Tough My Family and Other Animals Quiz | 25 Questions | Literature

Answer: Easy Recipes from Rajputana

Gerald's father was an engineer in India during the last days of the British Raj. Mother (aka Louisa Durrell) was born in India and only left after the death of her husband in 1928.

Answer: Mr. Beeler

Poor Mr. Beeler. He showed the Durrells every house he knew, and yet Mother dismissed them all. Upon learning that she required a bathroom, he couldn't understand why they needed one when they could bathe in the sea! The others on the list are people we will meet later...

Answer: Theosophy

Larry (aka Lawrence Durrell, author of "The Alexandria Quartet" among others) was Gerald's oldest sibling. Gerald describes him as "a small, blond firework, exploding ideas in other people's minds, and then curling up with catlike unctuousness and refusing to take any blame for the consequences."

Answer: Achilles

Achilles was a small land tortoise who had a passion for strawberries. He was one of a select handful of Gerry's pets that the whole family liked.

Answer: Tapirs and tea

George, the first of a roster of ineffectual tutors, quickly learned that the only way to engage Gerry's interest was to include "a sprig of zoology and a sprinkle of completely irrelevant detail." In truth, Gerald only had about three months of formal schooling in his life, if my memory serves.

Answer: A pocket microscope

Dr. Theodore Stephanides was Gerry's first real teacher. He was a Greek doctor, naturalist, historian, poet and war veteran. Three species of microscopic aquatic organisms and a crater on the moon are named after him.

Answer: Turkish Delight

Margo, unbeknownst to the family, started seeing a Turk. Upon being informed of this development in a particularly chilling manner by Spiro, Mother invited him to tea, whereupon he proceeded to alienate everyone except Margo. Fortunately, the trip to the cinema opened Margo's eyes!

Answer: Kissing the feet of St. Spiridion

Margo, Gerry and Mother got caught up in the annual adoration of St. Spiridion. It was tradition to kiss the mummified saint's feet while asking for intercession; Margo wanted him to help cure her acne. Instead, she caught the flu. Spiro brought Dr. Androuchelli (see Question 2) to treat her.

Answer: Melanie, Countess de Torro

Melanie, Countess de Torro endeared herself to Gerry by removing her wig within five minutes of arriving at the villa. Due to the Countess' ill-fitting dentures, Mother was convinced that Melanie had just recovered from syphilis. Theodore had to be brought in to explain to Mother just what the Countess had. Zatopec was an Armenian poet who, despite his advanced age, chased the peasant girls with verve. Jonquil and Michael, along with Durant, were artists who came to work, but spent their stays lying in the sun.

Answer: Persian

After the affair of the scorpion family in the matchbox, Mother decided that Gerry needed a new tutor; therefore, the Belgian consul was engaged to teach Gerry French while the search for a full-time tutor was underway. The consul was a cat-lover who owned three Persians, and his heart was broken by the sight of the numerous feral cats that roamed the town. So how did he help the overpopulation problem? He shot them. "So my lessons in French were continuously being interrupted while the consul leaped to the window to send yet another cat to a happier hunting ground." Quite a way to learn French!

Answer: Screech Owl

Gerry found Ulysses in a hollow tree when Ulysses was a baby. After an initial scuffle, Ulysses and Roger the dog became friends, and Ulysses would ride on Roger's back down to the sea for late night swims. This is one of my favorite chapters with the the unveiling of Mother's swimming costume and the hauntingly beautiful description of the dance of the fireflies, dolphins and phosphoresence on a moonless night.

Answer: The Bootle-Bumtrinket

Gerry decided to ask each member of the family for gifts that appealed to that person's interests. He asked Margo for muslin and calico, Mother for the most expensive items, Larry for books and Leslie for a boat. The boat, christened the Bootle-Bumtrinket (!) was almost circular, flat-bottomed, green and white inside and orange and black outside.

The family's motorboat was called the Sea Cow. The other two were boats that my husband owned!

Answer: Snipe

Larry, upon hearing of Leslie's first left-and-right, suggested that it was quite easy. Leslie, like the rest of the family, was tired of hearing Larry denigrate any and every accomplishment, so he suggested that Larry should demonstate a left-and-right while hunting snipe. Needless to say, the day was a complete fiasco -- Larry ended up in the drink (in more ways than one!), and the house caught fire.

