Brief Summary of School Reading List Books - Ievgen Sykalo 2026

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

Part One: The Escape, the Chaos, and the Magic of Corfu

It all began with a thunderstorm. Not the kind that hurls lightning or shakes windowpanes, no. A domestic storm, made of coughs, sighs, complaints, and British weather — that damp, sulking kind of atmosphere that creeps into your bones and convinces you that life is best lived under a heavy blanket with a cup of tea and mild despair. That was England. That was our life — my family’s life — before the escape.

Mother, always dressed in black and swathed in a vague scent of lavender and melancholy, had finally had enough. "Why don’t we move to somewhere warmer?" she suggested one dreary afternoon, as though suggesting toast for tea. The idea rolled around the room like a marble on a wooden floor, then suddenly picked up speed, momentum — madness, really — until, before any of us quite realised what we’d done, we’d packed up our entire lives, and were boarding a boat bound for the Greek island of Corfu.

Now, let me tell you: the moment we set foot on Corfu, the world changed. It was as though we had stepped from a black-and-white photograph into a swirling watercolour. The sea shimmered like melted turquoise, the sky stretched endlessly above like a blue silk scarf, and the air — oh, the air! — was thick with scents of herbs and promise.

And then, of course, there was the heat. Roger, our faithful and unfailingly noble dog, panted with solemn dignity as he led us along dusty tracks, sniffing every olive tree and barking at invisible threats. He was the first to truly embrace Corfu, I think — he understood that this place was a paradise designed for the curious and the sun-kissed.

The family — oh, yes, the family. Allow me to introduce the dramatis personae, if you will.

There was Larry, my eldest brother, who fancied himself the reincarnation of a literary demigod. He wore a cravat, wrote furiously in notebooks, and sighed often at the "impossibility" of working in such chaos — a chaos entirely of his own making. His friends, eccentric as mushrooms in a thunderstorm, came and went in a parade of dramatic entrances and philosophical debates.

Then there was Leslie, gun enthusiast, lover of warfare manuals, and a walking arsenal of explosive potential. If it could be dismantled, loaded, or shot at, Leslie was involved. He prowled the island looking for wild boars, or more often, for things that simply sounded like wild boars.

Margo, our only sister, was a whirlwind of creams, diets, sunbathing, and unrequited romances. Her bedroom smelled perpetually of lotions and strawberry water, and she was forever either weeping dramatically or complaining that her complexion had been ruined by the sun (which she worshipped daily).

And then, Mother — the unflappable centre of our universe. She seemed permanently dressed for a Victorian tea party, even as she haggled with Greek fishermen or chased scorpions out of the kitchen. Her tolerance was saintly, her teapot endless, and her cooking, well — experimental. But she loved us, her ridiculous, unpredictable brood, and kept us afloat with the gentle persistence of a ship’s figurehead braving a hurricane.

And me? I was Gerry — the youngest, the most quiet (comparatively), and the most obsessively fascinated by the teeming natural world of Corfu. From the first day, I was spellbound. Lizards skittered across sunbaked walls, beetles the size of coins buzzed through the air, and mysterious birds called from the olive groves like forgotten gods of the forest.

Our first house was the "Villa Strawberry-Pink," perched like a plump cake on a hillside. It was a marvel — leaky, overgrown, and delightfully untidy. We lived there like pirates who had just discovered an uncharted island. No schedules, no tutors, no wet umbrellas. Just the island, the sun, and the sea.

But even paradise must make room for education, and so Larry — who believed firmly in cultivating genius (his own, naturally) — decided I needed tutoring. Thus entered a parade of characters worthy of a Greek comedy.

First came George, the gentle, stuttering scholar who taught me languages while we rowed along the coast and discussed the mating habits of octopuses. Then Kralefsky, a bird-loving teacher who encouraged my ornithological obsessions while indulging his own. He believed firmly that birds had characters — jealous, passionate, noble — and I rather think he was right.

And of course, there was Spiro — our beloved, thick-accented taxi driver, protector, and fixer of all things legal, illegal, or just slightly inappropriate. With his gigantic car, vast belly, and booming laugh, Spiro was more than a driver — he was a guardian angel in human form, with a cigarette in one hand and a threat for any bureaucrat foolish enough to cross him.

Alongside him was Theodore Stephanides, a doctor, poet, and naturalist — and one of the few adults who treated my passion for creatures not as a childish phase, but as a serious and sacred pursuit. With him, I dissected fish, studied bacteria, and explored the architecture of shells. He opened doors in my mind that have never closed.

And so our days tumbled forward in a carnival of misadventure. One moment I was adopting a family of scorpions and storing them in a matchbox (to Mother’s horror), the next I was raising a pair of gulls in the bathroom, or training an intelligent dog called Quasimodo to climb ladders. Life was gloriously, irredeemably chaotic — a constant ballet of absurdity, wonder, and sunshine.

