Europe > Greece > Ionian (corfu/west) > Corfu > Articles > The Fertility of Corfu

‘Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu, the blue really begins,” wrote Lawrence Durrell. For TS Eliot, the walls of Magnus Martyr in London held “inexplicable splendour in Ionian white and gold”. Edward Lear was in raptures over “olive grove and orange garden, the blue of sky and ivory of church and chapel, the violet of mountain rising from peacock-wing hued sea”.

But what really hits you, even in summer, is the green. Utterly unlike the Cyclades or the Dodecanese, no other Mediterranean island is as fertile as Corfu.

The cypresses tower above forests of enormous olive trees and a floor of wild flowers. In England, cypresses are only planted in formal gardens, placed with mathematical precision and never growing half so elegantly. To find them wild in such random profusion is as surprising as seeing your first flock of budgerigars. Even the oleander and bougainvillea, the inevitable staples of every hot-climate resort, are constantly surprising, and beneath them are English daisies, clover, teasels and grass.

All plants seem to thrive in Corfu. Unfortunately so does concrete. Over the last 2,000 years, the island has survived attacks from Romans, Vandals, Goths, Genoese, Sicilians, Catalans, Turks, pirates, Italians and Germans only for much of it to be overrun and destroyed in less than half a century. Kavos, Benitses, Gouvia, Ipsos and Sidari are all wrecked. In the height of summer, Sidari has an English population of 30,000, bigger than many famous English towns.

Durrell described the flying boats that landed once a week in Gouvia Bay: “their keels suddenly rip open the emerald lake surface, and the long shavings of water curl up on each side.” No one writes eloquently about the charter jets that land all hours of the day and night on the far side of Corfu Town.

The Durrell family’s Daffodil Yellow House in Kontokali is a sad sight, its paint no longer peeling and its elegant garden no longer overgrown, but marooned in a sea of concrete.

Even in 1968, Paleocastrizza had become “a Greek Margate”. For the poet Peter Levi, visiting 10 years later, it was becoming “an insult to the eye”. But it is nowhere near as bad as much of Spain and the Algarve, and as long ago as 1862 Edward Lear was complaining about the tourists: “accursed picnic parties with miserable scores of asses male and female.”

The interior of the island is still unspoilt with beautiful Venetian villages and forests of oak, but you don’t go to a Greek island to avoid the coast.

Gerald Durrell, whose My Family and Other Animals did most to fix the island in the British imagination — even more that Shakespeare who, it is often claimed, set The Tempest here — was horrified when he returned in 1968. His guilt over what he saw as his own role in its destruction led quickly to alcoholism, breakdown and a long stay in the Priory. And that was in 1968.

We stayed in Acharavi on the north coast, west of Roda. Until 10 years ago, it was almost entirely undeveloped, which is odd because it has five miles of accessible sand and shingle beach, good flat roads and a narrow plain to build on between the sea and the hills.

Planning restrictions have been tightened up since the island’s first onrush of tourist development, although not quite enough. Acharavi has few ugly buildings, and none are more than three storeys high. But the place sprawls like an American Gold Rush town, and as you walk along the beach to get away from the sunloungers you have barely escaped the outskirts of Acharavi before you find yourself in Roda or Almyros.

It isn’t anywhere the Durrells would have recognised, nor is it an upmarket New Greece, rather a slightly better version of the old, low-budget Corfu. The Electric Blue café in the lane to the beach lists its attractions, in no particular order, as “real Yorkshire hospitality”, “clean toilets” and “a full English breakfast”. Quiz Night is on Wednesdays. There is also karaoke — the music crept by me upon the waters.

The tavernas on the beach sell pizzas and chicken curry but haven’t yet forgotten how to cook traditional Greek dishes, and the service is as friendly as it always was in Greece.

You may want to talk to Andreas, the Albanian who puts out the sunloungers on the beach. He is a professional archaeologist but earns more fetching and carrying in Corfu than he ever could when teaching at Tirana University. The mountains of Albania are violet in the distance, more beautiful than they really could be.

