Diarmuid Breatnach
(Reading time: 3 mins.)
I am falling in love with Mrs. Durrell, which is unfortunate in a number of ways. Not for her, she won’t mind. For me.
Well, she’s long dead. And she’s middle-class English. Not sure which of those is the biggest problem. I know, I know, the English individually are ok. Most of them. But there is that 800 years thing.
Yes, people keep telling us to get over that. Who does? Well, mostly the English, as it happens.
I’d be willing … it would be easier to “get over that”, if their army and colonial police force were not sitting on one-sixth of our country and their air force wasn’t flying through our air space.
Yes, I know, the Yanks are doing that too, carrying murder for Palestinians. And maybe with prisoners they haven’t murdered yet (but who might wish they were dead).
And yes, I do also know that it’s our government that has invited the RAF into our skies and welcomes the US military into our country. And I’m not happy about that at all, believe me.
But Mrs. Durrell … And then there’s the thing about her being dead. No, I’m not at all into necrophilia. In fact, not even a little turned on by lack of response.
Well, the woman who plays Mrs. Durrell would be way out of my social circle anyway.
I first met Mrs. Durrell when I was not even a teenager and it was her son, Gerald, in whom I was most interested. I thought he was my alter-ego. Crazy about animals, collecting all kinds of live ones … How I wished I was he! Well, maybe not with that family but certainly on that Corfu island, at that time.
And as it happens, yes, I have lived on an island, a small one, as a child. Not in sunny Greece but off the West Coast of Ireland. Went to school there without shoes, in all weather. My first day of school I went there via the rocks and rock-pools which were so educational and interesting that by the time I reached the school (less than a mile from the house where I was staying), school was over for the day and everyone had gone home.
As an adult, Gerald made a living catching wild animals for zoos, writing about his expeditions, running a zoo and later with a TV series. I watched the weekly episodes in a friend’s house because we didn’t have BBC access in our house.
I read I think all of Gerald Durrell’s books, including The Drunken Forest, Three Singles to Adventure and I thought I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. But it was My Family and Other Animals, about Gerald Durrell’s childhood on the Greek Island of Corfu that most spoke to my boyhood spirit.
As a child, I had at various times kept mice, a guinea-pig, a rabbit, frogs, sticklebacks, newts, a fledgeling magpie, hedgehogs and various invertebrates from pond and land. And a dog, that had to be trained to leave all those others alone.
I was far from immune to having the hots for females at that time but Mrs. Durrell did not even pass close to my fantasies then. But now that I’ve seen her again and also have seen her personality, I am definitely falling for her.
In England, she berated a schoolmaster for caning her son. Widowed, in financial trouble, neither of her two older boys earning a wage, she took the whole family off to Corfu to live.
Apart from being out of my social circle, the part of Mrs. Durrell, the widowed mother of two young men, a teenage daughter and young Gerald on Corfu is being acted by Keeley Hawes
Mrs. Durrell apart, The Durrells series, so far on Netflix, is very enjoyable.
End.
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