But beneath the laughter, there was something deeper — a kind of slow revelation. I was discovering not just the island’s creatures, but the rhythms of life itself: the elegance of a mantis praying, the stillness of a sleeping owl, the strange dignity of a turtle sunning itself on a rock. I was learning — in the deepest, truest sense — how to see the world.

Corfu, in all its brilliant wildness, taught me that nature was not a museum to be observed but a symphony to be entered. It sang in a language beyond words, and I listened with all the reverence of a young monk at the feet of his first oracle.

But even in paradise, time passes. The golden light begins to slant. We stayed on Corfu for five years, each one more colourful, more improbable than the last. And in that time, we changed — not always visibly, but profoundly.

Larry wrote more furiously. Margo fell in and out of love. Leslie built increasingly alarming weaponry. Mother made friends with half the island and kept her tea always steeped just right. And I... I became something else entirely. Not just a collector of animals, but a part of nature’s tapestry.

Corfu was a place of freedom, laughter, and transformation. It was the childhood I didn’t know I needed — mad, unschooled, sun-soaked, and filled with flying things.

But as with all great adventures, the island would eventually fade behind us, the sea rising to take us home — or at least, to what the world calls home. We would carry Corfu with us, like the scent of thyme in our suitcases, and I would go on to tell its stories — of animals, yes, but also of people. Because, in the end, what is a life but a collection of strange, miraculous encounters?

Part Two: Wild Guests, Greek Ghosts, and the Invisible Threads of Belonging

And so Corfu wove itself around us like a spell — not a quick flick of a wand, but the slow, steady enchantment of sun and salt and the laughter of children echoing in olive groves. The days became less like a sequence of hours and more like pages in a dream, each one smudged at the edges with wonder.

Of course, in a house brimming with both humans and animals, the line between guest and resident blurred rapidly. My "collection" — as Mother came to call it with a mix of fondness and dread — grew like an exuberant vine. Tortoises paraded solemnly through the garden, geckos blinked sleepily from ceiling beams, and water-snakes slithered through washbasins with the casual confidence of guests long past introductions. I was curator, caretaker, and occasionally, victim, depending on which species decided to express itself unexpectedly.

There was Achilles, the turtle with a limp and a fondness for strawberries; Alecko, a gull with a cry like the scraping of rusty hinges and a noble but misplaced sense of pride; and a pair of magpies, named Widdle and Puke by Larry (he said it suited them), who took great delight in stealing earrings, buttons, and once, Mother’s dentures. I kept insects in matchboxes, frogs in jam jars, and a snake in the bath — until Margo discovered it mid-bubble.

"Gerald, darling," Mother said one day, brushing flour from her apron and blinking rapidly, "do you think you could warn us before releasing a swarm of ants in the dining room?"

I did not. Because how could one predict the majestic chaos of nature?

But the animals were not the only wild creatures in our lives.

The people of Corfu — ah, they were just as vivid, just as unpredictable. There was Lugaretzia, our part-time maid and full-time hypochondriac, who suffered from an endless, dramatic list of ailments and insisted that every slight ache foretold her imminent death. "The worm is eating my liver," she would groan theatrically, then promptly sweep the floor with alarming vigour.

There was Kosti, the shepherd-poet who wept openly when describing his goats, and Yani, a weathered old man who taught me how to trap water-snakes and once claimed to have seen a ghost with the face of a potato.

And always, always there was Spiro, bulldozing through bureaucracy, bribing customs officers with cigarettes and wine, barking at anyone who dared upset his "little English family." He was our lifeline — to food, to sanity, to the very rhythm of Corfu. He swore in Greek and smiled like a rogue saint. I trusted him more than I trusted the sun to rise.

Our second villa — a daffodil-yellow one this time — was nestled in the hills, where the evenings sang with cicadas and the sea below murmured like an old friend. Larry insisted it was better for writing. Leslie liked the range for target practice. Margo found a new dietician in the village. Mother grew oregano and pretended not to hear the shrieks when I brought home a centipede the size of a hairbrush.

But even amidst the absurdity, there were quiet moments. There were times when the stillness of the island crept in like a blessing — walking through groves bathed in amber light, watching turtles dig their nests, lying flat on my stomach for hours just to witness a beetle wage a battle against gravity.

And in those moments, I learned a strange, gentle truth: life — real, sacred, untamed life — was not something you studied from the outside. You had to live alongside it, with your face in the mud and your ears tuned to the hum of wings.

I remember once, lying in the sun near a cypress tree, feeling the whole world vibrating around me. Ants threading through dry grass. Lizards sunbathing. A kestrel slicing the sky. It was not stillness — it was being. And I, small and barefoot and ten, was a part of it.

And yet, amidst all this wonder, the human world buzzed on with its own peculiar rhythm.

Leslie had fallen in love with guns and a local girl, though he never decided which he liked better. Margo tried one new beauty regimen after another — she steamed, she slathered, she even tried being hypnotised into attractiveness. Larry kept inviting increasingly mad friends over — one of whom claimed he could communicate with vegetables, another who tried to paint our entire living room black.

