Gerald Durrell

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.

‘It’s that bloody boy again,’ Lawrence could be heard bawling above the universal turmoil. Roger, deciding Lugaretzia was to blame for the brouhaha, promptly bit her in the leg.

‘It’s that bloody boy,’ bellowed Lawrence again. ‘He’ll kill the lot of us. Look at the table … knee-deep in scorpions …’

Soon the scorpions had hidden themselves under the crockery and cutlery, and a temporary lull descended.

‘That bloody boy …’ Lawrence reiterated, almost speechless. ‘Every matchbox in the house is a death trap.’

In another potentially heart-stopping incident, it was Leslie’s turn to undergo trial by terror. One hot day in September, seeing that his water snakes were wilting in the heat, Gerald took them into the house and put them in a bath full of cool water. Not long afterwards, Leslie returned from a shooting expedition and decided to have a bath to freshen up. Suddenly there was a tremendous bellow from the direction of the bathroom, and Leslie emerged on to the veranda wearing nothing but a small towel.

‘Gerry!’ he roared, his face flushed with anger. ‘Where’s that boy?’

‘Now, now, dear,’ said Mother soothingly, ‘whatever’s the matter?’

‘Snakes,’ snarled Leslie, ‘that’s what’s the matter … That bloody boy’s filled the soddin’ bath full of bleeding snakes, that’s what’s the matter … Damn great things like hosepipes … It’s a wonder I wasn’t bitten.’

Gerald removed the snakes from the bath and put them into a saucepan from the kitchen, returning in time to hear Lawrence holding forth to the lunch party on the veranda, ‘I assure you the house is a death trap. Every conceivable nook and cranny is stuffed with malignant faunae waiting to pounce. How I have escaped being maimed for life is beyond me …’

One day Gerald and Theo came back with a jar full of medicinal leeches – gruesome red-and-green-striped bloodsuckers, all of three inches long. Even today Lake Scotini, the only permanent freshwater lakelet on Corfu and a favourite hunting ground for the indomitable pair, swarms with such creatures. Due to a mishap the jar was knocked off a table, and the leeches vanished. For nights Lawrence lay awake in terror, expecting to find the creatures feeding on his body and the sheets soaked in blood. It was, he felt, the ultimate nightmare visitation, the apotheosis of all Gerry’s wildlife horrors.

Lawrence’s estimation of his youngest brother, which had been sinking lower with each daily delivery of centipedes, scorpions or toads into the family home, rallied somewhat when one day, to his intense surprise, he heard the bug-happy boy whistling part of the first movement of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony. But the years did not mellow him when it came to the matter of Gerald’s life-threatening proclivities on Corfu. ‘As a small boy he was impossible,’ he told a friend many years later. ‘A terrible nuisance. He has recounted the worst of himself as well as the best in that Family book. Oh, it was matchboxes full of scorpions all the time, I didn’t dare to sit down anywhere in the house, and of course Mother was there to defend him – the slightest criticism and she would snarl like a bear, and meanwhile there were beetles in the soup. No, he was intolerable, he needed to be thrashed.’

Since the family was so dismayed by many of Gerald’s strange pets, Theo’s affirmation of the boy’s ruling passion was like a papal benediction for him. Later Gerald was to relate how, when the rains began to fill the ponds and ditches, he and Theo would prowl among them, ‘as alert as fishing herons’:

I was seeking the terrapin, the frog, toad or snake to add to my menagerie, while Theo, his little net with bottle on the end, would seek the smaller fauna, some almost invisible to the eye.

‘Ah ha!’ he would exclaim when, having swept his net through the water, he lifted the little bottle to his eye. ‘Now this is – er, um – most interesting. I haven’t seen one of these since I was in Epir …’

‘Look, Theo,’ I would say, lifting a baby snake towards him.

‘Um – er – yes,’ Theo would reply. ‘Pretty thing.’

To hear an adult call a snake a pretty thing was music to my ears.

FOUR The Garden of the Gods Corfu 1937–1939

So the bug-happy boy wandered about his paradise island while conventional education passed him by. For a time Mother endeavoured to stop him turning completely wild by sending him off for daily French lessons with the Belgian Consul, another of Corfu’s great eccentrics. The Consul lived at the top of a tall, rickety building in the centre of the Jewish quarter of Corfu town, an exotic and colourful area of narrow alleys full of open-air stalls, bawling vendors, laden donkeys, clucking hens – and a multitude of stray and starving cats. He was a kindly little man, with gold teeth and a wonderful three-pointed beard, and dressed at all times in formal attire appropriate to his official status, complete with silk cravat, shiny top hat and spats.

