The Durrells of Corfu

by Michael Haag

  By the time the Durrells arrived at Jamshedpur, the one-time village in the midst of a steaming jungle had already burgeoned into an industrial town of over 50,000 people, with projected development projects set to increase the numbers fourfold within the next few years. The steel factory alone employed over 25,000 people. But conditions were primitive and the terrain still half wild. Local tigers, enraged at the destruction of their forest home, had killed two Indian labourers, and an elephant, driven berserk by the disturbance and the noise, smashed a number of workers’ huts to pieces.

  Durrell & Co. won a contract to build a tin-plate mill, a brick-making plant, an office building, a 300-bed hospital complete with diagnostic and operating facilities, and over 400 workers’ houses, each with its garden, for the Tata family who as philanthropists as well as entrepreneurs were determined to make Jamshedpur a model town, socially and technologically far in advance of any other city in India. The Tata Steel plant had by 1939 become the largest in the British Empire and today the city is one of the most advanced industrial and high-tech cities in India, home to the multinational Tata company, the owners of Jaguar, Land Rover and Tetley Tea.

  Gerald – Gerry – was born at Jamshedpur on 7 January 1925. Louisa was thirty-eight and Lawrence Samuel forty. ‘His arrival did not disturb us children at all,’ remembered Margaret. ‘Gerry was just the baby, given over to our Hindu ayah, carefully watched by Mother’, to guard against the common practice of dipping her fingers in opium to soothe the cries of a restless child. His father seemed a remote figure. ‘I would see him twice a day for half an hour and he would tell me stories about the Three Bears. I knew he was my daddy but I was on much greater terms of intimacy with Mother and my ayah.’

  Larry, the oldest of the Durrell children, was nearly thirteen when Gerry was born and had been shipped off to school in England two years previously. The family had gone with him – their first visit to England – to enrol him at St Olave’s grammar school in Bermondsey, on the south bank of the Thames in London (he later moved to St Edmund’s public school in Canterbury). ‘Lawrence’, Margo said (she always called him Lawrence), ‘was deposited at school in England, feeling abandoned and bearing a grudge against his parents. I felt I never knew my brother Lawrence as a young boy. We returned to India, to home.’ Larry never saw India again. He never knew Gerry in India and hardly knew Leslie and Margo there either. ‘His presence’, remembered Margo, who was four when Larry went to England, ‘was only felt by me as a passing blond, boisterous elder brother.’

  Margo and Leslie with Larry, on a visit to England, 1923.

  Larry had, in fact, been away from the family for much of the previous three years, at St Joseph’s College, a Jesuit school in Darjeeling, so that when Margo recalled the way things were at home in Jamshedpur Larry was like an absent memory. ‘Nursery was our kingdom until the magic hour of teatime at 4pm, when we children would be washed and dressed in clean clothes and presented to Mother and Father in the drawing room. I do not remember Lawrence at all in those times; he must have been away in Darjeeling.’

  But, Margo added, ‘I think Lawrence experienced the most glamorous and best part of our life as children in India.’ Whereas his siblings’ memories only went back to Jamshedpur, to the days when the family’s circumstances became more settled and prosperous, the surroundings more ordinary, Larry shared the early trials and adventures of his mother and father.

  * * *

  The Durrells’ house in Jamshedpur was a long low bungalow with flowers and greenery climbing up the pillars of the verandah. The family’s tailor sat cross-legged in the shade of the verandah whirling his sewing machine, while indoors the air was stirred and cooled by fans and punkah wallahs. The bungalow was set within a large and beautifully kept garden and beyond it was a compound to shelter the servants.

  The garden was the setting for birthdays and Christmases, Margo remembering ‘magical times with marquees, lots of guests, children, music, presents, rollicking party games, wonderful party dresses and the cooks producing their best from the kitchen’. A snake charmer would appear with cobras rising from round baskets, ‘swaying to the sweet call of the crude bamboo pipes, surrounded by happy laughing children’. And once they were joined by an Indian banging a drum followed by a large brown bear on which the children were allowed to ride around the garden.

