The Durrells of Corfu

by Michael Haag

  Molly recalled that ‘Gerry was a beautiful little boy, really, and great fun’, but that he and Leslie ‘ran rings round Aunt Lou and were quite unmanageable’. Molly and her sister did not like Leslie very much. ‘Leslie drove Aunt Lou mad at this time, staying in bed till midday and slouching about. He never settled to anything, never saw anything through.’ And when he would sometimes condescend to play with them, ‘you never knew from one minute to the next how he would behave. He would suddenly turn nasty for no reason at all’.

  They were terrified by Gerry’s animals but they loved it when he taught them how to ride his bicycle; they would shriek with laughter every time they fell off, until a booming voice came from on high; Larry was visiting and trying to write in an upper room from where he bellowed, ‘Stop that bloody row!’ Not that Gerry thought much of his two ‘domineering hags of cousins’ who teased and sneered and daily touted the variety and superiority of their toys to his, to which he finally replied, ‘You haven’t a father in heaven, but I have.’

  But now with summer gone, and with it her guests and children gone away, Louisa was alone. As Gerry put it (writing as an adult): ‘Incarcerated in this gigantic house with only a small boy as company, Mother took to mourning the death of my father in earnest with the aid of Demon Drink.’ Louisa continued to struggle with the herbaceous borders and Gerry would join her in the kitchen as she prepared their delicious meals and tried to teach him to cook. ‘But she was lonely and so she was drawn inevitably to the bottle more and more frequently.’

  Gerry, at the time, noticed nothing and life went on as normal as far as he was concerned. At the end of the day he would have his bath and then climb into his mother’s bed and curl up against her warm body in its silk nightgown.

  And then, suddenly, one day in October 1932, Mother disappeared.

  * * *

  Had Gerry not written in his unpublished autobiographical jottings that his mother had had a ‘nervous breakdown’ and ‘disappeared for a rest cure’, this would have remained a secret. Louisa’s breakdown is not there in My Family and Other Animals nor any of Gerry’s other books (nor is her drinking for that matter), and Larry, Margo and Leslie never publicly brought it up. Even in his notes, Gerry says almost nothing about it, how long it lasted, how it affected him and the rest of the family. The matter was completely hushed up. ‘There was only one man as far as Mother was concerned and that was Father,’ Margo said. But Louisa had only a small boy and ghosts.

  The secret was even more than Gerry or any of the others would admit or perhaps knew. Louisa had booked a first-class passage to India for herself and Gerry aboard the Ellerman Line’s SS City of Calcutta sailing from Liverpool on 29 October. Her name and Gerry’s are on the passenger list but were then crossed out, meaning something suddenly happened: they were about to sail but disembarked, or unexpectedly failed to board. It looks like Louisa’s breakdown was an attempt to return to the land of her ghosts, to the India where she was born and where her infant daughter and her husband lay buried in the ground. Someone, possibly Larry, discovered that Louisa had decided to cut and run, and at the very last moment prevented her and Gerry from sailing with the ship.

  When Louisa then entered the nursing home, or wherever it is she went, a formidable woman called Miss Burroughs moved into Berridge House to look after Gerry. ‘She was not a bad woman,’ he thought, when looking back on that time, but she had never looked after a small boy before and was terrified that he might wander off and get lost. ‘A regime of door locking was instituted as if I were a dangerous prisoner. I was locked in the kitchen, the drawing room and the dining room, but the worst was that she banished Simon from my bedroom, saying that dogs were full of germs, and locked me in at night so that by morning my bladder was bursting and I dare not wet the bed for fear of some terrible retribution.’ On top of it Miss Burroughs was a terrible cook. ‘Gone were the delicious curries Mother used to concoct, gone the steaming bowls of rice like elongated pearls, chutneys like liquid amber filled with delicious fruit, gone the wonderful Indian sweets like jalebi oozing sugar.’