Gerald acquired little French from his lessons, but his boredom was alleviated by a curious obsession of his tutor’s. It turned out that the Consul was as compulsive a gunman as Gerald’s brother Leslie, and every so often during the morning lessons he would leap out of his chair, load a powerful air rifle, take careful aim out of the window and blaze away at the street outside. At first Gerald’s hopes were raised by the possibility that the Consul was mixed up in some deadly family feud, though he was puzzled why no one ever fired back, and why, after firing his gun, the Consul would be so upset, muttering dolefully, with tears in his eyes: ‘Ah, ze poor lizzie fellow …’ Finally Gerald discovered that the Consul, a devoted cat lover, was shooting the hungriest and most wretched of the strays. ‘I cannot feed zem all,’ he explained, ‘so I like to make zem happiness by zooting zem. Zey are bezzer so, but iz makes me feel so zad.’ And he would leap up again to take another potshot out of the window.

The Belgian Consul fared no better than any of Gerald’s other hired tutors, totally failing to strike a spark from the boy’s obdurate flint. It was his brother Larry’s educative influence that complemented that of Theo Stephanides, firing him with what he called a ‘sort of verbal tonic’. ‘He has the most extraordinary ability for giving people faith in themselves,’ he was to write of his eldest brother. ‘Throughout my life he has provided me with more enthusiastic encouragement than anyone else, and any success I have achieved is due, in no small measure, to his backing.’ Not long after the family had settled down on Corfu, Lawrence began to take his youngest brother’s literary education in hand. It was under his eclectic but inspired guidance that Gerald was introduced to the world of reading and the basics of writing – above all to the world of Lawrence’s vivid, ever-fermenting imagination.

‘My brother Larry was a kind of god for me,’ Gerald recalled, ‘and therefore I tried to imitate him. Larry had people like Henry Miller staying with him in Corfu and I had access to his very varied library.’ Larry would throw books at him, he remembered, with a brief word about why they were interesting, and if Gerald thought he was right he’d read them. ‘Good heavens, I was omnivorous! I read anything from Darwin to the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I adored books by W.H. Hudson, Gilbert White and Bates’ A Naturalist on the River Amazons. I believe that all children should be surrounded by books and animals.’ It was Lawrence who gave his young brother copies of Henri Fabre’s classic works Insect Life: Souvenirs of a Naturalist and The Life and Love of the Insects, with their accounts of wasps, bees, ants, gnats, spiders, scorpions – books which Gerald was later to claim ‘set me off on Corfu’, and which remained an inspiration throughout his life on account of the simplicity and clarity with which they were written and the stimulation they provided the imagination. He was to write:

If someone had presented me with the touchstone that turns everything to gold, I could not have been more delighted. From that moment Fabre became my personal friend. He unravelled the many mysteries that surrounded me and showed me miracles and how they were performed. Through his entrancing prose I became the hunting wasp, the paralysed spider, the cicada, the burly, burnished scarab beetle, and a host of other creatures as well.

Ironically, though, it was a publication that Gerald borrowed from his highly unliterary, gun-slinging brother Leslie that was to sound the clearest call to action for his future life. This was a copy of a popular adventure magazine called Wide World, which serialised a refreshingly humorous account by an American zoologist, Ivan Sanderson, about a recent animal-collecting expedition, led by Percy Sladen, in the wilds of the Cameroons in West Africa. Sanderson’s beguiling tale planted a dream inside Gerald’s young skull, a dream which hardened into a youthful vow of intent that one day he too would combine his love of animals with his yearning for adventure and brave the African wilds in search of rare animals – animals which he would bring back alive, not trapped, shot and stuffed like Percy Sladen’s.

Lawrence’s greatest gift to Gerald was not printed books but language itself, especially language at its most evocative and illuminating, in the form of simile and metaphor. Judging by the progression from Gerald’s earliest literary offerings to those that followed, the impact of his brother’s tuition was electrifying. It was as if Gerald had grown up in a year, emerging by the summer of 1936, when he was eleven, with the perception of someone three times his age. If his next poem, ‘Death’, was not written by Lawrence, the influence of Lawrence totally dominates it, from the subject to the prosody. And the transformation in Gerald’s spelling is suspiciously miraculous.

on a mound a boy lay

as a stream went tinkling by:

mauve irises stood around him as if to

shade him from the eye of death which

was always taking people unawares

and making them till his ground

rhododendrons peeped

at the boy counting sheep

the horror is spread

the boy is dead

BUT DEATH HIMSELF IS NOT SEEN

Lawrence was so impressed by the poem that he sent a copy of it to his friend Henry Miller in America, naming his younger brother as the author. ‘He has written the following poem,’ he wrote. ‘And I am envious.’ Later he included the poem in the November 1937 issue of the Booster, the controversial literary magazine of the American Country Club near Paris, which he edited with Miller, Alfred Pérles and William Saroyan.

