The Durrells of Corfu

by Michael Haag

  A consequence of the scorpion panic was that Gerry was given an additional room, a large room on the first floor, in the hope that this would confine his animals to that part of the villa. The family called this room the Bug House; to Gerry it was his studio and here he kept his natural history books, his diary, microscope, dissecting instruments, nets, collecting bags and so on. The room housed his collections of beetles, butterflies, dragonflies and birds’ eggs, as well as such curiosities as a four-legged chicken, which was a present from Lugaretzia’s husband, the fossilised remains of a fish, a photograph of Gerry shaking hands with a chimpanzee and a stuffed bat.

  Gerry had dissected and stuffed the bat himself (‘it looked, I thought, extremely like a bat, especially if you stood at the other side of the room’), but he failed to cure it first. A disagreeable smell began to permeate the house for which Roger was initially blamed, but when finally the stench seeped into Larry’s bedroom an investigation was launched and the source identified. Under pressure, Gerry was forced to get rid of the bat, but this early dissection and taxidermy work was to raise in his mind profound questions about the nature of life and his relationship to his own being and the magic of the whole – as he was to write sixty years later in one of his last autobiographical fragments:

  I think it was because of these primitive dissections that I first started appreciating the complex and fantastic structure in which I dwelt – my body – and most of it functioning without any apparent direction from me, who was the owner or temporary inhabitant. I was unaware how my kidneys functioned. I gave them no orders and yet they continued to do their duty nevertheless. If I put out my hand to pick something up, I was aware that my brain had given my hand instructions to perform this task, and yet I was not even on speaking terms with my kidneys. Did a hedgehog, I wondered, give instructions to the web of muscles so that he rolled into a spiky ball when danger hove into view, or did it happen automatically? (I longed to dissect a cow or a horse, but I knew that the intricacies of smuggling so large a corpse into my bedroom would be discovered and put an end to.)

  Then there was the amazing difference between various creatures. The difference between the musculature and bone structure of a bat and a bird, for example. After all, although they were bird and mammal, they both flew and so you would expect their internal organs to be the same. Then there was the difference between a lizard, a snake and a tortoise … All this was fascinating enough, but when you got to the insects who, for the most part, wore their protective armour outside, the mind boggled at the shapes they had assumed and the incredible architecture and articulation of their body parts. Then of course there were the transformations as startling and bizarre as anything a stage magician could produce. The dragonfly larvae, like some strange steam shovel in the pond’s depths who, when the time was right, would crawl up a leaf or twig and split open like a strange sandwich and from its uncouth interior would emerge the adult, hawk-eyed, wings glittering like a thousand church windows, and with a speed and manoeuvrability that no man-made flying machine could match …

  Leaf to bud, caterpillar to butterfly, tadpole to toad or frog, I was surrounded by miracles. I was surrounded by magic as though Merlin had passed through and casually touched the island with his wand.

  * * *

  One reason Theodore liked to visit the Daffodil-Yellow Villa on Thursday afternoons was to satisfy his passion for watching seaplanes put down in the waters of Gouvia Bay. Gerry describes in My Family and Other Animals how around teatime the Short Empire flying boat of Imperial Airways would arrive from Athens, having flown from India or Egypt and far beyond, en route to Southampton, which it would reach just over twenty-four hours later.

  Theodore, in the middle of an anecdote or an explanation, would suddenly stop talking, his eyes would take on a fanatical gleam, his beard would bristle, and he would cock his head on one side.

  ‘Is that … er … you know … is that the sound of a plane?’ he would inquire.

  Everyone would stop talking and listen; slowly the sound would grow louder and louder. Theodore would carefully place his half-eaten scone on his plate.

  Imperial Airways flying boat at Gouvia Bay.

  ‘Ah ha!’ he would say, wiping his fingers carefully. ‘Yes, that certainly sounds like a plane … er … um … yes.’

  Mother would put Theodore out of his misery and ask if he would like to watch it land. This meant going up four flights of stairs to the attic, where the windows offered a clear view over the headland to the bay.

  ‘Well … er … if you’re sure …’ Theodore would mumble, vacating his seat with alacrity. “I … er … find the sight very attractive … if you’re sure you don’t mind.’

