Blue Thirst (3 page)

Here's a closeup of the house and a bad picture of the
caïque
coming to take them off, and that's my landlord up there looking wistful, I don't know why. This was taken much later. I lived on the top floor and the family lived on the bottom floor, and we had a boat which since has sunk, which used to be attached in that boat house. In winter the sea was so rough that it really came up to that balcony and swamped it. We had to completely tear away the vine and everything there. And it's very amusing. Now it's a place of pilgrimage. The Club Mediterranee charged people enormous sums to go look at it as the Durrell residence and serve them Coca-Cola for even larger sums. I don't know how posthumous you can feel, but my brother and I put on dark glasses and funny hats and we went on one of these trips, and I've never heard so much misinformation about our family and in such strange French. I think they were all Syrians. Anyway, we drank Coca-Cola in our own honor and sneaked off back to town.

There is a very pleasant fancy which is a far eastern one, namely, that you have two birth-places. You have the place where you were really born and then you have a place of predeliction where you really wake up to reality. One day you wake up and it's there, and in your inner life, in your dreams and so on and so forth, it's the place of predeliction that comes forward and which nourishes you. It's particularly useful in yoga to realize the difference between the two birthplaces. This my predeliction place. It's a shrine of St. Arsenius. He's a funny old cross-eyed saint, nobody knows much about him. He has brief mention in the calendar, but an ikon was washed up here after a storm. Naturally, a fisherman found it and decreed that it had to be housed properly, so the priest came and they built this little shrine for him and we found when we got here that this is one of those wonderful places. There's a very deep rock pool here and a cave about as big as a stage opening through a flue on the other side so it's fully lighted with a little pebble beach inside and reached by ducking under that lintel you find yourself in this extraordinary cave. We built a huge statue there in clay every year when we were there but in the winter the sea gets up and it licks out the cave like a hollow tooth and the statue just disappeared. Well now this is the place where I finished the
Black Book
and where my first poems were being selected when I was really working properly and beginning to feel my feet as a writer. It is also the place where we bathed naked all the time. We were extremely careful not to offend susceptibilities in Greece, and they were exteremely proper, the peasant girls and so on, so we didn't do ony of the idiocies you see Swedes doing now, running about Athens all naked. It brings great shame and discredit on our nations when we do that. Anyway, we were very careful about their susceptibilities, but we used to bathe there because those rocks completely prevented anyone from getting near the place. In fact I finished the
Black Book
naked one day, and then later on when the war came I got a letter from a friend of mine in the British Embassy in Athens saying, “What sort of orgies are you having up there?” This puzzled me a great deal. The war was just being declared and I didn't pay much attention, but I was living with my wife, legitimately married to her in a hamlet of four people and no orgies whatsoever, there was hardly enough to drink. And working every day at the shrine. What had happened was this. When I got to Athens and was taken on to the staff of the British Embassy I discovered a report by the local consul, who was a Greek, against me saying that I bathed naked with a woman. Now what happened was the British fleet used to visit the town 20 miles away and on Sundays they used to invite visitors aboard to have a look at the ships and during this one of the prize things to show was the range-finders of HMS Barham with a 25 mile range and they picked us up sitting there like Adam and Eve, and so the consul who was deeply shocked wrote a confidential report on me.

My second birthplace, the shrine of St. Arsenius.

The Ionian Bar on Rue de Rivoli—the happiest drinks, warmest sunlight…

With Katsimbalis in Athens.

That's Niko, the sailor, and that's his boat, just a little rig, old-fashioned
caïque,
moves like honey. He's still there and he's still sailing like a demon. I saw him a couple of years ago and he's still speaking a very personal French. He's the man who showed me all these new books, the Demotic versions of Homer, which so touched me. I owe my first lessons in Greek to him and many is the drink we had under that vine. That's his house, actually, it's right alongside mine, and that's the morning
caïque
coming in and that's some unidentified child who doesn't look at all pleasant.

