Gerald Durrell: The Authorised Biography
Douglas Botting
This edition does not include illustrations.The authorised biography of the great naturalist and conservationist Gerald Durrell, who died aged seventy in January 1995 in Jersey, where he founded the zoo he’d dreamed of as a small boy and pioneered the captive breeding of animals for conservation.Gerald Durrell was a world-famous naturalist and popular author who wrote, in all, some thirty-seven immensely readable yarns, including the bestselling ‘My Family and Other Animals’. His other books include ‘Birds, Beasts and Relatives’, ‘The Bafut Beagles’ and ‘A Zoo in My Luggage’.Above all, he paved the way in print for the popular presentation of the natural world on television and presented twelve series himself – the early ones, of his own expeditions. Sir David Attenborough has said: ‘He was responsible for changing people’s attitudes to zoology and changing their agenda. He showed them small animals could be as interesting as apes and elephants…He was a pioneer with a marvellous sense of humour.’His brother was the famous writer Lawrence Durrell.
GERALD DURRELL
THE AUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY
Douglas Botting
Copyright (#ulink_9549dc6e-53b5-5cbd-8184-b0b3fc4c01af)
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers in 1999
Copyright © Douglas Boning 1999
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006387305
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2014 ISBN: 9780007381227
Version: 2017-06-09
Praise (#ulink_a570e80d-d5d7-5d6e-83b1-a14cd4418896)
Further reviews for Gerald Durrell:
‘Douglas Botting is to be congratulated on Gerald Durrell. He has done a magnificent job in telling the complex story of a complex person, wrinkles and all. Here is your chance to rediscover the man who for over sixty years exasperated and fascinated his friends and fans, giving hope to generations that there was a future for animals, plants and people.’
DAVID BELLAMY, Literary Review
‘The book serves up so much by way of compelling detail that the reader forges happily ahead … [an] affectionate account of a rumbustious figure.’
PENELOPE LIVELY, Daily Telegraph
‘Douglas Botting’s biography of Gerald Durrell is a whacking great book … But then, the environmentalist, naturalist, humorist, bestselling author and adventurer was a whacking great personality. His riotous enjoyment of life and his passion-ate, loving struggle for animal conservation fly off the pages. It’s an absorbing, hugely appealing story.’
New Scientist
‘Botting’s admiration and affection for his subject are infectious.’
Sunday Times
‘An extraordinary story … a biographer’s dream.’
EDWARD MARRIOTT, Evening Standard
‘Douglas Botting quotes continually from unpublished material – letters, journals, diaries – which prove to be a treasure-house of agile and acute observation … [He] is a perceptive, vigorous, unabashed chronicler … at his best in dealing with the complexities of Durrell’s own character and the crises in his life … This is the most enjoyable biography I have read for years.’
J.B. PICK, Scotsman
‘A compelling read.’
DAVID NICHOLSON-LORD, Financial Times
‘Botting gives us a full-on Durrell … a wonderfully detailed account.’
RICHARD D NORTH, Independent
‘Exhaustive research … poignant reading.’
CAROLINE MOOREHEAD, Spectator
‘Absorbing.’
Tatler
‘Gerald Durrell was a man of immense character as this enormous biography testifies … and he shines out of these pages. Botting’s writing style is a delight. He has a wry eye and his own dry wit … He has told a powerful story.’
JULIA LANGDON, The Herald (Glasgow)
‘Wonderfully affectionate account … wonderfully readable.’
CHRISTINE BARKER, Birmingham Post
‘The best parts are the descriptions of furry animals – both Durrell’s and the author’s – which appear on page after page … the book is a love story of a sort.’
ROY HATTERS LEY, Mail on Sunday
‘Joyful reading … Botting is on sure, captivating ground as he relates Durrell’s escapades … a valuable chronology of Durrell’s experiences.’
ROSEMARY GORING, Scotland on Sunday
‘Douglas Botting paints a vivid picture … an excellent reflection of the man behind the magic’
ISOBEL OSMONT, Jersey Evening News
‘This revealing and compulsive biography will inspire many generations to come.’
JOHN BURTON, World Land Trust Review
‘Botting’s biography is vast, vibrant, intense.’
MICK MIDDLES, Manchester Evening News
‘In this superb biography Douglas Botting keeps you turning the pages and even succeeds in conjuring tears at the end. Meticulous research has enabled him to bring us an in-depth picture of the man. It is a measure of its success that I seriously resented having to go to work, or to bed, whilst reading it.’
HILARY PAIPETI, The Corfiot Magazine, Greece
Epigraph (#ulink_83e260b9-cec0-566f-abe5-42681324d054)
Right in the Hart of the Africn Jungel a small wite man lives. Now there is one rather xtrordenry fackt about him that is that he is the frind of all animals.
From ‘The Man of Animals’ by Gerald Durrell, aged ten
Whoever saves one life,
Saves the world.
The Talmud
When you get to the Pearly Gates and St Peter asks you, ‘Well, what did you do?’ if you can say, ‘I saved a species from extinction,’ I think he’ll say, ‘OK, well, come on in.’
John Cleese
Contents
COVER (#u5e98352e-72c8-50d2-85aa-6095aedeb6ec)
TITLE PAGE (#uf109b1b3-12b2-58e8-b96f-319c68d008da)
COPYRIGHT (#u1d16985f-abc2-5490-ba8b-c4d98838591a)
PRAISE (#u357a640c-2182-5264-b8eb-0c47990ee8e3)
EPIGRAPH (#u5e9d1ac3-99e0-5171-b3be-3e78af5a5d90)
PREFACE (#ued66f7f9-0f6a-54f8-a834-bb3d35fe9d5a)
PROLOGUE (#u38bb8dbf-3933-5ace-ad5e-98446aa0f45a)
PART 1: ‘The Boy’s Mad … Snails in his Pockets!’ (#u591d26ea-59cb-59c2-bed5-5394daaa587a)
1 Landfall in Jamshedpur: India 1925–1928 (#u52f0587a-7226-568d-bfa1-c27765d6b8a0)
2 ‘The Most Ignorant Boy in the School’: England 1928–1935 (#ubb9065f9-f609-528b-9dd0-f4c73a653c1a)
3 The Gates of Paradise: Corfu 1935–1936 (#u07d6beb2-9495-58eb-8f13-ccdc66158eec)
4 The Garden of the Gods: Corfu 1937–1939 (#ue2273203-231a-5c04-97de-f3a9303bc759)
5 Gerald in Wartime: England 1939–1945 (#ud7d3c692-65db-5af3-8d64-0eefa5c421a7)
6 Odd-Beast Boy: Whipsnade 1945–1946 (#u6cdead58-1ac1-5d93-810b-4b6293433f7f)
7 Planning for Adventure: 1946–1947 (#uacf7cf89-51b4-50b1-a84d-45896b68f067)
PART 2: Promise Fulfilled (#u3d40bc85-3ba2-5ebf-9e85-d8ca0f326851)
8 To the Back of Beyond: First Cameroons Expedition 1947–1948 (#u6d3f1566-0a7f-5873-940b-67f912aa685d)
9 In the Land of the Fon: Second Cameroons Expedition 1948–1949 (#u2c8666e4-1d47-5a4c-af86-569367843de1)
10 New Worlds to Conquer: Love and Marriage 1949–1951 (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Writing Man: 1951–1953 (#litres_trial_promo)
12 Of Beasts and Books: 1953–1955 (#litres_trial_promo)
13 The Book of the Idyll: 1955 (#litres_trial_promo)
14 Man and Nature: 1955–1956 (#litres_trial_promo)
15 ‘A Wonderful Place for a Zoo’: 1957–1959 (#litres_trial_promo)
PART 3: The Price of Endeavour (#litres_trial_promo)
16 A Zoo is Born: 1959–1960 (#litres_trial_promo)
17 ‘We’re All Going to be Devoured’: Alarms and Excursions 1960–1962 (#litres_trial_promo)
18 Durrell’s Ark: 1962–1965 (#litres_trial_promo)
19 Volcano Rabbits and the King of Corfu: 1965–1968 (#litres_trial_promo)
20 Crack-Up: 1968–1970 (#litres_trial_promo)
21 Pulling Through: 1970–1971 (#litres_trial_promo)
22 The Palace Revolution: 1971–1973 (#litres_trial_promo)
23 Gerald in America: 1973–1974 (#litres_trial_promo)
24 ‘Two Very Lost People’: 1975–1976 (#litres_trial_promo)
25 Love Story: Prelude: 1977–1978 (#litres_trial_promo)
26 Love Story: Finale: 1978–1979 (#litres_trial_promo)
PART 4: Back on the Road (#litres_trial_promo)
27 A Zoo with a View: 1979–1980 (#litres_trial_promo)
28 Ark on the Move: From the Island of the Dodo to the Land of the Lemur 1980–1982 (#litres_trial_promo)
29 The Amateur Naturalist: 1982–1984 (#litres_trial_promo)
30 To Russia with Lee: 1984–1985 (#litres_trial_promo)
31 Grand Old Man: 1985–1991 (#litres_trial_promo)
PART 5: A Long Goodbye (#litres_trial_promo)
32 ‘Details of my Hypochondria’: 1992–1994 (#litres_trial_promo)
33 ‘A Whole New Adventure’: 1994–1995 (#litres_trial_promo)
AFTERWORD (#litres_trial_promo)
THE DURRELL WILDLIFE CONSERVATION TRUST (#litres_trial_promo)
SOURCES (#litres_trial_promo)
BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo)
INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
BY THE SAME AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)
Preface (#ulink_dac48ed5-d68d-53a4-bbfe-f96dacacc422)
I met Gerald Durrell only once in the flesh. It was in the early summer of 1989 at the London Butterfly House in Syon Park, where he and his wife Lee ceremonially launched an initiative called ‘Programme for Belize’ – intended to save for posterity a superb tract of tropical forest in the north-east of that country – by releasing newly hatched Belizean butterflies into the Butterfly House. Our encounter afterwards, as Durrell passed down a line of extended hands on his way out through the door, was brief, polite and perfunctory. At this meeting neither he nor I could have dreamed that biographer was meeting biographee. Had we known it, we would have had a lot to talk about. With better luck all round, we might have been talking still.
I thought no more about this until, one scorching late September noon in 1994, I found myself sitting with my elder daughter Kate on the terrace of the White House, Lawrence Durrell’s old pre-war home at Kalami on the north-east coast of Corfu, watching the caïques coming in to the bay one by one, each with its complement of tourists on board. Across the water I could hear the running commentary of the Greek skippers. ‘And now we enter beautiful Kalami Bay,’ they intoned. ‘On your left you will see the famous White House where Gerald Durrell once lived in Corfu and wrote his famous book, My Family and Other Animals …’
Gerald Durrell, of course, had done nothing of the kind. I turned to Kate. ‘That’s all wrong,’ I said. ‘Someone ought to do something to get it right. Come to think of it, someone ought to do something about writing a proper biography of Gerald Durrell.’
Kate, who was a Durrell fan, replied: ‘Perhaps you ought to write it yourself.’
It was not a totally wild idea. I had already written two books about traveller-naturalists, and my recently published biography of the author-naturalist Gavin Maxwell had been well enough received for me to begin to think about writing some kind of sequel. I had read most of Gerald Durrell’s books, I had even reviewed one or two for the national press, I felt I understood his world and mind-set, I had even – dammit! – shaken the man by the hand in the Butterfly House. As soon as I returned to England I phoned Gerald Durrell’s personal assistant at Jersey Zoo, and on his advice wrote to Durrell’s literary agent enclosing a copy of my latest book and, for good measure, proposing myself as her client’s future biographer.
Within a few hours my book was in Durrell’s hands in a London hospital ward, where he lay gravely ill after a major operation. He knew of Gavin Maxwell, of course, and had reviewed Ring of Bright Water for the New York Times. He opened the book and read the first lines of the preface: ‘The sea in the little bay is still tonight and a full moon casts a wan pallor over the Sound and the hills of Skye. A driftwood fire crackles in the hearth of the croft on the beach, and through the open window I can hear all the sounds and ghosts of the night – the kraak of a solitary heron stalking fish in the moonlight at the edge of the shore, a seal singing softly in the bay, the plaintive child-like voice rising and falling like a lullaby in the dark …’ Here in the noisy bedlam of the public ward, a world of bedpans, drips, catheters, trolleys and rubber sheets, of pain, squalor and despair, his weary head sunk deep into his hard starched pillow, his wild white hair strewn about him, he recognised at once a kind of mirror image of his own past life and dreams. He turned the page. ‘A guru of the wilds among a whole generation, Gavin Maxwell was ranked with John Burroughs, W. H. Hudson and Gerald Durrell as one of the finest nature writers of the last hundred years …’
Durrell sat up a bit. For some time he had been putting together scattered fragments of his own autobiography. But lately, as the ceaseless cycle of fever and crisis, relapse and remission continued seemingly without end, he had put aside his notebook and pen. From time to time in recent years he had been approached by authors or would-be authors who had put themselves forward as his prospective biographer. Many of these had been wishful-thinkers and no-hopers, but one or two had been serious candidates. So long as he was well and active the story of his life was his own copy, and his alone. But now the situation had changed. He asked his wife Lee to read the book aloud to him, and as she read he began to feel that perhaps he had found his biographer. Henceforth the biography was a reality, something to aim at, a goal to achieve. In the highly adverse circumstances in which he found himself, it was to be one of the last preoccupations of his life.
Gerald was anxious to meet up with me in order to talk about the project face to face, and to come to a decision. But each time Lee called me with a date on which to visit the hospital she would have to ring back to reschedule, because Gerald was back in intensive care. Our meeting was not to be. Shortly after his death in January 1995, Lee authorised me to write a full and frank account of his life and work.
Over the next two years, I came to know more about Gerald Durrell than I did about myself. I thought I had got the measure of the man. Then one day I came upon an extraordinary, and utterly unexpected, sequence of private love letters. Here was a man moved by passion, joy, fear, romantic and erotic love, and by gratitude to the love of his life and to life itself and to the world. As I read, I inwardly sang and laughed and declaimed with him. And then I came to a letter written on 31 July 1978, and I fell silent:
I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like golden coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers … I have felt winds as tender and warm as a lover’s breath, winds straight from the South Pole, bleak and wailing like a lost child … I have known silence: the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the silence when great music ends … I have heard tree frogs in an orchestration as complicated as Bach singing in a forest lit by a million emerald fireflies. I have heard the cobweb squeak of the bat, wolves baying at a winter’s moon … I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms. I have seen whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea. I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of dolphins … All this I did without you. This was my loss …
As I read, I began to realise, first with disbelief and then with some degree of unease, that the voice inside my head was no longer my own. I had heard enough of Gerald Durrell’s soft, beguiling, cultured English diction on tapes of interviews and radio and television broadcasts to be able to identify it with certainty. There was no doubt. The voice reading this impassioned love letter was Durrell’s own. Not only had I got the measure of Gerald Durrell; Gerald Durrell, it seemed, had got the measure of me. I recalled something Sir David Attenborough had said at the farewell celebration of the man in London after his death: ‘Gerald Durrell was magic.’
This, then, is the biography of Gerald Durrell – naturalist, traveller, raconteur, humorist, visionary, broadcaster, best-selling author, one of the great nature writers of the twentieth century, one of the great conservation leaders of the modern world, champion of the animal kingdom, founder and Honourary Director of Jersey Zoo and the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust, saviour of endangered species, champion of the lowly, the defenceless and the doomed.
I don’t think it is hyperbole to say that though Gerald Durrell was not a particularly saintly man – his warts were several, and sometimes spectacular – he led a saintly life in pursuit of a saintly mission: simply put, to save animal species from extinction at the hands of man. In his way he was a latter-day St Francis, confronting a problem that St Francis could never have conceived in his worst nightmare. Since his struggle with that problem helped to kill him, it could be said that Gerald Durrell laid down his life for the animal kingdom and the world of nature he loved.
From the outset this biography was conceived as a full, searching and rounded portrait of the man, his life and his work. It was Lee Durrell’s wish, when she authorised the book after her husband’s death, that it should be so. In other words, though this book is described as the ‘authorised’ biography, I have had carte blanche in the writing of it, and the portrait of the man and the narrative of the life are mine and mine alone – though none of it could have been put together without the help of many others.
What ‘authorised’ actually means in this case is that I have been allowed exclusive access to the personal and professional archives of Gerald Durrell (which are voluminous) and to the files of the organisation he founded and directed, the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust (now renamed the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust). I also enjoyed unqualified freedom in approaching anybody involved in the Gerald Durrell story, of whom there are many.
I would especially like to thank Dr Lee Durrell, Gerald Durrell’s widow and Honorary Director of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, for her unstinting support and tireless assistance during the researching and writing of this biography. I am doubly grateful to her, first for allowing me unconditional access both to the Durrell private archives and the archives of Jersey Zoo and Trust, and second for allowing me to refer to and quote from the unpublished works of Gerald Durrell in this book. I would also particularly like to thank Jacquie Durrell, who plays a crucial part in this story at several key stages, for her tremendous help and encouragement in the preparation of the first half of this biography, as well as those who have contributed to this story from its very centre – Margaret Duncan (née Durrell), Jeremy Mallinson OBE (Director of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust), John Hartley (International Programme Director of the Trust), Simon Hicks (currently Development Director of the Trust) and Tony Allchurch (General Administrator, Jersey Zoo). I am also grateful to Peter Harrison, who between teaching assignments in Poland, Russia and the Gulf delved tirelessly into the Durrells’ early years, introduced me to Gerald Durrell’s Corfu and its dramatis personae, and produced a meticulous gloss on my first draft; John and Vivien Burton of the World Land Trust, for many valuable comments and insights; Anthony Smith, for his untiring advice in matters of science and zoology; and Sir David Attenborough, for critically important guidance. Thanks also to my publisher Richard Johnson and my editor Robert Lacey at HarperCollins for the care and support they have afforded this project, and my agent Andrew Hewson at John Johnson and Gerald Durrell’s agent Anthea Morton-Saner at Curtis Brown for all their hands-on help and encouragement in bringing this huge task to fruition.
My thanks to Curtis Brown, acting on behalf of Mrs Lee Durrell, for permission to quote from published and unpublished works by Gerald Durrell.
Extracts from Lawrence Durrell’s book Prospero’s Cell (Faber & Faber, 1945), Bitter Lemons (Faber & Faber, 1957) and Spirit of Place, Mediterranean Writings (Faber & Faber, 1969) are reproduced by kind permission of the publishers.
Extracts from Jacquie Durrell’s Beasts in my Bed (Collins, 1967) are reproduced by kind permission of the author; extracts from David Hughes’s Himself and Other Animals: A Portrait of Gerald Durrell (Hutchinson, 1997) are reproduced by permission of the author and the publishers.
I would also like to thank Jill Adams; Michael Armstrong; Marie Aspioti; Michael Barrett; Quentin Bloxam (General Curator, Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust); Kate and Anna Botting; Gordon Bowker; Gerry Breeze; Nicholas Breeze; Sarah Breeze; Tracy Breeze; Felicity Bryan; Rev. Geoffrey Carr; David Cobham; Philip Coffey; Anthony Condos; Menelaus Condos; Fleur Cowles; Sophie Danforth; Anthony Daniells; Eve Durrell; Mr and Mrs Alex Emmett; Doreen Evans; Dr Roger Evans (Manuscript Department, British Library); Tom Evans; W. Paterson Ferns; Bronwen Garth-Thornton; Bob Golding; Anna Grapes; Peter Grose; Lady Rhona Guthrie; Dr Jeremy Guyer; Jonathan Harris; Paula Harris; Gwen Hayball; E.C. (Teddy) Hodgkin; Penelope Hope (née Durrell); David Hughes; Dr Michael Hunter; The Earl of Jersey; Carl Jones; Colin Jones; Dorothy Keep; Sarah Kennedy; Françhise Kestsman; Patrick Leigh-Fermor; Vi Lort-Phillips; Thomas Lovejoy; Judy Mackrell; Odette Mallinson; Stephen Manessi; Dr Bob Martin; Alexandra Mayhew; Alexia Mercouri; Dr Desmond Morris; Lesley Norton; Richard Odgers; Dr Alan Ogden; Dr Guy O’Keeffe; Peter Olney; Eli Palatiano; Christopher Parsons OBE; Joss Pearson; Peggy Peel; Lucy Pendar; Julian Pettifer; Joan Porter; Tim R. Newell Price (Archivist, Leighton Park School); Betty Renouf; Dr Marielle Risse; Robin Rumboll; Tom Salmon; Peter Scott; Richard Scott-Simon; Dr Bula Senapati; Maree Shillingford; Trudy Smith; Mary Stephanides; Dr Ian Swingland; Dr Christopher Tibbs; Lesley Walden; Sam and Catha Weller; Edward Whitley; Celia Yeo.
Douglas Batting
14 December 1998
Prologue (#ulink_eb6b6afa-ea31-5c63-9666-d1b6ea4249a3)
The blue kingdom of the sea is a treasure-house of strange beasts which the boy longs to collect and observe. At first it is frustrating, for he can only peck along the shoreline like some forlorn seabird, capturing the small fry in the shallows and occasionally being tantalised by something mysterious and wonderful cast up on the shore. But now he has got a boat, and the whole kingdom is opened up for him, from the golden red castles of rock and their deep pools and underwater caves in the north to the long, glittering white sand dunes lying like snowdrifts in the south.
When he goes on any long expedition in the boat the boy always takes plenty of food and water in case he is blown off course and shipwrecked. If he has a full crew on board – three dogs, an owl, and sometimes a pigeon – and is carrying a full cargo – some two dozen containers full of seawater and specimens – it is a back-aching load to push through the water with the oars.
On this particular day the boy has decided to pay a visit to a small bay where a host of fascinating creatures dwell. His particular quarry is a peacock blenny, a curious-looking fish with a body shaped like an eel, and pop eyes and thick lips vaguely reminiscent of a hippopotamus. The boy is anxious to capture some of these colourful little fish, since it is their breeding season, and he is hoping to establish a colony of them in one of his aquariums so that he can watch their courtship.
