The Durrells of Corfu

by Michael Haag

  There was no adventure for Leslie, except for his secret and continuing liaison with Maria Condos, the family maid. He had taken a photograph of her in Corfu and on the reverse he had written ‘Jolly nice’.

  Now when Margo returned from Africa at the end of the war she noticed Maria putting the washing on the line.

  ‘That’s funny, she’s pregnant, and I said to Mother, “I think Maria’s pregnant,” and she looked immediately round for a double gin.’

  Epilogue: Family, Friends and Animals…

  GERRY BEGAN WRITING My Family and Other Animals in 1955 in the attic of his sister’s house in Bournmouth at 51 St Alban’s Avenue, opposite Mother at number 52. Separated from Jack Breeze, and with two young sons to support, Margo had bought the house in 1947 with her share of the inheritance from her father. After her adventures in marriage and Africa, her Aunt Prue sensibly declared, ‘It will be like a sort of anchor for you: at the moment you are like an old boat being tossed about without a rudder.’ There was no stability in marriage, continued Prue, not with your temperament, but a guest house would ensure both a home and an income for the rest of your life. Mind you, a guest house, not a boarding house – ‘boarding is so common’, said Aunt Prue.

  Margo felt she was slipping into the shoes of her mother. ‘I’ve always been head of the family – all my life! It has been my burden that I have to carry. And help out here and there wherever needed, wherever there was a drama – and we’ve had plenty of those.’

  One immediate problem would be dealing with Gerry, who, while he was away at Whipsnade Zoo, had ‘marked his territorial claim’ at Mother’s house, ‘not with musk and urine but with a marmoset which, happily, did both for him’. Margo had always been tolerant of Gerry and his habits, but ‘it was obvious that I should never keep a lodger if I allowed him to put one foot over the threshold of my new house with any species of animal – domestic or otherwise’.

  Margo’s Bournemouth guest house at 51 St Alban’s Avenue: top, Gerry and Jacquie in the garden; below: Margo with her sons, Nicholas and Gerry.

  But of course it did not turn out like that. ‘In the end we had all the animals, running all over the place.’ Over the coming years as Gerald travelled in search of wildlife in Africa and South America, then returned to Bournemouth, where he and his wife Jacquie Wolfenden, whom he married in 1951, inhabited their small room at 51 St Alban’s Avenue, a zoo grew up in Margo’s back garden – ‘monkeys and birds, you name it.’

  * * *

  Gerry’s career as an independent zoologist began when he turned twenty-one and came into his share of the inheritance left by his father; by the end of 1947 he was financing his own wildlife collecting expedition to Cameroon in West Africa. With the animals he brought back he supplied zoos in London, Bristol, Manchester and elsewhere, providing more than twenty-five new species to London Zoo alone. In 1949 Gerry was again in Cameroon and in 1950 he mounted an expedition to Guyana in South America. Unlike other wildlife collecting expeditions, Gerry never over-collected specimens nor aimed to capture animals because they would attract the highest prices from collectors; moreover he fed and housed his animals to the highest standards; which taken all together meant he was broke by the end of the third expedition.

  In desperation and encouraged by Jacquie, and with advice from Larry, Gerry turned to writing humorous accounts of his expeditions. The Overloaded Ark, published in 1953, was about the first Cameroon expedition and became a bestseller. ‘My youngest brother Gerry has scored a tremendous success with his first book and is making a deal of money,’ Larry wrote to Henry Miller. ‘He collects wild animals for zoos and writes up his adventures afterwards. The one pays for the other; how marvellous to have one’s career fixed at 25 or so and to be able to pay one’s way.’

  Two further bestsellers followed. Three Singles to Adventure, about the Guyana expedition, was published in 1954, and The Bafut Beagles, about Cameroon again, was published at the end of the same year. Soon Larry was writing to Henry that Gerry was now ‘a more famous writer than all of us put together’. But Gerry, who disliked writing, forever looked up to Larry, who at this stage in his career was well regarded within literary circles, but not famous and certainly not able to make a living from his writings. ‘The subtle difference between us’, Gerry said of Larry, ‘is that he loves writing and I don’t. To me it’s simply a way to do my animal work, nothing more.’

