by Michael Haag
Veronica and Larry sunbathing near Kalami.
By first sunlight we are away again, wondering what the wide-eyed fisher-boys will make of this great relief in sand. Aphrodite rising from the foam.
‘Larry was twenty-six; he was very beautiful and had all this lovely blond hair. He was very brown; he was very athletic, loved swimming. We all used to swim with no clothes all the time. Nancy was a lovely long thin blonde creature. Such a contrast to Larry in build. The fact that we were a couple of strange females around was by the way; in those days people did not go to bed like they do now.’
Throughout their lives, Veronica said, she and Dorothy held memories of this magical time. ‘We really did feel all the Greek gods and goddesses and nymphs and dryads – you see, Larry produced that atmosphere. He was terribly good at this sort of thing. You could feel Cupid and Psyche. It was absolutely wonderful.’
Nancy also remembered that time. ‘I don’t think Larry was in love with either of them at all. He wanted to have a flock of young girls. They were twenty, I suppose, and it was wonderful for him to dance with two dancers, pretending to be Pan, while they danced naked on the beach.’
‘When I left him’ – Nancy left Larry during the war – ‘when he was trying to persuade me not to leave him, he said, “I’ve only been unfaithful to you twice. Once was behind a rock with Dorothy Stevenson. And once with …” I’ve forgotten her name, in Paris. And I think it was probably true that he wasn’t much more unfaithful than that.’
* * *
From time to time, says Gerry in My Family and Other Animals, the Durrells would decide to throw a big party, and this time, as it was already September, they decided to call it a Christmas party, to which they invited everyone they could think of, not forgetting people they disliked. Preparations began far in advance, almost guaranteeing, as Gerry observed, that nothing would go according to plan. On the day itself Mother was in her kitchen preparing vast quantities of food, her eyeglasses misted over, oblivious as always to the approaching storm. On this occasion the predictable mayhem was owed to the animals, in particular to the creatures Gerry had brought back from the Chessboard Fields, Old Plop and Alecko and the water snakes.
The detonator came when Gerry, for innocent and intricate and outlandish reasons, filled the bath with water snakes and Leslie, who abhorred nothing more than a snake, leapt into the tub without looking, just as the first guests were arriving. All talk was abruptly frozen by a bellow from inside the house, then Leslie appeared on the verandah clad in nothing but a small towel.
‘Gerry,’ he roared, his face a deep red with rage. ‘Where’s that boy?’
‘Now, now, dear,’ said Mother soothingly, ‘whatever’s the matter?’
‘Snakes,’ snarled Leslie, making a wild gesture with his hands to indicate extreme length, and then hastily clutching at his slipping towel, ‘snakes, that’s what’s the matter. That bloody boy’s filled the sodding bath full of bleeding snakes,’ said Leslie, making things quite clear.
‘Never mind, dear, it’s really my fault. I told him to put them there,’ Mother apologized, and then added, feeling that the guests needed some explanation, ‘they were suffering from sunstroke, poor things.’
This led to a general eruption, with Larry protesting with fantastical exaggerations, Margo bitterly accusing Larry of interferring, Leslie telling everyone to shut up, Margo insisting she has as much right as anyone to air her views, Mother haplessly telling her children not to quarrel, not to shout – and then, when the dogs in the street outside began to howl, attracted to Dodo, one of the Durrells’ dogs, who was on heat, the entire family would turn round and bellow, ‘Shut up,’ causing the more nervous of the guests to spill their drinks.
* * *
A ten-year-old girl called Vivian Iris Raymond was at this Durrell party, or one very much like it, and has left her own impressions. She was born in Cephalonia, one of the neighbouring Ionian islands, and belonged to a British merchant family who had been resident there since the early nineteenth century and evidently regarded themselves as some sort of aristocracy. She spelt her name in the masculine form with an ‘a’ (instead of Vivien) because she had been named after an admiral of the Royal Navy.
