Gerald Durrell: The Authorised Biography

Did the eleven-year-old boy with his simple, innocent passion for blennies and trapdoor spiders really write this unbelievably precocious piece of desperately straining and contrived Weltschmerz? Not only the subject, but the existentialist mind-set, the mood, the vocabulary, the startling and often far-fetched imagery, the compulsive desire to shock, all reek of the influence of Larry the poet, not to mention Larry the uncompromising, anarchic novelist then wrestling with his first major work of fiction, his seriously black – and blue – Black Book. Did Larry actually write it? If not, it can only be seen as a pastiche of Larry, and as such quite stunning for one so young – bizarrely sophisticated nonsense work that nonetheless makes a kind of sense.

A later poem by Gerald entitled ‘An African Dialogue’ was later published, with Lawrence’s help, in a fringe literary periodical called Seven in the summer of 1939. As the final verse indicates, it is remarkable for the cryptic compression of its metaphysical conceit.

She went to the house and lit a candle.

The candle cried: ‘I am being killed.’

The flame: ‘I am killing you.’

The maid answered: ‘It is true, true.

For I see your white blood.’

Meanwhile, family life chez the Durrells was beginning to disintegrate into riot and pandemonium. ‘We’ve got so lax,’ Larry wrote to Alan Thomas, ‘what with Leslie farting at meals, and us nearly naked all day on the point, bathing.’ Nancy agreed. Mother could keep no kind of order at all. ‘Even Gerry could have done better with a little more discipline,’ she complained. ‘I mean he did grow up with really no discipline at all.’ Nancy and Larry were glad of the seclusion and tranquillity of their whitewashed fisherman’s house at Kalami, far from the uproarious family. ‘Ten miles south,’ Larry reported to Thomas, ‘the family brawls and caterwauls and screams in the cavernous new Ypso villa.’

At a cost of £43.1os. the Durrell splinter party had had a top storey added to their house, with a balcony from which they could look over the sea and the hills towards the dying day. For them at least, and later for Gerald and the rest of the family on their forays north, the island entered a new dimension of enchantment.

‘The peace of those evenings on the balcony before the lighting of the lamps was something we shall never discover again,’ Lawrence was to write; ‘the stillness of objects reflected in the mirror of the bay … It was the kind of hush you get in a Chinese water-colour.’ As they sat there, sea and sky merging into a single veil, a shepherd would start playing his flute somewhere under an arbutus out of sight.

Across the bay would slide the smooth, icy notes of the flute; little liquid flourishes, and sleepy squibbles. Sitting on the balcony, wrapped by the airs, we would listen without speaking. Presently the moon appeared – not the white, pulpy spectre of a moon that you see in Egypt – but a Greek moon, friendly, not incalculable or chilling … We walked in our bare feet through the dark rooms, feeling the cool tiles under us, and down on to the rock. In that enormous silence we walked into the water, so as not to splash, and swam out into the silver bar. We didn’t speak because a voice on that water sounded unearthly. We swam till we were tired and then came back to the white rock and wrapped ourselves in towels and ate grapes.

‘This is Homer’s country pure,’ Lawrence scribbled enthusiastically, if not entirely accurately, to Alan Thomas. ‘A few 100 yards from us is where Ulysses landed …’ The diet, he said, was a bit wild. ‘Bread and cheese and Greek champagne … Figs and grapes if they’re in … But in compensation the finest bathing and scenery in the world – and ISLANDS!’

It was inevitable that sooner or later, looking out every day over such an incomparably mesmeric expanse of sea, the family should eventually take to the water. Leslie was the leading spirit in this foray. Before he came to Corfu he had badly wanted to join the Merchant Navy, but his local doctor deemed his constitution wasn’t strong enough. In Corfu he acquired a small boat, the Sea Cow, which he first rowed, then, following the addition of an outboard engine, motored up and down the coast, often alone, sometimes with the rest of the family.

‘You should see us,’ Leslie wrote in one of his infrequent missives home, ‘the whole bloody crowd at sea, it would make you laugh.

One day Larry and Nan came here and I said I would take them home in the boat – Mother, Pat, Gerry, Larry, Nan and myself all in the motor boat. We started off and ran into quite a rough sea. Pat lying on the deck and holding on for all he was worth was dripping in about 5 minutes. Larry, Nan, Mother and Gerry crawled under a blanket – most unseamanlike. The blanket was wet and so was everyone under it. This went on for a bit and things got worse, when suddenly the boat did a beautiful roll and sent gallons of sea water over us. This was enough for Mother and we had to turn back. When Larry, Nan and Pat had had some whiskey and dry clothes they went home in a car.