  * * *

  At the end of the war Larry left Alexandria and was posted to Rhodes as Public Information Officer until the British, who had liberated the island from the Germans, united it with Greece two years later. His sojourn in Rhodes would result in his book about the island, Reflections on a Marine Venus, eventually published in 1953. But meanwhile, in 1947, on his way to a new job in Argentina, this time as lecturer at the British Council Institute at Cordoba, Larry came to Bournemouth with his Alexandrian wife Eve and they moved in with Mother at number 52. It was the first time that all the family had been together since Corfu – and it would be the last. Eve responded to the family in the same way Nancy had done fifteen years before, enjoying their banter, their extravagant playfulness and Mother’s delicious curries, which she would make at the drop of a hat. ‘They all looked alike – all like their mother’, Eve thought. The only difference between them was that Gerry was taller than Larry, taller than any of them; Leslie and Larry were about the same size.

  Eve Cohen Durrell – Larry’s second wife and the model for Justine in his Alexandria Quartet.

  In September 1947 Nancy wrote to Mother saying she would like to visit. In August she had married Edward Hodgkin, director of the British-run Near East Arab Broadcasting Station in Jerusalem, and now they had returned to England. Nancy was pregnant and felt that dealing with both seven-year-old Penelope, her daughter by Larry, and her new marriage and an expected child, was too much. So she decided to place Penelope in a school near Bournemouth. Mother averted Nancy’s visit with the reply that Larry and Eve were there. But Larry leapt at the chance to see Penelope for the first time since she was two and, recognising that she was feeling abandoned, was soon bringing her home on visits to Mother’s at number 52. Penelope was the link that connected Nancy with the family, but there was Margo, too; thirty-six years later, when Nancy was suffering from cancer, Penelope cared for her during that last year and Margo was with her on the day she died.

  Leslie had only recently moved out of number 52. With his inheritance he had bought a fishing boat; and with his luck it sank in Poole harbour during its maiden voyage. Now he had moved in with Doris, eleven years older than Leslie, ‘big-hearted, big-voiced, laughing Doris,’ as Gerry called her, who ran the pub down the bottom of the road. Eventually they married – ‘when really he should have been marrying Maria, that was my opinion’, said Margo, ‘but you see, he was already involved with Doris who was a very strong character’.

  Leslie with his wife, Doris, in Bournemouth.

  Maria Condos, whom the family had brought with them from Corfu, gave birth to Leslie’s son, Anthony (Tony), in September 1945. ‘Leslie didn’t really seem to take it too seriously,’ recalled Margo, while Maria ‘adored him, and used to call him Roula Mou, that’s Greek for darling, in fact deeper, more tender than darling. It was such an awkward situation; you bring a Greek maid back and, suddenly, find she’s expecting, you know, and I arranged for her to go to a home to have the baby. I kept in touch with her and when I had number 51 I had her to stay, and right to her death I was put down as her next of kin.’ Tony had memories of monkeys climbing over the furniture and snakes in chests of drawers, but he had no recollection of his father. Maria and Tony eventually moved into a council house in Bournemouth, but it was always a hard life for his mother, who struggled to raise him while working in the laundry at the local Christchurch Hospital.

  In 1952 Leslie and Doris went off to Kenya, where he managed a farm, then worked as a bursar at a school, where he misapproprated funds. In order to avoid prosecution, he and Doris fl
ed back to England in 1968, arriving with nothing more than the clothes they wore and £75 in their pockets. Nevertheless, for Margo, Leslie always remained what he had been with her in childhood, ‘a lovable rogue’. Leslie did manage to secure a living and a place to live when he got a job as a janitor in a block of flats near Marble Arch in London. He died in 1982 of a heart attack in a pub in Notting Hill Gate, where he would tell everyone that he was a civil engineer.