Our apartment was next to the beach in the Filorian, a pleasantly eccentric two-storey block built round a small courtyard entirely filled by a pair of enormous rubber plants. In England, they are grown in pots and reach 3ft if you are lucky. Here, they top 30ft. The handrail on the stairs is made of thin black-enamelled metal and rattles like a tin-type toy as you tap it with your fingernails. For some reason, this seems very authentically Greek. The floors are a local stone, softer than marble and less shiny, the colour of a pale café crème with a spoonful of cement, rather like the statues made in Lyme Regis by the 18th-century industrialist Mrs Eleanor Coade. You can find pebbles of the same stone on the beach.

There, the sea shelves gently and is flat except for two or three time a day when for no reason it suddenly erupts with a dozen large waves, then just as suddenly stops, as though a sea monster has turned over in its sleep and flipped its tail.

The sunset over the islet of Orthoni is special.

So why has no one built here before? No one lets on, not even the guidebooks, but it becomes obvious on your first afternoon when you go shopping. It is like going into a Transylvanian supermarket and finding half the shelves devoted to garlic products. Prominently displayed in every Acharavi shop are hundreds of different mosquito coils, candles, sprays and lotions.

At the far end of the beach near Agios Spiridion Bay is the Lake of Lilies from My Family and Other Animals, a mile-long sheet of shallow water “with the pleasant jingling name of Antiniotissa”. The Durrells’ visit to the lake is one of the most potent images in the book: Larry and their sister Margo half asleep in the shallow water; Gerald and his mentor Theodore Stephanides hunting for insects; Spiro, their friend, fixer and “factotum”, in his underpants fanning the olive-wood fire on the beach; and “the great lily-covered dune behind, a thousand white flowers in the sunshine like a multitude of ivory horns producing instead of music a rich heavy scent that was the distilled essence of summer”. Larry thought it heavenly, Mother wanted to be buried there, and Theodore said it was “certainly a very . . . er . . . beautiful place”.

The bay is still largely undeveloped, the beach pleasant, if crowded, but the lake is just a brackish pond, not made any prettier by the fish farm and “Keep Out” notices in English.

On the dune, a cordon has been put round one of only a few patches of sand lilies, pancratium maritimum of the amaryllidaceae family, its delicate white trumpets more like a daffodil than a lily and with no scent that my nose could detect. Perhaps it was a bit early in the season. Perhaps later there would be more of them. (You can buy them in England from nurseries such as, but they don’t thrive in captivity.)

And the “pleasant jingling name of Antiniotissa” roughly translates as “The Enemy of Youth”. This is Corfu’s Mosquito Coast, and the reason why no one lived here was that for centuries it was a malarial swamp. DDT seemed to have cured the problem, which is why the developers moved in, but with global warming and growing immunity, the mosquitoes are back. All day, the helicopters fly up and down spraying, but it doesn’t work.

The trouble with My Family and Other Animals is that it is an impossible dream, an elegy for a childhood that never really existed. When he wrote it in 1956, he hadn’t been to Corfu since 1939 when he was 14. If you read it as a 10 year old, it is an immensely seductive idea: imagine if you never had to go to school again and instead live on the most beautiful island in the world and do anything you wanted. When you re-read it as an adult, you start to see the cracks he papered over, and you can’t help looking for the bits he left out. You can see that by the age of 14 Gerald was out of control, and if it hadn’t been for the care of Theodore Stephanides he would have wasted his life like his brother Leslie. According to Larry, Leslie painted beautifully but made nothing of it and ended his life as a failed conman. If the alcoholic gene exists, both Gerald and Larry inherited it from their mother.

It forms an unlikely trilogy with Larry’s book, Prospero’s Cell, and Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Marousi, written about many of the same places, and often the same people, but from very different perspectives, rather like the Alexandria Quartet.

In early 1935, according to one version of the story, Larry had found a copy of Tropic of Cancer in a public lavatory in Corfu Town, discarded by a disgusted or possibly disappointed American tourist. Still 20 years away from making any real name for himself as a writer, he wrote a fan letter to Miller and the two corresponded regularly but rarely met for the next 45 years. Miller came to visit in 1939, just as the party was breaking up, and wrote The Colossus about his travels.

