Free Marrying Off Mother by Gerald Durrell Page A

Officer had just downed. I stood for a moment remembering the Captain, his charm, his gallantry with the ladies, his gentleness, but above all I remembered how he was going to draw, play his flute, and lie in bed with his beloved wife and watch the seagulls go past their bedroom window. I decided that retirement was something you should take a little bit of every day, like a tonic, for you never knew what awaited you around the corner.
    I also decided that I didn’t want any dinner.

Marrying Off Mother
    T hat summer in Corfu was a particularly good one. The night skies were a heavy velvety blue with, apparently, more stars than ever before, like a crop of tiny burnished mushrooms glinting in the vast blue meadow. The moon seemed twice as large as normal, starting — as we turned towards her and she lifted herself into the night sky — as orange as a tangerine and then undergoing colour changes from apricot to daffodil yellow before hatching out into a miraculous white, as white as a bride’s gown, the light from which cast pools of bright silver among the hunched and twisted olives. Excited by the warmth and beauty of these nights, the fireflies would attempt to emulate and outdo the stars and so formed their own glittering, throbbing conglomerations among the trees where the Scops owls chimed like mournful little bells. At dawn the eastern sky would have a blood red line drawn across, the sword of the approaching sun. This would change to canary yellow, then lilac, and finally as the sun made his splendid appearance over the horizon the sky would suddenly turn as blue as flax and the stars would be extinguished as one blows out candles after a gigantic ball.
    I used to wake just before the sun’s rim flooded our world with light and contemplate my room and its contents. The room was large with two big windows and slatted shutters that used to make friendly musical noises when touched by the slightest wind. In winter it was an orchestra. The floor was a wooden one of plain scrubbed boards that creaked and grumbled, in one corner of which were two elderly blankets and a pillow on which my three dogs, Roger, Widdle and Puke, slept in a snoring, twitching huddle. The other accoutrements of a normal bedroom were lacking. True, there was a cupboard, allegedly for hanging up my clothes, but in reality most of its space was taken up with more sensible things, like my various forked sticks for catching snakes, my different nets for catching insects, for delving into ponds and ditches and stouter ones for marine captures, as well as fishing rods and useful poles with three large hooks on the end for pulling pond or seaweed within reach and thus facilitating the capture of those creatures that dwelt in their green, feathery grottoes.
    There was, of course, a table, but this was piled high with my nature notes, books, test-tubes full of specimens and, on this particular day, I recall, the semi-dissected corpse of a hedgehog I had found which, even by my broad-minded standards, was starting to make its presence felt. Round the room there were shelves containing aquariums and glass-fronted cages in which crouched bulbous-eyed mantids who regarded you malevolently, tree frogs like green velvet, geckos with stomach skin so fine you could see their internal organs through it, newts in their watery world and baby terrapins the size of walnuts. Presiding over all this on top of the window pelmet was Ulysses, my Scops owl, looking like a slim statue carved from ash-grey wood streaked with Maltese crosses in black, his eyes like oriental slits against the intrusive sunlight.
    In the garden below I could hear the yapping of my seagull Alecko calling for fish and the wicked witch’s cackle of my two magpies. The half-closed shutters were making a pattern of tiger stripes across the bare boards. The air was hot even at that hour. The sheets were hot and, even though I slept naked and it was only just past dawn, I could feel