Corfu that summer turned into a caravanserai of the Durrell clan and their friends. Margaret came out for most of the time, followed by the formidable Aunt Prue and then brother Larry, still bowed down by the death of Claude, unusually subdued, sticking close to the crowd but saying little. (‘So many friends have died,’ he wrote in a letter, ‘that I feel ringed with graves … Damn everything.’) Dix Branch came out from Mexico, and Alan and Shirley Thomas, Mai Zetterling and David Hughes, and Xan and Daphne Fielding, the former a war hero who had fought behind the German lines in Greece, the latter (so Gerald enthused) ‘a really fabulous creature’. Peter Bull brought an American boyfriend called Don, a quiet, good-looking dancer. For Doreen Evans the casual coming and going of film stars, celebrities and royalty was heady stuff.
‘Last night was the big night,’ she wrote home excitedly on 21 August. ‘The Corfu film we made last year, Garden of the Gods, was shown at the Casino to all those who helped in any way or are important. Everyone was there from the fisherman who arranged the night fishing to the Archbishop with his long beard and the military Colonel in charge of the island under the new regime. Also Prince Philip’s sister and her family and many German princesses!! It was a big success and everyone was impressed by the film.’ On 12 September Doreen wrote again, with as much sangfroid as she could muster, to report how they had all taken Prince Michael of Kent – ‘a nice, unaffected, very lonely boy’ – on an excursion to Sidari in the north of the island.
The weather was unseasonably cold and wet that summer, but that did not deter the party on their excursions to other parts of the island and across to Paxos and Antipaxos in the benzina (the local motor-boat). One day they all drove off to Afra, the grand but decaying old Venetian country mansion belonging to the aristocratic Curcumelli family. ‘We drove up to a high village in the south,’ Doreen reported. ‘The streets were so narrow we had to leave the cars outside and walk. Immediately we appeared we were surrounded by a group of boys who proudly took us on a tour of their village. It is the richest in the island – but the dirtiest. Everyone lined the streets, standing in their doorways. They had to touch my face and hair and Margo took great pains to explain that not only was I “beautiful” but “good”! This was greeted with approval and applause, but she rather spoiled the effect by explaining that the only word of Greek I understood was “bed”! Typical of Marg, who never thinks before she speaks.’
Afra was the most famous and romantic of all the grand old estates on Corfu, built on the ruins of a thirteenth-century monastery by an eighteenth-century ancestor of the Curcumelli family. With its weathered roof of Roman tiles and its rusty pink Venetian facade, its luxuriant garden of magnolias and olive trees, its ancient, richly furnished interiors, Afra was both grand and lovely. Its current owner was Marie Curcumelli, a gallant old lady who had become another of Gerald’s Corfiot friends. ‘She is an enchanting woman,’ he wrote to Alan Thomas, ‘and lives all alone in this vast crumbling mansion which she is trying desperately to keep up, but it is a losing battle as she is so poverty stricken.’ Gerald hoped Alan could come out and cast an eye over her antique book collection, with a view to selling it to raise funds for the mansion’s embattled denizen: ‘She has got a damned great cellarful rotting away. Some dating as far back as her grandfather and even her great great grandfather.’
Gerald’s trips around the island made him increasingly despondent. If Mexico had been an exercise in futility, Corfu was an essay in destruction. A case in point was Palaeokrastitsa, one of the most beautiful spots on the island, with a lovely scalloped little bay and an ancient monastery perched on a high hill above. Throughout the whole of the twentieth century until now Palaeokrastitsa had remained unchanged – two houses, a tiny hotel, peace and silence on land and sea. But not any more. ‘They have turned it into a Greek Margate,’ Gerald was to lament to a friend. Soon, he reckoned, the rumble of the cement mixers would be drowning the birdsong in the secretive little Eden he called Nightingale Valley. Palaeokrastitsa was a metaphor for change on Corfu, and Corfu was a metaphor for change in the world. ‘We are like a set of idiot children,’ he was to protest, ‘let loose in a complex and beautiful garden that we are turning into a barren and infertile desert.’
