Yet, if our Greek island adventure remains with me to this day, if no other holiday has been as fruitful (in oh so many ways), it was not because it went to plan! If the greens and golds of Corfu beckoned, it was the dusty blue of my Indian passport that tripped us up before we even got there. Sending off my passport to their embassy in London, I hadn’t imagined it would not come back stamped with permission to enter Greece. Wasn’t it the most ancient and wise of cultures, the least prone to Johnny-come-lately European beliefs in white supremacy? But not only was my musty navy passport returned without the happily anticipated stamp, I was summoned to London too. After hours of queuing with other undesirables like myself, I was finally allowed in for an interview. My Greek interrogator looked as impervious as an Ionic column, till I started telling him about my lifelong interest in his country. And in the Durrells. At the mention of whom, his liquid eyes lit up; at my near-perfect recall of their adventures, his face relaxed into a smile; and with my vouchsafing of our intention to search Corfu’s orchards and olive groves for their lost villas, he handed me the stamped passport with alacrity.
My ancient blue passport ran into trouble again at their even more ancient, ramshackle airport. ‘What is this?’ asked the sweating official, glaring at me, and then scrutinizing the document with narrowed eyes. Not entirely sure what he was questioning, I hazarded a guess, ‘My passport?’
‘I have never seen this before,’ he huffed. I mulled this over and offered, ‘That’s because this is my first trip here.’ To which he angrily exclaimed, holding my passport at arm’s length as if it might explode, ‘Never seen such a thing before!’ Really mystified, I murmured, ‘You’ve never seen a passport before?’ Was it his first day on the job? At which he, and not my passport, exploded, ‘Nobody has seen such a passport before! Where is it from?!’ As I nervously shifted from foot to foot, never having come across such a thing either – an airport official who hadn’t heard of India – and attempted to explain with gestures, shaping my hands into namastes, and worse, the Taj Mahal’s onion domes, an older customs official took pity on me and came over to examine the offending item. I held my breath, expecting it to end badly, but then he grinned, ‘Amitabh!’ Yes, yes, I nodded, that’s where I was from – the Land of Amitabh. ‘I’ve met him once too,’ I slipped in. ‘Ooooo,’ gushed the man, all excited, ‘I loves Amitabhs, Missus Handles!’ Fast-tracked out of the airport and into our tiny hired car, we were then released with smiles and waves into Corfu. All it had needed was our own Spiro.
Gasping on our drive to our rented villa, and not just because of the many hairpin bends in the hills we climbed, we scanned the melding of mountain and sea, one tumbling into another, yet standing out for their verve and beauty, with bated breath. Looking down from the hills as we rounded each bend, into the deep green of the olive groves in the valleys, we observed their brightening into golden green at the treetops, turning to azure as they touched the skies. The hills themselves were a patchwork of moss and sunlit green, chequered with yellow and orange orchards, and splashes of turquoise where the sea peeped through the gaps in the trees.
Other shades shimmered where young farmworkers and older folk picking olives could be discerned, but for the most part, we saw no one at all. Nearing the address I clutched in my hand, our surroundings grew shrouded, as the olive, lemon and cypress trees pressed in. A comforting embrace rather than an encroachment, the island held us closer still as we drove onto the last stretch of narrow track to our villa. The villa itself was dappled rather than dark. Some of it as deeply in the shade as the rest was gilded with light, as if it represented all of life in its balancing of dark and bright. If the approach was dimly soporific, and so were the cavernous rooms with their coolto-the-feet tiles and sheets that enveloped like the sea, the glass doors at the back opened out to glorious sunshine and riotous colours. In its blossoming garden was a sunny patio and pool, around which we spent hours eating and reading, more often than swimming. Besides buying local produce at the colourful markets and delis we found, we also nicked the occasional lime, lemon or orange from the sunlit orchards beyond our holiday home. These went into our scrumptious alfresco meals, cooked with love, fresh air, and the occasional bug that fell in accidentally. So delicious were our days and nights, we could have just stayed put at our villa, but other passions beckoned.
Exploring the villages and beaches, we stopped to refuel at the open-air tavernas that dotted every jetty, roadside, and spit of white sand. As delicious as the food was, with an abundance of aubergine, lamb, and feta cheese, the joy of taverna-hopping was as much about the varying views it offered each time. The finest were, of course, on the beach, looking out at the cobalt blue Mediterranean Sea, but the roadside ones were perfect for watching people, who were as colourful and chaotic. We enjoyed sniffing out markets just as much, some big and bustling, others secretively tucked away, and a few twinkling around harbours like seashells lost in the sand. From these we bought baskets of fresh, flavoursome food, and the occasional trinket. We swam in the sparkling sea too, but it was a cooler summer than usual, and more joy was to be had in walking along its pristine shore. These delights were entwined with our search for the Durrells’ old villas – the strawberry pink, the daffodil yellow, and the snow white, preserved in my memory from childhood.
