Really it was the first time I’d been in a family – in a jolly family – and the first time that I’d been able to say what I liked – there was nothing forbidden to say. It was a great opening-up experience for me, hearing everybody saying ‘You bloody fool!’ to everybody else, and getting away with it. It was marvellous. So I really fell in love with the family.
Gerry was six or seven at the time – a very slender, very delicate, very charming little boy who looked a bit like Christopher Robin and was too sensitive to go to school. Even at that time there was quite a lot of friction between Larry and Leslie, and Larry used to tease his brother mercilessly. Leslie was never very quick-witted, and Larry would make him look a fool any time he liked, and any time Leslie crossed him he used to absolutely flay him, which Leslie minded very much.
But my first visit ended in disaster. On our first morning Larry came into my room and hopped into bed with me, and then Gerry came along and hopped into bed too, so we were all sort of cosy under the blankets, cuddled together, the three of us, and this was too much for Mother. She came in and said she’d never been so disgusted in her life. ‘What a way to behave!’ she said, shouting. ‘Out you go, out you go this minute, out you both go, five minutes and you must get out, I’m not having Gerry corrupted!’ She could have histrionics when she wanted to.
I was a bit abashed, feeling terrible about it, but Larry said, ‘Oh, the silly woman, she’ll get over it. Come on, we’ll go. She’ll get over it in a day and be pleased to have us back. Silly nothing – just like a stupid woman. Don’t be such a fool, Mother …’
So we sort of tiptoed out of the house – but within a fortnight or so we were welcomed back, and you know, Mother closed her eyes to whatever we were doing from then onwards. And she was terribly sweet to me. I mean, I always felt rather like a goose among ducklings – they were all so small and I was so long and thin. But they couldn’t have been sweeter. After that first moment Mother was always clucking over me. She thought I looked consumptive and used to give me lots of gold-top milk and butter and fill me up with cream and Weetabix and whatever was going. And she was a marvellous cook; she did most of the cooking, a lot of hot stuff, curries, Indian cooking …
I just loved the whole craziness of it. Mother used to drink a lot of gin at that time, and she used to retire to bed when Gerry went to bed – Gerry wouldn’t go to bed without her, he was afraid of being on his own, I think – and she’d take her gin bottle up with her when she went. So then we all used to retire up there, carrying a gin bottle up to bed. She had a large double bed, and an enormous silver tea-tray with lots of silver teapots and things on it, and we’d carry on the evening sitting on the bed, drinking gin and tea and chatting, while Gerry was asleep in his own bed in the same room. I think he must have been able to go to sleep if there was a noise going on. It was all very cosy.
Though friends might adore the Durrells, the wider family – the cohort of aunts and grannies – disapproved mightily. They were appalled at Mother’s incompetence and extravagance when it came to money, dismayed that she would not help her cousin Fan out of her penury, and scandalised at the way she was bringing up her children – her lack of control; their wild, undisciplined ways; the outrageous Bohemian ambience of her household, as they saw it, doubly shocking in the deathly polite context of suburban Bournemouth. Leslie especially was a cause for concern. One cousin, Molly Briggs, the daughter of Gerald’s father’s sister Elsie, remembered:
Leslie drove Aunt Lou mad at this time, staying in bed till midday and slouching about. He never settled to anything, never saw anything through. As children my sister and I didn’t like him very much. Sometimes he would condescend to play with us, but you never knew from one minute to the next how he would behave. He would suddenly turn nasty for no reason at all. Both Gerry and Leslie ran rings round Aunt Lou and were quite unmanageable, But Gerry was a beautiful little boy, really, and great fun. He used to shin up a tree where he had a secret place we didn’t dare follow him to. And he used to play with three slow worms, fondling them and winding them around his hands. We had been brought up in Ceylon to fear snakes, so were terrified of Gerry’s pets and wouldn’t touch them. I remember we learned to ride a bike with Gerry on a sunken lawn surrounded by heather banks. We were terribly noisy and shrieked with laughter whenever we fell over, which was very often, so eventually Larry, who was probably composing something, leaned out of an upstairs window and shouted: ‘Stop that bloody row!’
‘It’s curious – something one didn’t realise at the time – but my mother allowed us to be,’ Gerald recalled.
She worried over us, she advised (when we asked) and the advice always ended with, ‘But anyway, dear, you must do what you think best.’ It was, I suppose, a form of indoctrination, a form of guidance. She opened new doors on problems that allowed new explorations of ways in which you might – or might not – deal with them – simple things now ingrained in me without a recollection of how they got there. I was never lectured, never scolded.
Lawrence and Nancy had been living for a year with their friends George and Pam Wilkinson in a cottage at Loxwood in Sussex, where Lawrence wrote his first novel, a novice work called Pied Piper of Lovers, which was published in 1935. At the end of 1934 the Wilkinsons had struck camp and moved on, emigrating to the Greek island of Corfu, where the climate was good, the exchange rate favourable and the living cheap and easy. Lawrence and Nancy, meanwhile, moved in with the family at Dixie Lodge. From time to time a letter would arrive from George Wilkinson describing the idyllic life they were leading on their beautiful, verdant and as yet unspoilt island, and gradually the idea began to grow – in Lawrence’s mind first – that perhaps that was where he and Nancy should live and have their being, a perfect retreat for a young aspiring writer and a young aspiring painter, both of them keen to learn what they could of ancient Greek art and archaeology. There was nothing to keep Lawrence in England. It was not the land of his birth, he had no roots there, and there was much about the place and the English outlook and way of life – ‘the English way of death’, he called it – that he had detested from the moment he set foot there as a lonely, bewildered boy of eleven, exiled from his native India to begin his formal education at ‘home’. ‘Pudding Island’ was his dismissive term for Britain. ‘That mean, shabby little island,’ he was to tell a friend much later, ‘wrung my guts out of me and tried to destroy anything singular and unique in me.’ Its dismal climate alone was reason enough to move on. ‘Alan,’ he had remarked to Alan Thomas after receiving a letter from George Wilkinson describing the orange groves surrounding his villa, ‘think of the times in England when everybody you know has a cold.’ Though the running was made by Lawrence, the idea of moving to Corfu soon took hold of the whole family.
While his mother was still alive, Gerald’s version of events described a kind of mass migration to the sun dreamed up and pushed through by his eldest brother. It had all begun, he was to relate in a famous passage, on a day of a leaden August sky. ‘A sharp, stinging drizzle fell,’ he wrote, ‘billowing into opaque grey sheets when the wind caught it. Along the Bournemouth seafront the beach-huts turned blank wooden faces towards a greeny-grey, froth-chained sea that leapt eagerly at the cement bulwark of the shore. The gulls had been tumbled inland over the town, and they now drifted above the housetops on taut wings, whining peevishly. It was the sort of weather calculated to try anyone’s endurance.’
At Dixie Lodge the family were assembled – ‘not a very prepossessing sight that afternoon’. For Gerald the weather had brought on catarrh, and he was forced to breath ‘stertorously’ through open mouth. For Leslie it had inflamed his ears so that they bled. For Margaret it had brought a fresh blotch of acne. For Mother it had generated a bubbling cold and a twinge of rheumatism. Only Larry was as yet unscathed, and as the afternoon wore on his irritation grew till he was forced to declaim: ‘Why do we stand this bloody climate? Look at it! And, if it comes to that, look at us …