The Durrells of Corfu

by Michael Haag

  By now Gerry had recovered from the death of Simon and Louisa decided that a new dog would help him also recover from the whole unpleasantness of school and the headmaster’s beating. And so, as Gerry recalled, ‘we got on one of the clanking trams and went down to the shops,’ where in the window of a pet shop they saw a litter of puppies with plump bellies and black curls. ‘I stood for a long time contemplating them and wondering which one I should buy. At length I decided on the smallest and the one who was getting the most bullying from the others, and who kept casting soulful glances at me from his large brown eyes. I christened him, for no particular reason, Roger.’

  Roger, who grew rapidly into something resembling a small Airedale covered with the sort of curls you find on a poodle, became Gerry’s stalwart companion. ‘A more intelligent and brave dog I have never possessed. He was, of course, a mongrel, but to me a mongrel of pedigree.’ Roger mastered several tricks such as dying for King and Country and ‘now the garden became an even more exciting place for there were two of us to have adventures within it’. Roger soon recognised the Durrells as his pack, leaping to their defence, and made himself at home as one of the family – and would be made famous by Gerry and forever remembered in My Family and Other Animals.

  ‘As a small boy he was impossible, a terrible nuisance,’ Larry remarked. ‘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.’ Alan Thomas remembered Gerry being furious with Larry, who, wanting to wash, had pulled the plug out of a basin full of marine life. ‘Spluttering with ungovernable rage, almost incoherent, searching for the most damaging insult in his vocabulary: “You, you (pause), you AUTHOR, YOU”’.

  Roger – the dog who came with Gerry to Corfu.

  This was at the time when Larry was living in the cottage in Sussex and writing his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers. If Gerry did not appreciate Larry pulling the plug on his marine life, he was nevertheless stimulated by his brother’s visits to Bournemouth, where he remembered Larry taking him to the theatre to see The Tempest and stimulating an interest in poetry. ‘When I was just six or seven years old and Larry was a struggling and unknown writer, he would encourage me to write. Spurred on by his support, I wrote a fair bit of doggerel in those days and Larry always treated these effusions with as much respect as if they had just come from the pen of T.S. Eliot. He would always stop whatever work he was engaged upon to type my jingles out for me and so it was from Larry’s typewriter that I first saw my name, as it were, in print.’

  If many people today know Lawrence Durrell from Gerry’s affectionate lampoon in My Family and Other Animals, much of the credit for Gerry’s development belongs to Larry, though he always gave full dues to Gerry himself. ‘Gerry has overcome this weird childhood and turned himself into a man, and a tough one, and a fully developed one, in the teeth of an upbringing that might well have justified no career at all.’

  * * *

  In 1934, Lottie’s husband became seriously ill with cancer and reluctantly she gave up her position as Gerry’s governess at Dixie Lodge to look after him. Back to square one, as Gerry put it, because as much as anything else Lottie had been a companion to Louisa, but now with the holidays over, and friends gone away and Leslie and Margo back at school, it was ‘lonely evenings where Mother had only myself as company’. She returned, more seriously than ever, to ‘the Demon Drink’.

  Larry was still at Loxwood in Sussex with Nancy, finishing his novel. However, their friends George and Pam Wilkinson had left in June to bicycle across Europe and in September they had reached Corfu. George was writing enthusiastically to Larry about the island idyll they had discovered where life was cheap and free of pressure; they were having a boat built and were putting together a travel book. Greece seemed the answer for Larry and Nancy. Living more easily on their inheritances in Greece than in England, they could devote themselves entirely to writing and painting and travel. ‘Corfu is the ideal place to use as a base for Mediterranean exploration: Nancy is rabid to examine the traces of early Byzantine painting down that coast of Greece,’ Larry replied, while he was eager to get to Knossos and examine the traces of Minoan civilisation, adding that he would bring ‘a huge small library’ to provide ‘food for study and delight’.

