I recently came across this rather amusing letter in The Guardian by Sara Holdsworth, whose parents rented out the top floor of their house in Woodside Park in north London to Gerald and Jacquie in 1955-1956, after returning from Cyprus, when Sara was a baby.
Holdsworth writes:
The number and exoticism of the animals they brought with them had been airily glossed over when they arranged the let. I was a baby at the time, and my mother was convinced that one of the snakes or monkeys would climb down a drainpipe and snatch me from my pram. However, before this could happen the Durrells left suddenly, taking their menagerie but leaving a strange assortment of clothes (including a pair of snakeskin high heels) which provided me with dressing-up gear for many years.
One assumes that the snakeskin high heels were probably Jacquie’s.
According to Gerald’s official biographer, Douglas Botting (who does not mention any snakeskin high heels, unfortunately), the Durrells left quickly because Gerald had begun writing his masterpiece, My Family and Other Animals, in the flat at Holden Road, but felt that he could not continue there, and so Margo came to collect him and Jacquie and their various animals, and they moved to her boarding house in Bournemouth.
Botting describes how Gerald decided to embark on writing this book after becoming ill with jaundice, mapping it out and deciding on which characters–animal and human–to include, and thinking up pseudonyms for those still alive who may potentially have been litigious, before realizing that:
Woodside Park was not the place to write the book. Gerald’s landlord objected to the two monkeys he was keeping in the flat.
One wonders whether, given Sara’s recollections of her parents feeling concerned that the Durrells’ snakes might crawl down drainpipes or the monkeys snatch her from her pram, that in fact (a) there was a bit (perhaps a lot) of tension between the Durrells and their landlord and landlady, and (b) Margo came to take them away to Bournemouth in a rush because of that, and not because Gerald thought Bournemouth would be more convivial to his muse.
Here is the house where the Durrells lived for a brief time, and where My Family and Other Animals was originally conceived, even if it did not end up being written here.
Durrelliana 