The Durrells of Corfu

by Michael Haag

  ‘In a moment of misguided enthusiasm,’ said Gerry, Mother engaged Lugaretzia to work for them in the villa. She was ‘a thin, lugubrious individual’ and sensitive; the slightest criticism of her work and she broke into tears, and so the family gave up criticising her at all. Her chief contribution to life at the villa was her hypochondria: the only thing that brought a glint to Lugaretzia’s eye, a smile to her lips, was when the family would discuss her numerous ailments.

  The temperamental maid – Lugaretzia.

  And so with everything in place the Durrells moved in.

  * * *

  Just beyond the villa was Gouvia, or Govino, once a Venetian port, though for many years its fortifications had been sinking deeper into the silt and the great naves of its arsenal, where shipwrights repaired the galleys of the Levant squadron, were roofless and gaping at the sky. However, the flying boats of Imperial Airways had recently brought new activity to the place, and the excitement of distant worlds. Gouvia Bay was a way station between England and Egypt and beyond; at Alexandria the route bifurcated, one heading south up the Nile to Khartoum and Lake Victoria, then on to South Africa, the other heading east to Baghdad, Karachi, Calcutta, Singapore and Australia.

  When the Durrells wanted a new villa, Spiro knew where to look; he was familiar with Gouvia Bay, where the Short flying boats circled and hovered above its surface until their keels suddenly ripped open the polished emerald surface of the bay. ‘Spiro is the favourite taxi-driver of the pilots’, Larry wrote in Prospero’s Cell; ‘they like his Brooklyn drawl, his boasting, his coyness; he combines the air of a chief conspirator with a voice like a bass viol … Prodigious drinker of beer, he resembles a cask with legs; coiner of oaths and roaring blasphemies, he adores little children, and never rides out in his battered Dodge without two at least sitting beside him listening to his stories’.

  Spiro was moved when one young pilot asked to be driven to Canoni at four in the morning, just an hour before his departure. In the light of the car’s headlamps they both clambered up the dew-drenched hillside overlooking Mouse Island, gathering narcissi and asphodel. ‘It is the kind of little devotion that touches the raw heart of Spiro’, reflected Larry, ‘as he pants and grunts up the slopes of Canoni, his big fists full of wet flowers, and his sleepy mind thinking of the English girl who to-morrow will touch this lovely evidence of the island’s perpetual spring.’

  Spiro with his taxi and local children.

  * * *

  These first months at the Daffodil-Yellow Villa, from the early autumn of 1935 through the spring of 1936, more closely match the account given in My Family and Other Animals than any other. For once in Corfu all the Durrells were under the same roof. There was plenty of space for everyone and the rooms were large. Larry and Nancy’s room was bright and airy, with two large windows that were partly shaded by a great climbing vine which covered the side of the house. Very soon, noticed Theodore, the room became cluttered with books and dictionaries and files, which turned the room into a battleground between Larry and his mother. Mother would insist that he must keep his room tidy; Larry, who had just had his first novel Pied Piper of Lovers published in London and was close to completing his second, Panic Spring, insisted that he would not.

  Apart from battling Larry over the state of his room, Louisa busied herself in her enormous stone-flagged kitchen improvising jams and lime chutneys while trying to ignore the drone of Lugaretzia’s litany of illnesses and complaints. But meanwhile she was making little progress with her Greek, having trouble for example with the similarities between the words for flea (psillos), dog (skilo) and wood (ksilo), and was forever asking Lugaretzia to add more fleas or another dog to the fire.

  But it could be hard to know if Mother was always as vague as she seemed to be, as, on that morning, recalled by Gerry, when she took Larry by surprise while he was complaining at breakfast about the quantities of insects in his honey, something that had long delighted Gerry and provided him with many new forms of insect life for his collection.

  ‘Can’t that fool Lugaretzia’s husband collect honey in a civilised way?’ Larry asked irritably. ‘Must we have the entire insect population of Corfu embedded in it? French honey, after all, is as clear as amber.’

  ‘Do you know what a French breakfast is?’ asked Mother somewhat unexpectedly.

  ‘What?’ said Larry, unguardedly.