  As at Dulwich, the time at Berridge House began and ended with the coming and going of a dog. Where Prince had taken to attacking other canines, it was Simon’s cowardice that was his ultimate undoing. A sweep had come to clean the chimneys, carrying his rods and brushes in the sidecar of his motorbike. Simon was sleeping upstairs and was unaware of the visit; when he woke up he went down to the garden as usual to attend to nature. Just then the chimney sweep left and started up his motorbike with a terrific roar. For a moment Simon was frozen in horror; this was an even greater evil than a lawnmower or a garden hose, and in fear for his life he panicked and ran out the gate and on to the road – where Gerry watched helplessly as ‘a car, unable to brake in time, neatly crushed Simon’s skull, killing him instantly’.

  * * *

  A short time later Louisa moved again, this time to a house in Wimborne Road, much closer to the heart of Bournemouth than Parkstone. Perhaps reacting against the censure of her Durrell in-laws, she named it for her family in Roorkee and called it Dixie Lodge.

  The house and grounds at Dixie Lodge were not nearly as extensive as those of Berridge House, but it was a cosier place, while Gerry delighted in the garden, which had several highly climbable trees and inviting clusters of shrubs that were home to a variety of strange and wonderful insects. Mother found a governess for him, a raucous and benign woman called Lottie, and Gerry settled down quite happily in his new home.

  ‘But then Mother did something so terrible that I was bereft of words. She enrolled me in the local school.’ Wychwood School (which Gerry in his autobiographical notes unfailingly calls Witchwood) ‘expected you to learn things like algebra and mathematics and history and, above all else, things that were anathema to me – sports.’ When he played cricket, for example, a slow game which allowed Gerry a lot of time to watch the bees in the clover, he was forever missing catches, while his one achievement in football was to kick the ball into his own goal. ‘We had to do a lot in gym, which meant climbing up ladders and sliding down ropes, all to no purpose as far as I could see, and then once a week a torture so monstrous that even today I shiver at the thought of it. There was a tiled room in which there was a small tiled swimming pool, and we were stripped and ranged shiveringly along the edge. Then each one of us had a huge canvas belt fitted round our waist which allowed us to be lowered into the water like a frozen bouquet garni, and instructions as to what to do with our arms and legs were shouted at us. It was sheer torture and, of course, like many of the other pupils I did not learn how to swim.’ Gerry’s scholastic achievements were no better; ‘I was somewhat of a dullard.’

  Nancy Myers – who would become Larry’s first wife.

  The young writer – Larry in London, around 1932.

  The previous year, in 1932, when Larry was twenty, he met Nancy Myers, a few months younger, who had dropped out of the Slade School of Fine Art. She was tall and slim, much taller than Larry, with light blonde hair and striking looks. Within a short time they were living together in Bloomsbury – Nancy had a small inheritance and Larry now had a small inheritance too from his father. In a somewhat over-flavoured account of his bohemian days in London, Larry described getting together with Nancy:

  My so called up-bringing was quite an uproar. I have always broken stable when I was unhappy … I hymned and whored in London – playing jazz in a nightclub, composing jazz songs, working in real estate. Never really starved – but I wonder whether thin rations are not another degree of starvation – I met Nancy in an equally precarious position and we struck up an incongruous partnership … We did a bit of drinking and dying … Ran a photographic studio together. It crashed. Tried posters, short stories, journalism – everything short of selling our bottoms to a clergyman. I wrote a cheap novel. Sold it – well that altered things. Here was a stable profession for me to follow. Art for money’s sake.

  The book was his loosely autobiographic
al first novel Pied Piper of Lovers, set in India and London, which he wrote when he and Nancy, with their friends George and Pam Wilkinson, left London and went to live and paint and write in a cottage at Loxwood in Sussex for a year from mid-1933.

