‘I was riveted,’ Gerald remembered. ‘I knew about pictures but I had not realised that pictures could move. Felix, of course, was a very simplistic, stick-like animal, but his antics kept us all enthralled. We were provided with bits of paper and pencils to scribble with, and while the others were scribbling I was trying to draw Felix, who had become my hero. I was infuriated because I could not get him right, simple a drawing though he was. When I finally succeeded, I was even more infuriated because, of course, he would not move.’
Whether it was a real live creature, or an animated image, or a drawing on a page, the child brought with him a passion and a tenderness for animals so innate it was as if it was embedded in his genes. In the years to follow, come hell or high water, this affinity was not to be denied.
So young Gerald came to a new home in a new country – and a new life without a father. The loss of the family’s patriarch was to have a profound effect on the lives of all the Durrell siblings, for, deprived of paternal authority, they grew up free to ‘do their own thing’, decades before the expression came into vogue.
TWO ‘The Most Ignorant Boy in the School’ England 1928–1935
The house at 43 Alleyn Park, in the prosperous and leafy south London suburb of Dulwich, now became the Durrell family home. It was a substantial house, befitting the family of a servant of empire who had made his pile, with large rooms on three floors and a big garden enclosing it. Before long Mother had installed Gerald’s Aunt Prudence, a butler and a huge mastiff guard dog that chased the tradesmen and according to Gerald devoured two little dogs a day. But the new house was vast, expensive to run, and haunted: one evening Mother saw the ghost of her late husband, as plain as day, smoking a cigarette in a chair – or so Gerald claimed.
Early in 1930, therefore, when Gerald was five, the family took over a large flat at 10 Queen’s Court, an annexe of the sprawling Queen’s Hotel, a Victorian pile stuck in the faded south London suburb of Upper Norwood. Mother’s cousin Fan lived here, along with other marooned refugees from the Indian Army and Civil Service, so for her the place felt almost like home. The family’s new abode was a strange, elongated flat in the hotel grounds. The entrance was through the hotel, but there was a side door which allowed access to the extensive garden, with its lawns, trees and pond. ‘The flat itself consisted of a big dining room cum drawing room,’ Gerald recalled, ‘a room opposite which was for Larry, then a small room in which I kept my toys, then a minuscule bathroom and kitchen, and finally Mother’s spacious bedroom. Lying in bed in her room, you could look down the whole length of the flat to the front door.’
Mother’s susceptibility to the paranormal showed no signs of abating, for this place too turned out to be haunted, one ghost being visible, two others audible. The first took the form of a woman who appeared at the foot of Mother’s bed when she woke from a siesta one day. The woman smiled at Mother, then faded slowly away. She appeared again a few weeks later, this time witnessed by Gerald’s cousins Molly and Phyllis, who came running into the kitchen shouting, ‘Auntie, Auntie, there’s a strange lady in your room.’
The second ghost took the form of a voice that kept telling Mother to put her head in the gas oven, and the third manifested itself in Larry’s room one night when he was playing in a jazz band up in town. In Larry’s room reposed the great teak roll-top desk that his father had had built to his own design. When the roll-top was raised or lowered the noise, Gerald recalled, was indescribable. That night, while Mother lay smoking in bed, waiting anxiously for Larry’s return, she heard the unmistakable racket of the roll-top opening and closing. ‘Taking me firmly by the hand,’ Gerald was to recount, ‘we went down the length of the flat, listening to the constant clatter of the lid being pulled shut and then opened again, but the moment we opened the door and looked into the room there was nothing to be seen.’
It was in the garden of the Queen’s Hotel, while he was trying to catch birds by putting salt on their tails, that Gerald first came face to face with the more sensual side of life, in the form of a beautiful young woman called Tabitha. ‘She had big, melting brown eyes,’ he recalled, ‘brown and glossy as new horse chestnuts, a wide smile, brown hair bobbed and with a fringe like a Christmas cracker.’ Before long Tabitha was looking after him in her tiny flat whenever Mother went off house-hunting. She had a cat called Cuthbert and two goldfish called Mr Jenkins and Clara Butt, as well as a lot of gentlemen friends who came and went and seemed to spend a shorter or longer time in her bedroom – to talk business, she told her young friend.
‘I loved the days I spent with Tabitha,’ Gerald wrote in his private memoir:
In fact I loved Tabitha very much. She was so gentle and gay, her smile engulfed you with love. She smelt gorgeous too, which was important to me, since Mother smelt gorgeous as well. She was not only very sweet and kind but very funny. She had a squeaky wind-up gramophone and a pile of records of Harry Lauder and Jack Buchanan, so we would clear away the furniture and Tabitha would teach me how to do the Charleston and the waltz. At times we went round and round so fast that eventually we would collapse on the sofa, she with peals of laughter and me giggling like a hysteric. Tabitha also taught me lots of songs, including one which enchanted me:
Iz ’e an Aussie, iz ’e, Lizzie?
Iz ’e an Aussie, iz ’e, eh?
Iz it because ’e iz an Aussie
That ’e makes you feel this way?
But alas, somehow or other Mother got to hear of Tabitha’s business associates and my visits to her flat were ended. So Tabitha’s lovely brown eyes and wonderful smell disappeared from my world, and I mourned the fact that I could no longer waltz and Charleston and sing silly songs with this enchanting girl.
Looking back in later years, it struck Gerald as odd that Mother should have been so prim. ‘After all,’ he noted, ‘she was rearing a brood of offspring who became sexually precocious and pursued their own interests with the relentlessness of dynamos. Still, her fledglings managed to erode her Victorian attitudes and train her into more broad-minded ways, so that when, at the age of twenty-one, I went home one weekend with a girlfriend, I found a note from my mother which said: “I have made up two beds, dear, and the double bed, since you didn’t tell me whether you are sleeping together or not. The sheets are aired and the gin is in the dining room cupboard.”’
It was while living at the Queen’s Hotel annexe that Mother got to know the Brown family – a matriarchy of English provenance who had recently come over from America, consisting of Granny Richardson, her daughter Mrs Brown, and Mrs Brown’s young daughter Dorothy. Like the Durrells, the Browns had a garden flat at the hotel, and the two mothers soon became good friends, for both were exiles who had returned to a foreign motherland. Dorothy Brown was eleven when she first encountered Gerald, who had just turned five. ‘He was a bright little spark,’ she recalled, ‘and even then he was very fond of animals. When our cat had kittens he was always there on the doorstep, clamouring to see them. He was very much a mother’s boy and always terribly fond of her. As far as he was concerned she could do no wrong.’
Like Louisa Durrell, the Browns were looking for a house to buy, and finally settled on Bournemouth, a salubrious seaside resort on the south coast, stuffed with decaying ex-members of His Majesty’s Forces and genteel ladies eking out modest pensions, but warmer and sunnier than most towns in England, and surrounded by beautiful countryside. Mother decided to follow her friends’ example and move to Bournemouth, and early in 1931 the family became the proud possessors of Berridge House, at 6 Spur Hill, Parkstone, complete with a butler, a housekeeper and two servants. This marked the beginning of the