by Michael Haag
For Gerry the most important hours were those devoted to natural history, when he and George would walk down to the beach and look at fishes and crabs and slugs, and George would tell Gerry all about the Battle of Trafalgar and how calm Nelson was throughout, instilling confidence in his sailors when they saw him on the bridge labelling his birds’ egg collection. But, above all else, George’s great contribution to Gerry’s development was to teach him how to keep a diary and record his observations in a notebook: ‘At once my enthusiastic but haphazard interest in nature became focused, for I found that by writing things down I could learn and remember much more.’
* * *
Whether out of boredom with his lessons or given stimulus by George, Gerry resumed writing, as he had done in Bournemouth, now producing his first extended work in prose, which he called ‘The Man of Animals’. Here the ten-year-old boy sees himself as the man he will become, and not only a man of animals but a vivid and dramatic writer, the sort of boy who might one day write My Family and Other Animals. An interesting detail is the appearance of the cobra; as Gerry would have known, a cobra played a central part in Larry’s first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, which had just been published, but there the man is the enemy of the natural and traditional world and the cobra rears up, spreads his hood, and kills him. In ‘The Man of Animals’, however, the young man, like the old man, freely passes through the jungle as the friend of all animals – though if you have to kill, feather, gut and eat a toucan to feed yourself, that too is the way of the natural world. Gerry was not a sentimentalist.
Gerry’s earliest surviving story, ‘The Man of Animals’, written aged ten, when the Durrells were living at the Strawberry-Pink Villa.
Right in the Hart of the Africn Jungel a small wite man lives. Now there is one rather xtrordenry fackt about Him that is that he is the frind of all animals. Now he lives on Hearbs and Bearis Both of Which he nos, and soemtimes, not unles he is prakticly starvying, he shoot with, a bow and arrow, a Bird of some sort, for you see he dos not like killing His frinds even wene He is so week that He cann hardly walk!
One of his farveret pets is a Big gray baboon, wich he named ‘Sotine’. Now there are surten words this Big crether nows, for intenes if His master was to say ‘Sotine I want a stick to mack a Bow, will you get me one?’ then the Big ting with a nod of His Hede would trot of into the Jungel to get a bamboo fo the Bow and Arrow. But before bracking it he would Bend it so as to now that it would Be all right, then Breacking it of He would trot Back to his master and give it to Him and wight for prase, and nedless to say His master would give him a lot.
The story then continues but it is told in the first person by an adventurous young man in whom Gerry would have seen himself.
One day wile I was warking in front of my porters in africa a Huge Hariy Hand caught my sholder and another one coved my mouth and I was dragged of into the Jungel by this unseen figer.
At larst I was put down (not to gently) and I found my self looking into the eyes of a great baboon. “Holy mackralel” I egeackted “what the devel made you carry me of like thish ay?’ I saw the Babon start at my words and then it walked over to the ege of the clearing bekining me with a big Hairy Hand.
“Now where do you want me to go?” I arksed surspishely as I foleard him down a little parth. He said notheing but a little grunt of reliefe as I folled Him.
Suddenly a huge crober glied out at the side of the parth. It saw us and flatend it hade reddy to strik But the Baboon said something to it and insted of Bighting us as I had exped it to it glied towards me and twind itself about my boody and stade there, wile I (keeping my face a good way away) flooed the baboon who by thish time I had a surten faith in.
Soon we came to a little clearing in the jungel and there was a little rush hut right in the middell, to this the Baboon trooted and I floed somewhat Bewileder.
At the dore the baboon stoped and then it knoked thre times on it then a voice saide “come in Sotine”. It was a verry week voice that souned as though someone was very ill.
The Baboon opened the Dore and went in I foloed and closed the dore Behind me.