And all the while, Mother soldiered on, baking strange cakes and accepting each new creature with a resigned smile, her main concern being whether it bit, stung, or shed. Her patience was oceanic. Once, when a family of bats took up residence in the attic and Leslie tried to shoot them out with a small pistol, she simply said, “Try not to shoot the roof, dear.”

We moved house again — to the "snow-white villa," as I came to call it. There, perched on a headland like a lighthouse for lunatics, we finally began to feel rooted. The locals no longer stared. Spiro was on speed-dial (if one could have such a thing in those days), and even Mother had taken to sitting in the sun and shelling peas like a proper island matron.

It was there, in that luminous space between sea and sky, that the magic deepened. My animals multiplied. My notebooks bulged with drawings, maps, theories. My friendships — with Theodore, with my tutors, even with the occasional goat — grew rich and strange. I was beginning to realise that the world was not just made of facts and lessons, but of stories, every creature telling one with its body, its habits, its rhythm.

And I began to see my family as part of this story — not just characters in a household farce, but complex, comical, deeply lovable animals in their own right.

Larry, beneath all his pomposity, longed to write something true, something that would outlast him. Leslie wanted adventure, but he also wanted connection — to land, to nature, to something primal. Margo was aching to be seen, not just as a pretty girl, but as someone with depth. And Mother? Mother wanted peace — a garden, a family, and enough quiet to keep everyone alive and reasonably dressed.

I watched them all, as I watched my animals — with curiosity, with affection, with awe. And slowly, it dawned on me that all life, human or not, danced to the same invisible tune.

But paradise is a fragile thing. We never expected it to last forever. As Europe’s skies darkened and the whisper of war began curling around the edges of things, even Corfu — our sun-drenched, impossible Corfu — felt it. Letters from England grew more urgent. News reached us in fragments. Something was ending.

And I knew, though I couldn’t have said how, that the island was preparing to let us go.

Part Three: Last Songs of Summer, and the Farewell Beneath the Cypress Trees

The island had changed, though it looked the same. The light still spilled like honey over the hills. The cicadas still screamed from the trees as if trying to hold the world together with sound alone. But we — my family, my animals, even I — had shifted slightly, as though we’d caught a whiff of something uncertain on the breeze. Something not of Corfu.

Larry began to pace more than he wrote. There was tension in his fingers as he rolled his cigarettes, his jokes a little sharper, his silences longer. He no longer laughed so readily at the chaos of our household. Instead, he grew more abstract, more philosophical — talking about how “all paradises are illusions, but some illusions are worth living in.” Mother would just nod and stir the soup, pretending not to understand.

Leslie became obsessed with oiling his guns and setting up “watch stations” along the olive groves. It had less to do with boar-hunting now and more to do with that creeping fear none of us wanted to name — the war. The war, always in the distance like thunderclouds not quite ready to burst.

And Margo? She’d fallen in love again. Fiercely, foolishly, and completely. This time with a local sculptor who wore sandals in the rain and had the melancholy eyes of a man who believed even beauty would one day betray him. She said she wanted to stay, to marry, to live on the island forever. But Corfu was not built for permanence — at least not for people like us.

As for me, I burrowed deeper into the folds of nature. I began to know the island not just as a boy, but as something more — an acolyte, a pilgrim of sorts. I knew the habits of lizards in heat, the secret nests of tree frogs, the courting rituals of owls. I learned how to wait — not just to observe, but to listen.

It was Theodore who helped me see it clearly.
“Gerry,” he said one afternoon as we examined a moth with translucent wings and eyes like polished amber, “what you’re learning isn’t just about animals. You’re learning how to see the world. Not for what you expect, but for what it offers when you pay attention.”

And I realised that the language of the natural world — that soft, eternal murmur — had become my second tongue. I could feel it in the sway of the grass, in the low swoop of bats at dusk, in the quiet dignity of a spider building its web for the fiftieth time, no matter how often it was ruined.

But just as the animals were preparing for their autumn slumber, so too were we, unconsciously, preparing to leave.

Mother began packing in small, hopeful bursts — one afternoon it was linens, another day, Larry’s books (a monumental task that involved much shouting and dust).
“We won’t really go, will we?” I asked one night, curled in bed with a scorpion in a matchbox beside me (safely taped shut, of course).

Mother’s smile was tight. “Just a little visit to England, darling. A change of scenery.”

But we both knew it wasn’t that. The world was tilting.

The news from Europe had taken on a new tone — less ominous, more inevitable. Names we scarcely understood — Poland, Germany, Munich — hung in the air like unfamiliar thunder. And Spiro, usually so composed, began to visit more often, driving his battered car with unusual urgency. He brought extra supplies. He spoke in Greek more than English, as though slipping into his native tongue could soften the edges of what was coming.

One afternoon, I found him sitting alone on the garden wall, smoking a cigarette and staring at the sea.

“You going?” he asked without turning.

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded. “Is better. But... Corfu will miss you.”

I didn’t know how to answer. So I watched the sea with him. That shimmering, infinite blue that had cradled us for so long.

