and rolled south towards Athens in April 1941, the king and government left the capital for Crete, and Lawrence and Nancy followed their example. It was a perilous and close-run thing. They escaped from the Peleponnesus by caïque one day before the Germans invaded, and after six nightmare weeks under German air attack in Crete they left on almost the last passenger ship to get out, arriving in Alexandria two days before Greece fell. Lawrence soon got a job as foreign press officer at the British Embassy in Cairo, and was to remain in Egypt for the rest of the war, but in July 1942, with the Egyptian cities under threat from the advancing Germans, Nancy and Penelope were evacuated to Palestine, a parting which effectively marked the end of the marriage. A year later Lawrence fell in love with an Alexandrian girl, Eve Cohen, who was eventually to become his second wife.

For Mother, the move back to England, with its blackouts, gasmasks and ration books, was just one more in a series of upheavals that had punctuated her life ever since, far away and long ago, she had married her much-loved and much-missed husband in India, the land of her birth. To this latest uprooting she responded as she had always done – without complaint, without fuss, making do, always there. But after the cheap living and favourable exchange rate of the Corfu years, the move back to England was a backward step financially, and leaner times now loomed. Much of the money her husband had left to her had been dissipated in imprudent disbursements before the war, and when in due course the Japanese overran Burma a substantial proportion of her remaining assets, which were invested in Burmah Oil, were lost for ever. The steady decline in the family’s standard of living in Bournemouth during the war was barely perceptible to friends and relatives who saw them on a regular basis, but to Lawrence, who was away for all of that time, its extent was quite shocking when he saw it for himself on his return.

For all that, Louisa continued to cluck and fuss over her remaining brood, an unfailing (if faintly vague) source of culinary aromas and mother love for the two sons still in her care. But for Leslie, sadly, the return to England marked a big step in his gradual descent into waste and oblivion. At the outbreak of hostilities he had hoped to join the Royal Air Force, which had both glamour and guns galore. But he had loosed off one shotgun too many in his time on Corfu, and a military medical board declared that his hearing was defective, and that he was unfit for military service. Barred from doing his bit with the RAF, Leslie was condemned to spend the war toiling away at inglorious, menial tasks in the local aircraft factory.

As for Gerald, now fifteen, the retreat to Blighty – from a sun-drenched Mediterranean island to whose human and animal fauna he had closely related, to a mist-shrouded North Sea island to which he barely related at all – was more than just a migration from one kind of habitat to another: it was like a flight into limbo, an existential near-void about which he was to say little in future years, and to write next to nothing till near the very end. The shock was palpable, and considerable adjustments were required for him to adapt to his new physical and cultural environment.

Gerald was no longer a boy, but an adolescent, with all that that turbulent transitional phase of development entailed. He was also, as a result of his upbringing on Corfu, part Greek in manners and outlook. More, he had no education – none, at any rate, that the authorities in the United Kingdom would recognise as such. Nor was he ever likely to receive any, for he was now almost past the statutory age of compulsory education in Britain. Not only had he long ago parted company with any school syllabus worthy of the name, but he stood no chance of passing any exam of any sort anywhere at any time.

Not that Mother didn’t give his education one last try, taking him along to a minor public school outside Bournemouth in the hope that the place might fire his enthusiasm. The visit was only a partial success. The headmaster chose to test the boy’s scholastic potential by asking him to write out the Lord’s Prayer, but Gerald could only remember the first six words, and invented the rest. A visit to the labs with the biology master was more promising – the man turned out to have once spent a holiday in Greece – but Gerald was rated no higher than ‘backward but bright’. Not that it mattered much, for Gerald had no wish to go to any school.

Believing, as always, that her children knew what was best for them, his mother tried a private tutor instead. Harold Binns was a neat, quiet man, with a face scarred by shrapnel in the Great War. He had written a study of the English poets, and was oddly addicted to eau de Cologne, often popping into the toilet to give himself a quick squirt. Mr Binns bestowed two great gifts upon his ill-educated student – how to unlock the treasures contained within the British public library system, and how to appreciate to the full the words of the English language in all their associations and assonances, nuances and overtones. His method was to teach Gerald for an hour, then fetch a volume of verse from his bookshelf for Gerald to browse through on his own. In an unpublished autobiographical fragment written in the last year of his life, Gerald recalled Mr Binns and the excitement he generated for the music and the magic of the language.

