Several weeks later, Gerry attempts to capture a terrapin named Old Plop and instead, captures two water snakes. Clare’s encounters with the royal family continue, including an incident where she almost ran Princess Anne off the track during a race. The backdrop was sunshine, happiness and the love and laughter of a doting, slightly eccentric family, Young Gerald explored his passion for the animal kingdom with his inspirational tutor, Dr Theodore Stephanides.

A picturesque Greek island Gerry (aged ten) and his family (mother, two older brothers and one sister) moved to from Britain. Their unusual upbringing includes receiving a pony from the queen, knowing that the horses come first with their father, and thinking that the seasons are flat racing and jumping rather than spring, summer, autumn, and winter. When they were coming to England by train a ‘disgracefully efficient official’ at the Swiss frontier described them in a form: 'One travelling Circus and Staff'. During an excursion to a beautiful lake, Theodore regales them with a tale of an opera performance that went very wrong. Shared with a sprinkling of nostalgia, a love of family and a captivating humour throughout, he managed to make me wish I’d been there through it all (well, almost all… I think I would take a pass on the incident with the scorpions.Split infinitives was a popular vice for authors such as Daniel Defoe, Benjamin Franklin, William Wordsworth, Abraham Lincoln, George Eliot, Henry James, and Willa Cather.

Her father is a trainer in the horse racing industry, and has a mostly benign neglect for his daughter and son, her mother is somewhat frazzled by the children and helping to manage their business, and their grandmother is horrified by their wildness and poor manners. However, the book does succeed in preserving the impressions of ten- to fourteen-year-old Gerald extremely vividly and with a great deal of light-hearted humour. There was only one thing in life that could bring a smile to Lugaretzia’s gloomy countenance, a glint to her spaniel eyes, and that was a discussion of her ailments. Despite the omissions and inaccuracies, Lawrence Durrell commented: "This is a very wicked, very funny, and I'm afraid rather truthful book – the best argument I know for keeping thirteen-year-olds at boarding-schools and not letting them hang about the house listening in to conversations of their elders and betters".

Durrell moved Gerald, his sister Margo, and brother Leslie to the Greek island of Corfu to join her eldest son, Lawrence (Larry in the novel), who already lived there with his wife. I hadn’t considered this when I began to listen to her autobiography a few days ago, but it is certainly an apt time to experience her book. Adapted and directed by Daniel Austin, the play premiered on 22 February 2007 at Rouge Bouillon School in St Helier.