  But then Larry learnt something that made him tear his letter open again, and now he added, ‘The days are so dun and gloomy that we pant for the tropics: as much too, to see your faces again. My mother has gotten herself into a really good financial mess and has decided to cut and run for it. Being too timid to tackle foreign landscapes herself, she wants to be shown around the Mediteranean by us. She wants to scout Corfu, largely because your letters have stimulated her so.’ But Larry was making excuses and covering up; Louisa had not got herself into a financial mess; when he writes of his mother cutting and running, he has in mind her heavy drinking now and her breakdown a year and a half before. Having begun his letter talking of himself and Nancy coming to Greece, he was now including the whole family.

  In the opening pages of My Family and Other Animals Gerry gives his famous account of why the family went to Corfu, being funny as the Durrells could always be when skirting over serious things, and, like Larry’s letter to George Wilkinson, an exercise in avoiding the truth.

  Gerry’s account begins with a cold, grey, drizzling August afternoon in Bournemouth. He is plugged up with catarrh and can barely speak or breathe; his older brother Leslie is largely deaf to the world owing to a persistent ear infection; his sister Margo is suffering a renewed attack of acne on her already blotched face; and their mother Louisa is wheezing and sneezing with a cold and is being bitten by rheumatism. ‘Your family,’ Larry tells her, ‘looks like a series of illustrations from a medical encyclopedia’.

  ‘I can’t be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of gloom and eucalyptus’ says Larry. ‘What we need is sunshine … a country where we can grow.’

  ‘That would be nice,’ says mother who is deep into a large volume called Easy Recipes from Rajputana.

  Larry has had a letter from George Wilkinson that morning; George says Corfu is wonderful. Why don’t we pack up and go to Greece?

  ‘Very well, dear, if you like,’ says mother unguardedly. Usually careful not to commit herself to Larry’s enthusiasms she realises she has made a mistake and quickly recovers herself. It would mean selling the house, she says, and I have only just bought it. Sell it anyway, while it is still fresh, says Larry.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous dear,’ says Mother, ‘that would be madness.’

  So we sold the house and fled from the gloom of the English summer, like a flock of migrating swallows.

  That is Gerry’s comic version in My Family and Other Animals. But actually the decision to go to Corfu was taken in late autumn or winter and the family set sail before spring. And, as Gerry reveals in his autobiographical fragments, much more than climate and illness lay behind the migration to Corfu; Larry saw that Louisa was falling back into heavy drinking and, ‘recognising the pitfalls that lay ahead, decided that decisive action must be taken’.

  Larry was not free to go to Corfu and leave his mother behind – ‘the pitfalls’ included another breakdown and worse – and so if he and Nancy wanted to live their lives as artists in Greece, Larry would have to take his mother and Gerry too. Then Margo refused to stay behind at Malvern School and said, ‘Well, if you’re all going to Corfu, I’m coming,’ and Leslie decided to leave his school (he was boarding at Pangbourne College in Berkshire) and come too. Mother did not say no. ‘Corfu was an escape in a way,’ said Margo, looking back on their adventure a lifetime later. As for the consequences, ‘None of us gave it any serious thought.’

  And so they sold the house, and their necessary belongings were boxed up and sent ahead to Corfu. Gerry gave his white mice to the baker as a present to his son, as he knew they would have a good home there; he gave his canary to the man next door who alr
eady had quite a collection of finches; and Billie the tortoise went to Lottie, who, twenty-seven years later, when Gerry was famous, wrote to him asking if he wanted it back. ‘Then somebody said Roger would need a certificate before we could take him into Greece. This turned out to be a most complex piece of bureaucatic idiocy and eventually we got an enormous paper, done in copperplate handwriting, and ending in a huge red seal. This was Roger’s passport and, needless to say, nobody ever wanted to consult it.’

  * * *

  In My Family and Other Animals Gerry gives the impression that the entire family, including Larry (but not mentioning Nancy), travelled across Europe by train before making the ferry crossing from Italy to Corfu. In fact Larry and Nancy led the way after getting married at Bournemouth on 22 January 1935, then on 2 March they set sail from the Port of London at Tilbury aboard the P&O liner SS Oronsay bound for Naples, from where they took the train to Brindisi and the overnight ferry to Corfu. The rest of the family followed in their wake within a week, sailing from Tilbury on 6 March aboard the SS Hakone Maru, a Japanese cargo boat of the NYK Line.

