8


Hedgehogs and Sea-dogs

When spring came, we moved to a new villa, an elegant, snow-white one shaded by a huge magnolia tree, that lay in the olive groves not far from where our very first villa had been. It was on a hillside overlooking a great flat area marked out like a gigantic chess-board by irrigation ditches, which I knew as the fields. They were in fact the old Venetian salt-pans used long ago for collecting the brine that floated into the channels from the big salt-water lake on whose shores they lay. The lake had long since silted up and the channels, now flooded by fresh water from the hills, provided a grid-work of lush fields. This was an area overflowing with wildlife, and so it was one of my happiest hunting grounds.

Spring in Corfu never seemed to be half-hearted. Almost overnight, it seemed, the winter winds had blown the skies clean of clouds, so that they shone a clear delphinium blue, and overnight the winter rains had flooded the valleys with wildflowers; the pink of pyramid orchids, yellow of crocus, tall pale spikes of the asphodels, the blue eyes of the grape hyacinths peering at you from the grass, and the wine-dipped anemones that bowed in the slightest breeze. The olive groves were alive and rustling with the newly arrived birds: the hoopoes, salmon-pink and black with surprised crests, probed their long, curved beaks at the soft earth between the clumps of emerald grass; goldfinches, chiming and wheezing, danced merrily from twig to twig, their plumage glowing gold and scarlet and black. In the irrigation ditches in the fields, the waters became green with weed, interlaced with the strings of toad spawn, like black-pearl necklaces; emerald-green frogs croaked at each other, and the water tortoises, their shells as black as ebony, crawled up the banks to dig their holes and lay their eggs. Steel-blue dragon-flies, slender as threads, hatched and drifted like smoke through the undergrowth, moving in a curious stiff flight. Now was the time when the banks at night were lit by the throbbing, green-white light of a thousand glow-worms and in the day-time by the glint of wild strawberries hanging like scarlet lanterns in the shade. It was an exciting time, a time for explorations and new discoveries, a time when an overturned log might reveal almost anything from a field-vole’s nest to a wriggling glitter of baby slow-worms, looking as though they were cast in burnished bronze.

I was down in the fields one day, endeavouring to catch some of the brown water-snakes that inhabited the irrigation ditches, when an old woman, whom I knew slightly, called me from some six fields away. She had been digging up the ground with her short-handled, broad-bladed hoe, standing up to her ankles in the rich loam, wearing the thick, ungainly sheep’s-wool stockings the peasants put on for this operation.

‘I’ve found you something,’ she called. ‘Come quickly.’

It was impossible for me to get there quickly, for each field was surrounded by an irrigation ditch on all four sides and finding the bridges across these was like finding your way through a maze.

‘Quickly! Quickly!’ screamed the old woman. ‘They are running away. Quickly!’

I ran and leaped and scuttled, almost falling into the ditches, racing across the rickety plank bridges, until, panting, I reached her side.

‘There,’ she said, pointing. ‘There. Mind they don’t bite you.’

I saw that she had dug up a bundle of leaves from under the earth in which something white was moving. Gingerly I parted the leaves with the handle of my butterfly net and saw to my delight four fat, newly born, baby hedgehogs, pink as cyclamen, with soft, snow-white spines. They were still blind and they wriggled and nosed at each other like a litter of tiny pigs. I picked them up and put them carefully inside my shirt, thanked the old woman, and made my way homewards. I was excited about my new pets, principally because they were so young. I already had two adult hedgehogs, called Itch and Scratch because of the vast quantities of fleas they harboured, but they were not really tame. These babies I thought would grow up differently. I would be, as far as they were concerned, their mother. I visualized myself walking proudly through the olive groves, preceded by the dogs, Ulysses, and my two magpies, and trotting at my heels, four tame hedgehogs, all of which I would have taught to do tricks.

The family were arranged on the veranda under the grapevine, each occupied with his or her own affairs. Mother was knitting, counting the stitches audibly at intervals to herself and saying ‘damn’ periodically when she went wrong. Leslie was squatting on the flag-stones, carefully weighing gunpowder and little piles of silver shot as he filled shiny red cartridge cases. Larry was reading a massive tome and occasionally glancing irritably at Margo, who was clattering away at her machine, making some diaphanous garment, and singing, off key, the only line she knew of her favourite song of the moment.

‘She wore her little jacket of blue,’ she warbled. ‘She wore her little jacket of blue, She wore her little jacket of blue, She wore her little jacket of blue.’