  The sound of the plane’s engines were now directly overhead; the entire family abandoned the table and leapt up the stairs, following a joyfully barking Roger who raced on ahead.

  The plane, like a cumbersome overweight goose, flew over the olive-groves, sinking lower and lower. Suddenly it would be over the water, racing its reflection over the blue surface. Slowly the plane dropped lower and lower. Theodore, eyes narrowed, beard bristling, watched it with bated breath. Lower and lower, and then suddenly it touched the surface briefly, left a widening petal of foam, flew on, and then settled on the surface and surged across the bay, leaving a spreading fan of white foam behind it. As it came slowly to rest, Theodore would rasp the side of his beard with his thumb, and ease himself back into the attic.

  ‘Um … yes,’ he would say, dusting his hands, ‘it is certainly a … very … er … enjoyable sight.’

  * * *

  Communications were important for Larry, whose literary links were with London and Paris, a day away by air mail. Corfu and the other Ionian Islands had been under British rule for half of the nineteenth century and the impress of England was still felt. In the 1930s, said Larry, the island was far more developed than the rest of Greece, though ‘it wasn’t the Englishness that mattered, but the communications, the postal service, the degree of civilisation. Compared to Athens, Corfu was like Florence.’ Larry was only partly living in Corfu; his thoughts and much of his sensibility were at the farthest end of the flying boat route, in England, in the suburban streets of Bournemouth and London, and in the Queens Hotel, which in the new book he was writing in Corfu he calls the Regina Hotel.

  Do not ask me why, at this time, on a remote Greek headland in a storm, I should choose, for my first real book, a theatre which is not Mediterranean. It is part of us here, in the four damp walls of a damp house, under an enormous wind, under the sabres of rain. From this nervous music rise those others, no less spectres, who are my mimes. I mean Tarquin, walking along the iced suburban streets … I mean Lobo … I mean Perez, Chamberlain, Gregory, Grace, Peters, Hilda … When I am in the Regina I am dead again.

  The book Larry was writing, his ‘first real book’, was called The Black Book, ‘this chronicle of the English Death’, finished on his twenty-fifth birthday at the house of Anastasius Athenaios at Kalami.

  Chapter 6: The White House at Kalami

  ON A BEAUTIFUL SPRING DAY IN 1936, Spiro drove Theodore and Larry and Nancy north from Kontokali along the coast road, a difficult journey during rainy weather and impossible when it was stormy. Here the ridges of Mount Pantocrator drove straight into the sea, creating a succession of coves but allowing little workable land, only the olive trees clinging to the slopes of the mountain in steep steps of terraces. Normally the journey was done by the daily caique which set out from Corfu Town for Kouloura across the narrow strait from Albania. In each direction the caique put in, when requested, at the little villages along this remote coast – exposed to the northern winter winds, parched in summer, a wilder Corfu, so different from the gentler, almost Italian lower half of the island. But today was fine, and as the big car bounced north along the broken road the afternoon sun struck obliquely through the olives, dappling the occasional colour-washed houses of ochre, of white, of mulberry, with light and shade.
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  Theodore had been invited to tea by Madame Gennatas and was asked to bring his new friends. The old widow lived in a fortified Venetian manor house at the port of Kouloura, the most beautiful of all the little coves along this coast, where a horseshoe jetty sheltered red and blue fishing boats, and where waving pale green eucalyptus and dark jets of cypress rose above the sound of water faintly lapping at a pebble beach. The immensely thick walls of the manor house, originally pierced by loopholes, was now opened up by several French windows, which let out onto a wide stone terrace overlooking the sea. Here the visitors were served afternoon tea and listened to Madame Gennatas recall the Corfu she had known when she was a girl – and puzzled over her faint Liverpudlian accent, suggesting the possibility that her family had been cotton merchants who spent some time in Liverpool which was directly linked to the activities of the Greek cotton barons in Alexandria in Egypt, the two cities which then had the largest cotton exchanges in the world.

  Madame Gennatas’ fortified Venetian manor house at the port of Kouloura.