  The SS Hakone Maru in which the family set sail for Greece.

  As the SS Hakone Maru fought its way across the Bay of Biscay en route to Gibraltar, Leslie wrote to Alan Thomas: ‘We had a heavy snow storm this morning and we had to go up to the top deck where the lifeboats are and give that ******* dog some exercise. God what a time we had, what with the dog piddling all over the place, the snow coming down, the old wind blowing like HELL – God what a trip! No one seemed to know what to do at lifeboat drill, so if anything goes wrong it will only be with the Grace of God (if there is one) if any of us see the dear coast of Old England again.’

  But, once in the Mediterranean, everything changed. In the opening lines of Prospero’s Cell, his book about Corfu, Larry recounts the passage from Italy to Greece as though crossing a magical latitude: ‘Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu the blue really begins … You are aware of a change in the heart of things.’

  Gerry recalled the family being up on deck that morning, ‘straining our eyes to see our new destination, our new home’. Compared to the muted colours of England, where sunlight seems to pass through a veil, ‘in Corfu the light was so intense, so brilliant that it brought out every minute detail of landscape, trees, creatures, the sea and the rocks. This brilliant light, of course, not only heightened the colours of everything but also the smells and scents of flowers and trees, the smell of the sea and the smell of the very earth of which the island was constructed. It was like being allowed back into Paradise. Our arrival in Corfu was like being born for the first time.’

  That was the memory and that became the truth; Corfu would become a paradise for the family. But the Durrells’ first encounter with Corfu was not quite like that, as their letters at the time show. They had arrived in a country whose language and ways they did not know. Louisa’s bank in London had not forwarded any money, leaving them penniless and forcing them to borrow from the proprietor of their pension. Larry’s and Nancy’s books and baggage had not arrived, so they barely had a change of clothes. Margo and Gerry were miserable with homesickness and would hardly stop crying. And Louisa’s searches for a place to live met with the discouraging discovery of a lack of plumbed-in toilets.

  ‘Don’t believe a word they say about this smelly island,’ she added as a PS to a letter from Leslie to Alan Thomas. And Larry wrote despairingly of his mother to Pat Evans, a mutual friend of Larry’s and Alan’s: ‘Like the blue fart that she is, she says the heat is too much, the flies too many, and the Greeks too insanitary. I’m afraid she might go back any day. What a waste of money!’

  Chapter 4: Corfu – the Strawberry-Pink Villa

  ‘THE FAMILY CRAWLED ASHORE TODAY,’ Larry wrote to Alan Thomas from Corfu. Larry and Nancy had arrived not much earlier; they had been delayed at Brindisi for several days. In My Family and Other Animals, however, Gerry describes the entire family arriving together (though as always he excludes Nancy), with Mother leading the way, ‘looking like a tiny, harrassed missionary in an uprising’ and being ‘dragged unwillingly to the nearest lamp post by an exuberant Roger and forced to stand there, staring into space, while he relieved the pent-up feelings that had accumulated in his kennel’.

  From the port Louisa and her family took a horsedrawn cab to the Pension Suisse and ‘took us in bed so to speak,’ as Larry put it. The family also brought the news that the publishers Cassell in London had offered to publish Larry’s first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, marking the beginning of a career that would lead through The Alexandria Quartet and The Avignon Quintet, with several island books along the way, starting with Prospero’s Cell, the book he would write about Corfu.

  The Pension Suisse was in Moustoxidou Street, lined with handsome buildings, among them several Venetian mansions. The Dimomitsi Mansion is today the Serbian Museum, while next door stands the seventeenth-century Ricci Mansion, an arcade running across its façade, the keystones of its arches adorned with sculpted female and male heads. This was then the Pension Suisse, where the Durrells had rooms with a small balcony overlooking the street. Below them in Venetian times the nobility and dignitaries of the town would gather on the large balcony that ran atop the arcade to watch the jousting contests on the last Thursday of Carnival, the most important event of the Corfiot year. The Germans bombed Corfu during the Second World War and hit the Pension Suisse (which moved to a building in the Liston overlooking the Esplanade, the town’s great central square, that some mistakenly identify with the pension known to the Durrells). In Moustoxidou Street, the façade of the Ricci Mansion has since been restored; however, the interior is different to what it was when the Durrells were here.

