Gerald Durrell: The Authorised Biography

to its home

in the skelaton

of a liveing tree!

It was the discovery of a series of mysterious small silken trapdoors set into the floor of a neighbouring olive grove, each about the size of an old shilling piece, that led to an encounter that was to change for ever the direction of Gerald’s life. Puzzled by the trapdoors, he made his way to George Wilkinson’s villa to seek his advice. George was not alone. ‘Seated in a chair was a figure which, at first glance, I thought must be George’s brother,’ Gerald remembered, ‘for he also wore a beard. He was, however, immaculately dressed in a grey flannel suit with waistcoat, a spotless white shirt, a tasteful but sombre tie, and large, solid, highly polished boots.’

‘Gerry, this is Dr Theodore Stephanides,’ said George. ‘He is an expert on practically everything you care to mention. And what you don’t mention, he does. He, like you, is an eccentric nature-lover. Theodore, this is Gerry Durrell.’

Gerald described the tiny trapdoors in the olive grove and Dr Stephanides listened gravely. Perhaps, he suggested, they could go together to look at this phenomenon, since the olive grove lay on a roundabout route back to his home near Corfu town. ‘As we walked along I studied him covertly. He had a straight, well-shaped nose; a humorous mouth lurking in the ash-blond beard; straight, rather bushy eyebrows under which his eyes, keen but with a twinkle in them and laughter-wrinkles at the corners, surveyed the world. He strode along energetically, humming to himself.’

A quick inspection revealed that each trapdoor concealed the entrance to a burrow from which a spider emerged to catch passing prey. The mystery solved, Dr Stephanides shook Gerald’s hand and prepared to go on his way. ‘He turned and stumped off down the hill, swinging his stick, staring about him with observant eyes. I was at once confused and amazed by Theodore. He was the only person I had met until now who seemed to share my enthusiasm for zoology. I was extremely flattered to find that he treated me and talked to me exactly as though I was his own age. Theodore not only talked to me as though I was grown up, but also as though I was as knowledgeable as he.’

Gerald did not expect to meet the man again, but clearly his enthusiasm, high seriousness and powers of observation had made an impression on Theodore, for two days later Leslie came back from town carrying a parcel addressed to Gerald. Inside was a small box and a letter.

My dear Gerry Durrell,

I wondered, after our conversation the other day, if it might not assist your investigations of the local natural history to have some form of magnifying instrument. I am therefore sending you this pocket microscope, in the hope that it will be of some use to you. It is, of course, not of very high magnification, but you will find it sufficient for field work.

With best wishes,

Yours sincerely,

Theo. Stephanides

P.S. If you have nothing better to do on Thursday, perhaps you would care to come to tea, and I could show you some of my microscope slides.

With the doctor and naturalist Theo Stephanides as his mentor, Gerald was to journey through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces and phenomena, entering the orbit of Zatopec the poet and the ex-King of Greece’s butler, the microscopic world of the scarlet mite and the one-eyed cyclops bug, the natural profligacy of the tortoise hills, the lake of lilies, the phosphorescent porpoise sea. In the course of his travels he was to become transformed, learning the language and gestures of rural Greece, absorbing its music and folklore, drinking its wine, singing its songs, and shedding his thin veneer of Englishness, so that in mind-set and social behaviour he was never to grow up a true Englishman – a handicap which, like his lack of a formal education, was to prove a tremendous boon in later years.

Theodore Stephanides had just passed forty when Gerald first encountered him. Though the Stephanides family originated from Thessaly in Greece, Theo (like Gerald) was born in India, thus qualifying him for British as well as Greek nationality. At home in Bombay he and his family spoke only English, and it was not until his father retired to Corfu in 1907, when Theo was eleven, that he began to learn Greek properly. After serving in the Greek army in Macedonia in World War One and in Asia Minor in the ensuing war against the Turks, Theo went to Paris to study medicine, later returning to Corfu, where he established the island’s first x-ray unit in 1929, and shortly afterwards married Mary Alexander, a young woman of English and Greek parentage and the granddaughter of a former British Consul on Corfu. Though Theo was a doctor he was never well off, mainly because much of his work he did free of charge, and he and his wife lived in the same rented house in Corfu town throughout the period of their stay on the island.

