MICHAEL HAAG First Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Profile Books: 3 Holford Yard, Bevin Way London WC1X 9HD

MICHAEL HAAG First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Profile Books: 3 Holford Yard, Bevin Way London WC1X 9HD www.profilebooks.com Copyright © 2017 Michael Haag. 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset in Sabon 10.5/14 to a design by Henry Iles. The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 224pp ISBN 978-1781257883 e-ISBN 978-1782833307 Printed and bound in CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY on Forest Stewardship Council (mixed sources) certified paper. St Spiridion Lake of Lilies Beach (Antiniotissa) Durrells Corfu Acharavi Kassiopi Picture box 115 x 177mm Mount Vigla Kouloura Pantocrator Agni Kalami Butrint The White House Revised 6.1.17 Nissaki St Arsenius A L B A N I A Shrine M AINL Lakones AND G RE Paleocastritsa Govino Bay E C Kontokali E The Daffodil-Yellow Villa Vido Island CORFU TOWN (KERKIRA) Ermones N Myrtiotissa Benitses 0 10 CORFU TOWN St Kilometres (KERKIRA) Spiridion Church Liston Pension Suisse Lefkimi Halikiopoulos Lagoon The Snow-White C O R F U Villa i n t h e 1 9 3 0 s Cressida Durrell house Road Chessboard Fields Canoni Other location Built-up Pontikonisi Town / village area (Mouse Island) The Strawberry Pink Villa Perama PRDU Corfu F0lio v3.indd 1 06/01/2017 19:46 Contents Introduction Chapter One: India . .. 1 Chapter Two: England . 22 Chapter Three: The Crisis . 46 Chapter Four: The Strawberry-Pink Villa . 57 Chapter Five: The Daffodil-Yellow Villa . 85 Chapter Six: The White House at Kalami . 111 Chapter Seven: The Snow-White Villa . 131 Chapter Eight: The War and the Scattering . 156 Epilogue: Family, Friends and Animals . 177 Further reading . 202 Acknowledgements . 204 Sources and images . 205 Index . 206 The first edition of My Family and Other Animals. Introduction: The Durrells of Corfu IN 1935 LOUISA DURREll AND HER FOUR CHildREN – Lawrence (Larry), Leslie, Margaret (Margo) and Gerald (Gerry) – went to live in Corfu . The years that followed were made famous in Gerald Durrell’s much-loved My Family and Other Animals and in Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods, the other volumes of his Corfu Trilogy . Gerry’s older brother Lawrence, who achieved world renown with The Alexandria Quartet, also wrote his own beautifully observed book about Corfu, Prospero’s Cell . ‘We had arrived at a place that was to be of enormous influence over all of us,’ Gerry wrote of the family’s reaction to Corfu . ‘It was like being allowed back into Paradise .’ In My Family and Other Animals Gerry gives the impres- sion that the family came to Corfu almost on a whim, selling up their house and sailing into the unknown to escape rainy summer days in England and stuffed-up noses . But what he does not mention, and neither does Larry in Prospero’s Cell, was the tragedy . They laughed and wrote beautifully of their island idyll, but nobody mentioned what had really brought them to the island – the sudden death of their father in India, the devastating effect it had on their mother, and the yearning to restore something lost . ix But the brightness and colour and the freedom they discovered in Corfu lifted their spirits . The island possessed the softness of an Italian landscape, the warmth and fragrance of the Mediterranean, the idiosyncrasy of Greece – an intensity of sensations they had not known since leaving India . For the Durrells, after their years in England struggling with their family tragedy, it was a rebirth . Protective of their family unity, the children never pushed their disorder too far, allowing their mother to preside over a happy anarchy . For each of the Durrells, Corfu was a healing . This book takes a fresh look at the story of the Durrells in Corfu . Individual members of the Durrell family, and the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust in Jersey, have provided the author with letters and reminiscences of their lives in India, England and Corfu, as well as later, and also many family photographs . These allow the family to speak for themselves, presenting a new and revealing narrative, and provide a detailed account of the family before Corfu, and during their stay on the island, and in the immediate aftermath of war . And not only the family but figures who played a crucial part in their lives, like Larry’s friend and Gerry’s mentor Theodore Stephanides; the outsized character of Spiro Americanos, taxi- driver and all-round fixer; and the American writer Henry Miller, who visited Larry in Corfu towards the end of the Durrells’ stay