Our last weeks were a blur of departures — of farewell feasts, of villagers pressing figs into our hands, of Theodore giving me my own microscope (“So you don’t forget to keep looking,” he said). Lugaretzia wept dramatically and gave us her blessing (and a long list of her current ailments).

I released many of my creatures, though not without tears. Achilles was returned to his favorite strawberry bush. The gull flew off with a reluctant squawk. Widdle and Puke, ever the anarchists, tried to smuggle themselves in Leslie’s suitcase. I let them. I suspect they made it halfway to Albania before giving up.

The night before we left, I walked alone through the olive groves. The moon was a pale silver coin in the sky, and the trees whispered like old women in shawls. I sat under a cypress and let the hum of the island seep into me one last time.

I thought of everything the island had given me — not just a parade of insects and birds and reptiles, but a sense of being part of something, of belonging not to a place, but to life itself.

In Corfu, I had not learned facts; I had learned wonder.

And wonder, once found, can never be forgotten.

The morning we sailed, the sun was sharp and merciless. The sea sparkled with a kind of indifferent beauty, as if to say: You may leave, but I remain.

Spiro drove us to the harbour. No one spoke much. Even Larry looked subdued. As we boarded, Spiro hugged Mother awkwardly, shook Leslie’s hand, kissed Margo’s cheek, and turned to me.

“You come back,” he said. “Promise me.”

“I will,” I whispered.

But we both knew how war burns maps and breaks promises.

The boat pulled away slowly, Corfu shrinking into a dream behind us — its hills soft as old memories, its groves green with secrets I would spend my life trying to remember.

And though I didn’t know it yet, that island had changed me forever. It had planted in me not just a love of animals, but a reverence for the wildness that lives in everything — in geckos and poets, in scorpions and siblings, in the strange, ridiculous, unrepeatable mess of family.

It had taught me how to look closely. And, more importantly, how to care.

Part Four: The Island in the Mirror, or How to Remember What You Love

As the ship churned its way north, slicing through the Aegean like a page being torn from a book, I stood at the rail and stared at the place I had come to think of as mine. Corfu. The island of humming cicadas and lizard flickers. The island of raspberry-colored sunsets and stars so close you could reach for them. It receded slowly, like a dream you try to hold on to even as morning drags you out of sleep.

But Corfu didn’t vanish. It folded itself somewhere deep inside me — not in my suitcase, not in my notebooks, but in the small, quiet place where love sits and grows teeth.

What I didn't yet know — and wouldn't fully understand until many years later — was that Corfu had given me not only the wild mess of its olive-scented life, but a calling. I had arrived a sickly, awkward boy who preferred beetles to people, and left something else entirely. I was now someone who knew the heartbeat of hedgehogs and the war songs of frogs, someone who felt pain when a tree was felled or a bird’s nest was trampled. Corfu had taught me that animals weren’t objects in jars or curiosities on pages. They were neighbors. They had stories. They deserved witness.

And I had become the witness.

Back in England — grey, sensible, brick-laden England — it was as though someone had turned the volume down on life. The air didn’t hum. The light fell in weak drizzles. Even the people seemed wrapped in raincoats of mood. Our family, so riotously alive on Corfu, seemed to shrink slightly — like exotic fruits withering in an unfamiliar kitchen.

Mother coped the way she always had — with stews and seed catalogs and an almost divine refusal to be defeated. She planted gardens. She baked and fretted. She joined societies with names like “The Women’s Guild for the Preservation of Victorian Recipes.”

Larry, sulking like a sea lion dragged from the sun, locked himself in his room and churned out manuscripts while railing against the damp, the tea, the complete absence of “characters.” Margo took to wearing makeup so thick it seemed like she was trying to paint a Greek summer back onto her skin. She flirted with dentists. She read beauty manuals. Occasionally, she sighed like a Victorian heroine and threw herself across the furniture.

Leslie tried to recreate Corfu with alarming dedication. He hung maps on the walls and ordered books on naval engineering. He filled the house with equipment that smelled of gun oil and rust. And when Mother protested, he’d simply grunt, “I’m preparing.”

But no amount of preparation could recreate the wild disarray we’d left behind.

As for me — I tried to recreate the island one cage at a time. I set up a miniature zoo in the attic, complete with rescued squirrels, voles, and once, disastrously, a fox cub that bit everyone and had to be released into a park under cover of darkness. I visited museums with dusty taxidermy exhibits and felt only grief. I missed my turtles. I missed Theodore’s booming, wise voice. I missed the smell of Spiro’s pipe smoke curling through the orange trees.

Most of all, I missed the sound of the island — not just the birdsong, but the life-song — that invisible vibration of joy that ran through even the most ordinary hours on Corfu.

And so, I began to write.
Not proper writing. Not like Larry. But scribbled observations, long letters to Theodore, descriptions of beetles, sketches of salamanders, memory-maps of where I’d found a rare bird’s egg or watched a praying mantis mate. At first, it was just a way to remember. Then it became something more. A way to preserve it. A way to honor the magic I’d been given.

