The Durrells of Corfu

by Michael Haag

  This was one of Gerry’s favourite hunting grounds, for the landscape of ditches and tiny islands and the lush undergrowth harboured a multitude of creatures, among them the ancient and wily terrapin called Old Plop that eluded capture by Gerry for a month or more. But it was easy to get lost here; in the pursuit of a plopping amphibian or a fluttering butterfly you might cross the wrong little wooden bridge between islands and lose your bearings in the labyrinth of reeds and fig leaves and stalks of maize. For Gerry, though, he was never far from a welcome.

  Most of the fields belonged to friends of mine, peasant families who lived up in the hills, and so when I was walking there I was always sure of being able to rest and gossip over a bunch of grapes with some acquaintance, or to receive interesting items of news, such as the fact that there was a lark’s nest under the melon-plants on Georgio’s land.

  Villa Number Three, or as Gerry called it, the Snow-White Villa, at Cressida.

  In this way Gerry became what he called in his unpublished autobiographical fragments a ‘human newspaper’, an itinerant gatherer and broadcaster of local news.

  In Corfu, within a six mile radius, I was the medieval equivalent of the town crier or a sort of human newspaper. Some of the peasant communities would perhaps only see each other once or twice a year at a fiesta. So I, travelling around as I did, brought the latest news, whether Agatha had died or whether Spiro (no – not that Spiro but Spiro with the blind donkey – Oh! that one) – well, his potato crop had failed. Po! Po! Po! they would cry in horror, and he had the whole winter stretching before him, potatoless. St Spiridion preserve him.

  * * *

  One day when Gerry had gone to the Chessboard Fields and was plunging for water snakes in the shallows of the lagoon he became aware of a young man who had arrived silently and was now squatting nearby and watching him with wry interest. He was ‘a short, stocky individual whose brown face was topped by a thatch of close-cropped fair hair, the colour of tobacco. He had large, very blue eyes that had a pleasant humorous twinkle in them, and crows’ feet in the fine skin at the corners.’ Gerry supposed him to be a fisherman from some village farther along the coast.

  ‘Your health,’ the man greeted Gerry with a smile.

  Gerry returned the greeting while trying to wrestle the snake he had just caught into his basket without letting the first one escape. The snakes were quite harmless, Gerry knew, but he fully expected the man to lecture him on the deadliness of water snakes; to Gerry’s surprise, however, he remained silent, watching intently as Gerry wrestled the writhing snake into the basket. Gerry then produced the grapes he had helped himself to from the fields, offered half to the man, and they sat together silently.

  ‘You are a stranger?’ the man asked after a while. Gerry said he was English and that he lived with his family in a villa up in the hills. But instead of interrogating Gerry further, as peasants usually did, wanting to know all about each member of the family, their ages, gender, work and so on, the man again surprised Gerry by seeming to be entirely content with his answer.

  Then Gerry said he would go down to the sea to wash the caked silt off his body and look for some cockles to eat. ‘I will walk with you,’ the man said. ‘I have a basketful of cockles in my boat; you may have some of those if you like.’

  As they walked through the fields towards the sands, the man pointed to his rowing boat in the distance, pulled up on the shore. Gerry asked if he was a fisherman and where he was from.

  ‘I come from here, from the hills’, he replied. ‘At least, my home is here, but I am now at Vido.’

  The reply puzzled Gerry, for Vido was the local prison island lying off the town of Corfu, and as far as he knew entirely uninhabited except for convicts and warders. Gerry pointed this out to him.

  ‘That’s right,’ he agreed, stooping to pat Roger as he ambled past, ‘that’s right. I’m a convict.’

  I thought he was joking, and glanced at him sharply, but his expression was quite serious. I said I presumed he had just been let out.

  ‘No, no, worse luck,’ he smiled. ‘I have another two years to do. But I’m a good prisoner, you see.

  Kosti the convict (front) with a local fisherman.

  Trustworthy and make no trouble. Any like me, those they feel they can trust, are allowed to make boats and sail home for the weekend, if it’s not too far. I’ve got to be back there first thing Monday morning.’

