Gerald Durrell: The Corfu Trilogy

‘There,’ said Margo brightly when we had finished, as if she had been responsible for providing the viands, ‘that was nice. Now I suppose we’d better be getting back.’

Immediately, a snag became apparent; Adrian’s feet, cool and happy from the rock pool, had swollen and it took the united efforts of Margo and myself to get his boots on again. Even when we had succeeded in forcing his feet into the boots he could only progress at a painfully slow pace, limping along like an elderly tortoise.

‘I do wish you’d hurry up,’ shouted Margo irritably after we had progressed a mile or so and Adrian was lagging behind.

‘I can’t go any faster. My feet are killing me,’ Adrian said miserably.

In spite of our protests, that he would get sunburned, he had taken off his flannel shirt and exposed his milk-white skin to the elements. It was when we were a couple of miles from the villa that the peasant’s prophecy about the storm became fact. These summer storms would be hatched in a nest of cumulus clouds in the Albanian mountains and ferried rapidly across to Corfu by a warm, scouring wind like the blast from a baker’s oven. The wind hit us now, stinging our skins and blinding us with dust and bits of leaf. The olives changed from green to silver like the sudden gleam of a turning school of fish, and the wind roared its way through a million leaves with a noise like a giant breaker on the shore. The blue sky was suddenly, miraculously, blotted out by bruise-coloured clouds that were splintered by jagged spears of lavender-coloured lightning. The hot, fierce wind increased and the olive groves shook and hissed as though shaken by some huge, invisible predator. Then came the rain, plummeting out of the sky in great gouts, hitting us with the force of sling-shot. A background to all this was the thunder, stalking imperiously across the sky, rumbling and snarling above the scudding clouds like a million stars colliding, crumbling and avalanching through space.

This was one of the best storms we had ever experienced and Margo and I were thoroughly enjoying it, for after the heat and stillness we found the stinging rain and the noise exhilarating. Adrian did not share our view; he was one of those unfortunate people who were terrified of lightning, so to him the whole thing was monstrous and alarming. We tried to take his mind off the storm by singing but the thunder was so loud that he could not hear us. We struggled on grimly and at last, through the gloomy, rain-striped, olive groves we saw the welcoming lights of the villa. As we reached it and Adrian staggered in through the front door, seeming more dead than alive, Mother appeared in the hall.

‘Where have you children been? I was getting quite worried,’ she said, and then, catching sight of Adrian; ‘Good heavens, Adrian dear, what have you been doing?’

She might well have asked, for those parts of Adrian’s anatomy that were not scarlet with sunburn were interesting shades of blue and green; he could hardly walk and his teeth were chattering so violently that he could not talk. Being scolded and commiserated in turns, he was whisked away to bed by Mother, where he lay, with mild sun-stroke, a severe cold and septic feet, for the next few days.

‘Really, Margo, you do make me angry sometimes,’ said Mother. ‘You know he’s not strong. You might have killed him.’

‘Serves him jolly well right,’ said Margo callously. ‘He shouldn’t have said I was boring. It’s an eye for an ear.’

Adrian, however, unwittingly got his own back; when he recovered he found a shop in the town that stocked gramophone needles.

It was towards the end of summer that we held what came to be known as our Indian party. Our parties, whether carefully planned or burgeoning onthe spur of the moment out ofnothing, were always interesting affairs since things seldom went exactly as we planned them. In those days, living as we did in the country, without the dubious benefits of radio or television, we had to rely on such primitive forms of amusement as books, quarrelling, parties, and the laughter of our friends, so naturally parties – particularly the more flamboyant ones – became red-letter days, preceded by endless preparations. Even when they were successfully over, they provided days of delightfully acrimonious argument as to how they could have been better managed.

We had had a fairly tranquil patch for a month or so; we had not had a party, and no one had turned up to stay, so Mother had relaxed and become very benign. We were sitting on the veranda one morning reading our mail when the party was hatched. In her mail Mother had just received a mammoth cookery book entitled A Million Mouthwatering Oriental Recipes , lavishly illustrated with colour reproductions so lurid and glossy that you felt you could eat them. Mother was enchanted with it and kept reading bits aloud to us.

‘Madras Marvels!’ she exclaimed delightedly. ‘Oh, they’re lovely. I remember them, they were a favourite of your father’s when we lived in Darjeeling. And, look! Konsarmer’s Delights! I’ve been looking for a recipe for them for years . They’re simply delicious, but so rich.’

‘If they’re anything like the illustrations,’ said Larry, ‘you’d have to live on a diet of bicarbonate of soda for the next twenty years after you ate one.’

‘Don’t be silly, dear. The ingredients are absolutely pure – four pounds of butter, sixteen eggs, eight pints of cream, the flesh of ten young coconuts…’

‘God!’ said Larry, ‘it sounds like a breakfast for a Strasbourg goose.’

‘I’m sure you’ll like them, dear. Your father was very fond of them.’

‘Well, I’m supposed to be on a diet,’ said Margo. ‘You can’t go forcing me to have stuff like that.’

‘Nobody’s forcing you, dear,’ said Mother. ‘You can always say no.’

‘Well, you know I can’t say no, so that’s forcing.’

‘Go and eat in another room,’ suggested Leslie, flipping through the pages of a gun catalogue, ‘if you haven’t got the will power to say no.’

‘But I have got the will power to say no,’ said Margo indignantly. ‘I just can’t say no when Mother offers it to me.’

‘Jeejee sends his salaams,’ said Larry, looking up from the letter he was perusing. ‘He says he’s coming back here for his birthday.’

‘His birthday!’ exclaimed Margo. ‘Ooh, good! I’m glad he remembered.’

‘Such a nice boy,’ said Mother. ‘When’s he coming?’

‘As soon as he gets out of hospital,’ said Larry.

‘Hospital? Is he ill?’

‘No, he’s just having trouble with his levitation; he’s got a busted leg. He says his birthday’s on the sixteenth so he’ll try and make it by the fifteenth.’

‘I am glad,’ said Mother. ‘I grew very fond of Jeejee and I’m sure he’ll love this book.’

‘I know, let’s give him a huge birthday party,’ said Margo excitedly. ‘You know, a really huge party.’

‘That’s a good idea,’ said Leslie. ‘We haven’t had a decent party for ages.’

‘And I could make some of the recipes out of this book,’ contributed Mother, obviously intrigued by the thought.

‘An oriental feast,’ exclaimed Larry. ‘Tell everyone to come in turbans, with jewels in their navels.’

‘No, I think that’s going too far,’ said Mother. ‘No, let’s just have a nice, quiet little…’

‘You can’t have a nice, quiet little party for Jeejee,’ said Leslie. ‘Not after you told him you always travelled with four hundred elephants. He expects something a bit spectacular.’