Douglas Botting - Gerald Durrell

One day Gerald found a fat female scorpion in the wall, with a mass of tiny babies clinging to her back. Enraptured, he carefully put mother and babies into one of his empty matchboxes, intending to smuggle them into the Bug House where he could watch the babies grow up. Unfortunately, lunch was served just as he went into the house, so he put the matchbox on the drawing room mantelpiece for temporary safekeeping, and joined the rest of the family. The meal passed affably, then Lawrence rose and went to fetch his cigarettes from the drawing room, picking up the matchbox he found conveniently ready on the mantelpiece.

Gerald watched as, ‘still talking glibly’, Lawrence opened the matchbox. In a flash the mother scorpion was out of the box and on to the back of his hand, sting curved up and at the ready, babies still clinging on grimly. Lawrence let out a roar of fright, and with an instinctive flick of his hand sent the scorpion scooting down the table, shedding babies to left and right. Pandemonium ensued. Lugaretzia dropped the plates, Roger the dog began barking madly, Leslie leapt from his chair, and Margo threw a glass of water at the creature, but missed and drenched Mother.

‘It’s that bloody boy again,’ Lawrence could be heard bawling above the universal turmoil. Roger, deciding Lugaretzia was to blame for the brouhaha, promptly bit her in the leg.

‘It’s that bloody boy,’ bellowed Lawrence again. ‘He’ll kill the lot of us. Look at the table … knee-deep in scorpions …’

Soon the scorpions had hidden themselves under the crockery and cutlery, and a temporary lull descended.

‘That bloody boy …’ Lawrence reiterated, almost speechless. ‘Every matchbox in the house is a death trap.’

In another potentially heart-stopping incident, it was Leslie’s turn to undergo trial by terror. One hot day in September, seeing that his water snakes were wilting in the heat, Gerald took them into the house and put them in a bath full of cool water. Not long afterwards, Leslie returned from a shooting expedition and decided to have a bath to freshen up. Suddenly there was a tremendous bellow from the direction of the bathroom, and Leslie emerged on to the veranda wearing nothing but a small towel.

‘Gerry!’ he roared, his face flushed with anger. ‘Where’s that boy?’

‘Now, now , dear,’ said Mother soothingly, ‘whatever’s the matter?’

‘Snakes,’ snarled Leslie, ‘that’s what’s the matter … That bloody boy’s filled the soddin’ bath full of bleeding snakes , that’s what’s the matter … Damn great things like hosepipes … It’s a wonder I wasn’t bitten.’

Gerald removed the snakes from the bath and put them into a saucepan from the kitchen, returning in time to hear Lawrence holding forth to the lunch party on the veranda, ‘I assure you the house is a death trap. Every conceivable nook and cranny is stuffed with malignant faunae waiting to pounce. How I have escaped being maimed for life is beyond me …’

One day Gerald and Theo came back with a jar full of medicinal leeches – gruesome red-and-green-striped bloodsuckers, all of three inches long. Even today Lake Scotini, the only permanent freshwater lakelet on Corfu and a favourite hunting ground for the indomitable pair, swarms with such creatures. Due to a mishap the jar was knocked off a table, and the leeches vanished. For nights Lawrence lay awake in terror, expecting to find the creatures feeding on his body and the sheets soaked in blood. It was, he felt, the ultimate nightmare visitation, the apotheosis of all Gerry’s wildlife horrors.

Lawrence’s estimation of his youngest brother, which had been sinking lower with each daily delivery of centipedes, scorpions or toads into the family home, rallied somewhat when one day, to his intense surprise, he heard the bug-happy boy whistling part of the first movement of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony. But the years did not mellow him when it came to the matter of Gerald’s life-threatening proclivities on Corfu. ‘As a small boy he was impossible,’ he told a friend many years later. ‘A terrible nuisance. He has recounted the worst of himself as well as the best in that Family book. Oh, it was matchboxes full of scorpions all the time, I didn’t dare to sit down anywhere in the house, and of course Mother was there to defend him – the slightest criticism and she would snarl like a bear, and meanwhile there were beetles in the soup. No, he was intolerable, he needed to be thrashed.’

Since the family was so dismayed by many of Gerald’s strange pets, Theo’s affirmation of the boy’s ruling passion was like a papal benediction for him. Later Gerald was to relate how, when the rains began to fill the ponds and ditches, he and Theo would prowl among them, ‘as alert as fishing herons’:

I was seeking the terrapin, the frog, toad or snake to add to my menagerie, while Theo, his little net with bottle on the end, would seek the smaller fauna, some almost invisible to the eye.

‘Ah ha!’ he would exclaim when, having swept his net through the water, he lifted the little bottle to his eye. ‘Now this is – er, um – most interesting. I haven’t seen one of these since I was in Epir …’

‘Look, Theo,’ I would say, lifting a baby snake towards him.

‘Um – er – yes,’ Theo would reply. ‘Pretty thing.’

To hear an adult call a snake a pretty thing was music to my ears.

So the bug-happy boy wandered about his paradise island while conventional education passed him by. For a time Mother endeavoured to stop him turning completely wild by sending him off for daily French lessons with the Belgian Consul, another of Corfu’s great eccentrics. The Consul lived at the top of a tall, rickety building in the centre of the Jewish quarter of Corfu town, an exotic and colourful area of narrow alleys full of open-air stalls, bawling vendors, laden donkeys, clucking hens – and a multitude of stray and starving cats. He was a kindly little man, with gold teeth and a wonderful three-pointed beard, and dressed at all times in formal attire appropriate to his official status, complete with silk cravat, shiny top hat and spats.

Gerald acquired little French from his lessons, but his boredom was alleviated by a curious obsession of his tutor’s. It turned out that the Consul was as compulsive a gunman as Gerald’s brother Leslie, and every so often during the morning lessons he would leap out of his chair, load a powerful air rifle, take careful aim out of the window and blaze away at the street outside. At first Gerald’s hopes were raised by the possibility that the Consul was mixed up in some deadly family feud, though he was puzzled why no one ever fired back, and why, after firing his gun, the Consul would be so upset, muttering dolefully, with tears in his eyes: ‘Ah, ze poor lizzie fellow …’ Finally Gerald discovered that the Consul, a devoted cat lover, was shooting the hungriest and most wretched of the strays. ‘I cannot feed zem all,’ he explained, ‘so I like to make zem happiness by zooting zem. Zey are bezzer so, but iz makes me feel so zad.’ And he would leap up again to take another potshot out of the window.

The Belgian Consul fared no better than any of Gerald’s other hired tutors, totally failing to strike a spark from the boy’s obdurate flint. It was his brother Larry’s educative influence that complemented that of Theo Stephanides, firing him with what he called a ‘sort of verbal tonic’. ‘He has the most extraordinary ability for giving people faith in themselves,’ he was to write of his eldest brother. ‘Throughout my life he has provided me with more enthusiastic encouragement than anyone else, and any success I have achieved is due, in no small measure, to his backing.’ Not long after the family had settled down on Corfu, Lawrence began to take his youngest brother’s literary education in hand. It was under his eclectic but inspired guidance that Gerald was introduced to the world of reading and the basics of writing – above all to the world of Lawrence’s vivid, ever-fermenting imagination.