My thanks to Curtis Brown, acting on behalf of Mrs Lee Durrell, for permission to quote from published and unpublished works by Gerald Durrell.
Extracts from Lawrence Durrell’s book Prospero’s Cell (Faber & Faber, 1945), Bitter Lemons (Faber & Faber, 1957) and Spirit of Place, Mediterranean Writings (Faber & Faber, 1969) are reproduced by kind permission of the publishers.
Extracts from Jacquie Durrell’s Beasts in my Bed (Collins, 1967) are reproduced by kind permission of the author; extracts from David Hughes’s Himself and Other Animals: A Portrait of Gerald Durrell (Hutchinson, 1997) are reproduced by permission of the author and the publishers.
I would also like to thank Jill Adams; Michael Armstrong; Marie Aspioti; Michael Barrett; Quentin Bloxam (General Curator, Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust); Kate and Anna Botting; Gordon Bowker; Gerry Breeze; Nicholas Breeze; Sarah Breeze; Tracy Breeze; Felicity Bryan; Rev. Geoffrey Carr; David Cobham; Philip Coffey; Anthony Condos; Menelaus Condos; Fleur Cowles; Sophie Danforth; Anthony Daniells; Eve Durrell; Mr and Mrs Alex Emmett; Doreen Evans; Dr Roger Evans (Manuscript Department, British Library); Tom Evans; W. Paterson Ferns; Bronwen Garth-Thornton; Bob Golding; Anna Grapes; Peter Grose; Lady Rhona Guthrie; Dr Jeremy Guyer; Jonathan Harris; Paula Harris; Gwen Hayball; E.C. (Teddy) Hodgkin; Penelope Hope (née Durrell); David Hughes; Dr Michael Hunter; The Earl of Jersey; Carl Jones; Colin Jones; Dorothy Keep; Sarah Kennedy; Françhise Kestsman; Patrick Leigh-Fermor; Vi Lort-Phillips; Thomas Lovejoy; Judy Mackrell; Odette Mallinson; Stephen Manessi; Dr Bob Martin; Alexandra Mayhew; Alexia Mercouri; Dr Desmond Morris; Lesley Norton; Richard Odgers; Dr Alan Ogden; Dr Guy O’Keeffe; Peter Olney; Eli Palatiano; Christopher Parsons OBE; Joss Pearson; Peggy Peel; Lucy Pendar; Julian Pettifer; Joan Porter; Tim R. Newell Price (Archivist, Leighton Park School); Betty Renouf; Dr Marielle Risse; Robin Rumboll; Tom Salmon; Peter Scott; Richard Scott-Simon; Dr Bula Senapati; Maree Shillingford; Trudy Smith; Mary Stephanides; Dr Ian Swingland; Dr Christopher Tibbs; Lesley Walden; Sam and Catha Weller; Edward Whitley; Celia Yeo.
Douglas Batting
14 December 1998
The blue kingdom of the sea is a treasure-house of strange beasts which the boy longs to collect and observe. At first it is frustrating, for he can only peck along the shoreline like some forlorn seabird, capturing the small fry in the shallows and occasionally being tantalised by something mysterious and wonderful cast up on the shore. But now he has got a boat, and the whole kingdom is opened up for him, from the golden red castles of rock and their deep pools and underwater caves in the north to the long, glittering white sand dunes lying like snowdrifts in the south.
When he goes on any long expedition in the boat the boy always takes plenty of food and water in case he is blown off course and shipwrecked. If he has a full crew on board – three dogs, an owl, and sometimes a pigeon – and is carrying a full cargo – some two dozen containers full of seawater and specimens – it is a back-aching load to push through the water with the oars.
On this particular day the boy has decided to pay a visit to a small bay where a host of fascinating creatures dwell. His particular quarry is a peacock blenny, a curious-looking fish with a body shaped like an eel, and pop eyes and thick lips vaguely reminiscent of a hippopotamus. The boy is anxious to capture some of these colourful little fish, since it is their breeding season, and he is hoping to establish a colony of them in one of his aquariums so that he can watch their courtship.
After half an hour’s stiff rowing he reaches the bay, which is rimmed with silvery olive groves and great tangles of broom that sends its heavy, musky scent out over the still, clear waters. He anchors the boat in two feet of water near the reef, and then, armed with his butterfly net and a wide-mouthed jar, he steps into the gin-clear sea which is as warm as a bath.
Everywhere there is such a profusion of life – sea slugs, sea urchins, chitons and top shells, hermit crabs and spider crabs – that it requires stern concentration for the boy not to be diverted from his task. Before long he catches a fine male blenny, brilliant and almost iridescent in its courting outfit of many colours, and by lunchtime he has also collected two green species of starfish which he has not seen previously.
The sun is now blisteringly hot, and most of the sea life has disappeared under rocks to lurk in the shade. The boy makes his way to the shore to sit under the olive trees and eat his lunch. The air is heavy with the scent of broom and full of the zinging cries of cicadas. Presently, after finishing his lunch, he loads up the boat, gets the dogs on board, and begins to row home so that he can settle the blennies in their aquarium.
When he gets up the next morning he finds, to his intense annoyance, that the blennies must have been active at dawn, for a number of eggs have been laid on the roof of the catching pot. Which female is responsible for this he does not know, but the male is a very protective and resolute father, attacking the boy’s finger when he picks up the pot to look at the eggs.
The boy waits eagerly for the baby blennies to appear, but there must be something wrong with the aeration of the water, for only two of the eggs have hatched. One of the diminutive babies, to his horror, is eaten by its own mother, before his very eyes. Not wishing to have a double case of infanticide on his conscience, he puts the second baby in a jar and rows back down the coast to the bay where he caught its parents. Here he releases it, with his blessing, into the clear tepid water ringed with broom, hoping against hope that it will rear many multicoloured offspring of its own.
As a pioneer experiment in captive breeding, the blenny business is not an unqualified success. But it doesn’t matter. The blenny is not an endangered species. The sea round Corfu is stuffed with blennies. And there is plenty of time, for the boy, Gerald Durrell, is still only twelve years old, a whole life with animals stretches before him, and the summer blazes on for eternity.
ONE Landfall in Jamshedpur India 1925–1928
Gerald Malcolm Durrell was born in Jamshedpur, Bihar Province, India, on 7 January 1925, the fourth surviving child of Louisa Florence Durrell (nee Dixie), aged thirty-eight, and Lawrence Samuel Durrell, forty, a civil engineer.
When Gerald was older his mother told him something about the circumstances of his entry into the world. During the later stages of her pregnancy, it seems, she had swelled up to a prodigious degree, her enormous girth accentuated by her diminutive height, for she stood only five feet tall in her stockinged feet. Eventually she had grown so ashamed of her immense rotundity that she refused to leave the house. This annoyed her husband, who told her she ought to get out and about and go down to the Club, the social and recreational centre where all the local members of the British Raj used to congregate. ‘I can’t go to the Club looking like this,’ she retorted. ‘I look like an elephant.’ Whereupon Gerald’s father suggested building a howdah in which she could pass unnoticed, a flippancy which so annoyed her that she refused to speak to him for two days.
‘As other women have cravings for coke or wood shavings or similar extraordinary foods when they are in this state,’ Gerald was to record in an unpublished memoir about his Indian childhood, ‘my mother’s craving was for champagne, of which she drank an inordinate quantity