  When Margo spoke of the joys and escapades of her childhood she meant Leslie and herself, so close to one another in age. ‘We were conspirators most times when not enemies and beating each other up. We were always doing things like trying to poison the governess, an English Catholic, a tough spinster and an ogre in the eyes of Leslie and me. She was a pious lady who spent her free moments supplicating the Lord in prayer. We were put directly under her responsibility much to our alarm and war was declared at once. We were given lessons by the governess and we hated it.’ After wishing for her death they would creep into her room in the mornings to see if she was still breathing. Or they would plot to creep off ‘to forbidden territories, to the canal, a slow surge of deep and muddy water winding its way through paddy fields, way beyond our boundaries – we might catch a snake, a poisonous one. That would serve our governess right.’

  ‘We were ghastly children,’ Margo recalled. ‘We were a gang, Leslie and me, and Leslie was the gang leader. But he was very delicate and so he got a lot of attention. Anything going, he caught, all the major illnesses. Mother indulged him; I always thought he should be indulged because he was the weakest of us. But I was a toughie.’

  Leslie and Gerry with their ayah.

  For a while, the garden at the house in Jamshedpur was home to two Himalayan bear cubs. The cubs left an indelible impression on the infant Gerry, thanks to the antics of Leslie and Margo. The cubs were a gift from Uncle John, Louisa’s brother, a big-game hunter, and though they had been weaned they had come straight out of the wild and no attempt had been made to tame them. ‘They had very long sharp claws and very sharp white teeth,’ Gerry remembered, ‘and uttered a series of yarring cries of rage and frustration.’ They were temporarily housed under a big domed basket on the rear lawn, where a servant was instructed to look after them. Gerry told the story, many years later, in an autobiographical fragment:

  Of course, having your own bears was a wonderful thing, even though they did smell very lavatorial. And, of course, at that age Margaret and Leslie were ripe for any sort of mischief. As soon as the boy detailed to look after the bears went to get some food they would overturn the basket and run screaming into the house saying, “The bears are out! The bears are out!” After two or three days of this my mother’s nerves could stand no more. She was terrified that the bears would escape and find me sitting on my rug and proceed to disembowel me.

  And so the bears were sent away to the zoo, reducing the family menagerie to Bindle, a cocker spaniel, and Jemima, Margo’s pet duck.

  * * *

  Glory Dixie, the daughter of Louisa’s brother John, would visit her aunt’s family at Kurseong and Jamshedpur and observed their behaviour. ‘Larry was always robust, a typical small boy. He was always up to pranks but he was somebody who made everything very cheerful and happy, you know. And Margo was always robust. But Leslie was totally different. I can remember Leslie holding his breath to get what he wanted and Aunt Lou would panic that Leslie would die, and Leslie would be given whatever he wanted.’

  Glory recalled that Louisa and Lawrence Samuel would go to the club for a game of tennis but that otherwise she was a homebody. ‘She wasn’t really a social person at all, not for going out or dances. Her family meant everything to her.’ Sometimes Lawrence Samuel would go to the club without her. ‘He would enter into everything. He was a good tennis player, he sang, there were fancy dress parties and amateur theatricals, and he used to take part in them all. I can remember him dressed as a Pierrot and singing a song called “Wallah Walloo”. As a girl of twelve I thought how smashing he was.’

  Louisa, having lost one child to dipht
heria and given birth to Leslie during a cholera epidemic, kept the Medical Annual at her elbow and was always on the alert for snake bites, poisons, rabies, leprosy or yellow fever. ‘We used to eat berries and goodness knows what,’ said Margo, ‘and that would drive her crazy.’ Louisa would call for their local doctor ‘at every possible moment’, so often that he became a friend of the family. Dr Chakravati was his name, a small chubby man who would bump his old bicycle along the dirt roads, black bag in hand, to respond to Mother’s pleas.

  ‘What is the trouble today, dear lady?’ he would say with warm concern as he came puffing up the verandah steps. ‘Oh dear Dr Chakravati,’ Louisa would say anxiously, ‘Is that plant on the verandah poisonous? The children have been sucking the milky juice from its leaves,’ to which Dr Chakravati would respond, ‘Oh dear dear, castor oil must be given to all.’

