Gerald Durrell’s Corfu, and a magical world of animals

Durrell writes that his life in Corfu was 'surrounded by magic’.  (iStockphoto)
Durrell writes that his life in Corfu was 'surrounded by magic’. (iStockphoto)

Summary

Author Gerald Durrell’s true magic lay in his ability to uncover the wonders in his own backyard—he revealed the beauty in the humblest of creatures

A long, long time ago, in an age before literature festivals, I met a man who wrote books. I was just a wide-eyed schoolboy in Kolkata and I don’t recall anything the portly pink-faced man with twinkling eyes and a bushy beard said when he visited our school, but I remember the delightful little animal sketches he made on the fly on the optical projector. Later, he signed a copy of one of his books for me. It was my first literary autograph. It felt incredibly thrilling. It was as if the book had sprung to life. I was starstruck. This was not just any author but Gerald Durrell, who had written one of my most beloved books—My Family and Other Animals. This January marks Durrell’s centenary.

My father had bought me the book. I don’t know why he got it. It was possibly because I loved animals. I would drag the family to see documentaries like Elephant Called Slowly. I doubt my father knew Durrell’s India connection. He was born in Jamshedpur in 1925. His father, a civil engineer for the Tatas, built their administrative offices and hospital, even the bungalow where Durrell was born. Durrell was a toddler when the family returned to England after his father’s death. None of his 40-plus books are set in India. But he said that the family moved to the Greek island of Corfu, the setting for My Family and Other Animals, because they missed the warmth of India in dreary grey England.

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Sitting in Kolkata, I would not be able to find Corfu on a map. But I wanted Durrell’s childhood, in a strawberry-pink villa on an idyllic island with a garden growing wild, with nature as my classroom, an eccentric family and even more eccentric pets—an owl named Ulysses, an ancient terrapin called Old Plop, the thieving magpies named The Magenpies alongside dogs named Widdle, Waddle and Puke. It was as unconventional as my own childhood was utterly conventional. Corfu was like another planet with its tossing and hissing cypress trees, waxy yellow crocuses and delicate ivory anemones whose petals seemed to have been dipped in wine. In Myself and Other Animals, a recently released posthumous collection of his writings, Durrell writes that in Corfu “I was surrounded by magic as though Merlin had passed through and casually touched the island with his wand".

What I didn’t realise then was the magic of Durrell was not really about Corfu in particular, enchanting as it was. It was his eye for the life teeming in his own backyard. While I was obsessed with elephants, lions, giraffes in my nature documentaries, Durrell was equally captivated by spiders, beetles and scorpions, no creature too humble for him. Where others just saw beetles, Durrell saw “businessmen hurrying with portly efficiency about their night’s work". He was enraptured by a fat female scorpion wearing a “pale fawn fur coat" which turned out to be a “mass of tiny babies clinging to their mother’s back". A plump scarlet mite, “the size of a match-head, struggled like a tubby huntsman through the forest of moss". In 2021, his wife Lee told me at the Kolkata Literary Meet that he gave her four tarantula spiders for their 10th anniversary. “When we would go travelling, I asked his secretary if she would please feed my spiders," said Lee, who will speak at the Coal India Kolkata Literary Meet this year. “She wasn’t too happy about that. But I thought that was a great present."

Inspired by Durrell, I tried to keep orange-and-black caterpillars in a shoebox by my bed. I prowled near my grandmother’s lily plants trying to trap the metallic blue-green flies that buzzed around during the monsoon like plump helicopters. I made up stories about the crows that perched on our neem tree and tried to bully the shrill kites. Durrell was teaching me something vital. If you loved nature, it couldn’t just be about the so-called “box office species"—cute pandas and majestic tigers. “He loved the whole of the animal kingdom," said Lee. “Including the creepy crawly things that most people don’t like." He called them the “little brown jobs", the obscure, small, drab creatures of the animal world.

While some say he might have anthropomorphised these creatures, investing them with too much human idiosyncrasy, perhaps that was his way of making the rest of us care for them. He wrote that animals could not write to members of parliament or go on strike. “They have nobody to speak for them except us, the human beings who share the world with them but do not own it."

But even as I tried to be an amateur naturalist among the potted plants on our terrace, I did wish my family was a little more colourful. We could not compete with the Durrells —the hapless mother flailing as she tried to keep the family together, one brother Lawrence dreaming of being a serious writer while the other brother Leslie did target practice with guns and sister Margo recovered from doomed love affairs by sequestering herself in the attic with Tennyson’s poems. In Durrell’s world, every-day events were booby-trapped. His brother Leslie flicked open a matchbox to light a post-dinner cigarette, not realising Durrell had stashed the mother scorpion and her brood in there. All hell broke loose, every delicious detail captured gleefully by an unrepentant Durrell.

“Look at the table, knee-deep in scorpions."

“But how did the scorpions get on the table, dear?"

“That bloody boy… Every matchbox in the house is a deathtrap…"

“Look out, it’s coming towards me.. Quick, quick, do something…"

“Hit it with your knife… your knife."

There was no way my family could measure up to this madhouse. It was years later that I realised Durrell was also giving us a masterclass in creative memoir writing. His brother Lawrence, more renowned as a serious literary figure, wrote Prospero’s Cell, set during the Corfu years as well. Many of the same characters appear in that book but it feels like a different world in many ways. For example, the reader of My Family will never realise that Lawrence was actually married during those years. His wife Nancy has been entirely eliminated in Durrell’s account of the family.

Lee said Durrell and Nancy adored each other but it was a “deliberate thing on Gerry’s part to structure the book just around the family". That was the poetic licence he gave himself to turn his family into entertainment. In the introduction to Birds, Beasts and Relatives, Lawrence complains “it’s fine being caricatured but to be caricatured in bad prose is terrible". His sister even wrote her own sequel of sorts called Whatever Happened to Margo? Durrell wrote its preface, proving that despite the bickering facade this was a family bound together by real affection. “They revelled in his success," said Lee.

The secret of that success was not just his ability to put everything under the microscope, from his family to the trapdoor spiders at the bottom of the garden, but to do it with so much such affection for all creatures great and small.

Over the years I have had many writers sign their books for me—Booker winners, Pulitzer winners, even Nobel laureates. But I’ve held on to my autographed Durrell book though its pages are now yellowed and falling apart. It will always be special. Gerald Durrell was once asked if he could gift a child something, what it would be. He said “my magical childhood in Corfu".

But he did give us that. Even in my busy street in the heart of Kolkata, he gave me a sunlit childhood in Corfu.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.

Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr

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