Corfu’s compensations enormously outweighed any drawbacks. Their rent was cheap (£2 a month for a large house overlooking the sea), and so was food. ‘There is a good peasant wine,’ Lawrence reported to Alan Thomas, ‘which tastes and looks like iced blood. It costs 6 drachs – 3d per bottle. What more does one want? In England I couldn’t buy a bottle of horse-piss for 3d. Yesterday we dined very royally on red mullet – as you know a most epicurean dish – it cost Iod.’ Clothes were casual for the most part. Gerry wore shorts throughout his time on the island, and usually kept his hair very long, as he hated going to the barber in town. When an admirer gave Margo a large silk shawl she did not care for, Gerald appropriated it and pinned it round his neck like a cloak when he went out riding on the village pony. The shawl had a pattern in gold, green, red and purple, and a long red fringe. ‘I thought I cut a hell of a dash,’ he recalled, ‘as I galloped round the countryside.’
Generally the Durrell abodes on Corfu were sparsely furnished. All the rooms had bare floorboards which were scrubbed once a week in rotation and holystoned, and all the bedclothes were hung out of the windows each day to air. The furniture was mostly simple, rural and Greek, with the addition of a few exotic Indian items that Mother had brought out from England – deep blue curtains with huge peacocks on them; ornate round brass tables, intricately embossed and standing on elaborately carved teak legs; ashtrays decorated with peacocks and dragons.
At a domestic level the family’s life on Corfu was simple, uncluttered, unhurried, unpressured. At a more exalted level, the island was gloriously beautiful, utterly unspoilt, a paradise on earth surrounded by an unpolluted crystalline sea. For Gerald, it was a revelation:
Gradually the magic of the island settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen. Each day had a tranquillity, a timelessness about it, so that you wished it would never end … In those days I lived a curious sort of triple life. I dwelt in three worlds. One was the family, one was our eccentric friends, and the third was the peasant community. Through these three worlds I passed unobserved but observing.
For Gerald, Corfu was a kind of Mediterranean Congo peopled with natives and crawling with wildlife, where every foray was a venture into the interior, and every bend in the track and view through the trees portended something utterly new, unexpected and absorbing.
The family had decided on a six-month trial period to see if they liked Corfu and wanted to stay. Gerald remembered this as a time of pure freedom, a total holiday – no lessons, no duties, no set hours, just carte blanche to roam at will, exploring the wonders of his paradise island. As the weeks of that first enchanted summer of exploration and discovery went by he increased the range of his excursions away from the Strawberry-Pink Villa.
Every day began with the rising sun striking the shutters of his bedroom windows, followed soon after by the smell of a charcoal fire in the kitchen, cock-crows, yapping dogs, goats’ bells clanging as the flocks wended their way to their grazing grounds. After a breakfast of coffee, toast and eggs under the tangerine trees Gerald would put on his Wellington boots – Mother, having been brought up to dread snakes in India, insisted he wore these in the early days – and saunter forth in the cool of the morning, his butterfly net in his hand, empty matchboxes in his pockets, following the black, bouncing form of Roger the dog, his constant and dearly beloved companion on all his forays.
Within a six-mile radius of the villa Gerald became the local equivalent of the town crier, or a sort of itinerant human newspaper. In those days some of the peasant communities would only see each other once or twice a year at fiestas. So, travelling around as he did, it was Gerald who brought the news from village to village – how Maria had died and how Spiro’s potato crop had failed (that was Spiro with the blind donkey, not Spiro with the Dodge convertible). ‘Po! Po! Po!’ the villagers would cry in horror – ‘and he has the whole winter stretching before him, potatoless. St Spiridion preserve him.’
It was in these early outings that Gerald got to know the Corfiot peasants of the locality, many of whom became his friends. There was the cheerful simpleton, an amiable but retarded youth with a face as round as a puffball and a bowler hat without a brim. There was rotund, cheerful old Agathi, past seventy but with hair still glossy and black, spinning wool outside her tumbledown cottage and singing the haunting peasant songs of the island, including her favourite, ‘The Almond Tree’, which began ‘Kay kitaxay tine anthismeni amigdalia …’. Then there was Yani, the toothless old shepherd, with hooked nose and great bandit moustache, who plied the ten-year-old Gerald with olives and figs and the thick red wine of the region (well-watered to a rosy pink).
And then there was the Rose-beetle man, one of the most extraordinary characters of the island, a wandering peddler of the most extreme eccentricity. When Gerald first encountered him in the hills, playing a shepherd’s pipe, the Rose-beetle Man was fantastically garbed, wearing a battered hat that sprouted a forest of fluttering feathers of owl, hoopoe, kingfisher, cockerel and swan, and a coat whose pockets bulged with trinkets, balloons and coloured pictures of the saints. On his back he carried bamboo cages full of pigeons and young chickens, together with several mysterious sacks, and a large bunch of fresh green leeks. ‘With one hand he held his pipe to his mouth, and in the other a number of lengths of cotton, to each of which was tied an almond-size rose-beetle, glittering golden green in the sun, all of them flying round his hat with desperate deep buzzings.’ The beetles, the man mimed – for he was dumb as well as strange – were substitute toy aeroplanes for the village children.
One of the Rose-beetle Man’s sacks was full of tortoises, and one in particular struck the boy’s fancy – a sprightly kind of tortoise, with a brighter eye than most, and possessed (so Gerald was to claim) of a peculiar sense of humour. Gerald named him Achilles. ‘He was undoubtedly the finest tortoise I had ever seen, and worth, in my opinion, at least twice what I had paid for him. I patted his scaly head with my finger and placed him carefully in my pocket.’ But before setting off down the hill he glanced back. ‘The Rose-beetle Man was still in the same place in the road, but he was doing a little jig, prancing and swaying, while in the road at his feet the tortoises ambled to and fro, dimly and heavily.’
From the Rose-beetle Man Gerald obtained several other small creatures that took up residence in the Strawberry-Pink Villa, including a frog, a sparrow with a broken leg, and the man’s entire stock of rose-beetles, which infested the house for days, crawling into the beds and plopping into people’s laps ‘like emeralds’. Perhaps the most idiosyncratic of these creatures was a revolting-looking young pigeon which refused to learn to fly and insisted on sleeping at the foot of Margo’s bed. So repulsive and obese was the bird that Larry suggested calling it Quasimodo. It was Larry who first noticed that Quasimodo was partial to dancing around the gramophone when a waltz was being played, and stomping up and down with puffed-up chest when the record was a march by Sousa. Eventually Quasimodo surprised everybody by laying an egg, whereupon she grew wilder and wilder, abjured the gramophone, and finally, suddenly endowed with the gift of flight, flew out of the door to take up residence in a tree with a large cock bird.
With Gerald rapidly turning into part of the fauna of Corfu, Mother decided it was time he had some sort of education. George Wilkinson was hired for this thankless task. Every morning he would come striding through the olive groves, a lean, lanky, bearded, bespectacled, disjointed figure in shorts and sandals, clutching bundles of books from his own small library, anything from the Pears Cyclopaedia