Читать книгу Gerald Durrell: The Authorised Biography - Douglas Botting - Страница 11

The house at 43 Alleyn Park, in the prosperous and leafy south London suburb of Dulwich, now became the Durrell family home. It was a substantial house, befitting the family of a servant of empire who had made his pile, with large rooms on three floors and a big garden enclosing it. Before long Mother had installed Gerald’s Aunt Prudence, a butler and a huge mastiff guard dog that chased the tradesmen and according to Gerald devoured two little dogs a day. But the new house was vast, expensive to run, and haunted: one evening Mother saw the ghost of her late husband, as plain as day, smoking a cigarette in a chair – or so Gerald claimed.

Early in 1930, therefore, when Gerald was five, the family took over a large flat at 10 Queen’s Court, an annexe of the sprawling Queen’s Hotel, a Victorian pile stuck in the faded south London suburb of Upper Norwood. Mother’s cousin Fan lived here, along with other marooned refugees from the Indian Army and Civil Service, so for her the place felt almost like home. The family’s new abode was a strange, elongated flat in the hotel grounds. The entrance was through the hotel, but there was a side door which allowed access to the extensive garden, with its lawns, trees and pond. ‘The flat itself consisted of a big dining room cum drawing room,’ Gerald recalled, ‘a room opposite which was for Larry, then a small room in which I kept my toys, then a minuscule bathroom and kitchen, and finally Mother’s spacious bedroom. Lying in bed in her room, you could look down the whole length of the flat to the front door.’

Mother’s susceptibility to the paranormal showed no signs of abating, for this place too turned out to be haunted, one ghost being visible, two others audible. The first took the form of a woman who appeared at the foot of Mother’s bed when she woke from a siesta one day. The woman smiled at Mother, then faded slowly away. She appeared again a few weeks later, this time witnessed by Gerald’s cousins Molly and Phyllis, who came running into the kitchen shouting, ‘Auntie, Auntie, there’s a strange lady in your room.’

The second ghost took the form of a voice that kept telling Mother to put her head in the gas oven, and the third manifested itself in Larry’s room one night when he was playing in a jazz band up in town. In Larry’s room reposed the great teak roll-top desk that his father had had built to his own design. When the roll-top was raised or lowered the noise, Gerald recalled, was indescribable. That night, while Mother lay smoking in bed, waiting anxiously for Larry’s return, she heard the unmistakable racket of the roll-top opening and closing. ‘Taking me firmly by the hand,’ Gerald was to recount, ‘we went down the length of the flat, listening to the constant clatter of the lid being pulled shut and then opened again, but the moment we opened the door and looked into the room there was nothing to be seen.’

It was in the garden of the Queen’s Hotel, while he was trying to catch birds by putting salt on their tails, that Gerald first came face to face with the more sensual side of life, in the form of a beautiful young woman called Tabitha. ‘She had big, melting brown eyes,’ he recalled, ‘brown and glossy as new horse chestnuts, a wide smile, brown hair bobbed and with a fringe like a Christmas cracker.’ Before long Tabitha was looking after him in her tiny flat whenever Mother went off house-hunting. She had a cat called Cuthbert and two goldfish called Mr Jenkins and Clara Butt, as well as a lot of gentlemen friends who came and went and seemed to spend a shorter or longer time in her bedroom – to talk business, she told her young friend.

‘I loved the days I spent with Tabitha,’ Gerald wrote in his private memoir:

In fact I loved Tabitha very much. She was so gentle and gay, her smile engulfed you with love. She smelt gorgeous too, which was important to me, since Mother smelt gorgeous as well. She was not only very sweet and kind but very funny. She had a squeaky wind-up gramophone and a pile of records of Harry Lauder and Jack Buchanan, so we would clear away the furniture and Tabitha would teach me how to do the Charleston and the waltz. At times we went round and round so fast that eventually we would collapse on the sofa, she with peals of laughter and me giggling like a hysteric. Tabitha also taught me lots of songs, including one which enchanted me:

Iz ’e an Aussie, iz ’e, Lizzie?

Iz ’e an Aussie, iz ’e, eh?

Iz it because ’e iz an Aussie

That ’e makes you feel this way?

But alas, somehow or other Mother got to hear of Tabitha’s business associates and my visits to her flat were ended. So Tabitha’s lovely brown eyes and wonderful smell disappeared from my world, and I mourned the fact that I could no longer waltz and Charleston and sing silly songs with this enchanting girl.