‘The only remarkable thing about your singing is your tenacity,’ said Larry. ‘Anybody else, faced with the fact that they could not carry a tune and couldn’t remember the simplest lyric, would have given up, defeated, a long time ago.’

He threw his cigarette butt down on the flag-stones and this produced a roar of rage from Leslie.

‘Watch the gunpowder,’ he shouted.

‘Leslie dear,’ said Mother, ‘I do wish you wouldn’t shout like that, you’ve made me lose count.’

I produced my hedgehogs proudly and showed them to Mother.

‘Aren’t they sweet,’ she said, peering at them benignly through her spectacles.

‘Oh, God! He hasn’t got something new has he?’ asked Larry. He peered at my pink progeny in their white fur coats with distaste.

‘What are they?’ he inquired.

I explained that they were baby hedgehogs.

‘They can’t be,’ he said. ‘Hedgehogs are all brown.’

My family’s ignorance of the world they lived in was always a source of worry to me, and I never lost an opportunity of imparting information. I explained that female hedgehogs could not, without suffering the most refined torture, give birth to babies covered with hard spines, and so they were born with these little rubbery white spikes which could be bent between the fingers as easily as a feather. Later, as they grew, the spines would darken and harden.

‘How are you going to feed them, dear? They’ve got such tiny mouths,’ said Mother, ‘and they must still be drinking milk, surely?’

I said that I had seen, in a shop in the town, a complete do-it-yourself baby outfit for children, which consisted of several worthless items such as a celluloid doll, nappies, a potty, and so forth, but one article had caught my attention: a miniature feeding bottle with a supply of tiny red teats. This, I said, would be ideal for feeding the baby hedgehogs with, but the potty, doll, and other accoutrements could be given to some deserving peasant child. There was only one slight snag, and that was that I had had some rather heavy expenses to meet recently (such as the wire for the magpie cage) and so I had overspent on my pocket-money.

‘Well, dear,’ said Mother doubtfully, ‘if it isn’t too expensive I suppose I could buy it for you.’

I said it was not expensive at all, when you considered that it was more like an investment, for not only would you be getting an invaluable feeding bottle which would come in useful for other animals, but you would be rearing four tame hedgehogs and getting a grateful peasant child into the bargain. What finer way, I asked, of spending money? So the outfit was purchased. A young peasant girl, whom I rather fancied, received with the most satisfactory joy the doll, potty, and other rubbish, and I went about the stern task of rearing my babies.

They lived in a large cardboard box, full of cotton wool, under my bed, and at night, in order to keep them warm, I placed their box on top of a hot-water bottle. I had wanted to have them sleeping in the bed with me, but Mother pointed out that this was not only unhygienic, but that I risked rolling on them in the night and killing them. I found they thrived best on watered cow’s milk and I fed them assiduously three times a day and once in the middle of the night. The night feed proved to be a little difficult, for in order to make sure that I woke up I had borrowed a large tin alarm clock from Spiro. This used to go off like a rattle of musketry, and unfortunately woke not only me but the entire family as well. Eventually, so vociferous were the family in their complaints, Mother suggested I give them an extra feed late at night when I went to bed, in lieu of the feed at two o’clock in the morning that woke everybody up. This I did and the hedgehogs thrived and grew. Their eyes opened and their spines turned from snow-white to grey and became firmer. They had now, as I anticipated, convinced themselves that I was their mother, and would come scrambling onto the edge of the box when I opened it, jostling and pushing for first suck at the bottle, uttering tiny wheezy squeaks and grunts. I was immensely proud of them and looked forward happily to the day when they would trot at my heels through the olive groves.

Then Mother and I were invited to spend a week-end with some friends in the extreme south of the island, and I found myself in a quandary. I longed to go, for the sandy, shallow coasts of the south were a fine place for finding heart-urchins which, in fact, looked not unlike baby hedgehogs. Heart-shaped, they were covered with soft spines which formed a tufted tail at one end and a spiky Red-Indian-like head-dress along the back. I had found only one of these, and that had been crushed by the sea and was scarcely recognizable, but I knew from Theodore that they were found in abundance two or three inches under the sand in the south of the island. However, I had my brood of hedgehogs to consider, for I could not very well take them with me, and as Mother was coming too, there was nobody I really trusted to look after them.

‘I’ll look after them,’ offered Margo. ‘Dear little things.’

