My childhood in Corfu shaped my life. If I had the craft of Merlin, I would give every child the gift of my childhood.
Interpretation
Gerald Durrell expresses the profound impact of his childhood experiences on his life and wishes to share their joy with every child.
In this quote, Gerald Durrell reflects on how his formative years in Corfu have significantly influenced his personal development and perspective on life. He conveys a deep nostalgia and appreciation for the innocence and wonder of childhood, expressing a desire to share those enriching experiences with all children, highlighting the importance of a joyful upbringing in shaping one's character and outlook.
In practice
During a speech at a childrenβs charity event, I would quote this to emphasize the importance of a happy childhood.
You cannot begin to preserve any species of animal unless you preserve the habitat in which it dwells. Disturb or destroy that habitat and you will exterminate the species as surely as if you had shot it. So conservation means that we have to preserve forest and grassland, river and lake, even the sea itself. This is vital not only for the preservation of animal life generally, but for the future existence of man himself - a point that seems to escape many people.
Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.
Every child can remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.
I was spoiled in a very strange way as a child, because everybody told me, from the moment I was able to hear, that I was absolutely marvelous, and I never heard a discouraging word for years, you see. I didn't know what was ahead of me.
When the others grew tired and went home and there was no one else to play with I used to play my own Test matches on the porch of our house, using a broom handle or a stick as the bat and a marble as the ball. I would arrange the pot plants to represent fielders and try to find the gaps as I played my shots.
I worry about kids today not having time to build a tree house or ride a bike or go fishing. I worry that life is getting faster and faster.
When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old, I was utterly baffled by the enthusiasm with which my cousin Brenda, a year and a half younger, accepted her mother's definition of her as someone who needed to go to bed at six-thirty and finish every bite of three vegetables, one of them yellow, with every meal.
Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.
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