by Gerald Durrell, 1969
A second beautiful book about his time in Corfu in the late 1930’s. What a treasure his books are! His writing brings me to a place and time and among people I love. This book covered stories about a wedding party, Gerry’s surprise birthday present of a goat, Gerry witnessing the birth of a baby boy, meeting Sven and his accordion, sea horses and fishing with Kokino using a female cuttlefish, Captain Creech (lecherous old drunk sea captain), the seance lady who is deceiving Margo, the recluse Countess in her enormous villa, night-fishing on the reefs with Taki, olive harvest, grape harvest, and his endless collecting of insects, sea creatures, and land creatures; all beautifully and hilariously described.
The seance scene takes place in England, where Margo was sent in order to heal her ‘corpulence’ and acne. Mother and Gerry follow her there after alarming reports from the relatives and Mother puts an abrupt end to the nonsense in the middle of the seance, “I think we have heard quite enough from Mawake.” Mawake was the spirit guide whom Mrs. Haddock conjured up. That chapter ended like this:
I had ceased listening. My whole being was flooded with excitement. We were going back to Corfu. We were leaving the gritty, soulless absurdity of London. We were going back to the enchanted olive groves and blue sea, to the warmth and laughter of our friends, to the long, golden, gentle days.
Isn’t that just beautiful!
The last chapter is about a day spent at a winery during the grape harvest. The owner of the winery invited the whole family and whomever else they wished to bring along. Larry jumps at the opportunity and wants to make it into a huge party. It ends up being the family, Spiro, Donald and Max, Kralefsky, Theo, and Sven with his accordion. Mother brings all of the food and drink and a boat (“benzina”) is hired to bring them all to the winery. “Getting on board took us quite some time. There were the numerous hampers of food and wine, the cooking utensils, and Mother’s enormous umbrella which she refused to travel without during the summer months.”
Here’s part of their boat ride and their arrival on the beach below the winery:
I left them and made my way up into the bow of the benzina where I lay, staring down over the prow as it sheared its way through the glassy blue sea. Occasionally little flocks of flying fish would break the surface ahead of us, glittering blue and moon silver in the sun, as they burst from the water and skimmed along the surface, like insect-gleaning summer swallows across a blue meadow.
At eight o’clock we reached our destination, a half-mile long beach that lay under the flanks of Pandokrator. Here the olive grove came almost to the sea, separated from it only by a wide strip of shingle. As we approached the shore, the engine was switched off and we drifted in gently under our own momentum. Now that there was no engine noise we could hear the cries of the cicadas welcoming us to land. The benzina, with an enormous sigh, pressed its bow into the pebbles of the shallows. The lithe, brown boy, whose boat it was, came forward from the engine and leaped from the bow with the anchor, which he lodged firmly in the shingle. Then he piled a collection of boxes alongside the bow of the benzina in a sort of tottering staircase down which Mother and Margo were escorted by Kralefsky, who bowed elegantly as each reached the shingle, but somewhat marred the effect by inadvertently stepping backwards into six inches of seawater and irretrievably ruining the crease of his elegant trousering. Eventually we and all our goods and chattels were ashore, and leaving our possessions under the olive trees, strewn haphazardly like something from a wrecked ship that had been disgorged by the sea, we made our way up the hill to Stavrodakis’ villa.
After touring the winery, Mother, Margo, and Spiro return to the beach to prepare a feast:
Under the trees at the edge of the sea, three charcoal fires had been lighted and they glowed, shuddered, and smoked gently, and over them popped and sizzled a variety of foods. Margo had laid a great cloth in the shade and was putting cutlery and glasses on it, singing untunefully to herself while Mother and Spiro crouched like witches over the fires, larding the brown sizzling carcass of a kid with oil and squeezed garlic and anointing the great body of a fish–its skin bubbled and crisped enticingly by the heat–with lemon juice.
Lunch we ate in a leisurely fashion, sprawled round the bright cloth, the glasses glowing with wine. The mouthfuls of kid were rich and succulent, woven with herbs, and the sections of fish melted like snow-flakes in your mouth. The conversation drifted and sprang up and then coiled languidly again, like the smoke from the fires.
While this conversation “drifted and sprang up and then coiled languidly,” Gerry makes his way down to the sea – it is the hottest part of the day:
Slowly, full of food and wine, I got up and made my way down to the sea. “And sometimes,” I could hear Stavrodakis say to Margo, “sometimes the barrels really shout. They make a noise as if they were fighting. It keeps me awake.”
“Oh, don’t,” said Margo, shuddering. “It makes me creepy just to think of it.”
The sea was still and warm, looking as though it had been varnished, with just a tiny ripple patting languidly at the shore. The shingle scrunched and shifted, hot under my bare feet. The rocks and pebbles that made up this beach were incredible in shape and colour, moulded by the waves and the gentle rubbing and polishing one against the other. They had been sculptures into a million shapes. Arrow-heads, sickles, cockerels, horses, dragons, and starfish. Their colouring was as bizarre as their shapes, for they had been patterned by the earth’s juices millions of years before and now their decorations had been buffed and polished by the sea. White with gold or red filigree, blood-red with white spots, green, blue, and pale fawn, hen’s-egg, brown with a deep rusty-red pattern like a fern sprawled across them, pink as a peony with white Egyptian hieroglyphics forming a mysterious, undecipherable message across them. It was like a vast treasure trove of jewels spread along the rim of the sea.
I waded into the warm shallows and then dived and swam out to cooler water. Here, if you held your breath and let yourself sink to the bottom, the soft velvety blanket of the sea momentarily stunned and crippled your ears. Then, after a moment, they became attuned to the underwater symphony. The distant throb of a boat engine, soft as a heart-beat, the gentle whisper of the sand as the sea’s movement shuffled and rearranged it and, above all, the musical clink of the pebbles on the shore’s edge. To hear the sea at work on its great store of pebbles rubbing and polishing them lovingly, I swam from the deep waters in to the shallows. I anchored myself with a handful of multi-coloured stones, then, ducking my head below the surface, listened to the beach singing under the gentle touch of the small waves. If walnuts could sing, I reflected, they would sound like this. Scrunch, tinkle, squeak, mumble, cough (silence while the wave retreats) and then the whole thing in different keys repeated with the next wave. The sea played on the beach as though it were an instrument. I lay and dozed for a time in the warm shallows and then, feeling heavy with sleep, I made my way back into the olive groves.
Everyone lay about disjointedly, sleeping round the ruins of our meal. It looked like the aftermath of some terrible battle. I curled up like a dormouse in the protective roots of a great olive and drifted off to sleep myself.
I woke to the gentle clinging of tea-cups as Margo and Mother laid the cloth for tea. Spiro brooded with immense concentration over a fire on which he had set a kettle. As I watched drowsily, the kettle lifted its lid and waved pertly at him, hissing steam. He seized it in one massive hand and poured the contents into a teapot, then, turning, he scowled at our recumbent bodies.
“Teas,” he roared thunderously. “Teas is readys.”
Everybody started and woke.
“Dear God! Must you yell like that, Spiro?” asked Larry plaintively, his voice thickened by sleep.
And here is the last, lovely paragraph of this beautiful, sparkling book:
Lulled by the wine and the throbbing heart of the boat’s engine, lulled by the warm night and the singing, I fell asleep while the boat carried us back across the warm, smooth waters to our island and the brilliant days that were not to be.
How I love these two books by Gerald Durrell! What a magical, beautiful place!