I was doubtful. Did she realize, I asked, the intricacies of looking after the hedgehogs? The fact that, for example, the cotton wool in their box had to be changed three times a day? That they must have only diluted cow’s milk? That the milk had to be warmed to blood heat and no more? And most important of all, that they were allowed only half a bottle of milk each at every feed? For I had very soon found out that, if you let them, they would drink themselves comatose at every meal, with the most dire results that entailed the changing of the cotton wool even more frequently.

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Margo. ‘Of course I can look after them. I know about babies and things. You just write down on a piece of paper what I am supposed to do, and they’ll be quite all right.’

I was torn. I desperately wanted to search for heart-urchins in the golden sands covered by the warm, shallow sea, and yet I doubted Margo’s proclivities as a nursemaid. However, Margo grew so indignant at my doubting her that eventually, reluctantly, I gave in. I had prevailed upon Larry, who happened to be in a good mood, to type out a detailed list of do’s and don’t’s for hedgehog-rearers and I gave Margo a practical course in bottle warming and cotton wool changing.

‘They seem awfully hungry,’ she said as she lifted each writhing, squeaking baby out of the box and pushed the end of the teat into its groping, eager mouth.

I said that they were always like that. One should take no notice of it. They were just naturally greedy.

‘Poor little things,’ said Margo.

I should have been warned.

I spent an exhilarating week-end. I got myself badly sunburnt, for the fragile spring sun was deceptive, but I came back, triumphant, with eight heart-urchins, four shells new to my collection, and a baby sparrow that had fallen out of its nest. At the villa, after I had suffered the barks and licks and nibbles of greeting that the dogs always bestowed upon you if you had been away for more than two hours, I asked Margo eagerly how my baby hedgehogs were.

‘They’re doing all right now,’ she said. ‘But really, Gerry, I do think you ill-treat your pets. You were starving those poor little things to death. They were so hungry. You’ve no idea.’

With a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, I listened to my sister.

‘Ravenous, poor little dears. Do you know, they’ve been taking two bottles each at every feed?’

Horrified, I rushed up to my bedroom and pulled the cardboard box out from under my bed. In it lay my four hedgehogs, bloated beyond belief. Their stomachs were so large that they could only paw feebly with their legs without making any progress. They had degenerated into pink sacks full of milk, frosted with spines. They all died that night and Margo wept copiously over their balloon-like corpses. But her grief did not give me any pleasure, for never would my hedgehogs trot obediently at my heels through the olive groves. As a punishment to my overindulgent sister, I dug four little graves and erected four little crosses in the garden as a permanent reminder, and for four days I did not speak to her.

My grief over the death of my hedgehogs was, however, short-lived, for at that time Donald and Max reappeared on the island, triumphantly, with a thirty-foot yacht, and Larry introduced into our midst Captain Creech.

Mother and I had spent a very pleasant afternoon in the olive groves, she collecting wildflowers and herbs and I collecting newly emerged butterflies. Tired but happy, we made our way back to the villa for tea. When we came in sight of the villa, she came to a sudden halt.

‘Who’s that man sitting on the veranda?’ she asked.

I had been busy throwing sticks for the dogs, so I was not really concentrating. Now I saw, stretched out on the veranda, a strange figure in crumpled white ducks.

‘Who is he? Can you see?’ asked Mother, agitated.

At that time she was suffering under the delusion that the manager of our bank in England was liable, at any moment, to pay a flying visit to Corfu for the express purpose of discussing our overdraft, so this unknown figure on the veranda fermented her fears.

I examined the stranger carefully. He was old, almost completely bald, and what little hair he had adhering to the back of his skull was long and as white and wispy as late summer thistle-down. He had an equally unkempt white beard and moustache. I assured Mother that, as far as I could see, he bore no resemblance to the bank manager.

‘Oh, dear,’ said Mother, annoyed. ‘He would arrive now. I’ve got absolutely nothing for tea. I wonder who he is?’

As we got nearer, the stranger, who had been dozing peacefully, suddenly woke up and spotted us.

‘Ahoy!’ he shouted, so loudly and suddenly that Mother tripped and almost fell down. ‘Ahoy! You must be Mother Durrell, and the boy, of course. Larry told me all about you. Welcome aboard.’

‘Oh, dear,’ whispered Mother to me, ‘it’s another one of Larry’s.’

As we got closer, I could see that our guest had a most extraordinary face, pink and as carunculated as a walnut. The cartilage of his nose had obviously received, at one time or another, so many severe blows that it twisted down his face like a snake. His jaw too had suffered the same fate and was now twisted to one side, as though hitched up to his right ear-lobe by an invisible thread.