After half an hour’s stiff rowing he reaches the bay, which is rimmed with silvery olive groves and great tangles of broom that sends its heavy, musky scent out over the still, clear waters. He anchors the boat in two feet of water near the reef, and then, armed with his butterfly net and a wide-mouthed jar, he steps into the gin-clear sea which is as warm as a bath.
Everywhere there is such a profusion of life – sea slugs, sea urchins, chitons and top shells, hermit crabs and spider crabs – that it requires stern concentration for the boy not to be diverted from his task. Before long he catches a fine male blenny, brilliant and almost iridescent in its courting outfit of many colours, and by lunchtime he has also collected two green species of starfish which he has not seen previously.
The sun is now blisteringly hot, and most of the sea life has disappeared under rocks to lurk in the shade. The boy makes his way to the shore to sit under the olive trees and eat his lunch. The air is heavy with the scent of broom and full of the zinging cries of cicadas. Presently, after finishing his lunch, he loads up the boat, gets the dogs on board, and begins to row home so that he can settle the blennies in their aquarium.
When he gets up the next morning he finds, to his intense annoyance, that the blennies must have been active at dawn, for a number of eggs have been laid on the roof of the catching pot. Which female is responsible for this he does not know, but the male is a very protective and resolute father, attacking the boy’s finger when he picks up the pot to look at the eggs.
The boy waits eagerly for the baby blennies to appear, but there must be something wrong with the aeration of the water, for only two of the eggs have hatched. One of the diminutive babies, to his horror, is eaten by its own mother, before his very eyes. Not wishing to have a double case of infanticide on his conscience, he puts the second baby in a jar and rows back down the coast to the bay where he caught its parents. Here he releases it, with his blessing, into the clear tepid water ringed with broom, hoping against hope that it will rear many multicoloured offspring of its own.
As a pioneer experiment in captive breeding, the blenny business is not an unqualified success. But it doesn’t matter. The blenny is not an endangered species. The sea round Corfu is stuffed with blennies. And there is plenty of time, for the boy, Gerald Durrell, is still only twelve years old, a whole life with animals stretches before him, and the summer blazes on for eternity.
PART ONE ‘The Boy’s Mad … Snails in his Pockets!’ (#ulink_4d636693-c7c3-5d5e-b9c7-3618601cfbef)
ONE Landfall in Jamshedpur India 1925–1928 (#ulink_a420e846-c1e2-5339-8437-5edfd949cd77)
Gerald Malcolm Durrell was born in Jamshedpur, Bihar Province, India, on 7 January 1925, the fourth surviving child of Louisa Florence Durrell (nee Dixie), aged thirty-eight, and Lawrence Samuel Durrell, forty, a civil engineer.
When Gerald was older his mother told him something about the circumstances of his entry into the world. During the later stages of her pregnancy, it seems, she had swelled up to a prodigious degree, her enormous girth accentuated by her diminutive height, for she stood only five feet tall in her stockinged feet. Eventually she had grown so ashamed of her immense rotundity that she refused to leave the house. This annoyed her husband, who told her she ought to get out and about and go down to the Club, the social and recreational centre where all the local members of the British Raj used to congregate. ‘I can’t go to the Club looking like this,’ she retorted. ‘I look like an elephant.’ Whereupon Gerald’s father suggested building a howdah in which she could pass unnoticed, a flippancy which so annoyed her that she refused to speak to him for two days.
‘As other women have cravings for coke or wood shavings or similar extraordinary foods when they are in this state,’ Gerald was to record in an unpublished memoir about his Indian childhood, ‘my mother’s craving was for champagne, of which she drank an inordinate quantity until I was born. To this I attribute the fact that I have always drunk excessively, and especially champagne, whenever I could afford it.’
Gerald was by far the largest of his mother’s babies, which might explain why she had grown so huge during her pregnancy, and when he was fully grown he would stand head and shoulders not only above her but above his sister and two brothers, who were all almost as small as their mother. But his birth, when it came, was simple. ‘I slipped out of her like an otter into a pool,’ he was to write, relating what his mother had told him. The staff from the household and from his father’s firm gathered round to congratulate the sahib and memsahib on the arrival of their latest son. ‘All the Indians agreed that I was a special baby, and that I had been born with a golden spoon in my mouth and that everything during my lifetime would be exactly as I wished it. Looking back at my life, I see that they were quite right.’
Both of Gerald’s parents, as well as his grandfather on his mother’s side, were Anglo-Indians in the old sense of the term (not Eurasians, but British whites with their family roots in India) who had been born and brought up in the India of the Raj. His father had been born in Dum Dum in Bengal on 2.3 September 1884, and his mother in Roorkee, North-West Province, on 16 January 1886. Her father too had been born in Roorkee, and was six years old when the Indian Mutiny polarised the subcontinent in 1857.
Gerald’s family thus had little knowledge or experience of the distant but hallowed motherland of England. The depth of their association with India, which they regarded as their true home and native land, was such that when, many years later, Gerald’s mother applied for a British passport, she was to declare: ‘I am a citizen of India.’ Though Gerald was not to live long in India, its influence on his sense of identity was palpable, and at no point in his life was he ever to feel himself entirely English, in terms of nationality, culture or behaviour. For his three older siblings, who lived a good deal longer in India – Lawrence George (not quite thirteen when Gerald was born, and at school in England), Leslie Stewart (seven, and also about to go to school in England) and Margaret Isabel Mabel (five) – the sense of dislocation was even stronger.
Gerald’s mother was of pure Protestant Irish descent, the Dixies hailing from Cork in what is now the Irish Republic. It was to this Irish line that two of her sons, Gerald and Lawrence, were to attribute their gift of the gab and wilder ways. Louisa’s father, George Dixie, who died before her marriage, had been head clerk and accountant at the Ganges Canal Foundry in Roorkee. It was in Roorkee that she first met Lawrence Samuel Durrell, then aged twenty-five, who was studying there, and in Roorkee that the couple married in November 1910. ‘God-fearing, lusty, chapel-going Mutiny stock’, was how Gerald’s eldest brother Lawrence was to describe the family’s Indian roots. ‘My grandma sat up on the veranda of the house with a shotgun across her knees waiting for the mutiny gangs: but when they saw her they went the other way. Hence the family face … I’m one of the world’s expatriates anyhow.’
Louisa Durrell was an endearing woman, rather shy and quietly humorous, and totally dedicated to her children. She was so protective towards her brood that she was for ever rushing home from parties and receptions to make sure they were safe and sound – not without reason, for India was a dangerous place for children: her second-born, Margery Ruth, had died of diphtheria in early infancy, and Lawrence and Leslie were often ill with one ailment or another. Her husband adored her, but forbade her from involving herself in most of the usual routines and duties of a wife and mother of her era (including the daily practicalities of running a home and family, all of which were attended to by the native servants) because he felt she should observe the proprieties of her status as a memsahib of the Raj.
But though she was utterly devoted to her dynamic, patriarchal and largely conventional husband, and seemingly compliant to his every wish, there lay behind Louisa’s quiet, non-confrontational façade a highly individual and unusual woman, independent of spirit and not without fortitude, who unobtrusively went her own way in many things and quietly defied the rigid codes of conduct laid down for her sex in that era of high empire. As an Anglo-Indian, she was less mindful of her exalted status than the average white memsahib who passed her time in the subcontinent in a state of aloof exile. As a young woman she had defied convention and trained as a nurse, and had even scrubbed floors (unheard of for a white woman in India then). When her husband’s work took him up-country or out into the wilds, his young wife, along with their children, would go with him and rough it without complaint. When he was back in town, and out at the office or on a construction site, she would spend hours in the heat and smoke of the kitchen learning from cook the art of curry-making, at which she became very adept, and developing a taste for gin at sundown, though Lawrence Samuel made sure she limited herself to no more than two chota-pegs a day. It was probably from his mother that Gerald (like his two brothers) inherited his humour and the alcohol gene. But it was from his father that he inherited his bright blue eyes and hair type (full and flopping over his eyes) and his height, exceptional in an otherwise very short family.
Physically minute, impractical, fey and seemingly somewhat bewildered as a person, Louisa was also in a way rather Oriental in her outlook and mindset – her son Lawrence was to describe her as a kind of born-again Buddhist. If Father was the respectable, uncomplicated patriarch, Mother was to a degree his opposite. ‘My mother was the neurotic,’ Lawrence Durrell once remarked. ‘She provided the hysterical Irish parts of us and also the sensibility that goes with it. She’s really to blame for us, I think – she should have been run in years ago.’ Not altogether surprisingly, she had an interest in the paranormal. Perhaps it was the Irish in her, perhaps it was the miasma of India, but she had a fondness for ghosts, and felt no fear of them. In one of the family’s Indian postings their house backed on to a wild forest, and the servants, shivering with fright, would complain to Louisa of the lonely spirit that cried there at night. She would then take a lantern – so the story goes – and set off into the depths of the forest on her own, with the servants trying to stop her, crying, ‘Oh memsahib, oh memsahib,’ until she was swallowed up by the trees and all they could hear was her voice calling out, ‘Come on, come on,’ as if trying to placate the lonely, desolate spirit.
Mother was to remain a hugely important figure in the lives of her offspring. ‘I was the lucky little bastard that got all the attention,’ Gerald was to recall years later. ‘She was a most marvellous non-entity; a great mattress for her children.’ But though Gerald was always the closest to his mother, it was Leslie who was her favourite, perhaps because she realised he might have the most need for her. Everyone loved Louisa – everyone, that is, except her eldest son Lawrence, who never forgave her for allowing him to be sent to England to complete his education, abandoned among the ‘savages’.
Gerald’s father, Lawrence Samuel Durrell, was, strictly speaking, not a Durrell at all. The facts of the matter are buried in a tangle of relationships involving his grandmother, Mahala Tye, in the depths of rural Suffolk in the early years of the Victorian era. After the suicide of her first husband, William Durrell, it seems that Mahala gave birth to an illegitimate son, whose biological father was a Suffolk farmer by the name of Samuel Stearne. Shortly afterwards Mahala married Henry Page, a labourer, who became the baby’s stepfather and by whom she had five other children. Later in life the illegitimate son – the future grandfather of Gerald Durrell – sailed to India, and in Lucknow in 1883 he married for the second time, to Dora Johnstone, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a sergeant-major in the Royal Horse Brigade, by whom he had eight children. Grandfather Durrell went on to serve with distinction in the Boxer Rebellion in China, rising eventually to the rank of major and dying in Portsmouth in 1914, shortly after volunteering for active service in the Great War at the age of sixty-three. The first of his children by his second wife was Gerald Durrell’s father, Lawrence Samuel, elevated from birth by his illegitimate father’s steady climb through the social scale from yokel stock to officer class.
Lawrence Samuel Durrell by all accounts was a decent but rather distant and often absent figure to his children, for his work as an engineer took him across the length and breadth of British India, from the Punjab and the Himalayas to Bengal, and as far away as the jungles of Burma. According to his eldest son, Lawrence, he was a good, serious, sincere man, deeply imbued with the Victorian faith in the overriding power of science to solve all things. He was not an imaginative man, nor was he particularly cultured, but though he was a straightforward servant of empire, he was not an entirely conventional one; he did not live like the British but like the Anglo-Indians, and he resigned from his club when an Oxford-educated Indian doctor he had proposed for membership was blackballed, even though he had saved his eldest son’s life. This disregard for racial distinctions was shared by his wife.
Gerald’s father was clearly a man of exceptional ability, determination and industry who rose from relatively modest beginnings to become a trail-blazing railway builder and civil engineer of the kind celebrated by the laureate of the Raj, Rudyard Kipling – an empire-builder in the classic mould. Dedicated to playing his part in laying down the infrastructure of a modern, industrialising India, from the construction of roads, railways, canals and bridges to the building of hospitals, factories and schools, Lawrence Samuel slogged away in monsoon and jungle, carting his family around with him like a band of privileged gypsies, and earning the highest commendations from his employers. ‘A splendid man at his work,’ went one report, ‘full of energy and careful over details … With tact and gentle persuasion, Mr Durrell has managed his workmen splendidly.’
By 1918 Lawrence Samuel was Chief Engineer with the Darjeeling and Himalaya Railway on the India-Tibet border, leaving two years later to found his own company – Durrell & Co., Engineers and Contractors – in the new industrial boom town of Jamshedpur, planned and built as a ‘garden city’ by the giant Tata Iron and Steel Company, but in those days a raw-edged place in the middle of a hot, dusty plain. In the four years preceding Gerald’s birth he became one of the fat cats of British India, successful, rich – and desperately overworked.
Most of the major construction projects that Durrell & Co. helped to build in Jamshedpur still stand today, among them extensions to the Tata works, the Tinplate Company of India, the Indian Cable Company, the Enamelled Ironware Company and much else beside, including ‘Beldi’, the home in which Gerald was born and in which he spent the first years of his life. ‘Beldi’ was a regulation D/6 type bungalow in European Town, Jamshedpur, a residence appropriate to Lawrence Samuel Durrell’s status as a top engineer – a rung or two below the Army and the Indian Civil Service, a rung or two above the box-wallahs and commercials. It was not grand, but it was comfortable, with cool, shuttered rooms, a large veranda with bamboo screens against the heat of the sun, and a sizeable garden of lawn, shrubs and trees, where Gerry the toddler took his first steps.
Gerald was never much aware of his three older siblings during his infant years in India. His elder brother Lawrence had already been packed off to school in England by the time he was born, and Leslie (now back in India) and Margaret (five years his senior), had advanced far beyond baby talk and infant toys. He was even less aware of the outer fringes of the Durrell family network – the army of aunts and his daunting paternal grandmother, Dora, the overweight, doom-preaching, oppressive and rather terrifying matriarch known as ‘Big Granny’, who circulated around the family and was destined not to expire until 1943. For much of his time Gerald was left in the company of his Indian surrogate mother, or ayah. ‘In those days children only saw their parents when they were presented to them at four o’clock for the family tea,’ Margaret was to recall. ‘So our lives revolved around the nursery and our Hindu ayah and Catholic governess. Gerry would have had more to do with the ayah than we older children did, so the biggest influence in his Indian years would have been the Indian rather than the European part of the household.’
In later years Gerald claimed to remember a number of incidents from his early life in Jamshedpur. One of the most vivid of these, often recounted, was his first visit to a zoo, an experience so memorable that he attributed to it the beginning of his lifelong passion for animals and zoos. In fact there was no zoo in Jamshedpur in Gerald’s day, though there is one now. Even if there had been a zoo, it is highly unlikely that Gerald could have remembered it, for when he was only a toddler of fourteen months he left Jamshedpur with his father, mother, sister Margaret and Big Granny Dora, never to return. On 11 March 1926 the Durrell party sailed from Bombay for England on board the P&O ship SS Ranchi, and by April they were in London.
In the India of that time it was normal for British servants of the Raj to take a furlough in Britain roughly every two years, but it seems that the Durrells also had a mission to perform during their visit. Lawrence Samuel was keen to find a property to buy in London, either as an investment or as a place to retire to, or both. As a successful engineer of empire he had begun to amass a small fortune, and had already invested in a large fruit farm in Tasmania, which he had purchased unseen. He was now forty-two, and his workload was punishing. Many years later his future (albeit posthumous) daughter-in-law Nancy, first wife of his eldest son Lawrence, was to recall as she lay dying: ‘Father decided he’d had enough of this sort of life and wanted to go to England and live an entirely different sort of life. His ambition was to go on the stage and partner Evelyn Laye in the music hall.’ Whether this was true (which seems improbable) or was one of Lawrence’s numerous canards (which seems very possible), it appears that Father did intend to strike camp at some time, and leave an India where the clamour for self-rule was growing noticeably more vociferous and militant. But not yet. In due course he purchased a suitably grand eight-bedroomed house at 43 Alleyn Park in Dulwich, not far from Lawrence and Leslie’s schools.
On 12 November 192.6 Big Granny sailed back to Bombay on board the SS Rawalpindi after a six-month spell in England. A little later Louisa, Leslie, Margaret and Gerald followed her. They returned not to Jamshedpur but to Lahore, where Lawrence Samuel, who was engaged on contract work in the region, had established a new home in a substantial bungalow at 7 Davis Street. It was in Lahore that such memories as Gerald retained of his life in India were formed – though these were fragmentary and fleeting, and undoubtedly coloured by what his mother, brothers and sister later told him.
From an early age, it seems, Gerald was endowed (like his brother Lawrence) with a highly developed, almost photographic memory. He was to recall in an unpublished memoir:
My handful of memories of this time were just little sharply etched vignettes in brilliant colour, with sight and sound and smell and taste added – the scarlet of the sunsets, for example, the harsh singing cries of a peacock, the smell of coriander and bananas, the tastes of different kinds of rice, especially the wonderful taste of my favourite breakfast, which was rice boiled in buffalo milk with sugar. I remember I used to wear little suits made out of tussore. I remember the lovely colour of it – a very pale biscuit brown – and the delicious soft silky feel of it and the rustling sound it made as my ayah dressed me in the morning. I remember my ayah refused to wake me in the morning unless it was to the strains of Harry Lauder on the gramophone, because otherwise I would be grumpy and morose and she couldn’t do anything with me. The gramophone was a wind-up one and although it was very scratchy, like a lot of mice in a tin box, it was wonderful to my ears, and I would wake up with a beaming smile on my face, which made my ayah heave a sigh of relief.
It was in the India of his infancy that Gerald’s intense sense of colour was born, but it was the young child’s first glimpse of other life forms that was to have the profoundest impact on him. That glimpse was brief and unpromising, but for Gerald it was unforgettable, and from it all else was to follow. He was walking with his ayah, he remembered, and happened to wander to the edge of the road, where there was a shallow ditch.
Here I found two enormous slugs, at least they appeared enormous to me, though they were probably not much more than three or four inches long. They were pale coffee colour with dark chocolate stripes and they were slowly sliding about over each other in a sort of dance and the slime from their bodies made them glitter as though they were freshly varnished. They were glutinous and beautiful and I thought they were the most marvellous creatures I had ever seen. When my ayah discovered I was slug-watching she pulled me away and told me that I must not touch or even watch such disgusting creatures as they were dirty and horrible. I could not understand, even at that age, that she could think such beautiful creatures could be dirty, and throughout my life I have met so many people who think things are disgusting or dirty or dangerous when they are nothing of the sort but miraculous pieces of nature.
Before long the infant Gerald really did set foot inside his first zoo, and his life was transformed for evermore. The zoo was in Lahore (not, as he was later to recall, in Jamshedpur), and the impact of this modest establishment was overwhelming. Gerald was to recall of this landmark in his life:
The rich ammonia-like smell coming from the tiger and leopard cages, the incredible chatter and screams from the small group of monkeys and the melodious song of the various birds that inhabited the little zoo captivated me from the start. I remember the lovely black freckles on the leopard’s skin, and the tiger, as he walked, looking like a rippling golden sea. The zoo was in fact very tiny and the cages minuscule and probably never cleaned out, and certainly if I saw the zoo today I would be the first to have it closed down, but as a child it was a magic place. Having been there once, nothing could keep me away.
According to his mother, ‘zoo’ was one of the first words Gerald ever uttered, and whenever he was asked where he wanted to go he would say ‘zoo’, loudly and belligerently. If he didn’t go to the zoo his screams of frustration could be heard ‘from the top of Everest to the Bay of Bengal’. Once, when he was too ill even to visit the zoo, Gerald was provided with a sort of substitute zoo of his own by the family butler, Jomen, who modelled a whole menagerie of animals – rhinoceros, lion, tiger, antelope – out of red laterite clay from the garden. Perhaps it was this collection of little mud replicas that gave Gerald the idea – that was to become an idée fixe by the time he was six – of having a real zoo of his own one day.
Other creatures that reinforced Gerald’s love of animals made their appearance at this time:
One day my Uncle John, Mother’s favourite brother, a great shikar [hunter] who lived at Ranchi, and was employed by the government to shoot man-eating tigers and rogue elephants, sent us, in a moment of aberration, two fat Himalayan bear cubs. They were weaned but had come straight from the wild and no attempt had been made to tame them. They had very long, sharp claws and very sharp, white teeth and uttered a series of yarring cries of rage and frustration. They were housed temporarily under a big, dome-like basket on the back lawn and a man was detailed to look after them. Of course, having your own bears was a wonderful thing, even though they did smell very lavatorial. Unfortunately, at that age Margaret was ripe for any sort of mischief, and as soon as the bears’ minder went off for some food she would overturn the bears’ basket and then run screaming into the house, shouting, ‘The bears are out! The bears are out!’ After two or three days of this my mother’s nerves could stand no more. She was terrified that the bears would escape and find me sitting on my rug and proceed to disembowel me. So the bears were packed up and sent down to the little zoo.
The long, golden days of Gerald’s privileged infancy, with an army of servants and all the perks of an imperial elite, were to come to an abrupt stop in a tragedy of great consequence for all the Durrells.
Early in 1928 Gerald’s father fell seriously ill. Though the illness was never satisfactorily diagnosed, the symptoms suggest a brain tumour of some kind. Margaret remembered her father suffering from severe headaches, and talking and behaving in a very odd and frightening manner. One day, for example, she was dismayed to see him reach for the inkwell on his desk and drink its contents as if it were a glass of whisky or a cup of tea. Friends and relatives suggested it might help if the ailing man was taken up into the cool of the hills, away from the heat of the Lahore plains, and eventually he was transported to the hill station of Dalhousie, which at a height of nearly eight thousand feet crowned the most westerly shoulder of a magnificent snowy range of the lower Himalayas. Dalhousie had a small English cottage hospital looking out over the mountains, the air was crisp and the ambience calm.
Lawrence Samuel was made as comfortable as possible, but his condition continued to deteriorate. Louisa stayed at the hospital to be near him, while the younger children were billeted at a nearby house with their Irish governess. Sometimes the family would drive out into the surrounding hills, where in the cool pine forests, loud with the rustle of the trees, the throbbing chorus of birdsong and the bubbling of the shallow, brownwater streams, Gerald was given a broader vision of the world of nature. Occasionally he was given rides on his father’s large bay horse, surrounded by a ring of servants in case he fell off. Not even the death of the horse, which fell down a cliff when Gerald suddenly startled it as it grazed with its feet tethered near the edge one day, could wean him off his burgeoning passion for the animal world.