  It was dark by the time Theodore, Larry and Nancy departed, but the bright moonlight helped Spiro navigate the Dodge back to Kontakali. Along the way the talk was of the beauty of Kouloura and the dramatic landscape of the surrounding countryside. Nancy had long wanted to get away from the south of Corfu, away from the villas near town. ‘I felt we’d been living too near the crowds – too tame. I was terribly keen on being in the wildest place I could find – most untamed.’ Come morning, and Larry and Nancy decided to find some rooms in a peasant cottage up that way. Their thoughts were put into immediate effect by Spiro, who knew everyone: ‘Don’t you worries, Larry, I’ll soon fixes it.’ Ten days later, and against the wishes of his mother Louisa, who wanted him to remain at her villa in Kontokali, Larry was moving with Nancy into two rooms in a white-painted house overhanging the sea at Kalami, a sprinkling of four or five cottages round the headland to the south of Kouloura.

  * * *

  In moving out from the Daffodil-Yellow Villa Nancy misplaced what Larry called her ‘beautiful anti-aircraft device’, and without any means of contraception she soon became pregnant. Neither wanted a child just then; a chief purpose in coming to Kalami was to devote themselves without distraction to their writing and painting. But contraceptive devices were illegal in Greece and abortions too; only with some difficulty did they persuade a doctor in town, to whom they had been referred by Theodore, to declare that Nancy, so long and thin, ‘was delicate and there was something slightly wrong with me’, thereby justifying an abortion on health grounds.

  ‘I held her head while she was coming round,’ Larry wrote to a friend. ‘God sicking froth and green stuff like camel shit from the ether. Then very quietly awake and laughing softly, as if at some incredible puckish and private joke. It’s all very queer. All very untrue I feel. It’s not fair. I don’t feel we can ever make it up to women for what they are and for what they do for us.’ The crude reaction from some at the clinic outraged Larry. ‘The Greeks are plain shits. Except for Spiro Halikiopoulos.’

  Nancy – ‘I wanted just to absolutely drown myself in the sun and the sea.’

  Meanwhile the unfolding news of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia was full of foreboding and was brought closer to home when an Italian bomber, ‘an aluminium giant fart’, wrote Larry, made a reconnoitring flight over town. ‘Of course we’re scared shitless because if there’s any place Benito wants more than Ethiopia it’s Corfu. He smashed up the town with bombs in 1925, and had to be chased out by the British: and everyone is afraid he’ll do it again. We’re living in the extreme north of the island, and if there’s trouble we’ll have to get a fisherman to row us over to Epirus, and escape thence to Athens.’ But, for the present, ‘Sea dashes up under our drawing room windows, and the dolphins slink by all day as I sit and write this. I must go and bathe now. Naked, by God.’

  The local Greeks, however, saw nothing godly about Larry and Nancy swimming in the nude. ‘We used to go and bathe naked together,’ Nancy remembered, ‘keeping out of view of the fishermen because we didn’t want to shock them too much – at that time peasants never even took their vests off in summer.’ On one occasion, however, they had not noticed a church on a nearby promontory and the priest sitting on his porch with a full view of the beach. At the sight of their offence against God, tradition, morality and modesty, the priest rallied the youths of the nearby village, who took up positions in the hills above and pelted the bathers with stones. Larry and Nancy were forced to seek out isolated coves to avoid stonings, but they were seen nevertheless and their behaviour aroused indignation among many across the island.

  For Nancy and Larry, however, their naked contact with the air and light and waters of Corfu was a sacred immersion. ‘We were absolutely mad on taking off all our clothes,’ recalled Nancy, ‘I could never have enough. I wanted just to absolutely drown myself in the sun and the sea.’

  One of their secluded bathing spots was a shingle beach shielded by a low cliff just north of Kouloura to which Larry, Theodore and Nancy would go by rowing boat, picnicking beneath the arms of an immense fig tree which overhung several gently inclined ledges of rock. Here they sunbathed and slipped naked into the blood-warm water of the rockpools, then plunged into the cold currents fed by streams spilling down from Mount Pantocrator. These ‘stimulated his brain’, Nancy said of Larry, who would bring a typewriter along and work on his latest book, the one that would become The Black Book. Then one day they found ‘Angli’ written in charcoal on one of the slabs of rock and knew that here too they were being watched.