And there on a bed made of Bamboos was liying a an old wite heaired man and I could see at a glance that he was very ill and why he was ill was becose he was in need of food and water. So, bring my pistol out of my houlster I went out side and shot a “Tookn” and brought it in and fatherd and guted it and then maiking some rich soup gave the old man some after that he seemd to buck up a bit and then he said “I am very gratful to you and “Sotine” for saveing my life my Boy”
“Well now I must go” I said. “Good bye sir”
“Good by” he said.
And as I left the hut ‘Sotine’ gave a little wimpring cry and ran after me and gave me a big (rather wet) kiss on my cheek and ran back into the hut.
Another time I was in Afric I manged to find my way to the hut and was gratly welkumed by an old man and a big Baboon.
* * *
The way Gerry tells it in My Family and Other Animals, he and Roger were returning from a visit to Yani and Aphrodite. Yani was saying that he should have taken his goats to Gastouri that morning but it was too hot, so he went instead and tasted Taki’s new white wine. ‘Spiridion!’ cried Yani, invoking the island saint, ‘What a wine!’ Then Yani came home and had only now awoken from an afternoon’s sleep. Reaching in his pocket he pulled out a little bottle filled with olive oil, saying to Gerry, ‘Here, you are interested in the little ones of God, look at this that I caught this morning, crouching under a rock like the devil.’ In the bottle was a scorpion, the poison in its body seeping into the oil.
Aphrodite brought some olives and bread and figs and wine, and Yani continued. He had known a young man once, a shepherd like himself, who was returning from a fiesta warm with wine and fell asleep under a myrtle, where a scorpion crawled into his ear and when he awoke it stung him. ‘Phut! Like that.’ Screaming in agony the man had tried to run for his village. He never made it. They found him the next morning as they were going to the fields. ‘What a sight! What a sight! With that one little bite his head had swollen up as though his brains were pregnant and he was dead, quite dead.’
That is why he always carried such a bottle, Yani explained to Gerry. ‘You do not know, little lord, though you spend all your time on your stomach catching such things, eh?’ he said. ‘Let the sweet oil soak up the poison. Then should you ever be stung by one of his brothers (and Saint Spiridion protect you from that), you must rub the place with that oil.’
So on their way home Gerry and Roger sat down on a mossy bank and shared a gift of grapes from Aphrodite. While watching a grasshopper, a snail, a mite, pursuing their lives in their microscopic world at his feet, Gerry noticed something curious, several faint circular marks in the velvety surface of the moss. Prodding at one the whole circle opened like a trap door. Indeed it was a trap door with a bevelled edge which fitted neatly into a silk-lined shaft to which it was attached by a silken hinge. For a long time Gerry stared into this fantastic home trying to imagine what kind of mysterious creature had made it. Feeling he needed to find out immediately, he called Roger and they ran to ask George.
View from Canoni towards Perama. In the foreground is the monastery island connected to Canoni by a causeway. The farther island is Pontikonisi (Mouse Island). This photo was taken by Leslie when the Durrells were living at the Strawberry-Pink Villa in Perama.
Out of breath and bursting with excitement, Gerry dashed through the door and only then realised that George was not alone. With him was a bearded man whom Gerry took to be his brother. Apologising for the intrusion he told George about the strange circular homes he had found.
‘Thank heavens, you’re here, Theodore,’ said George to his guest. ‘I shall now be able to hand the problem over to expert hands. Gerry, this is Doctor Theodore Stephanides. He is an expert on practically everything you care to mention. And what you don’t mention, he does. He, like you, is an eccentric nature lo
ver. Theodore, this is Gerry Durrell.’
Together they walked up the stony goat path to the olive grove, where Gerry pointed out the trap door. Delicately opening the door with the point of his pocket knife, Theodore peered in.
‘Um, yes,’ he said, ‘They are the burrows of the trapdoor spiders, of the females of course’ and he explained how she would pop out to grab and devour an unsuspecting insect, though he often wondered how the female recognised passing male spiders and did not devour them by mistake. ‘He may make some sort of … you know … some sort of sound which the female recognises.’
