posted on 27 Dec 2015

My Family And Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

When I was about 15, I was given a copy of The Harrap Book of Humorous Prose which was to become one of the books that made up the ‘O’ level English syllabus at my rather down-at-heel Technical school. This anthology introduced me to some of the great humorists of English literature – P.G. Wodehouse, Stephen Leacock, Saki, Dylan Thomas and Gerald Durrell – most of whom I’d never heard of. The collection was made up of short(ish) extracts from much longer works but I was too dim to realise that at the time and I assumed these were entirely self contained short stories.

My absolute favourite story in the book was the one written by Gerald Durrell which tells the story of the launching of the Bootle Bum-trinket – the self-constructed coracle-cum-pond boat that Gerald planned to use to explore the shallows of the Corfu coast in his search for wildlife. The extract made me laugh out loud every time I read it and the accessibility of the writing and the way it conjured-up the heat and light of Corfu were magical for someone trapped in grim old Birmingham.

When I subsequently discovered that there was a whole book of this stuff called My Family And Other Animals I was thrilled and it has subsequently become one of my all-time favourite reads. The book tells the story of five years in the early life of ten year old Gerald when the Durrell family decided to up sticks and head for the warm and healing climate of Corfu – considerably more of an adventure then than in these days of package holidays. When Durrell, as an adult, came to write the story of this period he intended it to be a gentle memory of the Corfu wildlife (he was, by this time, already forging himself a reputation as a naturalist and conservator). What he produced however was one of the most endearing portraits of a family that we have in English literature.

To call the Durrells eccentric would be to understate their claim to oddness. Durrell’s older brother, Lawrence, was already set on becoming a ‘great unconventional novelist’ and behaved with a sort of unspeakable self-centredness that he thought was necessary for his writing – shipping in his own band of hangers-on and crazies. Margot, his sister, was vain and narcissistic and, despite her teenage spottiness, intent on spending as much time breaking hearts as possible. Gerald himself was pretty much out of control, filling the house with wildlife of all sorts, while his mother fluttered around absent-mindedly trying to make ends meet.

All that and then of course there were the locals; Yani and Spiro, adding their own brand of Corfu madness to the mix. But by some distance the most impressive local is the Corfu countryside itself and the host of small animals and creepy-crawlies that fire Gerald’s already over-heated imagination. The sun beats down on a sort of nostalgic never-ending summer when the outside is a mere extension of the inside and the sun coats everything (even incipient poverty and bankruptcy) with a magical glow. The blue sky and the crystal-clear sea exists in a time before mass tourism and the merciless commercial exploitation of the seashore and its hinterland that would come along two or three decades later. Durrell has captured an age of childhood innocence that we’d all have loved to live in and written it down in a way that means we can all travel with him to those magical lawless days when our school was the world and all it had to offer and adults were an endless source of unfailing amusement.

The book celebrates its 60th anniversary this year but that passage of time means nothing – the book exists in an everlasting bubble of now-ness that echoes the timelessness of our own fondest childhood memories.

 

Terry Potter

December 2015