When I first discovered the books of Gerald Durrell (1925-1995) I couldn't
put them down to take care of even the most rudimentary personal or
gastronomical tasks. He is British (enough said, for those who enjoy
their dry, understated but deadly wit) and his speciality is memoir,
namely his recollections of his childhood.
The biographical notes one finds about him are a clue to his unique upbringing and ultimate writing style: Born in Jamshedpur, India, Gerald was the youngest child of Louisa and Lawrence Durrell (both of whom were also born in
India of English and Irish parents). Durrell spent most of his time
in the company of an
ayah (nursemaid) and attributed his lifelong
love of animals to his first memorable visit to an Indian zoo.
The family moved to England after the death of his father in 1928 and
settled in South London, where Durrell "frequently stayed home from
school by feigning illness". In 1935, Mrs. Durrell moved her three
youngest children (Gerald, Margo and Leslie) to the Island of Corfu,
where her eldest son Lawrence (the author) already lived with his wife. It was here
that Gerald's long love affair with insects, birds and beasts flourished. In fact he
frequently terrorized his long-suffering family with a menagerie of local
animals he insisted on keeping as pets in the home.
Durrell is a wonderful writer, and his books contain the most beautifully evocative
passages about their Island home. Here is his description of his
first glimpse of Corfu:
The tiny ship throbbed away from the heel of Italy 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.
The
sea lifted smooth blue muscles of wave as it stirred in the dawn light, and the
foam of our wake spread gently behind us like a white peacock’s tail, glinting
with bubbles. The sky was pale and stained with yellow on the eastern
horizon. Ahead lay a
chocolate-brown smudge of land, huddled in mist, with a frill of foam at its
base. This was Corfu, and we
strained our eyes to make out the exact shapes of the mountains, to discover
valleys, peaks, ravines, and beaches, but it remained a silhouette. Then suddenly the sun lifted over the
horizon, and the sky turned the smooth enamelled blue of a jay’s eye. The
endless, meticulous curves of the sea flamed for an instant and then changed to
a deep royal purple flecked with green. The mist lifted in quick, lithe
ribbons, and before us lay the island, the mountains as though sleeping 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 fold, red, and
white rocks. We rounded the northern cape, a smooth shoulder of rust-red cliff
carved into a series of giant caves.
I knew I had fallen in love with this man when I read his note of thanks to his mother in the introduction to his first book:
I should like to pay a special
tribute to my mother, to whom this book is dedicated. Like a gentle, enthusiastic,
and understanding Noah, she has steered her vessel full of strange progeny
through the stormy seas of life with great skill, always faced with the
possibility of mutiny, always surrounded by the dangerous shoals of overdraft
and extravagance, never being sure that her navigation would be approved by the
crew, but certain that she would be blamed for anything that went wrong. That
she survived the voyage is a miracle, but survive it she did, and, moreover,
with her reason more or less intact. As my brother Larry rightly points out, we
can be proud of the way we have brought her up; she is a credit to us. That she
has reached that happy Nirvana where nothing shocks or startles is exemplified
by the fact that one week-end recently, when all alone in the house, she was
treated to the sudden arrival of a series of crates containing two pelicans, a
scarlet ibis, a vulture, and eight monkeys. A lesser mortal might have quailed
at such a contingency, but not Mother. On Monday morning I found her in the
garage being pursued round and round by an irate pelican which she was trying
to feed with sardines from a tin.
“I'm glad you've come, dear,”
she panted; “this pelican is a little difficult to handle.”
When I asked her how she knew the animals
belonged to me, she replied: “Well, of course I knew they
were yours, dear; who else would send pelicans to me?”
Which goes to show how well
she knows at least one of her family.
Lastly, I would like to make a
point of stressing that all the anecdotes about the island and the islanders
are absolutely true. Living in Corfu was rather like living in one of the more
flamboyant and slapstick comic operas.
I highly recommend "My Family and Other Animals" and "Birds, Beasts and Relatives".
Gerald Durrell.... the young man and the old.