Answer: Great-Uncle Patrick

When Great-Aunt Hermione writes to tell the family that she is coming to visit, Larry and Mother get into an arguement about the rest of the members of the family and the degrees of their insanity. Aunt Bertha kept imaginary cats, Great-Uncle Patrick was the nude whale-murderer, and Great-Aunt Hermione had been dying for decades and sang "Lead, Kindly Light" in the lavatory while "everyone queues on the landing." Louisa is Mother's name, and while she was a little eccentric, she certainly was not nuts!

Answer: A mantis

Cicely and Geronimo the gecko fought the Battle of the Bedroom. Cicely was an extremely large mantis, and while Geronimo eventually won, Cicely gave him quite the run for his money.

Answer: The lavatory

Gerry realized that not everyone dealt with the subject of lavatories with the same nonchalance as his family; he thought that this was Kralefsky's way of saying he needed to visit the toilet. Gerry learned otherwise one morning when he had eaten too many loquats for breakfast.

He asked to visit Kralefsky's mother, and after a brief absence, was ushered into a bedroom where an old, old woman with glorious auburn hair was tucked up in bed. The loquats were obviously forgotten as Gerry and Kralefsky's mother had a wonderfully odd conversation about flowers' personalities and conversations.

Answer: Bull-terriers

Kralefsky, while living a life devoted solely to his mother and his birds, indulged in a rich imaginary life in which he continually rescued A Lady from various perilous situations. In one of these adventures, he rescued a Lady from the slavering jaws of a bull-terrier in Hyde Park. He eventually strangled the beast with its own tongue.

Answer: Tosca

During the first performance, the stage crew neglected to pad the floor, so that when the heroine threw herself off the battlements, her yells of pain as she hit the floor "detracted somewhat from the impression that she was a shattered corpse on the rocks far below." The next night, the stage crew were over-enthusiastic in the padding, so that the heroine bounced back up into view several times! (By the way, "Help, Help the Globolinks" is a real opera by Gian Carlo Menotti!)

Answer: He killed his wife

Vido was the local prison island. Kosti received three years for killing his wife, while anyone caught dynamiting fish received five years. Trusted convicts were allowed to make boats and sail home for the weekend. Gerry met Kosti while looking for cockles; he got the cockles and a black-backed gull named Alecko. Alecko was yet another of Gerry's pets that wreaked havoc!

Answer: Leslie

Leslie went hunting the morning of the party and went to change. He appeared a few minutes later clad only in a small towel and bellowing for Gerry. Gerry had put the water-snakes in the bath to recover from sunstroke. Thank goodness Larry didn't find them!

Answer: To decide where Gerry should finish his studies

Kralefsky admitted to Mother that he had taught Gerry all he could. Mother decided that they would return to England to argue with their bank while they decided where Gerry would finish his schooling. (In fact, Gerald never completed more than three months of formal schooling.) In another book, Gerald claims that they left Corfu when Great Britain entered World War II.

Answer: Cameroon

The first expedition to Cameroon (as opposed to the second or third expeditions) produced "The Overloaded Ark." "The Drunken Forest" grew out of the South American expedition, and Gerald's last visit to Madagascar produced "The Aye-Aye and I."

Answer: 1982

Gerald met his second wife, Lee, in 1979. He went to Russia to film "Durrell in Russia" in 1984. Sadly, Gerald Durrell died in 1995.

Answer: Whipsnade Zoo

Gerald supplied Bristol, Belle Vue and Chester Zoos, as well as others, with animals caught on his various expeditions. In 1957, Gerald decided the animals caught on the last expedition to Camaroon would form the core of his own zoo. After boarding the animals with Margo and Mother in their back garden in Bournemouth, he founded the Jersey Zoological Park on the Channel Island of Jersey. Today, the zoo is the home of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust.

Answer: Fierce Creatures

In "Fierce Creatures," a zoo director decides that in order to boost profits, only deadly animals would be featured at the zoo.
Thank you for taking my quiz on "My Family and Other Animals."

"We hope that there will be fireflies and glow-worms at night to guide you and butterflies in hedges and forests to greet you.
We hope that your dawns will have an orchestra of bird song and that the sound of their wings and the opalescence of their colouring will dazzle you.
We hope that there will still be the extraordinary varieties of creatures sharing the land of the planet with you to enchant you and enrich your lives as they have done for us.
We hope that you will be grateful for having been born into such a magical world." - Gerald Durrell, from the inscription on a time capsule buried at Jersey Zoo in 1988.