Looking back in later years, it struck Gerald as odd that Mother should have been so prim. ‘After all,’ he noted, ‘she was rearing a brood of offspring who became sexually precocious and pursued their own interests with the relentlessness of dynamos. Still, her fledglings managed to erode her Victorian attitudes and train her into more broad-minded ways, so that when, at the age of twenty-one, I went home one weekend with a girlfriend, I found a note from my mother which said: “I have made up two beds, dear, and the double bed, since you didn’t tell me whether you are sleeping together or not. The sheets are aired and the gin is in the dining room cupboard.”’

It was while living at the Queen’s Hotel annexe that Mother got to know the Brown family – a matriarchy of English provenance who had recently come over from America, consisting of Granny Richardson, her daughter Mrs Brown, and Mrs Brown’s young daughter Dorothy. Like the Durrells, the Browns had a garden flat at the hotel, and the two mothers soon became good friends, for both were exiles who had returned to a foreign motherland. Dorothy Brown was eleven when she first encountered Gerald, who had just turned five. ‘He was a bright little spark,’ she recalled, ‘and even then he was very fond of animals. When our cat had kittens he was always there on the doorstep, clamouring to see them. He was very much a mother’s boy and always terribly fond of her. As far as he was concerned she could do no wrong.’

Like Louisa Durrell, the Browns were looking for a house to buy, and finally settled on Bournemouth, a salubrious seaside resort on the south coast, stuffed with decaying ex-members of His Majesty’s Forces and genteel ladies eking out modest pensions, but warmer and sunnier than most towns in England, and surrounded by beautiful countryside. Mother decided to follow her friends’ example and move to Bournemouth, and early in 1931 the family became the proud possessors of Berridge House, at 6 Spur Hill, Parkstone, complete with a butler, a housekeeper and two servants. This marked the beginning of the Durrells’ close association with Bournemouth, which has lasted to the present day.

Berridge House was a huge Victorian mansion standing in four acres of grounds, part woodland, part orchard, with a lawn on which two games of tennis could be played at once and a herbaceous border which was, Gerald remembered, ‘slightly wider than the Nile and home to nearly every known weed, with the exception of Mandrake’. When Mother was asked if the house was not a trifle large for a widowed lady and a six-year-old boy – Margaret was now at Malvern, Leslie at Dulwich and Larry at a crammer’s – she answered, rather vaguely, that she had to have room for her children’s friends. To the young Gerald the place looked like a gigantic dolls’ house, with a bewildering quantity of bedrooms, bathrooms and attic rooms, a huge drawing room, dining room and kitchen, a cellar and a parquet-floored basement ballroom that ran the length and width of the house. On rainy days this vast ballroom was his playroom, where he could indulge in ingenuity and uproar without knocking anything over or disturbing anyone upstairs.

To celebrate the move Mother bought Gerald a Cocker spaniel, the first dog of his very own. It arrived in a cardboard box, and when Gerald opened it the creature inside took his breath away – ‘a dog all soft and squidgy, with hair the colour of ripe corn and big brown eyes and a loving disposition’. Gerald named the dog Simon, and from the moment he lifted him from his cardboard box he became his devoted companion.

There was no comparable companion for Mother, however, and the reality of her lonely state began to take its toll of her. ‘The difficulties of living in a great, echoing, empty house with only a small boy as a companion began to tell on Mother’s nerves,’ Gerry was to write in his memoir. She devoted herself to her cooking and teaching Gerald how to cook, and to tending the herbaceous borders in the garden, but then came the evening, and solitude. ‘She was lonely,’ Gerald wrote, ‘and she took to mourning the death of my father in earnest with the aid of the Demon Drink, resorting to the bottle more and more frequently.’

It helped, perhaps, that Gerald shared her bed with her. ‘At the end of the day I would have my bath and then, with a clothes brush, I would climb into the bed that I shared with Mother and dust it carefully to make sure there was not a speck of dust anywhere. Then Mother would come to bed and I would curl up against her warm body in its silk nightgown and frequently I would wake to find myself pressed up against her in a state of arousal.’ For many years to come, mother and child were to remain closer to one another than to any other human beings.

Eventually, matters reached a crisis. ‘Mother departed,’ Gerald remembered, ‘to have what in those days was called a “nervous breakdown” and Miss Burroughs entered my life.’ Miss Burroughs was Gerald’s first and last English governess. ‘She had a face,’ he recalled, ‘which disappointment had crumpled, and embedded in it were two eyes, grey and sharp as flints.’ Miss Burroughs had never had to deal with a small boy before. Terrified for some reason that Gerald might be kidnapped, she instituted a regime of locked doors, as though he were a dangerous prisoner. ‘I was locked in the kitchen, the drawing room and the dining room, but the worst thing was that she banished Simon from my bedroom, saying that dogs were full of germs, and locked me in at night, so that by morning my bladder was bursting, and as I didn’t dare wet the bed I had to lift a corner of the carpet to relieve myself.’