By now Mother had found Gerald a new tutor to take the place of George Wilkinson, who had remained at Pérama. He was a twenty-two-year-old friend of Lawrence’s by the name of Pat Evans, ‘a tall, handsome young man,’ Gerald noted, ‘fresh from Oxford.’ Evans entertained serious ambitions of actually educating his young pupil, an aim Gerald himself found ‘rather trying’ and did his best to subvert. He need not have worried, however, for soon the island began to work its languorous magic on the new arrival, and all talk of fractions and adverbs and suchlike was abandoned in favour of a more outdoor kind of teaching, like floating about in the sea while chatting in a desultory way about the effects of warm ocean currents and the origins of coastline geology. Evans had a keen interest in natural history and biology, and he passed on his enthusiasm to his young pupil in a casual, unobtrusive way, ‘walking around, just looking at bugs’, as Margo recalled.

Gerald persuaded Pat Evans to let him write a book as a substitute for English lessons, and soon he was busy scribbling away at a narrative he was to describe as ‘a stirring tale of a voyage round the world capturing animals with my family’, a work Lawrence called ‘his great novel of the flora and fauna of the world’ – a story written very much in the style of the Boy’s Own Paper, with one chapter ending with Mother being attacked by a jaguar and another with Larry caught in the coils of a giant anaconda. Unfortunately, the manuscript was inadvertently left behind in a tin trunk when the family finally left the island, and was probably impounded (so Gerald reckoned) by a bunch of Nazi illiterates during the war and thus lost to posterity for ever.

One fragment of Gerald’s early writing that did survive was a remarkable prose poem, ‘In the Theatre’, which Lawrence also published in the Booster – it was, indeed, Gerald’s first published work. It was clear from ‘In the Theatre’ that Gerald shared with his eldest brother an aptitude for vivid, concrete imagery and the instinct for simile and metaphor which lies at the heart of all poetic vision – much of it drawn from the wildlife the boy had been observing at first hand in his rambles around Corfu.

They brought him in on a stretcher, starched and white, every stitch of it showing hospital work. They slid him on to the cold stone table. He was dressed in pyjamas and jacket, his face looked as if it was carved out of cuttlefish. A student fidgeted, someone coughed, huskily, uneasily. The doctor looked up sharply at the new nurse: she was white as marble, twisting a blue lace handkerchief in her butterfly-like hands.

The scalpel whispered as if it were cutting silk, showing the intestines coiled up neatly like watchsprings. The doctor’s hands moved with the speed of a striking snake, cutting, fastening, probing. At last, a pinkish-grey thing like a sausage came out in the scorpion-like grip of the pincers. Then the sewing-up, the needle burying itself in the soft depth and appearing on the other side of the abyss, drawing the skin together like a magnet. The stretcher groaned at the sudden weight.

When Lawrence first read this prose-poem with his eleven-year-old brother’s name appended to it, he thought it must have been his tutor Pat Evans who had really written it. But Evans denied any involvement. ‘Do you suppose,’ he told Lawrence, ‘that if I could write as well as that I would waste my time on being a tutor?’

But Pat Evans clearly was an inciting agent of some sort in Gerald’s literary development, for later in the year Gerald wrote to Alan Thomas enclosing a copy of his most recent poetic concoction:

I send you my latest opus. Pat and I set each other subjects to write poems in each week. This is my first homewark [sic]. NIGHT-CLUB.

Spoon on, swoon on to death. The mood is blue.

Croon me a stave as sexless as the plants,

Deathless as platinum, cynical as love.

My mood is indigo, my dance is bones.

If there were any limbo it were here.

Dancing dactyls, piston-man and pony

To dewey negroes played by saxophones …

Sodom, swoon on, and wag the deathless boddom.

I love your sagging undertones of snot.

Love shall prevail – and coupling in cloakrooms

When none shall care whether it prevail or not.

Much love to you. Nancy is drawing a bookplate for you. Why? Gerry Durrell