Because, you see, memory is a kind of taxidermy — but with breath still left in it, if you do it right. And I wanted my Corfu to breathe. To chirp and scurry and hoot and hiss. To leap from the page like Quasimodo the puppy bounding into the sea.

That was the first seed of everything I would later do. My zoos. My books. My life among animals. It all started on that island, with that family, with that tangled, explosive, ridiculous collection of humans and beasts that somehow made sense only in the Greek sun.

There’s something deeply philosophical beneath it all, though we never called it philosophy. We were far too busy surviving each other. But what we practiced, unknowingly, was a kind of reverence — for absurdity, for difference, for beauty in unlikely places. A sort of everyday paganism, born not of belief but of attention.

Because to love something — truly love it — you must first see it. Not glance, not study, but see. As I saw the glowworm’s light trembling in the leaves, or Mother’s hands when she peeled onions, or Spiro’s crooked smile when he caught us in yet another escapade.

We saw each other — sometimes through shouting matches, or doors slammed, or gales of laughter. But we saw.

That, perhaps, is what made us a family.

Not resemblance. Not shared interests. But the choice — every day — to keep turning toward one another, no matter how improbable the arrangement seemed.

Years later, when the world changed again, when I found myself in jungles and deserts, surrounded by animals most people had only seen in nightmares or dreams, I still carried Corfu with me. In my notebooks. In my heart. In the way I spoke to a frightened monkey or approached a wounded owl.

Because once you’ve lived in a place that teaches you how to wonder — really wonder — you never leave it. Not really.

And so Corfu remains — an island not just on the map, but in the mind. Sun-soaked. Madness-filled. Teeming with insects, poetry, unspoken affection, and unrepentant chaos.

A small boy’s paradise. A family’s accidental Eden.
A love letter written in lizard tracks and laughter.

Part Five: A Kingdom Remembered, or How the Wildness Endures

The attic of our English house creaked in protest as I shuffled among old trunks and dusty jars, each a poor substitute for the honeyed disorder of our Corfu villas. There were moments when the whole affair felt like a dream I had once dreamed too vividly — and now, standing in this grey-washed world of teacups and timetables, I couldn’t tell if it had ever been real. But the creatures I had brought back — the memories, more than the animals — kept chattering, fluttering, skittering behind my eyes, refusing to let the dream die.

It wasn’t just nostalgia. It was a hunger.

The kind of hunger you feel not only for the past, but for a way of being — of noticing. In Corfu, life had been immediate. A scorpion under a stone could derail an entire afternoon. A walk to the market might include a detour through a monastery, an encounter with a runaway goat, and a philosophical discussion with an ancient fisherman who smelled of olives and salt. Everything was porous — time, plans, clothes, even windows — and through those cracks flooded not chaos, but life. And once you’ve tasted life unfiltered, the chlorinated version offered back in England is awfully hard to drink.

But the strange thing is, the more I wrote, the more I noticed something shift inside me. Each sentence tugged at a thread, pulling Corfu out of the fog and into Technicolor. I could smell the fig trees again. I could hear Roger’s bark echoing across the hill. I could see Mother standing in the kitchen, her spectacles steamed, arguing with the old cooker as though it were a troublesome aunt. The act of writing didn’t just preserve the past — it reanimated it. And as it came alive, so did I.

I realized that while the animals had been my first love, it was the act of telling their stories — of placing them in a world, a family, a tangle of context and confusion — that gave them power. A beetle on a page was no longer just an insect. It was mine — and through me, it became yours too.

Perhaps that’s what the island had given me above all — a voice. Not a polished, literary one like Larry’s, with its sweeping metaphors and Grecian references. Mine was messier. Earthier. It had mud under its fingernails and mosquito bites on its ankles. But it was real. And it carried the rhythm of cicadas, the breath of dusty afternoons, the laughter of a family that never quite fit but somehow held together.

There was, of course, a melancholy to it all. No Eden stays untouched. Life moves. People change. Even the animals I loved so much eventually disappeared — not just from Corfu, but from the world. Habitats shrink. Poisons spread. Voices get drowned. I’ve returned to the island since, and though the rocks remain, the hush of progress has altered the song.

But memory — when written down, when spoken — can become its own kind of conservation. And so I wrote, not just to remember, but to rescue. To pin not butterflies, but moments.

And what of my family?
Well, Larry became Lawrence Durrell, poet and novelist, full of brooding and brilliance. We wrote to each other often, trading barbs and affections like seasoned duelists. Margo flitted in and out of marriages and sunlamps but retained, to the last, her glorious absurdity. Leslie became the stuff of anecdotes — always halfway between invention and truth. And Mother — ah, Mother — she remained the gentle, unshakable heartbeat of the lot. Even when we scattered, we orbited her warmth like eccentric moons.

In time, I would found my own family — of sorts. A family made up of creatures and caretakers, of volunteers and visionaries, of animals rescued from cruelty and ignorance. The Jersey Zoo was born not just from science, but from a boy’s ache for an island and the creatures that made it sing. It was my way of keeping the song alive.

