Lying side by side with Roger the dog in the bow of the boat as it drifted in towards the shallows, he peered down through a fathom of crystal water at the tapestry of the seabed passing beneath him – the gaping clams stuck upright in the silver sand, the serpulas with their feathery orange-gold and blue petals, ‘like an orchid on a mushroom stem’, the pouting blennies in the holes of the reefs, the anemones waving on the rocks, the scuttling spider-crabs camouflaged with coats of weeds and sponges, the caravans of coloured top shells moving everywhere. Eventually, as the sun sank lower, he began to row for home, his glass jars and collecting tubes full of marine specimens of all kinds. ‘The sun gleamed like a coin behind the olive trees,’ he was to write, ‘and the sea was striped with gold and silver when the Bootle-Bumtrinket brought her round behind bumping gently against the jetty. Hungry, thirsty, tired, with my head buzzing full of the colours and shapes I had seen, I carried my precious specimens slowly up the hill to the villa …’
Sometimes in the summer, if the moon was full, the family went bathing at night, when the sea was cooler than in the heat of the day. They would take the Sea Cow out into deep water and plunge over the side, the water wobbling bright in the moonlight. On one such night, when Gerald had floated out some distance from both shore and boat, he was overtaken by a shoal of porpoises, heaving and sighing, rising and diving all around him. For a short while he swam with them, overjoyed at their beautiful, exuberant presence; but then, as if at a signal, they turned and headed out of the bay towards the distant coast of Albania. ‘I trod water and watched them go,’ he remembered, ‘swimming up the white chain of moonlight, backs aglow as they rose and plunged with heavy ecstasy in the water as warm as fresh milk. Behind them they left a trail of great bubbles that rocked and shone briefly like miniature moons before vanishing under the ripples.’
Soon the family discovered other marvels of the Corfu night – the phosphorescence in the sea and the flickering of the fireflies in the olive groves along the shore, both better seen when there was no moon. On the memorable night that Mother took to the water for the first time in her home-made bathing suit, the porpoises, the fireflies and the phosphorescence coincided in a single breathtaking display. Gerald was to write:
Never had we seen so many fireflies congregated in one spot. They flicked through the trees in swarms, they crawled on the grass, the bushes and the olive trunks, they drifted in swarms over our heads and landed on the rugs, like green embers. Glittering streams of them flew out over the bay, swirling over the water, and then, right on cue, the porpoises appeared, swimming in line into the bay, rocking rhythmically through the water, their backs as if painted with phosphorous … With the fireflies above and the illuminated porpoises below it was a fantastic sight. We could even see the luminous trails beneath the surface where the porpoises swam in fiery patterns across the sandy bottom, and when they leapt high in the air the drops of emerald glowing water flicked from them, and you could not tell if it was phosphorescence or fireflies you were looking at. For an hour or so we watched this pageant, and then slowly the fireflies drifted back inland and further down the coast. Then the porpoises lined up and sped out to sea, leaving a flaming path behind them that flickered and glowed, and then died slowly, like a glowing branch laid across the bay.
The motorboat gave the Durrells a greater freedom to roam round the island than ever before. At first it was Leslie who did the trail-blazing, mainly because of the rich opportunities for hunting and shooting provided by the wilder country to the north. Sometimes he picked up Lawrence and Nancy on the way, since Kalami lay on his passage north from Kondokali. ‘A week or 2. ago,’ Lawrence wrote to Alan Thomas, ‘we went up to a death-swamp lake in the north, Les and Nancy and me for a shoot. Tropical. Huge slime covered tracts, bubbled in hot marsh-gas and the roots of trees. Snakes and tortoises swimming quietly above and toads below. A ring of emerald slime thick with scarlet dragon-flies and mosquitoes. It’s called ANTINIOTISSA (enemy of youth).’
Before long Lawrence had become almost as obsessive a hunter as Leslie. It is extraordinary that Gerald was able to nurture his passion and love for the animal world while his two older brothers seemed hell-bent on blasting the wildlife of the island to pieces. But he did, conniving in the slaughter to the extent of helping to fill Leslie’s cartridges for him and sometimes accompanying him on pigeon shoots, looking on when, out of compassion, Leslie shot the stray and starving dogs that followed the family on their picnics.
Lawrence was largely indifferent to the natural world, except as spectacle, and his expeditions with Leslie to the north of the island revealed a killer streak. ‘I’m queer about shooting,’ he wrote to Alan Thomas. ‘So far I’ve prohibited herons. But duck is a different matter. Just a personified motor-horn, flying ham with a honk. No personality, nothing. And to bring them down is the most glorious feeling. THUD. Like breaking glass balls at a range. I could slaughter hundreds without a qualm.’ As for octopus, which he learned to hunt with a stick with a hook like the Greeks, they were ‘altogether filthy … utterly foul’.
Larry began to revise his opinion of Leslie somewhat after a few shooting trips with him in the north. ‘You wouldn’t recognise Leslie I swear,’ he wrote to Alan Thomas in the summer of 1936. ‘His personality is really amazingly strong now, and he can chatter away in company like Doctor Johnson himself. It’s done him a world of good, strutting about with a gun under each arm and one behind his ear, shooting peasants right and left.’ Leslie saw himself as a tough guy in a tough guy’s world, the fastest gun on the island – ‘dirty, unshaven,’ his kid brother said, ‘and smelling of gun-oil and blood’.
The family had a Kodak camera, and from time to time snapped family groups and memorable outings. Many of the photographs were taken by Leslie, who had an eye for a picture – and a handsome woman. On the back of a snap of Maria, the family’s maid, he jotted a caption full of portent: ‘Maria our maid (jolly nice)’.
Towards the end of the summer of 1936 Mother decided to dispense with the services of Gerald’s tutor, Pat Evans – according to Gerald, on the grounds that he was getting far too fond of Margo, and Margo of him. So departed one of the staunchest supporters of Gerald’s budding natural history and literary endeavours. Banished for ever from the family, the disconsolate Evans found his way to mainland Greece, where during the war he became a local hero, fighting behind the lines as a British SOE agent in Nazi-occupied Macedonia. A rather shy and diffident loner, Evans was, Margo recalled, ‘very, very attractive’, and she had become deeply infatuated with him. She took the news of his dismissal badly, and shut herself away in the attic, eating hugely. ‘This was the period when Margaret was in a very bad way,’ Nancy remembered. ‘She began to get very fat, I mean she really did get awfully fat, and she got so ashamed of herself that she wouldn’t even appear – wouldn’t come down to meals or anything.’ It was neither gluttony nor a broken heart that was the cause of Margo’s weight problem, however, for according to reports it later turned out that she had a glandular condition that was causing her to put on a pound a day.
A new tutor was found, a Polish exile with French and English ancestry by the name of Krajewsky, whom Gerald in his book was to call Kralefsky. A gnome-like humpback, his redeeming virtue, as far as Gerald was concerned, was the huge collection of finches and other birds he kept on the top floor of the mouldering mansion on the edge of town where he lived with his ancient, witch-like mother (‘a ravaged old queen’).
His lessons, however, were old-fashioned and boring – history was lists of dates and geography lists of towns – so it came as a relief to the wearied boy when he discovered that his tutor possessed another virtue. For Krajewsky was a fantasist, and often conjured up an imaginary world in which his past life was presented as a series of wild adventures – a shipwreck on a voyage to Murmansk, an attack by bandits in the Syrian desert, a spot of derring-do in the Secret Service in World War One, an incident in Hyde Park when he strangled a killer