Miss Burroughs’ cooking left a lot – indeed, ‘virtually everything’ – to be desired. She was, Gerald recollected, the only person he had ever met who put sago in the gruel she called soup – ‘like drinking frog-spawn’. If the weather was bad, he was confined to the ballroom, where he and Simon invented their own games. Boy and dog built up an astonishing rapport, understanding completely how each other’s human and canine imaginations were working.

‘Sometimes, miraculously, Simon would become a pride of lions,’ Gerald was to record, ‘and I a lone Christian in an arena. As I prepared to strangle him, he would behave in the most un-lionlike way, slobbering over me with his moist, velvet-soft mouth and crooning endearments. At other times I would change into a dog and follow him round the ballroom on all fours, panting when he panted, scratching when he scratched and flinging myself down in abandoned attitudes as he did.’

Simon, Gerald noticed, was basically a coward, for whom ‘a lawnmower was a machine from hell’, and sadly it was his cowardice, which should have saved his life, that was to cause his death. Startled by a chimneysweep driving away from the house on a motorcycle and sidecar, he turned and fled down the drive, into the road and under the wheel of a car, which, Gerald was to lament, ‘neatly crushed Simon’s skull, killing him instantly’.

Gerald was left as alone as his mother, now returned from her cure and, for the moment, recovered from her addiction. It was high time, she decided, for him to begin some kind of formal education and to mix with other children. Down the hill from Berridge House was a kindergarten called The Birches, run by a large old lady called Auntie and a dapper, kindly, intelligent woman called Miss Squire, better known to the children as Squig. Gerald remembered The Birches with fondness. It was the only school he ever attended where he completed the course.

Gerald loved The Birches because both Auntie and Miss Squire knew exactly how to teach and treat young people. Every morning he would take a tribute of slugs, snails, earwigs and other creepy-crawlies down to Squig, sometimes in matchboxes and sometimes in his pocket, thus forming a zoo of a kind. ‘The boy’s mad!’ exclaimed brother Lawrence when he learnt of this. ‘Snails in his pockets …!’

‘Aren’t they lovely?’ Gerald would tell Squig.

‘Oh, yes dear, quite beautiful,’ Squig would reply, ‘but I think they would probably be happier in the garden.’

Noticing the interest that Gerald’s wrigglies aroused in his fellow pupils, Squig bought and installed an aquarium with some goldfish and pond snails in it, and they would all watch the antics of these creatures absolutely enthralled. It was about this time that Gerald, still only six, announced to his mother his wish to have a zoo of his own one day. He had kept a collection of small toy animals made of lead – camel, penguin, elephant, two tigers – in a wooden orange-box at the Queen’s Hotel, but one day as he walked along the Bournemouth promenade with his mother he described to her his blueprint for a collection of real creatures, listing the species, the kinds of cages they would be housed in, and the cottage in which he and his mother would live at his zoo.

In 1932 the family moved a short distance to a brand new house at 18 Wimborne Road, Bournemouth, which Mother named Dixie Lodge in honour of her family. Though still substantial, it was a rather smaller property than Berridge House, in less extensive grounds, and so easier and cheaper to run. In Gerald’s view it was a pleasanter place altogether, and the garden contained a number of climbable trees which were home to all sorts of strange insects. Here he settled down – ‘quite happily’, he said, ‘under the raucous but benign influence of Lottie, the Swiss maid’.

But then, when he was eight, disaster struck out of a clear blue sky:

Mother did something so terrible that I was bereft of words. She enrolled me in the local school. Not a pleasant kindergarten like The Birches, where you made things out of plasticine and drew pictures, but a real school. Wychwood School was a prep school where they expected you to learn things like algebra and history – and things that were even greater anathema to me, like sports. As both my scholastic achievements and interest in sports were nil, I was, not unnaturally, somewhat of a dullard.

Football and cricket were an utter bore for Gerald, gym and swimming lessons an absolute torture, bullying a constant menace. The only part of the curriculum that appealed to him was the one and a half hours per week devoted to natural history. ‘This was taken by the gym mistress, Miss Allard,’ he remembered, ‘a tall blonde lady with protuberant blue eyes. As soon as she realised my genuine interest in natural history, she went out of her way to take a lot of trouble with me and so she became my heroine.’