On 16 April 1928, when Gerald was three years and three months of age, his father died of a suspected cerebral haemorrhage, and was buried the next day at the English cemetery at Dalhousie. Neither Gerald nor Margaret attended the funeral. Mother was entirely shattered.
Within the family there was a general feeling that Father’s premature death, at the age of forty-three, was brought on by worry and overwork. He had made a fortune as a railway-builder, but had fared less well when he turned to road construction, on one occasion undertaking to build a highway on a fixed-price contact, only to find that the subsoil was solid rock. His sister Elsie believed he had ‘worked himself to death’, and was told that at the moment he was taken ill he was ‘out in the heat of the midday sun supervising a critical piece of work on a bridge’. According to Nancy Durrell (who would have got it from her husband Lawrence), her father-in-law had quarrelled with the Indian partners in his business. ‘They apparently turned a bit nasty, and there was a very gruelling lawsuit, which he handled all by himself, he wouldn’t have a lawyer. But he got overexcited, and what exactly happened I don’t know, but in the end he had a sort of brainstorm, and he died rather quickly.’
In July 1928 Lawrence Samuel’s will was granted probate, and Louisa, now embarking on almost half a lifetime of widowhood, was left the sum of 246,217 rupees, the equivalent of £18,500 at the exchange rate of the time, or more than half a million pounds in today’s money. Financially enriched but emotionally beggared, she was left bereft: grieving, alone and helpless. So great was her despair that years later she was to confess she had contemplated suicide. It was only the thought of abandoning Gerry, still totally dependent on her love and care, that restrained her. Mother and child were thus bound together for ever in a relationship of mutual debt and devotion, for each, in their different ways, had given the other the gift of life.
‘When my father died,’ Gerald was to recall, ‘my mother was as ill-prepared to face life as a newly hatched sparrow. Dad had been the completely Edwardian husband and father. He handled all the business matters and was in complete control of all finances. Thus my mother, never having to worry where the next anna was coming from, treated money as a useful commodity that grew on trees.’
Gerald himself was seemingly unscathed by the family tragedy:
I must confess my father’s demise had little or no effect upon me, since he was a remote figure. I would see him twice a day for half an hour and he would tell me stories about the three bears. I knew he was my daddy, but I was on much greater terms of intimacy with Mother and my ayah than with my father. The moment he died I was whisked away by my ayah to stay with nearby friends, leaving my mother, heartbroken, with the task of reorganising our lives. At first she told me her inclination was to stay in India, but then she listened to the advice of the Raj colony. She had four young children in need of education – the fact that there were perfectly good educational facilities in India was ignored, they were not English educational facilities, to get a proper education one must go ‘home’. So mother sold up the house and had everything, including the furniture, shipped off ahead, and we headed for ‘home’.
Mother, Margaret and Gerald took a train that bore them across half the breadth of India to Bombay, where they were to stay with relatives while they waited for the passenger liner that was to carry them, first class, to England. So Gerald sailed away from the land of his birth, not to return till almost half a century had gone by and he was white-haired and bushy-bearded. Like most of the other children on board, he was a good sailor – unlike the grown-ups. ‘Two days out,’ he wrote in his unpublished memoir, ‘we were struck by a tumultuous storm. Huge grey-green waves battered the ship and she ground and shuddered. All the mothers immediately succumbed to sea-sickness, to be followed very shortly by the ayahs, who turned from a lovely biscuit brown to a leaden jade green. The sound of retching was like a chorus of frogs and the stifling hot air was filled with the smell of vomit.’
The reluctant crew were forced to take charge of a dozen or more children of around Gerald’s age. Twice a day the children were linked together by rope like a chain gang, so that none of them could fall overboard, and taken up on deck for some fresh air, before being taken back down again to play blind man’s buff and grandmother’s footsteps in the heaving, yawing dining saloon. One of the crew had a cine projector and a lot of ‘Felix the Cat’ cartoon films, and these were shown in the club room as a way of diverting the children during the long haul to Aden and Suez.
‘I was riveted,’ Gerald remembered. ‘I knew about pictures but I had not realised that pictures could move. Felix, of course, was a very simplistic, stick-like animal, but his antics kept us all enthralled. We were provided with bits of paper and pencils to scribble with, and while the others were scribbling I was trying to draw Felix, who had become my hero. I was infuriated because I could not get him right, simple a drawing though he was. When I finally succeeded, I was even more infuriated because, of course, he would not move.’
Whether it was a real live creature, or an animated image, or a drawing on a page, the child brought with him a passion and a tenderness for animals so innate it was as if it was embedded in his genes. In the years to follow, come hell or high water, this affinity was not to be denied.
So young Gerald came to a new home in a new country – and a new life without a father. The loss of the family’s patriarch was to have a profound effect on the lives of all the Durrell siblings, for, deprived of paternal authority, they grew up free to ‘do their own thing’, decades before the expression came into vogue.
TWO ‘The Most Ignorant Boy in the School’ England 1928–1935 (#ulink_a3eaeb72-1d57-5aa4-bff7-14caa86ab7d6)
The house at 43 Alleyn Park, in the prosperous and leafy south London suburb of Dulwich, now became the Durrell family home. It was a substantial house, befitting the family of a servant of empire who had made his pile, with large rooms on three floors and a big garden enclosing it. Before long Mother had installed Gerald’s Aunt Prudence, a butler and a huge mastiff guard dog that chased the tradesmen and according to Gerald devoured two little dogs a day. But the new house was vast, expensive to run, and haunted: one evening Mother saw the ghost of her late husband, as plain as day, smoking a cigarette in a chair – or so Gerald claimed.
Early in 1930, therefore, when Gerald was five, the family took over a large flat at 10 Queen’s Court, an annexe of the sprawling Queen’s Hotel, a Victorian pile stuck in the faded south London suburb of Upper Norwood. Mother’s cousin Fan lived here, along with other marooned refugees from the Indian Army and Civil Service, so for her the place felt almost like home. The family’s new abode was a strange, elongated flat in the hotel grounds. The entrance was through the hotel, but there was a side door which allowed access to the extensive garden, with its lawns, trees and pond. ‘The flat itself consisted of a big dining room cum drawing room,’ Gerald recalled, ‘a room opposite which was for Larry, then a small room in which I kept my toys, then a minuscule bathroom and kitchen, and finally Mother’s spacious bedroom. Lying in bed in her room, you could look down the whole length of the flat to the front door.’
Mother’s susceptibility to the paranormal showed no signs of abating, for this place too turned out to be haunted, one ghost being visible, two others audible. The first took the form of a woman who appeared at the foot of Mother’s bed when she woke from a siesta one day. The woman smiled at Mother, then faded slowly away. She appeared again a few weeks later, this time witnessed by Gerald’s cousins Molly and Phyllis, who came running into the kitchen shouting, ‘Auntie, Auntie, there’s a strange lady in your room.’
The second ghost took the form of a voice that kept telling Mother to put her head in the gas oven, and the third manifested itself in Larry’s room one night when he was playing in a jazz band up in town. In Larry’s room reposed the great teak roll-top desk that his father had had built to his own design. When the roll-top was raised or lowered the noise, Gerald recalled, was indescribable. That night, while Mother lay smoking in bed, waiting anxiously for Larry’s return, she heard the unmistakable racket of the roll-top opening and closing. ‘Taking me firmly by the hand,’ Gerald was to recount, ‘we went down the length of the flat, listening to the constant clatter of the lid being pulled shut and then opened again, but the moment we opened the door and looked into the room there was nothing to be seen.’
It was in the garden of the Queen’s Hotel, while he was trying to catch birds by putting salt on their tails, that Gerald first came face to face with the more sensual side of life, in the form of a beautiful young woman called Tabitha. ‘She had big, melting brown eyes,’ he recalled, ‘brown and glossy as new horse chestnuts, a wide smile, brown hair bobbed and with a fringe like a Christmas cracker.’ Before long Tabitha was looking after him in her tiny flat whenever Mother went off house-hunting. She had a cat called Cuthbert and two goldfish called Mr Jenkins and Clara Butt, as well as a lot of gentlemen friends who came and went and seemed to spend a shorter or longer time in her bedroom – to talk business, she told her young friend.
‘I loved the days I spent with Tabitha,’ Gerald wrote in his private memoir:
In fact I loved Tabitha very much. She was so gentle and gay, her smile engulfed you with love. She smelt gorgeous too, which was important to me, since Mother smelt gorgeous as well. She was not only very sweet and kind but very funny. She had a squeaky wind-up gramophone and a pile of records of Harry Lauder and Jack Buchanan, so we would clear away the furniture and Tabitha would teach me how to do the Charleston and the waltz. At times we went round and round so fast that eventually we would collapse on the sofa, she with peals of laughter and me giggling like a hysteric. Tabitha also taught me lots of songs, including one which enchanted me:
Iz ’e an Aussie, iz ’e, Lizzie?
Iz ’e an Aussie, iz ’e, eh?
Iz it because ’e iz an Aussie
That ’e makes you feel this way?
But alas, somehow or other Mother got to hear of Tabitha’s business associates and my visits to her flat were ended. So Tabitha’s lovely brown eyes and wonderful smell disappeared from my world, and I mourned the fact that I could no longer waltz and Charleston and sing silly songs with this enchanting girl.
Looking back in later years, it struck Gerald as odd that Mother should have been so prim. ‘After all,’ he noted, ‘she was rearing a brood of offspring who became sexually precocious and pursued their own interests with the relentlessness of dynamos. Still, her fledglings managed to erode her Victorian attitudes and train her into more broad-minded ways, so that when, at the age of twenty-one, I went home one weekend with a girlfriend, I found a note from my mother which said: “I have made up two beds, dear, and the double bed, since you didn’t tell me whether you are sleeping together or not. The sheets are aired and the gin is in the dining room cupboard.”’
It was while living at the Queen’s Hotel annexe that Mother got to know the Brown family – a matriarchy of English provenance who had recently come over from America, consisting of Granny Richardson, her daughter Mrs Brown, and Mrs Brown’s young daughter Dorothy. Like the Durrells, the Browns had a garden flat at the hotel, and the two mothers soon became good friends, for both were exiles who had returned to a foreign motherland. Dorothy Brown was eleven when she first encountered Gerald, who had just turned five. ‘He was a bright little spark,’ she recalled, ‘and even then he was very fond of animals. When our cat had kittens he was always there on the doorstep, clamouring to see them. He was very much a mother’s boy and always terribly fond of her. As far as he was concerned she could do no wrong.’
Like Louisa Durrell, the Browns were looking for a house to buy, and finally settled on Bournemouth, a salubrious seaside resort on the south coast, stuffed with decaying ex-members of His Majesty’s Forces and genteel ladies eking out modest pensions, but warmer and sunnier than most towns in England, and surrounded by beautiful countryside. Mother decided to follow her friends’ example and move to Bournemouth, and early in 1931 the family became the proud possessors of Berridge House, at 6 Spur Hill, Parkstone, complete with a butler, a housekeeper and two servants. This marked the beginning of the Durrells’ close association with Bournemouth, which has lasted to the present day.
Berridge House was a huge Victorian mansion standing in four acres of grounds, part woodland, part orchard, with a lawn on which two games of tennis could be played at once and a herbaceous border which was, Gerald remembered, ‘slightly wider than the Nile and home to nearly every known weed, with the exception of Mandrake’. When Mother was asked if the house was not a trifle large for a widowed lady and a six-year-old boy – Margaret was now at Malvern, Leslie at Dulwich and Larry at a crammer’s – she answered, rather vaguely, that she had to have room for her children’s friends. To the young Gerald the place looked like a gigantic dolls’ house, with a bewildering quantity of bedrooms, bathrooms and attic rooms, a huge drawing room, dining room and kitchen, a cellar and a parquet-floored basement ballroom that ran the length and width of the house. On rainy days this vast ballroom was his playroom, where he could indulge in ingenuity and uproar without knocking anything over or disturbing anyone upstairs.
To celebrate the move Mother bought Gerald a Cocker spaniel, the first dog of his very own. It arrived in a cardboard box, and when Gerald opened it the creature inside took his breath away – ‘a dog all soft and squidgy, with hair the colour of ripe corn and big brown eyes and a loving disposition’. Gerald named the dog Simon, and from the moment he lifted him from his cardboard box he became his devoted companion.
There was no comparable companion for Mother, however, and the reality of her lonely state began to take its toll of her. ‘The difficulties of living in a great, echoing, empty house with only a small boy as a companion began to tell on Mother’s nerves,’ Gerry was to write in his memoir. She devoted herself to her cooking and teaching Gerald how to cook, and to tending the herbaceous borders in the garden, but then came the evening, and solitude. ‘She was lonely,’ Gerald wrote, ‘and she took to mourning the death of my father in earnest with the aid of the Demon Drink, resorting to the bottle more and more frequently.’
It helped, perhaps, that Gerald shared her bed with her. ‘At the end of the day I would have my bath and then, with a clothes brush, I would climb into the bed that I shared with Mother and dust it carefully to make sure there was not a speck of dust anywhere. Then Mother would come to bed and I would curl up against her warm body in its silk nightgown and frequently I would wake to find myself pressed up against her in a state of arousal.’ For many years to come, mother and child were to remain closer to one another than to any other human beings.
Eventually, matters reached a crisis. ‘Mother departed,’ Gerald remembered, ‘to have what in those days was called a “nervous breakdown” and Miss Burroughs entered my life.’ Miss Burroughs was Gerald’s first and last English governess. ‘She had a face,’ he recalled, ‘which disappointment had crumpled, and embedded in it were two eyes, grey and sharp as flints.’ Miss Burroughs had never had to deal with a small boy before. Terrified for some reason that Gerald might be kidnapped, she instituted a regime of locked doors, as though he were a dangerous prisoner. ‘I was locked in the kitchen, the drawing room and the dining room, but the worst thing was that she banished Simon from my bedroom, saying that dogs were full of germs, and locked me in at night, so that by morning my bladder was bursting, and as I didn’t dare wet the bed I had to lift a corner of the carpet to relieve myself.’
Miss Burroughs’ cooking left a lot – indeed, ‘virtually everything’ – to be desired. She was, Gerald recollected, the only person he had ever met who put sago in the gruel she called soup – ‘like drinking frog-spawn’. If the weather was bad, he was confined to the ballroom, where he and Simon invented their own games. Boy and dog built up an astonishing rapport, understanding completely how each other’s human and canine imaginations were working.
‘Sometimes, miraculously, Simon would become a pride of lions,’ Gerald was to record, ‘and I a lone Christian in an arena. As I prepared to strangle him, he would behave in the most un-lionlike way, slobbering over me with his moist, velvet-soft mouth and crooning endearments. At other times I would change into a dog and follow him round the ballroom on all fours, panting when he panted, scratching when he scratched and flinging myself down in abandoned attitudes as he did.’
Simon, Gerald noticed, was basically a coward, for whom ‘a lawnmower was a machine from hell’, and sadly it was his cowardice, which should have saved his life, that was to cause his death. Startled by a chimneysweep driving away from the house on a motorcycle and sidecar, he turned and fled down the drive, into the road and under the wheel of a car, which, Gerald was to lament, ‘neatly crushed Simon’s skull, killing him instantly’.
Gerald was left as alone as his mother, now returned from her cure and, for the moment, recovered from her addiction. It was high time, she decided, for him to begin some kind of formal education and to mix with other children. Down the hill from Berridge House was a kindergarten called The Birches, run by a large old lady called Auntie and a dapper, kindly, intelligent woman called Miss Squire, better known to the children as Squig. Gerald remembered The Birches with fondness. It was the only school he ever attended where he completed the course.
Gerald loved The Birches because both Auntie and Miss Squire knew exactly how to teach and treat young people. Every morning he would take a tribute of slugs, snails, earwigs and other creepy-crawlies down to Squig, sometimes in matchboxes and sometimes in his pocket, thus forming a zoo of a kind. ‘The boy’s mad!’ exclaimed brother Lawrence when he learnt of this. ‘Snails in his pockets …!’
‘Aren’t they lovely?’ Gerald would tell Squig.
‘Oh, yes dear, quite beautiful,’ Squig would reply, ‘but I think they would probably be happier in the garden.’
Noticing the interest that Gerald’s wrigglies aroused in his fellow pupils, Squig bought and installed an aquarium with some goldfish and pond snails in it, and they would all watch the antics of these creatures absolutely enthralled. It was about this time that Gerald, still only six, announced to his mother his wish to have a zoo of his own one day. He had kept a collection of small toy animals made of lead – camel, penguin, elephant, two tigers – in a wooden orange-box at the Queen’s Hotel, but one day as he walked along the Bournemouth promenade with his mother he described to her his blueprint for a collection of real creatures, listing the species, the kinds of cages they would be housed in, and the cottage in which he and his mother would live at his zoo.
In 1932 the family moved a short distance to a brand new house at 18 Wimborne Road, Bournemouth, which Mother named Dixie Lodge in honour of her family. Though still substantial, it was a rather smaller property than Berridge House, in less extensive grounds, and so easier and cheaper to run. In Gerald’s view it was a pleasanter place altogether, and the garden contained a number of climbable trees which were home to all sorts of strange insects. Here he settled down – ‘quite happily’, he said, ‘under the raucous but benign influence of Lottie, the Swiss maid’.
But then, when he was eight, disaster struck out of a clear blue sky:
Mother did something so terrible that I was bereft of words. She enrolled me in the local school. Not a pleasant kindergarten like The Birches, where you made things out of plasticine and drew pictures, but a real school. Wychwood School was a prep school where they expected you to learn things like algebra and history – and things that were even greater anathema to me, like sports. As both my scholastic achievements and interest in sports were nil, I was, not unnaturally, somewhat of a dullard.
Football and cricket were an utter bore for Gerald, gym and swimming lessons an absolute torture, bullying a constant menace. The only part of the curriculum that appealed to him was the one and a half hours per week devoted to natural history. ‘This was taken by the gym mistress, Miss Allard,’ he remembered, ‘a tall blonde lady with protuberant blue eyes. As soon as she realised my genuine interest in natural history, she went out of her way to take a lot of trouble with me and so she became my heroine.’
Gerald came to hate the school so vehemently that it was all Louisa could do to keep him there at all. ‘He used to be taken to school by his mother in the morning,’ recalled a visitor to Dixie Lodge; ‘at any rate she tried to take him – and he would cling onto the railings on the way, screaming, and then he’d have to be taken home, and then he’d get a temperature and the doctor would say, it’s no good, you’ll have to keep him away from school.’ Eventually the GP diagnosed Gerald’s recurring condition as a chronic form of what he called ‘school pain’ – a psychosomatic reaction which prevented the boy from ever completing his prep school education.
Soon after the Durrells moved into Dixie Lodge, Lawrence (who lived there off and on, as did Leslie and Margaret) had struck up a friendship with Alan Thomas, the assistant manager at Bournemouth’s famous Commin’s bookshop, a young man of about Lawrence’s age who shared many of his intellectual and literary interests. Enormously tall, thin, bearded and ‘spider-like’, Alan lived in nearby Boscombe, and soon got to know the family well, becoming a kind of extra brother to the boys and a lifelong friend. It was not long after Gerald had joined the unhappy ranks of Wychwood that Alan happened to spot the headmaster browsing in his shop.
‘I believe you have the brother of a friend of mine at your school,’ said Alan.
‘Oh?’ said the headmaster. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Durrell. Gerald Durrell,’ Alan replied.
‘The most ignorant boy in the school,’ snapped the headmaster, and stalked out of the shop.
Gerald stumbled with difficulty through his lessons, until one day, falsely accused of a misdemeanour by the school sneak and given six of the best on his bare bottom by the headmaster, his mother took the mortified boy away from the school for good, thus terminating his formal schooling for ever at the age of nine.
To help Gerald get over the trauma of his beating, Mother decided to buy him a present, and took him down on the tram to Bournemouth town centre to choose a dog at the pet shop. Gerald recalled:
There was a whole litter of curly-headed black puppies in the window and I stood for a long time wondering which one I should buy. At length I decided on the smallest one, the one that was getting the most bullying from the others, and he was purchased for the noble sum of ten shillings. I carried him home in triumph and christened him Roger and he turned out to be one of the most intelligent, brave and lovely dogs that I have ever had. He grew rapidly into something resembling a small Airedale covered with the sort of curls you find on a poodle. He was very intelligent and soon mastered several tricks, such as dying for King and Country.
Roger was destined one day to become famous – and, in a sense, immortal.
Relieved of the intolerable burden of schooling, Gerald reverted to his normal cheerful, engaging self, exploring the garden, climbing the trees, playing with his dog, roaming around the house with his pockets full of slugs and snails, dreaming up pranks. It was Gerald, Dorothy Brown recalled, who would put stink-bombs in the coal scuttle when he came over with the family for Christmas. Mother presided over the moveable feast that was life at Dixie Lodge. ‘No one was ever turned away from her table,’ Dorothy remembered, ‘and all her children’s friends were always welcome. “How many of you can come round tonight?” she would ask, and they would all sit down, young and old together. Mother was very small but she had a very big heart. She was very friendly and a good mixer and she was a wonderful cook.’
The delicious aromas that drifted out of Mother’s kitchen, the range and quality of the dishes she brought to the dining table, and the enthusiasm, good cheer and riotous conversation enjoyed by the company that sat down at that table had a deep and permanent impact on her youngest child. Gerald emerged into maturity as if he had been born a gourmet and a gourmand. Much of her cooking Louisa had learned from her mother, the rest from her Indian cooks in the kitchens of her various homes, where she would secretly spend hours behind her disapproving husband’s back. When she returned to England she brought with her the cookbooks and notebooks she had carted around the subcontinent during her itinerant life there. Some of Louisa’s favourite recipes – English, Anglo-Indian and Indian – had been copied out in a perfect Victorian copperplate by her mother: ‘Chappatis’, ‘Toffy’, ‘A Cake’, ‘Milk Punch’, ‘German Puffs’, ‘Jew Pickle’ (prunes, chillies, dates, mango and green ginger). Most, though, were in her own hand, and embraced the cuisine of the world, from ‘Afghan Cauliflower’, ‘Indian Budgees’ and ‘American Way of Frying Chicken’ to ‘Dutch Apple Pudding’, ‘Indian Plum Cake’, ‘Russian Sweet’, ‘All Purpose Cake’, ‘Spiral Socks’ (a mysterious entry) and ‘Baby’s Knitted Cap’ (another). But Indian cookery was her tour de force and alcoholic concoctions her hobby: dandelion wine, raisin wine, ginger wine (requiring six bottles of rum) and daisy wine (four quarts of daisy blossoms, yeast, lemons, mangoes and sugar).
