But Pat Evans clearly was an inciting agent of some sort in Gerald’s literary development, for later in the year Gerald wrote to Alan Thomas enclosing a copy of his most recent poetic concoction:
I send you my latest opus. Pat and I set each other subjects to write poems in each week. This is my first homewark [sic]. NIGHT-CLUB.
Spoon on, swoon on to death. The mood is blue.
Croon me a stave as sexless as the plants,
Deathless as platinum, cynical as love.
My mood is indigo, my dance is bones.
If there were any limbo it were here.
Dancing dactyls, piston-man and pony
To dewey negroes played by saxophones …
Sodom, swoon on, and wag the deathless boddom.
I love your sagging undertones of snot.
Love shall prevail – and coupling in cloakrooms
When none shall care whether it prevail or not.
Much love to you. Nancy is drawing a bookplate for you. Why? Gerry Durrell
Did the eleven-year-old boy with his simple, innocent passion for blennies and trapdoor spiders really write this unbelievably precocious piece of desperately straining and contrived Weltschmerz? Not only the subject, but the existentialist mind-set, the mood, the vocabulary, the startling and often far-fetched imagery, the compulsive desire to shock, all reek of the influence of Larry the poet, not to mention Larry the uncompromising, anarchic novelist then wrestling with his first major work of fiction, his seriously black – and blue – Black Book. Did Larry actually write it? If not, it can only be seen as a pastiche of Larry, and as such quite stunning for one so young – bizarrely sophisticated nonsense work that nonetheless makes a kind of sense.
A later poem by Gerald entitled ‘An African Dialogue’ was later published, with Lawrence’s help, in a fringe literary periodical called Seven in the summer of 1939. As the final verse indicates, it is remarkable for the cryptic compression of its metaphysical conceit.
She went to the house and lit a candle.
The candle cried: ‘I am being killed.’
The flame: ‘I am killing you.’
The maid answered: ‘It is true, true.
For I see your white blood.’
Meanwhile, family life chez the Durrells was beginning to disintegrate into riot and pandemonium. ‘We’ve got so lax,’ Larry wrote to Alan Thomas, ‘what with Leslie farting at meals, and us nearly naked all day on the point, bathing.’ Nancy agreed. Mother could keep no kind of order at all. ‘Even Gerry could have done better with a little more discipline,’ she complained. ‘I mean he did grow up with really no discipline at all.’ Nancy and Larry were glad of the seclusion and tranquillity of their whitewashed fisherman’s house at Kalami, far from the uproarious family. ‘Ten miles south,’ Larry reported to Thomas, ‘the family brawls and caterwauls and screams in the cavernous new Ypso villa.’
At a cost of £43.1os. the Durrell splinter party had had a top storey added to their house, with a balcony from which they could look over the sea and the hills towards the dying day. For them at least, and later for Gerald and the rest of the family on their forays north, the island entered a new dimension of enchantment.
‘The peace of those evenings on the balcony before the lighting of the lamps was something we shall never discover again,’ Lawrence was to write; ‘the stillness of objects reflected in the mirror of the bay … It was the kind of hush you get in a Chinese water-colour.’ As they sat there, sea and sky merging into a single veil, a shepherd would start playing his flute somewhere under an arbutus out of sight.
Across the bay would slide the smooth, icy notes of the flute; little liquid flourishes, and sleepy squibbles. Sitting on the balcony, wrapped by the airs, we would listen without speaking. Presently the moon appeared – not the white, pulpy spectre of a moon that you see in Egypt – but a Greek moon, friendly, not incalculable or chilling … We walked in our bare feet through the dark rooms, feeling the cool tiles under us, and down on to the rock. In that enormous silence we walked into the water, so as not to splash, and swam out into the silver bar. We didn’t speak because a voice on that water sounded unearthly. We swam till we were tired and then came back to the white rock and wrapped ourselves in towels and ate grapes.
‘This is Homer’s country pure,’ Lawrence scribbled enthusiastically, if not entirely accurately, to Alan Thomas. ‘A few 100 yards from us is where Ulysses landed …’ The diet, he said, was a bit wild. ‘Bread and cheese and Greek champagne … Figs and grapes if they’re in … But in compensation the finest bathing and scenery in the world – and ISLANDS!’
It was inevitable that sooner or later, looking out every day over such an incomparably mesmeric expanse of sea, the family should eventually take to the water. Leslie was the leading spirit in this foray. Before he came to Corfu he had badly wanted to join the Merchant Navy, but his local doctor deemed his constitution wasn’t strong enough. In Corfu he acquired a small boat, the Sea Cow, which he first rowed, then, following the addition of an outboard engine, motored up and down the coast, often alone, sometimes with the rest of the family.
‘You should see us,’ Leslie wrote in one of his infrequent missives home, ‘the whole bloody crowd at sea, it would make you laugh.
One day Larry and Nan came here and I said I would take them home in the boat – Mother, Pat, Gerry, Larry, Nan and myself all in the motor boat. We started off and ran into quite a rough sea. Pat lying on the deck and holding on for all he was worth was dripping in about 5 minutes. Larry, Nan, Mother and Gerry crawled under a blanket – most unseamanlike. The blanket was wet and so was everyone under it. This went on for a bit and things got worse, when suddenly the boat did a beautiful roll and sent gallons of sea water over us. This was enough for Mother and we had to turn back. When Larry, Nan and Pat had had some whiskey and dry clothes they went home in a car.
Sometimes, on dead-still moonlight nights with a glassy sea, Lawrence and Nancy would row across to the Albanian coast for a midnight picnic and then row back, an adventure out of dreamland, pure phantasmagoria. Soon he had bought a boat of his own, a black and brown twenty-two-foot sailing boat called the Van Norden – ‘a dream, my black devil’ – in which they could sail to remoter coasts and islands. Leslie acquired for £3 another small boat, soon to bear the proud name of the Bootle-Bumtrinket, which he and Pat Evans fixed up for Gerald as a birthday present. The boat they produced was, according to Gerald, a genuine oddity in the history of marine construction. The Bootle-Bumtrinket was seven feet long, flat-bottomed and almost circular in shape, painted green and white inside, with black, white and orange stripes outside. Leslie had cut a remarkably long cypress pole for a mast, and proposed raising this at the ceremonial launch and maiden voyage from the jetty in the bay in front of the villa. All did not go according to plan, however, for the moment the mast was inserted in its socket, the Bootle-Bumtrinket – ‘with a speed remarkable for a craft of her circumference,’ Gerald observed – turned turtle, taking Pat Evans with it.
It took a little while for Leslie to redo his calculations, and when he finally sawed the mast down to what he estimated to be the correct length, it turned out to be a mere three feet high, which was insufficient to support a sail. So for the time being the vessel remained a rowing boat, a tub which bobbed upright on the surface of the sea ‘with the placid buoyancy of a celluloid duck’. Gerald made his maiden voyage on a summer’s dawn of perfect calm, with just the faintest breeze. He pushed off from the shore and rowed and drifted down the coast, in and out of the little bays and around the tiny islets of the offshore archipelago, rich in shallow-water marine