  Nancy was an only child who had been raised in a constrained family atmosphere; part of Larry’s appeal to her was that he broke all the rules. Now he began taking her down to Bournemouth, where he introduced her to his family, preparing her with sketches of what to expect: ‘Larry dramatised everything – mad mother, ridiculous children, mother drunk, throwing their fortune to the winds, getting rid of everything. Hellish, foolish, stupid woman.’ This, for Nancy, was a thrilling litany: ‘It’s wonderful to hear anybody talking about their family like that.’ Nor did the Durrells disappoint. Arriving at one of those times when everyone was there, Nancy was delighted: ‘Really it was the first time I’d been in a family – in a jolly family – and the first time that I’d been able to say what I liked – there was nothing forbidden to say. It was a great opening-up experience for me, hearing everybody saying, “You bloody fool!” to everybody else and getting away with it. It was marvellous. So I really fell in love with the family.’

  At the first visit Mother threw Nancy and Larry out when she found them in bed together one morning, and Gerry had hopped in too. ‘Out you go, out you go this minute, out you both go, five minutes and you must get out, I’m not having Gerry corrupted!’ Larry brushed it off. ‘Don’t be such a fool, Mother.’ And two weeks later they were welcomed back, Mother clucking over Nancy, trying to feed her up because she was so thin. ‘And she was a marvellous cook; she did most of the cooking, a lot of hot stuff, curries, Indian cooking.’

  Nancy loved what she called ‘the whole craziness of it’. She recalled that ‘Mother used to drink a lot of gin at that time, and she used to retire to bed when Gerry went to bed – Gerry wouldn’t go to bed without her, he was afraid of being on his own, I think – and she’d take her gin bottle up with her when she went.’ They would all follow her up to her bedroom and arrange themselves about her big double bed, where Louisa had an enormous silver tea tray with silver teapots and bottles on it, ‘and we’d carry on the evening sitting on the bed, drinking tea and gin and chatting’. Meanwhile Gerry would happily slip into sleep. ‘It was all very cosy.’

  In the midst of this Larry was teaching Gerry to read, giving him children’s classics like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat and other nonsense poems, and A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, which like Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, so often read to him by his mother, were all tales of animals inhabiting the human world; and then there were Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat and the adventure stories of R.M. Ballantyne. As Gerry remembered, Larry’s visits set everything alight: ‘Larry was designed by Providence to go through life like a small, blond firework, exploding ideas in other people’s minds.’ His conversation was extraordinary. He could take a very ordinary event ‘and by skilful embroidery, by a twist of viewpoint, and with a handful of similes, turn it into something that leaves you helpless with laughter.’ And sometimes Larry would go further: ‘My brother could, out of his nimble and mercurial mind, make statements which you knew to be untrue, but they were produced with such a wealth of convincing detail that you came close to believing them. And when they were hilariously comic – which they generally were – you wanted to believe them even more.’

  * * *

  During these visits to Bournemouth, Larry discovered a wonderful old-fashioned bookshop called Commins, which had a nineteenth-century atmosphere. A young man named Alan Thomas was in charge and decades later he would become the doyen of the British antiquarian book trade. Tens of thousands of books filled the whole of five floors and customers were free to wander at will, so little molested by pressure to buy that sometimes they were forgotten about altogether and locked in when the staff went home. Larry and Nancy would come in nearly every day, talking books and ideas and art with Alan, in whom they discovered a kindred spirit, and soon he was becoming a frequent visitor to Dixie Lodge.

  ‘There never was more generous hospitality,’ Alan recalled. ‘Amid the gales of Rabelaisian laughter, the wit, Larry’s songs accompanied by piano or guitar, the furious arguments and animated conversations going on far into the night, I felt that life had taken on a new dimension. Larry was writing, Nancy painting, Leslie crooning, like a devoted mother, over his collection of unlicensed firearms. Every basin in the house was unusable because Gerry had filled them with newts, tadpoles and such-like. Margaret, realising that book-learning was no part of her world, was rebelling about returning to school, and soon succeeded, backed by the rest of the family, in staying put.’

  Commins Bookshop, Bournemouth, and its manager Alan Thomas.