Not surprisingly, Alan Thomas was soon spending almost every evening and weekend with the family. They were, he quickly realised, a most extraordinary bunch:
There never was more generous hospitality. Nobody who has known the family at all well can deny that their company is ‘life-enhancing’. All six members of the family were remarkable in themselves, but in lively reaction to each other the whole was greater than the sum of the parts. Amid the gales of Rabelaisian laughter, the wit, Larry’s songs accompanied by piano or guitar, the furious arguments and animated conversation going on long into the night, I felt that life had taken on a new dimension.
At this time Lawrence was writing, Margaret rebelling about returning to school, and Leslie ‘crooning, like a devoted mother, over his new collection of firearms’. As for Gerald, though he was still tender in years he was already a great animal collector, and every washbasin in the house was filled with newts, tadpoles and the like.
‘While one could hardly say that Mrs Durrell was in control of the family,’ Alan recalled, ‘it was her warm-hearted character, her amused but loving tolerance that held them together; even during the occasional flare-ups of Irish temper. I remember Gerry, furious with Larry who, wanting to wash, pulled the plug out of a basin full of marine life. Spluttering with ungovernable rage, almost incoherent, searching for the most damaging insult in his vocabulary: “You, you (pause), you AUTHOR, YOU.’”
But the boy Gerald owed much to his big brother’s selfless and unstinting support: ‘Years ago when I was six or seven years old and Larry was a struggling and unknown writer, he would encourage me to write. Spurred on by his support, I wrote a fair bit of doggerel in those days and Larry always treated these effusions with as much respect as if they had just come from the pen of T.S. Eliot. He would always stop whatever work he was engaged upon to type my jingles out for me and so it was from Larry’s typewriter that I first saw my name, as it were, in print.’
Near the end of his life, with more than half the family now dead, Gerald looked back with fondness and frankness at the turmoil of his childhood days, scribbling a fleeting insight in a shaky hand on a yellow restaurant paper napkin: ‘My family was an omelette of rages and laughter entwined with a curious love – an amalgam of stupidity and love.’
At about the time Mother bought Dixie Lodge, Lawrence met Nancy Myers, an art student at the Slade, slightly younger than him and very like Greta Garbo to look at – tall, slim, blonde, blue-eyed. Just turned twenty, Lawrence was living a dedicatedly Bohemian, aspiringly artistic existence in London, playing jazz piano in the Blue Peter nightclub, scribbling poetry, grappling with his first novel and reading voraciously under the great dome of the British Library. ‘My so-called upbringing was quite an uproar,’ he was to recall. ‘I have always broken stable when I was unhappy. I hymned and whored in London. I met Nancy in an equally precarious position and we struck up an incongruous partnership.’ Soon he and Nancy were sharing a bedsit in Guilford Street, near Russell Square. ‘Well, we did a bit of drinking and dying. Ran a photographic studio together. It crashed. Tried posters, short stories, journalism – everything short of selling our bottoms to clergymen. I wrote a cheap novel. Sold it – well that altered things. Here was a stable profession for me to follow. Art for money’s sake.’
Before long Lawrence decided it was time Nancy was given her baptism of fire and shown off to the family. Many years later, Nancy vividly remembered her introduction to that unforgettable ménage.
We drove down in the car for the weekend. I was fascinated to be meeting this family, because Larry dramatised everything – mad mother, ridiculous children, mother drunk, throwing their fortune to the winds, getting rid of everything … hellish, foolish, stupid woman. I mean, it’s wonderful to hear anybody talking about their family like that, and I was very thrilled.
The house had no architectural merit at all, but the rooms were a fair size, and they had a certain amount of comfort – a rather disarray sort of comfort. I mean, they had a few easy chairs and a sofa in the sitting-room and the floors were carpeted and things. It all seemed a little bit makeshift somehow. But I remember I loved the house – the sort of craziness of it, people sort of playing at keeping house rather than really keeping house. You felt they weren’t forced into any mould like people usually are – every sort of meal was at a different time, and everybody was shouting at everybody else, no control anywhere.
Really it was the first time I’d been in a family – in a jolly family – and the first time that I’d been able to say what I liked – there was nothing forbidden to say. It was a great opening-up experience for me, hearing everybody saying ‘You bloody fool!’ to everybody else, and getting away with it. It was marvellous. So I really fell in love with the family.
Gerry was six or seven at the time – a very slender, very delicate, very charming little boy who looked a bit like Christopher Robin and was too sensitive to go to school. Even at that time there was quite a lot of friction between Larry and Leslie, and Larry used to tease his brother mercilessly. Leslie was never very quick-witted, and Larry would make him look a fool any time he liked, and any time Leslie crossed him he used to absolutely flay him, which Leslie minded very much.
But my first visit ended in disaster. On our first morning Larry came into my room and hopped into bed with me, and then Gerry came along and hopped into bed too, so we were all sort of cosy under the blankets, cuddled together, the three of us, and this was too much for Mother. She came in and said she’d never been so disgusted in her life. ‘What a way to behave!’ she said, shouting. ‘Out you go, out you go this minute, out you both go, five minutes and you must get out, I’m not having Gerry corrupted!’ She could have histrionics when she wanted to.
I was a bit abashed, feeling terrible about it, but Larry said, ‘Oh, the silly woman, she’ll get over it. Come on, we’ll go. She’ll get over it in a day and be pleased to have us back. Silly nothing – just like a stupid woman. Don’t be such a fool, Mother …’
So we sort of tiptoed out of the house – but within a fortnight or so we were welcomed back, and you know, Mother closed her eyes to whatever we were doing from then onwards. And she was terribly sweet to me. I mean, I always felt rather like a goose among ducklings – they were all so small and I was so long and thin. But they couldn’t have been sweeter. After that first moment Mother was always clucking over me. She thought I looked consumptive and used to give me lots of gold-top milk and butter and fill me up with cream and Weetabix and whatever was going. And she was a marvellous cook; she did most of the cooking, a lot of hot stuff, curries, Indian cooking …
I just loved the whole craziness of it. Mother used to drink a lot of gin at that time, and she used to retire to bed when Gerry went to bed – Gerry wouldn’t go to bed without her, he was afraid of being on his own, I think – and she’d take her gin bottle up with her when she went. So then we all used to retire up there, carrying a gin bottle up to bed. She had a large double bed, and an enormous silver tea-tray with lots of silver teapots and things on it, and we’d carry on the evening sitting on the bed, drinking gin and tea and chatting, while Gerry was asleep in his own bed in the same room. I think he must have been able to go to sleep if there was a noise going on. It was all very cosy.
Though friends might adore the Durrells, the wider family – the cohort of aunts and grannies – disapproved mightily. They were appalled at Mother’s incompetence and extravagance when it came to money, dismayed that she would not help her cousin Fan out of her penury, and scandalised at the way she was bringing up her children – her lack of control; their wild, undisciplined ways; the outrageous Bohemian ambience of her household, as they saw it, doubly shocking in the deathly polite context of suburban Bournemouth. Leslie especially was a cause for concern. One cousin, Molly Briggs, the daughter of Gerald’s father’s sister Elsie, remembered:
Leslie drove Aunt Lou mad at this time, staying in bed till midday and slouching about. He never settled to anything, never saw anything through. As children my sister and I didn’t like him very much. Sometimes he would condescend to play with us, but you never knew from one minute to the next how he would behave. He would suddenly turn nasty for no reason at all. Both Gerry and Leslie ran rings round Aunt Lou and were quite unmanageable, But Gerry was a beautiful little boy, really, and great fun. He used to shin up a tree where he had a secret place we didn’t dare follow him to. And he used to play with three slow worms, fondling them and winding them around his hands. We had been brought up in Ceylon to fear snakes, so were terrified of Gerry’s pets and wouldn’t touch them. I remember we learned to ride a bike with Gerry on a sunken lawn surrounded by heather banks. We were terribly noisy and shrieked with laughter whenever we fell over, which was very often, so eventually Larry, who was probably composing something, leaned out of an upstairs window and shouted: ‘Stop that bloody row!’
‘It’s curious – something one didn’t realise at the time – but my mother allowed us to be,’ Gerald recalled.
She worried over us, she advised (when we asked) and the advice always ended with, ‘But anyway, dear, you must do what you think best.’ It was, I suppose, a form of indoctrination, a form of guidance. She opened new doors on problems that allowed new explorations of ways in which you might – or might not – deal with them – simple things now ingrained in me without a recollection of how they got there. I was never lectured, never scolded.
Lawrence and Nancy had been living for a year with their friends George and Pam Wilkinson in a cottage at Loxwood in Sussex, where Lawrence wrote his first novel, a novice work called Pied Piper of Lovers, which was published in 1935. At the end of 1934 the Wilkinsons had struck camp and moved on, emigrating to the Greek island of Corfu, where the climate was good, the exchange rate favourable and the living cheap and easy. Lawrence and Nancy, meanwhile, moved in with the family at Dixie Lodge. From time to time a letter would arrive from George Wilkinson describing the idyllic life they were leading on their beautiful, verdant and as yet unspoilt island, and gradually the idea began to grow – in Lawrence’s mind first – that perhaps that was where he and Nancy should live and have their being, a perfect retreat for a young aspiring writer and a young aspiring painter, both of them keen to learn what they could of ancient Greek art and archaeology. There was nothing to keep Lawrence in England. It was not the land of his birth, he had no roots there, and there was much about the place and the English outlook and way of life – ‘the English way of death’, he called it – that he had detested from the moment he set foot there as a lonely, bewildered boy of eleven, exiled from his native India to begin his formal education at ‘home’. ‘Pudding Island’ was his dismissive term for Britain. ‘That mean, shabby little island,’ he was to tell a friend much later, ‘wrung my guts out of me and tried to destroy anything singular and unique in me.’ Its dismal climate alone was reason enough to move on. ‘Alan,’ he had remarked to Alan Thomas after receiving a letter from George Wilkinson describing the orange groves surrounding his villa, ‘think of the times in England when everybody you know has a cold.’ Though the running was made by Lawrence, the idea of moving to Corfu soon took hold of the whole family.
While his mother was still alive, Gerald’s version of events described a kind of mass migration to the sun dreamed up and pushed through by his eldest brother. It had all begun, he was to relate in a famous passage, on a day of a leaden August sky. ‘A sharp, stinging drizzle fell,’ he wrote, ‘billowing into opaque grey sheets when the wind caught it. Along the Bournemouth seafront the beach-huts turned blank wooden faces towards a greeny-grey, froth-chained sea that leapt eagerly at the cement bulwark of the shore. The gulls had been tumbled inland over the town, and they now drifted above the housetops on taut wings, whining peevishly. It was the sort of weather calculated to try anyone’s endurance.’
At Dixie Lodge the family were assembled – ‘not a very prepossessing sight that afternoon’. For Gerald the weather had brought on catarrh, and he was forced to breath ‘stertorously’ through open mouth. For Leslie it had inflamed his ears so that they bled. For Margaret it had brought a fresh blotch of acne. For Mother it had generated a bubbling cold and a twinge of rheumatism. Only Larry was as yet unscathed, and as the afternoon wore on his irritation grew till he was forced to declaim: ‘Why do we stand this bloody climate? Look at it! And, if it comes to that, look at us … Really, it’s time something was done. I can’t be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of doom and eucalyptus … Why don’t we pack up and go to Greece?’
After his mother’s death Gerald was to give an alternative – or perhaps additional – motive for the idea. Mother, it seems, had found some grown-up consolation and companionship at Dixie Lodge, in the company of Lottie, the family’s Swiss maid. But then Lottie’s husband fell ill – Gerald thought with cancer – and Lottie had no option but to leave Mother’s employ in order to help look after her husband. ‘So back to square one,’ Gerald wrote in his unpublished memoir:
Lonely evenings, where Mother had only myself, aged nine, as company. So loneliness, of course, nudged Mother closer and closer to the Demon Drink. Larry, recognising the pitfalls, decided that decisive action must be taken and told Mother he thought we ought to up sticks and go and join George in Corfu. Mother, as usual, was hesitant.
‘What am I supposed to do with the house?’ she asked.
‘Sell it before it gets into a disreputable state,’ said Larry. ‘I think it is essential that we make this move.’
Larry himself gave a third, perhaps more cogent reason for emigrating, which he explained in a note to George Wilkinson out in Corfu: ‘The days are so dun and gloomy that we pant for the sun,’ he wrote. ‘My mother has gotten herself into a really good financial mess and has decided to cut and run for it. Being too timid to tackle foreign landscapes herself, she wants to be shown around the Mediterranean by us. She wants to scout Corfu. If she likes it I have no doubt but that she’ll buy the place …’
It is very likely that all three pressures – booze, money and sun – played their part in the final decision. But Mother did not need a great deal of persuading. She always hated to say no, Lawrence said, and in any case there was not much to keep her in England. In fact there wasn’t much to keep any of them there, for they were all exiles from Mother India, and none of them had sunk many roots in the Land of Hope and Glory. ‘It was a romantic idea and a mammoth decision,’ Margaret was to relate. ‘I should have been going back to school at Malvern but I said, “I’m not going to be left out!” and Mother, being a bit like that about everything, agreed.”’
So the decision was made. The whole family would go – Larry and Nancy, Mother, Leslie (who would be eighteen by the time they sailed), Margaret (fifteen) and Gerald (ten). When Larry replied to George Wilkinson’s invitation to move to Corfu, he asked about schooling for Gerry. A little alarmed, Wilkinson replied: ‘D’you all intend coming(!) and how many is all?’ But it was all or none. The house was put up for sale and goods and chattels crated up and shipped out ahead to Corfu.
The fate of the animals of the household presented a major headache, especially for Gerald, to whom they all belonged. The white mice were given to the baker’s son, the wigged canary to the man next door, Pluto the spaniel to Dr Macdonald, the family GP, and Billie the tortoise to Lottie in Brighton, who twenty-seven years later, when Gerald was famous, wrote to ask if he wanted it back, adding: ‘You have always loved animals, even the very smallest of them, so at least I know you couldn’t be anything but kind.’ Only Roger the dog would be going off with the family, complete with an enormous dog passport bearing a huge red seal.
Lawrence and Nancy were due to go out as the vanguard early in 1935. While they were living in Dixie Lodge prior to departure they decided to marry in secret – perhaps to keep the news from Nancy’s parents, who may have disapproved of such a raffish and Bohemian husband for their beautiful daughter. The marriage took place on 22 January at Bournemouth Register Office. Alan Thomas was sworn to secrecy and asked to act as witness. There was some anxiety before the wedding that because Alan and Nancy were so tall and Lawrence so short, the registrar might marry the wrong pair without realising it. ‘With a view to avoiding any such contingency,’ recalled Alan, ‘we approached a couple of midgets, then appearing in a freak-show at the local fun-fair, and asked them to appear as witnesses; but their employer refused to allow such valuable assets out of his sight.’
On 2 March 1935 Lawrence and Nancy set sail from Tilbury on board the P&O liner SS Oronsay, bound for Naples on the first stage of their journey to Corfu. Within the week the rest of the family were also en route. On 6 March they checked into the Russell Hotel in London, from where, the following day, Leslie sent Alan Thomas a postcard: ‘We are going to catch the boat this evening (with luck). P.S. Note the address – we are getting up in the world – 12/6 a night bed and etc!!!!’
In his published account of the family’s Corfu adventure, Gerald gives the impression they travelled overland across France, Switzerland and Italy. In fact Mother, Leslie, Margaret, Gerald and Roger the dog sailed from Tilbury, travelling second class on board a Japanese cargo boat, the SS Hakone Maru of the NYK Line, bound for Naples. Leslie seems to have been the only Durrell on board who was up to writing, and his postcards and other missives constitute virtually his last recorded utterance in this history. Chugging through the Dover Straits he told Alan Thomas on 8 March: ‘So far I have a cabin of my own. The people in the Second Class are quite nice and very jolly. The ship’s rolling a bit but the Durrells are all fine.’
Two days later, butting their way across the Bay of Biscay, the adventure was hotting up nicely. ‘We had a heavy snow storm this morning,’ wrote Leslie, ‘and we had to go up to the top deck where the lifeboats are and give that ******* dog some exercise. God what a time we had, what with the dog piddling all over the place, the snow coming down, the old wind blowing like HELL – God what a trip! No one seemed to know what to do at lifeboat drill, so if anything goes wrong it will only be with the Grace of God (if there is one) if any of us see the dear coast of Old England again.’
By 15 March, after a trip ashore at Gibraltar – ‘none of the Durrells sick so far, not even that ******* dog,’ reported Leslie – they had reached Marseilles. Next stop Naples, the train to Brindisi and the ferry to Corfu, 130 miles away across the Strait of Otranto and the Ionian Sea
It was an overnight run. ‘The tiny ship throbbed away from the heel of Italy,’ Gerald recalled of that fateful crossing, ‘out into the twilit sea, and as we slept in our stuffy cabins, somewhere in that tract of moon-polished water we passed the invisible dividing-line and entered the bright, looking-glass world of Greece. Slowly this sense of change seeped down to us, and so, at dawn, we awoke restless and went on deck.’ For a long time the island was just a chocolate-brown smudge of land, huddled in mist on the starboard bow.
Then suddenly the sun shifted over the horizon and the sky turned the smooth enamelled blue of a jay’s eye … The mist lifted in quick, lithe ribbons, and before us lay the island, the mountains sleeping as though beneath a crumpled blanket of brown, the folds stained with the green of olive-groves. Along the shore curved beaches as white as tusks among tottering cities of brilliant gold, red, and white rocks … Rounding the cape we left the mountains, and the island sloped gently down, blurred with silver and green iridescence of olives, with here and there an admonishing finger of black cypress against the sky. The shallow sea in the bays was butterfly blue, and even above the sound of the ship’s engines we could hear, faintly ringing from the shore like a chorus of tiny voices, the shrill, triumphant cries of the cicadas.
Decades later, old and sick and near the verge of death, Gerald Durrell was to recall that magic landfall that was to transform his life with all the pain and longing of remembered youth. ‘It was like being allowed back into Paradise,’ he whispered. ‘Our arrival in Corfu was like being born for the first time.’
THREE The Gates of Paradise Corfu 1935–1936 (#ulink_eccc183f-3f63-594d-a73f-0688625bdc41)
A few hours later the Durrells disembarked at the quay in Corfu town, Gerald clutching his butterfly net and a jam-jar full of caterpillars, Mother – ‘looking like a tiny, harassed missionary in an uprising’ – holding on tightly to a dog desperate to find a lamp-post. Two horse-drawn cabs, one for the family and one for the luggage, conveyed the party through the narrow, sun-bright streets of the island’s elegant, faintly rundown capital, and after a short ride they reached the first stop in their island adventure, the Pension Suisse, not far from the Platia, the town’s main square, where they were reunited with Lawrence and Nancy. ‘The family crawled ashore today,’ Lawrence reported to Alan Thomas, ‘and took us in bed so to speak … The scenic tricks of this paragon of places are highly improbable, and I don’t quite believe my eyes yet.’
Next morning Mother and her brood were taken house-hunting by the hotel guide, driving round the surrounding countryside in a cloud of dust to inspect villas of all sorts and situations. But Mother shook her head at everything she saw, for not one of the properties had an essential requirement – a bathroom. In the meantime the whole family hung on at the Pension Suisse. On 29 March Leslie wrote to Alan asking him to send various newspapers and magazines – the Daily Mirror and the overseas edition of any other newspaper; Puck and Crackers for Gerry; Stitchcraft and Good Housekeeping for Mother; and The American Rifleman and Game and Gun for Leslie. At the end of the letter Mother added a postscript suggesting Corfu had so far fallen some way below her expectations.
We are still in the hotel and hope some day to be settled. Don’t believe a word they say about this smelly island. The country around is beautiful, I will admit, but as for the town – the less said about it the better. However, if you ever feel like coming out we will give you a corner. You might have to sleep with Leslie or Gerry – but one gets used to anything in Corfu.
Mother had good reason to feel dejected. They all did. They were stranded in a strange country, whose language they did not speak and whose manners they did not understand, not knowing what they were doing or where they were going, and feeling confused, anxious and querulous. Worse, the bank in London hadn’t sent any money, so they were penniless, and Lawrence’s and Nancy’s baggage hadn’t turned up, so Lawrence was shirtless and bookless. Stuck in the stuffy recesses of the Pension Suisse, they survived by borrowing from the proprietor. Margaret, or Margo, as she was always known on Corfu, was homesick and cried; and Gerry howled in unison. Only the colours in the streets, he recalled, and the look of the sea down by the old fort gave any promise or hope.
It was below the old fort during those early limbo days in Corfu town that Gerald made a crucial breakthrough in his island life, and finally entered a new dimension of existence, by learning to swim. During his brief time at prep school swimming lessons had filled him with dread and taught him nothing but a profound fear of drowning. But all that suddenly changed when he reached the island.
‘Mother and I,’ he recalled,
accompanied by a bustling Roger, would go down to a small rocky cove beneath the great sandcastle-like Venetian fort that dominated the town. It was here that I learnt for the first time what a delicious, magical element water was. At first I was up to my knees, then up to my armpits and then, incredibly, I was swimming in the blue, warm, silky blanket, tasting the wonderful rind of salt on my lips, buoyed up by the water and rid of my fear. Soon I was swimming so far out in this liquid glass that Mother used to get alarmed and run up and down the shore like a distraught Sandpiper, imploring me to come back into the shallows.
While the rest of the family hung about in the town, Lawrence and Nancy were soon fixed up with a small house on a hill near the Villa Agazini, the home of their friends the Wilkinsons at Pérama, along the coast to the south. From the hill they could look down on the great sweep of the sea and the comings and goings on the dirt road below them. A fortnight or so after moving Lawrence wrote to Alan Thomas:
I’ve told you how unique it is up here, stuck on the hillside, haven’t I? Well, multiply that by four. Today we rose to a gorgeous sunlight and breakfasted in it. Our breakfast table looks out plumb over the sea, and fishing boats go swirling past the window. There is a faint mist over Albania today but here the heat is paralysing. Bees and lizards and tortoises are making hay … God the Sun.