  A more secure bathing place was two coves south of Kalami where they found the shrine of a saint which was inaccessible except by water. Larry describes it in Prospero’s Cell:

  All morning we lie under the red brick shrine to Saint Arsenius, dropping cherries into the pool – clear down two fathoms to the sandy floor where they loom like drops of blood. N has been going in for them like an otter and bringing them up in her lips. The Shrine is our private bathing pool; four puffs of cypress, deep clean-cut diving ledges above two fathoms of blue water, and a floor of clean pebbles. Once after a storm an ikon of the good Saint Arsenius was found here by a fisherman called Manoli, and he built the shrine out of red plaster as a house for it. The little lamp is always full of sweet oil now, for Saint Arsenius guards our bathing.

  The shrine of St Arsenius near Kalami, photographed by Larry.

  Larry spoke of having two birthplaces: the one where you were physically born, the other the place where you wake up to reality. ‘One day you wake up and it’s there, and in your inner life, in your dreams; it’s the place of predilection that comes forward and nourishes you.’ That place for Larry was the shrine of Saint Arsenius, ‘the place where we bathed naked all the time … the place where I was reborn, where I finished The Black Book’.

  * * *

  Larry was inspired to write The Black Book after reading Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller’s ebullient and erotic depiction of underground Paris that had been published in 1934. In the summer of 1935, within a few months of arriving in Corfu and while still living near his family in Perama, Larry had been lent a copy of Miller’s book by Barclay Hudson, an American painter sojourning on the island. ‘Larry was absolutely bowled over by it,’ recalled Nancy, while Larry declared to Alan Thomas, ‘it’s the greatest thing written in our lifetimes’. Where other books, ‘all those tedious Ulysses and Chatterlies’, got stuck in ‘the morass and dirt of modern life, Miller comes out on the other side with a grin’. Published in Paris but banned for obscenity in Britain and America, Larry urged Alan to somehow get his hands on the book and, appealing to his instincts as a book dealer, told him, ‘Even if you don’t like it, the first edition value is going to be enormous.’

  After reading the book, Larry wrote a letter to Miller in Paris that marked the beginning of a lifelong correspondence and friendship. ‘It strikes me as being the only really man-size piece of work which this cen
tury can really boast of,’ Larry wrote of Tropic of Cancer. ‘It really gets down on paper the blood and bowels of our time … It finds the way out of the latrines at last. Funny that no one should have thought of slipping out via the pan during a flush, instead of crowding the door.’

  To which Miller replied, ‘Your letter is so vivid, so keen, that I am curious to know if you are not a writer yourself.’

  By the end of 1935, his first year in Corfu, and once he had finished Panic Spring in December, Larry began writing The Black Book. He worked on it furiously for over a year with Nancy as his audience. The two were very close at this time: ‘Nancy is as proud as punch, it being her book,’ Larry wrote to Henry. ‘I thought it was marvellous,’ she recalled. ‘I hadn’t liked his first novel much – the Pied Piper was a bit dull – but The Black Book I thought was quite terrific.’

  The Black Book was a radical departure for Larry from his first two novels. His first, Pied Piper of Lovers, completed in the summer of 1934 before any thought of going to Corfu and published by Cassell in the following year, has broad brush-strokes of autobiography. It tells the story of a boy, Walsh Clifton, born and raised in India, the son of a civil engineer. Sent to England for his education. Walsh briefly enters into London’s bohemia but turns his back on it to live with the young woman he loves in a remote spot along the south coast of England overlooking the sea, not so far from Bournemouth. The girl has a heart problem; they know she will die at any time. Walsh and the girl decide to live by the moment, not as hedonists but happy to be alive, daily reborn into the here and now.

  Panic Spring follows on, but loosely and at an angle. Larry began the book at Brindisi in March 1935 while travelling from England to Corfu and finished it at the Daffodil-Yellow Villa at the end of that year. The girl has died and Walsh, no longer the central character, is one of several expatriates, mostly British, who go to the Greek island of Mavrodaphne – which Larry based on Corfu – to heal from a wider malaise.