Lawrence Durrell working steadily on typescript of the novel that will become The Black Book. Nancy and Penelope Durrell evacuated from Egypt, taking up residence first in Palestine, then in Beirut. Lawrence Durrell meets Yvette Eve Cohen b. Lawrence and Sappho Durrell move to Cyprus, where he works variously as a teacher, a public relations officer for the British government, and a special correspondent.
Durrell pens introduction for E. Durrell School of Corfu established. Please share additions, clarifications, or corrections to this chronology via the following form. Name required Email required Website Comment required Submit. Durrell The Lawrence Durrell Centenary. Skip to content. Durrell About Durrell Call for Papers. Getting There. London House, Goodenough College.
The British Library. Durrell: A Chronology. Durrell: The London Years. Lawrence Durrell enrolls in St. Lawrence and Nancy Durrell leave Corfu in early September. Henry Miller leaves Greece for America, 28 December Lawrence and Nancy Durrell arrive in Egypt, 1 May. Lawrence Durrell writes for The Egyptian Gazette. No wonder a grey postwar Britain greedily devoured the Durrell myth and has been letting the juices run down its chin ever since.
We know what actually happened between and , when Anglo-Indian widow Louisa Durrell and her four children set up home in a series of ice-cream colour villas along the eastern coastline of Corfu.
Instead he fillets well-known sources such as Whatever Happened to Margo? There are also the notes that Gerald Durrell left for his autobiography, unpublished at the time of his death in , which were mined by Botting for his authorised work of One absent wife looks like carelessness, or perhaps a desire for narrative clarity, but three suggests the desperate wish of a fatherless child to ensure that he has the undivided attention of his caregivers.
The most Haag is willing to concede is that when the Durrells arrived in Corfu in they were still mourning the death of their father and husband seven years earlier.
The loss of Lawrence Samuel Durrell, an Anglo-Indian railway engineer, at the age of just 43, had left his widow suicidal and permanently tipsy. But what Haag fails to say is that Louisa continued to drink heavily, which puts a slightly different complexion on all that charming dottiness that Mother exhibits in My Family. As a young woman she had defied convention and trained as a nurse, and had even scrubbed floors unheard of for a white woman in India then.
When her husband's work took him upcountry or out into the wilds, his young wife, along with their children, would go with him and rough it without complaint. When he was back in town, and out at the office or on a construction site, she would spend hours in the heat and smoke of the kitchen learning from cook the art of curry-making, at which she became very adept, and developing a taste for gin at sundown, though Lawrence Samuel made sure she limited herself to no more than two chota-pegs a day.
It was probably from his mother that Gerald like his two brothers inherited his humour and the alcohol gene. But it was from his father that he inherited his bright blue eyes and hair type full and flopping over his eyes and his height, exceptional in an otherwise very short family.
Physically minute, impractical, fey and seemingly somewhat bewildered as a person, Louisa was also in a way rather Oriental in her outlook and mindset — her son Lawrence was to describe her as a kind of born-again Buddhist.
If Father was the respectable, uncomplicated patriarch, Mother was to a degree his opposite. She's really to blame for us, I think — she should have been run in years ago.
Perhaps it was the Irish in her, perhaps it was the miasma of India, but she had a fondness for ghosts, and felt no fear of them. In one of the family's Indian postings their house backed on to a wild forest, and the servants, shivering with fright, would complain to Louisa of the lonely spirit that cried there at night.
Mother was to remain a hugely important figure in the lives of her offspring. Gerald's father, Lawrence Samuel Durrell, was, strictly speaking, not a Durrell at all. The facts of the matter are buried in a tangle of relationships involving his grandmother, Mahala Tye, in the depths of rural Suffolk in the early years of the Victorian era.
After the suicide of her first husband, William Durrell, it seems that Mahala gave birth to an illegitimate son, whose biological father was a Suffolk farmer by the name of Samuel Stearne. Shortly afterwards Mahala married Henry Page, a labourer, who became the baby's stepfather and by whom she had five other children.
Later in life the illegitimate son — the future grandfather of Gerald Durrell — sailed to India, and in Lucknow in he married for the second time, to Dora Johnstone, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a sergeant-major in the Royal Horse Brigade, by whom he had eight children. Grandfather Durrell went on to serve with distinction in the Boxer Rebellion in China, rising eventually to the rank of major and dying in Portsmouth in , shortly after volunteering for active service in the Great War at the age of sixty-three.
The first of his children by his second wife was Gerald Durrell's father, Lawrence Samuel, elevated from birth by his illegitimate father's steady climb through the social scale from yokel stock to officer class. Lawrence Samuel Durrell by all accounts was a decent but rather distant and often absent figure to his children, for his work as an engineer took him across the length and breadth of British India, from the Punjab and the Himalayas to Bengal, and as far away as the jungles of Burma.
According to his eldest son, Lawrence, he was a good, serious, sincere man, deeply imbued with the Victorian faith in the overriding power of science to solve all things. He was not an imaginative man, nor was he particularly cultured, but though he was a straightforward servant of empire, he was not an entirely conventional one; he did not live like the British but like the Anglo-Indians, and he resigned from his club when an Oxford-educated Indian doctor he had proposed for membership was blackballed, even though he had saved his eldest son's life.
This disregard for racial distinctions was shared by his wife. Gerald's father was clearly a man of exceptional ability, determination and industry who rose from relatively modest beginnings to become a trail-blazing railway builder and civil engineer of the kind celebrated by the laureate of the Raj, Rudyard Kipling — an empire-builder in the classic mould. Dedicated to playing his part in laying down the infrastructure of a modern, industrialising India, from the construction of roads, railways, canals and bridges to the building of hospitals, factories and schools, Lawrence Samuel slogged away in monsoon and jungle, carting his family around with him like a band of privileged gypsies, and earning the highest commendations from his employers.
With tact and gentle persuasion, Mr Durrell has managed his workmen splendidly. In the four years preceding Gerald's birth he became one of the fat cats of British India, successful, rich — and desperately overworked. It was not grand, but it was comfortable, with cool, shuttered rooms, a large veranda with bamboo screens against the heat of the sun, and a sizeable garden of lawn, shrubs and trees, where Gerry the toddler took his first steps.
Gerald was never much aware of his three older siblings during his infant years in India. His elder brother Lawrence had already been packed off to school in England by the time he was born, and Leslie now back in India and Margaret five years his senior , had advanced far beyond baby talk and infant toys.
For much of his time Gerald was left in the company of his Indian surrogate mother, or ayah. Gerry would have had more to do with the ayah than we older children did, so the biggest influence in his Indian years would have been the Indian rather than the European part of the household.
In later years Gerald claimed to remember a number of incidents from his early life in Jamshedpur. One of the most vivid of these, often recounted, was his first visit to a zoo, an experience so memorable that he attributed to it the beginning of his lifelong passion for animals and zoos.
In fact there was no zoo in Jamshedpur in Gerald's day, though there is one now. Even if there had been a zoo, it is highly unlikely that Gerald could have remembered it, for when he was only a toddler of fourteen months he left Jamshedpur with his father, mother, sister Margaret and Big Granny Dora, never to return. In the India of that time it was normal for British servants of the Raj to take a furlough in Britain roughly every two years, but it seems that the Durrells also had a mission to perform during their visit.
Lawrence Samuel was keen to find a property to buy in London, either as an investment or as a place to retire to, or both. As a successful engineer of empire he had begun to amass a small fortune, and had already invested in a large fruit farm in Tasmania, which he had purchased unseen. He was now forty-two, and his workload was punishing.
His ambition was to go on the stage and partner Evelyn Laye in the music hall.
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