The Durrells were not a normal family. Neither were they in the first half of the 20th century nor would they be today. Why? Its members trumpeted an involuntary eccentricity and flaunted their unapologetic freedom, each a different universe, and collectively simply wanting to get on with minimizing concerns. A rarity, all in all. From those crazy characteristics derives his legacy, which is distributed in books, documentaries or a television series that bears his surname as its title, The Durrellsand narrates his stay in Corfu.
They arrived on this Greek island in the mid-thirties of the last century and their presence can still be glimpsed: without an official tour, anyone interested in this curious family can visit their different residences, some of the corners where they spent more time or the recognitions that have been made to them through plaques or sculptures: their spirit still remains in Corfu, despite the changes that this place of rocky beaches, medieval fortresses and rugged villages has undergone.
But first, we should briefly introduce them. The lineage was consolidated from Lawrence Samuel and Louisa Durrell, who had Lawrence, Margery (who died at one year of diphtheria), Leslie, Margaret and Gerald between 1912 and 1925. All were born in India, where the father worked as an engineer , and returned to England when he died in April 1928. From the misty beaches of Bournemouth, south of Southampton, the Durrells moved to Greek territory in 1935. These were times when, as their mother would say, they did not know I knew what you were going to find when you got off the ship.
And what they found was a paradise totally opposite to the English landscape. Corfu, the mythical island where Odysseus was supposedly shipwrecked before reaching Ithaca, had green hills that descended imposingly to the lapis lazuli of the Ionian Sea. The towns were home to orchards of friendly farmers. The old city, with a Byzantine wall protecting the historic center, declared world heritage by Unesco in 2007sought entertainment between the beauty of its alleys and the mixture of influences in urban planning or in real estate.
Corfu was a separate planet for the Durrells. From the tropics they had jumped into the British cold. And from there to Mediterranean splendor. On their paths they crossed paths with people of unknown language who lent themselves to help at any time and on a day-to-day basis they had altered the humid school for a kind of anarchy under the sun. Under Louisa’s tutelage, the brothers forged their identity among orchards and pebble coves. They changed houses three times, they were victims of innocent misunderstandings and, above all, a saga was consolidated that has not ceased to be talked about.
One of them, perhaps the best known, was Gerald. Renowned naturalist and founder of the zoo on the island of Jersey (United Kingdom), the youngest of the family was not only a figure in his guild, but also left for posterity several literary works that tell, precisely, his childhood on the island. With My family and other animals (1956), included in the Corfu Trilogy beside Bugs and other relatives (1969) and the garden of the gods (1978), began his foray into literature and left for posterity a humorous portrait of his brothers and the ups and downs until 1939 for this piece of Greece.
It tells how Leslie became fond of hunting and weapons, without miraculously amputating any of his relatives’ limbs; like Margaret, or margo, enjoyed enough success among the male sex and cried the disappointments of love; how Lawrence (affectionately nicknamed Larry), the eldest, took off in his career as a writer with the novel Pied Piper of Lovers (1935). He was also inspired by this geography to Prospero’s cellprecursor of an extensive bibliography of theater, stories, poetry or the famous tetralogy The Alexandria Quartetwhich placed him on the verge of the Nobel Prize in 1962. And, of course, he impregnates each feat with the struggle of Louisa, head of the family, against this domestic farce.
The strawberry house, the daffodil house and the white villa
Today you can visit some of the most important places where the Durrell pawned these years, apart from finding their name in a school or shop and in one of the main parks of the citadel (there, in addition, a bronze bust is dedicated to them). Gerald and Lawrence). Following the route marked in My family and other animalsthe fundamental thing is to go to the houses where they lived and that form the backbone of the chapters of these memoirs, in which he recounts that first incursion on the back of Spiro Hakiaopulos or american spirowho was his trusted driver the rest of the time.
“Like an exhalation we crossed the tortuous outskirts of the town, happily dodging the loaded donkeys, the carts, the groups of peasant women and the innumerable dogs, announcing our passage with thunderous honks”, Gerald writes about that journey until the first town, pink or “strawberry”. As he introduces, “it was small and square, planted in its little garden with a pinkish and arrogant appearance. The shutters, cracked and peeling in places, had turned a delicate pastel green in the sun. In the garden, surrounded by tall fuchsia hedges, the flower beds formed intricate geometric patterns, outlined with white edges.
