If you’ve seen The Durrells in Corfu, you’ll undoubtedly remember the slightly dotty daughter in the series, Margo.
When I finished the show (a slightly heartbreaking moment – I hope they release a new season in the future!), I was curious about what happened next. Though it offers a fictionalized account of the Durrells’ lives, the characters were based on real people. To think of them in the clutches of World War II…
In episode 75 of the Vocabbett podcast, I shared more about the remarkable life of Margo Durrell. You can read the transcript and listen below, or check it out on your favorite podcast player!
Modified Transcript:
Today, I want to talk about Margo Durrell. She's portrayed as slightly dim in the show (and in her own book, Whatever Happened to Margo?). But that does not mean she didn't live an extraordinary life!
When Margot was just 16, her mother was like, "Ugh, England is so boring. Let’s move to Corfu." So as a widow with four children, she packed up the family and moved them all to a Greek island.
We know about this because the youngest of the kids, Gerald, went on to become a famous naturalist who cavorted with Princess Margaret, prevented species from becoming extinct, and wrote a famous series about their time in Corfu. The first one is My Family and Other Animals, and apparently it's a major classic in the U.K.
So Gerry gets a lot of the fame, but Margo’s story is, I think, just as interesting.
Let’s pick up the thread in the late 1930’s, as the television series winds down. Margo had been living in Corfu for a few years, and World War II was on the horizon. Most of the family relented and returned to England, but Margo was like, "No, this is my home now. I’m not leaving."
So even though she spoke very little Greek, Margo disguised herself as a Greek woman and went to live with some of her friends. Around this time, she also fell in love with a young man in the Royal Air Force who was stationed in Corfu -- I wouldn’t be surprised if she fell in love first, then decided to stay! -- but the 1940’s sees her married to a guy who’s like, "Listen, I love your bravery, but you cannot stay on Corfu any longer. The Nazis are coming. We need to go."
The next part of the story is something that I--with an admitted sense of schadenfreude--really want to know more about. There’s not much information available, but the bare bones fact is that at some point in World War II, Margo ended up pregnant and a prisoner of war in Ethiopia.
She was in a POW camp run by Italians, and when it was time to give birth, she had to have a C-section with zero drugs. No anesthesia, no numbing cream. Nothing. I want to cry just thinking about it.
The nuns in the camp felt so bad that basically as soon as Margo could move, they smuggled her and the baby out to safety. And at this point, Margo started to think, "OK, maybe there are worse things than being bored in England. Time to go back to the home counties."
So Margo moved back to Bournemouth, had another child, and got divorced. Shortly after the war ended, she used her inheritance to buy the house across the street from her mom, which she turned into a boarding house (like a bed-and-breakfast for those of us in the States.)
Living there, Margo quickly reclaimed her joie de vivre. In a notoriously stuffy era, she threw her doors open to everyone. Her granddaughter, who spent a lot of time there, recalls that there was always Greek music playing and Margo's favorite lodgers were a gay couple. Today that's no big deal, but again, this was the 1940’s, 1950’s. This is when Alan Turing saved the world from the Nazis, but because he was gay, was subjected to prosecution and a horrific so-called "treatment" that basically killed him.
So imagine being a gay couple and wanting to live together. Who’s going to rent a place to you? It was basically impossible to do this openly, but Margo was like, "Come on in! Have a drink." They threw parties all the time, according to her granddaughter. The house was just a blast.
There were also always animals everywhere because Gerry didn’t have the money to open his first wildlife preserve yet, so he kept a bunch of his creatures in her backyard.
Margo’s granddaughter, Tracey, was interviewed about all this and said that Margo "embraced everything and everybody and you could talk to her about anything. She was a natural confidante.”
Her granddaughter also talked about how Margo would take everyone camping, loading all the grandkids in the back of a van, and they’d get there and she wouldn’t have any supplies. She’d just be like, “Oh, what will we do for food?” Those of you who love The Durrells in Corfu can probably picture this.
The article continues: “Later, Tracy occasionally skipped school with friends, heading instead for Margo’s beach hut. “She would just sit with us and chat. She never asked why we weren’t in school.”
By the time Margo was in her fifties--so this is the 1970’s or so--she was like, "Alright, World War II’s well in the rearview mirror, time to get back out there." So she responded to an ad for some random job on a Greek cruise ship. There are all these pictures of her in her fifties hanging out with 20-year-olds sailing through Greece, having a blast.
By all accounts, Margo was a loving mother and a wonderful grandmother, but she didn’t abide by the dictates of society. She didn’t let what was perceived to be “normal” control her.
The Durrells were normal people who just wanted to live a more interesting life, and they did it.
Correction to the podcast audio:
Thanks to a listener for pointing out that I was in error on the publication date of Whatever Happened to Margo. It was originally published in 1995, and she didn’t pass away until 2007 — therefore, it was very much NOT a posthumous publication!