But could one deny the aspirations of a poor people to a better life, some asked, simply because a privileged few, mostly foreigners, wished to keep the island preserved in aspic as it had been for the last hundred years? Was it possible to decree that an inhabited part of the planet remain frozen in time? It all depended, Gerald argued, on why it was changing, and how. Corfu wasn’t just being changed, it was being ruined, he reckoned. ‘When a Greek peasant designs a hotel, he makes the bad taste of a provincial Frenchman look like a stroke of genius. Total lack of control, total rapacity, total insensitivity. In the old days we used to have – think! – as many as fifty tourists coming ashore every two weeks, producing indescribable chaos and panic on the island. Nowadays …’
So upset was Gerald about what he saw as the rape of Corfu that he wrote a memorandum on the subject to the Greek Prime Minister, concluding: ‘I do hope that the necessary authorities in Athens will see their way to giving more power to the people on the spot, who are as worried as I am at the all too rapid and tasteless development of the island.’ Underlying Gerald’s disquiet was a sense of guilt that he had himself played a not insignificant part in the destruction of the thing he loved, by popularising the island in My Family and Other Animals. He was no less concerned that his recent film Garden of the Gods might have the same effect: ‘I am afraid that in spite of all my efforts it will promote rather than reduce tourism to Corfu,’ he wrote to his friend Marie Aspioti.
At that time the development on the island was more an intimation of things to come than an intolerable reality. The roads were still few and for the most part unsurfaced. Many parts of Corfu, especially the Durrell family’s old haunts along the north-east coast, remained unspoiled. Gerald was negotiating interminably to buy – from an eccentric old owner who wouldn’t sell – an ancient and beautiful olive press with a garden at the head of the little bay at Kouloura, not far from Lawrence’s old haunt at Kalami.
When Sir Giles Guthrie and his wife announced their intention of visiting Corfu, Gerald gave them some typically irreverent advice about who and what to see. ‘In order that you should not create unwanted disturbances and offend any friend of mine,’ he wrote, ‘I am issuing you with the following instructions which I hope you will abide by.’ Everybody in Corfu was mad, he advised. If they wanted anything fixed they should see Spiro’s son. If they wanted anything cooked – especially octopus – they should see a man called Vassili (‘face like a camel and the fastest, wittiest and most vulgar repartee in the whole of Corfu’) who ran his favourite restaurant, the Themis. ‘For your cultural activities you must approach Miss Marie Aspioti,’ Gerald advised. ‘She is the nearest approach to the White Queen outside the book. She is absolutely enchanting and her knowledge and love of Corfu is incredible.’ A rather well-preserved bandit called Christos was worth knowing, he went on – they couldn’t mistake him ‘because he has got a voice like a toad with laryngitis and a brand of English which makes Shakespeare turn in his grave’. The Manisses were three extraordinary brothers and were worth a visit. They were the uncrowned kings of the island, lived in one of the most gorgeous villas on Corfu and could do anything from providing you with a basket of new potatoes to getting you off a murder rap. ‘When you have finished insulting all my friends,’ he continued, ‘you may get Lady Guthrie to row you round the island. I am enclosing an Admiralty chart which was done in the 1800s and I have marked on it the places which I think would enchant you. If they don’t, then I think you have what I always suspected – incredibly bad taste!’
It was during their sojourn on Corfu that Jacquie noticed Gerald was beginning to behave rather strangely. His drinking had increased to the point where he was downing a bottle of ouzo before lunch, and he was becoming so difficult to live
with that she started to wonder whether it was possible to live with him at all. The exact nature of his deteriorating condition was hard to pin down. One symptom took the form of compulsive-obsessive syndrome. He would play the same music – usually Vivaldi or Scott Joplin – over and over again on the record player. On one occasion he turned his camera on his favourite view at Pérama – across the water to Mouse Island – and proceeded to take twenty identical shots of the same view, almost as if he were trying to will the scene to transform itself into the enchanted world of his lost boyhood of long ago, when he was happy, carefree – and loved.
