Fauna and Family

More Durrell Family Adventures on Corfu

Gerald Durrell

• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781567925913
• Topic: Technik & Maschinenbau
• Subtopic: Biographien der Naturwissenschaften & Technik

For fans of the PBS Masterpiece Theater series, The Durrells in Corfu

Fauna and Family is the third in Durrell's Corfu trilogy that begins with My Family and Other Animals and continues with Birds, Beasts and Relatives. Of this book, Durrell writes in his foreword, "I hope that it might give the same pleasure to its readers as apparently its predecessors have done, as for me it portrays a very important part of my life... which is a truly happy and sunlit childhood." The rest of the story of Durrell's zoological life continues in Fillets of Plaice and Beasts in My Belfry where he at last fulfilled his life-long dream.

The Merriment of Friendship

The sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of musick.

DANIEL 3:5

IT WAS TOWARDS the end of summer that we held what came to be known as our Indian party. Our parties, whether carefully planned or burgeoning on the spur of the moment out of nothing, were always interesting affairs, since things seldom went exactly as we planned them. In those days, living as we did in the country, without the dubious benefits of radio or television, we had to rely on such primitive forms of amusement as books, quarreling, parties, and the laughter of our friends, so naturally parties – particularly the more flamboyant ones – became red-letter days, preceded by endless preparations, and even when they were successfully over, they provided days of delightfully acrimonious argument as to how they could have been better stage-managed.

We had had a fairly tranquil patch for a month or so; we had not had a party, and no one had turned up to stay, so Mother had relaxed and become very benign. We were sitting on the verandah one morning reading our mail when the Indian party was hatched. In her mail Mother had just received a mammoth cookery book entitled A Million Mouthwatering Oriental Recipes, lavishly illustrated with color reproductions so lurid and glossy that you felt you could eat them. Mother was enchanted with it and kept reading bits aloud to us.

“Madras Marvels!” she exclaimed delightedly. “Oh, they’re lovely. I remember them. They were a favorite of your father’s when we lived in Darjeeling. And look! Konsarmer’s Delights! I’ve been looking for a recipe for them for years. They’re simply delicious, but so rich.”

“If they’re anything like the illustrations,” said Larry, “you’d have to live on a diet of bicarbonate of soda for the next twenty years after you ate one.”

“Don’t be silly, dear. The ingredients are absolutely pure – four pounds of butter, sixteen eggs, eight pints of cream, the flesh of ten young coconuts – ”

“God!” said Larry. “It sounds like a breakfast for a Strasbourg goose.”

“I’m sure you’ll like them dear,” said Mother. “Your father was very fond of them.”

“Well, I’m supposed to be on a diet,” said Margo. “You can’t go forcing me to have stuff like that.”

“Nobody’s forcing you, dear,” said Mother. “You can always say no.”

“Well, you know I can’t say no, so that’s forcing,” said Margo.

“Go and eat in another room,” suggested Leslie, flipping through the pages of a gun catalogue, “if you haven’t got the willpower to say no.”

“But I have got the willpower to say no,” said Margo indignantly. “I just can’t say no when Mother offers it to me.”

“Jeejee sends his salaams,” said Larry, looking up from the letter he was perusing. “He says he’s coming back here for his birthday.”

“His birthday!” exclaimed Margo. “Ooh, good, I’m glad he remembered.”

“Such a nice boy,” said Mother. “When’s he coming?”

“As soon as he gets out of hospital,” said Larry.

“Hospital? Is he ill?”

“No, he’s just having trouble with his levitation; he’s got a busted leg. He says his birthday’s on the sixteenth so he’ll try and make it by the fifteenth.”

“I am glad,” said Mother. “I grew very fond of Jeejee and I’m sure he’ll love this book.”

“I know, let’s give him a huge birthday party,” said Margo excitedly. “You know, a really huge party.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Leslie. “We haven’t had a decent party for ages.”

“And I could make him some of the recipes out of this book,” said Mother, obviously intrigued by the thought.

“An oriental feast,” said Larry. “Tell everyone to come in turbans, with jewels in their navels.”

“No, I think that’s going too far,” said Mother. “No, let’s just have a nice, quiet, little – ”

“You can’t just have a nice, quiet little party for Jeejee,” said Leslie. “Not after you told him you always traveled with four hundred elephants. He expects something a bit spectacular.”

“It wasn’t four hundred elephants, dear. I only said we went camping with elephants,” said Mother. “You children do exaggerate. And anyway, we can’t produce elephants here; he wouldn’t expect it.”

“No, but you’ve got to put on some sort of show,” said Leslie.

“I’ll do all the decorations,” said Margo. “Everything will be oriental. I’ll borrow Mrs. Papadrouya’s Burmese screens, and there are the ostrich feathers that Lena’s got …”

“We’ve still got a wild boar and some duck and stuff left in the cold room in town,” said Leslie. “Better use it up.”

