Gerald Durrell

This book is for Ann Peters,

at one time my secretary and

always my friend,

because she loves Corfu and

probably knows it better than I do

Dogs, Dormice, and Disorder

The unspeakable Turk should immediately be struck out of the question.

– CARLYLE

That summer was a particularly rich one; it seemed as if the sun had drawn up a special bounty from the island for never had we had such an abundance of fruit and flowers, never had the sea been so warm and filled with fish, never had so many birds reared their young, or butterflies and other insects hatched and shimmered across the countryside. Watermelons, their flesh as crisp and cool as pink snow, were formidable botanical cannonballs, each one big enough and heavy enough to obliterate a city; peaches, as orange or pink as a harvest moon, loomed huge in the trees, their thick, velvety pelts swollen with sweet juice; the green and black figs burst with the pressure of their sap, and in the pink splits the gold‑green rose beetles sat dazed by the rich, never‑ending largesse. Trees had been groaning with the weight of cherries, so that the orchards looked as though some great dragon had been slain among the trees, bespattering the leaves with scarlet and wine‑red drops of blood. The maize cobs were as long as your arm and as you bit into the canary‑yellow mosaic of seeds, the white milky juice burst into your mouth; and in the trees, swelling and fattening themselves for autumn, were the jade‑green almonds and walnuts, and olives, smoothly shaped, bright and shining as birds’ eggs strung among the leaves.

Naturally, with the island thus a‑burst with life, my collecting activities redoubled. As well as my regular weekly afternoon spent with Theodore, I now undertook much more daring and comprehensive expeditions than I had been able to before, for now I had acquired a donkey. This beast, Sally by name, had been a birthday present; and as a means of covering long distances and carrying a lot of equipment I found her an invaluable, if stubborn, companion. To offset her stubbornness she had one great virtue; she was, like all donkeys, endlessly patient. She would gaze happily into space while I watched some creature or other or else would simply fall into a donkey doze, that happy, trance‑like state that donkeys can attain when, with half‑closed eyes, they appear to be dreaming of some nirvana and become impervious to shouts, threats, or even whacks with sticks. The dogs, after a short period of patience, would start to yawn and sigh and scratch and show by many small signs that they felt we had devoted enough time to a spider or whatever it was and should move on. Sally, however, once she was in her doze, gave the impression that she would happily stay there for several days if the necessity arose.

One day a peasant friend of mine, a man who had obtained a number of specimens for me and who was a careful observer, informed me that there were two huge birds hanging about in a rocky valley some five miles north of the villa. He thought that they must be nesting there. From his description they could only be eagles or vultures and I was most anxious to try to get some young of either of these birds. My birds of prey collection now numbered three species of owl, a sparrowhawk, a merlin, and a kestrel, so I felt the addition of an eagle or vulture would round it off. Needless to say I did not vouchsafe my ambition to the family, as already the meat bill for my animals was astronomical. Apart from this I could imagine Larry’s reaction to the suggestion of a vulture being inserted into the house. When acquiring new pets I always found it wiser to face him with a fait accompli , for once the animals were introduced to the villa I could generally count on getting Mother and Margo on my side.

I prepared for my expedition with great care, making up loads of food for myself and the dogs, a good supply of gasoza as well as the normal complement of collecting tins and boxes, my butterfly net and a large bag to put my eagle or vulture in. I also took Leslie’s binoculars; they were of a higher magnification than my own. He, luckily, was not around for me to ask, but I felt sure he would happily have lent them to me had he been at home. Having checked my equipment for the last time to make sure nothing was missing I proceeded to festoon Sally with the various items. She was in a singularly sullen and recalcitrant mood, even by donkey standards, and annoyed me by deliberately treading on my foot and then giving me a sharp nip on the buttock when I bent down to pick up my fallen butterfly net. She took grave offence at the clout I gave her for this misbehaviour, so we started this expedition barely on speaking terms. Coldly, I fixed her straw hat over her furry lily‑shaped ears, whistled to the dogs and set off.

Although it was still early the sun was hot and the sky clear, burning blue, like the blue you get by scattering salt on a fire, blurred at the edges with heat haze. To begin with we made our way along the road thick with white dust, as clinging as pollen, and we passed many of my peasant friends on their donkeys, going to market or down to their fields to work. This inevitably held up the progress of the expedition, for good manners required that I passed the time of day with each one. In Corfu one must always gossip for the right length of time and perhaps accept a crust of bread, some dry watermelon seeds, or a bunch of grapes as a sign of love and affection. So when it was time to turn off the hot, dusty road and start climbing through the cool olive groves I was laden with a variety of edible commodities, the largest of which was a watermelon, a generous present pressed upon me by Mama Agathi, a friend of mine whom I had not seen for a week, an unconscionable length of time, during which she presumed I had been without food.

The olive groves were dark with shadows and as cool as a well after the glare of the road. The dogs went ahead as usual, foraging around the great pitted olive boles and occasionally, maddened by their audacity, chasing skimming swallows, barking vociferously. Failing, as always, to catch one, they would then attempt to vent their wrath on some innocent sheep or vacant‑faced chicken, and would have to be sternly reprimanded. Sally, her previous sulkiness forgotten, stepped out at a good pace, one ear pricked forward and the other one backward, so that she could listen to my singing and comments on the passing scene.

Presently we left the shade of the olives and climbed upwards through the heat‑shimmered hills, making our way through thickets of myrtle bushes, small copses of holm oak, and great wigs of broom. Here Sally’s hooves crushed the herbs underfoot and the warm air became redolent with the scent of sage and thyme. By midday, the dogs panting, Sally and I sweating profusely, we were high up among the gold and rust‑red rocks of the central range, while far below us lay the sea, blue as flax. By half past two, pausing to rest in the shade of a massive outcrop of stone, I was feeling thoroughly frustrated. We had followed the instructions of my friend and had indeed found a nest, which tomy excitement proved to be that of agriffon vulture, moreover, the nest perched on a rocky ledge contained two fat and almost fully fledged youngsters at just the right age for adoption. The snag was that I could not reach the nest, either from above or below. After having spent a fruitless hour trying to kidnap the babies I was forced, albeit reluctantly, to give up the idea of adding vultures to my birds of prey collection. We moved down the mountainside and stopped to rest and eat in the shade. While I ate my sandwiches and hard‑boiled eggs, Sally had a light lunch of dry maize cobs and watermelon, and the dogs assuaged their thirst with a mixture of watermelon and grapes, gobbling the juicy fruit eagerly and occasionally choking and coughing as a melon seed got stuck. Because of their voraciousness and total lack of table manners, they had finished their lunch long before Sally or I, and having reluctantly come to the conclusion that I did not intend to give them any more to eat they left us and slouched down the mountainside to indulge in a little private hunting.