  ‘A roll in bed with honey,’ said Mother and gave a coy giggle.

  Larry stared at her for a moment.

  ‘Really, Mother’, he said at last. ‘I do feel that if you are going to tiptoe into the realms of sex you should be able to do better than that. I do hope you haven’t gone about repeating that to all and sundry. They’ll wonder how you ever came to conceive us all. Anyway, anyone trying to roll about in bed with this honey is liable to get a mortal wound in their genitals from a scorpion.’

  ‘But Larry dear, it’s a play on words,’ Mother explained. ‘I think it’s rather clever.’

  ‘Next time I go to Paris, I’ll get you the works of Krafft-Ebing,’ he said austerely, ‘it’ll help straighten out your sexual perspectives.’

  ‘You always have to drag sex into everything,’ said Margo. ‘I think Mother’s joke is very funny. I mean, imagine getting honey all over the sheets. It would be very comical.’

  Larry groaned, picked up his book and his mail, left the terrace and went indoors.

  ‘Well,’ said Mother,. ‘I would have thought he would have liked my being a little less narrow minded.’

  ‘Who’s this girl Honey,’ asked Leslie interestedly. ‘Is she from Corfu?’

  At which Gerry left the familiar family tangle and returned to his animals.

  As for the others, Leslie, Margo and Gerry each responded in their own way to their new home. Leslie immediately turned the verandah behind the house into a shooting gallery and to avoid shooting his family hung a large red flag outside whenever he was practising.

  Margo began at the villa with three weeks in bed. Gerry says she had come down with a severe case of influenza after kissing the feet of the 1600-year-old mummified corpse of the island’s miracle-working patron saint during a celebration at the church of St Spiridion in town.

  ‘Po-po-po,’ said Dr Androuchelli to Margo, with echoes of Dr Chakravati, ‘remarkably unintelligent you have been, no? Kissing the saint’s feet! Po-po-po-po-po! Nearly you might have caught some bugs unpleasant. If you kiss another saint’s feet in the future I will not come and cure you. Po-po-po! What a thing to do!’

  Margo in Corfiot peasant’s costume.

  In My Family and Other Animals Margo enthusiastically kisses Spiridion’s feet hoping he will cure her acne; his healing powers were such that half the male children of Corfu were named after him. Margo herself never mentioned such an event, but she did admit to applying the holy water from Lourdes, given her by her governess in India, to a boil on her foot in Corfu – ‘a consequence of going native, walking barefoot as the peasants did’, but with no effect – an experience that diminished Margo’s faith in holy water, ‘but up till then I had been convinced!’

  Gerry for the first time had his own bedroom. He also had a vast new garden to explore – and plenty of time to do so, as George Wilkinson had excused himself from coming up from Perama to tutor him. There were encounters with the new and strange in every direction: scorpions in the garden walls, tree frogs in the lemon and fig trees, lizards, snakes and tortoises on the hillside, and birds of all kinds, most notably swallows, which Gerry was able to observe at close hand under the eaves of the house where they built their nests.

  There were also Gerry’s weekly visits to Theodore in town. Theodore’s initial invitation to tea and to look at his microscope slides had turned into a routine; Gerry was driven into town by Spiro every Thursday that autumn and winter, his pockets stuffed with matchboxes and test tubes of myriad creatures. ‘It was an appointment that I would not have missed for anything.’

  ‘Theodore’s study
was a room that met with my full approval,’ said Gerry. ‘Just what a room should be.’ The walls were lined with bookshelves filled with volumes on freshwater biology, botany, astronomy, medicine, folklore and ‘similar fascinating and sensible subjects’. Mixed in with these were collections of ghost and crime stories, so that Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles was cheek by jowl with Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and Le Fanu’s Carmilla, the story of a lesbian vampire, rubbed up against Fabre’s The Life of a Spider, ‘in what I considered to be a thoroughly well balanced library’. On one side of the room was a massive desk piled with X-ray plates, micro-photographs, scrapbooks, notebooks and diaries. On the other side was a microscope table with a powerful lamp and boxes full of Theodore’s slides. The windowsills were lined with bottles and jars containing twitching and whirling freshwater fauna and a telescope stood gazing at the sky. Gerry and Theodore’s talk went from fleas and spiders to tadpoles and vampires, from Greek mythology to the possibility of life on Mars – no matter what the subject, Theodore would open up some fresh vein of fascinating discovery.