Theo was a man of immense integrity and courtesy, behaving in the same way to old and young, friends and strangers. He was shy socially, except with close friends, but he had a highly developed sense of humour and loved cracking a good joke, or even a really silly one, at which he would chuckle mightily. He loved Greek dances, and would sometimes perform a kalamatianos by himself. He travelled all over Corfu in his spare time, by car where there were roads and on foot where there were not, singing almost every inch of the way. Whenever Gerald was with him he sang a nonsense song of which he was very fond, in a kind of pantomime English:

There was an old man who lived in Jerusalem

Glory Halleluiah, Hi-ero-jerum.

He wore a top hat and he looked very sprucelum

Glory Halleluiah, Hi-ero-jerum.

Skinermer rinki doodle dum, skinermer rinki doodle dum

Glory Halleluiah, Hi-ero-jerum …

‘It had a rousing tune,’ Gerald recalled, ‘that gave a new life to tired feet, and Theodore’s baritone voice and my shrill treble would ring out gaily through the gloomy trees.’

Theo held views on ecological matters that were very advanced for their time, particularly in Greece, and these planted the germs of a way of thinking in young Gerald’s head that was to stand him in valuable stead in future years. If Theo went for a drive in the country he would throw tree seeds out of the window, in the hope that a few would take root, and he took time off to teach the peasants how to avoid soil erosion when they were tilling the ground, and to persuade them to restrain the goats from devouring everything that grew. As a good doctor he did his best to improve public health on the island, encouraging the villagers to stock their wells with a species of minnow which fed on mosquito larvae and thus helped eradicate malaria.

For Gerald, being tutored by Theo was like going straight to Oxford or Harvard without the usual intermediary steps of primary and secondary schools in between. Theo was a walking, talking fount of knowledge, not only breathtakingly wide-ranging, but deep, detailed and exact. Born before the age of ultra-specialisation, he knew something – sometimes a great deal – about everything. In the course of a day he could engage the young Gerald in an advanced tutorial that would hop effortlessly through the fields of anthropology, ethnology, musicology, cosmology, ecology, biology, parasitology, biochemistry, medicine, history and much else. ‘I had few books to guide and explain,’ Gerald was to write, ‘and Theodore was for me a sort of walking, hirsute encyclopaedia.’

Theo was no mere pedant, with a kleptomaniac gift for collecting sterile, unrelated facts. He was a true polymath, who related the phenomena of past and present existence in a master synthesis, a grand vision which had its feet firmly planted in science but its head peering speculatively among the clouds. ‘Although the classroom basics of biology were a closed book to me,’ Gerald admitted to a friend in his middle age, ‘walks with Theo contained discussions of everything from life on Mars to the humblest beetle, and I knew they were all part and parcel, all interlocked.’

On top of all this, Theo Stephanides bestrode the iron curtain between art and science, for he was not only a doctor and a biologist, but a poet whose friends included some of Greece’s leading poets. ‘If I had the power of magic,’ Gerald once remarked, ‘I would confer two gifts on every child – the enchanted childhood I had on the island of Corfu, and to be guided and befriended by Theodore Stephanides.’ Under Theo’s tutelage Gerald became more than a juvenile version of a naturalist in the classic nineteenth-century mould, more even than a straightforward zoologist of the kind turned out by the British universities of the era – though that was what he was to put as his profession in his passport. For Theo not only taught him what biological life was and how it worked, but imbued him with two principles regarding the role of man in the scheme of things. The first was that life without human intervention maintained its own checks and balances. The second was that the proper role of mankind among living things was omniscience with humility – and the greater of these two was humility.

‘Not many young naturalists have the privilege of having their footsteps guided by a sort of omnipotent, benign and humorous Greek god,’ Gerald would recall. ‘Theodore had all the very best qualities of the early Victorian naturalists, an insatiable interest in the world he inhabited and the ability to illuminate any topic with his observations and thoughts. His wide interests are summed up by the fact that (in this day and age) he was a man who had a microscopic water crustacean named after him, as well as a crater on the moon.’