Sometimes, on dead-still moonlight nights with a glassy sea, Lawrence and Nancy would row across to the Albanian coast for a midnight picnic and then row back, an adventure out of dreamland, pure phantasmagoria. Soon he had bought a boat of his own, a black and brown twenty-two-foot sailing boat called the Van Norden – ‘a dream, my black devil’ – in which they could sail to remoter coasts and islands. Leslie acquired for £3 another small boat, soon to bear the proud name of the Bootle-Bumtrinket, which he and Pat Evans fixed up for Gerald as a birthday present. The boat they produced was, according to Gerald, a genuine oddity in the history of marine construction. The Bootle-Bumtrinket was seven feet long, flat-bottomed and almost circular in shape, painted green and white inside, with black, white and orange stripes outside. Leslie had cut a remarkably long cypress pole for a mast, and proposed raising this at the ceremonial launch and maiden voyage from the jetty in the bay in front of the villa. All did not go according to plan, however, for the moment the mast was inserted in its socket, the Bootle-Bumtrinket – ‘with a speed remarkable for a craft of her circumference,’ Gerald observed – turned turtle, taking Pat Evans with it.

It took a little while for Leslie to redo his calculations, and when he finally sawed the mast down to what he estimated to be the correct length, it turned out to be a mere three feet high, which was insufficient to support a sail. So for the time being the vessel remained a rowing boat, a tub which bobbed upright on the surface of the sea ‘with the placid buoyancy of a celluloid duck’. Gerald made his maiden voyage on a summer’s dawn of perfect calm, with just the faintest breeze. He pushed off from the shore and rowed and drifted down the coast, in and out of the little bays and around the tiny islets of the offshore archipelago, rich in shallow-water marine life. ‘The joy of having a boat of your own!’ he was to remember. ‘There was nothing to compare with that very first voyage.’

Lying side by side with Roger the dog in the bow of the boat as it drifted in towards the shallows, he peered down through a fathom of crystal water at the tapestry of the seabed passing beneath him – the gaping clams stuck upright in the silver sand, the serpulas with their feathery orange-gold and blue petals, ‘like an orchid on a mushroom stem’, the pouting blennies in the holes of the reefs, the anemones waving on the rocks, the scuttling spider-crabs camouflaged with coats of weeds and sponges, the caravans of coloured top shells moving everywhere. Eventually, as the sun sank lower, he began to row for home, his glass jars and collecting tubes full of marine specimens of all kinds. ‘The sun gleamed like a coin behind the olive trees,’ he was to write, ‘and the sea was striped with gold and silver when the Bootle-Bumtrinket brought her round behind bumping gently against the jetty. Hungry, thirsty, tired, with my head buzzing full of the colours and shapes I had seen, I carried my precious specimens slowly up the hill to the villa …’

Sometimes in the summer, if the moon was full, the family went bathing at night, when the sea was cooler than in the heat of the day. They would take the Sea Cow out into deep water and plunge over the side, the water wobbling bright in the moonlight. On one such night, when Gerald had floated out some distance from both shore and boat, he was overtaken by a shoal of porpoises, heaving and sighing, rising and diving all around him. For a short while he swam with them, overjoyed at their beautiful, exuberant presence; but then, as if at a signal, they turned and headed out of the bay towards the distant coast of Albania. ‘I trod water and watched them go,’ he remembered, ‘swimming up the white chain of moonlight, backs aglow as they rose and plunged with heavy ecstasy in the water as warm as fresh milk. Behind them they left a trail of great bubbles that rocked and shone briefly like miniature moons before vanishing under the ripples.’

Soon the family discovered other marvels of the Corfu night – the phosphorescence in the sea and the flickering of the fireflies in the olive groves along the shore, both better seen when there was no moon. On the memorable night that Mother took to the water for the first time in her home-made bathing suit, the porpoises, the fireflies and the phosphorescence coincided in a single breathtaking display. Gerald was to write:

Never had we seen so many fireflies congregated in one spot. They flicked through the trees in swarms, they crawled on the grass, the bushes and the olive trunks, they drifted in swarms over our heads and landed on the rugs, like green embers. Glittering streams of them flew out over the bay, swirling over the water, and then, right on cue, the porpoises appeared, swimming in line into the bay, rocking rhythmically through the water, their backs as if painted with phosphorous … With the fireflies above and the illuminated porpoises below it was a fantastic sight. We could even see the luminous trails beneath the surface where the porpoises swam in fiery patterns across the sandy bottom, and when they leapt high in the air the drops of emerald glowing water flicked from them, and you could not tell if it was phosphorescence or fireflies you were looking at. For an hour or so we watched this pageant, and then slowly the fireflies drifted back inland and further down the coast. Then the porpoises lined up and sped out to sea, leaving a flaming path behind them that flickered and glowed, and then died slowly, like a glowing branch laid across the bay.