I lay on my tummy eating crisp, cool watermelon, pink as coral, and examined the hillside. Fifty feet or so below where I lay were the ruins of a small peasant house. Here and there on the hillside I could just discern the crescent shaped, flattened areas which had once been the tiny fields of the farm. Eventually, it must have become obvious that the impoverished soil would no longer support maize or vegetables on the pocket handkerchief fields, and so the owner had moved away. The house had tumbled down and the fields become overrun with weeds and myrtle. I was staring at the remains of the cottage, wondering who had lived there, when I saw something reddish moving through the thyme at the base of one of the walls.

Slowly I reached out for the field glasses and put them to my eyes. The tumbled mass of rocks at the base of the wall sprang into clear view, but for a moment I could not see what it was that had attracted my attention. Then, to my astonishment, from behind a clump of thyme appeared a lithe, tiny animal, as red as an autumn leaf. It was a weasel, and to judge by its behaviour, a young and rather innocent one. It was the first weasel I had seen on Corfu and I was enchanted by it. It peered about with a slightly bemused air and then stood up on its hind legs and sniffed the air vigorously. Apparently not smelling anything edible, it sat down and had an intensive and, from the look of it, very satisfying scratch. Then it suddenly broke off from its toilet and carefully stalked and attempted to capture a vivid canary‑yellow brimstone butterfly. The insect, however, slipped out from under its jaws and flipped away, leaving the weasel snapping at thin air and looking slightly foolish. It sat up on its hind legs once more, to see where its quarry had gone and, overbalancing, almost fell off the stone on which it was sitting.

I watched it, entranced by its diminutive size, its rich colouring, and its air of innocence. I wanted above all things to catch it and take it home with me to add to my menagerie but I knew this would be difficult. While I was musing on the best method of achieving this result a drama unfolded in the ruined cottage below. I saw a shadow, like a Maltese cross, slide over the low scrub, and a sparrowhawk appeared, flying low and fast towards the weasel who was sitting up on his stone sniffing the air and apparently unaware of his danger. I was just wondering whether to shout or clap my hands to warn him when he saw the hawk. With an incredible turn of speed he turned, leaped gracefully on to the ruined wall and disappeared into a crack between two stones that I would have thought would not have allowed the passage of a slow‑worm, let alone a mammal the size of the weasel. It was like a conjuring trick; one minute he had been sitting on his rock, the next he vanished into the wall like a drop of rain water. The sparrowhawk checked with fanned tail and hovered briefly, obviously hoping the weasel would reappear. After a moment or so it got bored and slid off down the mountainside in search of less wary game. After a short time the weasel poked his little face out of the crack. Seeing the coast was clear he emerged cautiously. Then he made his way along the wall and, as though his recent escape into the crack had given him the idea, he proceeded to investigate and disappear into every nook and cranny that existed between the stones. As I watched him I was wondering how to make my way down the hill so as to throw my shirt over him before he was aware of my presence. In view of his expert vanishing trick when faced with the hawk, it was obviously not going to be easy.

At that moment he slid, sinuous as a snake, into a hole in the base of the wall. From another hole a little higher up there emerged a second animal in a great state of alarm, which made its way along the top of the wall and disappeared into a crevice. I was greatly excited, for even with the brief glimpse I had got of it, I recognized it as a creature that I had tried for many months to track down and capture, a garden dormouse, probably one of the most attractive of the European rodents. It was about half the size of a full‑grown rat, with cinnamon‑coloured fur, brilliant white underparts, a long furry tail ending in a brush of black and white hair, and a black mask of fur beneath the ears, running across the eyes and making it look ridiculously as though it was wearing an old‑fashioned mask of the sort that burglars were reputed to indulge in.

I was now in something of a quandary, for there below me were two animals I dearly wanted to possess, one hotly pursuing the other, and both of them exceedingly wary. If my attack was not well planned I stood a good chance of losing both animals. I decided to tackle the weasel first, as he was the more mobile of the two, and I felt that the dormouse would not move from its new hole if undisturbed. On reflection I decided that my butterfly net was a more suitable instrument than my shirt, so armed with it I made my way down the hillside with the utmost caution, freezing immobile every time the weasel appeared out of the hole and looked around. Eventually I got to within a few feet of the wall without being detected. I tightened my grip on the long handle of my net and waited for the weasel to come out from the depths of the hole he was now investigating. When he did emerge he did so with such suddenness that I was unprepared. He sat up on his hind legs and stared at me with interest untinged by alarm. I was just about to take a swipe at him with my net when, crashing through the bushes, tongues lolling, tails wagging, came the three dogs, as vociferously pleased to see me as if we had been separated for months. The weasel vanished. One minute he was sitting there, frozen with horror at this avalanche of dogs, the next he was gone. Bitterly I cursed the dogs and banished them to the higher reaches of the mountain, where they went to lie in the shade, hurt and puzzled at my bad temper. Then I set about trying to capture the dormouse.

Over the years the mortar between the stones had grown frail and heavy winter rains had washed it away so that now, to all intents and purposes, the remains of the house was a series of dry‑stone walls. With its maze of intercommunicating tunnels and caves, it formed the ideal hideout for any small animal. There was only one way to hunt for an animal in this sort of terrain and that was to take the wall to pieces, so rather laboriously this was what I started to do. After having dismantled a good section of it I had unearthed nothing more exciting than a couple of indignant scorpions, a few woodlice, and a young gecko who fled, leaving his writhing tail behind him. It was hot and thirsty work and after an hour or so I sat down in the shade of the, as yet, undismantled wall to have a rest.

I was just wondering how long it would take me to demolish the rest of the wall when from a hole some three feet from me, the dormouse appeared. It scrambled up like a somewhat overweight mountain climber and then, having reached the top, sat down on its fat bottom and began to wash its face with great thoroughness, totally ignoring my presence. I could hardly believe my luck. Slowly and with great caution I manoeuvred my butterfly net towards him, got it into position, and then clapped it down suddenly. This would have worked perfectly if the top of the wall had been flat, but it was not. I could not press the rim of the net down hard enough to avoid leaving a gap. To my intense annoyance and frustration, the dormouse, recovering from its momentary panic, squeezed out from under the net, galloped along the wall and disappeared into another crevice. However this proved to be its undoing, for it had chosen a ‘cul de sac’ and before it had discovered its mistake I had clamped the net over the entrance.

The next thing was to get it out and into the bag without getting bitten. This was not easy and before I had finished it had sunk its exceedingly sharp teeth into the ball of my thumb, so that I, the handkerchief, and the dormouse were liberally bespattered with gore. Finally, however, I got it into the bag. Delighted with my success, I mounted Sally and rode home in triumph with my new acquisition.