Because that’s what Corfu had always been: a song.
Sometimes a comic opera. Sometimes a lullaby.
But always sung at full volume, with cracked voices and too many verses, and someone in the background letting off fireworks or setting something on fire.

It was never perfect. But it was ours.
And it taught me, more than any school or textbook ever could, that the wild — both outside and inside us — is not a thing to fear or cage, but to meet with open hands and curious eyes.

There are children today who may never climb a fig tree or hold a baby tortoise or be chased by a swarm of indignant geese. There are children who will know animals only through screens, whose wild moments will come filtered and flattened. That’s why I kept writing. That’s why I keep writing still. Because someone must remember. Someone must tell the stories.

And so this is my offering: not just a memoir, but a mosaic. Of feathers and figs. Of sunburns and scorpions. Of arguments and animal cries and the unstoppable surge of being alive.

Corfu, to me, is not a place on a map.
It is a way of seeing.
It is the pulse behind every word I write.
It is home — even now, even always.

And maybe, just maybe, if you’ve read this far, it’s become a little bit of yours too.

Part Six: The Island Within

But of course, one never truly says goodbye to Corfu. Not even when the trunks are packed, not when the boat pulls away from the sunburnt quay and the island fades into a haze of whitewashed houses and cypress spears. You may think you’ve left it behind, but somehow, it lodges itself under your skin — like a burr or a beetle or a half-heard song. It burrows deep, and when you least expect it, it comes tapping on the inside of your ribcage, whispering: Remember?

I do remember. I remember it all.

There were the moments so absurd they seem almost fictional now — like when Margo took to wearing sun goggles and face cream so thick she resembled a startled ghost in a bathing suit, or when Leslie tried to build a boat and nearly blew up half the garden with his homemade gunpowder. Or when Larry, exasperated by the endless arrival of animals at the breakfast table, tried in vain to lay down literary law in a jungle of barking, croaking, and chirping. He was forever seeking an atmosphere of "calm intellectual repose" — and forever being thwarted by a family who treated repose like a mildly unpleasant suggestion.

But those were only the loud colours of the tapestry. The finer threads — the ones I held closest — were quieter.

It was the hush of dawn as I crouched beside a dew-jeweled spider’s web, watching a fly’s shadow tremble.
The prickling scent of hot sage underfoot.
The sudden thrill of a hawk’s shadow slicing across the olive grove.
The unspoken bond between boy and tortoise, between watcher and watched.

There is something profoundly philosophical about nature, if you learn to sit still enough. Animals have no use for our dramas. They do not lie or preen or boast. They exist in rhythm — with the sun, with the rain, with hunger and joy and fear — and that rhythm, once tapped into, resets something deep in the human spirit. Corfu was my monastery, my school, my playground. And the animals were my teachers.

From Theodore I learned taxonomy and Latin names, yes — but more importantly, the thrill of discovery. The poetry in precision. From my own collecting came lessons too: patience, observation, the gentle touch. When handling a mantis or a gecko, you quickly understand the power of gentleness — and how little of it the world truly teaches.

The Greeks themselves — old Yani, Spiro, the barefoot fishermen and stooped goatherds — taught me another kind of wisdom. The kind found not in books, but in faces weathered by sea winds and sun. They seemed, many of them, carved from the island itself. They belonged to it, not merely on it. Their speech had the cadence of waves. Their laughter was generous, round, often inexplicable.

Mother — in her firm, bumbling, unflappable way — taught me resilience. She was the anchor in our swirling chaos, a creature of comforting predictability in a land that often made no sense. She never panicked. She simply coped, usually with tea, occasionally with brandy, and always with a sigh that suggested the situation was both amusing and inevitable.

And Larry — though he would never have admitted it — taught me about story. About how to thread moments together, how to hold up a mirror to the absurdity of life without flinching. He raged, pontificated, sulked, and sparkled. He hated interruptions, but tolerated mine — barely — especially when I entered his study clutching something with wings or claws.

I used to think we were merely visitors on the island, passengers on a whim. But now I see we were more like seedlings — dropped by fate, perhaps, but nurtured by that wild soil into full bloom. We left Corfu, yes — but it never left us. It shaped the way we spoke, the way we listened, the way we loved.

In later years, when I stood before committees or funders, trying to plead the case of endangered lemurs or long-forgotten frogs, I did not summon dry statistics. I summoned Corfu. I summoned the sun-struck afternoons spent coaxing a shy turtle from its shell, the thrill of finding a nest tucked under ivy, the stillness of a lizard on warm stone. I summoned the child I had been, and the wild place that had made me.

Perhaps that’s why people connected with the book. Because beneath the laughter and lunacy was something true — a longing all of us feel, whether we name it or not. A longing to belong not just to a family or a town or a culture, but to the living world itself. To be part of the humming, buzzing, blooming riot that surrounds us and, too often, ignores us back because we are too loud, too rushed, too distracted.

But if you stop — if you sit, barefoot on a stone step, hands in your lap, eyes open — the wild notices you.
It leans in. It begins to trust you.
And suddenly, you’re no longer an outsider.