Gerald came to hate the school so vehemently that it was all Louisa could do to keep him there at all. ‘He used to be taken to school by his mother in the morning,’ recalled a visitor to Dixie Lodge; ‘at any rate she tried to take him – and he would cling onto the railings on the way, screaming, and then he’d have to be taken home, and then he’d get a temperature and the doctor would say, it’s no good, you’ll have to keep him away from school.’ Eventually the GP diagnosed Gerald’s recurring condition as a chronic form of what he called ‘school pain’ – a psychosomatic reaction which prevented the boy from ever completing his prep school education.

Soon after the Durrells moved into Dixie Lodge, Lawrence (who lived there off and on, as did Leslie and Margaret) had struck up a friendship with Alan Thomas, the assistant manager at Bournemouth’s famous Commin’s bookshop, a young man of about Lawrence’s age who shared many of his intellectual and literary interests. Enormously tall, thin, bearded and ‘spider-like’, Alan lived in nearby Boscombe, and soon got to know the family well, becoming a kind of extra brother to the boys and a lifelong friend. It was not long after Gerald had joined the unhappy ranks of Wychwood that Alan happened to spot the headmaster browsing in his shop.

‘I believe you have the brother of a friend of mine at your school,’ said Alan.

‘Oh?’ said the headmaster. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Durrell. Gerald Durrell,’ Alan replied.

‘The most ignorant boy in the school,’ snapped the headmaster, and stalked out of the shop.

Gerald stumbled with difficulty through his lessons, until one day, falsely accused of a misdemeanour by the school sneak and given six of the best on his bare bottom by the headmaster, his mother took the mortified boy away from the school for good, thus terminating his formal schooling for ever at the age of nine.

To help Gerald get over the trauma of his beating, Mother decided to buy him a present, and took him down on the tram to Bournemouth town centre to choose a dog at the pet shop. Gerald recalled:

There was a whole litter of curly-headed black puppies in the window and I stood for a long time wondering which one I should buy. At length I decided on the smallest one, the one that was getting the most bullying from the others, and he was purchased for the noble sum of ten shillings. I carried him home in triumph and christened him Roger and he turned out to be one of the most intelligent, brave and lovely dogs that I have ever had. He grew rapidly into something resembling a small Airedale covered with the sort of curls you find on a poodle. He was very intelligent and soon mastered several tricks, such as dying for King and Country.

Roger was destined one day to become famous – and, in a sense, immortal.

Relieved of the intolerable burden of schooling, Gerald reverted to his normal cheerful, engaging self, exploring the garden, climbing the trees, playing with his dog, roaming around the house with his pockets full of slugs and snails, dreaming up pranks. It was Gerald, Dorothy Brown recalled, who would put stink-bombs in the coal scuttle when he came over with the family for Christmas. Mother presided over the moveable feast that was life at Dixie Lodge. ‘No one was ever turned away from her table,’ Dorothy remembered, ‘and all her children’s friends were always welcome. “How many of you can come round tonight?” she would ask, and they would all sit down, young and old together. Mother was very small but she had a very big heart. She was very friendly and a good mixer and she was a wonderful cook.’

The delicious aromas that drifted out of Mother’s kitchen, the range and quality of the dishes she brought to the dining table, and the enthusiasm, good cheer and riotous conversation enjoyed by the company that sat down at that table had a deep and permanent impact on her youngest child. Gerald emerged into maturity as if he had been born a gourmet and a gourmand. Much of her cooking Louisa had learned from her mother, the rest from her Indian cooks in the kitchens of her various homes, where she would secretly spend hours behind her disapproving husband’s back. When she returned to England she brought with her the cookbooks and notebooks she had carted around the subcontinent during her itinerant life there. Some of Louisa’s favourite recipes – English, Anglo-Indian and Indian – had been copied out in a perfect Victorian copperplate by her mother: ‘Chappatis’, ‘Toffy’, ‘A Cake’, ‘Milk Punch’, ‘German Puffs’, ‘Jew Pickle’ (prunes, chillies, dates, mango and green ginger). Most, though, were in her own hand, and embraced the cuisine of the world, from ‘Afghan Cauliflower’, ‘Indian Budgees’ and ‘American Way of Frying Chicken’ to ‘Dutch Apple Pudding’, ‘Indian Plum Cake’, ‘Russian Sweet’, ‘All Purpose Cake’, ‘Spiral Socks’ (a mysterious entry) and ‘Baby’s Knitted Cap’ (another). But Indian cookery was her tour de force and alcoholic concoctions her hobby: dandelion wine, raisin wine, ginger wine (requiring six bottles of rum) and daisy wine (four quarts of daisy blossoms, yeast, lemons, mangoes and sugar).