On arrival at the villa I carried the dormouse up to my room and housed it in a cage which had, until recently, been the home of a baby black rat. This rat had met an unfortunate end in the claws of my scops owl, Ulysses, who was of the opinion that all rodents had been created by a beneficent providence in order to fill his stomach. I therefore made quite sure that my precious dormouse could not escape and meet a similar fate. Once it was in the cage I was able to examine it more closely. I discovered it was a female with a suspiciously large tummy, which led me to believe that she might be pregnant. After some consideration I called her Esmerelda (I had just been reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame and had fallen deeply in love with the heroine), and provided her with a cardboard box full of cotton waste and dried grass in which to have her family.

For the first few days Esmerelda would leap at my hand like a bulldog when I went to clean her cage or feed her, but within a week she had grown tame and tolerated me, though still viewing me with a certain reserve. Every evening Ulysses, on his special perch above the window, would wake up and I would open the shutters so that he could fly off into the moonlit olive groves and hunt, only returning for his plate of mincemeat at about two in the morning. Once he was safely out of the way I could let Esmerelda out of her cage for a couple of hours’ exercise. She proved to be an enchanting creature with enormous grace in spite of her rotundity, and would take prodigious and breathtaking leaps from the cupboard on to the bed (where she bounced as if it was a trampoline), and from the bed to the bookcase or table, using her long tail with its bushy end as a balancing rod. She was vastly inquisitive and nightly would subject the room and its contents to a minute scrutiny, scowling through her black mask with whiskers quivering. I discovered that she had a consuming passion for large brown grasshoppers and she would often come and sit on my bare chest, as I lay in bed, and scrunch these delicacies. The result was that my bed always seemed to contain a prickly layer of wing cases, bits of leg, and chunks of horny thorax, for she was a greedy and not particularly well‑mannered feeder.

The came the exciting evening when, after Ulysses had floated on silent wings into the olive groves and commenced to call ‘toink, toink’ after the manner of his kind, I opened the cage door to find that she would not come out but lurked inside the cardboard box and made angry chittering noises at me. When I tried to investigate her bedroom she fastened onto my forefinger like a tiger and I had great difficulty in getting her to let go. Eventually I managed to get her off and, holding her firmly by the scruff of the neck, investigated the box. I found there, to my infinite delight, eight babies, each the size of a hazelnut and as pink as a cyclamen bud. Delighted with Esmerelda’s happy event I showered her with grasshoppers, melon seeds, grapes, and other delicacies of which I knew she was particularly fond, and followed the progress of the babies with breathless interest.

Gradually the babies developed. Their eyes opened and their fur grew. Within a short time the more powerful and adventurous of them would climb laboriously out of their cardboard nursery and wobble about on the floor of the cage when Esmerelda was not looking. This filled her with alarm, and she would pick the errant baby up in her mouth, and uttering peevish growling noises, transfer it to the safety of the bedroom. This was all very well with one or two, but as soon as all eight babies reached the inquisitive stage, it was impossible for her to control them and so she had to let them wander at will. They started to follow her out of the cage and it was then that I discovered that dormice, like shrews, have a habit of caravanning. That is to say Esmerelda would go first; hanging on to her tail would be baby number one, hanging on to his or hers would be baby number two, on to his baby number three, and so on. It was a magical sight to see these nine diminutive creatures, each wearing his little black mask, wending their way around the room like an animated furry scarf, flying over the bed or shillying up the table leg. A scattering of grasshoppers on the bed or floor, and the babies, squeaking excitedly, would gather round to feed, looking ridiculously like a convention of bandits.

Eventually, when the babies were fully adult, I was forced to take them into the olive grove and let them go. The task of providing sufficient food for nine rapacious dormice was proving too time‑consuming. I released them at the edge of the olive grove, near a thicket of holm oak, and these they colonized successfully. In the evenings, when the sun was setting and the sky was getting as green as a leaf, striped with sunset clouds, I used to go down to watch the little masked dormice flitting through the branches with a ballerina‑like grace, chittering and squeaking to each other as they pursued moths, or fireflies or other delicacies through the shadowy branches.

It was a result of one of my many forays on donkey‑back that we became infested by dogs. We had been up in the hills where I had been endeavouring to catch some agamas on the glittering gypsum cliffs. We returned towards evening, when the shadows lay everywhere, charcoal black, and everything was bathed in the slanting, soft golden light of the sinking sun. We were hot and tired, hungry and thirsty, for we had long since eaten and drunk everything that we had brought with us. The last vineyard we had passed had only yielded some bunches of very black wine‑grapes whose sharp vinegariness had made the dogs curl back their lips and screw up their eyes and had left me feeling hungrier and thirstier than ever.

I decided that as leader of the expedition it was up to me to provide sustenance for the rest of the crew. I reined in and thought about the problem. We were equidistant between three sources of food. There was the shepherd, old Yani, who would, I knew, give us cheese and bread, but his wife would probably be still in the fields and Yani himself might not have returned from grazing his goat flock. There was Agathi, who lived alone in a tiny, tumbledown cottage, but she was so poor that I felt guilty at accepting anything from her, and, in fact, always made a point of sharing my food with her when I was around that way. Finally, there was sweet and gentle Mama Kondos, a widow of some eighty summers, who lived with her three unmarried and, as far as I could see, unmarriageable daughters on an untidy but prosperous farm in a valley to the south. They were quite well off by peasant standards, owning, apart from five or six acres of olives and agricultural land, two donkeys, four sheep, and a cow. They were what one might call the landed gentry of the area, and so I decided that the honour of revictualling my expedition would fall to them.

The three inordinately fat, ill‑favoured but good‑natured girls had just returned from working in the fields and were gathered round the small well, bright and shrill as parrots, washing their fat, hairy brown legs. Mama Kondos herself, like a diminutive clockwork toy, was trotting to and fro scattering maize for the squawking tousled flock of chickens. There was nothing straight about Mama Kondos; her diminutive body was bent like a sickle blade, her legs were bowed with years of carrying heavy loads on her head, her arms and hands permanently bent from picking things up; even her upper and lower lips curved inwards over her toothless gums, and her snow‑white, dandelion‑seed eyebrows curved over her black eyes, blue‑rimmed, which in their turn were guarded on each side by a fence of curved wrinkles in a skin as delicate as a baby mushroom’s.

The daughters, on seeing me, gave shrill cries of joy and gathered round me like benign shire horses, clasping me to their mammoth bosoms and kissing me, exuding affection, sweat, and garlic in equal quantities. Mama Kondos, a small, bent David among these aromatic Goliaths, beat them aside, shouting shrilly: ‘Give him to me, give him to me! My golden one, my heart, my love! Give him to me.’ She clasped me to her and covered my face with bruising kisses, for her gums were as hard as a tortoise’s mouth.