We once visited Mrs Durrell and the rest of the family in their home near Corfu Town. We were served a meal outside. Gerald, Lawrence’s youngest brother, was a few years older than me. He seemed to be a very big boy. He ignored me … The Durrells all talked at once, shouting across the table and calling from the kitchen door, behaviour I associated with my Greek cousins but not with English people. At one point a ruckus broke out when someone emptied a kitchen bowl of water into the garden. It had contained Gerald’s tadpoles. Many years later in his book, My Family and Other Animals, Gerald described this scene in fabulously exaggerated terms; the tadpoles had become snakes, flung far and wide amid shrieks of horror. As an adult I enjoyed the book for its entertaining stories, but was offended by the mocking tone towards the Greeks. The Greeks are exuberant, excitable people, full of energy and abundant self confidence. But they are not clowns. Indeed, it had seemed to me that the Durrells had been the clowns.
Theodore Stephanides was a friend of Vivian’s family and would sometimes visit them in Cephalonia. ‘He was a most upright man, in the literal and figurative sense, and sported a trim ginger beard …. He was a man of a great many parts.’ His wife Maria was ‘a very tall thin English lady’ whose guests would sit in a very large drawing room drinking tea. ‘Mrs Stephanides would serve steaming English scones with cream and strawberry jam from Harrods. Theodore would stay in his study where he had his microscopes, biology specimens in various tanks and a library that covered one entire wall. His study opened on to the drawing room. Men who were visiting would often take their scones and join Theodore in his study.’
Vivian’s family knew Madame Gennatas. Theodore told them she had a strange accent in Engligh but they never noticed because they always spoke to her in Greek. They would visit her by yacht, as did the King of Greece, who always called at Kouloura in summer.
At the White House, summer 1938: Anastasias ‘Totsa’ Athenaios (Larry and Nancy’s landlord and grandfather of Tassos, the present owner) is second left; Veronica and Dorothy are next to him, centre; and Larry is far right.
That was how Vivian Iris Raymond’s family came upon Nancy and Larry, who lived just round the Kouloura peninsula in the bay of Kalami.
We visited them quite a few times … The established British community was not comfortable with the Durrells’ bohemian lifestyle. The Durrells were not members of the professional or officer classes, and were certainly not gentry. They were quite unlike any other British people on the islands at that time. They associated with the peasants and villagers in a way that offended both those below and above their station. This is not because the establishment looked down on the villagers. We were genuinely fond of our servants … The villagers had a uniquely Greek sense of pride and bearing that permitted no acknowledgement of inferiority. However, they knew their place. There were many subtle rules that defined just what interactions were appropriate across the social strata. The Durrells did not understand these conventions. They did not fit.
According to Vivian, the Durrells’ behaviour caused offence throughout Corfu. They were known to have been stoned by the village priest and boys for bathing naked and, ‘worse still, they took visiting friends on their skinny dipping excursions, including unaccompanied young ladies from England. That was noticed’. Margo also attracted attention by sunbathing in the olive groves ‘in her scanty sun frock with matching frilly knickers. This was offensive to the villagers in those parts. Word spread.’
The nineteen-year-old Margo, in a thoroughly unrevealing dress.
Larry and Nancy certainly had no business calling themselves artists:
At the Durrells’ I saw a painting by Nancy. It represented Adam and Eve standing in a bathtub. The bathtub was deep but transparent so Adam and Eve were visible in thei
r nakedness, sporting exaggerated pubic hairs that had been painted in hard angry strokes. Their bodies were grotesquely ill-proportioned … I was shocked by the ugliness of Nancy’s painting. Lawrence talked loudly and drank too much. He slapped the local peasant fisherman on the shoulders, and invited him to eat with the family, and served him whisky. It seemed to me that the Durrells were ill-disciplined, with pretensions but without the sensitivity or upbringing to participate in the ancient and settled culture of Corfu. I had heard Mummy’s friends talk about degenerates, a term I had not understood, but decided that they must have been referring to people like the Durrells.
* * *
Following the deparure of Dorothy and Veronica, and a month after the Munich Agreement in September 1938 gave Hitler a slice of Czechoslovakia, Nancy told Larry that she wanted a child. ‘A little red general with fat legs, to ride into Czechoslovakia on a white horse? What sort of animal vegetable mineral is a woman’s mind?’ Larry wrote to Henry Miller. The matter was put off a year, and early in November Larry and Nancy again travelled to Paris and London.