  Once the thing was explained, of course, it was simple. It never even occurred to me that the procedure was unusual. I knew one wasn’t allowed home for weekends from an English prison, but this was Corfu, and in Corfu anything could happen.

  Gerry’s curiosity to know what his crime had been was interrupted as they reached the boat and he saw, tethered to the stern, an immense black-backed gull. Gerry at once stretched out his hand to stroke its back.

  ‘Be careful, watch out; he is a bully, that one!’ said the man urgently.

  But his warning came too late. Gerry was already gently running his fingers through the bird’s feathers. The gull crouched, his beak opened slightly, his eyes narrowed – and he did nothing.

  ‘Spiridion!’ said the man in amazement. ‘He must like you; he’s never let anyone else touch him without biting.’

  Gerry asked the man where he had got such a magnificent bird. Crossing over to Albania in the spring, he said, to catch some hares. The gull was small then, but now, he said, addressing the gull, it had become a ‘fat duck, ugly duck, biting duck, aren’t you, eh?’ The gull opened one eye and gave a short sharp yarp of agreement.

  He had tried to get rid of him, said the man. He could not catch enough fish to feed him, he went about biting everyone, and the prisoners and wardens did not like him, but each time he let him go he came back. One weekend soon he would take him across to Albania and abandon him there.

  ‘But if you want him you can have him,’ the man said.

  Gerry could hardly believe his ears. He would have given his soul for such a wonderful bird and now incredibly it was being offered to him almost carelessly. How the family would greet the arrival of a bird the size of a goose and with a beak like a razor never entered Gerry’s mind; without hesitating he took up the bird to carry it home under his arm.

  ‘He knows his name’, the man remarked. ‘I call him Alecko. He’ll come when you call.’ At which Alecko waggled his legs and, squinting up at Gerry, yarped again. ‘You’ll be wanting some fish for him. I’m going out in the boat tomorrow, about eight. If you like to come we can catch a good lot for him.’

  As the man was pushing his boat out into the waters of the lagoon, Gerry took his chance and as casually as he could asked him his name and why he was in prison.

  ‘My name’s Kosti,’ he said smilingly over his shoulder. ‘Kosti Panopoulos. I killed my wife.

  ‘Your health,’ he called as his boat went out. ‘Until tomorrow.’

  * * *

  ‘What on earth’s that?’ gasped Mother.

  ‘What an enormous bird!” exclaimed Margo. ‘What is it, an eagle?’

  ‘Where did you get him, anyway?’ asked Leslie.

  Gerry explained about his meeting with Kosti, but said nothing of the water snakes; all snakes terrified Leslie. And without thinking, Gerry added that Kosti was a convict.

  ‘A convict?’ quavered Mother. ‘What d’you mean, a convict?’

  I explained about Kosti being allowed home for the week-ends, because he was a trusted member of the Vido community. I added that he and I were going fishing the next morning.

  ‘I don’t know whether it’s very wise, dear,’ Mother said doubtfully. ‘I don’t like the idea of your going about with a convict. You never know what he’s done.’

  Indignantly, I said I knew perfectly well what he’d done. He killed his wife.

  ‘A murderer? said Mother, aghast. ‘But what’s he doing wandering round the countryside? Why didn’t they hang him?’

  ‘They don’t have the death penalty here for anythin
g except bandits,’ explained Leslie; ‘you get three years for murder and five years if you’re caught dynamiting fish.’

  ‘Ridiculous!’ said Mother indignantly. ‘I’ve never heard of anything so scandalous … Anyway, I won’t have you wandering around with a murderer,’ said Mother to me. ‘He might cut your throat or something.’

  And so the next morning Gerry went fishing with Kosti and, when they returned with enough fish to keep Alecko fed for a couple of days, Gerry asked his friend to come up to the villa and meet Mother.

  Nervously Mother sat on the verandah, the few words of Greek she knew having flown her mind in the face of the ordeal of having to make small talk with a murderer, while Kosti in his faded shirt and tattered trousers drank a glass of beer and Gerry translated.