You’re home.

That, I suppose, is the final gift of Corfu — and of my ridiculous, beloved family.
They made it impossible for me to ever feel separate from the world again.
We were all tangled together — animals, humans, storms, silences — in a web far more intricate than any spider could dream.

So I wrote this story not just as a chronicle of days gone by, but as an invitation.
To look closer. To laugh more loudly. To listen more carefully.
To wander, barefoot and curious, into the wild that still waits for us all.

Because the world is still full of animals.
And other humans.
And families.
And miracles.

All you have to do is look.

Part Seven: Echoes of the Island

Yes — all you have to do is look.

And in the years that followed, I never stopped looking. Corfu had trained my eyes like a patient tutor trains a wild but eager pupil. Even when I found myself in the concrete tangle of London, or deep in the unyielding jungles of Cameroon, or crammed on trains next to crates of irate macaques, I was still looking — with the same sense of reverent wonder I’d learned crouched in an olive grove or belly-flat by a garden wall.

But the truth is, the act of looking is never really separate from the act of remembering. Corfu wasn’t just a place I’d lived in — it was a place I carried inside me. A lens, a rhythm, a kind of bright madness stitched into my very being.

I think of the way Margo would appear on a veranda, her arms full of mysterious lotions and her mind full of improbable health cures, announcing with the solemnity of a priestess that she had found the answer to acne — or to love — or to both. I think of Leslie, whose blunt earnestness disguised a surprisingly tender heart, who could speak in depth about the stopping power of a 12-gauge shotgun and then spend hours nursing a wounded gull back to flight.

Larry, of course, never truly left Corfu either — not really. He may have physically departed to chase the literary salons and intellectual salons and every other salon he imagined was waiting breathlessly for his genius. But the island had crept under his skin too. It clung to his metaphors. You could smell the Mediterranean in his sentences if you knew where to sniff.

And Mother — ah, Mother. The matriarch of this warm and wobbling ship. Unruffled by chaos, ever practical, always wielding either a cup of tea or a pair of pruning shears, depending on the emotional weather. She never asked for gratitude, never paused for applause, yet the whole fragile, beautiful madness of our Corfu life stood balanced on her quiet strength.

I think we all imagined we were the center of the story, each in our own way. Larry, in his dreamy literary haze; Leslie, with his arsenal of ambitions; Margo, navigating the emotional weather systems of adolescence. Even I, traipsing through the undergrowth with jars and nets and a heart thudding like a wild bird’s — I imagined myself the star of my own personal documentary.

But really, the island itself was the protagonist. We were merely the guests. It shaped us, not the other way around.

Even now, when I close my eyes, I can feel it:
The thrum of cicadas at midday.
The languid shimmer of heat rising from whitewashed stones.
The salt-bright taste of the air, spiced with thyme and sunburn.
The way time moved there — not in hours or minutes, but in wings and waves and light.

Perhaps that’s what Corfu gave me most of all: a sense that time was not something to be dominated, but something to be folded into. There, life happened in the slow curve of a snail’s journey across a leaf, in the long echo of goat bells down a valley, in the curl of smoke from a fisherman’s fire. It was a place that didn’t need you to hurry — only to notice.

That noticing became a way of life. A practice. A prayer.

It’s what led me, eventually, to zoos and conservation and battles with bureaucracy. It led me into steamy forests and parched plains, into fierce debates about ethics and habitats and the strange, sometimes cruel, always complicated relationship between human beings and the rest of the living world.

But in all those places — amidst the noise and urgency and aching loss of so much vanishing life — I carried Corfu like a talisman. I remembered how it felt to be a child who believed that ants had personalities, that scorpions were misunderstood, that toads deserved names and proper housing and the occasional bit of conversation.

That’s the magic of childhood, you see — and the particular magic of that childhood: everything was alive, and everything was significant. A pebble, a beetle, a shaft of light falling just so. And even now, I cling to that enchantment. Not as naivety, but as a deliberate act of defiance in a world that wants us to forget.

Because the world needs people who remember how to wonder.
How to kneel.
How to listen.

And Corfu, with its golden haze and its roosters and ruins and riotous vegetation, taught me just that.

So yes, we left. The war grew louder, the tides of history began to pull at our heels. The sky over Europe darkened, and we packed our trunks with more sadness than we let on. Even Spiro, normally indomitable and gruff as an old lion, grew solemn. He drove us to the port in silence, his moustache trembling, his enormous hands gripping the wheel as though the island itself might shift and shake us back into its arms.

I remember the scent of the sea that day — bittersweet and sharp, like the end of a dream. I remember looking back, my face pressed to the rail, watching the houses shrink into colored specks, the mountains dissolve into cloud, and thinking: How can a place be so real and feel like a story all at once?

I didn’t know then that I would write that story. I only knew I had to keep it alive — for myself, for others, for the animals and the madness and the joy of it all.

And perhaps that’s the final secret Corfu whispered to me, somewhere between the olive branches and the lizard skins: that joy, like nature, must be preserved.
Celebrated.
Shared.

