After his mother’s death Gerald was to give an alternative – or perhaps additional – motive for the idea. Mother, it seems, had found some grown-up consolation and companionship at Dixie Lodge, in the company of Lottie, the family’s Swiss maid. But then Lottie’s husband fell ill – Gerald thought with cancer – and Lottie had no option but to leave Mother’s employ in order to help look after her husband. ‘So back to square one,’ Gerald wrote in his unpublished memoir:
Lonely evenings, where Mother had only myself, aged nine, as company. So loneliness, of course, nudged Mother closer and closer to the Demon Drink. Larry, recognising the pitfalls, decided that decisive action must be taken and told Mother he thought we ought to up sticks and go and join George in Corfu. Mother, as usual, was hesitant.
‘What am I supposed to do with the house?’ she asked.
‘Sell it before it gets into a disreputable state,’ said Larry. ‘I think it is essential that we make this move.’
Larry himself gave a third, perhaps more cogent reason for emigrating, which he explained in a note to George Wilkinson out in Corfu: ‘The days are so dun and gloomy that we pant for the sun,’ he wrote. ‘My mother has gotten herself into a really good financial mess and has decided to cut and run for it. Being too timid to tackle foreign landscapes herself, she wants to be shown around the Mediterranean by us. She wants to scout Corfu. If she likes it I have no doubt but that she’ll buy the place …’
It is very likely that all three pressures – booze, money and sun – played their part in the final decision. But Mother did not need a great deal of persuading. She always hated to say no, Lawrence said, and in any case there was not much to keep her in England. In fact there wasn’t much to keep any of them there, for they were all exiles from Mother India, and none of them had sunk many roots in the Land of Hope and Glory. ‘It was a romantic idea and a mammoth decision,’ Margaret was to relate. ‘I should have been going back to school at Malvern but I said, “I’m not going to be left out!” and Mother, being a bit like that about everything, agreed.”’
So the decision was made. The whole family would go – Larry and Nancy, Mother, Leslie (who would be eighteen by the time they sailed), Margaret (fifteen) and Gerald (ten). When Larry replied to George Wilkinson’s invitation to move to Corfu, he asked about schooling for Gerry. A little alarmed, Wilkinson replied: ‘D’you all intend coming(!) and how many is all?’ But it was all or none. The house was put up for sale and goods and chattels crated up and shipped out ahead to Corfu.
The fate of the animals of the household presented a major headache, especially for Gerald, to whom they all belonged. The white mice were given to the baker’s son, the wigged canary to the man next door, Pluto the spaniel to Dr Macdonald, the family GP, and Billie the tortoise to Lottie in Brighton, who twenty-seven years later, when Gerald was famous, wrote to ask if he wanted it back, adding: ‘You have always loved animals, even the very smallest of them, so at least I know you couldn’t be anything but kind.’ Only Roger the dog would be going off with the family, complete with an enormous dog passport bearing a huge red seal.
Lawrence and Nancy were due to go out as the vanguard early in 1935. While they were living in Dixie Lodge prior to departure they decided to marry in secret – perhaps to keep the news from Nancy’s parents, who may have disapproved of such a raffish and Bohemian husband for their beautiful daughter. The marriage took place on 22 January at Bournemouth Register Office. Alan Thomas was sworn to secrecy and asked to act as witness. There was some anxiety before the wedding that because Alan and Nancy were so tall and Lawrence so short, the registrar might marry the wrong pair without realising it. ‘With a view to avoiding any such contingency,’ recalled Alan, ‘we approached a couple of midgets, then appearing in a freak-show at the local fun-fair, and asked them to appear as witnesses; but their employer refused to allow such valuable assets out of his sight.’
On 2 March 1935 Lawrence and Nancy set sail from Tilbury on board the P&O liner SS Oronsay, bound for Naples on the first stage of their journey to Corfu. Within the week the rest of the family were also en route. On 6 March they checked into the Russell Hotel in London, from where, the following day, Leslie sent Alan Thomas a postcard: ‘We are going to catch the boat this evening (with luck). P.S. Note the address – we are getting up in the world – 12/6 a night bed and etc!!!!’
In his published account of the family’s Corfu adventure, Gerald gives the impression they travelled overland across France, Switzerland and Italy. In fact Mother, Leslie, Margaret, Gerald and Roger the dog sailed from Tilbury, travelling second class on board a Japanese cargo boat, the SS Hakone Maru of the NYK Line, bound for Naples. Leslie seems to have been the only Durrell on board who was up to writing, and his postcards and other missives constitute virtually his last recorded utterance in this history. Chugging through the Dover Straits he told Alan Thomas on 8 March: ‘So far I have a cabin of my own. The people in the Second Class are quite nice and very jolly. The ship’s rolling a bit but the Durrells are all fine.’
Two days later, butting their way across the Bay of Biscay, the adventure was hotting up nicely. ‘We had a heavy snow storm this morning,’ wrote Leslie, ‘and we had to go up to the top deck where the lifeboats are and give that ******* dog some exercise. God what a time we had, what with the dog piddling all over the place, the snow coming down, the old wind blowing like HELL – God what a trip! No one seemed to know what to do at lifeboat drill, so if anything goes wrong it will only be with the Grace of God (if there is one) if any of us see the dear coast of Old England again.’
By 15 March, after a trip ashore at Gibraltar – ‘none of the Durrells sick so far, not even that ******* dog,’ reported Leslie – they had reached Marseilles. Next stop Naples, the train to Brindisi and the ferry to Corfu, 130 miles away across the Strait of Otranto and the Ionian Sea
It was an overnight run. ‘The tiny ship throbbed away from the heel of Italy,’ Gerald recalled of that fateful crossing, ‘out into the twilit sea, and as we slept in our stuffy cabins, somewhere in that tract of moon-polished water we passed the invisible dividing-line and entered the bright, looking-glass world of Greece. Slowly this sense of change seeped down to us, and so, at dawn, we awoke restless and went on deck.’ For a long time the island was just a chocolate-brown smudge of land, huddled in mist on the starboard bow.
Then suddenly the sun shifted over the horizon and the sky turned the smooth enamelled blue of a jay’s eye … The mist lifted in quick, lithe ribbons, and before us lay the island, the mountains sleeping as though beneath a crumpled blanket of brown, the folds stained with the green of olive-groves. Along the shore curved beaches as white as tusks among tottering cities of brilliant gold, red, and white rocks … Rounding the cape we left the mountains, and the island sloped gently down, blurred with silver and green iridescence of olives, with here and there an admonishing finger of black cypress against the sky. The shallow sea in the bays was butterfly blue, and even above the sound of the ship’s engines we could hear, faintly ringing from the shore like a chorus of tiny voices, the shrill, triumphant cries of the cicadas.
Decades later, old and sick and near the verge of death, Gerald Durrell was to recall that magic landfall that was to transform his life with all the pain and longing of remembered youth. ‘It was like being allowed back into Paradise,’ he whispered. ‘Our arrival in Corfu was like being born for the first time.’
THREE The Gates of Paradise Corfu 1935–1936
A few hours later the Durrells disembarked at the quay in Corfu town, Gerald clutching his butterfly net and a jam-jar full of caterpillars, Mother – ‘looking like a tiny, harassed missionary in an uprising’ – holding on tightly to a dog desperate to find a lamp-post. Two horse-drawn cabs, one for the family and one for the luggage, conveyed the party through the narrow, sun-bright streets of the island’s elegant, faintly rundown capital, and after a short ride they reached the first stop in their island adventure, the Pension Suisse, not far from the Platia, the town’s main square, where they were reunited