The motorboat gave the Durrells a greater freedom to roam round the island than ever before. At first it was Leslie who did the trail-blazing, mainly because of the rich opportunities for hunting and shooting provided by the wilder country to the north. Sometimes he picked up Lawrence and Nancy on the way, since Kalami lay on his passage north from Kondokali. ‘A week or 2. ago,’ Lawrence wrote to Alan Thomas, ‘we went up to a death-swamp lake in the north, Les and Nancy and me for a shoot. Tropical. Huge slime covered tracts, bubbled in hot marsh-gas and the roots of trees. Snakes and tortoises swimming quietly above and toads below. A ring of emerald slime thick with scarlet dragon-flies and mosquitoes. It’s called ANTINIOTISSA (enemy of youth).’

Before long Lawrence had become almost as obsessive a hunter as Leslie. It is extraordinary that Gerald was able to nurture his passion and love for the animal world while his two older brothers seemed hell-bent on blasting the wildlife of the island to pieces. But he did, conniving in the slaughter to the extent of helping to fill Leslie’s cartridges for him and sometimes accompanying him on pigeon shoots, looking on when, out of compassion, Leslie shot the stray and starving dogs that followed the family on their picnics.

Lawrence was largely indifferent to the natural world, except as spectacle, and his expeditions with Leslie to the north of the island revealed a killer streak. ‘I’m queer about shooting,’ he wrote to Alan Thomas. ‘So far I’ve prohibited herons. But duck is a different matter. Just a personified motor-horn, flying ham with a honk. No personality, nothing. And to bring them down is the most glorious feeling. THUD. Like breaking glass balls at a range. I could slaughter hundreds without a qualm.’ As for octopus, which he learned to hunt with a stick with a hook like the Greeks, they were ‘altogether filthy … utterly foul’.

Larry began to revise his opinion of Leslie somewhat after a few shooting trips with him in the north. ‘You wouldn’t recognise Leslie I swear,’ he wrote to Alan Thomas in the summer of 1936. ‘His personality is really amazingly strong now, and he can chatter away in company like Doctor Johnson himself. It’s done him a world of good, strutting about with a gun under each arm and one behind his ear, shooting peasants right and left.’ Leslie saw himself as a tough guy in a tough guy’s world, the fastest gun on the island – ‘dirty, unshaven,’ his kid brother said, ‘and smelling of gun-oil and blood’.

The family had a Kodak camera, and from time to time snapped family groups and memorable outings. Many of the photographs were taken by Leslie, who had an eye for a picture – and a handsome woman. On the back of a snap of Maria, the family’s maid, he jotted a caption full of portent: ‘Maria our maid (jolly nice)’.

Towards the end of the summer of 1936 Mother decided to dispense with the services of Gerald’s tutor, Pat Evans – according to Gerald, on the grounds that he was getting far too fond of Margo, and Margo of him. So departed one of the staunchest supporters of Gerald’s budding natural history and literary endeavours. Banished for ever from the family, the disconsolate Evans found his way to mainland Greece, where during the war he became a local hero, fighting behind the lines as a British SOE agent in Nazi-occupied Macedonia. A rather shy and diffident loner, Evans was, Margo recalled, ‘very, very attractive’, and she had become deeply infatuated with him. She took the news of his dismissal badly, and shut herself away in the attic, eating hugely. ‘This was the period when Margaret was in a very bad way,’ Nancy remembered. ‘She began to get very fat, I mean she really did get awfully fat, and she got so ashamed of herself that she wouldn’t even appear – wouldn’t come down to meals or anything.’ It was neither gluttony nor a broken heart that was the cause of Margo’s weight problem, however, for according to reports it later turned out that she had a glandular condition that was causing her to put on a pound a day.

A new tutor was found, a Polish exile with French and English ancestry by the name of Krajewsky, whom Gerald in his book was to call Kralefsky. A gnome-like humpback, his redeeming virtue, as far as Gerald was concerned, was the huge collection of finches and other birds he kept on the top floor of the mouldering mansion on the edge of town where he lived with his ancient, witch-like mother (‘a ravaged old queen’).