From 1935 to 1939 Theo and his wife Mary visited the Durrells once a week, arriving after lunch and leaving after dinner. Their young daughter Alexia, often ailing, was usually left at home with her French nanny, because Theo was jealous of his afternoons with Gerald, who was like a son to him. For if Gerald was fortunate to have encountered such a gifted tutor in such a place at such a time in his life, Theodore was no less fortunate to have found an acolyte so innately endowed with responsive gifts of his own. Quite apart from his boundless energy and enthusiasm, his inexhaustible spirit of enquiry – remarkable for one so young, noted Theo – the boy had all the essential qualities of a naturalist. Patience, for a start. He could remain perched in a tree for hours on end, utterly still, utterly enthralled, as he watched the comings and goings of some small creature. Even Nancy, no naturalist, saw this special quality in him: ‘He had an enormous patience when he was very young. He used to make lassoes for catching lizards – lassoes of grass – and he would stay hours crouched in front of a little hole where he knew the lizard was, and then he would pull the noose tight and lasso it.’

Theo also discerned that Gerald lacked the arrogance that most human beings brought to their encounters with animals. Animals, Gerald felt by instinct, were his equals, no matter how small, or ugly, or undistinguished; they were, at a level beyond the merely sentimental, his friends and companions – often his only ones, for he had no great rapport with other children. And the animals, in their turn, sensed this, and responded accordingly, not just when he was a boy on Corfu but throughout all the years of his life.

By corollary, it followed in Gerald’s mind that it was a fundamental moral law that all species had an equal right to exist, this at a time when most human societies observed no ethical principles applicable to living things outside of humankind. It also followed that he had difficulty pursuing the study of natural history in the way that was the common practice of the period: that is by snuffing the life out of living things in order to examine, classify and dissect them in death. ‘Live with living things, I say,’ he was later to declare, ‘don’t just peer at them in a pool of alcohol.’ Gerald, in other words, was a behavioural zoologist (or ethologist) from the very start, and natural history for him was the study of living things – all too evidently living, as his family were to find out soon enough.

The family’s first winter came, coolish and very wet. By now Larry and Nancy, seeking the wilder, lonelier shores of the island, had moved up to Kalami, a remote hamlet on the north-east coast of Corfu, where they took a single-storey, whitewashed fisherman’s house – the White House – on the edge of the sea overlooking a small bay, with the barren hills of Albania only a couple of miles away across the straits. The winter rain in Corfu was almost tropical in density, the sea pounded on the rocks below the house, and the only heating was some smouldering logs in the middle of the room.

When nineteen-year-old Alex Emmett, a family friend who had been at school with Leslie, arrived to join the Durrells for their first Christmas at the Strawberry-Pink Villa, he found Mother still downing gin, Leslie an aimless, rootless, mother-fixated castaway, and Gerry utterly absorbed in his trapdoor spiders and his natural history lessons with Theo Stephan-ides. But for Theo, Emmett reckoned, young Gerry might easily have become a drifter like Leslie.

Having arrived for Christmas, Emmett stayed on for the family’s first full-blown spring on Corfu. It was to prove a season of singular magic. Gerald observed it through eyes round with wonder. The whole island was ‘flower-filled, scented and a-flutter with new leaves’. The cypress trees were now covered with a misty coat of greenish-white cones. Waxy yellow crocuses tumbled down the banks and blue day-irises filled the oak thickets. Gerald recorded: ‘It was no half-hearted spring, this; the whole island vibrated with it as though a great, ringing chord had been struck. Everything and everyone heard it and responded. It was apparent in the gleam of flower-petals, the flash of bird wings and the sparkle in the dark, liquid eyes of the peasant girls.’

The family responded to the spring in their different ways. Leslie blazed away at turtle-doves with his guns. Lawrence bought a guitar and a large barrel of strong red wine and sang Elizabethan love songs which induced a mood of melancholy. Margo perked up, bathed frequently and took an interest in a good-looking but boring young Turk – not a popular choice on a Greek island.

Gerald’s excursions took on an even greater range and interest when, in the summer of 1936, the family moved to another villa on the far side of Corfu town. According to Gerald, it was Larry who provoked the move. He had invited some friends to come to stay on Corfu – Zatopec the poet (an Albanian whose real name was Zarian), three artists called Jonquil, Durant and Michael, and the bald-headed Melanie, Countess of Torro – and he wanted Mother to put them up in the Strawberry-Pink Villa. Since the villa was barely big enough for the family, let alone an untold number of guests, Mother’s circuitous logic decided that the easiest solution was to find a bigger place. In any case, the Strawberry-Pink Villa never had a bathroom worthy of the name, only a separate washroom and a primitive toilet in the grounds, which alone was a compelling enough reason to move on.