This man in the foreground is the man who shows you around and pours out the Coca-Cola with a trembling hand and says that'll be 5 drachmas, but the place is still ravishing. You see how bright the mountain is behind it, it goes up in sort of leaps, really, to the crown and it's all self-seeded cypresses, marvelous olives amazingly tended considering the difficulties and that's the total crop. The main road moves there, but it's washed out immediately when the first rains come in winter and then the sea knocks out all the
caïque
stuff and really, to walk to town would take you, I suppose, 8 hours, which is difficult in cases of illness.

If you ever need any instruction about, or exactly how the Bible was considered and founded, these monks in Parakastrisa were absolutely marvelous. One of them spoke French; in those days my Greek wasn't up to it, but I did so admire their hats and I had all sorts of questions which later I was able to put more clearly in Greek in Alexandria to the patriarch there, but they were so gracious and kind and they loved having their photographs taken. It was very amusing, every time you produced a camera they would whip out combs and fix up their beards and hair and a religious service was wonderful. Their deep, growling Gregorian chant was like a deep sea moving over pebbles or a dry riverbed. They were all courtesy and kindness because we were then among the very few strangers in Greece, we were really a rarity and an oddity and we profited by that. Hospitality was absolutely wonderful. That hasn't changed—nor will it ever.

That's my bay and that is the old
“dogana”
or customs house where Albanian brigands used to be frisked before being turned loose in the island. Albania's only about 4 miles over by water at the narrowest point in the north and we used to go over very frequently in the winter and shoot with my shot-mad brother, my insect-mad brother was too young, and we never allowed him to touch anything that might go off. But he used to come here on one of these craft—these are island craft—camp the night with us and we'd go off with one of these things and he would go off after wild boar. There was plenty of mallard, very good duck shooting and he did a lot of boar shooting in Butrinto. This was long before Albania got it's own iron curtain. The calm at night was so extraordinary and then you'd hear suddenly in the olives a pipe just wheedling, just wheedling very softly and the tinkling of sheep bells. This girl used to bring her sheep down every morning and every evening walk along here.

This is my godson, he's called George—Jorgos. He's now 45 and has gigantic set of whiskers and he's got 2 children of his own and he's doing the Yokohama run taking wood from the Greek merchant marine to some point in China, I think. I put him in there for one good reason. It's a cautionary tale. The first thing Greeks do when they like you is to ask you to be a godfather. It's a friendly thing and an easy thing, but it's very much more serious than it is in our case because the laws of consanguinity are involved. In other words, if you baptize a boy and then you baptize a girl and they fall in love, they can't marry, they're just like real brother and sister. So, the thing, the tactic to adopt is to baptize only boys or only girls, and so I stuck to only boys and all my friends followed suit, but that way we've never caused any heartbreak at all.

This is a family shot. This is my shot-mad brother. These are all characters from my brother's book. There's my mother looking a bit frisky—looking a little bit sad, actually. That's Patrick Evans who writes poetry and was my brother's tutor. That's me trying to pretend I'm Byron, and that's Spiro, the great fixer, the man with the raucous voice. And that's my brother, the other brother is collecting insects just behind that shelf. That's my wife and that's a Swedish friend who I think got drowned. I don't know.

This is a very rare picture. You will never come across this again in your life. In the island of Corfu the patron saint, you probably know quite a lot about him already, his name is St. Speridian, all the children are named after him, but he's a great miracle maker and a miracle-bringer. He can bring rain, he can do almost anything that you can think of. He actually is a real mummy and he's kept in the church of St. Speridian in a jeweled casket and once a year he's paraded around the town to bless all the people and to have a service and then he's put back. I have actually seen him and he's a genuine dried mummy, but this is very difficult to get a view of him in the general press and this as you see, my marvelous Rolliflex managed to do many many years ago.

Procession of the mummy of Saint Speridian, the miracle-maker.