‘Delighted to meet you,’ he said, as though he owned the villa, his rheumy eyes beaming. ‘My, you’re a better-looking wench than your son described.’

Mother stiffened and dropped an anemone from the bunch of flowers she carried.

‘I,’ she said with frigid dignity, ‘am Mrs Durrell, and this is my son Gerald.’

‘My name’s Creech,’ said the old man. ‘Captain Patrick Creech.’ He paused and spat accurately and copiously over the veranda rail into Mother’s favourite bed of zinnias. ‘Welcome aboard,’ he said again, exuding bonhomie. ‘Glad to know you.’

Mother cleared her throat nervously. ‘Is my son Lawrence here?’ she inquired, adopting her fruity, aristocratic voice, which she did only in moments of extreme stress.

‘No, no,’ said Captain Creech. ‘I left him in town. He told me to come out here for tea. He said he would be aboard shortly.’

‘Well,’ said Mother, making the best of a bad job, ‘do sit down. If you will excuse me a moment I’ll just go and make some scones.’

‘Scones, eh?’ said Captain Creech, eyeing Mother with such lasciviousness that she dropped two more wildflowers. ‘I like scones, and I like a woman that’s handy in the galley.’

‘Gerry,’ said Mother frostily, ‘you entertain Captain Creech while I get the tea.’

She made a hurried and slightly undignified exit and I was left to cope with Captain Creech.

He had reslumped himself in his chair and was staring at me with watery eyes from under his tattered white eyebrows. His stare was so fixed that I became slightly unnerved. Conscious of my duties as host, however, I offered him a box full of cigarettes. He peered into it, as though it were a well, his jaw moving to and fro like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

‘Death!’ he shouted so suddenly and so vigorously that I almost dropped the cigarettes. He lay back in his chair and fixed me with his blue eyes.

‘Cigarettes are death, boyo,’ he said. He felt in the pocket of his white ducks and produced a stubby pipe as blackened and as gnarled as a piece of charcoal. He stuck it between his teeth, which made his jaw look even more lop-sided than ever.

‘Never forget,’ he said, ‘a man’s best friend is his pipe.’

He laughed uproariously at his own joke and dutifully I laughed too. He got up and spat copiously over the veranda rail and then flopped back into his chair. I searched my mind for a topic of conversation. Nothing seemed to present itself. He would surely not be interested in the fact that today I had heard the first cicada, nor that Agathi’s chicken laid six eggs the size of hazel-nuts. Since he was nautically inclined, I wondered whether the news would excite him that Taki, who could not afford a boat, had been night-fishing (holding a light above his head with one hand and a trident in the other) and had successfully driven the trident through his own foot, imagining it was an exotic form of fish? But Captain Creech, peering at me from behind the oily fumes of his pipe, started the conversation himself.

‘You’re wondering about my face, aren’t you boyo?’ he said accusingly, and I noticed that the skin on his cheeks became pinker and more shiny, like satin, as he said it. Before I could voice a denial, he went on.

‘Wind-jammers. That’s what did it. Wind-jammers. Going round the Horn. Tearing wind, straight out of the arsehole of the earth. I fell, see? The canvas flapping and roaring like God’s thunder. The rope slipped through my fingers like an oiled snake. Straight onto the deck. They did what they could with it… of course, we hadn’t a doctor on board.’ He paused and felt his jaw meditatively. I sat riveted in my chair, fascinated. ‘By the time we got round to Chile the whole thing had set as hard as Portland,’ he said, still fondling his jaw. ‘I was sixteen years old.’

I wondered whether to commiserate with him or not, but he had fallen into a reverie, his blue eyes blank. Mother came onto the veranda and paused, struck by our immobility.

‘Chile,’ said the Captain with relish. ‘Chile. That was the first time I got gonorrhoea.’

Mother started and then cleared her throat loudly.

‘Gerry, come and help me bring out the tea,’ she said.

Together we brought out the teapot, milk jug and cups, and the plates with golden-yellow scones and toast Mother had prepared.

‘Tucker,’ said Captain Creech, filling his mouth with scone. ‘Stops your belly rumbling.’

‘Are you, um, staying here long?’ asked Mother, obviously hoping that he was not.

‘Might retire here,’ said Captain Creech indistinctly, wiping scone crumbs off his moustache. ‘Looks a pretty little place. Might go to anchor here.’

He was forced, because of his jaw, to slurp his tea noisily. I could see Mother getting increasingly alarmed.