At length, after I had been thoroughly kissed and patted and pinched all over to make sure I was real, I was allowed to sit down and to offer some explanations as to why I had deserted them for so long. Did I not realize that it was a whole week since I had visited them? How could my love be so cruel, so tardy, so ephemeral? Still, since I was here at last, would I like some food? I said yes, I would love some, and some for Sally as well. The dogs, more ill‑mannered, had helped themselves; Widdle and Puke had torn sweet white grapes off the vine that trailed over part of the house and were gulping them down greedily, while Roger, who appeared to be more thirsty than hungry, had gone beneath the fig and almond trees and had disembowelled a watermelon. He was laying with his nose stuck into its cool pink interior, his eyes closed in ecstasy, sucking the sweet icy juice through his teeth. Immediately, Sally was given three cobs of ripe corn to chew on and a bucket of water to slake her thirst, while I was presented with a mammoth sweet potato, its skin black and deliciously charcoaly from the fire, its sweet flesh beautifully soggy, a bowl of almonds, some figs, two enormous peaches, a hunk of yellow bread, olive oil and garlic.

Once I had engulfed this provender and thus taken the edge off my hunger, I could concentrate on exchanging gossip. Pepi had fallen out of an olive tree and broken his arm, silly boy; Leonora was going to have another baby to replace the one that died; Yani – no, not that Yani, the Yani over on the other side of the hill – had quarrelled with Taki over the price of a donkey and Taki had got so angry he had fired his shotgun at the side of Yani’s house, only it had been a very dark night and Taki was drunk and it had turned out to be Spiro’s house, so now none of them were speaking. For some time we discussed the foibles and dissected the characters of our fellow men with great relish and then I noticed that Lulu was missing from the scene. Lulu was Mama Kondos’ dog, a lean and long‑legged bitch with huge soulful eyes and long floppy ears like a spaniel. Like all peasant dogs, she was gaunt and scabby, her ribs sticking out like the strings of a harp, but she was an endearing creature and I was fond of her. Normally, she was one of the first to greet me but now she was nowhere to be seen. Had anything happened to her, I asked.

‘Puppies!’ said Mama Kondos. ‘Po, po, po, po . Eleven! Would you believe it?’

They had tied Lulu up to an olive tree near the house when the birth had become imminent and she had crawled into the depths of the tree trunk to have her young. After she had greeted me with enthusiasm she watched with interest as I crawled into the olive tree on hands and knees and extracted the puppies to look at. As always, I was amazed that such scrawny, half‑starved mothers could produce such plump, powerful puppies, with squashed, belligerent faces and loud seagull voices. They were, as usual, in a wide variety of colours – black and white, white and tan, silver and bluish‑grey, all black and all white. Any litter of Corfu puppies displays such a wide variety of colour schemes that to settle the question of paternity is virtually impossible. I sat with the mewling patchwork of puppies in my lap and told Lulu how clever she was. She wagged her tail furiously.

‘Clever, huh?’ said Mama Kondos sourly. ‘Eleven puppies isn’t clever, it’s wanton. We shall have to get rid of all but one.’

I was well aware that Lulu could not possibly be allowed to keep her full complement of puppies and, in fact, she was lucky that they were going to leave her one. I felt I might be of use. I said that I felt sure that my mother would not only be delighted at the thought of having a puppy but would be overwhelmed with gratitude to the Kondos family and Lulu for providing her with one. I therefore, after much thought, chose the one I liked best, a slug‑fat, screaming little male who was black, white, and grey with bright, corn‑coloured eyebrows and feet. I asked them to save this one for me until he was old enough to leave Lulu; in the meantime, I would apprise Mother of the exciting fact that we had acquired another dog, which would bring our complement up to five; a nice round figure, I considered.

To my astonishment, Mother was not a bit pleased with the suggested increase in our dog tribe.

‘No, dear,’ she said firmly, ‘we are not having another dog. Four is quite enough. And what with all your owls and everything it’s costing a fortune in meat anyway. No, I’m afraid another dog is out of the question.’

In vain I argued that the puppy would be killed if we did not intervene. Mother remained firm. There was only one thing to be done. I had noticed in the past that Mother, faced with a hypothetical question like, ‘Would you like a nestful of baby redstarts?’ would say ‘no’ firmly and automatically. Faced, however, with the nestful of baby birds, she would inevitably waver and then say yes. Obviously, there was only one thing to be done and that was to show her the puppy. I was confident that she would never be able to resist his golden eyebrows and socks. I sent a message down to the Kondoses asking if I could borrow the puppy to show Mother, and one of the fat daughters obligingly brought it up the next day. But when I unwrapped it from the cloth in which she had brought it I found to my annoyance that Mama Kondos had sent the wrong puppy. I explained this to the daughter, who said that she could do nothing about it as she was on her way to the village. I had better go and see her mother. She added that I had better make haste as Mama Kondos had mentioned that she was intending to destroy the puppies that morning. Hastily, I mounted Sally and galloped through the olive groves.

When I reached the farm I found Mama Kondos sitting in the sun stringing garlic heads together into white, knobbly plaits, while around her the chickens scratched and purred contentedly. After she had embraced me, asked after the health of myself and the family and given me a plate of green figs, I produced the puppy and explained my errand.

‘The wrong one?’ she exclaimed, peering at the yelling puppy and prodding it with her forefinger. ‘The wrong one? How stupid of me. Po po po po , I quite thought it was the one with white eyebrows you wanted.’ Had she, I inquired anxiously, destroyed the rest of the puppies?

‘Oh yes,’ she said absently, still staring at the puppy. ‘Yes, this morning, early.’

Well then, I said resignedly, since I could not have the one I had set my heart on, I had better have the one she had saved.

‘No, I think I can get you the one you want,’ she said, getting to her feet and fetching a broad‑bladed hoe.

How, I wondered, could she get me my puppy if she had destroyed them? Perhaps she was going to retrieve the corpse for me. I had no desire for that. I was just going to say so when Mama Kondos, mumbling to herself, trotted off to a field nearby the house, where the stalks of the first crop of maize stood yellow and brittle in the hot sun‑cracked ground. Here she cast about for a moment and then started to dig. With the second sweep of the hoe she dug up three screaming puppies, their legs paddling frantically, ears, eyes, and pink mouths choked with earth.

I was paralysed with horror. She checked the puppies she had dug up, found they were not the one that I wanted, threw them to one side, and recommenced digging. It was only then that the full realization of what Mama Kondos had done swept over me. I felt as though a great scarlet bubble of hate burst in my chest and tears of rage poured down my cheeks. From my not uncomprehensive knowledge of Greek insults, I dragged up the worst in my vocabularly. Yelling these at Mama Kondos, I pushed her out of the way so hard that she sat down suddenly, bewildered among the corn stalks. Still calling down the curses of every saint and deity I could think of, I seized the hoe and rapidly but carefully dug up the rest of the gasping puppies. Mama Kondos was too astonished by my sudden change from calm to rage to say anything; she just sat there, open‑mouthed. I stuffed the puppies unceremoniously into my shirt, collected Lulu and the pup that had been left to her, and rode off on Sally, shouting curses over my shoulder at Mama Kondos, who had now got to her feet and was running after me shouting: ‘But, golden one, what’s the matter? Why are you crying? You can have all the puppies. What’s the matter?’