  At another summons the black bicycle bounced to a standstill, Dr Chakravati hurried into the dining room, which Louisa had converted into a spotless hospital operating theatre. It was ‘goodbye tonsils’ day, recalled Margo.

  ‘You can rely on me, dear lady Mrs Durrell, to make a good job of it,’ he said with confidence, and the tonsils were removed one by one without fuss.

  And then there was the occasion when Leslie developed tropical sprue, an inflammation of the small intestine which weakens the body due to malnutrition. The cure was found only in the 1940s, but decades earlier Dr Chakravati had his own remedy. Leslie had to drink fresh chicken’s blood, the chicken killed there and then because the blood had to be warm.

  The prospect of castor oil and chicken’s blood did not deter Leslie from feigning illness in order to get attention. Margo, his accomplice in many other ways, was sceptical when he ran a temperature.

  Should the doctor be called, or is it because his parents are having a social night at the club and he is determined to ruin their evening?

  Though Margo knew that ‘Leslie was so delicate’, she also knew that ‘he was a good actor and an expert at manufacturing high temperatures’. At the slightest hint that Leslie was unwell, Louisa would rush to him. But Margo and the governess would discuss the situation and more often than not agree that Leslie could survive the night without disturbing his parents.

  There were, however, occcasions when serious medical attention was called for:

  ‘Oh dear Dr Chakravati,’ said Mother wringing her hands. ‘Margo has been bitten by a dog, our neighbour’s. Could it be mad?’ Their best friends’ dog had nipped Margaret as she was petting it while it was deep asleep. ‘We will have to wait and see developments, dear lady,’ said Dr Chakravati. Leslie hovered eagerly, or so she felt, waiting for his sister to foam at the mouth.

  But when Margo was again bitten by a sleeping dog, Dr Chakravati urged that the dog be tested for rabies. This time it was Bindle, the family dog, and he had bitten Margo’s face. The test had to be done at Simla, the imperial summer capital of British India high in the Himalayas, a thousand miles to the northwest of Jamshedpur. Mother, the ayah, the governess, various servants, and Margo and Leslie all made the two-day journey by train. Bindle went too, or at least his severed head which was carried in a canister to be tested. Margo was worried about being scarred for life, not about the possibility of being infected with rabies. She was protected by the holy water given her by the governess:

  ‘From Lourdes,’ she explained with holy reverence, and I, awe-inspired by her tone, kept the bottle safe for years. In fact, I recall taking it carefully wrapped in a handkerchief to England and eventually to Corfu in 1935. No one knew this secret!’

  Father had remained at home where he was visited by an unexpected guest that sent the cook into a panic. Looking for something suitable for the occasion, and not realising Jemima’s place in the family tree, the cook turned Margo’s pet duck into a pot roast.

  * * *

  According to his mother, Gerry’s first word was ‘zoo’. The zoo was in Lahore, in the Punjab, where Lawrence Samuel moved the family in 1927, when his contract at Jamshedpur came to an end. Gerry had just turned two and long remembered that first pungent smell of leopards and tigers. He retained early sensations too of gold and yellow and scarlet sunsets, the vivid colours of saris and food in the bazaars, the smell of coriander and curries at home, the taste of his favourite breakfast, boiled rice in buffalo milk, the sound of parakeets squeaking and fluttering across a green sky.

  Scent and sound and brilliant colour pervaded Gerry’s memories of his first years, his earliest sensations of what he later described as this ‘magical and beautiful’ world into which he had been born. One day when his ayah, a plump motherly woman in a spotless white sari, was taking him on his daily walk, she stopped to gossip with friends, men wearing turbans and belted in green, and women swathed in saris, one of magenta embroidered with gold and silver. Gerry slipped away and wandered over to a shallow roadside ditch, where he discovered a pair of pale coffee-coloured slugs crawling over one another in a strange mad dance. He was watching in fascination as they covered one another with glistening slime when his ayah, discovering he was gone, raced over to the ditch in a panic. ‘She immediately pulled me away and told me I must not touch or even watch such disgusting creatures. I remember at the time being puzzled because to me they were beautiful and not ugly at all.’ Throughout his life Gerry would return to the colours of that day, to the gleaming slugs glistening each other with the slime of their bodies, and to the enchanting woman in the rich magenta, which forever remained one of his favourite colours.

