Free Marrying Off Mother by Gerald Durrell Page B

areas of sweat on my body. I got out of bed and padded across to open the shutters and a blinding flood of dandelion-coloured sunlight poured into the room. The dogs stretched, yawned, clippered themselves briefly with their front teeth to disturb a brood of worrying fleas and stood up wagging their tails. Having ascertained that Sally, my donkey, was still tethered to the almond tree where I had left her the evening before, and that no dastardly member of the peasantry had stolen her, I got dressed. This was a simple process. Slip on shorts and a cobweb linen shirt, slide feet into well worn sandals and I was ready to face what the day might bring. The first hurdle to overcome was having breakfast with my family and being as unobtrusive as possible in case my elder brother Larry had smelt the hedgehog. His olfactory senses were far too well developed for a brother to possess, in my opinion. We had breakfast in the little sunken garden that ran along and below our broad, flagged veranda, cloaked in vine. The garden was very Victorian looking, with small flowerbeds in squares, rounds, triangles or stars, carefully rimmed with white stone. In each bed stood a small tangerine tree, whose scent, when the sun shone on them, was almost overpowering. In the beds at their feet grew nice old-fashioned flowers, forget-me-nots, pinks, lavender, sweet-william, night-scented stock, tobacco plants and lilies of the valley. It was a sort of Piccadilly Circus for the local insects and so was a favourite hunting ground of mine, for there was everything from butterflies to antlions, lacewing flies to rose beetles, great fat burring bumble bees to tiny wasps.
    The table was set in the shade of the tangerine trees, and round it arranging plates and knives would hobble Lugaretzia, our maid, groaning gently to herself. She was a professional hypochondriac and was always cherishing and cosseting six or seven ailments at any time and would, if you were not careful, give you vivid and sometimes disgusting descriptions of what the interior of her stomach was doing, or how her varicose veins throbbed like a savage tribe’s tom-toms when on the warpath.
    This day I noted with satisfaction that we were having scrambled eggs. Mother used to simmer chopped onions until they were transparent and then add the beaten eggs that had yolks as brilliant as the sun and came from our own family of chickens. One day my sister Margo, in a philanthropic mood, let all the chickens out of their pen for a walk. They found a patch of wild garlic and feasted on it, with the result that the omelettes for breakfast the next morning were thoroughly impregnated. My brother Leslie complained that it was like eating the upholstery out of a Greek bus.
    Scrambled eggs were really something to start the day on. I generally had two helpings and then followed this up with four or five huge slices of brown toast covered with a thick coating of honey from our own hives. Lest I be thought greedy, let me hasten to say that eating this much toast and honey was much like following a natural history lesson or an archaeological dig. The hives were in the charge of Lugaretzia’s husband, a fragile-looking man who seemed to have the cares of the world on his shoulders, as, indeed, he had, as anyone spending ten minutes in his wife’s company would readily perceive. Whenever he deprived our five hives of bees of their carefully garnered provender he was always stung so severely that he would have to spend several days in bed. As he was being stung, however, he inevitably dropped several honeycombs on the ground, where they became a magnificent sticky trap for any insect that happened to be around. In spite of Mother’s desperate attempts to strain the honey before it came to table, there was always a small and interesting zoological collection lurking there. So spreading the musky, brown-gold delicacy on your bread was like spreading out liquid amber in which you might find