‘Don’t you, um, have a ship?’ she asked.

‘No bloody fear,’ said Captain Creech, seizing another scone. ‘Retired, that’s me. Got time now to look a little more closely at the wenches.’

He eyed Mother meditatively as he spoke, masticating his scone with great vigour.

‘A bed without a woman is like a ship without a hold,’ he observed.

Mercifully Mother was saved from having to reply to this remark by the arrival of the car containing the rest of the family and Donald and Max.

‘Muzzer, we have come,’ announced Max, beaming at her and embracing her tenderly. ‘And I see we are in time for tea. Strumpets! How lovely! Donald, we have strumpets for tea!’

‘Crumpets,’ corrected Donald.

‘They’re scones,’ said Mother.

‘I remember a strumpet in Montevideo,’ said Captain Creech. ‘Marvellous bitch. Kept the whole ship entertained for two days. They don’t breed them with stamina like that nowadays.’

‘Who is this disgusting old man?’ asked Mother as soon as she had an opportunity of backing Larry into a corner away from the tea-party, which was now in full swing.

‘He’s called Creech,’ said Larry.

‘I know that,’ said Mother, ‘but what did you bring him here for?’

‘He’s an interesting old boy,’ said Larry, ‘and I don’t think he’s got a lot of money. He’s come here to retire on a minute pension, I think.’

‘Well, he’s not going to retire on us,’ said Mother firmly. ‘Don’t invite him again.’

‘I thought you’d like him,’ said Larry. ‘He’s travelled all over the world. He’s even been to India. He’s full of the most fascinating stories.’

‘As far as I am concerned he can go on travelling,’ said Mother. ‘The stories he’s been telling up to now aren’t what I call fascinating.’

Captain Creech, once having discovered our ‘anchorage,’ as he put it, became a frequent visitor. He would arrive generally, we noticed, just in time for a meal, shouting, ‘Ahoy there! Can I come aboard and have a chin-wag?’ As he had obviously walked two and a half miles through the olive groves to reach us, it was difficult to deny him this privilege, and so Mother, muttering evilly, would rush into the kitchen and water the soup and bisect the sausages so that Captain Creech could join us. He would regale us with tales of his life at sea and the names of the places that he had visited. Names that I knew only from maps would slide enticingly out of his disjointed mouth. Trincomalee, Darwin and Durban, Buenos Aires, Wellington and Calcutta, the Galapagos, the Seychelles and the Friendly Islands. It seemed that there was no corner of the globe that he had not penetrated. He would intersperse these stories with prolonged and exceptionally vulgar sea-shanties and limericks of such biological complexity that, fortunately, Mother could not understand them.

Then came the never-to-be-forgotten day when Captain Creech arrived, uninvited, for tea as we were entertaining the local English minister and his wife, more out of a sense of duty than of religion. To our amazement, Captain Creech behaved remarkably well. He exchanged views on sea-serpents and the height of tidal waves with the padre and explained the difference between longitude and latitude to the padre’s wife. His manners were exemplary and we were quite proud of him, but towards the end of tea the padre’s wife had, with extreme cunning, managed to steer the conversation onto her children. This subject was all-absorbing to her. You would have thought that not only was she the only woman in the world to have given birth, but that they had been immaculately conceived as well. Having treated us to a ten-minute monologue on the incredible perspicacity of her offspring, she paused momentarily to drink her tea.

‘I’m a bit too old to have babies,’ said Captain Creech.

The padre’s wife choked.

‘But,’ he went on with satisfaction, ‘I have a lot of fun trying.’

The tea-party was not a success.

Shortly after this, Donald and Max turned up one day at the villa.

‘Muzzer,’ said Max, ‘we are going to carry you away.’

‘Yacht party,’ said Donald. ‘Fabulous idea. Max’s idea, of course.’

‘Yacht party where?’ inquired Mother.

‘Round ze island,’ said Max, throwing out his long arms in an all-embracing gesture.

‘But I thought you didn’t know how to sail her,’ said Leslie.

‘No, no. We don’t sail her. Larry sails her,’ said Max.

‘Larry?’ said Leslie incredulously. ‘But Larry doesn’t know the first thing about boats.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Donald earnestly. ‘Oh, no. He’s quite an expert. He’s been taking lessons from Captain Creech. The Captain’s coming along too, as crew.’

‘Well, that settles it then,’ said Mother. ‘I’m not coming on a yacht with that disgusting old man, apart from the danger involved if Larry’s going to sail it.’

