Authors: Gerald Durrell
‘I think it’s essential that he learns to dance,’ said Margo, ‘or else he’ll grow up into one of these awful tongue-tied hobbledehoys.’
‘Yes, dear; but that sort of thing can come
later
. He should be getting some sort of grounding in things like mathematics and French… and his spelling’s appalling.’
‘Literature,’ said Larry, with conviction, ‘that’s what he wants, a good solid grounding in literature. The rest will follow naturally. I’ve been encouraging him to read some good stuff.’
‘But don’t you think Rabelais is a little
old
for him?’ asked Mother doubtfully.
‘Good, clean fun,’ said Larry airily; ‘it’s important that he gets sex in its right perspective now.’
‘You’ve got a mania about sex,’ said Margo primly; ‘it doesn’t matter what we’re discussing, you always have to drag it in.’
‘What he wants is a healthy, outdoor life; if he learned to shoot and sail –’ began Leslie.
‘Oh, stop talking like a bishop. You’ll be advocating cold baths next.’
‘The trouble with you is you get in one of these damned supercilious moods where you think you know best, and you won’t even listen to anyone else’s point of view.’
‘With a point of view as limited as yours, you can hardly expect me to listen to it.’
‘Now, now, there’s no sense in fighting,’ said Mother.
‘Well, Larry’s so bloody unreasonable.’
‘I like that!’ said Larry indignantly; ‘I’m far and away the most reasonable member of the family.’
‘Yes, dear, but fighting doesn’t solve the problem. What we want is someone who can teach Gerry and who’ll encourage him in his interests.’
‘He appears to have only one interest,’ said Larry bitterly, ‘and that’s this awful urge to fill things with animal life. I don’t think he ought to be encouraged in
that
. Life is fraught with danger as it is. I went to light a cigarette only this morning and a damn’ great bumble-bee flew out of the box.’
‘It was a grasshopper with me,’ said Leslie gloomily.
‘Yes, I think that sort of thing ought to be stopped,’ said Margo. ‘I found the
most revolting
jar of wriggling things on the dressing-table, of all places.’
‘He doesn’t mean any harm, poor little chap,’ said Mother pacifically; ‘he’s so interested in all these things.’
‘I wouldn’t mind being attacked by bumble-bees, if it
led
anywhere,’ Larry pointed out. ‘But it’s just a phase… he’ll grow out of it by the time he’s fourteen.’
‘He’s been in this phase from the age of two,’ said Mother, ‘and he’s showing no signs of growing out of it.’
‘Well, if you insist on stuffing him full of useless information, I suppose George would have a shot at teaching him,’ said Larry.
‘
That’s
a brain-wave,’ said Mother delightedly. ‘Will you go over and see him? I think the sooner he starts the better.’
Sitting under the open window in the twilight, with my arm round Roger’s shaggy neck, I had listened with interest, not unmixed with indignation, to the family discussion on my fate. Now that it was settled, I wondered vaguely who George was, and why it was so necessary for me to have lessons. But the dusk was thick with flower scents, and the olive groves were dark, mysterious, and fascinating. I forgot about the imminent danger of being educated, and went off with Roger to hunt for glow-worms in the sprawling brambles.
I discovered that George was an old friend of Larry’s, who had come to Corfu to write. There was nothing very unusual about this, for all Larry’s acquaintances in those days were either authors, poets, or painters. It was George, moreover, who was really responsible for our presence in Corfu, for he had written such eulogistic letters about the place that Larry had become convinced we could live nowhere else. Now George was to pay the penalty for his rashness. He came over to the villa to discuss my education with Mother, and we were introduced. We regarded each other with suspicion. George was a very tall and extremely thin man who moved with the odd disjointed grace of a puppet. His lean, skull-like face was partially concealed by a finely pointed brown beard and a pair of large tortoise-shell spectacles. He had a deep, melancholy voice, a dry and sarcastic sense of humour. Having made a joke, he would smile in his beard with a sort of vulpine pleasure which was quite unaffected by anyone else’s reactions.
