IT’S HARD to turn down the invitation to spend another hour in the company of the Durrell family, even when you’ve heard all the tales before.

Michael Haag has been slated for producing a “pointless book”, that simply reflects the sunlit frothiness whipped up by Gerald Durrell; neither adding to, challenging nor attempting to get to the heart of the real story.

But hey, what would you rather do on a chilly Sunday afternoon in Hexham than cocoon yourself in the Queen’s Hall theatre, listening to anecdotes imbued with all the qualities of childhood memories?

Michael, a publisher by trade, was actually friends with Laurence Durrell, thanks to the fact he’d written to the famed author of T he Alexandria Quartet to write an introduction to an E M Forster novel he was publishing.

A few years later, ‘Larry’ Durrell got back in touch, asking if Michael would publish his book of correspondence with Henry Miller. Faber & Faber were dragging their feet over it and Larry’s only proviso, in giving him the rights, was that Michael would let the much bigger enterprise know.

“He was using me as an agent provocateur,” he said. “The result was, though, that I went to visit Larry in the south of France and he introduced me to his friends and I got to know his second wife, Eve, who was the model for Justine in The Alexandria Quartet .

“I also got to know some of the family so, somehow, I got into it.”

Chairing the event, writer Sheilagh Matheson asked how the family had felt when they knew he planned to write a book about them. “Quite content” was the answer, and one or two, including Gerald Durrell’s widow, had thrown open their doors and family archives to him.

He recapped on how the family, all born in India, were left rudderless following the death of their father, civil engineer Laurence Samuel Durrell, at the age of just 42.

Matriarch Louisa was bereft, and it was eldest sibling Larry and his then wife, Nancy (he was married four times in all) who engineered the move to Corfu, on the grounds it would be a cheap and warm place to live.

Larry, in particular, had no taste for the England he’d experienced as a very unhappy boarding school pupil.

Louisa, who had also lost a baby daughter to diptheria, had taken refuge in alcohol by then. “Larry realised he couldn’t just go to Corfu and leave his mother – he had to look after her,” said Michael.

And that was the start of the saga, neigh, the legend.