They tried their best to persuade her, but Mother was adamant. The most she would concede was that the rest of the family, with Theodore, would drive across the island and rendezvous with them at a certain bay where we could picnic and, if it was warm enough, bathe.

It was a bright, clean morning when we set off and it looked as though it were going to be ideal for both sailing and picnicking; but by the time we reached the other side of the island and had unpacked the picnic things, it began to look as though we were in for a sirocco. Theodore and I made our way down through the trees to the edge of the bay. The sea had turned a cold steel-grey and the wind had stretched and starched a number of white clouds across the blue sky. Suddenly, along the rim of the sea, three water-spouts appeared, loping along the horizon like the huge undulating necks of some prehistoric monsters. Bowing and swaying, graceful as swans they danced along the horizon and disappeared.

‘Aha,’ said Theodore, who had been watching this phenomenon interestedly, ‘I have never seen three of them together. Very curious. Did you notice how they moved together, almost as if they were… er… you know, animals in a herd?’

I said that I wished they had been closer.

‘Um,’ said Theodore rasping his beard with his thumb. ‘I don’t think water-spouts are things one wants to get on… er… um… intimate terms with. I remember once I visited a place in Macedonia where one had… er… you know, come ashore. It had left a trail of damage about two hundred yards wide and a quarter of a mile long, that is to say inland. Even quite big olive trees had been, er, you know, damaged and the smaller ones were broken up like matchwood. And of course, at the point where the water-spout finally broke up, the ground was saturated by tons of salt water and so it was… you know… completely unsuitable for agriculture.’

‘I say, did you see those bloody great water-spouts?’ asked Leslie, joining us.

‘Yes, very curious,’ said Theodore.

‘Mother’s in a panic,’ said Leslie. ‘She’s convinced they’re heading straight for Larry.’

‘I don’t think there’s any danger of that,’ said Theodore, ‘they look too far out to me.’

By the time we had installed ourselves in the olive groves at the edge of the bay, it was obvious that we were in for one of those sudden and exceedingly sharp siroccos which blew up at that time of the year. The wind lashed the olive trees and churned up the bay to white-capped rollers.

‘We might as well go home,’ said Leslie. ‘It isn’t going to be much fun picnicking in this.’

‘We can’t, dear,’ said Mother. ‘We promised to meet Larry here.’

‘If they’ve got any sense, they’ll have put in somewhere else,’ said Leslie.

‘I can’t say I envy them being out in this,’ said Theodore, gazing at the waves pounding the rocks.

‘Oh, dear, I do hope they will be all right,’ said Mother. ‘Larry really is foolish.’

We waited an hour, with Mother getting increasingly panicky with each passing moment. Then Leslie, who had climbed to a neighbouring headland, came back with the news that he could see them.

‘I must say I think it’s surprising they got this far,’ said Leslie. ‘The boom’s swinging about all over the place and they’re tacking practically in circles.’

Presently the yacht headed into the narrow mouth of the bay and we could see Donald and Max dodging about, pulling at ropes and canvas while Larry and Captain Creech clung to the tiller and were obviously shouting instructions. We watched their progress interestedly.

‘I hope they remember that reef,’ said Leslie.

‘What reef?’ said Mother in alarm.

‘There’s a damn great reef just there where that white water is,’ said Leslie.

Spiro had been standing gazing out to sea like a brown gargoyle, his face scowling.

‘I don’t likes it, Master Leslies,’ he said in a hoarse whisper. ‘They don’t looks as though they knows how to sails.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Mother. ‘Why ever did I agree to this?’

At that moment (owing to the fact, we discovered later, that Donald and Max misinterpreted their instructions and had hauled up a length of canvas instead of taking it down) several things happened simultaneously. The yacht’s sails were suddenly caught by an errant gust of wind. They puffed out. The boom came over with a splintering crash that one could hear quite clearly on shore and knocked Max overboard. The yacht turned almost on her side and, propelled by the gust of wind, ran with a remarkably loud scrunching noise straight onto the reef, where she remained upright for a brief moment and then, as if despairing of the yachtsmen on board, she lay down languidly on her side. Immediately all was confusion.