I burst into the house, hot, tear‑stained, covered with mud, my shirt bulging with puppies, Lulu trotting at my heels, delighted with this sudden and unexpected outing for herself and her offspring. Mother was, as usual, embedded in the kitchen making various delicacies for Margo who had been away touring the mainland of Greece to recover from yet another unfortunate affair of the heart. Mother listened to my incoherent and indignant account of the puppies’ premature burial and was duly shocked.

‘Really!’ she exclaimed indignantly. ‘These peasants! I can’t understand how they can be so cruel. Burying them alive! I never heard of such a barbarous thing. You did quite right to save them, dear. Where are they?’

I ripped open my shirt, as though committing hara‑kiri, and a cascade of wriggling puppies fell out on to the kitchen table where they started to grope their way blindly about, squeaking.

‘Gerry, dear, not on the table where I’m rolling pastry,’ said Mother. ‘Really, you children! Yes, well, even if it’s clean mud we don’t want it in the pies. Get a basket.’

I got a basket and we put the puppies into it. Mother peered at them.

‘Poor little things,’ she said. ‘There do seem to be an awful lot of them. How many? Eleven! Well, I don’t know what we’ll do with them. We can’t have eleven dogs with the ones we’ve got.’

I said hastily that I had got it all worked out; as soon as the puppies were old enough we would find homes for them. I added that Margo, who would be home by then, could help me; it would be an occupation for her and keep her mind off sex.

‘Gerry, dear!’ said Mother, aghast. ‘Don’t say things like that. Whoever told you that?’

I explained that Larry had said that she needed her mind taken off sex and so I thought that the puppies’ arrival would achieve this happy result.

‘Well, you mustn’t talk like that,’ said Mother. ‘Larry’s got no business to say things like that. Margo’s just… just… a bit… emotional, that’s all. Sex has nothing to do with it; that’s something quite different. Whatever would people think if they heard you? Now go and put the puppies somewhere safe.’

So I took the puppies to a convenient olive tree near the veranda, tied Lulu to it and cleaned the puppies with a damp cloth. Lulu, deciding that baskets were very effete places in which to bring up puppies, immediately excavated a burrow between the friendly roots of the tree and carefully transferred her puppies to it one by one. To his annoyance, I spent more time cleaning up my special puppy than the others and tried to think of a name for him. Finally, I decided to call him Lazarus, Laz for short. I placed him carefully with his brothers and sisters and went to change my mud‑ and urine‑stained shirt.

I arrived at the lunch table in time to hear Mother telling Leslie and Larry about the puppies.

‘It’s extraordinary,’ said Leslie, ‘I don’t think they mean to be cruel; they just don’t think. Look at the way they shove wounded birds into their game bags. So what happened? Did Gerry drown the puppies?’

‘No he did not ,’ said Mother indignantly. ‘He brought them here, of course.’

‘Dear God!’ said Larry. ‘Not more dogs! We’ve got four already.’

‘They’re only puppies,’ said Mother, ‘poor little things.’

‘How many are there?’ asked Leslie.

‘Eleven,’ said Mother reluctantly.

Larry put down his knife and fork and stared at her. ‘Eleven?’ he repeated. ‘Eleven? Eleven puppies! You must be mad.’

‘I keep telling you, they’re only puppies – tiny little things,’ said Mother, flustered. ‘And Lulu’s very good with them.’

‘Who the hell’s Lulu?’ asked Larry.

‘Their mother – she’s a dear,’ said Mother.

‘So that’s twelve bloody dogs.’

‘Well, yes, I suppose it is,’ said Mother. ‘I hadn’t really counted.’

‘That’s the trouble round here,’ snapped Larry. ‘Nobody counts! And before you know where you are you’re knee deep in animals. It’s like the bloody creation all over again, only worse. One owl turns into a battalion before you know where you are; sex‑mad pigeons defying Marie Stopes in every room of the house; the place is so full of birds it’s like a bloody poulterer’s shop, to say nothing of snakes and toads and enough small fry to keep Macbeth’s witches in provender for years. And on top of all that you go and get twelve more dogs. It’s a perfect example of the streak of lunacy that runs in this family.’

‘Nonsense, Larry, you do exaggerate,’ said Mother. ‘Such a lot of fuss over a few puppies.’

‘You call eleven puppies a few ? The place will look like the Greek branch of Crufts’ Dog Show and they’ll probably all turn out to be bitches and come into season simultaneously. Life will deteriorate into one long canine sexual orgy.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Mother, changing the subject. ‘You’re not to go around saying Margo’s sex mad. People will get the wrong idea.’

‘Well, she is,’ said Larry. ‘I see no reason to cover up the truth.’

‘You know perfectly well what I mean,’ said Mother firmly; ‘I won’t have you saying things like that. Margo’s just romantic. There’s a lot of difference.’

‘Well, all I can say is,’ said Larry, ‘when all those bitches you’ve brought into the house come into season together Margo’s going to have a lot of competition.’

‘Now, Larry, that’s quite enough,’ said Mother. ‘Anyway I don’t think we ought to discuss sex at lunch.’

A few days after this, Margo returned from her travels, bronzed and well and with her heart apparently healed. She talked incessantly about her trip and gave us graphic thumbnail pictures of the people she had met, inevitably ending with, ‘and so I told them if they came to Corfu to come and see us’.

‘I do hope you didn’t invite everyone you met, Margo dear,’ said Mother, slightly alarmed.

‘Oh, of course not, Mother,’ said Margo impatiently, having just told us about a handsome Greek sailor and his eight brothers to whom she had issued this lavish invitation. ‘I only asked the interesting ones. I would have thought you’d be glad to have some interesting people around.’

‘I get enough interesting people that Larry invites, thank you,’ said Mother acidly, ‘without you starting.’

‘This trip has opened my eyes,’ concluded Margo dramatically. ‘I’ve realized that you’re all simply stagnating here. You’re becoming narrow‑minded and… and… insulated.’

‘I don’t see that objecting to unexpected guests is being narrow‑minded, dear,’ said Mother. ‘After all, I’m the one that has to do the cooking.’

‘But they’re not unexpected,’ explained Margo haughtily, ‘I invited them.’

‘Well, yes,’ said Mother, obviously feeling that she was not making much headway with this argument. ‘I suppose if they write and let us know they’re coming we can manage.’

‘Of course they’ll let us know,’ said Margo coldly. ‘They’re my friends; they wouldn’t be so ill‑mannered as not to let us know.’

As it happened, she was wrong.

