theodore stephanides my family and other animals

Many aspects of the book acquire, through adult eyes, a new aspect, such as Mother’s habit of constantly picking out new places in which to be buried, or Larry’s springtime purchase of “a large bottle of strong, red wine,” which he consumes while playing Elizabethan love songs on a guitar and becoming increasingly maudlin to the point where he “would pause to inform whichever member of the family happened to be present that spring, for him, did not mean the beginning of a new year, but the death of the old one. While the Durrells’ Ionian interlude therefore incidentally reveals a surprising amount about the Anglo-Indian experience, the reading public’s wild enthusiasm for the book and the dreams of escape which it has fuelled testify to the trials and sadnesses of the post-war nation, as well as to our total ignorance of twentieth century Greek history and culture -as pointedly suggested by Catherine Brown in a 2017 Standpoint article, “And I Too Have Been in Anglo-Arcadia.” It was hardly surprising, then, that the climate of Bournemouth caused the family the medical difficulties lugubriously outlined in the introduction to Part One, “The Migration.” This uprooted family battled with windy, rainy coastal weather and a social system which, in contrast to the elasticity of the Raj’s mores, seemed to be hemming them in.

The family’s impetuous move to Greece is also more easily explained by the fact that Mother and her deceased husband were Anglo-Indians (that is to say, they descended from English families settled in India) and the children had been born and spent much of their lives in India. In particular, Michael Haag’s The Durrells of Corfu explains that Louisa Durrell was struggling with bereavement following the premature death of her husband and relying on alcohol to anaesthetise herself, which prompted her eldest son Lawrence to intervene and decide upon a change of scene. The various biographies of the Durrells make greater sense of their peculiar behaviours, particularly those of Mother, a lovable, vague, and embattled figure. While the descriptions of the local wildlife still entrance upon rereading the book as an adult, the personalities of the eccentric Durrells and their social situation on the Greek Ionian island of Corfu are even more interesting.

My introduction to it was via the Listen for Pleasure taped audiobook read by the extremely mellifluous Gerald Harper (otherwise best known for his portrayal of the titular Victorian dandy in the sixties fantasy series Adam Adamant), and I know the opening lines by heart: “July had been blown out like a candle by a biting wind that ushered in a leaden August sky…” It is difficult to return with anything like objectivity to a book that one read and adored as a child. My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

Theodore stephanides my family and other animals