Gravely George set about the task of teaching me. He was undeterred by the fact that there were no school-books available on the island; he simply ransacked his own library and appeared on the appointed day armed with a most unorthodox selection of tomes. Sombrely and patiently he taught me the rudiments of geography from the maps in the back of an ancient copy of
Pears Cyclopædia
, English from books that ranged from Wilde to Gibbon, French from a fat and exciting book called
Le Petit Larousse
, and mathematics from memory. From my point of view, however, the most important thing was that we devoted some of our time to natural history, and George meticulously and carefully taught me how to observe and how to note down observations in a diary. At once my enthusiastic but haphazard interest in nature became focused, for I found that by writing things down I could learn and remember much more. The only mornings that I was ever on time for my lessons were those which were given up to natural history.
Every morning at nine George would come stalking through the olive trees, clad in shorts, sandals, and an enormous straw hat with a frayed brim, clutching a wedge of books under one arm, swinging a walking-stick vigorously.
‘Good morning. The disciple awaits the master agog with anticipation, I trust?’ he would greet me, with a saturnine smile.
In the little dining-room of the villa the shutters would be closed against the sun, and in the green twilight George would loom over the table, methodically arranging the books. Flies, heat-drugged, would crawl slowly on the walls or fly drunkenly about the room, buzzing sleepily. Outside the cicadas were greeting the new day with shrill enthusiasm.
‘Let me see, let me see,’ George would murmur, running a long forefinger down our carefully prepared time-table; ‘yes, yes, mathematics. If I remember rightly, we were involved in the Herculean task of discovering how long it would take six men to build a wall if three of them took a week. I seem to recall that we have spent almost as much time on this problem as the men spent on the wall. Ah, well, let us gird our loins and do battle once again. Perhaps it’s the
shape
of the problem that worries you, eh? Let us see if we can make it more exciting.’
He would droop over the exercise book pensively, pulling at
his beard. Then in his large, clear writing he would set the problem out in a fresh way.
‘If it took two caterpillars a week to eat eight leaves, how long would four caterpillars take to eat the same number? Now, apply yourself to that.’
While I struggled with the apparently insoluble problem of the caterpillars’ appetites, George would be otherwise occupied. He was an expert fencer, and was at that time engaged in learning some of the local peasant dances, for which he had a passion. So, while waiting for me to finish the sum, he would drift about in the gloom of the room, practising fencing stances or complicated dancing steps, a habit that I found disconcerting, to say the least, and to which I shall always attribute my inability to do mathematics. Place any simple sum before me, even now, and it immediately conjures up a vision of George’s lanky body swaying and jerking round the dimly lit dining-room. He would accompany the dancing sequences with a deep and tuneless humming, like a hive of distraught bees.
‘Tum-ti-tum-ti-tum… tiddle tiddle tumty
dee
… left leg over… three steps right… tum-ti-tum-ti-tum-ti –
dum
… back, round, down, and up… tiddle iddle umpty
dee
…,’ he would drone, as he paced and pirouetted like a dismal crane. Then, suddenly, the humming would stop, a steely look would creep into his eyes, and he would throw himself into an attitude of defence, pointing an imaginary foil at an imaginary enemy. His eyes narrowed, his spectacles a-glitter, he would drive his adversary back across the room, skilfully avoiding the furniture. When his enemy was backed into the corner, George would dodge and twist round him with the agility of a wasp, stabbing, thrusting, guarding. I could almost see the gleam of steel. Then came the final moment, the upward and outward flick that would catch his opponent’s weapon and twist it harmlessly to one side, the swift withdrawal, followed by the long, straight lunge that drove the point of his foil right through the adversary’s heart.
Through all this I would be watching him, fascinated, the exercise book lying forgotten in front of me. Mathematics was not one of our more successful subjects.