Not surprisingly, Alan Thomas was soon spending almost every evening and weekend with the family. They were, he quickly realised, a most extraordinary bunch:

There never was more generous hospitality. Nobody who has known the family at all well can deny that their company is ‘life-enhancing’. All six members of the family were remarkable in themselves, but in lively reaction to each other the whole was greater than the sum of the parts. Amid the gales of Rabelaisian laughter, the wit, Larry’s songs accompanied by piano or guitar, the furious arguments and animated conversation going on long into the night, I felt that life had taken on a new dimension.

At this time Lawrence was writing, Margaret rebelling about returning to school, and Leslie ‘crooning, like a devoted mother, over his new collection of firearms’. As for Gerald, though he was still tender in years he was already a great animal collector, and every washbasin in the house was filled with newts, tadpoles and the like.

‘While one could hardly say that Mrs Durrell was in control of the family,’ Alan recalled, ‘it was her warm-hearted character, her amused but loving tolerance that held them together; even during the occasional flare-ups of Irish temper. I remember Gerry, furious with Larry who, wanting to wash, pulled the plug out of a basin full of marine life. Spluttering with ungovernable rage, almost incoherent, searching for the most damaging insult in his vocabulary: “You, you (pause), you AUTHOR, YOU.’”

But the boy Gerald owed much to his big brother’s selfless and unstinting support: ‘Years ago when I was six or seven years old and Larry was a struggling and unknown writer, he would encourage me to write. Spurred on by his support, I wrote a fair bit of doggerel in those days and Larry always treated these effusions with as much respect as if they had just come from the pen of T.S. Eliot. He would always stop whatever work he was engaged upon to type my jingles out for me and so it was from Larry’s typewriter that I first saw my name, as it were, in print.’

Near the end of his life, with more than half the family now dead, Gerald looked back with fondness and frankness at the turmoil of his childhood days, scribbling a fleeting insight in a shaky hand on a yellow restaurant paper napkin: ‘My family was an omelette of rages and laughter entwined with a curious love – an amalgam of stupidity and love.’

At about the time Mother bought Dixie Lodge, Lawrence met Nancy Myers, an art student at the Slade, slightly younger than him and very like Greta Garbo to look at – tall, slim, blonde, blue-eyed. Just turned twenty, Lawrence was living a dedicatedly Bohemian, aspiringly artistic existence in London, playing jazz piano in the Blue Peter nightclub, scribbling poetry, grappling with his first novel and reading voraciously under the great dome of the British Library. ‘My so-called upbringing was quite an uproar,’ he was to recall. ‘I have always broken stable when I was unhappy. I hymned and whored in London. I met Nancy in an equally precarious position and we struck up an incongruous partnership.’ Soon he and Nancy were sharing a bedsit in Guilford Street, near Russell Square. ‘Well, we did a bit of drinking and dying. Ran a photographic studio together. It crashed. Tried posters, short stories, journalism – everything short of selling our bottoms to clergymen. I wrote a cheap novel. Sold it – well that altered things. Here was a stable profession for me to follow. Art for money’s sake.’

Before long Lawrence decided it was time Nancy was given her baptism of fire and shown off to the family. Many years later, Nancy vividly remembered her introduction to that unforgettable ménage.

We drove down in the car for the weekend. I was fascinated to be meeting this family, because Larry dramatised everything – mad mother, ridiculous children, mother drunk, throwing their fortune to the winds, getting rid of everything … hellish, foolish, stupid woman. I mean, it’s wonderful to hear anybody talking about their family like that, and I was very thrilled.

The house had no architectural merit at all, but the rooms were a fair size, and they had a certain amount of comfort – a rather disarray sort of comfort. I mean, they had a few easy chairs and a sofa in the sitting-room and the floors were carpeted and things. It all seemed a little bit makeshift somehow. But I remember I loved the house – the sort of craziness of it, people sort of playing at keeping house rather than really keeping house. You felt they weren’t forced into any mould like people usually are – every sort of meal was at a different time, and everybody was shouting at everybody else, no control anywhere.

Really it was the first time I’d been in a family – in a jolly family – and the first time that I’d been able to say what I liked – there was nothing forbidden to say. It was a great opening-up experience for me, hearing everybody saying ‘You bloody fool!’ to everybody else, and getting away with it. It was marvellous. So I really fell in love with the family.

Gerry was six or seven at the time – a very slender, very delicate, very charming little boy who looked a bit like Christopher Robin and was too sensitive to go to school. Even at that time there was quite a lot of friction between Larry and Leslie, and Larry used to tease his brother mercilessly. Leslie was never very quick-witted, and Larry would make him look a fool any time he liked, and any time Leslie crossed him he used to absolutely flay him, which Leslie minded very much.