Part of the problem, clearly, was Corfu itself. ‘He becomes quite intolerable from the moment he sets foot on the quay,’ Jacquie was to tell a friend, ‘and realises it will never be what it was. That’s why I loathe Corfu – for what it does to him now.’ On Corfu in the summer of 1968 Gerald seemed to be turning into a tortured soul, shrouded in gloom and fear, bad-tempered, intransigent, contradictory, subject to long silences and furious outbursts of temper. One day he told Jacquie, ‘I keep having these deep depressive doubts. I feel I want to commit suicide.’
Margaret, too, was aware that something was seriously amiss. ‘I remember Gerry weeping in the car,’ she was to relate, ‘weeping, weeping, weeping, and I said, “What is the matter?” He wouldn’t say. Something was very wrong and I knew it was to do with Jacquie.’ Margaret reckoned that Ann Peters – an on-off long-term secretary-cum-friend whom Gerald had first met on Corfu in the early sixties – was in love with her brother. ‘He’d have done better to have married her,’ she felt. ‘I could fall in and out of love like a yoyo, but Gerry couldn’t – this was the problem. Gerry remained fond of Jacquie long after she had ceased to be fond of him. He had bouts of weeping and drinking himself to death. I don’t know how he managed to do the things he did with all those pressures that were on him.’
The best course seemed to be to return to Jersey and seek medical help, but the return journey involved a detour to Basle Zoo to consult with its director Ernst Lang on zoo business, and it was almost the middle of October before Gerald and Jacquie returned home. Dr Hunter, their local GP, examined Gerald and decided he needed specialist care and recuperation. Jacquie felt his breakdown was the result of gross overwork, after years of unremitting pressure at the zoo. This was undoubtedly a major contributory cause, but Dr Hunter thought it was also alcohol-related. He was all for leaving it till Gerald raised the subject himself, but Jacquie told him, ‘If you wait that long, he’ll probably hang himself.’ So arrangements were made for Gerald to be admitted to The Priory, in Roehampton, south-west London, an expensive private clinic in a splendid Gothic building for people with depressive conditions, especially alcohol-and drug-related ones, and early in 1969 Gerald was quietly slipped off for a three-week ‘cure’.
The big question was: why had Gerald Durrell cracked up? He was drinking anything by this time, Jacquie was to recall. He drank for all the usual reasons – to cope with stress, to cover his shyness, for Dutch courage, for joie de vivre, to drown his sorrows, to escape. The conventional attitude to alcohol addiction was to blame it on weakness of character, but in Gerald’s case it was much more likely to be due to something beyond his control – an alcohol gene which he and his brothers had inherited, most likely from their mother. Sometimes it seemed that Gerald was addicted to the simple physiological mechanism of drinking, for whenever he couldn’t get booze he would drink tea, and even water, in vast quantities.
The only absolute cure for such a genetically driven compulsion was total abstinence, and though occasionally Gerald had attempted this, the inordinate stresses in his life made it difficult to persevere with, for alcohol was more an enabler than a disabler for him. He got to a point where, like his brother Larry, he couldn’t function without it – or at least, where he functioned better with it. Life was hard. So much to do. So little time. He worked constantly, mind pelting, and when he stopped he drank. You had to get through the day.
The medic in charge at The Priory was a Dr Flood.
‘He’s just an alcoholic,’ Dr Flood told Jacquie at their first meeting.
‘Are you trying to tell me something I don’t know?’ she retorted.
‘Well, he’s been having affairs, I suppose?’ Dr Flood went on.
‘No,’ Jacquie replied. ‘He hasn’t, actually.’
‘Well, then you’ve been having an affair.’
‘No,’ Jacquie told him. ‘I have not.’
Dr Flood, having run through the usual options, paused for a moment.
‘So,’ he went on. ‘What do you think is the cause?’
Jacquie told him she thought it was his mother’s death, and his inability to come to terms with it. But the doctor only spoke to Gerry twice while he was there, and never got to the bottom of it. Possibly Gerald’s breakdown was a combination of many things – stress, overwork, alcohol, Corfu, the zoo, the death of Mother, mid-life crisis, the fate of the animal kingdom, the after-effects of malaria, hepatitis and all the other tropical bugs, the frustrations and inner contradictions of body and soul – the whole package, the intolerable burden of being.