In geography we made better progress, for George was able to give a more zoological tinge to the lesson. We would draw giant maps, wrinkled with mountains, and then fill in the various places of interest, together with drawings of the more exciting fauna to be found there. Thus for me the chief products of Ceylon were tapirs and tea, of India tigers and rice, of Australia kangaroos and sheep, while the blue curves of currents we drew across the oceans carried whales, albatross, penguins, and walrus, as well as hurricanes, trade winds, fair weather and foul. Our maps were works of art. The principal volcanoes belched such flames and sparks one feared they would set the paper continents alight; the mountain ranges of the world were so blue and white with ice and snow that it made one chilly to look at them. Our brown, sun-drenched deserts were lumpy with camel humps and pyramids, and our tropical forests so tangled and luxuriant that it was only with difficulty that the slouching jaguars, lithe snakes, and morose gorillas managed to get through them, while on their outskirts emaciated natives hacked wearily at the painted trees, forming little clearings apparently for the purpose of writing ‘coffee’ or perhaps ‘cereals’ across them in unsteady capitals. Our rivers were wide, and blue as forget-me-nots, freckled with canoes and crocodiles. Our oceans were anything but empty, for where they had not frothed themselves into a fury of storms or drawn themselves up into an awe-inspiring tidal wave that hung over some remote, palm-shaggy island, they were full of life. Good-natured whales allowed unseaworthy galleons, armed with a forest of harpoons, to pursue them relentlessly; bland and innocent-looking octopi tenderly engulfed small boats in their arms; Chinese junks, with jaundiced crews, were followed by shoals of well-dentured sharks, while fur-clad Eskimos pursued obese herds of walrus through ice fields thickly populated by polar bears and
penguins. They were maps that lived, maps that one could study, frown over, and add to; maps, in short, that really
meant
something.
Our attempts at history were not, at first, conspicuously successful, until George discovered that by seasoning a series of unpalatable facts with a sprig of zoology and a sprinkle of completely irrelevant detail, he could get me interested. Thus I became conversant with some historical data which, to the best of my knowledge, have never been recorded before. Breathlessly, history lesson by history lesson, I followed Hannibal’s progress over the Alps. His reason for attempting such a feat and what he intended to do on the other side were details that scarcely worried me. No, my interest in what I considered to be a very badly planned expedition lay in the fact that
I knew the name of each and every elephant
. I also knew that Hannibal had appointed a special man not only to feed and look after the elephants,
but to give them hot-water bottles when the weather got cold
. This interesting fact seems to have escaped most serious historians. Another thing that most history books never seem to mention is that Colum-bus’s first words on setting foot ashore in America were, ‘Great heavens, look… a jaguar!’ With such an introduction, how could one fail to take an interest in the continent’s subsequent history? So George, hampered by inadequate books and a reluctant pupil, would strive to make his teaching interesting, so that the lessons did not drag.
Roger, of course, thought that I was simply wasting my mornings. However, he did not desert me, but lay under the table asleep while I wrestled with my work. Occasionally, if I had to fetch a book, he would wake, get up, shake himself, yawn loudly, and wag his tail. Then, when he saw me returning to the table, his ears would droop and he would walk heavily back to his private corner and flop down with a sigh of resignation. George did not mind Roger’s being in the room, for he behaved himself well, and did not distract my attention. Occasionally, if he was
sleeping very heavily and heard a peasant dog barking, Roger would wake up with a start and utter a raucous roar of rage before realizing where he was. Then he would give an embarrassed look at our disapproving faces, his tail would twitch, and he would glance round the room sheepishly.
For a short time Quasimodo also joined us for lessons, and behaved very well as long as he was allowed to sit in my lap. He would drowse there, cooing to himself, the entire morning. It was I who banished him, in fact, for one day he upset a bottle of green ink in the exact centre of a large and very beautiful map that we had just completed. I realized, of course, that this vandalism was not intentional, but even so I was annoyed. Quasimodo tried for a week to get back into favour by sitting outside the door and cooing seductively through the crack, but each time I weakened I would catch a glimpse of his tail-feathers, a bright and horrible green, and harden my heart again.
Achilles also attended one lesson, but he did not approve of being inside the house. He spent the morning wandering about the room and scratching at the skirting-boards and door. Then he kept getting wedged under bits of furniture and scrabbling frantically until we lifted the object and rescued him. The room being small, it meant that in order to move one bit of furniture we had to move practically everything else. After a third upheaval George said that as he was unused to such exertions, he thought Achilles would be happier in the garden.