  Margo, Gerry, Theodore, Mary, Mother and an unknown woman at Villa Anemoyanni – the Daffodil-Yellow Villa.

  * * *

  No hordes of Larry’s friends descended on the Daffodil-Yellow Villa, but the villa did have one visitor that winter of 1935–1936, nineteen-year-old Alex Emmett, who had been at school with Leslie and had known the entire family in Bournemouth. He arrived in time for Christmas. ‘It is reputed that I nearly killed him’, remembered Margo, ‘by walking him right across Corfu without any water one day.’ Margo was a great walker and it was with Margo that Gerry did much of his long-range exploring – dressed in a brightly coloured sweater so that Mother would be better able to pick him out at a distance. ‘Gerry and I went everywhere together, into the fields with the workmen. We involved ourselves in every incident: births, marriages and deaths, and anything else that might come along.’ Alex observed that Mother was still knocking back the gin, Leslie was cleaving to her and at the same time lost, while Gerry found refuge in his animals and his lessons with Theodore. Had it not been for Stephanides, Alex concluded, Gerry would have become lost too, like Leslie.

  After a cool wet winter, the whole island vibrated with spring. ‘It was apparent in the gleam of flower petals, the flash of bird wings and the sparkle in the dark, liquid eyes of the peasant girls.’ And best of all, continued Gerry in My Family and Other Animals, ‘In the water-filled ditches the frogs that looked newly enamelled snored rapturous chorus in the lush weeds.’

  The time of water-filled ditches was the season Theodore had been waiting for.

  I think … er … you know …’ he would say, ‘we might investigate those little ponds near … er … Kontokali. One of the reasons I particularly want to go … er … that way … is because the path takes us past a very good ditch … er … you know … that is to say, a ditch in which I have found a number of rewarding specimens.

  Theodore would come and visit the Daffodil-Yellow Villa always immaculately dressed in suit and tie and stiff collar and wearing a Homburg hat, which contrasted with his nets and bags and boxes full of test tubes. He came every Thursday for tea, arriving at the villa by carriage ‘as soon after lunch as was decent’, Gerry wrote in My Family and Other Animals. In fact he often arrived on foot, enjoying the walk from town, and Mary his wife and Alexia his daughter would follow in a carriage – though Gerry does not mention them at all in his book, nor even in his autobiographical fragments. Mary was ‘a very beautiful lady’, remembered Margo, ‘very social and led a totally different life’ to Theodore’s. Leslie, who like all the other Durrells loved Theodore, thought that Mary was frivolous and did not appreciate him. But, in Gerry, Theodore found someone eager to learn, a serious boy without arrogance towards animals and the natural world in whom he might instil his values – and he began to look upon Gerry as a son, hoping that Gerry would someday marry Alexia. The hope seems to have been shared by the Durrell family; ‘I remember hoping that Gerry would marry Alexia, although I didn’t think he would – because of his great interest in animals. Which was his main interest, in animals. Women came later.’

  Alexia Stephanides botanising with Gerry. Theodore’s daughter often joined her father and Gerry on their expeditions.

  On their expeditions, with Alexia tagging along, Theodore and Gerry would prowl the ponds and ditches, Gerry seeking a terrapin, a frog, a toad or a snake to add to his growing menagerie, Theodore pursuing his interest in freshwater biology, carrying a little net to scoop up the smaller fauna, some almost invisible to the eye. And, as they marched from place to place across the fields and through the groves of olives, they sang this rousing nonsense song which gave new life to their tired feet.

  There was an old man who lived in Jerusalem

  Glory Halleluiah, Hi-ero-jerum.

  He wore a top hat and he looked very sprucelum

  Glory, Halleluiah, Hi-ero-jerum.

  Skimmer rinki doodle dum, skinermer rinki doodle dum

  Glory Halleluiah, Hi-ero-jerum.