It is about 10 kilometers from the capital (Kerkyra, in Greek), but it is private property and can only be seen from outside or in one of the platforms where the villa is rented: reserving its 240 square meters of plot with a pool and three bedrooms costs about 350 euros per night. What it allows is to take the opportunity to see the so-called Pontikonisi or Mouse Island, named after its shape and with the legend of having been the ship in which Ulysses sailed in The odyssey before Poseidon transformed it into a green stone. It can be reached from the Vlacherna monastery, an icon of the island for being located on the sea, only connected to land by a boardwalk in the form of an appendix. And with a corridor on the other bank from which you can see (and hear) the planes that descend, brushing your hair, landing at the airport.
Gerald plays there with spiders and other insects listening in the background to “the screaming cicadas”, a sound that accompanies the traveler throughout the island. Shortly afterward they would pack up again and drive, with Spiro at the wheel, to the daffodil-colored villa. This mansion, which for the Durrells is “enormous”, “of a tall and square Venetian type”, stands “on a hill overlooking the sea, surrounded by unkempt olive groves and silent lemon and orange groves”. The atmosphere, continues the youngest of the family, exhales melancholy through its walls “full of cracks and chipping” or through “the echo of its immense halls”.
The block, which was surrounded by anemones and geraniums, is now a disused plot near Gouvia, a small town on the east coast, about nine kilometers north of Corfu town. On its reverse, where “a shaggy crest” of olive groves peeked out, Gerald Durrell scrutinized the ants and their larvae or stopped among the cypresses to see the nests of finches, but, above all, he discovered the courtship of the turtles. Along with his friend, Roger spent “hours and hours” watching “the knights in mismatched armor in contention for their ladies”, without “the show” getting boring and betting on who was going to win that courtship battle.
And from there to the key point of the route: the “white” town. A sturdy building, built on the shores of Kalami Bay — 30 kilometers north of the main city — that could be classified as the goal of this literary pilgrimage through the planet of the Durrells. This is how Gerald describes it: “Rising on a hill among olive trees, the new villa, white as snow, had a wide terrace framed by a thick vine cornice on all one side. Ahead was a well-walled pocket garden, dense tangle of wildflowers, shaded by the glossy dark green foliage of a large magnolia tree. The dirt road, furrowed with potholes, went around the house and then descended between olive groves, vineyards and orchards until it came out on the road”.
It should be added that this front yard bordered a cove of dark rock and crystal clear waters. It is assumed that Lawrence had become independent there with his wife Nancy, although this diversification is not nuanced in the novel. The intact building recalls those passages and stands as a tribute to the family. At the bottom, with the name of the White House in large letters and a plaque that highlights it, a restaurant has been set up with dozens of photos of the Durrells on the walls and a space dedicated to their books or the merchandise. You can buy the English edition of What happened to Margo?published in 1996, the memories that Margaret wrote decades later and in which she added anecdotes of those years in Corfu.
The second floor is where the owners of the premises live. And in the third, built later, an apartment is rented for 600 euros a day. In the event that there are no guests (a rare circumstance) you can see this room-museum on the history of the site for three euros. But, a virtual option on the web summarizes its future in seven sections, from the beginning of the 20th century to the present, explaining the years of World War I, the Durrell period, the disaster of World War II and the path towards mass tourism.
From there, Gerald and the rest went to the Antioniti Lagoon, at the southern end of the island, to have picnics. Or they went into the woods covered with cyclamen flowers (Cyclamen graecum), “an ideal place to rest after a hunt for lizards”, as noted by the naturalist. The surroundings of this white villa resembled the base of a board game, due to its plots framed by water canals where corn, potatoes, figs or grapes were grown. “Those fields, small squares of color surrounded by bright water, formed like a wide and multicolored chessboard on which the varied figures of the peasants circulated,” he points out.
It was the war declared in 1939 that forced the Durrells to return to England. They said goodbye between “tearful goodbyes” from Corfu and their suitcases and animals filled a caravan of cars that Lawrence described as “the funeral procession of a posh ragpicker”. In the land where they settled, each one followed their passions, be they bugs, weapons, furtive romances or letters, but none of them forgot this fascinating Greek corner. Just as now they are remembered in different parts of the island, ambassadors of honor thanks to their stories or fictions in memory of this extravagant clan.
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