  At the heart of it all, said Alan, was Louisa Durrell: ‘it was her warm-hearted character, her amused but loving tolerance that held them together’. Many years later Gerry looked back on the family. ‘It is curious – and something you don’t realise at the time – but my mother allowed us to be. She worried over us, she advised us (when we asked) and the advice always ended with “but anyway, dear, you must do what you think best”. It was, I suppose, a form of indoctrination, a form of guidance. She opened new doors on problems that allowed new exploration of ways in which you might – or might not – deal with them. Simple things now ingrained in me without a recollection of how they got there. I was never lectured, never scolded.’

  But Larry, the eldest brother, knew it was not quite as simple as that. As much as Louisa allowed her children to grow freely, there was an unspoken understanding among them of their mother’s fragility; for all their anarchy they had to look after their mother, otherwise they would have no family. Larry made a joke of it but the point was serious: ‘We can be proud of the way we have brought her up; she is a credit to us.’

  Chapter 3: The Crisis

  NOT LONG AFTER GERRY HAD BEGUN at Wychwood School, Alan Thomas spotted the headmaster browsing through the shelves at Commins bookshop. He went up to him and said, ‘I believe you have the son of some friends of mine at your school.’

  ‘Oh?’ said the headmaster. ‘What’s the name?’

  ‘Durrell. Gerald Durrell’, Alan replied.

  ‘The most ignorant boy in the school,’ snapped the headmaster and stalked out of the shop.

  Gerry’s rare happy moments at school came just once a week when Miss Allard, the tall blonde gym mistress, gave an hour-and-a-half class in natural history. ‘She became my heroine,’ said Gerry, recalling that she was the only teacher who had noticed his fascination with animals and went out of her way to foster his interests. Otherwise Gerry was a lonely and shy boy who lived in a world of improbable dreams, as when he told his mother one day, as they walked along the Bournemouth promenade, that when he grew up he wanted a zoo of his own.

  School was made worse by one especially unpleasant boy who bullied pupils and then contrived to put the blame on them, so that they were sent to see the headmaster for punishment. On one occasion, Gerry recalled, the boy had been particularly obnoxious to him and he saw an opportunity to get his own back:

  whereupon his wails of distress and moans and groans had to be heard to be believed, and I was immediately told that I would have to go up to see the headmaster within the half hour.

  I went up the broad staircase into the upper part of the house and tapped timidly on the door of the great man’s sanctum. He told me to come in and then gave me a lecture on bullying and how I would never get on in life if I persisted in this sort of attitude. Then he made me take down my trousers and bend over a chair. He delivered six hearty, stinging slaps to my backside and then said he hoped he wouldn’t have occasion to see me up in his study again.

  Fortunately this happened at the end of the day and Gerry was able to go straight home.

  Gerry’s one and only school – the dreadful Wychwood Hall.

  I was flushed with
embarrassment, mortification and rage. Nobody had ever lifted a finger to me, however bad my misdemeanor might have been. I half ran, half walked back home, the tears streaming down my face. I burst into the house and told the whole story to my horrified mother. I was shaking like a leaf with the indignation and unpleasantness of the whole thing. Mother wrapped me up in a blanket, put me by the fire and made me an eggnog.

  ‘Don’t you worry’, she said. ‘That’s the last time you’ll be going to that school.’

  She then sat down and wrote to the headmaster saying she had no intention of keeping her son at a school where the children were flogged for misdemeanors. Larry, arriving home in the midst of this, said he thought Mother was making far too great a fuss.

  ‘Nonsense’, said Mother, ‘the boy was terribly upset, and you would have been too if you’d been flogged.’

  ‘You can’t call a few slaps on the bum a flogging’, said Larry. ‘You’re talking about it as though he had been brutalised by a cat o’ nine tails’.

  ‘Nevertheless’, said Mother, ‘he is not going to go back.’

  And that was the end of Gerald Durrell’s formal education. From the age of nine he never went to school again.

  * * *

  Larry’s view was that Gerry was being made soft by the embrace of his mother’s love. ‘He never had to fight with his fists for room to breathe, as we had to in various schools and miles from home. Gerry tagged along with Ma, which was very weakening, but also very enriching. He had to struggle against the enormous indulgence granted him in living with this extraordinary mother, the most charming creature you could imagine, the most demanding in affection.’