Shortly afterwards, while Mother was still scouting for a place to settle, Lawrence wrote again to Alan, unable to contain his enthusiasm for his new island home.
I’d like to tell you how many million smells and sounds and colours this place is. As I sit, for instance. Window. Light. Blue grey. Two baby cypress lulling very slightly in the sirocco. Pointed and perky like girls’ breasts. The sea all crawling round in a bend as the coast curves away to Lefkimo with one sailing boat on it. In the road … the peasants are passing on donkeys. Raving, swearing, crashing colours, scarves and head-dresses. To the north nothing. Ahead Epirus and Albania with a snuggle of creamy cloud clotted on them. South mists and the mystery of the other islands lying out there, invisible, on the water.
Mother meanwhile had decided to hire a car so that she and Leslie, Margo and Gerald could go and view a house in Pérama owned by the proprietor of the Pension Suisse. It was thus that the family came face to face with an outsize character who was to change their life on the island, or at any rate greatly facilitate the way they conducted it. Jostled and harassed at the taxi-rank in the main square by a crowd of grumpy taxi drivers who spoke only Greek, they were suddenly startled by a deep, vibrant, booming voice – ‘the sort of voice you would expect a volcano to have’, Gerald recalled – speaking in English, or at any rate a sort of English.
‘Hoy! Whys donts yous have someones who can talks your own language?’
‘Turning, we saw an ancient Dodge parked by the kerb,’ Gerald was to write, ‘and behind the wheel sat a short barrel-bodied individual, with ham-like hands and a great leathery, scowling face surmounted by a jauntily-tilted peaked cap.’
‘Thems bastards would swindles their own mothers,’ he roared. ‘Wheres you wants to gos?’
This was the family’s first glimpse of Spyros Chalikiopoulos, better known as Spiro Americano on account of the eight years he had spent working in Chicago making enough money to come home, a great fire-eating fury of a man with a heart of gold who was to become the family’s fixer, philosopher and friend on a virtually permanent basis. To Gerald he was a ‘great brown ugly angel … a great suntanned gargoyle’; to Lawrence he resembled a ‘great drop of olive oil’.
‘Bathrooms?’ Spiro brooded. ‘Yous wants a bathrooms? Oh, I knows a villa with a bathrooms.’
Seated in Spiro’s Dodge, they shot off through the maze of streets and out along the dusty white prickly-pear-lined road into a countryside of vineyards and olive groves.
‘Yous English?’ Spiro bawled, swivelling round to address the family in the back as his Dodge swayed from one side of the road to the other. ‘Thought so … English always wants bathrooms … I likes the English … Honest to Gods, if I wasn’t Greek I’d likes to be English.’ Spiro, it seems, was an anglophile to his very guts. ‘Honest to Gods, Mrs Durrell,’ he informed Mother later, ‘you cuts me opes you find the Union Jack inside.’
They bowled along the edge of the sea, then sped up a hill. Suddenly Spiro jammed his foot on the brake and the car juddered to a halt in a thick cloud of dust.
‘Theres you ares,’ he said, jabbing with a stubby finger; ‘that’s the villa with the bathrooms, likes you wanted.’
They saw a small, square, single-storeyed, strawberry-pink villa, situated only a stroll away from Larry and Nancy’s place. It stood in its own minuscule garden, guarded by a group of slim, gently swaying cypresses, with a sea of olive trees filling the valley and lapping up the hill all around. The tiny balcony at the front was overgrown with a rampant bougainvillaea and the shutters had been faded by the sun to a delicate, cracked green. They loved the place, instantly and totally. ‘The warm air was thick with the scent of a hundred dying flowers,’ Gerald recalled, ‘full of the gentle, soothing whisper and murmur of insects. As soon as we saw it, we wanted to live there – it was as though the villa had been standing there waiting for our arrival. We felt we had come home.’
Moving day came, and the family’s baggage was carted up the hill, the shutters opened, floors swept, linen aired, beds made, charcoal fire lit in the kitchen, pots and pans arrayed, a home slowly formed amid much babble and commotion. To keep out of the way Gerald absconded to the garden, a strange garden with tiny flowerbeds laid out in complicated geometrical patterns of stars, half-moons, triangles and circles. That garden was a revelation – ‘a magic land,’ he remembered, ‘through which roamed creatures I had never seen before.’ Never had he seen such fecundity in nature. Under every stone he found twenty different creatures, on every plant stem twenty more: ladybirds, carpenter bees, hummingbird hawk-moths, giant ants, lacewing-flies that laid eggs on stilts, crab-spiders that changed colour like chameleons. Bewildered by the profusion of life on his doorstep, he wandered round the garden in a daze, then spent hours squatting on his heels watching the private lives of the creatures around him. ‘It wasn’t until we moved into that first villa,’ Gerald was to tell a friend years later, ‘that suddenly we realised we had been transported into paradise … For me it was like being pushed off the Bournemouth cliffs into heaven. From then onwards, just like that, I was home.’
So the family settled in, with the thunderous Spiro attending to their every need. It was Spiro who took them shopping down in the town, bargaining fiercely over the smallest purchase. It was Spiro who chivvied and harassed the bank manager about Mother’s missing funds and hectored the customs officials over confiscated baggage. It was Spiro who, ‘bull-voiced and scowling’, advised them on everything they needed to know about day-to-day life on the island and tended to their smallest whim. Mother he adored, hovering over her like a guardian angel, and he was horrified one day when Leslie told him: ‘She’s really not much good as a mother, you know.’ Spiro leapt instantly to her defence. ‘Donts says that!’ he roared. ‘Honest to Gods, if I hads a mother like yours I’d gos down every mornings and kisses her feets.’
Each member of the Durrell family adapted to their new environment according to their temperament and needs. Margo’s adaptation was the quickest. Short, blonde and attractive, by simply donning a revolutionary two-piece swimsuit and sunbathing in the olive groves she soon attracted an admiring band of peasant youths who appeared ‘like magic’ out of an apparently empty countryside. Or so Gerald was to claim in the best-selling account of Corfu he wrote twenty years later, My Family and Other Animals, a book which gives much of the essence of the Durrells’ years on Corfu, though only the barest outline of the chronology. Margo saw herself differently. ‘Gerald thought of me as a totally idiotic girl who was only interested in boys,’ she complained years later. ‘Gerry never saw the real me, the depth of character I consider I have. Looking back, I see myself as having been a romantic, sensitive person who wanted to understand the spirit of the Greeks. I’m the one who got to grips with the reality of Corfu.’
Leslie’s acclimatisation was the noisiest. The moment he arrived he unpacked his guns, cleaned, oiled and loaded them, then blazed away at an old tin-can from his bedroom window. Mother meanwhile pottered about all day in the kitchen, tending the bubbling pots on the charcoal fires amid an aroma of garlic and herbs. ‘Mother Durrell and I had a lot of fun cooking,’ Nancy recalled. ‘She was very keen on making tremendously hot things that nobody else could really eat. We made all kinds of lime chutneys, and tomato jam and marrow jam, and we ate loquats in the season, and lots of prickly pears.’
As for Lawrence, he was, Gerald recorded later, ‘designed by Providence to go through life like a small, blond firework, exploding ideas in other people’s minds, and then curling up with cat-like unctuousness and refusing to take any blame for the consequences’. Though My Family and Other Animals gives the impression that Lawrence shared the same house as the rest of the family, in fact he and Nancy lived under a separate roof for most of their time on Corfu. Equally, though Lawrence liked to declare publicly that he never saw the family on the island except at Christmas, in fact he and Nancy saw them a great deal. This was easy in the first months, when they were near neighbours at Perama, but relatively more difficult when they moved to the north of the island later. Nancy was to recall her association with the family all too clearly.
Larry used to needle Leslie mercilessly, telling him what a fool he was, how he’d wrecked his life, slapping him down all the time. Leslie had three or four different sorts of guns and when he got angry with Larry he used to point one at him and threaten to shoot him. I really thought he possibly would, and sometimes he used to take my side – used to rush in and point his gun at Larry when Larry and I were quarrelling. Poor old Leslie, he just marched across the fields with the field police, a very low category of person, with rifles over their shoulders. He had a pierced eardrum, so he didn’t enjoy all the swimming and things we did. It wasn’t much of an existence for a nineteen-year-old boy.
The villa only had three bedrooms, so though Gerald no longer passed his nights curled up in the same bed as his mother, he still had to share a room with her, squeezing into a cot in the corner. To Lawrence fell the role of father figure, then and for ever more. Lawrence was old enough to appear to the boy as someone from an earlier, more fatherly than brotherly generation, and he was all-knowing and authoritarian enough to fulfil the boy’s expectations of a father substitute.
Gradually the family came to grips with the fact that, Spiro apart, virtually nobody they ever encountered spoke to them in an intelligible tongue. Greek was not an easy language to learn, and the Durrells’ struggle to master it was long and dogged. For the younger members of the family it was a struggle slowly but surely won, less by a process of formal learning than a kind of osmosis, so that gradually they turned – linguistically speaking – into Corfiot peasant Greeks, retaining the language more or less intact till the end of their lives. ‘Gradually I came to understand them,’ Gerald remembered. ‘What had at first been a confused babble became a series of recognisable separate sounds. Then suddenly, they took on meaning, and slowly and haltingly I started to use them myself.’
Corfu was arguably the most beautiful of all the Mediterranean islands, and in the Durrells’ time it was virtually untouched by modern development. It was also one of the most sophisticated regions of Greece, and successive rulers of the island, including the Venetians, the French and the British, had all made contributions of one sort or another to how it looked and how its people lived. The Venetians had contributed an island aristocracy, much of Corfu town and many of the finest buildings, while the British, who had departed in 1864, had introduced ginger beer, a postal service and the game of cricket. It helped the Durrells hugely that the British were highly regarded by the islanders, who still believed that every Britisher they met was a lord and a paragon of all civilised virtues. Gerald was often greeted as ‘the little English lord’ by the local peasantry, and all doors were almost always open to him.
But like all unspoiled Edens, the island had its drawbacks. ‘The peasants are incorrigible thieves and liars,’ Lawrence noted soon after his arrival at Perama, ‘but make up for it by having the dandiest arse-action when they walk. This is due to always carrying huge weights on their heads.’ Lawrence soon changed his opinion of the Corfiots, and the family grew very close to many of them. But the Corfiot world took some getting used to, as Gerald was later to explain:
Corfu was wonderful because it was so lunatic, so insane. When a man in a shop said, with the Corfiot’s gentle charm, he would have a thing ready for you tomorrow, he was working in a world that would have mystified Einstein. The word tomorrow might mean half an hour later or two weeks or two months hence or, indeed, never. The word tomorrow had no normal meaning. It became yesterday, last month, the year after next. It was an Alice in Wonderland world.
Greece was not a mass holiday destination in those days – too far, too rough – and the few tourists who could afford to go abroad tended to make for Italy. Greece, therefore, remained a primitive backwater by European standards, and a foreigner contemplating setting up residence there confronted some hefty practical problems, even on Corfu.
Corfu before the discovery of DDT, Lawrence was later to point out, was ‘one large flea – one enormous hairy gnashing flea – and several kinds of bedbug as well, mostly elephant-sized’. In some ways, he reckoned, the island was almost as primitive as Africa, what with the insects, the malaria, the heat in summer and the rough going underfoot. In a remote Greek village a visitor was deep in the Middle Ages as far as medical matters were concerned, and if you fell ill it was up to the local ‘good women’ – masseuses, cuppers, bonesetters and specialists in herbal cures – to pull you round. Though there were qualified medics in the more civilised parts, going to see a Greek doctor, Gerald was to recall later, was ‘like going over Niagara in a barrel’. Roads were few, mostly dirt and caked in three inches of white dust; those that led up to the north were hard going even in summer and sometimes washed away in winter. Transport to the remoter parts of the island’s coast was best left to the passenger fishing boats called caiques, but in winter if the sea was rough the caiques stopped sailing.
For the Durrells, living a short car ride from Corfu town, life was less primitive. Fruit and vegetables – potatoes, corn, carrots, tomatoes, green peppers, aubergines – were cheap and abundant in season, and there was a rich variety of fresh fish to be had every day. But even at the best of times there was no butter, and the milk was goats’ milk. Chickens were thin and scrawny, beef was non-existent, though there was always good lamb and sometimes pork. Almost the only tinned food was peas and tomato paste, and the bread was heavy, grey, coarse and sour. There was no gas, electricity or coal. Heating for cooking was mostly charcoal, so that it took twenty minutes to boil a kettle for a cup of tea, and the ironing was done by maids using huge black charcoal irons. Light came from oil lamps, which filled the room with their distinctive smell, and oil stoves were used in winter to warm the rooms, along with wood fires. On special occasions the family would buy huge church candles for the veranda and garden, and set hollowed-out tangerines on the dining table with a little wick in oil inside. There were no refrigerators on Corfu, but Mother had an icebox which Spiro would refill with a huge block of ice he brought from town. Otherwise the best place to keep foodstuffs cool was the bottom of a deep well, or failing that a sea cave. ‘Sometimes it was so hot,’ Lawrence recalled, ‘that we carried our dinner table out into the bay and set it down in the water. It was cool enough if you sat with the water up to your waist while you dined. The water was so still and clear that the candles hardly moved on such summer nights. And the bronze moon was huge.’
Corfu’s compensations enormously outweighed any drawbacks. Their rent was cheap (£2 a month for a large house overlooking the sea), and so was food. ‘There is a good peasant wine,’ Lawrence reported to Alan Thomas, ‘which tastes and looks like iced blood. It costs 6 drachs – 3d per bottle. What more does one want? In England I couldn’t buy a bottle of horse-piss for 3d. Yesterday we dined very royally on red mullet – as you know a most epicurean dish – it cost Iod.’ Clothes were casual for the most part. Gerry wore shorts throughout his time on the island, and usually kept his hair very long, as he hated going to the barber in town. When an admirer gave Margo a large silk shawl she did not care for, Gerald appropriated it and pinned it round his neck like a cloak when he went out riding on the village pony. The shawl had a pattern in gold, green, red and purple, and a long red fringe. ‘I thought I cut a hell of a dash,’ he recalled, ‘as I galloped round the countryside.’
Generally the Durrell abodes on Corfu were sparsely furnished. All the rooms had bare floorboards which were scrubbed once a week in rotation and holystoned, and all the bedclothes were hung out of the windows each day to air. The furniture was mostly simple, rural and Greek, with the addition of a few exotic Indian items that Mother had brought out from England – deep blue curtains with huge peacocks on them; ornate round brass tables, intricately embossed and standing on elaborately carved teak legs; ashtrays decorated with peacocks and dragons.
At a domestic level the family’s life on Corfu was simple, uncluttered, unhurried, unpressured. At a more exalted level, the island was gloriously beautiful, utterly unspoilt, a paradise on earth surrounded by an unpolluted crystalline sea. For Gerald, it was a revelation:
Gradually the magic of the island settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen. Each day had a tranquillity, a timelessness about it, so that you wished it would never end … In those days I lived a curious sort of triple life. I dwelt in three worlds. One was the family, one was our eccentric friends, and the third was the peasant community. Through these three worlds I passed unobserved but observing.
For Gerald, Corfu was a kind of Mediterranean Congo peopled with natives and crawling with wildlife, where every foray was a venture into the interior, and every bend in the track and view through the trees portended something utterly new, unexpected and absorbing.
The family had decided on a six-month trial period to see if they liked Corfu and wanted to stay. Gerald remembered this as a time of pure freedom, a total holiday – no lessons, no duties, no set hours, just carte blanche to roam at will, exploring the wonders of his paradise island. As the weeks of that first enchanted summer of exploration and discovery went by he increased the range of his excursions away from the Strawberry-Pink Villa.
Every day began with the rising sun striking the shutters of his bedroom windows, followed soon after by the smell of a charcoal fire in the kitchen, cock-crows, yapping dogs, goats’ bells clanging as the flocks wended their way to their grazing grounds. After a breakfast of coffee, toast and eggs under the tangerine trees Gerald would put on his Wellington boots – Mother, having been brought up to dread snakes in India, insisted he wore these in the early days – and saunter forth in the cool of the morning, his butterfly net in his hand, empty matchboxes in his pockets, following the black, bouncing form of Roger the dog, his constant and dearly beloved companion on all his forays.
Within a six-mile radius of the villa Gerald became the local equivalent of the town crier, or a sort of itinerant human newspaper. In those days some of the peasant communities would only see each other once or twice a year at fiestas. So, travelling around as he did, it was Gerald who brought the news from village to village – how Maria had died and how Spiro’s potato crop had failed (that was Spiro with the blind donkey, not Spiro with the Dodge convertible). ‘Po! Po! Po!’ the villagers would cry in horror – ‘and he has the whole winter stretching before him, potatoless. St Spiridion preserve him.’
It was in these early outings that Gerald got to know the Corfiot peasants of the locality, many of whom became his friends. There was the cheerful simpleton, an amiable but retarded youth with a face as round as a puffball and a bowler hat without a brim. There was rotund, cheerful old Agathi, past seventy but with hair still glossy and black, spinning wool outside her tumbledown cottage and singing the haunting peasant songs of the island, including her favourite, ‘The Almond Tree’, which began ‘Kay kitaxay tine anthismeni amigdalia …’. Then there was Yani, the toothless old shepherd, with hooked nose and great bandit moustache, who plied the ten-year-old Gerald with olives and figs and the thick red wine of the region (well-watered to a rosy pink).
And then there was the Rose-beetle man, one of the most extraordinary characters of the island, a wandering peddler of the most extreme eccentricity. When Gerald first encountered him in the hills, playing a shepherd’s pipe, the Rose-beetle Man was fantastically garbed, wearing a battered hat that sprouted a forest of fluttering feathers of owl, hoopoe, kingfisher, cockerel and swan, and a coat whose pockets bulged with trinkets, balloons and coloured pictures of the saints. On his back he carried bamboo cages full of pigeons and young chickens, together with several mysterious sacks, and a large bunch of fresh green leeks. ‘With one hand he held his pipe to his mouth, and in the other a number of lengths of cotton, to each of which was tied an almond-size rose-beetle, glittering golden green in the sun, all of them flying round his hat with desperate deep buzzings.’ The beetles, the man mimed – for he was dumb as well as strange – were substitute toy aeroplanes for the village children.
One of the Rose-beetle Man’s sacks was full of tortoises, and one in particular struck the boy’s fancy – a sprightly kind of tortoise, with a brighter eye than most, and possessed (so Gerald was to claim) of a peculiar sense of humour. Gerald named him Achilles. ‘He was undoubtedly the finest tortoise I had ever seen, and worth, in my opinion, at least twice what I had paid for him. I patted his scaly head with my finger and placed him carefully in my pocket.’ But before setting off down the hill he glanced back. ‘The Rose-beetle Man was still in the same place in the road, but he was doing a little jig, prancing and swaying, while in the road at his feet the tortoises ambled to and fro, dimly and heavily.’
From the Rose-beetle Man Gerald obtained several other small creatures that took up residence in the Strawberry-Pink Villa, including a frog, a sparrow with a broken leg, and the man’s entire stock of rose-beetles, which infested the house for days, crawling into the beds and plopping into people’s laps ‘like emeralds’. Perhaps the most idiosyncratic of these creatures was a revolting-looking young pigeon which refused to learn to fly and insisted on sleeping at the foot of Margo’s bed. So repulsive and obese was the bird that Larry suggested calling it Quasimodo. It was Larry who first noticed that Quasimodo was partial to dancing around the gramophone when a waltz was being played, and stomping up and down with puffed-up chest when the record was a march by Sousa. Eventually Quasimodo surprised everybody by laying an egg, whereupon she grew wilder and wilder, abjured the gramophone, and finally, suddenly endowed with the gift of flight, flew out of the door to take up residence in a tree with a large cock bird.
With Gerald rapidly turning into part of the fauna of Corfu, Mother decided it was time he had some sort of education. George Wilkinson was hired for this thankless task. Every morning he would come striding through the olive groves, a lean, lanky, bearded, bespectacled, disjointed figure in shorts and sandals, clutching bundles of books from his own small library, anything from the Pears Cyclopaedia to works by Wilde and Gibbon. ‘Gerry really did everything he could to escape lessons,’ Nancy recalled. ‘He was utterly bored with lessons and with George as a tutor.’ The only way George could gain his attention was to introduce animals into everything he taught, from history (‘Good heavens, look. A jaguar,’ remarked Christopher Columbus as he stepped ashore in America for the first time) to mathematics (‘If it took two caterpillars a week to eat eight leaves, how long would it take four caterpillars?’). It was George who persuaded Gerald to start a nature diary, meticulously noting everything he saw and did every day in a set of fat blue-lined notebooks – a compilation sadly later lost.
Gerald was never at his best within the confines of a room, but outside – whether in a herbaceous border in the garden or a swamp full of snakes – he was a person transformed. Quickly realising this, George instituted a programme of al fresco lessons, out in the olive groves or down by the little beach at the foot of the hill overlooking Pondikonissi (Mouse Island). There, while discussing in a desultory way the historic role played by Nelson’s egg collection at the Battle of Trafalgar, they would float gently out into the shallow bay, and Gerald would pursue his real studies – the flora and fauna of the seabed, the black ribbon-weed, the hermit crabs, the sea-slugs slowly rolling on the sandy bottom, sucking in seawater at one end and passing it out at the other. ‘The sea was like a warm, silky coverlet,’ wrote Gerald later, ‘that moved my body gently to and fro. There were no waves, only this gentle underwater movement, the pulse of the sea, rocking me softly.’
