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A Word in Advance

THIS IS THE THIRD BOOK that I have written about a sojourn which my family and I had on the island of Corfu before the last world war. It may seem curious to some people that I can still find material to write about this period of my life; however, may I point out that we were in those days, and certainly by Greek standards, comparatively wealthy; none of us worked in the accepted sense of the word, and therefore most of our time was spent having fun. If you have five years of doing this, you accumulate quite a lot of experiences.

The pitfall of writing a series of books about the same, or essentially the same, characters, is that you do not want to bore a reader of your previous books with endless descriptions of the characters whom he knows. At the same time, you cannot be so vain as to suppose that everyone has read those previous books and so you must assume to a certain extent that the reader is approaching your work for the first time. It is difficult, therefore, to steer a course between irritating your old reader and overburdening your new one. I hope I have succeeded in doing that.

In the first book of the trilogy which I wrote – My Family and Other Animals – I had the following thing to say about it, which I don’t think I can better: “I have attempted to draw an accurate and unexaggerated picture of my family in the following pages; they appear as I saw them. To explain some of their more curious ways, however, I feel that I should state that at the time we were in Corfu the family were all quite young: Larry, the eldest, was twenty-three; Leslie was nineteen; Margo, eighteen; while I was the youngest, being of the tender and impressionable age of ten. We have never been very certain of my mother’s age, for the simple reason that she can never remember her date of birth; all I can say is that she was old enough to have four children. My mother also insists that I explain that she is a widow, for, as she so penetratingly observed, you never know what people might think.

In order to compress five years of incident, observation, and pleasant living into something a little less lengthy than the Encyclopædia Britannica, I have been forced to telescope, prune, and graft, so that there is little left of the continuity of events.”

I also said that I had left out a number of incidents and characters that I would have liked to have described, and I have attempted to repair this omission in this book. I hope that it might give the same pleasure to its readers as apparently its predecessors – My Family and Other Animals and Birds, Beasts and Relatives – have done, as for me it portrays a very important part of my life and the thing which, unfortunately, a lot of children nowadays seem to lack, which is a truly happy and sunlit childhood.