Authors: Gerald Durrell
I had been down in the olive groves helping the peasants and I started to feel hungry. I knew that Papa Demetrios always kept a good supply of food at the olive press, so I went down to visit him. It was a sparkling day with a rumbustious, laughing wind that thrummed through the olive grove like a harp. There was a nip in the air, so I ran all the way with the dogs leaping and barking about me, and I arrived flushed and panting to find Papa Demetrios crouched over a fire that he had constructed out of slabs of olive ‘cake’.
‘Ah!’ he said, glaring at me fiercely. ‘So you’ve come, have you? Where have you been? I haven’t seen you for two days. I suppose now spring is here you’ve got no time for an old man like me.’
I explained that I had been busy with a variety of things, such as making a new cage for my magpies, since they had just raided Larry’s room and stood in peril of their lives if they were not incarcerated.
‘Hum,’ said Papa Demetrios. ‘Ah, well. Do you want some corn?’
I said, as nonchalantly as I could, that there was nothing I would like better than corn.
He got up and strutted bow-legged to the olive press and reappeared carrying a large frying pan, a sheet of tin, a bottle of oil, and five golden-brown cobs of dried maize, like bars of
bullion. He put the frying pan on the fire and scattered a small quantity of oil into it, then waited until the heat of the fire made the oil purr and twinkle and smoke gently in the bottom of the pan. Then he seized a cob of maize and twisted it rapidly between his arthritic hands so that the golden beads of corn pattered into the pan with a sound like rain on a roof. He put the flat sheet of tin over the top, gave a little grunt, and sat back, lighting a cigarette.
‘Have you heard about Andreas Papoyakis?’ he asked, running his fingers through his luxurious moustache.
No, I said I had not heard.
‘Ah,’ he said with relish. ‘He’s in hospital, that foolish one.’
I said I was sorry to hear it because I liked Andreas. He was a gay, kind-hearted, exuberant boy who inevitably managed to do the wrong things. They said of him in the village that he would ride a donkey backwards if he could. What, I inquired, was his affliction?
‘Dynamite,’ said Papa Demetrios, waiting to see my reaction.
I gave a slow whistle of horror and nodded my head slowly. Papa Demetrios, now assured of my undivided attention, settled himself more comfortably.
‘This was how it happened,’ he said. ‘He’s a foolish boy, Andreas is, you know. His head is as empty as a winter swallow’s nest. But he’s a good boy, though. He’s never done anybody any harm. Well, he went dynamite fishing. You know that little bay down near Benitses? Ah, well, he took his boat there because he had been told that the country policeman had gone farther down the coast for the day. Of course, foolish boy, he never thought to check and make sure that the policeman
was
farther down the coast.’
I clicked my tongue sorrowfully. The penalty for dynamite fishing was five years in prison and a heavy fine.
‘Now,’ said Papa Demetrios, ‘he got into his boat and was rowing slowly along when he saw ahead of him, in the shallow
water, a big shoal of barbouni. He stopped rowing and lit the fuse on his stick of dynamite.’
Papa Demetrios paused dramatically, peered at the corn to see how it was doing, and lit another cigarette.
‘That would have been all right,’ he went on, ‘but just as he was about to throw the dynamite, the fish swam away, and what do you think that idiot of a boy did? Still holding the dynamite he rowed after them. Bang!’
I said I thought that there could not be very much left of Andreas.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Papa Demetrios scornfully. ‘He can’t even dynamite properly. It was such a tiny stick all it did was blow off his right hand. But even so, he owes his life to the policeman, who
hadn’t
gone farther down the coast. Andreas managed to row to the shore and there he fainted from loss of blood and he would undoubtedly have died if the policeman, having heard the bang, had not come down to the shore to see who was dynamiting. Luckily the bus was just passing and the policeman stopped it and they got Andreas into it and into the hospital.’
I said I thought it was a great pity that it should happen to anybody as nice as Andreas, but he was lucky to be alive. I presumed that when he was better he would be arrested and sent to Vido for five years.
‘No, no,’ said Papa Demetrios. ‘The policeman said he thought Andreas had been punished quite enough, so he told the hospital that Andreas had caught his hand in some machinery.’