George Wilkinson was an aspiring novelist, but Gerald was so bored by his English lessons that one day he suggested he should write a story of his own, just like his brother Larry (then busy on his second novel, The Black Book). Entitled ‘The Man of Animals’ and written in a wobbly and erratic hand and eccentric, nursery school spelling, the story relates, with uncanny prescience, the adventures of a man who was remarkably like the one Gerald would become:
Right in the Hart of the Africn Jungel a small wite man lives. Now there is one rather xtrordenry fackt about him that is that he is the frind of all animals. Now he lives on Hearbs and Bearis, both of which he nos, and soemtimes, not unles he is prakticly starvyng, he shoot with a bow and arrow a Bird of some sort, for you see he dos not like killing his frinds even wene he is so week that he cann hardly walk!
One of his favreret pets is a Big gray baboon, wich he named ‘Sotine’. Now there are surten words this Big cretcher nows, for intenes if his master was to say ‘Sotine I want a stick to mack a Bow, will you get me one?’ then the Big ting with a nod of his Hede would trot of into the Jungel to get a bamboo fo the Bow and Arrow. But before Brracking it he would bend it so as to now that it would be all right, then breacking it of he would trot back to his master and give it to him and wight for prase, and nedless to say his master would give him a lot …
So far, so good. But now, obviously not averse to experimental writing, the youthful author suddenly switches from the third to the first person, and the adventure continues not from the narrator’s but from the Man of Animals’ point of view.
One day wile I was warking in frount of my porters in Africa a Huge Hariy Hand caught my sholder and I was dragged of into the Jungel by this unseen figer. At last I was put down (not to gently) and I found my self looking into the eyes of a great baboon. ‘Holy mackrarel,’ I egeackted, ‘what the devel made you carry me of like this, ay?’ I saw the Baboon start at my words and then it walked over to the ege of the clearing, beckning me with a Big Hairy Hand …
As well as writing extended narratives in those early Corfu days, Gerald was also trying his hand at verse. At first this shared the simplicity – and the spelling – of his more ambitious works, but combined his passion for natural history with the conventions of pastoral verse:
That coulerd brid of incect land
floating on the waves of light
atractd by the throbing hart
and pulsing viens
this winged buaty
hovers then swops down
siting on the downey pettles
sucking the honey greedly
while the pollen
fall softly
on its red and yelow wings
its hunger qunched
it cralls up the slipry dome
and flys away
to its home
in the skelaton
of a liveing tree!
It was the discovery of a series of mysterious small silken trapdoors set into the floor of a neighbouring olive grove, each about the size of an old shilling piece, that led to an encounter that was to change for ever the direction of Gerald’s life. Puzzled by the trapdoors, he made his way to George Wilkinson’s villa to seek his advice. George was not alone. ‘Seated in a chair was a figure which, at first glance, I thought must be George’s brother,’ Gerald remembered, ‘for he also wore a beard. He was, however, immaculately dressed in a grey flannel suit with waistcoat, a spotless white shirt, a tasteful but sombre tie, and large, solid, highly polished boots.’
‘Gerry, this is Dr Theodore Stephanides,’ said George. ‘He is an expert on practically everything you care to mention. And what you don’t mention, he does. He, like you, is an eccentric nature-lover. Theodore, this is Gerry Durrell.’
Gerald described the tiny trapdoors in the olive grove and Dr Stephanides listened gravely. Perhaps, he suggested, they could go together to look at this phenomenon, since the olive grove lay on a roundabout route back to his home near Corfu town. ‘As we walked along I studied him covertly. He had a straight, well-shaped nose; a humorous mouth lurking in the ash-blond beard; straight, rather bushy eyebrows under which his eyes, keen but with a twinkle in them and laughter-wrinkles at the corners, surveyed the world. He strode along energetically, humming to himself.’
A quick inspection revealed that each trapdoor concealed the entrance to a burrow from which a spider emerged to catch passing prey. The mystery solved, Dr Stephanides shook Gerald’s hand and prepared to go on his way. ‘He turned and stumped off down the hill, swinging his stick, staring about him with observant eyes. I was at once confused and amazed by Theodore. He was the only person I had met until now who seemed to share my enthusiasm for zoology. I was extremely flattered to find that he treated me and talked to me exactly as though I was his own age. Theodore not only talked to me as though I was grown up, but also as though I was as knowledgeable as he.’
Gerald did not expect to meet the man again, but clearly his enthusiasm, high seriousness and powers of observation had made an impression on Theodore, for two days later Leslie came back from town carrying a parcel addressed to Gerald. Inside was a small box and a letter.
My dear Gerry Durrell,
I wondered, after our conversation the other day, if it might not assist your investigations of the local natural history to have some form of magnifying instrument. I am therefore sending you this pocket microscope, in the hope that it will be of some use to you. It is, of course, not of very high magnification, but you will find it sufficient for field work.
With best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Theo. Stephanides
P.S. If you have nothing better to do on Thursday, perhaps you would care to come to tea, and I could show you some of my microscope slides.
With the doctor and naturalist Theo Stephanides as his mentor, Gerald was to journey through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces and phenomena, entering the orbit of Zatopec the poet and the ex-King of Greece’s butler, the microscopic world of the scarlet mite and the one-eyed cyclops bug, the natural profligacy of the tortoise hills, the lake of lilies, the phosphorescent porpoise sea. In the course of his travels he was to become transformed, learning the language and gestures of rural Greece, absorbing its music and folklore, drinking its wine, singing its songs, and shedding his thin veneer of Englishness, so that in mind-set and social behaviour he was never to grow up a true Englishman – a handicap which, like his lack of a formal education, was to prove a tremendous boon in later years.
Theodore Stephanides had just passed forty when Gerald first encountered him. Though the Stephanides family originated from Thessaly in Greece, Theo (like Gerald) was born in India, thus qualifying him for British as well as Greek nationality. At home in Bombay he and his family spoke only English, and it was not until his father retired to Corfu in 1907, when Theo was eleven, that he began to learn Greek properly. After serving in the Greek army in Macedonia in World War One and in Asia Minor in the ensuing war against the Turks, Theo went to Paris to study medicine, later returning to Corfu, where he established the island’s first x-ray unit in 1929, and shortly afterwards married Mary Alexander, a young woman of English and Greek parentage and the granddaughter of a former British Consul on Corfu. Though Theo was a doctor he was never well off, mainly because much of his work he did free of charge, and he and his wife lived in the same rented house in Corfu town throughout the period of their stay on the island.
Theo was a man of immense integrity and courtesy, behaving in the same way to old and young, friends and strangers. He was shy socially, except with close friends, but he had a highly developed sense of humour and loved cracking a good joke, or even a really silly one, at which he would chuckle mightily. He loved Greek dances, and would sometimes perform a kalamatianos by himself. He travelled all over Corfu in his spare time, by car where there were roads and on foot where there were not, singing almost every inch of the way. Whenever Gerald was with him he sang a nonsense song of which he was very fond, in a kind of pantomime English:
There was an old man who lived in Jerusalem
Glory Halleluiah, Hi-ero-jerum.
He wore a top hat and he looked very sprucelum
Glory Halleluiah, Hi-ero-jerum.
Skinermer rinki doodle dum, skinermer rinki doodle dum
Glory Halleluiah, Hi-ero-jerum …
‘It had a rousing tune,’ Gerald recalled, ‘that gave a new life to tired feet, and Theodore’s baritone voice and my shrill treble would ring out gaily through the gloomy trees.’
Theo held views on ecological matters that were very advanced for their time, particularly in Greece, and these planted the germs of a way of thinking in young Gerald’s head that was to stand him in valuable stead in future years. If Theo went for a drive in the country he would throw tree seeds out of the window, in the hope that a few would take root, and he took time off to teach the peasants how to avoid soil erosion when they were tilling the ground, and to persuade them to restrain the goats from devouring everything that grew. As a good doctor he did his best to improve public health on the island, encouraging the villagers to stock their wells with a species of minnow which fed on mosquito larvae and thus helped eradicate malaria.
For Gerald, being tutored by Theo was like going straight to Oxford or Harvard without the usual intermediary steps of primary and secondary schools in between. Theo was a walking, talking fount of knowledge, not only breathtakingly wide-ranging, but deep, detailed and exact. Born before the age of ultra-specialisation, he knew something – sometimes a great deal – about everything. In the course of a day he could engage the young Gerald in an advanced tutorial that would hop effortlessly through the fields of anthropology, ethnology, musicology, cosmology, ecology, biology, parasitology, biochemistry, medicine, history and much else. ‘I had few books to guide and explain,’ Gerald was to write, ‘and Theodore was for me a sort of walking, hirsute encyclopaedia.’
Theo was no mere pedant, with a kleptomaniac gift for collecting sterile, unrelated facts. He was a true polymath, who related the phenomena of past and present existence in a master synthesis, a grand vision which had its feet firmly planted in science but its head peering speculatively among the clouds. ‘Although the classroom basics of biology were a closed book to me,’ Gerald admitted to a friend in his middle age, ‘walks with Theo contained discussions of everything from life on Mars to the humblest beetle, and I knew they were all part and parcel, all interlocked.’
On top of all this, Theo Stephanides bestrode the iron curtain between art and science, for he was not only a doctor and a biologist, but a poet whose friends included some of Greece’s leading poets. ‘If I had the power of magic,’ Gerald once remarked, ‘I would confer two gifts on every child – the enchanted childhood I had on the island of Corfu, and to be guided and befriended by Theodore Stephanides.’ Under Theo’s tutelage Gerald became more than a juvenile version of a naturalist in the classic nineteenth-century mould, more even than a straightforward zoologist of the kind turned out by the British universities of the era – though that was what he was to put as his profession in his passport. For Theo not only taught him what biological life was and how it worked, but imbued him with two principles regarding the role of man in the scheme of things. The first was that life without human intervention maintained its own checks and balances. The second was that the proper role of mankind among living things was omniscience with humility – and the greater of these two was humility.
‘Not many young naturalists have the privilege of having their footsteps guided by a sort of omnipotent, benign and humorous Greek god,’ Gerald would recall. ‘Theodore had all the very best qualities of the early Victorian naturalists, an insatiable interest in the world he inhabited and the ability to illuminate any topic with his observations and thoughts. His wide interests are summed up by the fact that (in this day and age) he was a man who had a microscopic water crustacean named after him, as well as a crater on the moon.’
From 1935 to 1939 Theo and his wife Mary visited the Durrells once a week, arriving after lunch and leaving after dinner. Their young daughter Alexia, often ailing, was usually left at home with her French nanny, because Theo was jealous of his afternoons with Gerald, who was like a son to him. For if Gerald was fortunate to have encountered such a gifted tutor in such a place at such a time in his life, Theodore was no less fortunate to have found an acolyte so innately endowed with responsive gifts of his own. Quite apart from his boundless energy and enthusiasm, his inexhaustible spirit of enquiry – remarkable for one so young, noted Theo – the boy had all the essential qualities of a naturalist. Patience, for a start. He could remain perched in a tree for hours on end, utterly still, utterly enthralled, as he watched the comings and goings of some small creature. Even Nancy, no naturalist, saw this special quality in him: ‘He had an enormous patience when he was very young. He used to make lassoes for catching lizards – lassoes of grass – and he would stay hours crouched in front of a little hole where he knew the lizard was, and then he would pull the noose tight and lasso it.’
Theo also discerned that Gerald lacked the arrogance that most human beings brought to their encounters with animals. Animals, Gerald felt by instinct, were his equals, no matter how small, or ugly, or undistinguished; they were, at a level beyond the merely sentimental, his friends and companions – often his only ones, for he had no great rapport with other children. And the animals, in their turn, sensed this, and responded accordingly, not just when he was a boy on Corfu but throughout all the years of his life.
By corollary, it followed in Gerald’s mind that it was a fundamental moral law that all species had an equal right to exist, this at a time when most human societies observed no ethical principles applicable to living things outside of humankind. It also followed that he had difficulty pursuing the study of natural history in the way that was the common practice of the period: that is by snuffing the life out of living things in order to examine, classify and dissect them in death. ‘Live with living things, I say,’ he was later to declare, ‘don’t just peer at them in a pool of alcohol.’ Gerald, in other words, was a behavioural zoologist (or ethologist) from the very start, and natural history for him was the study of living things – all too evidently living, as his family were to find out soon enough.
The family’s first winter came, coolish and very wet. By now Larry and Nancy, seeking the wilder, lonelier shores of the island, had moved up to Kalami, a remote hamlet on the north-east coast of Corfu, where they took a single-storey, whitewashed fisherman’s house – the White House – on the edge of the sea overlooking a small bay, with the barren hills of Albania only a couple of miles away across the straits. The winter rain in Corfu was almost tropical in density, the sea pounded on the rocks below the house, and the only heating was some smouldering logs in the middle of the room.
When nineteen-year-old Alex Emmett, a family friend who had been at school with Leslie, arrived to join the Durrells for their first Christmas at the Strawberry-Pink Villa, he found Mother still downing gin, Leslie an aimless, rootless, mother-fixated castaway, and Gerry utterly absorbed in his trapdoor spiders and his natural history lessons with Theo Stephan-ides. But for Theo, Emmett reckoned, young Gerry might easily have become a drifter like Leslie.
Having arrived for Christmas, Emmett stayed on for the family’s first full-blown spring on Corfu. It was to prove a season of singular magic. Gerald observed it through eyes round with wonder. The whole island was ‘flower-filled, scented and a-flutter with new leaves’. The cypress trees were now covered with a misty coat of greenish-white cones. Waxy yellow crocuses tumbled down the banks and blue day-irises filled the oak thickets. Gerald recorded: ‘It was no half-hearted spring, this; the whole island vibrated with it as though a great, ringing chord had been struck. Everything and everyone heard it and responded. It was apparent in the gleam of flower-petals, the flash of bird wings and the sparkle in the dark, liquid eyes of the peasant girls.’
The family responded to the spring in their different ways. Leslie blazed away at turtle-doves with his guns. Lawrence bought a guitar and a large barrel of strong red wine and sang Elizabethan love songs which induced a mood of melancholy. Margo perked up, bathed frequently and took an interest in a good-looking but boring young Turk – not a popular choice on a Greek island.
Gerald’s excursions took on an even greater range and interest when, in the summer of 1936, the family moved to another villa on the far side of Corfu town. According to Gerald, it was Larry who provoked the move. He had invited some friends to come to stay on Corfu – Zatopec the poet (an Albanian whose real name was Zarian), three artists called Jonquil, Durant and Michael, and the bald-headed Melanie, Countess of Torro – and he wanted Mother to put them up in the Strawberry-Pink Villa. Since the villa was barely big enough for the family, let alone an untold number of guests, Mother’s circuitous logic decided that the easiest solution was to find a bigger place. In any case, the Strawberry-Pink Villa never had a bathroom worthy of the name, only a separate washroom and a primitive toilet in the grounds, which alone was a compelling enough reason to move on.
The new house, which Gerald was to dub the Daffodil-Yellow Villa, was a huge Venetian mansion called Villa Anemoyanni, after the family who had owned it until recently. It stood on a modest eminence set back from the sea at a place called Sotoriotissa, near Kondokali, overlooking Gouvia Bay to the north of Corfu town. From the attic the children could watch the once-weekly Imperial Airways flying-boat splash down in the bay below. The house had stood empty for three years; it had faded green shutters and yellow walls, and was surrounded by neglected olive groves and untended orchards of lemon and orange trees. Gerald recalled:
The whole place had an atmosphere of ancient melancholy about it, the house with its cracked and peeling walls, the tremendous echoing rooms, its verandas piled high with drifts of last year’s leaves and so overgrown with creepers and vines that the lower rooms were in a perpetual green twilight … The house and land were gently, sadly decaying, lying forgotten on the hillside overlooking the shining sea and dark, eroded hills of Albania.
It was Spiro who found the villa, and Spiro who organised the move – the long line of handcarts piled high with the family’s possessions heading north in the now familiar cloud of white dust. But even after they had moved everything in, the house remained vast and echoing, mainly because much of the decrepit antique furniture that came with it disintegrated at the first touch of a human hand (or bottom). It was big enough for Gerald to be allocated a large room of his own on the first floor – his study, he called it, though to the rest of the family it was known as the Bug House. The Bug House was Gerald’s first true den and centre of operations:
This room smelt pleasantly of ether and methylated spirits. It was here I kept my natural history books, my diary, microscope, dissecting instruments, nets, collecting bags, and other important items. Large cardboard boxes housed my birds’ eggs, beetle, butterfly and dragon-fly collections, while on the shelves above were a fine range of bottles full of methylated spirit in which were preserved such interesting items as a four-legged chicken, various lizards and snakes, frog-spawn in different stages of growth, a baby octopus, three half-grown brown rats (a contribution from Roger), and a minute tortoise, newly hatched, that had been unable to survive the winter. The walls were sparsely, but tastefully, decorated with a slab slate containing the fossilised remains of a fish, a photograph of myself shaking hands with a chimpanzee, and a stuffed bat. I had prepared the bat myself, without assistance, and I was extremely proud of the result.
For Gerald the winter was enlivened by his tea-time natural history lessons every Thursday in Theo’s wonderful study in his flat in Corfu town. The room was packed with books, notebooks, x-ray plates, jars and bottles full of minute freshwater fauna, a telescope pointing at the sky, and a microscope table laden with instruments and slides, where Gerald would sit for hours on end peering transfixed at the mouth-parts of the rat flea, the egg-sacs of the one-eyed cyclops bug, the spinnerets of the cross or garden spider. When the weather improved they ventured out. Theo would come over to the Daffodil-Yellow Villa on foot, followed by his wife Mary and sometimes his young daughter Alexia in Spiro’s taxi; together he and Gerry would sally forth to explore the surrounding countryside, striding out side by side, singing at the top of their voices.
Alan Thomas, on a visit to Corfu, witnessed them setting out on an expedition, Theo in an immaculate white suit and a homburg that would have been a credit to Edward VII, Gerry running alongside, almost dancing with happiness, both of them strapped around with collecting equipment. ‘I turned to Larry,’ Thomas recalled, ‘and I said: “It’s wonderful for Gerry to have Theodore.” And Larry replied: “Yes, Theodore is Gerry’s hero.”’ They always carried a bottle of fresh lemonade and biscuits or sandwiches on these excursions, together with dipping nets and knapsacks and canvas bags full of collecting bottles and boxes and a few clumps of damp moss, for as Theodore explained: ‘Both Gerald and I were more interested in studying live creatures and kept our collection of preserved specimens to a minimum.’
Exploring the countryside with the close concentration of watchmenders, they left no stick or stone unturned, no puddle unexamined. ‘Every water-filled ditch was, to us, a teeming and unexplored jungle,’ Gerald recalled, with the minute cyclops and water-fleas, green and coral pink, suspended like birds among the underwater branches, while on the muddy bottom the tigers of the pool would prowl: the leeches and the dragonfly larvae. Every hollow tree had to be scrutinised in case it should contain a tiny pool of water in which mosquito-larvae were living, every mossy rock had to be overturned to find out what lay beneath it, and every rotten log had to be dissected. On their return they ransacked Mother’s kitchen for soup plates and teaspoons, which they used to sort out their finds before accommodating them in the gravel-bottomed, weed-aired jam jars and sweet bottles that would be their home. Before long, Theo was to recall, they had assembled a ‘whole army corps of aquaria’.
Soon Gerald was setting off from the Daffodil-Yellow Villa and exploring in every direction – always dressed, at his mother’s insistence, in very brightly coloured pullovers so that he could be easily spotted even when he strayed some distance from home. A myrtle-covered hill behind the house was covered with tortoises newly awakened from their winter’s hibernation, and Gerald would spend hours watching their romantic urges revive in the sun. ‘The actual sexual act,’ he was to record, ‘was the most awkward and fumbling thing I have ever seen. The incredibly heavy-handed and inexpert way the male would attempt to hoist himself on to the female shell, overbalancing and almost overturning, was extremely painful to watch; the urge to go and assist the poor creature was almost overwhelming.’ No less intriguing to the twelve-year-old was the sex life of the mantises, and he would stare in horror as the female slowly munched her way through her partner’s head while he proceeded to fertilise her with what was left of his body: a beautifully simple demonstration of the two purposes of life – feeding to ensure the survival of the individual, and copulation to ensure the survival of the species – neatly combined in a single event.
Sometimes Gerald would go out bat-hunting at night, an altogether different adventure in a world metamorphosed by silence and moonlight, where the creatures of the darkness – jackals, foxes, squirrel dormice, nightjars – slipped silently in an out of vision like shadows. Once he found a young Scops owl covered in baby down and took it home, naming him Ulysses. Ulysses was a bird of great strength of character, Gerald noted, and not to be trifled with, so when he grew up he was given the freedom of the Bug House, flying out through the window at night and riding on Roger the dog’s back when Gerald went down to the sea for a late-evening swim.
Gerald now began to collect creatures on a grand scale, and before long his room was so full that he had to house them in various nooks and crannies throughout the villa. This led to some embarrassing, not to say fractious situations, for the rest of the family did not share his affection for the island’s wildlife, and positively objected if they encountered it in the wrong place. For a while the house was infested with giant mosquitoes, whose provenance remained obscure until Theo realised that what Gerald thought were tadpoles in his aquarium were in fact the inch-long, pot-bellied larvae of Theobaldia longeareolata, the largest mosquito on the island. Gerald had been puzzled by the fact that, instead of turning into frogs, they had seemingly been vanishing into thin air. But worse was to follow.
Gerald had long been fascinated by the black scorpion, a particularly venomous version of a species which had a fearsome reputation – as Yani the shepherd once explained, its sting could kill, especially if it managed to crawl into your ear, as had happened to one of Yani’s friends, a young shepherd who died in unspeakable agony. Gerald was never deterred by dangerous animals, however, and in the crumbling wall surrounding the sunken garden of the Daffodil-Yellow Villa he was delighted to discover a whole battalion of black scorpions, each about an inch long. ‘They were weird-looking things,’ he was to write, ‘with their flattened, oval bodies, crooked legs, the enormous crab-like claws, bulbous and neatly jointed as armour, and the tail like a string of brown beads ending in a sting like a rose-thorn.’ At night he would go out with a torch and watch the scorpions’ wonderful courtship dances, claw in claw, tails entwined. ‘I grew very fond of these scorpions. I found them to be pleasant, unassuming creatures with, on the whole, most charming habits.’ Their cannibalism apart.
