The Durrells are probably the most celebrated literary family of the 20th century. Gerald turned them into celebrities with his tripartite memoir, beginning with My Family and Other Animals (1956) which told of his experiences with his widowed mother Louisa, brothers Lawrence and Leslie and sister Margo during their time in Corfu between 1935 and 1939. The book sold more than 300,000 copies in its first year of publication and has never gone out of print. Its enduring popularity was in part responsible for the expansion of Corfu as a tourist destination.
So know of the Durrells from their own writings and from the image of them created by the cultural heritage of their lives and work and by tv, film and biographical accounts of specific figures. What we do not know is the truth.
Louisa and Lawrence, the parents, were moneyed colonialists, he a senior engineer working on infrastructure projects in India until Lawrence's death in 1910, aged only 43. Louisa returned to England with her four children and ran a boarding house in Bournemouth before deciding to move the family to Corfu in the early 1930s. She and her children hated England because they were no longer part of the governing class. Corfu, she had heard, was an echo of the Empire, governed by Britain for nearly half a century after the Napoleonic wars and still sympathetic to Britain for improving its roads, drains, water supply and so on. The Durrells went there to relive their Colonial past and found that most of the indigenous population treated them with aghast fascination, and expatriate Britons saw them as a disgrace to the homeland.
The two brothers lied about their time there because it marked the beginning of the end of them as a family. Alcohol was a feature of their carefree island lifestyle, presented by Gerald as one aspect of their ability to assimilate to a culture where consuming wine and spirits was as routine as eating. In truth it was symptomatic of a collective desire to escape from uncomfortable aspects of their lives.
Variously fascinating and tragic, Richard Bradford's The Durrells will explore the truth behind the image.