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Margaret Durrell

Whatever Happened to Margo?

  • Whatever Happened to Margo?

  • *With a foreword from Gerald Durrell*
    In 1947, returning to the UK with two young children to support, Margaret Durrell starts a boarding house in Bournemouth. But any hopes of respectability are dashed as the tenants reveal themselves to be a host of eccentrics: from a painter of nudes to a pair of glamorous young nurses whose late-night shifts combined with an ever-revolving roster of gentleman callers leading to a neighbourhood rumour that Margo is running a brothel. Margo's own two sons, Gerry and Nicholas, prove to be every bit as mischievous as their famous Uncle Gerald - and he himself returns periodically with weird and wonderful animals, from marmosets to monkeys, that are quite unsuitable for life in a Bournemouth garden.

Margaret "Margo" Durrell (4th May 1920 - 16th January 2007) was the younger sister of novelist Lawrence Durrell, and elder sister of naturalist and author Gerald Durrell, whose Corfu Trilogy - My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods feature her as a character. Born in British India, she was brought up in India, England and Corfu. Margo had two children, Gerry and Nicholas, with her husband Jack Breeze, a British Royal Air Force pilot she met when he was stationed in Corfu during the Second World War. After they divorced, she moved back to Bournemouth, and started the boarding house she wrote about in her memoir, Whatever Happened to Margo?

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