  ‘He seems such a nice man’, Mother said after Kosti had taken his leave; ‘he doesn’t look a bit like a murderer. I thought he’d look, well, you know, a little more murderous.’

  * * *

  Early in 1938, just a few months after Louisa moved into the Snow-White Villa, Theodore’s expertise as a freshwater biologist led him to join an anti-malarial campaign funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Greece had been cursed by malaria since classical times and the disease continued to be responsible for over a million cases and five thousand deaths a year; this out of a population of less than seven million. Throughout this year and the next, his work would be in Cyprus and also in the north of Greece at Thessaloniki, and he would return to Corfu on only occasional visits.

  Theodore had been a mainstay of the Durrell family and his absence would be deeply felt; and for Gerry it was the loss of the one person, apart from Larry, whose learning and authority he valued and accepted. ‘If I had the power of magic’, Gerry once remarked, ‘I would confer two great gifts on every child – the enchanted childhood I had on the island of Corfu, and to be guided and befriended by Theodore Stephanides.’ Gerry was losing Theodore and soon he would lose Corfu.

  The family itself was changing; the Durrell children were hardly children any more, and Larry, who turned twenty-six in 1938, had always known Corfu as an adult. Now Leslie became twenty, Margo eighteen, and Gerry celebrated his thirteenth birthday. Gerry illustrated an invitation to his party with a prancing and rather Rabelaisian-looking depiction of himself inviting his guests to ‘make whoophee with me’, but he had passed beyond childhood into the more uncertain feelings of puberty.

  Gerry’s invitation to ‘make whoophee’ on his thirteenth birthday.

  In an autobiographical fragment Gerry recalled a woman nuzzling up to Theodore’s legs and saying,

  ‘You know, I have an open fire – I throw salt in it when it’s blazing’.

  ‘Indeed’, said Theodore, ‘why, er, do you do that?’

  ‘Because it makes a blue flame, blue as a man’s eyes, blue as yours.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Theodore, ‘It is interesting that the reason the salt makes the flame blue is …’

  She watched him adoringly and pressed on, asking him about Adam and Eve.

  ‘I have tried myself – in private you understand – to sew fig leaves so that they cover the – the – parts which on the human body they – reputedly – covered and I found them to be recalcitrant in a modist’s sort of way.’

  * * *

  On 15 April 1938, eight months after they had left for Paris and London, Larry and Nancy returned to Corfu. Theodore was briefly back on the island then and accompanied Spiro, who collected them at the port and drove them to Kalami. Spiro parked the car on the road above and they descended the winding mountain path from where the house came into distant view, with its extra storey whitewashed and roofed with tiles. But when they finally reached the beach and could see the house from the seaward side, Larry burst into a roar of rage. Facing out over Kalami Bay the upper floor had two small windows.

  ‘I have rarely seen Lawrence more indignant and upset,’ Theodore recalled. ‘At first he wanted to turn right around and return to the car and leave Kalami for ever. It was with great difficult that Nancy and I persuaded him to change his mind. But for many weeks, even after the upper floor had been made into a beautiful and comfortable home, he would scarcely speak to Athenaios.’

  But they made it up when the autumn storms proved that Totsa had been right all along. ‘It was extremely problematical if the upper floor could have been lived in,’ said Theodore, ‘if the two big windows had been actually installed.’

  With plenty of space now at the White House in Kalami, Margo and Gerry would come and stay. Margo thought Larry was ‘a very pompous creature in a way’, while Nancy was ‘a very gentle, a lovely person; she was often painting and reading – she was a quiet person’. But Margo thought Larry and Nancy got on well enough. ‘I don’t actually see it as a tempestuous marriage. I didn’t look at it that way.’

