Douglas Botting - Gerald Durrell - The Authorised Biography

Only Margo was left. Before his departure Lawrence had advised her that, should trouble come, she should sail the Van Norden down the Ionian Sea and into the Aegean to Athens – no mean voyage, especially as she had never handled a boat in her life. But she had no fears for her future: ‘I was young, and when you’re young you’re not frightened of anything.’ She had taken to going into Corfu town to hear the news reports and war bulletins relayed to the populace in the Platia, the central square. There, over a coffee or iced drink, she sometimes met up with the Imperial Airways flying-boat crews who were still operating the Mediterranean leg of the Karachi-UK air link. The airmen were aghast at her plan to ride out the war in the Corfu hills, and urged her to leave before the island was invaded and all communications with the outside world were cut. She became friendly with one officer in particular, a dashing young flight engineer by the name of Jack Breeze, and it was he who finally persuaded her to pull out and provided her with the means of doing so. Shortly after Christmas Margo was packed on to one of the last British aircraft flying out of Corfu, and left the island of her young womanhood for ever.

In October 1940 Italian forces entered Greece, and the following year they occupied Corfu. The White House at Kalami lay abandoned, and Larry’s little cutter sunk. Below the Strawberry-Pink Villa, where the boy Gerald had first strode out to explore the wild interior, the Italians built a huge tented camp, where they kept their ration store and marched their soldiers up and down. Later the Germans moved in, strafing the causeway and the chessboard fields of the Venetian lagoon where Gerald had once stalked Old Plop the terrapin, and bombing the old town, killing Theo Stephanides’s parents and Gerald’s tutor Krajewsky and his mad mother and all his birds. What fate befell the boy Gerald’s great manuscript novel of the flora and fauna of the world will never be known.

The Durrell family had been driven from Eden, swept away by the fury and folly of war. All they were left with from their island years were a few crumpled photographs and the memories of a magic life that for long afterwards continued to burn in their minds as vivid and bright as the sun itself.

It was in large part Corfu that made Gerald the person he was to be. But on the island he had known only love and affection, happiness and ease. As a result he was to be ill-equipped for the vicissitudes of real life, which one day would do their best to cut him off at the knees.

Looking back from the hard world beyond the walls of that enchanted garden, Lawrence was to observe many years later: ‘In Corfu, you see, we reconstituted the Indian period which we all missed. The island exploded into another open-air time of our lives, because one lived virtually naked in the sun. Without Corfu I don’t think Gerry would have managed to drag himself together and do all he has achieved … I reckon I too got born in Corfu. It was really the spell between the wars that was – you can only say paradise.’

Mother, Leslie and Gerald were back in England before war was declared on 3 September 1939. The dogs were put in quarantine the moment they landed, and the rest of the animals Gerald had brought back from Corfu, plus a marmoset and some magpies he had acquired in England, were housed on the top-floor landing of a London lodging house which Mother rented while she looked around for a more permanent home. Before long they had moved to a flat in a terraced house off Kensington High Street. Mother hankered to return to Bournemouth, where at least she had roots of a kind, and whenever she went off on one of her many forays into various part of the countryside in search of a house, the fourteen-year-old Gerald – now wearing his first pair of long trousers – was free to explore the capital. ‘I found London, at that time, fascinating,’ he would later recall. ‘After all, the biggest metropolis I was used to was the town of Corfu, which was about the size of a small English market town, and so the great sprawling mass of London had hundreds of exciting things for me to discover.’

Sometimes he would spend the afternoon in the Coronet cinema round the corner, absorbed in the illusory adventure and romance on the silver screen before him – a lifelong passion. At other times he would go to the Natural History Museum or the zoo, which only strengthened his belief that working in a zoo was the only real vocation for anyone.

It was in the London of the so-called ‘Phoney War’ – no air raids as yet, no nights spent in cellars or bomb shelters – that Gerald started his first job, as junior assistant in a pet shop called The Aquarium, not far from where he was living. It was a remarkably well-stocked shop, with rows of great tanks full of brilliant tropical fish, and glass-fronted boxes containing grass snakes, pine snakes, big green lizards, tortoises, newts with frilled tails like pennants and gulping, bulbous-eyed frogs. His job was to feed all these creatures and clean out their tanks and cages, but it soon became clear that he knew a great deal more about their needs and habits than the shop’s owner, who was astonished by the boy’s detailed knowledge and instinctive feeling for the animals’ welfare.

Before long Gerald had introduced a change in the creatures’ previously unvarying diet, forgoing his lunchtime sausage and mash in order to collect woodlice in Kensington Park for the reptiles and amphibians, and tipping pots of little water fleas into the fishtanks as a change from the fishes’ usual fare of tubifex worms. Then he began to improve the animals’ living conditions, putting clumps of wet moss into the cages of the large leopard toads so that they had some damp and shade, bathing their raw feet with olive oil and treating their sore eyes with Golden Eye ointment. But his pièce de résistance was the redecoration of the big tank in the shop window, which contained a large collection of wonderfully coloured fish in what looked like an underwater blasted heath.

I worked on that giant tank with all the dedication of a marine Capability Brown. I built rolling sand dunes and great towering cliffs of lovely granite. And then, through the valleys between the granite mountains, I planted forests of Vallisneria and other, more delicate, weedy ferns. And on the surface of the water I floated the tiny little white flowers that look so like miniature water-lilies. When I had finally finished it and replaced the shiny black mollies, the silver hatchet fish, the brilliant Piccadilly-like neon-tetras, and stepped back to admire my handiwork, I found myself deeply impressed with my own genius.

So was the owner. ‘Exquisite! Exquisite!’ he exclaimed. ‘Simply exquisite.’ Gerald was promptly promoted to more responsible tasks. Periodically he was sent off to the East End of London to collect fresh supplies of reptiles, amphibians and snakes. ‘In gloomy, cavernous stores in back streets,’ he remembered, ‘I would find great crates of lizards, basketfuls of tortoises and dripping tanks green with algae full of newts and frogs and salamanders … and a crate full of iguanas, bright green and frilled and dewlapped like any fairytale dragon.’ On one such jaunt 150 baby painted terrapins escaped from the box in which he was carrying them on the top of a double-decker bus. But for the help of a Blimpish, monocled colonel who also happened to be on the bus and who crawled up and down the aisle ‘heading the bounders off,’ Gerald would have experienced the first catastrophe of his professional career. ‘By George!’ cried the colonel. ‘A painted terrapin! Chrysemys picta ! Haven’t seen one for years. There’s one going under the seat there. Tally-ho! Bang! Bang!’