The corn had now started to explode, banging on to the tin like the explosions of miniature cannons. Papa Demetrios lifted the pan off the fire and took the lid off. There was each grain of corn exploded into a little yellow-and-white cumulus cloud, scrunchy and delicious. Papa Demetrios took a twist of paper from his pocket and unwrapped it. It was full of coarse grains of grey sea-salt, and into this we dipped the little clouds of corn and scrunched them up with relish.
‘I’ve got something for you,’ said the old man at last, wiping his moustache carefully with a large red-and-white handkerchief. ‘Another one of those terrible animals that you are so eager to get.’
Stuffing my mouth with the remains of the popcorn and wiping my fingers on the grass, I asked him eagerly what it was.
‘I’ll fetch it,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘It’s a very curious thing. I’ve never seen one like it before.’
I waited impatiently while he went into the olive press and reappeared carrying a battered tin, the neck of which he had stuffed with leaves.
‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Be careful, because it smells.’
I pulled out the plug of leaves and peered into the tin and discovered that Papa Demetrios was quite right; it smelt as strongly of garlic as a peasant bus on market day. In the bottom was crouched a medium-size, rather smooth-skinned, greenish-brown toad with enormous amber eyes and a mouth set in a perpetual, but rather insane, grin. As I put my hand into the tin to pick him up, he ducked his head between his forelegs, retracted his protuberant eyes into his skull in the odd way that toads have, and uttered a sharp bleating cry rather like that of a miniature sheep. I lifted him out of the tin and he struggled violently, exuding a terrible odour of garlic. I noticed that on each hind foot he had a horny black excrescence, blade-shaped, like a ploughshare. I was delighted with him, for I had spent a considerable amount of time and energy trying to track down spade-footed toads without success. Thanking Papa Demetrios profusely, I carried him home triumphantly and installed him in an aquarium in my bedroom.
I had placed earth and sand to a depth of two or three inches at the bottom of the aquarium and Augustus, having been christened and released, immediately set to work to build himself a home. With a curious movement of his hind legs, working backwards, using the blades of his feet as spades, he very rapidly
dug himself a hole and disappeared from view with the exception of his protuberant eyes and grinning face.
Augustus, I soon discovered, was a remarkably intelligent beast and had many endearing traits of character which made themselves apparent as he got tamer. When I went into the room, he would scuttle out of his hole and make desperate endeavours to reach me through the glass walls of the aquarium. If I took him out and placed him on the floor, he would hop round the room after me and then, if I sat down, would climb laboriously up my leg until he reached my lap, where he would recline in a variety of undignified attitudes, basking in the heat of my body, blinking his eyes slowly, grinning up at me, and gulping. It was then that I discovered he liked to lie on his back and have his stomach gently massaged by my forefinger, and so from this unusual behaviour he derived the surname of Tickletummy. He would also, I learned, sing for his food. If I held a large, writhing earthworm over the top of the aquarium, Augustus would go into paroxysms of delight, his eyes seeming to protrude more and more with excitement, and he would utter a series of little pig-like grunts and the strange bleating cry he had given when I first picked him up. When the worm was finally dropped in front of him, he would nod his head vigorously, as if in thanks, grab one end of it and proceed to stuff it into his mouth with his thumbs. Whenever we had any guests, they were treated to an Augustus Tickletummy recital and they all agreed, gravely, that he had the best voice and repertoire of any toad they had met.
It was round about this time that Larry introduced Donald and Max into our life. Max was an immensely tall Austrian with curly blond hair, a blond moustache perched like an elegant butterfly on his lip, and intensely blue and kindly eyes. Donald, on the other hand, was short and pale-faced; one of those Englishmen who give you a first impression of being not only inarticulate, but completely devoid of personality.
Larry had run into this ill-assorted couple in the town and had lavishly invited them up to have drinks. The fact that they arrived, mellowed by a variety of alcoholic stimuli, at two o’clock in the morning did not strike any of us as being particularly curious, since, by that time, we were inured, or almost inured, to Larry’s acquaintances.