I returned to the villa after a very pleasant afternoon spent drifting up the coast in my boat looking for seals and, bursting, sun‑glowing and hungry, into the drawing‑room in search of tea and the mammoth chocolate cake I knew Mother had made, I came upon a sight so curious that I stopped in the doorway, my mouth open in amazement while the dogs, clustered round my legs, started to bristle and growl with astonishment. Mother was seated on the floor, perched uncomfortably on a cushion, gingerly holding in one hand a piece of rope to which was attached a small, black, and excessively high‑spirited ram. Sitting around Mother, cross‑legged on cushions, were a fierce‑looking old man in a tarboosh and three heavily veiled women. Also ranged on the floor were lemonade, tea, and plates of biscuits, sandwiches, and the chocolate cake. As I entered the room, the old man had leaned forward, drawn a huge, heavily ornate dagger from his sash, and cut himself a large hunk of cake which he stuffed into his mouth with every evidence of satisfaction. It looked rather like a scene out of the Arabian Nights . Mother cast me an anguished look.

‘Thank goodness you’ve come, dear,’ she said, struggling with the ram, who had gambolled into her lap by mistake. ‘These people don’t speak English.’

I inquired who they were.

‘I don’t know,’ said Mother desperately. ‘They just appeared when I was making tea; they’ve been here for hours. I can’t understand a word they say. They insisted on sitting on the floor. I think they’re friends of Margo’s; of course, they may be friends of Larry’s but they don’t look highbrow enough.’

I tried tentatively talking in Greek to the old man and he leaped to his feet, delighted that someone understood him. He had a swooping, eagle nose, an immense white moustache like a frosty sheaf of corn, and black eyes that seemed to snap and crackle with his mood. He was wearing a white tunic with a red sash in which his dagger reposed, enormous baggy pants, long white cotton socks, and red, upturned charukias with immense pompoms on the toes. So I was the adorable signorina’s brother, was I, he roared excitedly, bits of chocolate cake trembling on his moustache as he talked. What an honour to meet me. He clasped me to him and kissed me so fervently that the dogs, fearing for my life, all started barking. The ram, faced with four vociferous dogs, panicked; it ran round and round Mother, twisting the rope around her. Then, at a particularly snarling bark from Roger, it uttered a frantic bleat and fled towards the French windows and safety, pulling Mother onto her back in a welter of spilled lemonade and chocolate cake. Things became confused.

Roger, under the impression that the old Turk was attacking both myself and Mother, launched an assault on the Turk’s charukias and got a firm grip on one of the pom‑poms. The old boy aimed a kick at Roger with his free foot and promptly fell down. The three women were sitting absolutely still, cross‑legged on their cushions, screaming loudly behind their yashmaks . Mother’s dog, Dodo, who had long ago decided that anything in the nature of a rough house was acutely distressing to a Dandie Dinmont of her lineage, sat soulfully in a corner and howled. The old Turk, who was surprisingly lithe for his age, had drawn his dagger and was making wild but ineffectual swipes at Roger, who was darting from pom‑pom to pom‑pom growling savagely, evading the blade with ease. Widdle and Puke were trying to round up the ram, and Mother, desperately unravelling herself, was shouting incoherent instructions to me.

‘Get the lamb! Gerry, get the lamb! They’ll kill it,’ she squeaked, covered with lemonade and bits of chocolate cake.

‘Black son of the devil! Illegitimate offspring of a witch! My shoes! Leave my shoes! I will kill you… destroy you!’ panted the old Turk, slashing away at Roger.

‘Ayii! Ayii! Ayii! His shoes! His shoes!’ screamed the women in a chorus, immobile on their cushions.

With difficulty avoiding a stab wound myself, I managed to tear the ravening Roger off the old Turk’s pom‑poms and get him and Widdle and Puke out onto the veranda. Then I opened the sliding doors and shut the lamb in the dining‑room as a temporary measure while I soothed the old Turk’s wounded feelings. Mother, smiling nervously and nodding vigorously at everything I said although she did not understand it, was making an attempt to clean herself up, but this was rather ineffectual as the chocolate cake had been one of her larger and more glutinous creations, oozing cream, and she had put her elbow into the exact centre of it as she fell backwards. At length I managed to soothe the old man, and while Mother went up to change her dress I dished out brandy to the Turk and his three wives. My helpings were liberal, so by the time Mother came back faint hiccups were coming from behind at least one of the veils and the Turk’s nose had turned fiery red.

‘Your sister is… how shall I tell you?… magical… God‑given. Never have I seen a girl like her,’ he said, holding out his glass eagerly. ‘I, who, as you see, have three wives, I have never seen a girl like your sister.’

‘What’s he saying?’ asked Mother, eyeing his dagger nervously. I repeated what the Turk had said.

‘Disgusting old man,’ said Mother. ‘Really, Margo should be more careful.’

The Turk drained his glass and held it out again, beaming convivially at us.

‘Your maid here,’ he said, jerking a thumb at Mother, ‘she is a little bit soft, huh? She doesn’t speak Greek.’

‘What does he say?’ asked Mother.

Dutifully, I translated.

‘Impertinent man!’ said Mother indignantly. ‘Really, I could smack Margo. Tell him who I am, Gerry.’

I told the Turk, and the effect on him was more than Mother could have wished. With a roar, he leaped to his feet, rushed across to her, seized her hands and covered them with kisses. Then, still holding her hands in a vice‑like grip, he peered into her face, his moustache trembling.

‘The mother,’ he intoned, ‘the mother of my Almond‑blossom.’

‘What’s he say?’ asked Mother tremulously.

But before I could translate, the Turk had barked out an order to his wives, who showed their first sign of animation. They leaped from their cushions, rushed to Mother, lifted their yashmaks , and kissed her hands with every symptom of veneration.

‘I do wish they wouldn’t keep kissing me,’ gasped Mother. ‘Gerry, tell them it’s quite unnecessary.’

But the Turk, having got his wives re‑established on their cushions, turned once again to Mother. He threw a powerful arm round her shoulders, making her squeak and threw out his other arm oratorically.

‘Never did I think,’ he boomed, peering into Mother’s face, ‘never did I think that I should have the honour of meeting the mother of my Almond‑blossom.’

‘What’s he saying?’ asked Mother agitatedly, trapped in the Turk’s bear‑like hug.

Again I translated.

‘Almond‑blossom? What’s he talking about? The man’s mad,’ she said.

I explained that the Turk was apparently greatly enamoured of Margo and that this was his name for her. This confirmed Mother’s worst fears about the Turk’s intentions.

‘Almond‑blossom, indeed!’ she said indignantly. ‘Just wait until she gets back – I’ll give her Almond‑blossom!’

Just at that moment, cool and fresh from aswim, Margo herself appeared in a very revealing bathing costume.

‘Ooooh!’ she screamed delightedly. ‘Mustapha! And Lena, and Maria, and Telina! How lovely!’

The Turk rushed across to her and kissed her hands reverently while his wives clustered round making muffled noises of pleasure.

