As for Gerald, now fifteen, the retreat to Blighty – from a sun-drenched Mediterranean island to whose human and animal fauna he had closely related, to a mist-shrouded North Sea island to which he barely related at all – was more than just a migration from one kind of habitat to another: it was like a flight into limbo, an existential near-void about which he was to say little in future years, and to write next to nothing till near the very end. The shock was palpable, and considerable adjustments were required for him to adapt to his new physical and cultural environment.
Gerald was no longer a boy, but an adolescent, with all that that turbulent transitional phase of development entailed. He was also, as a result of his upbringing on Corfu, part Greek in manners and outlook. More, he had no education – none, at any rate, that the authorities in the United Kingdom would recognise as such. Nor was he ever likely to receive any, for he was now almost past the statutory age of compulsory education in Britain. Not only had he long ago parted company with any school syllabus worthy of the name, but he stood no chance of passing any exam of any sort anywhere at any time.
Not that Mother didn’t give his education one last try, taking him along to a minor public school outside Bournemouth in the hope that the place might fire his enthusiasm. The visit was only a partial success. The headmaster chose to test the boy’s scholastic potential by asking him to write out the Lord’s Prayer, but Gerald could only remember the first six words, and invented the rest. A visit to the labs with the biology master was more promising – the man turned out to have once spent a holiday in Greece – but Gerald was rated no higher than ‘backward but bright’. Not that it mattered much, for Gerald had no wish to go to any school.
Believing, as always, that her children knew what was best for them, his mother tried a private tutor instead. Harold Binns was a neat, quiet man, with a face scarred by shrapnel in the Great War. He had written a study of the English poets, and was oddly addicted to eau de Cologne, often popping into the toilet to give himself a quick squirt. Mr Binns bestowed two great gifts upon his ill-educated student – how to unlock the treasures contained within the British public library system, and how to appreciate to the full the words of the English language in all their associations and assonances, nuances and overtones. His method was to teach Gerald for an hour, then fetch a volume of verse from his bookshelf for Gerald to browse through on his own. In an unpublished autobiographical fragment written in the last year of his life, Gerald recalled Mr Binns and the excitement he generated for the music and the magic of the language.
He would burst into the room in a tidal wave of eau de Cologne. ‘Now, dear boy,’ he would say, eyes raised to Heaven, hands outstretched. ‘Time to remove the cobwebs from the mind, eh? Leave that geometry which appears insoluble to you and let’s have a look at Swinburne. You know Swinburne? I think you’ll find he has something in common with you – yes – um – yes – um – this for a start.’
He would thrust a book into my hands and gallop out of the room trailing eau de Cologne like a bride’s train behind him.
A little later, bustling back into the room, he would ask: ‘Did you like him?’
‘I think the poetry is fascinating,’ I said, ‘and I love alliteration.’
‘So do I,’ he said fervently. ‘The whole poem is an example of what poetry should be. So few modern poets chime in the ear like a seashell whispering mysteries. At least he conjures up lantanas in your mind, illuminating your brain with fabulous words …’
All this was a revelation to Gerald, and would greatly influence him, as brother Larry had previously done, in his approach to his own writing.
While Mr Binns endowed Gerald with access to knowledge and reinforced the love of words Lawrence had encouraged on Corfu, there was no one to teach him the biology which fascinated him. Working his way at random through the textbooks in the Bournemouth public library and elsewhere, Gerald taught himself as best he could. There were advantages to this eclectic exploration of the subject, for it allowed him to approach it from eccentrically revelatory angles. But there were enormous disadvantages too, great gaps in his knowledge, and his grasp of the science could hardly be said to rest on sound foundations.
He was always conscious of this, especially when he became a high-profile practitioner and spokesman of the very science he had never been formally taught. Much later, he was to say:
Yes, a degree might have helped – but would it? In the long run it might have killed the other side of me. Because of no job, which was because of no degree, only the need to write for a living compelled me to write at all. Also, the degree idea is waved about like a flag to such an extent that one thinks one needs it – when it’s only society needing it. These absolute dolts in my own field have the application to store knowledge like a squirrel and regurgitate it all over ruled paper at the right moment. That shows a sense of inferiority on my part, doesn’t it?
More than compensating for his lack of formal qualifications, Gerald was endowed with a highly developed and inventive intelligence. His Corfu childhood under the tutelage of Theo Stephanides had provided him with a superlative insight into the phenomena of natural life, an education in hands-on biology largely denied to his peers in the United Kingdom, and his brother Lawrence had instilled in him the principles of creative literature in a way no classroom lessons could have done. The rest of the family, his mother especially, also contributed. ‘She encouraged us in everything we wanted to do,’ he was to recall. ‘She would say, “Well, try it, dear,” and if it failed, it failed. I was allowed to read anything I wanted to. Every question I asked was answered absolutely honestly, if it could be answered. In a funny way, I got a unique education which included dealing with an endless procession of eccentrics – so now, nothing a human being does surprises me.’
But his grasp of the mainstream of schoolboy learning – sums and stinks and 1066 and the rest – was patchy and uncertain. Gerald was therefore a highly unorthodox teenager in the Britain of his time. The familiar routine of morning assemblies and school games and end of term exams had passed him by. His primary education was fragmentary, his secondary education nil, his chances of higher education non-existent. For a youth with such an apparently oddball background there was only one option in wartime Bournemouth – to get a job, probably a mundane and lowly one, until he was old enough to be called up and have his head shot off in the war.
The only job that Gerald could imagine tolerating was working with animals. Though it doesn’t sound much, for Gerald a day spent in a pet shop in the company of white rats was not a day wasted. He had managed to run an aviary and keep a few adders in the garden at home during these years, but the largest animal he had to cope with was a fallow deer which was given to him by a boy who lived in the New Forest and was moving to Southampton. The boy had described it as a ‘baby’ and a ‘household pet’, but when it arrived it turned out to be a petulant creature at least four years old – far from the submissive, friendly fawn Gerald had been promised. With much patience he eventually learned how to pacify the deer, which he named Hortense, by scratching the base of its antlers, but in the end he had to give way to family pressure, and Hortense was exiled to a nearby farm.
As for the war, though a few stray bombs did land on Bournemouth, one of them rocking the treasurehouse of Commin’s bookshop, Gerald admitted that he did not really know what war was, nor care very much about it.
We used to see Southampton get a pasting, eagerly enjoying the eastern sky aflame, and there were plenty of jolly dogfights upstairs – but on the whole we had a cushy war. The entire family did. We were pinned to the nine o’clock news, cheering for victory, and I followed daily the progress of the battles on whatever front it was … but only selfishly. I wanted to get the war over as fast as possible and do something interesting, like return to Greece and see how the Germans had behaved to the swallowtails and trapdoor spiders. Even so, I spent every moment out of doors – aged fifteen to