My Family and Other Animals (The Corfu Trilogy)

by Gerald Durrell

July had been blown out like a candle by a biting wind that ushered in a leaden August sky.

The sea lifted smooth blue muscles of wave as it stirred in the dawn-light, and the foam of our wake spread gently behind us like a white peacock’s tail, glinting with bubbles.

Gradually the magic of the island settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen. Each day had a tranquility, a timelessness, about it, so that you wished it would never end. But then the dark skin of night would peel off and there would be a fresh day waiting for us, glossy and colourful as a child’s transfer and with the same tinge of unreality.

While you sleep, their roots grow into your brains and steal them, and when you wake up you are mad, head as empty as a whistle.’

a piece of bottle which had been rubbed and licked by the sea until it was like an astonishing jewel, green and translucent.

when January arrived it shone a clear, tender blue … the same blue as that of the tiny flames that devoured the olive-logs in the charcoal pits. The nights were still and cool, with a moon so fragile it barely freckled the sea with silver points. The dawns were pale and translucent until the sun rose, mist-wrapped, like a gigantic silkworm cocoon, and washed the island with a delicate bloom of gold dust.

bits of bottle-glass emeried and carved into translucent jewels by the tide and the sand, shells as spiky as hedgehogs, others smooth, oval, and delicate pink, like the finger-nails of some drowned goddess.