Whatever Happened to Margo? By Margaret Durrell

Whatever Happened to Margo?

By Margaret Durrell

(Warner Books)

Sister of the more famous and, it has to be said, more talented Gerald and Lawrence, Margaret Durrell’s memoir of her career as a landlady in Bournemouth in 1947, discovered by the author’s granddaughter 30 years after it was written, is a light and airy concoction. Margo is probably best known to readers through Gerald’s autobiography, My Family and Other Animals. Returning home after extensive travels in Greece and Africa, she found herself, divorced and with two young sons to support, in need of financial security. So she took the advice of her domineering maiden aunt Patience, and started a boarding house in the respectable seaside town.

But her snobby aunt’s vision of reputable, middle-class boarders was never to be fulfilled. Her first tenant was Edward Feather, a painter of nudes, and his voluptuous model wife. There followed Mrs Williams, a battered wife, and her precocious, over- weight son, Nelson, and a chauvinist bricklayer, Mr Budden, and his long-suffering wife. Then there were Blanche and Judy, student nurses; Gordon, a nervous bachelor who eventually comes into some money; jazz musicians Roger and Andy, the latter of whom Margo embarks on an affair with; and Jane, a prim ex-nurse, lusting after bohemia in revealing black negligees. Add to this mayhem the irregular visits of brother Gerald, who brings a posse of monkeys and a six-foot python into the human menagerie.

The claustrophobic atmosphere of the time, long before Philip Larkin’s annus mirabilis of 1963, is captured well, with two pence looking down on a penny, and nosy neighbours trying to rule people’s lives. Alas for the culture vultures, there is little mention of, and no appearance by, Lawrence. Margo comes across as a generous spirit, free of the pettiness so prevalent then, and with an appreciation of the comic side of life. But one still wonders if the adventures related here really merited a whole book to themselves. Nevertheless, she has produced a not too taxing confection of anecdote and incident, which should pleasurably pass a few hours.

Commissioned for Image magazine