  Larry continued to concern himself with Gerry’s education, having already introduced him to Rabelais during the early days at the Strawberry-Pink Villa, and since then giving him books to read such as The Story of My Heart by the utopian English nature writer Richard Jeffreys and Social Life in the Insect World by Jean-Henri Fabre, who was an influence on Darwin; and exposing Gerry to Beethoven which Larry played on his gramophone: ‘He was surprised to hear me whistling a bit of Beethoven’s Eighth,’ Gerry remarked in one of his autobiographical fragments.

  * * *

  ‘One of the nice things about Larry was that he was absolutely determined that Gerald was going to do life his own way. He didn’t want him messed up. He didn’t want him sent to schools that were going to take him the wrong way. When you went to see them, they did have a bath, but Gerald always had creatures in the bath.’

  Spiro with ballerinas Veronica and Dorothy.

  This is Veronica Tester speaking. Like her Australian friend Dorothy Stevenson, she was a ballet dancer and they came to Corfu in the summer of 1938 after meeting Larry in London the winter before: ‘He was full of life and energy. Dabbling in everything, lots of interests outside just poetry. I had always wanted to go to Greece, and I remember him saying, well, we’ve found our place in Corfu, we’re going to be building it, and you must come and stay.’

  In those days Kalami was so small, just a handful of houses, that one often spoke of it as being Kouloura, which was the nearby port for the daily caique back and forth to Corfu Town. Veronica arrived first; Dorothy came later.

  ‘They were in their house at Kouloura. So I stayed there with Nancy. I hadn’t met Nancy before, but we got on very well, and I stayed there the whole summer.’ Then Margo came to stay for about ten days. ‘She was a nice girl. One didn’t know if she was coming or going, but she was a very nice girl. One of the things we did together was we walked up Pantocrator; and we walked up there, and it was very very hot, really hot. There’s a road now, but there wasn’t then, only donkey tracks.’

  They all got up very early in the morning, at about six, and would sit on the big flat rock alongside the house where they would breakfast and look across to Albania. ‘Beautiful and quiet and lovely.’

  ‘And then Larry, he used to work all the morning; he worked very hard. Nancy used to paint all the morning. I used to go off exploring; I learnt enough Greek to be polite and go up to villages, and they all pinched my back, they had never seen a bare one, wearing shorts and a shirt. I had a lovely time doing that, looking at flowers and stuff.’

  As time passed Veronica became increasingly aware of the contrast between the north and south of the island. ‘All the people in the north wore their black clothes and blue and white, and they carried things on their backs; and then as you go down to the south of the island which had the Venetian history and where Larry’s mother and Margo and Gerald and Leslie were, you go down there and you had these women carrying things on their heads and wearing coloured things; the top was biblical and the bottom was Venetian, a complete divide. And then you had Corfu Town in the middle with people playing cricket and the Brits turning up. It was a magical place. And L
arry was extremely aware and very sensitive to all these different things, so it was fun being with him and enjoying these different aspects of it.’

  After Dorothy arrived, Larry decided they should all go off on an expedition, so he and Veronica sailed round the top of Corfu to Paleocastritsa while Spiro took Nancy and Dorothy by road. ‘It was a most beautiful empty beach, and there was a very large rock in the middle of it which gave it shade in the middle of the day. We stayed there two or three weeks, I should think. The goatherd used to come down from one side in the morning, and the shepherd came down the other way in the morning on the beach, but nobody else was there. I think there are little bits in Prospero’s Cell that refer to us,’ said Veronica.

  Prospero’s Cell is Larry’s lyrical evocation of Corfu written in Alexandria after the island and the world were struck by war. As Veronica said, ‘Before the war was another world.’ It is written in the form of a series of impressions entered into a journal. So for 9 August 1938 Larry writes:

  Riding south from Paleocastrizza in a fair wind we come to Ermones beach just before dawn; and swimming ashore in the grey half light we build in gleaming sand the figure of a gigantic recumbent Aphrodite. N and Veronica model the face while Dorothy and I shape the vast thighs. We give her a crown of pebbles for pearls and a belt made from withes of sapling, like snakes. She lies staring at the lightening sky, her mouth open in an agonizing shriek, being born. While the sea creeps up and gnaws her long rigid fingers.