But my first visit ended in disaster. On our first morning Larry came into my room and hopped into bed with me, and then Gerry came along and hopped into bed too, so we were all sort of cosy under the blankets, cuddled together, the three of us, and this was too much for Mother. She came in and said she’d never been so disgusted in her life. ‘What a way to behave!’ she said, shouting. ‘Out you go, out you go this minute, out you both go, five minutes and you must get out, I’m not having Gerry corrupted!’ She could have histrionics when she wanted to.

I was a bit abashed, feeling terrible about it, but Larry said, ‘Oh, the silly woman, she’ll get over it. Come on, we’ll go. She’ll get over it in a day and be pleased to have us back. Silly nothing – just like a stupid woman. Don’t be such a fool, Mother …’

So we sort of tiptoed out of the house – but within a fortnight or so we were welcomed back, and you know, Mother closed her eyes to whatever we were doing from then onwards. And she was terribly sweet to me. I mean, I always felt rather like a goose among ducklings – they were all so small and I was so long and thin. But they couldn’t have been sweeter. After that first moment Mother was always clucking over me. She thought I looked consumptive and used to give me lots of gold-top milk and butter and fill me up with cream and Weetabix and whatever was going. And she was a marvellous cook; she did most of the cooking, a lot of hot stuff, curries, Indian cooking …

I just loved the whole craziness of it. Mother used to drink a lot of gin at that time, and she used to retire to bed when Gerry went to bed – Gerry wouldn’t go to bed without her, he was afraid of being on his own, I think – and she’d take her gin bottle up with her when she went. So then we all used to retire up there, carrying a gin bottle up to bed. She had a large double bed, and an enormous silver tea-tray with lots of silver teapots and things on it, and we’d carry on the evening sitting on the bed, drinking gin and tea and chatting, while Gerry was asleep in his own bed in the same room. I think he must have been able to go to sleep if there was a noise going on. It was all very cosy.

Though friends might adore the Durrells, the wider family – the cohort of aunts and grannies – disapproved mightily. They were appalled at Mother’s incompetence and extravagance when it came to money, dismayed that she would not help her cousin Fan out of her penury, and scandalised at the way she was bringing up her children – her lack of control; their wild, undisciplined ways; the outrageous Bohemian ambience of her household, as they saw it, doubly shocking in the deathly polite context of suburban Bournemouth. Leslie especially was a cause for concern. One cousin, Molly Briggs, the daughter of Gerald’s father’s sister Elsie, remembered:

Leslie drove Aunt Lou mad at this time, staying in bed till midday and slouching about. He never settled to anything, never saw anything through. As children my sister and I didn’t like him very much. Sometimes he would condescend to play with us, but you never knew from one minute to the next how he would behave. He would suddenly turn nasty for no reason at all. Both Gerry and Leslie ran rings round Aunt Lou and were quite unmanageable, But Gerry was a beautiful little boy, really, and great fun. He used to shin up a tree where he had a secret place we didn’t dare follow him to. And he used to play with three slow worms, fondling them and winding them around his hands. We had been brought up in Ceylon to fear snakes, so were terrified of Gerry’s pets and wouldn’t touch them. I remember we learned to ride a bike with Gerry on a sunken lawn surrounded by heather banks. We were terribly noisy and shrieked with laughter whenever we fell over, which was very often, so eventually Larry, who was probably composing something, leaned out of an upstairs window and shouted: ‘Stop that bloody row!’

‘It’s curious – something one didn’t realise at the time – but my mother allowed us to be,’ Gerald recalled.

She worried over us, she advised (when we asked) and the advice always ended with, ‘But anyway, dear, you must do what you think best.’ It was, I suppose, a form of indoctrination, a form of guidance. She opened new doors on problems that allowed new explorations of ways in which you might – or might not – deal with them – simple things now ingrained in me without a recollection of how they got there. I was never lectured, never scolded.