  * * *

  Back in Bournemouth, in 1947, Larry met up with Alan Thomas for the first time since before the war; Thomas was now the owner of Commins bookshop, had bought a large house near the centre of town, and was well on his way to becoming the doyen of antiquarian book dealers in Britain. Alan was like an anchor for Larry, also a bank vault and a library; throughout his peripatetic and sometimes perilous career Larry could rely on Alan to safeguard his notebooks and manuscripts and his working library, or order books for him. As well as looking after Larry’s material, Alan established his own extensive collection of Larry’s books and letters, which at his death he bequeathed to the British Library.

  From time to time Larry and Eve would go up to London, staying at the home of a friend. It was there that they had his publisher T.S. Eliot to dinner, Eve preparing an excellent Egyptian meal. Larry and Eve also went round to see Veronica Tester, one of the dancers who had visited him on Corfu. Veronica was no longer a ballerina; after the outbreak of war she worked for Tom Harrisson, ‘the barefoot anthropologist’ and founder of Mass Observation, which gave her an interest in sociology. But then she was called up and given the task of organising the Land Army in the remote countryside of Pembrokeshire. Finally, after the war she enrolled at the London School of Economics, studying sociology and mental health. Larry and Veronica’s husband, who was still in the military, ‘just sort of glared at each other the way chaps do, and I never saw Larry again’. In any case Veronica felt uncomfortable meeting Larry in the company of Eve: ‘To me, Nancy was who belonged with Larry.’

  Nancy turned out to have been right about the two dancers; Veronica, she thought, was too large, but Dorothy Stevenson had the right body for a ballerina. After leaving Corfu, Dot, as Veronica always called her friend, joined the Ballets Russes, the most celebrated company of its day, but when war broke out she returned to Australia, where with Edouard Borovansky, a former soloist with the Pavlova company, her brilliance as a dancer and choreographer inspired the development of ballet in her home country. It was said that when she danced a phrase, it stayed danced, holding its shape in the mind’s eye.

  Gerry’s mentor Theodore Stephanides with Alan Thomas in London.

  Also in London, just before he and Eve sailed for Argentina, Larry bumped into Gerry, who was waiting for his cargo ship to take him on his first expedition to Cameroon. Larry was meeting up with Theodore Stephanides; they had seen each other at intervals throughout the war, and now Theodore was settled in London with Mary and Alexia and was working as a radiologist at St Thomas’s Hospital, where he would remain until his retirement in 1961. But for Gerry this was the first time he had met his old mentor since leaving Corfu in 1939, ‘without whom I would have achieved nothing’, as Gerry later said, a friendship now renewed, and to be conjured afresh when he would come to write My Family and Other Animals.

  Larry’s voyage to Argentina turned out to be a disaster. From Cordoba he wrote to a friend, ‘Oh dear, this boring tedious town. Food very good. Easy life, but the climate is desperately exacerbatng – electrical storms four times a week – temperatures going up and down … It is so hard to write about Greece from here’ – he was trying to write Reflections on a Marine Venus, his book about Rhodes – ‘one’s feelings don’t rise in this climate, the death dew settles on one.’ Simply, he was away from the Mediterranean, whose islands and shores had become his home. Cutting short his contract after a year, he and Eve were back in England.

  On his return from Argentina, Larry accepted a Foreign Office appointment as press attaché at the British Embassy in Belgrade, where he arrived with Eve in May 1949. At least it was within reach of Greece, where Larry and Eve would drive for their holidays. Two years later, in 1951, Eve gave birth to their daughter Sappho; but towards the end of 1952 Eve was taken to a British military hospital in Germany after falling into a deep depression and suffering hallucinations, which had Larry fearing for their daughter’s life.

  Larry had hated Argentina and disliked Yugoslavia almost as much; it paled alongside the Mediterranean world he had discovered in Corfu. The work held no great appeal, either. Larry resigned his Foreign Office position and determined to write the book he had sketched out ten years earlier in Alexandria and which would become Justine, the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet.

  He and Eve had been preparing to go to Cyprus, where they could live cheaply on his savings, but in the event Eve continued under medical treatment in England, and early in 1953 Larry travelled alone with Sappho to Cyprus, where Louisa Durrell arrived in May to help look after the child.

