Among the many centenaries celebrated this year is that of Gerald Durrell (1925-1995), who lived in Corfu in the 1930s, where he was inspired to become one of the world’s leading zoologists and conservationists.
He was famous as a writer, too, for his account of his childhood in Corfu: My Family and Other Animals. It’s a riveting portrayal of the way a 10-year-old boy has his eyes opened to the wonders of the natural world. As Durrell said in later life, he saw life in monochrome until he came to Corfu; thereafter he saw it in technicolour.
Gerald’s brother, Lawrence, also wrote about Corfu (in Prospero’s Cell) and, more widely, about the Greek islands. It was Lawrence who wrote, in The Greek Islands, that “this small country never had any fixed geographical borders. It was a state of mind”, and there is much to support this in the present border disputes between Greece, Turkey and Albania.
Incidentally, when Lawrence, commissioned by Travel and Leisure magazine, made his one visit to Dublin, “a city so beloved of its artists”, he thrilled to the sounds and sights of Moore Street, making an immediate connection with Greece: “fruit and vegetables are sold to a background of scabrous backchat worthy of Aristophanes”.
READ MORE
Gerald Durrell became world famous for his achievement in establishing the zoo in Jersey (today the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust), where he focused on the breeding of species threatened with extinction. Many of his expeditions to places such as the Cameroons, Madagascar and Mauritius were financed by his bestselling books such as Catch me a Colobus and The Bafut Beagles.
My Family and Other Animals spawned two television adaptations (in 1987 and 2005) and The Durrells, which ran for four spectacular seasons from 2016 to 2019, with the brilliant Milo Parker as the young Gerald and Keeley Hawes as his mother, Louisa. Gerald airbrushed Lawrence’s wife, Nancy, out of the book, and took serious liberties, such as pretending that Lawrence lived with the rest of the family. As Simon Nye, the scriptwriter on The Durrells, put it: “Who can blame Gerry for wanting to nudge reality towards the fiction that you would like to happen?”
[ Welcome to Hellas: Greece is not just a big holiday resortOpens in new window ]
The Durrell children were born in India, but left when their father died. They needed a place to think of as “home”. Gerald writes of Corfu: “We felt we had come home”, and when the family was invited to a village wedding he recalled: “We had been accepted by the island”, an impression enforced by the television series.
Could their lives have been as idyllic and peaceful as Gerald’s books portray them? Given that Greece had been under a fascist dictatorship and that they were forced to leave on the outbreak of the second World War – almost all of which is absent from the books by Gerald and Lawrence – the question is understandable.
Not everyone agrees with this idyllic representation of island life in the 1930s. Richard Bradford, a research professor at Ulster University, has recently published The Durrells: the Story of a Family, in which he argues that the Durrell family’s decision to live in Corfu was due to a different need: to escape “the lowbrow introverted culture of a nation obsessed with its place in the world”. Bradford dismisses the books on Corfu by both brothers as “weirdly counterfeit”.
The huge success of My Family and Other Animals has been one factor in encouraging holidaymakers to visit Corfu. The surge in tourism-related developments was so obvious to Gerald, even in the 1960s and 1970s, that he blamed himself for having contributed to this.
In 1987 he went so far as to write for a British newspaper that, as a child, he had fallen in love with “a ravishing creature who was mature and beautiful”. Revisiting it after 50 years “was like paying a visit to the most beautiful woman in the world suffering from a terminal case of leprosy, commonly called tourism”. He accused the Corfiots themselves of “vandalism beyond belief”.
That was almost 40 years ago. Today, he would be even more shocked that one of his favourite places on Corfu, the lagoon Antiniotissa, a short distance from my own house on Corfu’s north coast, is threatened now with the development of a large tourist resort.