‘Mother, this is Mustapha,’ said Margo, glowing.

‘We have already met,’ said Mother grimly, ‘and he’s ruined my new dress, or, rather his lamb has. Go and put some clothes on.’

‘His lamb?’ asked Margo, bewildered. ‘What lamb?’

‘The lamb he brought for his Almond‑blossom, as he calls you,’ said Mother accusingly.

‘Oh, it’s just a nickname,’ said Margo colouring, ‘he doesn’t mean any harm.’

‘I know what these dirty old men are,’ said Mother ominously. ‘Really, Margo, you should know better.’

The old Turk was listening to this exchange with quick glances from his bright eyes and a beatific smile on his face; however, I could see that my powers of translation would be stretched to their limit if Mother and Margo started arguing so I opened the sliding doors and let the lamb in. He came in pertly, prance‑footed, black and curly as a storm cloud.

‘How dare you!’ said Margo. ‘How dare you insult my friends. He’s not a dirty old man; he’s one of the cleanest old men I know.’

‘I don’t care whether he’s clean or not,’ said Mother, coming to the end of her patience. ‘He can’t stay here with all his… his… women. I’m not cooking for a harem.’

‘It is wonderful to hear the mother and daughter talk together,’ the Turk confided to me. ‘It’s like the sound of sheep bells.’

‘You’re beastly,’ said Margo, ‘you’re beastly! You don’t want me to have any friends. You’re narrow‑minded and suburban!’

‘You can’t call it suburban to object to three wives,’ said Mother indignantly.

‘It reminds me,’ said the Turk, his eyes moist, ‘of the singing of the nightingales in my valley.’

‘He can’t help it if he’s a Turk,’ shrilled Margo. ‘He can’t help it if he’s got to have three wives.’

‘Any man can avoid having three wives if he puts his mind to it,’ said Mother firmly.

‘I expect,’ said the Turk confidingly, ‘Almond‑blossom is telling her mother what a happy time we had in my valley, huh?’

‘You always try to repress me,’ said Margo. ‘Everything I do is wrong.’

‘The trouble is I give you too much licence. I let you go away for a few days and you come back with this… this… old roué and his dancing girls,’ said Mother.

‘There you are, that’s what I mean – you repress me,’ said Margo triumphantly. ‘Now you expect me to have a licence for a Turk.’

‘How I would like to take them back to my village,’ said the Turk, gazing at them fondly. ‘Such wonderful time we would have… dancing, singing, wine…’

The lamb seemed disappointed that no one was taking any notice of him; he had gambolled a little, decorated the floor, and done two nicely executed pirouettes, but he felt that no one was paying him the attention he deserved, so he put down his head and charged Mother. It was a beautifully executed charge. I could speak with some authority, for during my expeditions through the surrounding olive groves I had frequently met with eager and audacious young rams and fought them matador fashion, using my shirt as a cloak, to our mutual satisfaction. While deploring the result, I had to confess that the charge was excellent, well thought out, as it was, and with the full power of the ram’s wiry body and bony head landing with precision on the back of Mother’s knees. Mother was projected on to our extremely uncomfortable horsehair sofa as if propelled by a cannon, and she lay there gasping. The Turk, horrified at what his gift had done, leaped in front of her, arms outstretched, to protect her from further attack, which seemed imminent, for the ram, pleased with itself, had retreated to a corner of the room and was prancing and bucking rather in the manner of a boxer limbering up in his corner of the ring.

‘Mother, Mother, are you all right?’ screamed Margo.

Mother was too breathless to answer her.

‘Ah‑ha! You see, he has spirit like me, Almond‑blossom,’ cried the Turk. ‘Come on then, my brave one, come on!’

The ram accepted the invitation with a speed and suddenness that took the Turk by surprise. It moved across the room in a black blur, its feet machine‑gunning on the scrubbed boards, hit the Turk on his shins with a crack, and precipitated him onto the sofa with Mother, where he lay uttering loud criesofrage and pain. I had been charged in the shins like that and so I could sympathize.

The Turk’s three wives, aghast at their master’s downfall, were standing immobile, uttering noises like three minarets at sundown. It was into this interesting situation that Larry and Leslie intruded. They stood riveted in the doorway, drinking in the scene with unbelieving eyes. There was I pursuing a recalcitrant lamb round the room, Margo comforting three ululating ladies in veils, and Mother apparently rolling around on the sofa with an elderly Turk.

‘Mother, don’t you think you’re getting a little old for this sort of thing?’ Larry asked with interest.

‘By Jove, look at that marvellous dagger,’ said Leslie, eyeing the still‑writhing Turk with interest.

‘Don’t be stupid, Larry,’ said Mother angrily, massaging the backs of her legs. ‘It’s all Margo’s Turk’s fault.’

‘You can’t trust Turks,’ said Leslie, still eyeing the dagger. ‘Spiro says so.’

‘But what are you doing rolling about with a Turk at this hour?’ Larry inquired. ‘Practising to be Lady Hester Stanhope?’

‘Now, Larry, I’ve had quite enough this afternoon. Stop making me angry. The sooner this man is out of here, the better I’ll be pleased,’ said Mother. ‘Kindly ask him to go.’

‘You can’t, you can’t. He’s my Turk,’ squeaked Margo tearfully. ‘You can’t treat my Turk like that.’

‘I’m going upstairs to put some witch hazel on my bruises,’ said Mother, hobbling towards the door, ‘and I want that man out of here by the time I come down.’

By the time she had returned, both Larry and Leslie had struck up a firm friendship with the Turk and to Mother’s annoyance he and his wives stayed on for several hours, imbibing gallons of sweet tea and biscuits before we could finally manage to get them into a caraccino and back to town.

‘Well, thank heaven that’s over,’ said Mother, limping towards the dining‑room for our evening meal. ‘At least they’re not staying here, and that’s one mercy. But really, Margo, you should be careful who you invite.’

‘I’m sick of the way you criticize my friends,’ said Margo. ‘He’s a perfectly ordinary, harmless Turk.’

‘He would have made a charming son‑in‑law, don’t you think?’ asked Larry. ‘Margo could have called the first son Ali Baba and the daughter Sesame.’

‘Don’t joke like that, Larry dear,’ said Mother.

‘I’m not joking,’ said Larry. ‘The old boy told me his wives were getting a bit long in the tooth and that he rather fancied Margo as number four.’

‘Larry! he didn’t! Disgusting old brute,’ said Mother. ‘It’s a good thing he didn’t say that to me. I’d have given him a piece of my mind. What did you say?’

‘He was rather put off when I told him what Margo’s dowry was,’ said Larry.

‘Dowry? What dowry?’ asked Mother, mystified.

‘Eleven unweaned puppies,’ explained Larry.

Ghosts and Spiders

Take heed o’ the foul fiend.