“I’ll borrow Countess Lefraki’s piano,” said Larry.

“Now, look, all of you … stop it,” said Mother, alarmed. “It’s not a durbar we’re having, just a birthday party.”

“Nonsense, Mother, it’ll do us good to let off a little steam,” said Larry indulgently.

“Yes, in for a penny, in for a pound,” said Leslie.

“And you might as well be hung for an ox as an ass,” said Margo.

“Or your neighbor’s wife, if it comes to that,” said Larry.

“Now it’s a question of whom to invite,” said Leslie.

“Theodore, of course,” said the family in unison.

“Then there’s poor old Creech,” said Larry.

“Oh, no, Larry,” Mother said, “you know what a disgusting old brute he is.”

“Nonsense, Mother, the old boy loves a party.”

“And then there’s Colonel Ribbindane,” said Leslie.

“No!” Larry exclaimed vehemently. “We’re not having that quintessence of boredom, even if he is the best shot on the island.”

“He’s not a bore,” said Leslie belligerently. “He’s no more boring than your bloody friends.”

“None of my friends are capable of spending an entire evening telling you in words of one syllable and a few Neanderthal grunts how he shot a hippo on the Nile in 1904,” said Larry coldly.

“It’s jolly interesting,” said Leslie hotly, “damned sight more interesting than listening to all your friends going on about bloody art.”

“Now, now, dears,” said Mother peaceably, “there’ll be plenty of room for everyone.”

I left them to the normal uproar of vituperation that went on over the guest list for any party; as far as I was concerned, as long as Theodore was coming, the party was assured of success, so I could leave the choice of other guests to my family.

Gradually the preparations for the party gathered momentum. Larry succeeded in borrowing Countess Lefraki’s enormous grand piano and a tiger-skin rug to place alongside it. The piano was conveyed to us with the utmost tenderness, for it had been the favorite instrument of the late count, on the back of a long flat cart drawn by four horses. Larry, who had been to supervise the removal personally, took off the tarpaulins covering the instrument against the sun, mounted the cart and ran off a quick rendering of “Walking My Baby Back Home” to make sure the piano had not suffered from its journey. It seemed in good shape, if a trifle jangly, and after a prodigious effort we managed to get it into the drawing room. Planted, black and gleaming as an agate, in the corner, the magnificent tiger skin lying in front of it, the head snarling in defiance, it gave the whole room a rich, oriental air.

This was added to by Margo’s decorations – great tapestries that she had painted on huge sheets of paper and hung on the walls, pictures of minarets, peacocks, cupolaed palaces and bejeweled elephants, and everywhere vases of ostrich feathers dyed all the colors of the rainbow and bunches of multicolored balloons like crops of strange tropical fruit. The kitchen, of course, was like the interior of Vesuvius; in the flickering ruby light of half a dozen charcoal fires, Mother and her minions scurried to and fro, and the sound of beating and chopping and stirring was so loud it precluded speech, while the aromatic smells that drifted upstairs were so rich and heavy it was like being wrapped in an embroidered cloak of scent.

Over all this Spiro presided, like a scowling brown genie; he seemed to be everywhere, bull-voiced, barrel-bodied, carrying enormous boxes of food and fruit to the kitchen in his hamlike hands, sweating and roaring and cursing as three dining tables were insinuated into the dining room and joined together, appearing with everlasting flowers for Margo and strange spices and other delicacies for Mother. It was during moments like this that you realized Spiro’s true worth, for you could ask the impossible of him and he would achieve it. “I’ll fixes that,” he would say, and fix it he would, whether it was obtaining out-of-season fruit or procuring such a thing as a piano tuner, a species of human being that had been extinct on the island since 1890, as far as everyone knew. It was extremely unlikely, in fact, that any of our parties would have got beyond the planning stage if it had not been for Spiro.

At last everything was ready. The sliding doors between the dining room and drawing room had been pulled back, and the vast room thus formed was a riot of flowers, balloons and paintings, the long tables with their frost-white cloths sparkling with silver, the side tables groaning under the weight of the cold dishes. Sucking pig, brown and polished as a mummy, with an orange in its mouth, lay beside a haunch of wild boar, sticky with wine and honey marinade, thick with pearls of garlic and the round seeds of coriander; a bank of biscuit-brown chickens and young turkeys was interspersed with wild ducks stuffed with wild rice, almonds and sultanas, and woodcock skewered on lengths of bamboo; mounds of saffron rice, yellow as a summer moon, were treasure troves that made one feel like an archaeologist, so thickly were they encrusted with fragile pink strips of octopus, toasted almonds and walnuts, tiny green grape...