  The young zoologist – Gerry on the terrace at Jamshedpur.

  Gerry claimed to have a photographic memory and stored impressions of animals and colours and tastes and scents, and he kept a watchful eye on his family too. Being so much younger than the others he had the advantage of being able to observe them while they hardly noticed him.

  * * *

  Gerry had very little memory of his father, nor of his death, which happened when he had just turned three, on 16 April 1928. But Margaret, nine years old, remembered it well.

  It was a trauma. And it was a very great trauma for Mother. People advised us to go to Dalhousie. And Dad was taken into the hospital there. But he never recovered. Father was a tall handsome man with gentle manners and much loved by all. I have missed him, his image and his strong presence all my life. How much more must Mother have grieved when we lost him.

  The death of Lawrence Samuel changed everything; his driving purpose and his confident determination had set the course of their lives. The tragedy began in Lahore, in early 1928, when he began to suffer severe headaches. Friends put it down to exhaustion and suggested that he take a rest in the cool hill station of Dalhousie. The entire family moved into a rented house there, with the governess, the ayah, a chauffeur and other servants. But the headaches worsened and he began to behave irrationally. ‘You couldn’t trust him,’ said Margo.

  Lawrence Samuel was admitted to Dalhousie’s English cottage hospital and Louisa moved in with him, leaving the children in the charge of the governess. ‘The governess used to take us every day up to the hospital and we went to Mass at the Catholic church every morning. We were made to pray, more, longer prayers, louder prayers; we lit more candles, went to church more often. Frightened, we huddled close to our ayah and governess. Our governess had great faith in the priest who became a symbol of hope.’

  Lawrence Samuel had probably been suffering from a brain tumour; the registrar entered a cerebral haemorrhage as the immediate cause of death. Margo recalled:

  Leslie and I were allowed a last farewell visit: we saw Father briefly in the long, muted white ward, a remote still body covered by a white sheet. Mother was standing on the hospital verandah to greet us. She wore a plain blue dress, an image imprinted on my memory: white-faced, stricken yet calm – her inner strength had prevailed as my childhood memory recalls. I do not remember the funeral – I can only think that we were shielded from the last ritual and the breaking up of our home.

 
; Years later Louisa admitted that she had thought of committing suicide but went on living for the sake of Gerry, three years old and entirely dependent on her. She also told Margo that she had nearly become a Catholic after being ‘supported and strengthened by the presence of the Catholic nuns who daily gave her compassion, companionship and spiritual strength, which she could not find in any other religion’.

  Larry was at school in England when his father died. ‘Larry just got a telegram,’ said Margo. ‘He had no family around him. The death that is most difficult to get over is the absent death; Larry had his father at his shoulder for the rest of his life.’

  ‘The moment my father died,’ remembered Gerry, ‘I was whisked away by my ayah to stay with nearby friends, leaving my mother, heartbroken, with the task of reorganising our lives.’ India was no place for a woman to raise four children, Louisa was told by people in the English community. And so she sold the house, had everything shipped off ahead, and taking the train to Bombay the Durrells set sail for a country they hardly knew but which they called home.

  Larry during schooldays in England.

  ‘I have a few trivial memories of our railway journey down to the coast,’ Gerry said. ‘At one point the train ran along the banks of a river where women were washing clothes and huge buffaloes wallowed in the shallows and small boys scrambled over their huge chocolate bodies, rubbing them with stones. I wanted to join them and help them clean the buffalo, but Mother said that there was no time. Further along the river I saw my first camel, pacing slowly and sardonically along. I dearly wanted to stop the train so that I could get on a more intimate friendly footing with this fantastic animal but Mother said there was no time.’