One day Gerald found a fat female scorpion in the wall, with a mass of tiny babies clinging to her back. Enraptured, he carefully put mother and babies into one of his empty matchboxes, intending to smuggle them into the Bug House where he could watch the babies grow up. Unfortunately, lunch was served just as he went into the house, so he put the matchbox on the drawing room mantelpiece for temporary safekeeping, and joined the rest of the family. The meal passed affably, then Lawrence rose and went to fetch his cigarettes from the drawing room, picking up the matchbox he found conveniently ready on the mantelpiece.
Gerald watched as, ‘still talking glibly’, Lawrence opened the matchbox. In a flash the mother scorpion was out of the box and on to the back of his hand, sting curved up and at the ready, babies still clinging on grimly. Lawrence let out a roar of fright, and with an instinctive flick of his hand sent the scorpion scooting down the table, shedding babies to left and right. Pandemonium ensued. Lugaretzia dropped the plates, Roger the dog began barking madly, Leslie leapt from his chair, and Margo threw a glass of water at the creature, but missed and drenched Mother.
‘It’s that bloody boy again,’ Lawrence could be heard bawling above the universal turmoil. Roger, deciding Lugaretzia was to blame for the brouhaha, promptly bit her in the leg.
‘It’s that bloody boy,’ bellowed Lawrence again. ‘He’ll kill the lot of us. Look at the table … knee-deep in scorpions …’
Soon the scorpions had hidden themselves under the crockery and cutlery, and a temporary lull descended.
‘That bloody boy …’ Lawrence reiterated, almost speechless. ‘Every matchbox in the house is a death trap.’
In another potentially heart-stopping incident, it was Leslie’s turn to undergo trial by terror. One hot day in September, seeing that his water snakes were wilting in the heat, Gerald took them into the house and put them in a bath full of cool water. Not long afterwards, Leslie returned from a shooting expedition and decided to have a bath to freshen up. Suddenly there was a tremendous bellow from the direction of the bathroom, and Leslie emerged on to the veranda wearing nothing but a small towel.
‘Gerry!’ he roared, his face flushed with anger. ‘Where’s that boy?’
‘Now, now, dear,’ said Mother soothingly, ‘whatever’s the matter?’
‘Snakes,’ snarled Leslie, ‘that’s what’s the matter … That bloody boy’s filled the soddin’ bath full of bleeding snakes, that’s what’s the matter … Damn great things like hosepipes … It’s a wonder I wasn’t bitten.’
Gerald removed the snakes from the bath and put them into a saucepan from the kitchen, returning in time to hear Lawrence holding forth to the lunch party on the veranda, ‘I assure you the house is a death trap. Every conceivable nook and cranny is stuffed with malignant faunae waiting to pounce. How I have escaped being maimed for life is beyond me …’
One day Gerald and Theo came back with a jar full of medicinal leeches – gruesome red-and-green-striped bloodsuckers, all of three inches long. Even today Lake Scotini, the only permanent freshwater lakelet on Corfu and a favourite hunting ground for the indomitable pair, swarms with such creatures. Due to a mishap the jar was knocked off a table, and the leeches vanished. For nights Lawrence lay awake in terror, expecting to find the creatures feeding on his body and the sheets soaked in blood. It was, he felt, the ultimate nightmare visitation, the apotheosis of all Gerry’s wildlife horrors.
Lawrence’s estimation of his youngest brother, which had been sinking lower with each daily delivery of centipedes, scorpions or toads into the family home, rallied somewhat when one day, to his intense surprise, he heard the bug-happy boy whistling part of the first movement of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony. But the years did not mellow him when it came to the matter of Gerald’s life-threatening proclivities on Corfu. ‘As a small boy he was impossible,’ he told a friend many years later. ‘A terrible nuisance. He has recounted the worst of himself as well as the best in that Family book. Oh, it was matchboxes full of scorpions all the time, I didn’t dare to sit down anywhere in the house, and of course Mother was there to defend him – the slightest criticism and she would snarl like a bear, and meanwhile there were beetles in the soup. No, he was intolerable, he needed to be thrashed.’
Since the family was so dismayed by many of Gerald’s strange pets, Theo’s affirmation of the boy’s ruling passion was like a papal benediction for him. Later Gerald was to relate how, when the rains began to fill the ponds and ditches, he and Theo would prowl among them, ‘as alert as fishing herons’:
I was seeking the terrapin, the frog, toad or snake to add to my menagerie, while Theo, his little net with bottle on the end, would seek the smaller fauna, some almost invisible to the eye.
‘Ah ha!’ he would exclaim when, having swept his net through the water, he lifted the little bottle to his eye. ‘Now this is – er, um – most interesting. I haven’t seen one of these since I was in Epir …’
‘Look, Theo,’ I would say, lifting a baby snake towards him.
‘Um – er – yes,’ Theo would reply. ‘Pretty thing.’
To hear an adult call a snake a pretty thing was music to my ears.
FOUR The Garden of the Gods Corfu 1937–1939 (#ulink_f135fced-dc47-5561-b1b6-eb1310bdc7c7)
So the bug-happy boy wandered about his paradise island while conventional education passed him by. For a time Mother endeavoured to stop him turning completely wild by sending him off for daily French lessons with the Belgian Consul, another of Corfu’s great eccentrics. The Consul lived at the top of a tall, rickety building in the centre of the Jewish quarter of Corfu town, an exotic and colourful area of narrow alleys full of open-air stalls, bawling vendors, laden donkeys, clucking hens – and a multitude of stray and starving cats. He was a kindly little man, with gold teeth and a wonderful three-pointed beard, and dressed at all times in formal attire appropriate to his official status, complete with silk cravat, shiny top hat and spats.
Gerald acquired little French from his lessons, but his boredom was alleviated by a curious obsession of his tutor’s. It turned out that the Consul was as compulsive a gunman as Gerald’s brother Leslie, and every so often during the morning lessons he would leap out of his chair, load a powerful air rifle, take careful aim out of the window and blaze away at the street outside. At first Gerald’s hopes were raised by the possibility that the Consul was mixed up in some deadly family feud, though he was puzzled why no one ever fired back, and why, after firing his gun, the Consul would be so upset, muttering dolefully, with tears in his eyes: ‘Ah, ze poor lizzie fellow …’ Finally Gerald discovered that the Consul, a devoted cat lover, was shooting the hungriest and most wretched of the strays. ‘I cannot feed zem all,’ he explained, ‘so I like to make zem happiness by zooting zem. Zey are bezzer so, but iz makes me feel so zad.’ And he would leap up again to take another potshot out of the window.
The Belgian Consul fared no better than any of Gerald’s other hired tutors, totally failing to strike a spark from the boy’s obdurate flint. It was his brother Larry’s educative influence that complemented that of Theo Stephanides, firing him with what he called a ‘sort of verbal tonic’. ‘He has the most extraordinary ability for giving people faith in themselves,’ he was to write of his eldest brother. ‘Throughout my life he has provided me with more enthusiastic encouragement than anyone else, and any success I have achieved is due, in no small measure, to his backing.’ Not long after the family had settled down on Corfu, Lawrence began to take his youngest brother’s literary education in hand. It was under his eclectic but inspired guidance that Gerald was introduced to the world of reading and the basics of writing – above all to the world of Lawrence’s vivid, ever-fermenting imagination.
‘My brother Larry was a kind of god for me,’ Gerald recalled, ‘and therefore I tried to imitate him. Larry had people like Henry Miller staying with him in Corfu and I had access to his very varied library.’ Larry would throw books at him, he remembered, with a brief word about why they were interesting, and if Gerald thought he was right he’d read them. ‘Good heavens, I was omnivorous! I read anything from Darwin to the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I adored books by W.H. Hudson, Gilbert White and Bates’ A Naturalist on the River Amazons. I believe that all children should be surrounded by books and animals.’ It was Lawrence who gave his young brother copies of Henri Fabre’s classic works Insect Life: Souvenirs of a Naturalist and The Life and Love of the Insects, with their accounts of wasps, bees, ants, gnats, spiders, scorpions – books which Gerald was later to claim ‘set me off on Corfu’, and which remained an inspiration throughout his life on account of the simplicity and clarity with which they were written and the stimulation they provided the imagination. He was to write:
If someone had presented me with the touchstone that turns everything to gold, I could not have been more delighted. From that moment Fabre became my personal friend. He unravelled the many mysteries that surrounded me and showed me miracles and how they were performed. Through his entrancing prose I became the hunting wasp, the paralysed spider, the cicada, the burly, burnished scarab beetle, and a host of other creatures as well.
Ironically, though, it was a publication that Gerald borrowed from his highly unliterary, gun-slinging brother Leslie that was to sound the clearest call to action for his future life. This was a copy of a popular adventure magazine called Wide World, which serialised a refreshingly humorous account by an American zoologist, Ivan Sanderson, about a recent animal-collecting expedition, led by Percy Sladen, in the wilds of the Cameroons in West Africa. Sanderson’s beguiling tale planted a dream inside Gerald’s young skull, a dream which hardened into a youthful vow of intent that one day he too would combine his love of animals with his yearning for adventure and brave the African wilds in search of rare animals – animals which he would bring back alive, not trapped, shot and stuffed like Percy Sladen’s.
Lawrence’s greatest gift to Gerald was not printed books but language itself, especially language at its most evocative and illuminating, in the form of simile and metaphor. Judging by the progression from Gerald’s earliest literary offerings to those that followed, the impact of his brother’s tuition was electrifying. It was as if Gerald had grown up in a year, emerging by the summer of 1936, when he was eleven, with the perception of someone three times his age. If his next poem, ‘Death’, was not written by Lawrence, the influence of Lawrence totally dominates it, from the subject to the prosody. And the transformation in Gerald’s spelling is suspiciously miraculous.
on a mound a boy lay
as a stream went tinkling by:
mauve irises stood around him as if to
shade him from the eye of death which
was always taking people unawares
and making them till his ground
rhododendrons peeped
at the boy counting sheep
the horror is spread
the boy is dead
BUT DEATH HIMSELF IS NOT SEEN
Lawrence was so impressed by the poem that he sent a copy of it to his friend Henry Miller in America, naming his younger brother as the author. ‘He has written the following poem,’ he wrote. ‘And I am envious.’ Later he included the poem in the November 1937 issue of the Booster, the controversial literary magazine of the American Country Club near Paris, which he edited with Miller, Alfred Pérles and William Saroyan.
By now Mother had found Gerald a new tutor to take the place of George Wilkinson, who had remained at Pérama. He was a twenty-two-year-old friend of Lawrence’s by the name of Pat Evans, ‘a tall, handsome young man,’ Gerald noted, ‘fresh from Oxford.’ Evans entertained serious ambitions of actually educating his young pupil, an aim Gerald himself found ‘rather trying’ and did his best to subvert. He need not have worried, however, for soon the island began to work its languorous magic on the new arrival, and all talk of fractions and adverbs and suchlike was abandoned in favour of a more outdoor kind of teaching, like floating about in the sea while chatting in a desultory way about the effects of warm ocean currents and the origins of coastline geology. Evans had a keen interest in natural history and biology, and he passed on his enthusiasm to his young pupil in a casual, unobtrusive way, ‘walking around, just looking at bugs’, as Margo recalled.
Gerald persuaded Pat Evans to let him write a book as a substitute for English lessons, and soon he was busy scribbling away at a narrative he was to describe as ‘a stirring tale of a voyage round the world capturing animals with my family’, a work Lawrence called ‘his great novel of the flora and fauna of the world’ – a story written very much in the style of the Boy’s Own Paper, with one chapter ending with Mother being attacked by a jaguar and another with Larry caught in the coils of a giant anaconda. Unfortunately, the manuscript was inadvertently left behind in a tin trunk when the family finally left the island, and was probably impounded (so Gerald reckoned) by a bunch of Nazi illiterates during the war and thus lost to posterity for ever.
One fragment of Gerald’s early writing that did survive was a remarkable prose poem, ‘In the Theatre’, which Lawrence also published in the Booster – it was, indeed, Gerald’s first published work. It was clear from ‘In the Theatre’ that Gerald shared with his eldest brother an aptitude for vivid, concrete imagery and the instinct for simile and metaphor which lies at the heart of all poetic vision – much of it drawn from the wildlife the boy had been observing at first hand in his rambles around Corfu.
They brought him in on a stretcher, starched and white, every stitch of it showing hospital work. They slid him on to the cold stone table. He was dressed in pyjamas and jacket, his face looked as if it was carved out of cuttlefish. A student fidgeted, someone coughed, huskily, uneasily. The doctor looked up sharply at the new nurse: she was white as marble, twisting a blue lace handkerchief in her butterfly-like hands.
The scalpel whispered as if it were cutting silk, showing the intestines coiled up neatly like watchsprings. The doctor’s hands moved with the speed of a striking snake, cutting, fastening, probing. At last, a pinkish-grey thing like a sausage came out in the scorpion-like grip of the pincers. Then the sewing-up, the needle burying itself in the soft depth and appearing on the other side of the abyss, drawing the skin together like a magnet. The stretcher groaned at the sudden weight.
When Lawrence first read this prose-poem with his eleven-year-old brother’s name appended to it, he thought it must have been his tutor Pat Evans who had really written it. But Evans denied any involvement. ‘Do you suppose,’ he told Lawrence, ‘that if I could write as well as that I would waste my time on being a tutor?’
But Pat Evans clearly was an inciting agent of some sort in Gerald’s literary development, for later in the year Gerald wrote to Alan Thomas enclosing a copy of his most recent poetic concoction:
I send you my latest opus. Pat and I set each other subjects to write poems in each week. This is my first homewark [sic]. NIGHT-CLUB.
Spoon on, swoon on to death. The mood is blue.
Croon me a stave as sexless as the plants,
Deathless as platinum, cynical as love.
My mood is indigo, my dance is bones.
If there were any limbo it were here.
Dancing dactyls, piston-man and pony
To dewey negroes played by saxophones …
Sodom, swoon on, and wag the deathless boddom.
I love your sagging undertones of snot.
Love shall prevail – and coupling in cloakrooms
When none shall care whether it prevail or not.
Much love to you. Nancy is drawing a bookplate for you. Why? Gerry Durrell
Did the eleven-year-old boy with his simple, innocent passion for blennies and trapdoor spiders really write this unbelievably precocious piece of desperately straining and contrived Weltschmerz? Not only the subject, but the existentialist mind-set, the mood, the vocabulary, the startling and often far-fetched imagery, the compulsive desire to shock, all reek of the influence of Larry the poet, not to mention Larry the uncompromising, anarchic novelist then wrestling with his first major work of fiction, his seriously black – and blue – Black Book. Did Larry actually write it? If not, it can only be seen as a pastiche of Larry, and as such quite stunning for one so young – bizarrely sophisticated nonsense work that nonetheless makes a kind of sense.
A later poem by Gerald entitled ‘An African Dialogue’ was later published, with Lawrence’s help, in a fringe literary periodical called Seven in the summer of 1939. As the final verse indicates, it is remarkable for the cryptic compression of its metaphysical conceit.
She went to the house and lit a candle.
The candle cried: ‘I am being killed.’
The flame: ‘I am killing you.’
The maid answered: ‘It is true, true.
For I see your white blood.’
Meanwhile, family life chez the Durrells was beginning to disintegrate into riot and pandemonium. ‘We’ve got so lax,’ Larry wrote to Alan Thomas, ‘what with Leslie farting at meals, and us nearly naked all day on the point, bathing.’ Nancy agreed. Mother could keep no kind of order at all. ‘Even Gerry could have done better with a little more discipline,’ she complained. ‘I mean he did grow up with really no discipline at all.’ Nancy and Larry were glad of the seclusion and tranquillity of their whitewashed fisherman’s house at Kalami, far from the uproarious family. ‘Ten miles south,’ Larry reported to Thomas, ‘the family brawls and caterwauls and screams in the cavernous new Ypso villa.’
At a cost of £43.1os. the Durrell splinter party had had a top storey added to their house, with a balcony from which they could look over the sea and the hills towards the dying day. For them at least, and later for Gerald and the rest of the family on their forays north, the island entered a new dimension of enchantment.
‘The peace of those evenings on the balcony before the lighting of the lamps was something we shall never discover again,’ Lawrence was to write; ‘the stillness of objects reflected in the mirror of the bay … It was the kind of hush you get in a Chinese water-colour.’ As they sat there, sea and sky merging into a single veil, a shepherd would start playing his flute somewhere under an arbutus out of sight.
Across the bay would slide the smooth, icy notes of the flute; little liquid flourishes, and sleepy squibbles. Sitting on the balcony, wrapped by the airs, we would listen without speaking. Presently the moon appeared – not the white, pulpy spectre of a moon that you see in Egypt – but a Greek moon, friendly, not incalculable or chilling … We walked in our bare feet through the dark rooms, feeling the cool tiles under us, and down on to the rock. In that enormous silence we walked into the water, so as not to splash, and swam out into the silver bar. We didn’t speak because a voice on that water sounded unearthly. We swam till we were tired and then came back to the white rock and wrapped ourselves in towels and ate grapes.
‘This is Homer’s country pure,’ Lawrence scribbled enthusiastically, if not entirely accurately, to Alan Thomas. ‘A few 100 yards from us is where Ulysses landed …’ The diet, he said, was a bit wild. ‘Bread and cheese and Greek champagne … Figs and grapes if they’re in … But in compensation the finest bathing and scenery in the world – and ISLANDS!’
It was inevitable that sooner or later, looking out every day over such an incomparably mesmeric expanse of sea, the family should eventually take to the water. Leslie was the leading spirit in this foray. Before he came to Corfu he had badly wanted to join the Merchant Navy, but his local doctor deemed his constitution wasn’t strong enough. In Corfu he acquired a small boat, the Sea Cow, which he first rowed, then, following the addition of an outboard engine, motored up and down the coast, often alone, sometimes with the rest of the family.
‘You should see us,’ Leslie wrote in one of his infrequent missives home, ‘the whole bloody crowd at sea, it would make you laugh.
One day Larry and Nan came here and I said I would take them home in the boat – Mother, Pat, Gerry, Larry, Nan and myself all in the motor boat. We started off and ran into quite a rough sea. Pat lying on the deck and holding on for all he was worth was dripping in about 5 minutes. Larry, Nan, Mother and Gerry crawled under a blanket – most unseamanlike. The blanket was wet and so was everyone under it. This went on for a bit and things got worse, when suddenly the boat did a beautiful roll and sent gallons of sea water over us. This was enough for Mother and we had to turn back. When Larry, Nan and Pat had had some whiskey and dry clothes they went home in a car.
Sometimes, on dead-still moonlight nights with a glassy sea, Lawrence and Nancy would row across to the Albanian coast for a midnight picnic and then row back, an adventure out of dreamland, pure phantasmagoria. Soon he had bought a boat of his own, a black and brown twenty-two-foot sailing boat called the Van Norden – ‘a dream, my black devil’ – in which they could sail to remoter coasts and islands. Leslie acquired for £3 another small boat, soon to bear the proud name of the Bootle-Bumtrinket, which he and Pat Evans fixed up for Gerald as a birthday present. The boat they produced was, according to Gerald, a genuine oddity in the history of marine construction. The Bootle-Bumtrinket was seven feet long, flat-bottomed and almost circular in shape, painted green and white inside, with black, white and orange stripes outside. Leslie had cut a remarkably long cypress pole for a mast, and proposed raising this at the ceremonial launch and maiden voyage from the jetty in the bay in front of the villa. All did not go according to plan, however, for the moment the mast was inserted in its socket, the Bootle-Bumtrinket – ‘with a speed remarkable for a craft of her circumference,’ Gerald observed – turned turtle, taking Pat Evans with it.
It took a little while for Leslie to redo his calculations, and when he finally sawed the mast down to what he estimated to be the correct length, it turned out to be a mere three feet high, which was insufficient to support a sail. So for the time being the vessel remained a rowing boat, a tub which bobbed upright on the surface of the sea ‘with the placid buoyancy of a celluloid duck’. Gerald made his maiden voyage on a summer’s dawn of perfect calm, with just the faintest breeze. He pushed off from the shore and rowed and drifted down the coast, in and out of the little bays and around the tiny islets of the offshore archipelago, rich in shallow-water marine life. ‘The joy of having a boat of your own!’ he was to remember. ‘There was nothing to compare with that very first voyage.’
Lying side by side with Roger the dog in the bow of the boat as it drifted in towards the shallows, he peered down through a fathom of crystal water at the tapestry of the seabed passing beneath him – the gaping clams stuck upright in the silver sand, the serpulas with their feathery orange-gold and blue petals, ‘like an orchid on a mushroom stem’, the pouting blennies in the holes of the reefs, the anemones waving on the rocks, the scuttling spider-crabs camouflaged with coats of weeds and sponges, the caravans of coloured top shells moving everywhere. Eventually, as the sun sank lower, he began to row for home, his glass jars and collecting tubes full of marine specimens of all kinds. ‘The sun gleamed like a coin behind the olive trees,’ he was to write, ‘and the sea was striped with gold and silver when the Bootle-Bumtrinket brought her round behind bumping gently against the jetty. Hungry, thirsty, tired, with my head buzzing full of the colours and shapes I had seen, I carried my precious specimens slowly up the hill to the villa …’
Sometimes in the summer, if the moon was full, the family went bathing at night, when the sea was cooler than in the heat of the day. They would take the Sea Cow out into deep water and plunge over the side, the water wobbling bright in the moonlight. On one such night, when Gerald had floated out some distance from both shore and boat, he was overtaken by a shoal of porpoises, heaving and sighing, rising and diving all around him. For a short while he swam with them, overjoyed at their beautiful, exuberant presence; but then, as if at a signal, they turned and headed out of the bay towards the distant coast of Albania. ‘I trod water and watched them go,’ he remembered, ‘swimming up the white chain of moonlight, backs aglow as they rose and plunged with heavy ecstasy in the water as warm as fresh milk. Behind them they left a trail of great bubbles that rocked and shone briefly like miniature moons before vanishing under the ripples.’
