Tuesday, 7 January 2025

Centenary

 Born exactly 100 years ago today was the naturalist, writer and (an endangered species, this) zookeeper, Gerald Durrell – a child of the Raj, born in Jamshedpur in British India. I owe his shade some gratitude, as his books were among the first to engage me in reading for pleasure. Some time around the end of the 1950s a relation I knew as 'Auntie Molly', who had somehow sensed that I might be a boy in need of the right books, gave me a hardback copy of Durrell's Encounters with Animals, illustrated with fine line drawings by Ralph Thompson. Being a budding young naturalist myself, I was immediately interested, plunged in, read it straight through more than once, and thereafter leapt on every Durrell title I could find. It was several years before, my literary taste having become a little more exacting, I tired of Durrell's style, though I was always interested to read about the remarkable animals he continued to encounter on his collecting trips.
  The book of his that kept me enthralled the longest was My Family and Other Animals, his not entirely reliable but utterly charming account of his boyhood years with his family on Corfu, described by his brother Lawrence as 'the best argument I know for keeping thirteen-year-olds at boarding schools and not letting them hang about the house listening in to conversations of their elders and betters'. My Family has had a long afterlife, having been filmed, televised and adapted repeatedly. It might still be around when Lawrence's novels (does anyone read them any more?) are all but forgotten, but its survival would not be down to superior literary merit, only (only!) to a superior ability to deliver pleasure. Durrell's works certainly delivered plenty of that to the young me, so I salute him now on his centenary. 



No comments:

Post a Comment