Walking in silence back down the hill they shook hands and said goodbye. ‘I have enjoyed meeting you,’ Theodore said. As Gerry watched him strolling back towards town, he felt something important and special had happened; not only was Theodore the first person he had met who shared his enthusiasm for zoology, but he did not speak down to him; instead he treated him as an equal in age and knowledge.
‘I expect we shall meet again’, said Theodore at their parting.
Two days later, Gerry received a parcel with a letter inside.
My dear Gerald Durrell,
I wondered, after our conversation the other day, if it might not assist your investigations of the local natural history to have some form of magnifying instrument. I am therefore sending you this pocket microscope, in the hope that it will be of some use to you. It is, of course, not of very high magnification, but you will find it sufficient for field work.
With best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Theo. Stephanides
P.S. If you have nothing better to do on Thursday, perhaps you would care to come to tea, and I could show you some of my microscope slides.
Chapter 5: The Daffodil-Yellow Villa
GERRY’S ACCOUNT OF BURSTING into George’s villa and suddenly being introduced to Theodore Stephanides is a kind of shorthand – it compresses events and gets straight to what mattered to an eager ten-year old boy. At some point, maybe even on that first day, Gerry collared Theodore about the mysterious circles and as they peered into the homes of the trapdoor spiders they began to discover one another.
But Theodore’s recollection of meeting the Durrells began in a more roundabout way, in a late autumn afternoon in 1934 when he was in the olive woods hunting mushrooms, and ‘I suddenly came upon a thin and very tall young man with a short dark-brown beard and a very pleasant face’. The young man was George Wilkinson; they fell into conversation, quickly struck up a friendship, and walked to George’s villa for tea. There George and his wife Pamela spoke of their friends Larry and Nancy, with whom they had shared a cottage for a year in Sussex and were hoping to persuade to come and live in Corfu.
And so it turned out. Early in the summer of 1935 George and Pam invited Theodore for lunch at their home, the Villa Agazini, and afterwards they walked to the Strawberry-Pink Villa nearby for tea. ‘I was introduced to the Durrell clan, which included old Mrs Louisa Durrell, Leslie, Margaret and Gerald; also Roger, a large and friendly black dog of rather uncertain pedigree.’ Larry and Nancy turned up soon after.
What first struck me on meeting Lawrence was his jauntiness and self-assurance; also his bubbling energy. He seemed to be in every corner of the little house at once, throwing off advice and suggestions like a machine gun and arranging to undertake everything from the arrangement of the furniture to the planting of the garden.
It was this abounding energy and self-assurance which always seemed to me the keynote of Lawrence’s character. From the very beginning he was determined to become a great writer. He was quite certain that he would be one and, after I had known him for a short while, I was equally convinced that he would succeed in his aim.
Theodore, who was thirty-nine at the time, was something of a Renaissance man, a doctor, scientist, naturalist and a poet. He knew all about plants, flowers and trees, rocks and minerals, the lower forms of animal life, microbes and diseases, planets, comets and the stars; he was a student of the history and folklore of Corfu and enjoyed taking part in peasant dances; and he was devoted to poetry, writing his own poems in English and also translating from Greek to English the works of modern Greek poets. It was literature that drew Theodore to Larry.
But also there were the Indian and English connections which brought Theodore close to the entire Durrell family. Theodore’s parents were cosmopolitan Greeks: his father worked in India for the international Greek merchant company of Ralli Brothers and married Caterina Ralli, the boss’s daughter, who was born and educated in London. Theodore himself had been born in Bombay in 1896 and with his parents escaped the torrid summer months in the plains for the cooler climate and English society of the hill stations of India, including Kurseong and Darjeeling, where a dozen or so years later Lawrence Samuel Durrell would be the executive engineer of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway and Larry would be at school. Theodore grew up speaking English as his first language and also, having been born in the Raj, he was a British citizen; he learnt Greek only at eleven, when his father retired to Corfu, where the Rallis had an estate.
Theodore Stephanides soon after he met the Durrells.