Mother shouting ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God!’ had to sit down hurriedly on an olive root. Margo burst into tears, waving her hands and screaming, ‘They’ll drown! They’ll down!’ Spiro, Leslie, and I made our way to the edge of the bay. There was not much we could do as there was no boat available to launch as a rescue vessel. But presently we saw the four expert sailors swimming away from the wreck of the yacht, Larry and Donald apparently propelling Captain Creech through the water. Leslie and I and Spiro stripped off our clothes hurriedly and plunged into the sea. The water was icy cold and the waves had considerably more force in them than I gave them credit for.

‘Are you all right?’ shouted Leslie as the flotilla of shipwrecked mariners came towards us.

‘Yes,’ said Max. ‘Right as rain.’

He had a four-inch gash on his forehead and the blood was running down his face and into his moustache. Larry had one eye bruised and scraped and rapidly swelling. Captain Creech’s face, bobbing between Larry’s and Donald’s, had achieved an extraordinary mauve colour, rather like the bloom of a plum.

‘Give us a hand with the Captain,’ said Larry. ‘Silly old bastard only told me as we went over that he couldn’t swim.’

Spiro, Leslie, and I laid hands upon Captain Creech and relieved the panting Donald and Larry of their rescue work. We must have made an arresting tableau as we staggered, gasping, through the shallows and out onto the shore. Leslie and Spiro were supporting Captain Creech, one on each side of him, as his legs seemed in imminent danger of buckling.

‘Ahoy there!’ he called to Mother. ‘Ahoy there, my wench.’

‘Look at Max’s head!’ screamed Margo. ‘He’ll bleed to death!’

We staggered up into the shelter of the olive groves, and while Mother, Margo, and Theodore did hasty first-aid on Max’s head and Larry’s eye, we laid Captain Creech under an olive tree, since he seemed incapable of standing up.

‘Port at last,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Port at last. I’ll make sailors of you lads yet.’

It became obvious, now that we had time to concentrate, that Captain Creech was extremely drunk.

‘Really, Larry, you do make me cross,’ said Mother. ‘You might all have been drowned.’

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ said Larry aggrievedly. ‘We were doing what the Captain told us to do. Donald and Max went and pulled the wrong ropes.’

‘How can you take instructions from him?’ said Mother. ‘He’s drunk.’

‘He wasn’t drunk when he started,’ said Larry. ‘He must have had a secret supply somewhere on board. He did seem to pop down to the cabin rather a lot, now I come to think about it.’

‘Do not trust him, gentle maiden,’ sang Captain Creech in a wavering baritone. ‘Though his heart be pure as gold, He’ll leave you one fine morning, With a cargo in your hold.’

‘Disgusting old brute,’ said Mother. ‘Really, Larry, I’m extremely cross with you.’

‘A drink, me boyos,’ called Captain Creech hoarsely, gesturing at the dishevelled Max and Donald. ‘You can’t sail without a drink.’

At length we had dried ourselves as best we could and wrung the water out of everybody’s clothes; then we made our way, shivering, up the hill to the car.

‘What are we going to do about the yacht?’ said Leslie, since Donald and Max, as the owners, appeared to be unperturbed by her fate.

‘We’ll stops at the next village,’ said Spiro. ‘I knows a fisher-mans there. He’ll fix it.’

‘I think, you know,’ said Theodore, ‘if we’ve got any stimulant with us, it would be an idea to give some to Max. He may possibly suffer from concussion after a blow like that.’

‘Yes, we’ve got some brandy,’ said Mother, delving into the car.

She produced a bottle and a cup.

‘Darling girl,’ said Captain Creech, fixing his wavering eye upon the bottle. ‘Just what the doctor ordered.’

‘You’re not having any of this,’ said Mother firmly. ‘This is for Max.’

We had to dispose ourselves in the car as best we could, sitting on each other’s laps, trying to give as much space as possible to Max, who had now gone a very nasty leaden colour and was shivering violently in spite of the brandy. To Mother’s annoyance, she found herself, willy-nilly, having to be wedged in alongside Captain Creech.

‘Sit on my lap,’ said the Captain hospitably. ‘Sit on my lap and we can have a little cuddle to keep warm.’

‘Certainly not,’ said Mother primly. ‘I’d rather sit on Donald’s lap.’

As we drove back across the island to town, the Captain regaled us with his version of some sea-shanties. The family argued acrimoniously.

‘I do wish you’d stop him singing these songs, Larry,’ said Mother.

‘How can I stop him? You’re in the back. You stop him.’

‘He’s your friend,’ said Mother.

‘Ain’t it a pity, she’s only one titty to feed the baby on. The poor little bugger will never play rugger and grow up big and strong.’

‘Might have killed you all, filthy old brute,’ said Mother.