  That July, Gerry’s first book, The Overloaded Ark, was published in London, followed a month later by Larry’s Reflections on a Marine Venus, about Rhodes. However, the cost of rebuilding an old house Larry bought in Bellapais, a mountain village in northern Cyprus, overlooking Kyrenia and the sea, obliged him to earn some money to staunch the drain on his savings. He found a job in the capital, Nicosia, teaching at the Pancyprian Gymnasium, and would rise each morning at 4.30am to write, before driving the thirty miles over twisting mountain roads to begin his job at seven-thirty.

  The following April, 1954, Eve felt well enough to come to Cyprus, though tensions between her and Mother led Louisa to return to Bournemouth. At the same time Larry accepted the post of Director of Information Services for the Cyprus government. Part of his responsibilities were the Cyprus Tourist Office and the Cyprus Broadcasting Station and the monthly magazine Cyprus Review, which Larry edited, assisted by his deputy editor George Wilkinson, Gerry’s old tutor in Corfu.

  Eve, Sappho, Larry and Mother at Bellapaix in Cyprus

  During the working week, Larry lived in a small house in Nicosia, returning at weekends to Eve and Sappho at Bellapais.

  * * *

  While Larry’s work on Justine was held up by these professional and personal concerns, Gerry’s The Bafut Beagles, another bestseller, was published in London in October. Then, a few days later, in a letter of 24 October 1954, Gerry wrote to Larry, outlining a grand scheme – he had decided to establish his own zoo and wanted Larry’s help.

  I wish to propound an idea to you on which I should like your help and co-operation. I am now, I think, sufficiently well known to attempt something which I have had in mind for a number of years. To you, no doubt, it will sound completely mad and a lot of rubbish. I want to start a Trust or organisation, with land in somewhere like the West Indies, for the breeding of those forms of animal life which are on the borders of extinction, and which without help of this sort cannot survive.

  Gerry’s fundamental belief, radical at the time, was that zoos should be for the benefit of animals, not for the entertainment of man – they were to be places where animals could be protected, where species could be preserved, numbers grown, and threatened creatures re-established in the wild. Gerry explained to Larry that he had spoken to Julian Huxley, the evolutionary biologist, who thought it an excellent and necessary idea, but Huxley pointed out that, though Gerry could get every well-known zoologist on his side, they did not have money. So, Gerry continued to Larry, ‘What I would like to know from you is, who do you know that is stinking rich?’

  The young media naturalists: Gerry with David Attenborough.

  At the end of 1954 Larry invited Gerry to write an article in The Cyprus Review about the potential for establishing a zoo on the island. ‘It strikes me as surpising that no one has yet started a zoo in a place like Cyprus … The advantages are considerable, the main one being the climate. It is amazing how a good climate can cut down the costs of s
uch a project, and most creatures, including some of the more rare or delicate beasts, could be bred there with success.’

  On 31 March 1955, Gerry arrived in Cyprus to see for himself. Larry arranged a cocktail party that evening to introduce Gerry to Cypriot society. Then, just after midnight, as the brothers were having a drink, the thunder of blasting bombs rolled through the streets of Nicosia, and like seismic aftershocks reports came in of more explosions in Limassol, Larnaca and Famagusta. Archbishop Makarios, leader of the Greek Cypriot community, had given the order to General Grivas, leader of EOKA, the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters, to begin the terrorist campaign whose aim was the union or enosis of Cyprus with Greece. Over the next two years hundreds of people, mostly Cypriots, would die at the hands of EOKA; Larry himself was nearly killed by a terrorist’s bullet and an incendiary bomb was placed in his garage.

  In July, Eve left Larry and, taking Sappho with her, went to England where she applied for a divorce. In that same summer another Alexandrian, Claude Vincendon, joined the French section of the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation. She was a writer ‘with something oddly her own’, Larry wrote to Henry Miller. ‘She tumbled into my arms and gave me enough spark to settle down and demolish the book.’

  I used to make her come round to the villa at bomb time and set up a typewriter on the dining table. We drank red wine and worked like maniacs. Every twenty minutes there was a boom and something in the town went up; the telephone rang. We disregarded everything. I answered the duty room, the staff room, Government House, Police Press – and back to Justine.