PART 1: ‘The Boy’s Mad … Snails in his Pockets!’
1 Landfall in Jamshedpur: India 1925–1928
2 ‘The Most Ignorant Boy in the School’: England 1928–1935
3 The Gates of Paradise: Corfu 1935–1936
4 The Garden of the Gods: Corfu 1937–1939
5 Gerald in Wartime: England 1939–1945
6 Odd-Beast Boy: Whipsnade 1945–1946
7 Planning for Adventure: 1946–1947
8 To the Back of Beyond: First Cameroons Expedition 1947–1948
9 In the Land of the Fon: Second Cameroons Expedition 1948–1949
10 New Worlds to Conquer: Love and Marriage 1949–1951
12 Of Beasts and Books: 1953–1955
13 The Book of the Idyll: 1955
15 ‘A Wonderful Place for a Zoo’: 1957–1959
PART 3: The Price of Endeavour
17 ‘We’re All Going to be Devoured’: Alarms and Excursions 1960–1962
19 Volcano Rabbits and the King of Corfu: 1965–1968
22 The Palace Revolution: 1971–1973
23 Gerald in America: 1973–1974
24 ‘Two Very Lost People’: 1975–1976
25 Love Story: Prelude: 1977–1978
26 Love Story: Finale: 1978–1979
27 A Zoo with a View: 1979–1980
28 Ark on the Move: From the Island of the Dodo to the Land of the Lemur 1980–1982
29 The Amateur Naturalist: 1982–1984
30 To Russia with Lee: 1984–1985
32 ‘Details of my Hypochondria’: 1992–1994
33 ‘A Whole New Adventure’: 1994–1995
THE DURRELL WILDLIFE CONSERVATION TRUST
I met Gerald Durrell only once in the flesh. It was in the early summer of 1989 at the London Butterfly House in Syon Park, where he and his wife Lee ceremonially launched an initiative called ‘Programme for Belize’ – intended to save for posterity a superb tract of tropical forest in the north-east of that country – by releasing newly hatched Belizean butterflies into the Butterfly House. Our encounter afterwards, as Durrell passed down a line of extended hands on his way out through the door, was brief, polite and perfunctory. At this meeting neither he nor I could have dreamed that biographer was meeting biographee. Had we known it, we would have had a lot to talk about. With better luck all round, we might have been talking still.
I thought no more about this until, one scorching late September noon in 1994, I found myself sitting with my elder daughter Kate on the terrace of the White House, Lawrence Durrell’s old pre-war home at Kalami on the north-east coast of Corfu, watching the caïques coming in to the bay one by one, each with its complement of tourists on board. Across the water I could hear the running commentary of the Greek skippers. ‘And now we enter beautiful Kalami Bay,’ they intoned. ‘On your left you will see the famous