Gerald Durrell - The Corfu Trilogy

‘It wasn’t four hundred elephants, dear. I only said we went camping with elephants. You children do exaggerate. And, anyway, we can’t produce elephants here; he wouldn’t expect that .’

‘No, but you’ve got to put on some sort of show,’ said Leslie.

‘I’ll do all the decorations,’ offered Margo. ‘Everything will be oriental – I’ll borrow Mrs Papadrouya’s Burmese screens and there are the ostrich feathers that Lena’s got…’

‘We’ve still got a wild boar and some duck and stuff left in the cold room in town,’ said Leslie. ‘Better use it up.’

‘I’ll borrow Countess Lefraki’s piano,’ said Larry.

‘Now, look all of you… stop it,’ cried Mother, alarmed. ‘It’s not a durbar we’re having, just a birthday party.’

‘Nonsense, Mother, it’ll do us good to let off a little steam,’ said Larry indulgently.

‘Yes, in for a penny, in for a pound,’ said Leslie.

‘And you might as well be hung for anox as anass,’ contributed Margo.

‘Or your neighbour’s wife, if it comes to that,’ added Larry.

‘Now it’s a question of who to invite,’ said Leslie.

‘Theodore, of course,’ said the family in unison.

‘Then there’s poor old Creech,’ said Larry.

‘Oh no, Larry,’ Mother protested. ‘You know what a disgusting old brute he is.’

‘Nonsense, Mother, the old boy loves a party.’

‘And then there’s Colonel Ribbindane,’ said Leslie.

‘No!’ Larry exclaimed vehemently. ‘We’re not having that quintessence of boredom, even if he is the best shot on the island.’

‘He’s not a bore,’ said Leslie belligerently. ‘He’s no more boring than your bloody friends.’

‘None of my friends is capable of spending an entire evening telling you in words of one syllable and a few Neanderthal grunts how he shot a hippo on the Nile in 1904.’

‘It’s jolly interesting,’ retorted Leslie hotly. ‘A damned sight more interesting than listening to all your friends going on about bloody art.’

‘Now, now, dears,’ said Mother peaceably, ‘there’ll be plenty of room for everyone.’

I left them to the normal uproar that went on while the guest list for any party was being compiled; as far as I was concerned, so long as Theodore was coming the party was assured ofsuccess. I could leave the choice of other guests to my family.

The preparations for the party gathered momentum. Larry succeeded in borrowing Countess Lefraki’s enormous grand piano and a tiger-skin rug to place alongside it. The piano was conveyed to us with the utmost tenderness, for it had been the favourite instrument of the late Count, on the back of a long, flat cart drawn by four horses. Larry, who had been to supervise the removal, removed the tarpaulins that had been covering the instrument against the sun, mounted the cart and ran off a quick rendering of ‘Walking My Baby Back Home’, to make sure that it had not suffered from its journey. It seemed in good shape, if a trifle jangly, and after a prodigious effort we managed to get it into the drawing-room. Planted, black and gleaming as an agate, in the corner, the magnificent tiger skin lying in front of it, the mounted head snarling in defiance, it gave the whole room a rich, oriental air.

This was added to by Margo’s decorations – tapestries that she had painted on huge sheets of paper and hung on the walls, pictures of minarets, peacocks, cupola-palaces, and bejewelled elephants. Everywhere there were vases of ostrich feathers dyed all the colours of the rainbow, and bunches of multi-coloured balloons like crops of strange tropical fruit. The kitchen, of course, was like the interior of Vesuvius; in the flickering ruby light of half a dozen charcoal fires, Mother and her minions scurried to and fro. The sound of beating and chopping and stirring was so loud that it precluded speech, while the aromatic smells that drifted upstairs were so rich and heavy it was like being wrapped in an embroidered cloak of scent.

Over all this, Spiro presided, like a scowling, brown genie; he seemed to be everywhere, bull-voiced, barrel-bodied, carrying enormous boxes of food and fruit to the kitchen in his ham-like hands, sweating and roaring and cursing as three dining-tables were insinuated into the dining-room and joined together, appearing with everlasting flowers for Margo, strange spices and other delicacies for Mother. It was during moments like this that you realized Spiro’s true worth, for you could ask the impossible of him and he would achieve it. ‘I’ll fixes that,’ he would say, and fix it he would, whether it was out-of-season fruit or procuring such a thing as a piano tuner, a species of human being that had been extinct in the island since 1890 so far as anyone knew. It was extremely unlikely, in fact, that any of our parties would have got beyond the planning stage if it had not been for Spiro.

At last everything was ready. The sliding doors between the dining-room and drawing-room had been pulled back and the vast room thus formed was a riot of flowers, balloons and paintings, the long tables with their frost-white cloths sparkling with silver, the side tables groaning under the weight of the cold dishes. A suckling pig, brown and polished as a mummy, with an orange in his mouth, lay beside a haunch of wild boar, sticky with wine and honey marinade, thick with pearls of garlic and the round seeds of coriander; a bank of biscuit-brown chickens and young turkeys was interspersed with wild duck stuffed with wild rice, almonds and sultanas, and woodcock skewered on lengths of bamboo; mounds of saffron rice, yellow as a summer moon, were treasure-troves that made one feel like an archaeologist, so thickly were they encrusted with fragile pink strips of octopus, toasted almonds and walnuts, tiny green grapes, carunculated hunks of ginger and pine seeds. The kefalia I had brought from the lake were now browned and charcoal blistered, gleaming in a coating of oil and lemon juice, spattered with jade-green flecks of fennel; they lay in ranks on the huge plates, looking like a flotilla of strange boats tied up in harbour.

Interspersed with all this were the plates of small things – crystallized orange and lemon rind, sweet corn, flat thin oat cakes gleaming with diamonds of sea salt, chutney and pickles in a dozen colours and smells and tastes to tantalize and soothe the taste buds. Here was the peak of the culinary art – here a hundred strange roots and seeds had given up their sweet essence; vegetables and fruits had sacrificed their rinds and flesh to wash the fowl and the fish in layers of delicately scented gravies and marinades. The stomach twitched at this bank of edible colour and smell; you felt you would be eating a magnificent garden, a multi-coloured tapestry, and that the cells of your lungs would be so filled with layer upon layer of fragrance that you would be drugged and immobile like a beetle in the heart of a rose. The dogs and I tiptoed several times into the room to look at this succulent display; we would stand until the saliva filled our mouths and then reluctantly go away. We could hardly wait for the party.

Jeejee, whose boat had been delayed, arrived on the morning of his birthday, dressed in a ravishing peacock-blue outfit, his turban immaculate. He was leaning heavily on a stick but otherwise showed no signs of his accident, and was as ebullient as ever. To our embarrassment, when showed the preparation we had made for his birthday, he burst into tears.

‘To think that I, the son of a humble sweeper, an untouchable, should be treated like this,’ he sobbed.

‘Oh, it’s nothing really,’ said Mother, rather alarmed by his reaction. ‘We often have little parties.’

As our living-room looked like a cross between a Roman banquet and the Chelsea Flower Show, this gave the impression that we always entertained on the scale that would have been envied by the Tudor court.