Mother had gone to bed early with a severe cold, and the rest of the family had also retired to their rooms. I was the only member of the household awake. The reason for this was that I was waiting for Ulysses to return to the bedroom from his nightly wanderings and devour his supper of meat and minced liver. As I lay there reading, I heard a dim, blurred sound echoing through the olive groves. I thought at first it was a party of peasants returning late from a wedding, and took no notice. Then the cacophony grew closer and closer and from the clop and jingle accompanying it I realized it was some late night revellers passing on the road below in a cab. The song they were singing did not sound particularly Greek and I wondered who they could be. I got out of bed and leaned out the window, staring down through the olive trees. At that moment the cab turned off the road and started up the long drive towards the house. I could see it quite clearly because whoever was sitting in the back had apparently lighted a small bonfire. I watched this, puzzled and intrigued, as it flickered and shook through the trees on its way up to us.
At that moment Ulysses appeared out of the night sky, like a silently drifting dandelion clock, and endeavoured to perch on my naked shoulder. I shook him off and went and fetched his plate of food, which he proceeded to peck and gobble at, uttering tiny throaty noises to himself and blinking his brilliant eyes at me.
By this time the cab had made slow but steady progress and had entered the forecourt of the house. I leaned out the window enraptured by the sight.
It was not, as I had thought, a bonfire in the back of the
cab. There were two individuals sitting there, each clasping an enormous silver candelabra in which had been stuck some of the great white candles that one normally bought to put inthe church of St Spiridion. They were singing loudly and untunefully, but with great panache, a song from
The Maid of the Mountains
, endeavouring, wherever possible, to harmonize.
The cab rolled to a halt at the steps that led up to the veranda.
‘At seventeen…’ sighed a very British baritone.
‘At seventeen!’ intoned the other singer in a rather heavy middle-European accent.
‘He falls in love quite madly,’ said the baritone, waving his candelabra about wildly, ‘with eyes of tender blue.’
‘Tender blue,’ intoned the middle-European accent, giving a lechery to these simple words that had to be heard to be believed.
‘At twenty-five,’ continued the baritone, ‘he thinks he’s got it badly.’
‘Badly,’ said the middle-European accent dolefully.
‘With eyes of different hue,’ said the baritone, making such a wild gesture with his candelabra that the candles sped out of their sockets like rockets and fell sizzling onto the grass.
My bedroom door opened and Margo, clad in yards of lace and what appeared to be butter muslin, came in.
‘What on earth’s that
noise?
’ she asked in a hoarse, accusing whisper. ‘You
know
Mother’s not well.’
I explained that the noise was nothing whatsoever to do with me, but apparently we had company. Margo leaned out the window and peered down at the cab where the singers had just reached the next verse of their song.
‘I say,’ she called, in muted tones, ‘do you mind not making quite so much noise. My mother’s sick.’
Immediate silence enveloped the cab and then a tall, gangling figure rose unsteadily to its feet. He held his candelabra aloft and gazed earnestly up at Margo.
‘Must not dear lady,’ he intoned sepulchrally, ‘must not disturb Muzzer.’
‘No, by Jove,’ agreed the English voice from the interior of the cab.
‘Who do you think they are?’ Margo whispered to me in agitation.
I said that to me the thing was perfectly clear; they must be friends of Larry’s.
‘Are you friends of my brother’s?’ Margo fluted out the window.
‘A noble being,’ said the tall figure, waving the candelabra at her. ‘He invited us for drinks.’
‘Er… Just a minute, I’ll come down,’ said Margo.
‘To look you closer would be to fulfil the ambition of a lifetime,’ said the tall man, bowing somewhat uncertainly.
‘See you closer,’ corrected a quiet voice from the back of the cab.
‘I’ll go downstairs,’ said Margo to me, ‘and get them inside and keep them quiet. You go and wake Larry.’
I pulled on a pair of shorts, picked up Ulysses unceremoniously (who, with half-closed eyes, was digesting his food), and went to the window and threw him out.
‘Extraordinary!’ said the tall man, watching Ulysses fly away over the moon-silvered olive tops. ‘Dis like the house of Dracula, no, Donald?’
‘By Jove, yes,’ said Donald.
I pattered down the corridor and burst into Larry’s room. It took me some time to shake him awake, for, under the firm impression that Mother had been breathing her cold germs over him, he had taken the precaution of consuming half a bottle of whisky before he went to bed. Eventually he sat up blearily and looked at me.