Gerry seeing his tutor – possibly Kralefsky, the bird fancier – in Corfu Town.
Early in 1939 Margo decided it was time that she returned to England. She had always been in two minds about whether it had been right to leave Malvern Girls’ School. ‘Corfu was an escape, in a way,’ she recalled. ‘I was doing very well at Malvern. I could have had a career, you see, which I sometimes wish I had done.’ Now she returned to England and entered art school.
Following close behind was Maria Condos. The Durrells were very close to the Condos family in Perama, especially Leslie, who served in the local police force run by the Condos father, and also Margo, for whom they were a second home. Maria Condos had been the Durrells’ maid but she became involved with Leslie and now her family wanted to kill her to defend their honour. She was hurriedly sent off to England, possibly sponsored by Louisa’s always practical and helpful cousin ‘Aunt’ Prue who was buying up rental properties in London and would have found good use for Maria, at least until the family arrived; Maria’s immigration documents were stamped on 15 March. A month later Mary Stephanides and Alexia also left Corfu for England.
Larry had been away for months with no definite date of return, and Theodore was only occasionally on the island, leaving Gerry, who had recently turned fourteen, without any effective supervision. At the conclusion of My Family and Other Animals Mother is returning with the family to England on the advice of Gerry’s tutor, the fantasist and bird collector Mr Kralefsky, who was urging a proper education for Gerry.
But in fact the Durrells were being driven from Corfu by the growing threat of war. On 7 April the Italians invaded Albania; in less than a week their victory was complete. The Italian Army supported by the Navy now stood barely more than two miles across the strait from Corfu. Then Grindlay’s Bank, Louisa’s financial advisors in London, warned that in the event of war she might be cut off from funds if she remained abroad.
In June 1939, Mother and Leslie and Gerry closed the door on the Snow-White Villa and left Corfu.
Chapter 8: The War and the Scattering
LARRY HAD BEEN TRYING TO GET Henry Miller to visit Corfu for years. Now, on the eve of war, Henry decided to take a holiday. Hitler had grabbed the rest of Czechoslovakia in March and Mussolini had occupied Albania in April; in July 1939, Henry sailed from Marseilles for Greece.
It was almost high noon, as Henry tells it in The Colossus of Maroussi, his account of his travels in Greece, when his boat pulled in at Corfu where Larry was waiting on the dock with Spiro Americanos. After an hour’s drive they were at Kalami and before sitting down for lunch they went for a swim off the big black rock in the front of the house. ‘I hadn’t been in the water for nearly twenty years.’ Nancy and Larry, who were ‘like a couple of dolphins’, took Henry to the shrine of Saint Arsenius where ‘we baptised ourselves in the raw.’ Nancy enjoyed Henry’s visit and remarked how agreeable Larry was compared to how ‘pesky’ he had been during the visit of the ballerinas the summer before. But Nancy was less than happy with the English girl that Henry brought along, ‘this strange girl Meg Hurd that he psychoanalysed’, and when later Henry made love to Meg at the shrine of Arsenius, Larry crossly took it as a violation of his sacred place.
Henry Miller and Larry ‘baptising themselves in the raw’.
Larry’s letters to Paris had been marvellous, Henry recalled, but their descriptions of Corfu seemed a bit unreal. ‘They caused a certain amount of confusion in me, owing to the fact that the dream and the reality, the historical and the mythological, were so artfully blended. Later I was to discover for myself that this confusion is real.’
Once a week Henry, Larry and Nancy would go into town on the caique and visit Spiro at his home in Canoni with its view over Pontikonisi, Mouse Island. ‘In the evening’, Henry says, ‘Spiro sits here dreaming of his life in Rhode Island when the boot-legging traffic was in full swing.’
