Authors: Gerald Durrell
‘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.’