Lawrence and Nancy had been living for a year with their friends George and Pam Wilkinson in a cottage at Loxwood in Sussex, where Lawrence wrote his first novel, a novice work called Pied Piper of Lovers, which was published in 1935. At the end of 1934 the Wilkinsons had struck camp and moved on, emigrating to the Greek island of Corfu, where the climate was good, the exchange rate favourable and the living cheap and easy. Lawrence and Nancy, meanwhile, moved in with the family at Dixie Lodge. From time to time a letter would arrive from George Wilkinson describing the idyllic life they were leading on their beautiful, verdant and as yet unspoilt island, and gradually the idea began to grow – in Lawrence’s mind first – that perhaps that was where he and Nancy should live and have their being, a perfect retreat for a young aspiring writer and a young aspiring painter, both of them keen to learn what they could of ancient Greek art and archaeology. There was nothing to keep Lawrence in England. It was not the land of his birth, he had no roots there, and there was much about the place and the English outlook and way of life – ‘the English way of death’, he called it – that he had detested from the moment he set foot there as a lonely, bewildered boy of eleven, exiled from his native India to begin his formal education at ‘home’. ‘Pudding Island’ was his dismissive term for Britain. ‘That mean, shabby little island,’ he was to tell a friend much later, ‘wrung my guts out of me and tried to destroy anything singular and unique in me.’ Its dismal climate alone was reason enough to move on. ‘Alan,’ he had remarked to Alan Thomas after receiving a letter from George Wilkinson describing the orange groves surrounding his villa, ‘think of the times in England when everybody you know has a cold.’ Though the running was made by Lawrence, the idea of moving to Corfu soon took hold of the whole family.

While his mother was still alive, Gerald’s version of events described a kind of mass migration to the sun dreamed up and pushed through by his eldest brother. It had all begun, he was to relate in a famous passage, on a day of a leaden August sky. ‘A sharp, stinging drizzle fell,’ he wrote, ‘billowing into opaque grey sheets when the wind caught it. Along the Bournemouth seafront the beach-huts turned blank wooden faces towards a greeny-grey, froth-chained sea that leapt eagerly at the cement bulwark of the shore. The gulls had been tumbled inland over the town, and they now drifted above the housetops on taut wings, whining peevishly. It was the sort of weather calculated to try anyone’s endurance.’

At Dixie Lodge the family were assembled – ‘not a very prepossessing sight that afternoon’. For Gerald the weather had brought on catarrh, and he was forced to breath ‘stertorously’ through open mouth. For Leslie it had inflamed his ears so that they bled. For Margaret it had brought a fresh blotch of acne. For Mother it had generated a bubbling cold and a twinge of rheumatism. Only Larry was as yet unscathed, and as the afternoon wore on his irritation grew till he was forced to declaim: ‘Why do we stand this bloody climate? Look at it! And, if it comes to that, look at us … Really, it’s time something was done. I can’t be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of doom and eucalyptus … Why don’t we pack up and go to Greece?’

After his mother’s death Gerald was to give an alternative – or perhaps additional – motive for the idea. Mother, it seems, had found some grown-up consolation and companionship at Dixie Lodge, in the company of Lottie, the family’s Swiss maid. But then Lottie’s husband fell ill – Gerald thought with cancer – and Lottie had no option but to leave Mother’s employ in order to help look after her husband. ‘So back to square one,’ Gerald wrote in his unpublished memoir:

Lonely evenings, where Mother had only myself, aged nine, as company. So loneliness, of course, nudged Mother closer and closer to the Demon Drink. Larry, recognising the pitfalls, decided that decisive action must be taken and told Mother he thought we ought to up sticks and go and join George in Corfu. Mother, as usual, was hesitant.

‘What am I supposed to do with the house?’ she asked.

‘Sell it before it gets into a disreputable state,’ said Larry. ‘I think it is essential that we make this move.’

Larry himself gave a third, perhaps more cogent reason for emigrating, which he explained in a note to George Wilkinson out in Corfu: ‘The days are so dun and gloomy that we pant for the sun,’ he wrote. ‘My mother has gotten herself into a really good financial mess and has decided to cut and run for it. Being too timid to tackle foreign landscapes herself, she wants to be shown around the Mediterranean by us. She wants to scout Corfu. If she likes it I have no doubt but that she’ll buy the place …’

It is very likely that all three pressures – booze, money and sun – played their part in the final decision. But Mother did not need a great deal of persuading. She always hated to say no, Lawrence said, and in any case there was not much to keep her in England. In fact there wasn’t much to keep any of them there, for they were all exiles from Mother India, and none of them had sunk many roots in the Land of Hope and Glory. ‘It was a romantic idea and a mammoth decision,’ Margaret was to relate. ‘I should have been going back to school at Malvern but I said, “I’m not going to be left out!” and Mother, being a bit like that about everything, agreed.”’

So the decision was made. The whole family would go – Larry and Nancy, Mother, Leslie (who would be eighteen by the time they sailed), Margaret (fifteen) and Gerald (ten). When Larry replied to George Wilkinson’s invitation to move to Corfu, he asked about schooling for Gerry. A little alarmed, Wilkinson replied: ‘D’you all intend coming(!) and how many is all?’ But it was all or none. The house was put up for sale and goods and chattels crated up and shipped out ahead to Corfu.

