Gerald Durrell - Fauna and Family: More Durrell Family Adventures on Corfu

Fillets of Plaice (Godine, 2008)

The Overloaded Ark

The Bafut Beagles

Three Tickets to Adventure

The Drunken Forest

My Family and Other Animals

A Zoo in My Luggage

The Whispering Land

Menagerie Manor

Two in the Bush

Birds, Beasts and Relatives

Rosy Is My Relative (a novel)

The New Noah

The Donkey Rustlers

This is a Nonpareil Book
published in 2012 by
DAVID R. GODINE, Publisher
Post Office Box 450
Jaffrey, New Hampshire 03452
www.godine.com

Copyright 1978 by Gerald M. Durrell

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission from the publisher,
except in the case of brief excerpts embodied in critical
articles and reviews. For information contact Permissions,
David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc., Fifteen Court Square,
Suite 320, Boston, Massachusetts 02108.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Durrell, Gerald, 19251995.

[Garden of the gods]

Fauna and family : more Durrell Family Adventures on Corfu / by Gerald Durrell.

p. cm.

Originally published: The garden of the gods.

London : Collins, 1978.

PRINT ISBN-13: 978-1-56792-441-1

EBOOK ISBN-13: 978-1-56792-591-3

1. Durrell, Gerald, 19251995.

2. Natural historyGreeceCorfu Island.

3. Corfu Island (Greece)Description and travel.

4. ZoologistsGreat BritainBiography.

I. Title.

QL31.D87A33 2012

508.495'5dc2

2010051655

Contents

This book is for Ann Peters, at one time my secretary and always my friend, because she loves Corfu and probably knows it better than I do.

A Word in Advance

THIS IS THE THIRD BOOK that I have written about a sojourn which my family and I had on the island of Corfu before the last world war. It may seem curious to some people that I can still find material to write about this period of my life; however, may I point out that we were in those days, and certainly by Greek standards, comparatively wealthy; none of us worked in the accepted sense of the word, and therefore most of our time was spent having fun. If you have five years of doing this, you accumulate quite a lot of experiences.

The pitfall of writing a series of books about the same, or essentially the same, characters, is that you do not want to bore a reader of your previous books with endless descriptions of the characters whom he knows. At the same time, you cannot be so vain as to suppose that everyone has read those previous books and so you must assume to a certain extent that the reader is approaching your work for the first time. It is difficult, therefore, to steer a course between irritating your old reader and overburdening your new one. I hope I have succeeded in doing that.

In the first book of the trilogy which I wrote My Family and Other Animals I had the following thing to say about it, which I dont think I can better: I have attempted to draw an accurate and unexaggerated picture of my family in the following pages; they appear as I saw them. To explain some of their more curious ways, however, I feel that I should state that at the time we were in Corfu the family were all quite young: Larry, the eldest, was twenty-three; Leslie was nineteen; Margo, eighteen; while I was the youngest, being of the tender and impressionable age of ten. We have never been very certain of my mothers age, for the simple reason that she can never remember her date of birth; all I can say is that she was old enough to have four children. My mother also insists that I explain that she is a widow, for, as she so penetratingly observed, you never know what people might think.

In order to compress five years of incident, observation, and pleasant living into something a little less lengthy than the Encyclopdia Britannica, I have been forced to telescope, prune, and graft, so that there is little left of the continuity of events.

I also said that I had left out a number of incidents and characters that I would have liked to have described, and I have attempted to repair this omission in this book. I hope that it might give the same pleasure to its readers as apparently its predecessors My Family and Other Animals and Birds, Beasts and Relatives have done, as for me it portrays a very important part of my life and the thing which, unfortunately, a lot of children nowadays seem to lack, which is a truly happy and sunlit childhood.

The Garden of the Gods

Behold! the heavens do ope,

The gods look down, and this unnatural scene

They laugh at.

SHAKESPEARE, Coriolanus

THE ISLAND LAY bent like a misshapen bow, its two tips nearly touching the Greek and Albanian coastlines, and the blue waters of the Ionian Sea were caught in its curve like a blue lake. Outside our villa was a wide flagstoned verandah roofed with an ancient vine from which the great green clusters of grapes hung like chandeliers; from here one looked out over the sunken garden full of tangerine trees and the silver-green olive groves to the sea, blue and smooth as a flower petal. In fine weather we always had our meals on the verandah at the rickety marble-topped table, and it was here that all the major family decisions were taken.

It was at breakfast time that there was liable to be the most acrimony and dissension, for it was then that letters, if any, were read and plans for the day were made, remade and discarded; it was during these early-morning sessions that the family fortunes were organized, albeit haphazardly, so that a simple request for an omelette might end in a three-month camping expedition to a remote beach, as had happened on one occasion. So when we assembled in the brittle morning light, one was never quite sure how the day was going to get on its feet. To begin with, one had to step warily, for tempers were fragile, but gradually, under the influence of tea, coffee, toast, homemade marmalade, eggs and bowls of fruit, a lessening of the early-morning tension would be felt and a more benign atmosphere would begin to permeate the verandah.

The morning that heralded the arrival of the count among us was no different from any other. We had all reached the final cup of coffee stage, and each was busy with his own thoughts; Margo, my sister, her blonde hair done up in a bandana, was musing over two pattern books, humming gaily but tunelessly to herself; Leslie had finished his coffee and produced a small automatic pistol from his pocket, dismantled it, and was absentmindedly cleaning it with his handkerchief; my mother was perusing the pages of a cookery book in pursuit of a recipe for lunch, her lips moving soundlessly, occasionally breaking off to stare into space while she tried to remember if she had the necessary ingredients for the recipe she was reading; Larry, my elder brother, clad in a multicolored dressing gown, was eating cherries with one hand and reading his mail with the other.