‘Actually, most of it was Larry’s fault,’ said Leslie.

‘It was not,’ said Larry indignantly. ‘You weren’t there, so you don’t know. It’s extremely difficult when someone shouts at you to luff your helm, or whatever it is, when there’s a howling gale blowing.’

‘There was a young lady from Chichester,’ observed Captain Creech with relish, ‘who made all the saints in their niches stir.’

‘The one I’m sorry for is poor Max,’ said Margo, looking at him commiseratingly.

‘I don’t know why he should get the sympathy,’ said Larry, whose eye had now almost completely disappeared and was a rich shiny black. ‘He’s the fool who caused it all. I had the boat under perfect control till he hauled up that sail.’

‘Well, I don’t call you a sailor,’ said Margo. ‘If you’d been a sailor you wouldn’t have told him to haul it up.’

‘That’s just the point,’ snarled Larry. ‘I didn’t tell him to haul it up. He hauled it up on his own.’

‘It was the good ship Venus,’ began the Captain, whose repertoire appeared to be inexhaustible.

‘Don’t argue about it, dear,’ said Mother. ‘I’ve got a severe headache. The sooner we get into town, the better.’

We got to town eventually and dropped Donald and Max at their hotel and the still carolling Captain Creech at his and drove home, wet and cold and acrimonious.

The following morning we were sitting, all feeling slightly wilted, finishing our breakfast on the veranda. Larry’s eye had now achieved sunset hues which could only have been captured by the brush of Turner. Spiro drove up honking his horn, the dogs racing in front of the car, snarling and trying to bite the wheels.

‘I do wish Spiro wouldn’t make quite so much noise when he arrives,’ said Larry.

Spiro stumped up onto the veranda and went through his normal morning routine.

‘Morning, Mrs Durrells, morning Missy Margo, morning Master Larrys, morning Master Leslies, morning Master Gerrys. How’s your eyes, Master Larrys?’ he said, screwing up his face into a commiserating scowl.

‘At the moment I feel as if I shall probably be going round with a white stick for the rest of my days,’ said Larry.

‘I’ve got a letters for yous,’ said Spiro to Mother.

Mother put on her glasses and opened it. We waited expectantly. Her face went red.

‘The impertinence! The insolence! Disgusting old brute! Really, I have never heard anything like it.’

‘What on earth’s the matter?’ asked Larry.

‘That revolting old Creech creature,’ said Mother, waving the letter at him.

‘It’s your fault, you introduced him to the house.’

‘What have I done now?’ asked Larry, bewildered.

‘That filthy old brute has written and proposed to me,’ said Mother.

There was a moment’s stunned silence while we took in this remarkable information.

‘Proposal?’ said Larry cautiously. ‘An indecent proposal, I presume?’

‘No, no,’ said Mother. ‘He says he wants to marry me. What a fine little woman I am and a lot of sentimental twaddle like that.’

The family, united for once, sat back and laughed until tears came.

‘It’s no laughing matter,’ said Mother, stamping about the veranda. ‘You’ve got to do something about it.’

‘Oh,’ said Larry, mopping his eyes. ‘Oh, this is the best thing that’s happened for ages. I suppose he thinks since he took his trousers off in front of you yesterday to wring them out, he must make an honest woman of you.’

‘Do stop laughing,’ said Mother angrily. ‘It isn’t funny.’

‘I can see it all,’ said Larry unctuously. ‘You in white muslin, Leslie and me in toppers to give you away, Margo as your bridesmaid, and Gerry as your page. It will be a very affecting scene. I expect the church will be full of jaded ladies of pleasure, all waiting to forbid the banns.’

Mother glared at him. ‘When there’s a real crisis,’ she said angrily, ‘you children are of absolutely no use whatsoever.’

‘But I think you would look lovely in white,’ said Margo, giggling.

‘Where have you decided on for your honeymoon?’ asked Larry. ‘They say Capri is awfully nice at this time of year.’

But Mother was not listening. She turned to Spiro, registering determination from top to toe.

‘Spiro, you are to tell the Captain the answer is no, and that I never want him to set foot in this house again.’

‘Oh, come now, Mother,’ protested Larry. ‘What we children want is a father.’

‘And you all,’ said Mother, rounding on us in a fury, ‘are not to tell anybody about this. I will not have my name linked with that disgusting… disgusting reprobate.’

And so that was the last we saw of Captain Creech. But what we all referred to as Mother’s great romance made an auspicious start to the year.