The new house, which Gerald was to dub the Daffodil-Yellow Villa, was a huge Venetian mansion called Villa Anemoyanni, after the family who had owned it until recently. It stood on a modest eminence set back from the sea at a place called Sotoriotissa, near Kondokali, overlooking Gouvia Bay to the north of Corfu town. From the attic the children could watch the once-weekly Imperial Airways flying-boat splash down in the bay below. The house had stood empty for three years; it had faded green shutters and yellow walls, and was surrounded by neglected olive groves and untended orchards of lemon and orange trees. Gerald recalled:

The whole place had an atmosphere of ancient melancholy about it, the house with its cracked and peeling walls, the tremendous echoing rooms, its verandas piled high with drifts of last year’s leaves and so overgrown with creepers and vines that the lower rooms were in a perpetual green twilight … The house and land were gently, sadly decaying, lying forgotten on the hillside overlooking the shining sea and dark, eroded hills of Albania.

It was Spiro who found the villa, and Spiro who organised the move – the long line of handcarts piled high with the family’s possessions heading north in the now familiar cloud of white dust. But even after they had moved everything in, the house remained vast and echoing, mainly because much of the decrepit antique furniture that came with it disintegrated at the first touch of a human hand (or bottom). It was big enough for Gerald to be allocated a large room of his own on the first floor – his study, he called it, though to the rest of the family it was known as the Bug House. The Bug House was Gerald’s first true den and centre of operations:

This room smelt pleasantly of ether and methylated spirits. It was here I kept my natural history books, my diary, microscope, dissecting instruments, nets, collecting bags, and other important items. Large cardboard boxes housed my birds’ eggs, beetle, butterfly and dragon-fly collections, while on the shelves above were a fine range of bottles full of methylated spirit in which were preserved such interesting items as a four-legged chicken, various lizards and snakes, frog-spawn in different stages of growth, a baby octopus, three half-grown brown rats (a contribution from Roger), and a minute tortoise, newly hatched, that had been unable to survive the winter. The walls were sparsely, but tastefully, decorated with a slab slate containing the fossilised remains of a fish, a photograph of myself shaking hands with a chimpanzee, and a stuffed bat. I had prepared the bat myself, without assistance, and I was extremely proud of the result.

For Gerald the winter was enlivened by his tea-time natural history lessons every Thursday in Theo’s wonderful study in his flat in Corfu town. The room was packed with books, notebooks, x-ray plates, jars and bottles full of minute freshwater fauna, a telescope pointing at the sky, and a microscope table laden with instruments and slides, where Gerald would sit for hours on end peering transfixed at the mouth-parts of the rat flea, the egg-sacs of the one-eyed cyclops bug, the spinnerets of the cross or garden spider. When the weather improved they ventured out. Theo would come over to the Daffodil-Yellow Villa on foot, followed by his wife Mary and sometimes his young daughter Alexia in Spiro’s taxi; together he and Gerry would sally forth to explore the surrounding countryside, striding out side by side, singing at the top of their voices.

Alan Thomas, on a visit to Corfu, witnessed them setting out on an expedition, Theo in an immaculate white suit and a homburg that would have been a credit to Edward VII, Gerry running alongside, almost dancing with happiness, both of them strapped around with collecting equipment. ‘I turned to Larry,’ Thomas recalled, ‘and I said: “It’s wonderful for Gerry to have Theodore.” And Larry replied: “Yes, Theodore is Gerry’s hero.”’ They always carried a bottle of fresh lemonade and biscuits or sandwiches on these excursions, together with dipping nets and knapsacks and canvas bags full of collecting bottles and boxes and a few clumps of damp moss, for as Theodore explained: ‘Both Gerald and I were more interested in studying live creatures and kept our collection of preserved specimens to a minimum.’

Exploring the countryside with the close concentration of watchmenders, they left no stick or stone unturned, no puddle unexamined. ‘Every water-filled ditch was, to us, a teeming and unexplored jungle,’ Gerald recalled, with the minute cyclops and water-fleas, green and coral pink, suspended like birds among the underwater branches, while on the muddy bottom the tigers of the pool would prowl: the leeches and the dragonfly larvae. Every hollow tree had to be scrutinised in case it should contain a tiny pool of water in which mosquito-larvae were living, every mossy rock had to be overturned to find out what lay beneath it, and every rotten log had to be dissected. On their return they ransacked Mother’s kitchen for soup plates and teaspoons, which they used to sort out their finds before accommodating them in the gravel-bottomed, weed-aired jam jars and sweet bottles that would be their home. Before long, Theo was to recall, they had assembled a ‘whole army corps of aquaria’.