and began his own journey there, his discovery of Greece, which he recorded in the best book he ever wrote, The Colossus of Maroussi . The Durrells of Corfu concludes with an epilogue which traces what happened to almost everyone who had been part of the story in Corfu and provides a summary of the remarkable careers of Larry and Gerry, including the realisation of Gerry’s childhood dream, the founding of his Jersey Zoo . While the book is not a guide to the Durrells’ island, it can serve to allow the reader to follow in the footsteps of the family, discovering the villas and places they knew and wrote about . x Larry himself described how he and Gerry returned years later to Corfu and retraced their own footsteps by joining a tour . I don’t know how posthumous you can feel, but my brother and I put on dark glasses and funny hats and we went on one of these trips, and I’ve never heard so much misinformation about our family and in such strange French . I think they were all Syrians . Anyway, we drank Coca-Cola in our own honour and sneaked off back to town . The Durrells themselves were masters of fabulation . All of the children were great storytellers and embroiderers of tales . They complained about Gerry’s My Family and Other Animals – Margo in particular – even as they happily appro- priated each other’s stories and, where necessary, invented new ones . According to a close friend of Gerry’s, Birds Beasts and Relatives, the second volume of The Corfu Trilogy, was filled with leftover anecdotes so improbable that Gerry thought no one would believe them, while his third volume, The Garden of the Gods, was packed with stories which even if true, Gerald himself could not believe . As for the first volume, My Family and Other Animals, and also Larry’s Prospero’s Cell, Margo summed it up when she said, ‘I never know what’s fact and what’s fiction in my family’ . This book ventures into those magical days in Corfu before the war, and in trying to address Margo’s problem sheds new light on old stories and uncovers fresh stories that are often just as strange and fascinating and funny . * * * xi Top: the wedding of Lawrence Samuel Durrell and Louisa Dixie in Roorkee, 1910. Bottom: the Durrell family with visiting relatives in Jamshedpur, c.1920: Lawrence Samuel (far left), Louisa (far right), Larry (in shorts, standing), Margo and Leslie (sitting on the steps); Gerry was not yet born. xii CHAPTER ONE: INDIA Chapter One: India THE DURREllS WERE COLONIALS, all of them born in India . England was their cultural homeland, but Louisa in particular thought of India as her real home . Louisa – ‘Mother’ in My Family and Other Animals – was born Louisa Dixie in Roorkee in the Punjab, in 1887, and was raised in a large extended family there, all long settled in India . Her parents had been born in the Punjab, and she would marry Lawrence Samuel Durrell, also Indian-born, a brilliant and ambitious civil engineer, and travel with him across the Raj . All the Durrell children were born in India, too, and the colours, scents and sounds of the subcontinent would shape their sensibilities . In India, however, Louisa suffered two tragedies . First, the loss of Margery, her second child, from diphtheria . Then in 1928 the catastophe of her husband’s sudden death from a brain haemorrhage . Advised by friends in the British community that India was no place to raise a young family, Louisa set sail within weeks of her husband’s death for ‘home’, bereaved and lost, with a fatherless family to raise . * * * Lawrence Samuel Durrell’s father was a country boy, born out of wedlock, who had left Suffolk when he was eighteen and rose to the rank of major in the British Indian Army . Louisa Dixie’s 1 family had been in India a generation longer . Her grandfather came to teach at Thomason College of Civil Engineering in Roorkee – the first college of engineering in the British Empire (and now the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology) . Her father was head clerk and accountant for the workshop and foundry that maintained the Ganges Canal, a vast British- built irrigation project that transformed the Punjab into the breadbasket of India . Lawrence Samuel was eighteen when he first met Louisa at the Dixies’ home in Roorkee; he knew her older brother John Dixie from studying at Thomason College and would join the Dixie family in tennis, dancing and amateur theatricals . There he found himself attracted to John’s sister, a dreamy girl, barely sixteen, with a mischievous sense of fun, who stood at least a head shorter than her tall and earnest visitor .

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