His lessons, however, were old-fashioned and boring – history was lists of dates and geography lists of towns – so it came as a relief to the wearied boy when he discovered that his tutor possessed another virtue. For Krajewsky was a fantasist, and often conjured up an imaginary world in which his past life was presented as a series of wild adventures – a shipwreck on a voyage to Murmansk, an attack by bandits in the Syrian desert, a spot of derring-do in the Secret Service in World War One, an incident in Hyde Park when he strangled a killer bulldog with his bare hands – all of them in the company of ‘a Lady’. Henceforth lessons passed in a more agreeable fashion, with Gerald’s imagination and grasp of story-telling stimulated at the expense of the acquisition of new knowledge.

‘Like everything else in Corfu,’ Gerald was to reflect, ‘it was singularly lucky, this string of outlandish professors who taught me nothing that would be remotely useful in making me conform and succeed and flourish, but who gave me the right kind of wealth, who showed me life.’ And not only life, but freedom, pleasure, the sheer brilliance and sensuality of Corfu.

Gerald was growing up. In January 1937 he celebrated his twelfth birthday by throwing a party. To all the guests he sent an invitation in verse, decorated with a self-portrait of himself disguised as a Bacchanalian figure sporting a wild beard and looking uncannily like the man he was to become in later life:

Oh! Hail to you my fellow friends.

Will you yourselves to us lend?

We’re giving a party on 7th of Jan.

Do please come if you possibly can.

The doors are open at half-past three.

Mind you drop in and make whoopee with me.

One of those invited was the Reverend Geoffrey Carr, then Chaplain of the Holy Trinity Church that served the British community living on Corfu, and a good friend of Theo Stephanides and his seven-year-old daughter Alexia.

It was, Carr recalled, a splendid party, with Theo and Spiro and the Belgian Consul and a whole host of Corfu friends in attendance, and Leslie, Theo and the ex-King of Greece’s butler dancing the kalamatianos, and all the pets behaving badly, including the birthday present puppies, who were promptly christened Widdle and Puke, with good reason. A huge home-made cracker, constructed by Margo out of red paper, was suspended from the ceiling. It was eight feet long and three feet in diameter, and was stuffed with confetti, small toys and gifts of food and sweets for the local peasant children (who were sometimes nearly as hungry as the dogs). Disembowelled by Theo using a First World War bayonet belonging to Leslie, the cracker’s demise was the climax of the party, with a scrum of children scrabbling around for the gifts and sweets scattered about all over the floor.

Leslie and Lawrence had already carried out a reconnaissance of Antiniotissa, the large lake at the northern end of the island, and the rest of the family soon followed. The lake was an elongated sheet of shallow water about a mile long, bordered by a dense zariba of cane and reed and closed off from the sea at one end by a broad dune of fine white sand. The best time to visit it was at the season when the sand lilies buried in the dune pushed up their thick green leaves and white blooms, so that the dune became, as Gerald put it, ‘a glacier of flowers’. One warm summer dawn they all set off for Antiniotissa, Theodore and Spiro included, two boatloads full, with the Sea Cow towing the Bootle-Bumtrinket. As the engine died and the boats slid slowly towards the shore, the scent of the lilies wafted out to greet them – ‘a rich, heavy scent that was the distilled essence of summer, a warm sweetness that made you breathe deeply time and again in an effort to retain it within you’.

After establishing their picnic encampment among the lilies on the dune, the family did whatever came naturally to them. Leslie shot. Margo sunbathed. Mother wandered off with a trowel and basket. Spiro – ‘clad only in his underpants and looking like some dark hairy prehistoric man’ – stabbed at fish with his trident. Gerald and Theo pottered among the pools with their test tubes and collecting bottles looking for minuter forms of fauna. ‘What a heavenly place,’ murmured Larry. ‘I should like to lie here for ever. Eventually, of course, over the centuries, by breathing deeply and evenly I should embalm myself with this scent.’ Lunch came, then tea. Gerald and Theo returned to the edge of the lake to continue their search for insufficiently known organisms. Daylight faded as Spiro grilled a fish or an eel on the fire, and before long it grew dark – a still, hushed, magic dark, fireflies rising, fire spitting. This was a special place, Gerald knew, and he absorbed its balm through every sense.

The moon rose above the mountains, turning the lilies to silver except where the flickering flames illuminated them with a flush of pink. The tiny ripples sped over the moonlit sea and breathed with relief as they reached the shore at last. Owls started to chime in the trees, and in the gloomy shadows fireflies gleamed as they flew, their jade-green, misty lights pulsing on and off.

Eventually, yawning and stretching, we carried our things down to the boat. We rowed out to the mouth of the bay, and then in the pause while Leslie fiddled with the engine, we looked back at Antiniotissa. The lilies were like a snow-field under the moon, and the dark backcloth of olives was pricked with the lights of fireflies. The fire we had built, stamped and ground underfoot before we left, glowed like a patch of garnets at the edge of the flowers.

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.