Soon Gerald was setting off from the Daffodil-Yellow Villa and exploring in every direction – always dressed, at his mother’s insistence, in very brightly coloured pullovers so that he could be easily spotted even when he strayed some distance from home. A myrtle-covered hill behind the house was covered with tortoises newly awakened from their winter’s hibernation, and Gerald would spend hours watching their romantic urges revive in the sun. ‘The actual sexual act,’ he was to record, ‘was the most awkward and fumbling thing I have ever seen. The incredibly heavy-handed and inexpert way the male would attempt to hoist himself on to the female shell, overbalancing and almost overturning, was extremely painful to watch; the urge to go and assist the poor creature was almost overwhelming.’ No less intriguing to the twelve-year-old was the sex life of the mantises, and he would stare in horror as the female slowly munched her way through her partner’s head while he proceeded to fertilise her with what was left of his body: a beautifully simple demonstration of the two purposes of life – feeding to ensure the survival of the individual, and copulation to ensure the survival of the species – neatly combined in a single event.

Sometimes Gerald would go out bat-hunting at night, an altogether different adventure in a world metamorphosed by silence and moonlight, where the creatures of the darkness – jackals, foxes, squirrel dormice, nightjars – slipped silently in an out of vision like shadows. Once he found a young Scops owl covered in baby down and took it home, naming him Ulysses. Ulysses was a bird of great strength of character, Gerald noted, and not to be trifled with, so when he grew up he was given the freedom of the Bug House, flying out through the window at night and riding on Roger the dog’s back when Gerald went down to the sea for a late-evening swim.

Gerald now began to collect creatures on a grand scale, and before long his room was so full that he had to house them in various nooks and crannies throughout the villa. This led to some embarrassing, not to say fractious situations, for the rest of the family did not share his affection for the island’s wildlife, and positively objected if they encountered it in the wrong place. For a while the house was infested with giant mosquitoes, whose provenance remained obscure until Theo realised that what Gerald thought were tadpoles in his aquarium were in fact the inch-long, pot-bellied larvae of Theobaldia longeareolata, the largest mosquito on the island. Gerald had been puzzled by the fact that, instead of turning into frogs, they had seemingly been vanishing into thin air. But worse was to follow.

Gerald had long been fascinated by the black scorpion, a particularly venomous version of a species which had a fearsome reputation – as Yani the shepherd once explained, its sting could kill, especially if it managed to crawl into your ear, as had happened to one of Yani’s friends, a young shepherd who died in unspeakable agony. Gerald was never deterred by dangerous animals, however, and in the crumbling wall surrounding the sunken garden of the Daffodil-Yellow Villa he was delighted to discover a whole battalion of black scorpions, each about an inch long. ‘They were weird-looking things,’ he was to write, ‘with their flattened, oval bodies, crooked legs, the enormous crab-like claws, bulbous and neatly jointed as armour, and the tail like a string of brown beads ending in a sting like a rose-thorn.’ At night he would go out with a torch and watch the scorpions’ wonderful courtship dances, claw in claw, tails entwined. ‘I grew very fond of these scorpions. I found them to be pleasant, unassuming creatures with, on the whole, most charming habits.’ Their cannibalism apart.

One day Gerald found a fat female scorpion in the wall, with a mass of tiny babies clinging to her back. Enraptured, he carefully put mother and babies into one of his empty matchboxes, intending to smuggle them into the Bug House where he could watch the babies grow up. Unfortunately, lunch was served just as he went into the house, so he put the matchbox on the drawing room mantelpiece for temporary safekeeping, and joined the rest of the family. The meal passed affably, then Lawrence rose and went to fetch his cigarettes from the drawing room, picking up the matchbox he found conveniently ready on the mantelpiece.

Gerald watched as, ‘still talking glibly’, Lawrence opened the matchbox. In a flash the mother scorpion was out of the box and on to the back of his hand, sting curved up and at the ready, babies still clinging on grimly. Lawrence let out a roar of fright, and with an instinctive flick of his hand sent the scorpion scooting down the table, shedding babies to left and right. Pandemonium ensued. Lugaretzia dropped the plates, Roger the dog began barking madly, Leslie leapt from his chair, and Margo threw a glass of water at the creature, but missed and drenched Mother.