Spiro and Theodore appear in all three books. “Theodore is the most learned man I have ever met, and a saint to boot,” wrote Miller. The other two would have said the same. But Gerald doesn’t mention Miller and implies that all the Durrells were all living in the same house, and Larry’s wife Nancy has been entirely removed from the picture. Larry ignores the rest of his family apart from a single brief story about his other brother Leslie meeting a convict. The same story reappears in My Family and Other Animals with Gerald as the protagonist.

This has led to some confusion. According to Lonely Planet, both Larry and Gerald lived in the White House in Kalami, and Gerald wrote My Family and Other Animals while living just up the coast at Kouloura.

But only Larry and Nancy lived at Kalami, in a small square house on a rock at the far end of an empty bay. It was then the wild north east, a long way from the elegant villas of Perama and Kontokali where the rest of the Durrell clan lived, even further from the smart Kensington on Sea it is now. On the north-east coast, the mountains rise steeply from the sea and the roads are too steep and narrow to support large hotel complexes, and it has become the select, up-market resort that the whole island might have been.

Then, the White House was lit by oil lamps, and all their water had to be carried down from the spring. At night, they lay in bed with their skins “rough and satiny from the salt”. They lived a simple, idyllic life between arguments. He wrote poems; Nancy painted “lazy, pleasant” pictures. She had been to the Slade when that was the art college to go to, and you wonder how good her pictures were.

The writer Anaïs Nin met Nancy in Paris in 1937 and wrote in her diary about her “beautiful long refined leopard eyes”. “I was tremendously impressed by the photo of Nancy,” wrote Miller in his letter of May 3 1937. “She looks like a ‘person’.”

In the recent gentrification, Kalami has suffered more than most of the nearby bays, and whoever designed the vile mauve apartment complex on the hill deserves a special place in hell, but the White House is now a pleasant taverna, still owned by the family who rented it to the Durrells, and you can sit outside on the terrace by the sea where Nancy planned a garden. Did she plant the wisteria? Perhaps not. It was over 60 years ago.

A mile south of Kalami on the coastal path, you reach a cove where many years ago an icon of St Arsenius was washed up after a storm. A fisherman found it and built a small shrine, and later it became Nancy and Larry’s “private bathing pool”. They lay there for hours, dropping cherries into the water which lay “like drops of blood on the sandy floor two fathoms below” and Nancy “like an otter” would bring them up in her teeth. (In The Alexandria Quartet, Melissa’s daughter staying with Durrell’s alter ego Darley on an unnamed Greek island retrieves a tangerine from the sea bed “like a young otter”.)

“Durrell and Nancy were like a couple of dolphins; they practically lived in the water,” wrote Miller. “We rowed to a little cove where there was a tiny white shrine. Here we baptised ourselves anew in the raw.”

Later, Miller wrote, possibly metaphorically, about “black eyes at breakfast”.

The cover of The Miller-Durrell Letters 1935-1980 shows the pair sitting naked on the edge of the sea; Durrell looking pensive, Miller staring enigmatically at the photographer.

On Christmas Day 1943, Durrell wrote to Miller: “Nancy is in Jerusalem with the child. We have split up; just the war I guess.” “So you and Nancy have split up?” Miller replied, and then she wasn’t mentioned again for 25 years until Miller recalled a beautiful girl he had once seen in Paris outside the Dôme: “a bit like your Nancy, tall, willowy with auburn hair which fell down her hair like a waterfall . . . something out of the Arthurian legends”. And that was it.

Just before the cove with the shrine, the path drops down to Agni, a small horseshoe-shaped bay of white pebbles shelving steeply into deep, clear water. The reflection of the cypress trees turns the water green, and as you swim out you can see your shadow stalking you, five fathoms and more below. If there are any new villas in the bay, they are well hidden in the trees. Two of the three tavernas on the beach have been there for over a century. All three are different, all special, all seriously up-market. Turn round and you can expect to find Rick Stein and a film crew at the next table, or if you’re very unlucky, Michael Winner.

I looked up from my plate of pasta and mussels to see a webcam staring at me. That certainly wasn’t there in Durrell’s time.

A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Guardian.

Articles

• More from Ben Mallalieu