Fauna and Family. Gerald Durrell

the house, where I had the boat moored.

      “Zis … is yacht?” he asked in surprise and some alarm.

      I said that indeed this was our craft, stalwart and stable, and, he would note, a flat bottom to make it easier to walk about in. Whether he understood me, I do not know; perhaps he thought the Bootle Bumtrinket was merely the dinghy in which he was to be rowed out to the yacht, but he climbed in delicately, spread his handkerchief fastidiously over the seat and sat down gingerly. I leapt aboard and with the aid of a pole started punting the craft down the canal, which at this point was some twenty feet wide and two feet deep. I congratulated myself on the fact that only the day before I had decided that the Bootle Bumtrinket was starting to smell almost as pungently as the count, for over a period a lot of dead shrimps, seaweed and other debris had collected under her boards. I had sunk her in some two feet of sea water and given her bilges a thorough cleaning, so now, for this expedition, she was sparkling clean and smelt beautifully of sun-hot tar and paint and salt water.

      The old salt pans lay along the edge of the brackish lake, forming a giant chessboard with the cross-hatching of these placid canals, some as narrow as a chair, some thirty feet wide. Most of these waterways were only a couple of feet deep, but below the water lay an almost unplumbable depth of fine black silt. The Bootle Bumtrinket, by virtue of her shape and flat bottom, could be propelled up and down these inland waterways with comparative ease, for one did not have to worry about sudden gusts of wind or a sudden, bouncing cluster of wavelets, two things that always made her a bit alarmed. But the disadvantage of the canals was that they were fringed on each side with tall, rustling bamboo breaks which, while providing shade, precluded the wind, so the atmosphere was still, dark, hot and as richly odoriferous as a manure heap. For a time the artificial smell of the count vied with the scents of nature, but eventually nature won.

      “Ees smell,” the count pointed out. “In France ze water ees hygiene.”

      I said it would not be long before we left the canal and were out on the lake, where there would be no smell.

      “Ees heating,” was the count’s next discovery, mopping his face and moustache with a scent-drenched handkerchief, “ees heating much.”

      His pale face had, as a matter of fact, turned a light shade of heliotrope. I was just about to say that that problem, too, would be overcome once we reached the open lake when, to my alarm, I noticed something wrong with the Bootle Bumtrinket. She had settled sluggishly in the brown water and hardly moved to my punting. For a moment I could not imagine what was wrong with her; we had not run aground and I knew that there were no sandbanks in this canal. Then suddenly I noticed the swirl of water coiling up over the boards in the bottom of the boat. Surely, I thought, she could not have sprung a leak. Fascinated, I watched the water rise to engulf the bottom of the oblivious count’s shoes, and I suddenly realized what must have happened. When I had cleaned out the bilges I had, of course, removed the bung in the Bumtrinket’s bottom to let the fresh seawater in; apparently I had not replaced it with enough care, and now the canal water was pouring into the bilges. My first thought was to pull up the boards, find the bung and replace it, but the count was now sitting with his feet in about two inches of water and it seemed to me imperative that I turn the Bootle Bumtrinket towards the bank while I could still maneuver a trifle and get my exquisite passenger on shore. I did not mind being deposited in the canal by the Bootle Bumtrinket; after all, it was not her fault and, anyway, I was always in and out of the canals like a water rat in pursuit of water snakes, terrapins, frogs and other small fry, but I knew that the count would look askance at gamboling in two feet of water and an undetermined amount of mud, so my efforts to turn the leaden, waterlogged boat towards the bank were superhuman. Gradually, I felt the dead weight of the boat responding and her bows turning sluggishly towards the shore. Inch by inch I eased her towards the bamboos, and we were within ten feet of the bank when the count noticed what was happening.

      “Mon dieu!” he cried shrilly, “ve are submerge. My shoe is submerge. Ze boat, she ave sonk.”

      I stopped poling briefly to soothe the count. I told him that there was no danger; all he had to do was to sit still until I got him to the bank.

      “My shoe! Regardez my shoe!” he said, pointing at his now dripping and discolored footwear with such an expression of outrage and horror that it was all I could do not to giggle.

      A moment, I said to him, and I should have him on dry land, and indeed if he had done what I had said, this would have been the case, for I had managed to get the Bootle Bumtrinket to within six feet of the bamboos. But the count was worried about the state of his shoes, and this prompted him to do something very silly. He looked over his shoulder and saw land looming close, and in spite of my warning shout, he got to his feet and leapt onto the Bootle Bumtrinket’s minute foredeck. His intention was to leap from there to safety when I had maneuvered the boat a little closer, but he had not reckoned with the Bootle Bumtrinket’s temperament. A placid boat, she had nevertheless a few quirks, and one thing she did not like was anyone standing on her foredeck; she simply gave an odd sort of bucking twist, rather like a trained horse in a cowboy film, and, as it were, slid you over her shoulder. She did this to the count now.

      He fell into the water with a yell, spread-eagled like an ungainly frog, and his proud yachting cap floated towards the bamboo roots while he thrashed about in a porridge of water and mud. I was filled with a mixture of alarm and delight; I was delighted that the count had fallen in – though I knew my family would never believe that I had not engineered it – but I was alarmed at the way he was thrashing about. It is an instinctive action, when finding you are in shallow water, to try to stand up, but this action only makes you sink deeper into the glutinous mud. Once, Larry had fallen into one of these canals while out shooting and had made such a fuss and got himself so deeply embedded that it had required the united efforts of Margo, Leslie and myself to get him out. If the count got himself too wedged in the canal bottom, I would not have the strength to extricate him single-handed, and by the time I got help he might well have disappeared altogether beneath the gleaming mud. I abandoned ship and leapt into the canal to help him. Firstly, I knew how to walk in mud, and secondly, I weighed only a quarter of what the count weighed so I did not sink in so far. I shouted to him to keep quite still until I got to him.

      “Merde!” said the count, proving that he was at least keeping his mouth above water.

      He tried to get up once, but at the terrible, gobbling clutch of the mud, he uttered a despairing cry like a bereaved sea gull and lay still. Indeed, he was so frightened of the mud that when I reached him and tried to pull him shorewards he screamed and shouted and accused me of trying to push him in deeper. He was so absurdly childlike that I had a fit of the giggles, and this of course only made him worse. He had relapsed into French, which he was speaking with the rapidity of a machine gun, so with my tenuous command of the language I was unable to understand him. Eventually I got my unmannerly laughter under control and once more seized him under the armpits and started to drag him shorewards, but it suddenly occurred to me how ludicrous our predicament would seem to an onlooker – a twelve-year-old boy trying to rescue a six-foot man – and I was overcome again and sat down in the mud and laughed till I cried.

      “Vy you laughing? Vy you laughing?” screamed the count, trying to look over his shoulder at me. “You no laughing, you pulling, vite, vite!”

      Eventually, swallowing great hiccups of laughter, I started to pull the count again and eventually got him fairly close to the shore. Then I left him and climbed out onto the bank. This provoked another bout of hysteria.

      “No going avay! No going avay!” he yelled, panic-stricken. “I am sonk. No going avay!”

      I ignored him, and choosing seven of the tallest bamboos in the vicinity, I bent them over one by one until their stems splintered but did not snap, and then I twisted them round until they reached the count and formed a sort of green bridge between him and the shore. Acting on my instructions, he turned on his stomach and pulled himself along on this until at last he reached dry land. When he eventually got somewhat shakily to his feet, he looked as though the lower half of his body had been encased in melting chocolate.