It could not have helped that in the previous year Jacquie’s book, Beasts in my Bed, had been published by Collins. In it she proclaimed to friends and public alike: ‘I began to loathe the zoo or anything to do with it … I often felt that I had married a zoo and not a human being.’ Reading his wife’s message of disillusionment and renunciation, Gerald may well have felt that if his mother’s death had triggered his troubles, his wife’s withdrawal of total support had exacerbated them, for he was now doubly deprived, orphaned twice over.
Whatever the cause, Gerald was put on the clinic’s standard regimen for such cases, a heavy cocktail of tranquillisers, to which was added (since there seemed no enforced restriction) crates of booze brought to his room by his many well-wishers. On Dr Flood’s advice Jacquie’s visits were restricted, though Saranne Calthorpe called regularly on her behalf.
The publication of his two non-fiction books did little to alleviate Gerald’s problems, though he was proud of the fact that with his picaresque comic novel Rosy is my Relative he had finally succeeded in writing something straight out of his head, just like Lawrence. The story of Adrian Rookwhistle’s adventures travelling around Edwardian England with Rosy, an amazing elephant with an unfortunate penchant for alcohol, was described by the Washington Post as ‘a descendant of the traditional, rambling, good-natured British novel which goes back at least to Smollett’. Gerald’s fiction works tended to be curiously old-fashioned, almost as Edwardian as Adrian Rookwhistle in tone and outlook, and never found a readership comparable to his non-fiction. He wrote only one other novel for adult readers, most of his fiction being aimed at a juvenile audience. Published almost simultaneously with Rosy was The Donkey Rustlers, a charming and ingenious tale of two English children who hold a Greek village to ransom by rustling their entire stock of donkeys in Wild West style and keeping them hidden away on a tiny island. Both books soon attracted the attention of the film industry, and it was Rosy that brought home the bacon when Ken Harper, an independent British producer, paid £25,000 for it. The film was never made, but the deal solved all the Durrells’ financial problemss at a stroke, including the original loan they took out to found Jersey Zoo.
After three weeks Gerald was released from The Priory and went to stay in Jimmy and Hope Piatt’s London flat in order to acclimatise himself to being back in the normal world. Dr Flood advised Jacquie to leave him be for a time, and it was not until his return to Jersey in February that they were reunited. This proved to be a mixed blessing. ‘Though I did all I possibly could to support him throughout this bleak period in his life,’ Jacquie recalled, ‘all this naturally put a tremendous strain on our already creaking relationship.’ Drugged up to the eyeballs with medication, Gerald was ‘almost like a zombie’, and for Jacquie it was painful to watch him trying to get back into a normal routine.
; On 6 February Gerald scribbled a note to Alan Thomas: ‘I am feeling much better but still under these bloody drugs so one cannot really tell whether one is making any progress or not, as one is wandering around in a state of euphoria. I sometimes wake at night to find myself standing in the middle of the bedroom and wonder what the hell I am there for.’ Try as he might, Gerald found it virtually impossible to focus on his work, and was forced to admit to the Trust’s Scientific Advisory Committee that owing to illness he would be away from the island for part of the coming summer and all of the following winter. On 18 March Jacquie told Lawrence that Gerry was getting much better, but needed complete rest. In the following month Gerald left Jersey again for a recuperative sojourn on Corfu with Jacquie and Saranne Calthorpe.
They were to be away for more than three months, returning to Jersey in late July 1969 after a short diversion to the Greek mainland. They did not stay at home for long. Since their visit to Australia Gerald and Jacquie had felt an affinity for the country and its people, and now Gerald dreamed up a reason for going back there – not a collecting expedition this time, nothing too heavy or demanding, more a look-see, a conservation fact-finding mission, with the possibility of a book on the Great Barrier Reef thrown in if he felt up to it. In reality the trip was a kind of purposeful stretch of R & R designed to put Gerald and his shattered psyche in order again. With a long sea voyage out and a long sea voyage back he would be out of contact with the world of the zoo and the Trust for a full nine months.
Gerald Durrell Page 47