  Larry bought a guitar that spring and sang Elizabethan love songs, becoming more melancholy with the more wine he drank. His other favourites at this time were modern but hardly more upbeat, Jerome Kern’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Miss Otis Regrets by Cole Porter. Margo, who sang flat, also favoured the lovelorn and the morose, Gerry remembering her endlessly repeating She Wore a Little Jacket of Blue.

  She wore a little jacket of blue,

  She kept that little jacket of blue,

  And all the sailors knew

  Just why she wore his jacket of blue.

  Theodore characteristically delighted in livelier tunes, There is a Tavern in the Town and Waltzing Matilda. And Spiro would take to the road in his open-top Dodge singing his favourite, a song he picked up in America where it was number two in the charts in 1928, called Oh I’m a Gay Cabellero.

  Oh I am a gay caballero

  Going to Rio de Janeiro

  With nice oily hair,

  And full of hot air,

  I’m an expert at shooting the bull-eo.

  I’ll find me a fair señorita

  Not thin and yet not too much meat-a.

  I’ll woo her a while

  In my Argentine style

  And sweep her right off of her feet-a.

  Mother did not sing but Nancy recalled the joy one rainy afternoon when Theodore visited with some records of Greek folk music and taught her and Mother the graceful, flirtatious and swaying movements of traditional Corfiot dances.

  * * *

  Gerry had long had a fascination with scorpions. The garden wall was home to great numbers of them and Gerry would observe them patiently, finding them weird but charming and not at all frightening; if you were careful with them, they would respect you. Gerry would capture scorpions and make them walk about in jam jars to see how their feet moved, and he would watch them dining on grasshoppers, moths and flies, but he could never figure out how they caught their prey – except when they ate one another. Going out to the wall at night with a torch, he would follow their mating rituals. If only he could keep a colony of scorpions in captivity he would be able to observe the entire cycle of courtship and reproduction. But the family had forbidden scorpions in the house …

  Meanwhile, since the start of Theodore’s visits and their excursions together, Gerry had begun collecting creatures on an ever greater scale. His room was filling with specimens and Gerry was having to find space for new additions wherever he could around the house – with the occasional uproar if someone in the family found a beetle or frog where least expected.

  All of which presented a problem to Gerry on the day he came upon a fat female scorpion in the garden wall who appeared to be wearing a fur coat. On closer inspection this turned out to be a mass of babies clinging to their mother’s back. ‘I was enraptured by this family, and I made up my mind to smuggle them into the house and up to my bedroom so that I might
keep them and watch them grow up.’ He carefully put mother and young into a matchbox and rushed into the villa, but just then lunch was being served so he placed the matchbox on the mantelpiece in the drawing room and then joined the family in the dining room. What with dawdling over his food and sneaking bits of food to Roger, Gerry completely forgot about his scorpions. So it was with only the mildest interest that his gaze followed Larry, who had finished his meal and gone to the drawing room to fetch his cigarettes, bringing the matchbox back with him to the table and opening it.

  Gerry with a stuffed barn owl standing by a cage of his Corfu ‘zoo’.

  Larry, who was ‘talking glibly’ and not looking at what he was doing, withdrew a match from the box. The mother scorpion, seizing her chance to escape, scuttled out with her babies on board. Feeling the movement of the scorpion’s claws on the back of his hand, Larry glanced down to see what it was, and from that moment, as Gerry puts it, ‘things got increasingly confused’.

  Larry let out a roar of fright and with an instinctive flick of his hand sent the scorpion flying down the length of the table, scattering its babies everywhere, hiding under the plates and the cutlery. Lugaretzia dropped her plate, Roger leapt out from under the table wildly barking. Leslie and Margo screamed as the scorpion sped towards them and knocked it back and forth between them with their napkins until Margo attacked it with a glass of water which missed the scorpion but drenched Mother. Sensing now that the whole family was under attack, though he did not know by whom, Roger spun round and round the room barking hysterically and then went for the one outsider and bit Lugaretzia in the leg.

  ‘It’s that bloody boy again,’ shouted Larry. ‘Look at the table, knee-deep in scorpions, He’ll kill the lot of us!’