  This Corfu street scene was taken by one of the Durrells from the balcony of the Pension Suisse. From here the Durrells set off in Spiro’s big car to find a villa (‘with bathrooms’).

  Venice had ruled Corfu since 1386, when it became a major bulwark against the expansion of Islam. The island was the only part of Greece never to be occupied by the Ottoman Turks after they conquered Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, in 1453 – as late as 1913, the Turks stood on the mainland just two miles across the straits from Corfu. Venice’s generally benevolent and serene dominion lasted four centuries and deeply affected the architecture, landscape, culture, cuisine and prosperity of the island. The shady woods of olive trees which clothe the undulating hillsides and valleys were a Venetian planting scheme; the island possessed a nobility who wore Venetian titles and whose Venetian mansions adorned the countryside and the town; and until the mid-nineteenth century Italian was the lingua franca in Corfu. Napoleon seized the island when he extinguished the Venetian Empire in 1797, but after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 he was relieved of it by the British, who established a protectorate over Corfu and the other Ionian Islands. However, despite centuries of foreign domination, they had never ceased to feel Greek, and in 1864 the British united them with a recently independent Greece, an act that long contributed to the warm feelings of the Corfiots towards the English.

  Gerry was sensitive to the Venetian presence, describing in Birds, Beasts and Relatives ‘the facades of tall, elderly Venetian houses of the town, crumbling gently, coloured in pale shades of cream and brown and white and cyclamen pink’. But no romance attached to Louisa’s first impressions; not only was Corfu Town smelly, it was also a death trap. Margo remembered that, from their balcony at the Pension Suisse, ‘we saw a lot of funerals passing, and Mother was very alarmed because she thought there must be an epidemic of something. Mother was plagued by visions of epidemics.’

  As Gerry explains in My Family and Other Animals, ‘It was unfortunate for Mother’s peace of mind that the Pension Suisse happened to be situated in the road leading to the local cemetery.’

  As we sat on our small balcony overhanging the street an apparently endless succession of funerals passed beneath us. ‘I’m sure it’s an epidemic,’ she exclaimed at l
ast, peering down nervously into the street.

  Corfu Town: the Liston, with the Esplanade on the right. The arcaded building on the left is the one the Pension Suisse moved into after it was bombed out. It was here that the taxi ranks would have been – and where Spiro made his appearance into the Durrells’ lives.

  ‘Nonsense, Mother; don’t fuss,’ said Larry airily.

  ‘But, dear, so many of them. It’s unnatural. I’m sure it’s something to do with the drains. There’s nothing for it. We’ll have to move. We must get out of town. We must find a house in the country at once.’

  * * *

  The next morning, as Gerry tells it, Louisa set off with the hotel guide who drove her here and there about the island and showed her ten villas, but always Mother said no – not one had a bathroom. Somewhere in Corfu there must be a villa with an internal bathroom and toilet and she was determined to find it, so on the following day Louisa took the family to the taxi rank in the square, where ‘perceiving our innocent appearance’ the drivers leapt from their cars and advanced on them like vultures. Their eyes flashed, their voices grew louder, ‘and then they laid hold of us as though they would tear us apart’, though, as Gerry later realised, ‘we were being treated to the mildest of mild altercations, but we were not used to the Greek temperament’.

  Leslie was threatening to poke his assailants in the eye, Margo was yelling ‘We English, we no understand Greek’, and Mother, who was fighting to escape the clutches of a driver hustling her towards his car, called out to Larry, ‘Can’t you do something’, when suddenly a great rumbling voice reduced everyone to silence, ‘the sort of voice you would expect a volcano to have’.