We decided to give many of the better-known and disputed sites a wide berth for the hidden gems, even if their links with that famous family were just as weak. This took us to many quiet lanes, overgrown copses, and deserted watering holes no one had set foot in in years. Some we set out to find and never did, some we discovered to be disappointing, so devoid were they of mystery and romance, and others we stumbled upon by chance. Many we drove up to, especially if they were on elevated ground, smelling of evergreens and dusk, so late in the day did we arrive after hours on the hunt. To get to a few though, we had to abandon the car and walk down dense tracks, following glimmers of sunlight, and our instinct for the hidden and the glorious. In an abandoned orchard we followed a pearly glow to find a diminutive but dazzling edifice that was well worth the nettle stings, but not likely to be the Durrells’ snow-white villa for how few of their extensive menagerie of guests and pets it could have held. Down a path of long grasses heading out to sea, we discovered a vibrant yellow establishment, like a sunflower in a field. But we both agreed after a cursory search that it lacked the required je ne sais quoi to be their daffodil-yellow villa.
It was on our way back from this find that we decided to stop for a picnic in a sun-dappled olive grove we’d spied earlier. After a satisfying meal of fresh bread, olives (bought not picked!), and feta-stuffed tomatoes, we decided to explore. It was then that we discovered the house concealed in the cypress trees. A house we weren’t expecting because it wasn’t on our map. In a patch of land humming with life but deserted by humans, stood a faded ruby villa, large enough for a boisterous family and its many wards, but not so large that it couldn’t lose itself with time and the onrush of vegetation. We circled it, standing on its vine-entwined porch, looking in through its weathered windows, but as desolate as it clearly was, it feltv oddly lived-in too.
We sat on the porch, breathing in the tranquility of the moment and the reticent beauty of our setting. When my husband put his arm around me, I lay my head on his shoulder, and a few kisses were exchanged. When he leaned in for the fifth (or thereabouts, I don’t often count when kissing), we heard a noise in the house. It could have been a chair pulled back for a better look at what was outside. Or a harumph – the clearing of a human throat – to indicate the undetected presence of an onlooker. We jumped, casting around to ascertain who or what it could’ve been. ‘Can you hear a goat?’ my new husband hazarded, proving himself not very well acquainted with goats. I, on the other hand, had grown up in a part of Kolkata overrun with goats, and knew a cloven hooved critter when I heard one. ‘Human, I think,’ I whispered to him, as we made for our car. We had largesse in the back, in the form of mouth-watering food with which we did not intend to part. Nor did we want to be arrested for trespassing, or for our spate of kisses. Scrambling into the car, we were sure it felt more crowded than when we drove in, yet thought nothing further of it.
Suddenly our serene villa was quiet no longer. We heard the tread of unfamiliar footsteps in the empty kitchen. The splash of water when no one was in the pool. Whispers in the garden that weren’t leaves in the breeze. And on one occasion, another of those harumphs we’d heard at the apparently abandoned villa. Most of all, we were overtaken by a strong sense of being watched, though not in a lascivious way, despite the feeling that some of this observation followed us into the bedroom. It seemed as dispassionate but well intentioned as a naturalist studying his subjects. I almost expected to hear David Attenborough’s well-known voice, with that relaxed but knowledgeable commentary that grace all his engrossing programmes, but this time holding forth on us, and our youthful and amorous activities. That was when it dawned on me who it had to be – Gerry Durrell! Who else could be so amiably interested in animal activity? Who would be haunting his old strawberry pink villa, which we’d stumbled upon just days ago, but him? And hadn’t we felt like we’d been followed home from there? Who could it be but the patron saint of travellers to Corfu?
In the end, whether we found the Durrells’ villas in Corfu or not, we found something else for sure. Something more exciting. When we returned to Nottingham, the first stirrings started. Great waves of morning sickness assailed me for weeks till I took the tests that told us we were undoubtedly in the ‘My Family and Other Animals’ way. Exploring Corfu that languorous summer’s week with my second husband, I had not only discovered that it was every bit as full of life as Gerald had promised, but that this life was catching. When our baby boy came along eight months later, we did not call him Gerry. Nor was his little sister, joining us eighteen months after, called Geri. But bizarrely, as soon as they could talk, that was what both of them independently decided to name their first teddies.
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