Part Eight: The Legacy of Laughter and Life

And so the story continues—not just in books or memories, but in the very pulse of who I am, in the echoes of laughter that still ring from those sun-drenched terraces, in the way a sudden rustle of leaves or a flash of wings can still send my heart fluttering as if I were a boy again, chasing crabs on rocky shores.

Because beyond the chaos of my family’s endless eccentricities—the quarrels, the pet projects, the little catastrophes that made the days feel like one long, unpredictable carnival—there was something deeper, more enduring. Something that bound us all together like the golden thread of sunlight through a grove of olive trees.

It was the fierce and tender love of life itself.

Larry, for all his literary grandeur and his towering self-importance, could never escape the rawness of that love. Underneath his sharp wit and sharp words, there was a man who saw beauty in the smallest detail, who celebrated the absurd and the sublime with equal passion. His stories, his rants, his dreams—they all vibrated with the same restless devotion to the world’s endless wonder.

Leslie, with his blunt force and boyish enthusiasm, found his own way to express it—through invention and exploration, through a refusal to bow to the ordinary. He was the hammer pounding against the walls of convention, the dreamer who built castles in the air with tools in his hands and fire in his eyes.

And Margo, ever the seeker, the innocent and the wise in one, carried within her the fierce hope of youth and the quiet strength of endurance. Even in moments of awkwardness or rebellion, she moved through the world with a longing to understand, to connect, to belong.

And me—well, I was the collector, the watcher, the child who could see magic in the mundane, who believed that every creature, every stone, every breath of wind held a story waiting to be told.

Together, we were a strange, unruly constellation of souls, spinning in the Mediterranean light, caught in the delicate dance of family and freedom, of madness and mercy.

But what I carry most clearly from those days is the unspoken lesson that life’s richest treasures are not things, but moments. Moments of connection—between human and animal, between sibling and sibling, between person and place. Moments when the world holds its breath and you feel, unmistakably, that you are part of something vast and mysterious.

Corfu taught me that. And through the stories I wrote, I’ve tried to share that feeling—with its laughter, its messiness, its heartbreak, and its wild, unyielding beauty.

If there is a philosophical heart beating beneath the whimsy of My Family and Other Animals, it is this: that to live fully is to live attentively. To open your eyes, your heart, and your hands to the world around you—to be curious, to be kind, to be brave enough to love even when it’s inconvenient, even when it’s complicated.

And isn’t that the greatest adventure of all?

So when you read these pages, I hope you see not just a family’s foibles or a boy’s zoological exploits, but a celebration—a call to rediscover the world with fresh eyes, to listen to the whisper of wings and the murmur of waves, to find joy in the smallest living things and to carry that joy out into whatever wild corners of life you find yourself in.

Because the animals are waiting. The wild is waiting. The laughter and the love are waiting.

And if you listen closely enough, you might just hear the island calling your name.

Part Nine: The Quiet Wisdom of the Wild

This is where the heart of the story beats strongest—the quiet moments that slip between the laughter and the chaos, the gentle discoveries that no one ever really forgets.

Like the mornings when I would slip out before dawn, barefoot and half-dreaming, to explore the tangled gardens and sunlit cliffs, where the world felt both ancient and new all at once. The soft rustle of leaves, the tentative blink of a shy lizard basking on a stone, the sudden flash of a bright butterfly—each one a small miracle unfolding just for me.

Or the long afternoons spent cataloguing creatures both strange and wonderful, listening to the patient hum of insects or the distant cries of goats, scribbling notes and sketches with the wide-eyed enthusiasm only a child can truly summon. I remember feeling as if the island itself was a vast, breathing encyclopedia, and I was its eager apprentice, desperate to learn every secret it held.

And yet, beneath all this curiosity and joy, there was a profound lesson quietly taking root: the world was fragile. The scorpion’s delicate pincers, the tortoise’s slow, measured steps, the birds’ fleeting shadows all whispered of balance—a balance that must be honored if this wild, wild paradise was to endure.

It was this delicate understanding that shaped my life’s path. That taught me that animals are not mere curiosities or trophies, but living souls with stories and struggles of their own. That every creature, no matter how small or overlooked, deserves respect and protection.

Corfu showed me how the wild and the human are entwined, how the fate of one affects the other. The island was not just a backdrop for our family’s escapades—it was a living, breathing character in its own right, with moods and mysteries and a stubborn will to survive.

And so, as I grew older and ventured further afield—through steamy rainforests, dusty savannahs, and frozen tundras—I carried with me this quiet wisdom. The knowledge that to save the world, you must first learn to see it. To love it. To listen.

Because, in the end, that is what My Family and Other Animals is really about—not just the chaos of a family uprooted, not just the antics of eccentric siblings and their loyal servants, but a deep, abiding love for life in all its dazzling forms.

It is an invitation—to look closely, to laugh often, and to live with open eyes and an open heart.

For the world is full of wonder, waiting patiently for those willing to notice.