The fate of the animals of the household presented a major headache, especially for Gerald, to whom they all belonged. The white mice were given to the baker’s son, the wigged canary to the man next door, Pluto the spaniel to Dr Macdonald, the family GP, and Billie the tortoise to Lottie in Brighton, who twenty-seven years later, when Gerald was famous, wrote to ask if he wanted it back, adding: ‘You have always loved animals, even the very smallest of them, so at least I know you couldn’t be anything but kind.’ Only Roger the dog would be going off with the family, complete with an enormous dog passport bearing a huge red seal.

Lawrence and Nancy were due to go out as the vanguard early in 1935. While they were living in Dixie Lodge prior to departure they decided to marry in secret – perhaps to keep the news from Nancy’s parents, who may have disapproved of such a raffish and Bohemian husband for their beautiful daughter. The marriage took place on 22 January at Bournemouth Register Office. Alan Thomas was sworn to secrecy and asked to act as witness. There was some anxiety before the wedding that because Alan and Nancy were so tall and Lawrence so short, the registrar might marry the wrong pair without realising it. ‘With a view to avoiding any such contingency,’ recalled Alan, ‘we approached a couple of midgets, then appearing in a freak-show at the local fun-fair, and asked them to appear as witnesses; but their employer refused to allow such valuable assets out of his sight.’

On 2 March 1935 Lawrence and Nancy set sail from Tilbury on board the P&O liner SS Oronsay, bound for Naples on the first stage of their journey to Corfu. Within the week the rest of the family were also en route. On 6 March they checked into the Russell Hotel in London, from where, the following day, Leslie sent Alan Thomas a postcard: ‘We are going to catch the boat this evening (with luck). P.S. Note the address – we are getting up in the world – 12/6 a night bed and etc!!!!’

In his published account of the family’s Corfu adventure, Gerald gives the impression they travelled overland across France, Switzerland and Italy. In fact Mother, Leslie, Margaret, Gerald and Roger the dog sailed from Tilbury, travelling second class on board a Japanese cargo boat, the SS Hakone Maru of the NYK Line, bound for Naples. Leslie seems to have been the only Durrell on board who was up to writing, and his postcards and other missives constitute virtually his last recorded utterance in this history. Chugging through the Dover Straits he told Alan Thomas on 8 March: ‘So far I have a cabin of my own. The people in the Second Class are quite nice and very jolly. The ship’s rolling a bit but the Durrells are all fine.’

Two days later, butting their way across the Bay of Biscay, the adventure was hotting up nicely. ‘We had a heavy snow storm this morning,’ wrote Leslie, ‘and we had to go up to the top deck where the lifeboats are and give that ******* dog some exercise. God what a time we had, what with the dog piddling all over the place, the snow coming down, the old wind blowing like HELL – God what a trip! No one seemed to know what to do at lifeboat drill, so if anything goes wrong it will only be with the Grace of God (if there is one) if any of us see the dear coast of Old England again.’

By 15 March, after a trip ashore at Gibraltar – ‘none of the Durrells sick so far, not even that ******* dog,’ reported Leslie – they had reached Marseilles. Next stop Naples, the train to Brindisi and the ferry to Corfu, 130 miles away across the Strait of Otranto and the Ionian Sea

It was an overnight run. ‘The tiny ship throbbed away from the heel of Italy,’ Gerald recalled of that fateful crossing, ‘out into the twilit sea, and as we slept in our stuffy cabins, somewhere in that tract of moon-polished water we passed the invisible dividing-line and entered the bright, looking-glass world of Greece. Slowly this sense of change seeped down to us, and so, at dawn, we awoke restless and went on deck.’ For a long time the island was just a chocolate-brown smudge of land, huddled in mist on the starboard bow.

Then suddenly the sun shifted over the horizon and the sky turned the smooth enamelled blue of a jay’s eye … The mist lifted in quick, lithe ribbons, and before us lay the island, the mountains sleeping as though beneath a crumpled blanket of brown, the folds stained with the green of olive-groves. Along the shore curved beaches as white as tusks among tottering cities of brilliant gold, red, and white rocks … Rounding the cape we left the mountains, and the island sloped gently down, blurred with silver and green iridescence of olives, with here and there an admonishing finger of black cypress against the sky. The shallow sea in the bays was butterfly blue, and even above the sound of the ship’s engines we could hear, faintly ringing from the shore like a chorus of tiny voices, the shrill, triumphant cries of the cicadas.

Decades later, old and sick and near the verge of death, Gerald Durrell was to recall that magic landfall that was to transform his life with all the pain and longing of remembered youth. ‘It was like being allowed back into Paradise,’ he whispered. ‘Our arrival in Corfu was like being born for the first time.’