During the First World War Theodore served as a gunner with the Greek Army on the Macedonian front, and he served again in the disastrous Asia Minor campaign, which was fought to liberate the Greek-speaking population from Turkish domination but which ended with the destruction of Smyrna in 1922 and the expulsion of over a million Greeks from their ancient homeland.
In the same year as the fall of Smyrna, Theodore went to Paris to study medicine and specialised in radiology under Madame Curie. While there he developed his passion for astronomy under the tutelage of one of the leading French astronomers, Camille Flammarion, who wanted him to become his disciple and heir. Instead Theodore returned to Corfu, where he practised radiology, establishing the island’s first X-ray unit in 1929; he was never well off, however, as he treated anyone who came to him whether they could pay or not. On the island he met and married Mary Alexander, who was of Greek and English parentage; her grandfather had been British Consul in Corfu and had retired to Bournemouth, where Mary was raised. Theodore and Mary had one daughter, Alexia, not much younger than Gerry and who became his closest childhood friend.
Theodore in the Greek Army on the Macedonian front, 1917.
On top of these coincidences and connections, Theodore’s interests and the richness and variety of his learning further bound him to each of the Durrells, as Gerry explained in The Corfu Trilogy.
With Mother he could discuss plants, particularly herbs and recipes, while keeping her supplied with reading matter from his capacious library of detective novels. With Margo he could talk of diets, exercises and the various unguents supposed to have a miraculous effect on spots, pimples and acne. He could keep pace effortlessly with any idea that entered the mercurial mind of my brother Larry, from Freud to peasant belief in vampires; while Leslie he could enlighten on the history of firearms in Greece or the winter habits of the hare. As far as I was concerned, with a hungry, questing and ignorant mind, Theodore represented a fountain of knowledge on every subject from which I drank greedily.
* * *
‘A month or two after I knew them,’ recalled Theodore, that is in the late summer or early autumn of 1935, ‘the Durrell family, including Lawrence and Nancy, all transferred to the much larger Villa Anemoyanni.’ This was Gerry’s Daffodil-Yellow Villa near Kontokali, at Sotiriotissa, about five miles along the coast road north of Corfu Town. This contradicts Gerry’s account, which makes it seem that the family remained at the Strawberry-Pink Villa for a year and a half, until the summer of 1936, and that they moved only to accommodate a sudden influx of Larry’s friends. In fact the Strawberry-Pink Villa had been taken on a short six-month lease to see if the family liked Corfu, but it was always too small and once the lease expired at the end of the summer of 1935 it was time to move.
Margo, Nancy, Larry, Gerry, Mother at the Daffodil-Yellow Villa, 193
6, and the villa, little changed, in 1996.
Standing on the side of a hill rising out of the sea, the Daffodil-Yellow Villa (though it was actually a faded pink) was an enormous and neglected Venetian mansion four storeys high, set amidst extensive grounds, overgrown and almost wild, with unkempt orange and lemon orchards and olive groves, and with melancholy cypresses and stout arbutus heavy with ripening berries.
Facing the sea was a stone-paved terrace shaded with a trellis of vines and evergreens, from where terraced gardens and a Venetian stairway descended to a wooden jetty projecting from the shore. A couple of small islands shimmered in the channel and in the distance loomed the hills of mainland Greece and Albania. To the left was Gouvia Bay, a smooth sheet of water used as a landing place for seaplanes, and beyond that the high hills shouldering Pantocrator, the highest mountain on the island.
It was Spiro who had found the villa and who organised the family’s move from the Strawberry-Pink Villa with a minimum of fuss. Within three days of first seeing the Daffodil-Yellow Villa their belongings arrived, piled high on a procession of wooden carts which creaked and raised the dust all along the road from Perama to Kontokali.
The approach to the villa from the coastal road was through a stone gate and along a carriageway that wound through the orchards and olive groves, sweeping up to a broad flight of steps that ascended to a terrace and the entrance. Along the way the drive passed by the cottage of the villa’s gardener and his wife, Lugaretzia.
