Gerald Durrell - My Family and Other Animals

PENGUIN BOOKS

MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS

Gerald Dur rell was born in Jamshedpur, India, in 1925. In 1928 his family returned to England and in 1933 they went to live on the Continent. Eventually they settled on the island of Corfu, where they lived until 1939. During this time he made a special study of zoology, and kept a large number of the local wild animals as pets. In 1945 he joined the staff of Whipsnade Park as a student keeper. In 1947 he financed, organized, and led his first animal-collecting expedition to the Cameroons. This was followed by a second expedition in 1948 and a third in 1949, this time to British Guiana. He has also made expeditions to Paraguay, Argentina and Sierra Leone. In 1962 he and his wife went to New Zealand, Australia and Malaya to film a TV series, Two in the Bush, in conjunction with the BBC Natural History Film Unit. In 1958 he founded the Jersey Zoological Park, of which he is the director, and in 1964 he founded the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust. Gerald Durrell's other books include The Overloaded Ark, The Bafut Beagles, Encounters With Animals, The Drunken Forest, Three Singles to Adventure, A Zoo in My Luggage. The Whispering Land, Menagerie Manor, Birds, Beasts and Relatives, Fillets of Plaice, Catch Me a Colobus, Beasts in My Belfry, The Talking Parcel, The Stationary Ark, Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons and Garden of the Gods.

MY FAMILY

AND

OTHER ANIMALS

Gerald Durrell

It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness.

As You Like It

PENGUIN BOOKS

Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondswotth, Middlesex, England Penguin Books, 621 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10022, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

Penguin Hooks Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street, Markham, Ontario, Canada L.3R IB4 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland , New Zealand

First published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis 1956

Published in Penguin Hooks in Great Britain 1959 Reprinted 1960, 1961. 1962, 1963 (twice), 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967 1968, 1969, 1970 (twice),

1971 (twice) 1972, 1973 (twice), 1974 (twice), 197; (twice), 1976, 1977, 1978 (twice), 1979 (twice), 198c (twice), 1981 (twice)

First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1957

Viking Compass Edition published 1963 Reprinted 1965, 1965 (twice) 1966 (twice), 1967, 1968 (twice), 1969 (twice), 1970 (twice),

1971 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975

Published in Penguin Books in the United States of America 1977 Reprinted 1977, 1978, 1980

Copyright Gerald M. Durrell, 1956 All rights reserved

ISBN o 14 00.1399 7

Library of Congress catalog card number: 57-6436

Made and printed in Great Britain by Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd,

Aylesbury, Bucks Set in Monotype Garamond

Two excerpts from this book appeared in Mademoiselle magazine

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition

that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be rent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise

circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

To

M y

M other

Contents

The Speech for the Defence

PART ONE

The Migration

1. The Unsuspected Isle

2. The Strawberry-Pink Villa

3. The Rose-Beetle Man

4. A Bushel of Learning

5. A Treasure of Spiders

6. The Sweet Spring

Conversation

PART TWO

7. The Daffodil-Yellow Villa

8. The Tortoise Hills

9. The World in a Wall

10. The Pageant of Fireflies

11. The Enchanted Archipelago

12. The Woodcock Winter

Conversation

PART THREE

13. The Snow-White Villa

14. The Talking Flowers

15. The Cyclamen Woods

16. The Lake of Lilies

17. The Chessboard Fields

18. An Entertainment with Animals

The Return

The Speech for the Defence

"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'

The White Queen - Alice Through the Looking-Glass

THIS is the story of a five-year sojourn that I and my family made on the Greek island of Corfu. It was originally intended to be a mildly nostalgic account of the natural history of the island, but I made a grave mistake by introducing my family into the book in the first few pages. Having got themselves on paper, they then proceeded to establish themselves and invite various friends to share the chapters. It was only with the greatest difficulty, and by exercising considerable cunning, that I managed to retain a few pages here and there which I could devote exclusively to animals.

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 mother's 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 Encyclopaedia Britannica, I have been forced to telescope, prune, and graft, so that there is little left of the original continuity of events. Also I have been forced to leave out many happenings and characters that I would have liked to describe.

It is doubtful if this would have been written without the help and enthusiasm of the following people. I mention this so that blame can be laid in the right quarter.

My grateful thanks, then, to:

Dr Theodore Stephanides. With typical generosity, he allowed me to make use of material from his unpublished work on Corfu, and supplied me with a number of dreadful puns, some of which I have used.

My family. They, after all, unconsciously provided a lot of the material, and helped me considerably during the writing of the book by arguing ferociously and rarely agreeing about any incident on which I consulted them.

My wife, who pleased me by laughing uproariously when reading the manuscript, only to inform me that it was my spelling that amused her.

Sophie, my secretary, who was responsible for the introduction of commas and the ruthless eradication of the split infinitive.

I should like to pay a special tribute to my mother, to whom this book is dedicated. Like a gentle, enthusiastic, and understanding Noah, she has steered her vessel full of strange progeny through the stormy seas of life with great skill, always faced with the possibility of mutiny, always surrounded by the dangerous shoals of overdraft and extravagance, never being sure that her navigation would be approved by the crew, but certain that she would be blamed for anything that went wrong. That she survived the voyage is a miracle, but survive it she did, and, moreover, with her reason more or less intact. As my brother Larry rightly points out, we can be proud of the way we have brought her up; she is a credit to us. That she has reached that happy Nirvana where nothing shocks or startles is exemplified by the fact that one week-end recently, when all alone in the house, she was treated to the sudden arrival of a series of crates containing two pelicans, a scarlet ibis, a vulture, and eight monkeys. A lesser mortal might have quailed at such a contingency, but not Mother. On Monday morning I found her in the garage being pursued round and round by an irate pelican which she was trying to feed with sardines from a tin.