He would burst into the room in a tidal wave of eau de Cologne. ‘Now, dear boy,’ he would say, eyes raised to Heaven, hands outstretched. ‘Time to remove the cobwebs from the mind, eh? Leave that geometry which appears insoluble to you and let’s have a look at Swinburne. You know Swinburne? I think you’ll find he has something in common with you – yes – um – yes – um – this for a start.’

He would thrust a book into my hands and gallop out of the room trailing eau de Cologne like a bride’s train behind him.

A little later, bustling back into the room, he would ask: ‘Did you like him?’

‘I think the poetry is fascinating,’ I said, ‘and I love alliteration.’

‘So do I,’ he said fervently. ‘The whole poem is an example of what poetry should be. So few modern poets chime in the ear like a seashell whispering mysteries. At least he conjures up lantanas in your mind, illuminating your brain with fabulous words …’

All this was a revelation to Gerald, and would greatly influence him, as brother Larry had previously done, in his approach to his own writing.

While Mr Binns endowed Gerald with access to knowledge and reinforced the love of words Lawrence had encouraged on Corfu, there was no one to teach him the biology which fascinated him. Working his way at random through the textbooks in the Bournemouth public library and elsewhere, Gerald taught himself as best he could. There were advantages to this eclectic exploration of the subject, for it allowed him to approach it from eccentrically revelatory angles. But there were enormous disadvantages too, great gaps in his knowledge, and his grasp of the science could hardly be said to rest on sound foundations.

He was always conscious of this, especially when he became a high-profile practitioner and spokesman of the very science he had never been formally taught. Much later, he was to say:

Yes, a degree might have helped – but would it? In the long run it might have killed the other side of me. Because of no job, which was because of no degree, only the need to write for a living compelled me to write at all. Also, the degree idea is waved about like a flag to such an extent that one thinks one needs it – when it’s only society needing it. These absolute dolts in my own field have the application to store knowledge like a squirrel and regurgitate it all over ruled paper at the right moment. That shows a sense of inferiority on my part, doesn’t it?

More than compensating for his lack of formal qualifications, Gerald was endowed with a highly developed and inventive intelligence. His Corfu childhood under the tutelage of Theo Stephanides had provided him with a superlative insight into the phenomena of natural life, an education in hands-on biology largely denied to his peers in the United Kingdom, and his brother Lawrence had instilled in him the principles of creative literature in a way no classroom lessons could have done. The rest of the family, his mother especially, also contributed. ‘She encouraged us in everything we wanted to do,’ he was to recall. ‘She would say, “Well, try it, dear,” and if it failed, it failed. I was allowed to read anything I wanted to. Every question I asked was answered absolutely honestly, if it could be answered. In a funny way, I got a unique education which included dealing with an endless procession of eccentrics – so now, nothing a human being does surprises me.’

But his grasp of the mainstream of schoolboy learning – sums and stinks and 1066 and the rest – was patchy and uncertain. Gerald was therefore a highly unorthodox teenager in the Britain of his time. The familiar routine of morning assemblies and school games and end of term exams had passed him by. His primary education was fragmentary, his secondary education nil, his chances of higher education non-existent. For a youth with such an apparently oddball background there was only one option in wartime Bournemouth – to get a job, probably a mundane and lowly one, until he was old enough to be called up and have his head shot off in the war.

The only job that Gerald could imagine tolerating was working with animals. Though it doesn’t sound much, for Gerald a day spent in a pet shop in the company of white rats was not a day wasted. He had managed to run an aviary and keep a few adders in the garden at home during these years, but the largest animal he had to cope with was a fallow deer which was given to him by a boy who lived in the New Forest and was moving to Southampton. The boy had described it as a ‘baby’ and a ‘household pet’, but when it arrived it turned out to be a petulant creature at least four years old – far from the submissive, friendly fawn Gerald had been promised. With much patience he eventually learned how to pacify the deer, which he named Hortense, by scratching the base of its antlers, but in the end he had to give way to family pressure, and Hortense was exiled to a nearby farm.

As for the war, though a few stray bombs did land on Bournemouth, one of them rocking the treasurehouse of Commin’s bookshop, Gerald admitted that he did not really know what war was, nor care very much about it.