Theodore was staying briefly at Kalami when Henry came to Corfu. Theodore found him to be an amusing companion, a great talker and man of extreme energy who never seemed able to keep still – traits that reminded him very much of Larry despite their completely dissimilar physical appearances. Theodore also noted that Henry was a remarkable success with the locals. ‘Without knowing a word of Greek, he seemed to be able to understand them and make them understand him. Also he was very fond of clowning and had very humorous and mobile features with which he could send his audience into roars of laughter.’ Theodore himself was struck by Henry’s lively curiosity in every subject, as when they would sit out in the evenings on the sun-heated rock by the White House and look up at a sky filled with stars and Henry would ask Theodore countless questions about astronomy; or when Henry, who, like Larry, took a great delight in Corfu wildflowers, ‘especially the lovely pink cyclamen which had just begun to appear before he left the island’, would collect wildflowers of every kind and bring them to Theodore, asking him for their names. ‘It came as a great surprise to him when he discovered that there were a good many specimens that I could not name.’
As for Henry, he thought Theodore was quite simply ‘the most learned man I have ever met, and a saint to boot’.
‘At Kalami’, said Henry, ‘the days rolled on like a song.’ Sometimes he wrote a letter or painted a watercolour, but he had no interest in picking up a book. In the evenings he talked and sang with Nancy and Larry or he stood on the rocks on the edge of the water and with a telescope he surveyed the stars.
In August Larry called on Madame Gennatas. Probably Nancy and perhaps Henry came along too. He gave her a copy of Panic Spring and inscribed it, ‘To Madame Gennatas on her travels with the good wishes of her neighbour and friend. Charles Norden alias Larry. Kouloura 1939. August.’ Madame Gennatas was going away.
* * *
Out of the blue one day in August, Margo appeared. Her months away in England had sharply reawakened the love she felt for Corfu and its people, for the island she called paradise. ‘I decided Corfu was compelling and I came straight back.’ Margo moved in with her friends the Condos family, who lived in Perama, at the foot of the hill below the Strawberry-Pink villa – father and mother and Costas and Katerina (and there had been Maria too before she was spirited off to England by the Durrells).
Margo shared in the great sense of excitement everywhere at the approach of war. In the early morning of 1 September Germany invaded Poland; Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. Greece was neutral and Italy was still neutral, but there was the widespread feeling that a general European conflagration was about to begin.
‘War was declared while I was at Perama’, Margo recalled. ‘I got a little note from Spiro, and it said, “Don’t tell a soul! War has been declared!”’
‘That was when the men disappeared; the very night when war was declared. It was a very emotional scene, everywhere, because everybody had lost their men, they’d all been sent to various
camps. And Spiro Americanos immediately came to the rescue and took me and all the girls to find their men in all the army camps all over Corfu.’
Perama had no electricity and so no radio, and Margo and her friends would walk every night across the pedestrian causeway at the mouth of the lagoon to Canoni, where Spiro lived with his wife and children, to hear the most up-to-date war news.
Every able-bodied Greek on the island was mobilised, boats unloaded flour and bullets, a detachment of Cretan infantry landed in the north, joining four regiments standing at the defences opposite Albania. The men of Kalami and Kouloura, Larry’s landlord Totsa Athenaios among them, were sent inland to a secret arms dump. Only the women were left and the uncomprehending children weeping in the garden.
‘Leslie and I always swore to defend Corfu against the Italians’, Larry afterwards wrote to his poet friend Anne Ridler in London, ‘and we fought the whole thing out during the winter shoots, taking into account everything, including fleet movements. Ill luck found him in England.’ Corfu Town was swarming with people trying to escape. ‘Such passionate farewells, so many tears, so much language, it made one deaf. I had nothing to say goodbye to except the island, and it seemed already lost.’
At the White House in Kalami Larry and Nancy destroyed papers, books and paintings, emptying cupboards and packing clothes. A dazzling green rain fell on the glassy surface of the bay, while darkening clouds and viscous black water filled the strait towards Albania. ‘Standing on our balcony overlooking the sea it seemed like the end of the world.’
But Margo was going nowhere. ‘I wanted to stay and sit it out with my Greek family. I was definitely prepared to go into the fields and help them. I thought Lawrence was a bit oafish for dashing off. I did say goodbye to them at the port of Corfu.’