– SHAKESPEARE, King Lear

Throughout the year Thursday was, as far as I was concerned, the most important day of the week, for that was the day that Theodore visited us. Sometimes it would be a long family day – a drive down south and a picnic on a remote beach, or something similar; but, normally, Theo and I would set off alone on one of our excursions, as Theodore insisted on calling them. Bedecked with our collecting equipment and bags, nets, bottles, and test tubes and accompanied by the dogs, we would set out to explore the island in much the same spirit of adventure as filled the bosoms of Victorian explorers who ventured into Darkest Africa.

But not many of the Victorian explorers had the benefit of Theodore as a companion; as a handy encyclopaedia to take along on a trip, he could not be bettered. To me, he was omniscient as a god, but much nicer since he was tangible. It was not only his incredible erudition that astonished everyone who met him but his modesty. I remember how we would sit on the veranda, surrounded by the remnants of one of Mother’s sumptuous teas, listening to the tired cicadas singing the evening in, plying Theodore with questions. Meticulously dressed in his tweed suit, his blonde hair and beard immaculate, his eyes would sparkle with interest as each new subject was introduced.

‘Theodore,’ Larry would ask, ‘there’s a painting up in the monastery at Paleocastritsa that the monks say was done by Panioti Dokseras. D’you think it is?’

‘Well,’ Theodore would say cautiously, ‘I’m afraid it’s a subject about which I know very little. But I believe I’m right in saying that it’s more likely to be the work of Tsadzanis… er… he did that most interesting little picture… in the Patera Monastery… you know, the one on the upper road leading north of Corfu. Now, he of course…’

During the next half‑hour he would give an all‑embracing and succinct lecture on the history of painting in the Ionian Islands since about 1242 and then end by saying: ‘But if you want an expert opinion, there’s Doctor Paramythiotis who’d give you much more information than I can.’

It was small wonder that we treated him like an oracle. The phrase ‘Theo says’ set the seal of authenticity on whatever item of information the person was going to vouchsafe; it was the touchstone for getting Mother’s agreement to anything from the advisability of living entirely on fruit to the innocuousness of keeping scorpions in one’s bedroom. Theodore was everything to everyone. With Mother he could discuss plants, particularly herbs and recipes, while keeping her supplied with reading matter from his capacious library of detective novels. With Margo he could talk of diets, exercises, and the various unguents supposed to have a miraculous effect on spots, pimples, and acne. He could keep pace effortlessly with any idea that entered the mercurial mind of my brother Larry, from Freud to peasant belief in vampires; while Leslie he could enlighten on the history of firearms in Greece or the winter habits of the hare. As far as I was concerned, with a hungry, questing, and ignorant mind, Theodore represented a fountain of knowledge on every subject from which I drank greedily.

On Thursday, Theodore would generally arrive at about ten, sitting sedately in the back of the horse‑drawn cab, silver Homburg on his head, his collecting box on his knees, his walking‑stick with its little gauze net on the end by his side. I, who had been up since six and peering down through the olive groves to see if he were coming, would by now have decided in despair that he had forgotten what day it was or that he had fallen down and broken his leg or that some other catastrophe had overtaken him. My relief at seeing him, grave, sedate, and intact in the back of the cab, would be considerable. The sun, up until then suffering from an eclipse, would start to shine again. Having shaken me by the hand courteously, Theodore would pay the cab‑man and remind him to return at the appropriate hour in the evening. Then, hoisting his collecting bag onto his shoulders, he would contemplate the ground, rising and falling on his well‑polished boots.

‘I think… er… you know…’ he would say, ‘we might investigate those little ponds near… er… Kontokali. That is to say, unless there is somewhere else… er… you know… that you would prefer to go.’

I would say happily that the little ponds near Kontokali would suit me fine.

‘Good,’ Theodore would say. ‘One of the reasons I particularly want to go… er… that way… is because the path takes us past a very good ditch… er… you know… that is to say, a ditch in which I have found a number of rewarding specimens.’

Talking cheerfully, we would set out, and the dogs, tongues lolling, tails wagging, would leave the shade of the tangerine trees and follow us. Presently, a panting Lugaretzia would catch up with us, carrying the bag containing our lunch which we had both forgotten.

We would make our way through the olive groves, chattering together, stopping periodically to examine a flower or a tree, bird or caterpillar; everything was grist to our mill, and Theodore knew something about everything.

‘No I don’t know of any way you could preserve mushrooms for your collection; whatever you use, they would… um… er … you know… shrivel up. The best way would be to draw or paint them, or, perhaps, you know, photograph them. You could collect the spore patterns, though, and they are remarkably pretty. What…? Well, you remove the cup of the… er… you know… the mushroom or toadstool and place it on a white card. The fungus must be ripe, of course, or it won’t drop its spores. After a time, you remove the cap carefully from the card… that is to say, you take care not to smudge the spores, and you will find an attractive… er… sort of pattern is left.’

The dogs would fan out ahead of us, cocking their legs, snuffling in the dark holes that honeycombed the great, ancient olive trees, and dashing off in noisy and futile pursuit of the swallows that skimmed millimetres high over the ground down the long meandering avenues of trees. Presently, we would reach more open country where the olive groves would give way to small fields of fruit trees and maize or vineyards.

‘Aha!’ Theodore would say, stopping by a weedy, water‑filled ditch and peering into it, his eyes gleaming, his beard bristling with enthusiasm. ‘Now here’s something interesting. There, do you see? Just by the end of my stick.’

I would strain my eyes but see nothing. Theodore, attaching his net to the end of his walking‑stick, would make a neat dipping motion, like a man taking a fly out of his soup, and would then haul in the net.

‘There, you see? It’s the egg sac of the Hydrophilus piceus … er… that is to say, the great silver water beetle. It’s the female, as you know, that spins… er… makes this sac. It may have up to fifty eggs in it; the curious thing is… Just a minute, while I get my forceps… Um… there… you see? Now, this… um… you might say, chimney, though perhaps “mast” would be better, is filled with air so the whole thing is rather like a little boat which can’t capsize. The… er… air‑filled mast prevents it… Yes, if you put it in your aquarium it should hatch out, though I must warn you that the larvae are very… er… you know… very fierce and will probably eat your other specimens. Let’s see if we can catch an adult.’

Patiently as any wading bird, Theodore would pace the edge of the ditch, dipping his net in at intervals and sweeping it to and fro.

‘Aha! Success!’ he would exclaim at last, and carefully place a large black beetle, legs thrashing indignantly, into my eager hands.

I would admire the strong, ribbed wing cases, the bristly legs, the whole body with a faint olive green sheen.

‘It’s a rather slow swimmer compared with the other… er… you know… aquatic beetles, and it has a very curious method of swimming. Um… um… instead of using the legs together, like any other aquatic species, it uses them alternately. It gives it a… you know… very jerky appearance.’

The dogs, on these oc

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 1301