Soon the family discovered other marvels of the Corfu night – the phosphorescence in the sea and the flickering of the fireflies in the olive groves along the shore, both better seen when there was no moon. On the memorable night that Mother took to the water for the first time in her home-made bathing suit, the porpoises, the fireflies and the phosphorescence coincided in a single breathtaking display. Gerald was to write:
Never had we seen so many fireflies congregated in one spot. They flicked through the trees in swarms, they crawled on the grass, the bushes and the olive trunks, they drifted in swarms over our heads and landed on the rugs, like green embers. Glittering streams of them flew out over the bay, swirling over the water, and then, right on cue, the porpoises appeared, swimming in line into the bay, rocking rhythmically through the water, their backs as if painted with phosphorous … With the fireflies above and the illuminated porpoises below it was a fantastic sight. We could even see the luminous trails beneath the surface where the porpoises swam in fiery patterns across the sandy bottom, and when they leapt high in the air the drops of emerald glowing water flicked from them, and you could not tell if it was phosphorescence or fireflies you were looking at. For an hour or so we watched this pageant, and then slowly the fireflies drifted back inland and further down the coast. Then the porpoises lined up and sped out to sea, leaving a flaming path behind them that flickered and glowed, and then died slowly, like a glowing branch laid across the bay.
The motorboat gave the Durrells a greater freedom to roam round the island than ever before. At first it was Leslie who did the trail-blazing, mainly because of the rich opportunities for hunting and shooting provided by the wilder country to the north. Sometimes he picked up Lawrence and Nancy on the way, since Kalami lay on his passage north from Kondokali. ‘A week or 2. ago,’ Lawrence wrote to Alan Thomas, ‘we went up to a death-swamp lake in the north, Les and Nancy and me for a shoot. Tropical. Huge slime covered tracts, bubbled in hot marsh-gas and the roots of trees. Snakes and tortoises swimming quietly above and toads below. A ring of emerald slime thick with scarlet dragon-flies and mosquitoes. It’s called ANTINIOTISSA (enemy of youth).’
Before long Lawrence had become almost as obsessive a hunter as Leslie. It is extraordinary that Gerald was able to nurture his passion and love for the animal world while his two older brothers seemed hell-bent on blasting the wildlife of the island to pieces. But he did, conniving in the slaughter to the extent of helping to fill Leslie’s cartridges for him and sometimes accompanying him on pigeon shoots, looking on when, out of compassion, Leslie shot the stray and starving dogs that followed the family on their picnics.
Lawrence was largely indifferent to the natural world, except as spectacle, and his expeditions with Leslie to the north of the island revealed a killer streak. ‘I’m queer about shooting,’ he wrote to Alan Thomas. ‘So far I’ve prohibited herons. But duck is a different matter. Just a personified motor-horn, flying ham with a honk. No personality, nothing. And to bring them down is the most glorious feeling. THUD. Like breaking glass balls at a range. I could slaughter hundreds without a qualm.’ As for octopus, which he learned to hunt with a stick with a hook like the Greeks, they were ‘altogether filthy … utterly foul’.
Larry began to revise his opinion of Leslie somewhat after a few shooting trips with him in the north. ‘You wouldn’t recognise Leslie I swear,’ he wrote to Alan Thomas in the summer of 1936. ‘His personality is really amazingly strong now, and he can chatter away in company like Doctor Johnson himself. It’s done him a world of good, strutting about with a gun under each arm and one behind his ear, shooting peasants right and left.’ Leslie saw himself as a tough guy in a tough guy’s world, the fastest gun on the island – ‘dirty, unshaven,’ his kid brother said, ‘and smelling of gun-oil and blood’.
The family had a Kodak camera, and from time to time snapped family groups and memorable outings. Many of the photographs were taken by Leslie, who had an eye for a picture – and a handsome woman. On the back of a snap of Maria, the family’s maid, he jotted a caption full of portent: ‘Maria our maid (jolly nice)’.
Towards the end of the summer of 1936 Mother decided to dispense with the services of Gerald’s tutor, Pat Evans – according to Gerald, on the grounds that he was getting far too fond of Margo, and Margo of him. So departed one of the staunchest supporters of Gerald’s budding natural history and literary endeavours. Banished for ever from the family, the disconsolate Evans found his way to mainland Greece, where during the war he became a local hero, fighting behind the lines as a British SOE agent in Nazi-occupied Macedonia. A rather shy and diffident loner, Evans was, Margo recalled, ‘very, very attractive’, and she had become deeply infatuated with him. She took the news of his dismissal badly, and shut herself away in the attic, eating hugely. ‘This was the period when Margaret was in a very bad way,’ Nancy remembered. ‘She began to get very fat, I mean she really did get awfully fat, and she got so ashamed of herself that she wouldn’t even appear – wouldn’t come down to meals or anything.’ It was neither gluttony nor a broken heart that was the cause of Margo’s weight problem, however, for according to reports it later turned out that she had a glandular condition that was causing her to put on a pound a day.
A new tutor was found, a Polish exile with French and English ancestry by the name of Krajewsky, whom Gerald in his book was to call Kralefsky. A gnome-like humpback, his redeeming virtue, as far as Gerald was concerned, was the huge collection of finches and other birds he kept on the top floor of the mouldering mansion on the edge of town where he lived with his ancient, witch-like mother (‘a ravaged old queen’).
His lessons, however, were old-fashioned and boring – history was lists of dates and geography lists of towns – so it came as a relief to the wearied boy when he discovered that his tutor possessed another virtue. For Krajewsky was a fantasist, and often conjured up an imaginary world in which his past life was presented as a series of wild adventures – a shipwreck on a voyage to Murmansk, an attack by bandits in the Syrian desert, a spot of derring-do in the Secret Service in World War One, an incident in Hyde Park when he strangled a killer bulldog with his bare hands – all of them in the company of ‘a Lady’. Henceforth lessons passed in a more agreeable fashion, with Gerald’s imagination and grasp of story-telling stimulated at the expense of the acquisition of new knowledge.
‘Like everything else in Corfu,’ Gerald was to reflect, ‘it was singularly lucky, this string of outlandish professors who taught me nothing that would be remotely useful in making me conform and succeed and flourish, but who gave me the right kind of wealth, who showed me life.’ And not only life, but freedom, pleasure, the sheer brilliance and sensuality of Corfu.
Gerald was growing up. In January 1937 he celebrated his twelfth birthday by throwing a party. To all the guests he sent an invitation in verse, decorated with a self-portrait of himself disguised as a Bacchanalian figure sporting a wild beard and looking uncannily like the man he was to become in later life:
Oh! Hail to you my fellow friends.
Will you yourselves to us lend?
We’re giving a party on 7th of Jan.
Do please come if you possibly can.
The doors are open at half-past three.
Mind you drop in and make whoopee with me.
One of those invited was the Reverend Geoffrey Carr, then Chaplain of the Holy Trinity Church that served the British community living on Corfu, and a good friend of Theo Stephanides and his seven-year-old daughter Alexia.
It was, Carr recalled, a splendid party, with Theo and Spiro and the Belgian Consul and a whole host of Corfu friends in attendance, and Leslie, Theo and the ex-King of Greece’s butler dancing the kalamatianos, and all the pets behaving badly, including the birthday present puppies, who were promptly christened Widdle and Puke, with good reason. A huge home-made cracker, constructed by Margo out of red paper, was suspended from the ceiling. It was eight feet long and three feet in diameter, and was stuffed with confetti, small toys and gifts of food and sweets for the local peasant children (who were sometimes nearly as hungry as the dogs). Disembowelled by Theo using a First World War bayonet belonging to Leslie, the cracker’s demise was the climax of the party, with a scrum of children scrabbling around for the gifts and sweets scattered about all over the floor.
Leslie and Lawrence had already carried out a reconnaissance of Antiniotissa, the large lake at the northern end of the island, and the rest of the family soon followed. The lake was an elongated sheet of shallow water about a mile long, bordered by a dense zariba of cane and reed and closed off from the sea at one end by a broad dune of fine white sand. The best time to visit it was at the season when the sand lilies buried in the dune pushed up their thick green leaves and white blooms, so that the dune became, as Gerald put it, ‘a glacier of flowers’. One warm summer dawn they all set off for Antiniotissa, Theodore and Spiro included, two boatloads full, with the Sea Cow towing the Bootle-Bumtrinket. As the engine died and the boats slid slowly towards the shore, the scent of the lilies wafted out to greet them – ‘a rich, heavy scent that was the distilled essence of summer, a warm sweetness that made you breathe deeply time and again in an effort to retain it within you’.
After establishing their picnic encampment among the lilies on the dune, the family did whatever came naturally to them. Leslie shot. Margo sunbathed. Mother wandered off with a trowel and basket. Spiro – ‘clad only in his underpants and looking like some dark hairy prehistoric man’ – stabbed at fish with his trident. Gerald and Theo pottered among the pools with their test tubes and collecting bottles looking for minuter forms of fauna. ‘What a heavenly place,’ murmured Larry. ‘I should like to lie here for ever. Eventually, of course, over the centuries, by breathing deeply and evenly I should embalm myself with this scent.’ Lunch came, then tea. Gerald and Theo returned to the edge of the lake to continue their search for insufficiently known organisms. Daylight faded as Spiro grilled a fish or an eel on the fire, and before long it grew dark – a still, hushed, magic dark, fireflies rising, fire spitting. This was a special place, Gerald knew, and he absorbed its balm through every sense.
The moon rose above the mountains, turning the lilies to silver except where the flickering flames illuminated them with a flush of pink. The tiny ripples sped over the moonlit sea and breathed with relief as they reached the shore at last. Owls started to chime in the trees, and in the gloomy shadows fireflies gleamed as they flew, their jade-green, misty lights pulsing on and off.
Eventually, yawning and stretching, we carried our things down to the boat. We rowed out to the mouth of the bay, and then in the pause while Leslie fiddled with the engine, we looked back at Antiniotissa. The lilies were like a snow-field under the moon, and the dark backcloth of olives was pricked with the lights of fireflies. The fire we had built, stamped and ground underfoot before we left, glowed like a patch of garnets at the edge of the flowers.
Towards the end of 1937 Mother, Margo, Leslie and Gerald moved to another villa, their third, smaller and handier than the cavernous mansion at Kondokali, but in many ways more desirable and elegant, in spite of its decrepit state. It was a beautiful Georgian house built in 1824 at a spot called Criseda as the weekend retreat, in the days when the British ruled Corfu, of the Governor of the British Protectorate of the Ionian Islands. The new house was perched on a hill not so very far from the Strawberry-Pink Villa, and it was dubbed the Snow-White Villa. A broad, vine-covered veranda ran along its front, and beyond lay a tiny, tangled garden, deeply shaded by a great magnolia and a copse of cypress and olive trees. Lawrence and Nancy would sometimes come over for a few days when Kalami became too lonely for them, for as Lawrence put it: ‘You can have a little too much even of Paradise and a little taste of Hell now and then is good for my work – keeps my brain from stagnating. You can trust Gerry to provide the Hell.’
From the back the villa looked out over a great vista of hills and valleys, fields and olive-woods, promising endless days of exploration and a ceaseless quest for creatures great and small – from giant toads and baby magpies to geckoes and mantises. From the front, the villa faced the sea and the long, shallow, almost landlocked lagoon called Lake Halikiopoulou, along whose nearest edge lay the flatlands Gerald was to call the Chessboard Fields. Here the Venetians had dug a network of narrow irrigation canals to channel the salty waters of the lagoon into salt pans, and these ditches now provided a haven for marine life and a protective barrier for nesting birds. On the seaward side of the maze of canals lay the flat sands of the tide’s edge, the haunt of snipe, oyster-catchers, dunlins and terns. On the landward side lay a checkerboard patchwork of small square fields yielding rich crops of grapes, maize, melons and vegetables. All this was Gerald’s hunting ground, where he could roam at will in the orbit of seabird and waterfowl, terrapin and water snake. Here he was to stalk a wily and ancient terrapin he called Old Plop to his heart’s content, and in a roundabout way acquire a favourite pet bird, a black-backed gull called Alecko – Lawrence called it ‘that bloody albatross’ – which he claimed to have got from a convicted murderer on a weekend’s leave from the local gaol.
Gerald was in an ancient rural Arcadia here. There was no airport runway across the lake (unlike today), no busy road at the foot of the hill, no tourist developments, no mini-markets, next to no cars. One old monk still lived alone in the monastery on Mouse Island across the water, and there were still fisher families in the cottages there (now razed). Sometimes Gerald and Margo would go down to the beach at the foot of the hill and swim across the shallow channel to Mouse Island. There Gerald would search for little animals while Margo would sunbathe in her two-piece bathing costume – invariably the old monk would come down and shake his fist at the attractive, pale English girl and yell, ‘You white witch!’ The north European preoccupation with near nudity and sunburn was rather shocking to the devout, straitlaced Greeks.
Not long after Gerald’s thirteenth birthday in January 1938, his idyllic life on Corfu was given a severe jolt when his tutor and mentor Theo Stephanides decided to leave the island to take up an appointment with an anti-malarial unit founded by the Rockefeller Foundation in Cyprus. His departure was to mark the beginning of the end of the Durrell family’s utopian dream.
Leslie had begun to go native, drinking and brawling with the Greek peasant men whenever the opportunity offered. Larry and Nancy had kept themselves busy making improvements to their house in Kalami, but it was not enough. Holed up in the solitude of the north, the young couple had turned upon themselves, rowing vehemently and sometimes violently. It had not helped that in the summer of 1936 Nancy had become pregnant, and had had an abortion arranged by Theo, not something taken lightly in the moral climate of that place and time. Mother had been shocked to the core when she found out about it. The family edifice had begun to crack after that, and Lawrence had started to grow restless and bored in the narrow confines of paradise. When two young English dancers of his acquaintance came to stay, he slept between them on the beach at night, telling Nancy to find somewhere else to sleep. ‘He was going through a stage when he was tired of being an old married man,’ Nancy recalled with bitterness, ‘and so he tried to push me out of it, and snub me all the time, and was being rather beastly.’ Finally Lawrence had decided they should recharge their creative batteries in Paris and London, and leave the island for a while. Margo, now twenty, decided it was time she made her own way in the ‘real world’, and returned to England.
As for Gerald, such childish innocence as he may have brought to the island – not much, doubtless, but some – was blown away with the onset of puberty, when other interests began to conflict with his earlier enthusiasm for non-human forms of life. From time to time he would play ‘mothers and fathers’ with a young female counterpart – an activity that was seen as a natural part of the curiosity of a highly intelligent boy – and in middle age he was to confide to a friend: ‘Before you knew where you were, the knickers were off and you were away.’
Though the remaining Durrells seemed content to drift aimlessly into the future on their paradise island, the world beyond Corfu’s shores had other plans. War was looming in Europe. In the north, Hitler’s Germany was preparing to march. In the south, Mussolini was loudly braying Italy’s claims to dominion over Albania and to territorial rights over Greece, Corfu included.
Lawrence and Leslie had always sworn to help defend the island against the Italians, but they were overtaken by events. By April 1939 Mary Stephanides and her daughter Alexia had already left Corfu to live in England. Gerald was sorry to see the young girl go, for she had become his best and closest playmate. As war in Europe grew more inevitable by the day, Louisa began to think it might be unwise to linger. In My Family Gerald was to claim that it was her concern for his future education that prompted Mother to leave Corfu. By now he was fourteen years old, and was, as Mary Stephanides recalled, ‘quite independent of adult control. Lawrence tried to be a father to him at times, but he was seldom living in the same home, and was in any case too indulgent towards his small brother. And Gerald always got his own way with his mother. Only Theodore maintained any form of control over him, and that was only once a week. So even if war had not started in 1939, the Corfu days of Gerald Durrell were by then strictly numbered.’
It was Grindlays Bank, Mother’s financial advisers in London, who gave the final push, warning her that when war came her funds might be cut off, and she would be stranded in Greece for the duration without any means of support. In June 1939, therefore, she left the island with Gerald, Leslie and the thirty-year-old Corfiot family maid, Maria Condos.
‘As the ship drew across the sea and Corfu sank shimmering into the pearly heat haze on the horizon,’ Gerald was to write of that decisive farewell, ‘a black depression settled on us, which lasted all the way back to England.’ From Brindisi the train bore the party – consisting of four humans, three dogs, two toads, two tortoises, six canaries, four goldfinches, two greenfinches, a linnet, two magpies, a seagull, a pigeon and an owl – northward to Switzerland.
At the Swiss frontier our passports were examined by a disgracefully efficient official. He handed them back to Mother, together with a small slip of paper, bowed unsmilingly, and left us to our gloom. Some moments later Mother glanced at the form the official had filled in, and as she read it, she stiffened.
‘Just look what he’s put,’ she exclaimed indignantly, ‘impertinent man.’
On the little card, in the column headed Description of Passengers had been written, in neat capitals: ONE TRAVELLING CIRCUS AND STAFF.
Now only Lawrence and Nancy were left – or so it seemed – clinging on in the White House on the edge of Kalami bay as the late summer sun burned down on them and the Germans marched into Czechoslovakia and the Italians occupied Albania, only a few miles across the water. But there was one last twist in the family’s Corfu saga, for one day Margo suddenly reappeared, having decided that the island was where her true home and friends were. She holed up in a peasant hut with a tin roof on the Condos family patch at Pérama, sleeping in the same big old wooden bed as her peasant friends Katerina and Renee, washing in a little basin outside the door, and hoping that she could sit out the war on her beloved island disguised as a peasant girl herself.
Lawrence and Nancy lingered a little longer, in some trepidation as to what the future would bring. The confusion of impending war had lapped as far as the north of Corfu now, and it was time to decide whether to go or to be marooned on the island. Margo received a secret note from Spiro, still loyally guarding the family’s interests: ‘Dear Missy Margo, This is to tell you that war has been declared. Don’t tell a soul.’ Lawrence recalled the day war was declared with anguish. ‘Standing on the balcony over the sea,’ he wrote to his friend Anne Ridler in October, ‘it seemed like the end of the world … It was the most mournful period of my life those dark masses murmuring by the lapping water like the Jews in Babylon; such passionate farewells, so many tears, so much language …’
Every able-bodied man and every horse had been mobilised. Corfu town was swarming with people looking for a way to escape, and huge naphtha flares burned on the boats that were unloading bullets and flour at the docks. In Kalami children were weeping in the garden, and Cretan infantry were marching about, ‘smelling like hell, but with great morale’. The local commander was planning to rig up torpedo tubes outside the White House and to mine the straits. Then all the men of the village were sent inland to a secret arms dump, including Anastassiou, ‘our suave, cool, beautiful landlord, too feminine and hysterical to handle a gun’. Only the women were left, weeping around the wells, and the uncomprehending children. ‘I had nothing to say goodbye to except the island,’ Lawrence wrote. ‘I ached for them all.’
Frantically Lawrence and Nancy prepared to leave, destroying papers and drawings, packing the few books they could carry. The little black and brown Van Norden would have to be left behind, and Nancy’s paintings – ‘lazy pleasant paintings of our peasant friends’ that hung on every wall. In weird, autumnal weather, clouds piled high over Albania, the narrow straits like a black sheet, the thin rain falling ‘like Stardust’, they boarded a smoky little Athens-bound steamer at Corfu quay and fled the island. ‘I remembered it all,’ he was to write, ‘with a regret so deep that it did not stir the emotions … We never ever speak of it any more, having escaped.’
Only Margo was left. Before his departure Lawrence had advised her that, should trouble come, she should sail the Van Norden down the Ionian Sea and into the Aegean to Athens – no mean voyage, especially as she had never handled a boat in her life. But she had no fears for her future: ‘I was young, and when you’re young you’re not frightened of anything.’ She had taken to going into Corfu town to hear the news reports and war bulletins relayed to the populace in the Platia, the central square. There, over a coffee or iced drink, she sometimes met up with the Imperial Airways flying-boat crews who were still operating the Mediterranean leg of the Karachi-UK air link. The airmen were aghast at her plan to ride out the war in the Corfu hills, and urged her to leave before the island was invaded and all communications with the outside world were cut. She became friendly with one officer in particular, a dashing young flight engineer by the name of Jack Breeze, and it was he who finally persuaded her to pull out and provided her with the means of doing so. Shortly after Christmas Margo was packed on to one of the last British aircraft flying out of Corfu, and left the island of her young womanhood for ever.
In October 1940 Italian forces entered Greece, and the following year they occupied Corfu. The White House at Kalami lay abandoned, and Larry’s little cutter sunk. Below the Strawberry-Pink Villa, where the boy Gerald had first strode out to explore the wild interior, the Italians built a huge tented camp, where they kept their ration store and marched their soldiers up and down. Later the Germans moved in, strafing the causeway and the chessboard fields of the Venetian lagoon where Gerald had once stalked Old Plop the terrapin, and bombing the old town, killing Theo Stephanides’s parents and Gerald’s tutor Krajewsky and his mad mother and all his birds. What fate befell the boy Gerald’s great manuscript novel of the flora and fauna of the world will never be known.
The Durrell family had been driven from Eden, swept away by the fury and folly of war. All they were left with from their island years were a few crumpled photographs and the memories of a magic life that for long afterwards continued to burn in their minds as vivid and bright as the sun itself.
It was in large part Corfu that made Gerald the person he was to be. But on the island he had known only love and affection, happiness and ease. As a result he was to be ill-equipped for the vicissitudes of real life, which one day would do their best to cut him off at the knees.
Looking back from the hard world beyond the walls of that enchanted garden, Lawrence was to observe many years later: ‘In Corfu, you see, we reconstituted the Indian period which we all missed. The island exploded into another open-air time of our lives, because one lived virtually naked in the sun. Without Corfu I don’t think Gerry would have managed to drag himself together and do all he has achieved … I reckon I too got born in Corfu. It was really the spell between the wars that was – you can only say paradise.’
FIVE Gerald in Wartime England 1939–1945 (#ulink_3f918b7e-3a8b-55fa-9aa2-2b104814467d)
Mother, Leslie and Gerald were back in England before war was declared on 3 September 1939. The dogs were put in quarantine the moment they landed, and the rest of the animals Gerald had brought back from Corfu, plus a marmoset and some magpies he had acquired in England, were housed on the top-floor landing of a London lodging house which Mother rented while she looked around for a more permanent home. Before long they had moved to a flat in a terraced house off Kensington High Street. Mother hankered to return to Bournemouth, where at least she had roots of a kind, and whenever she went off on one of her many forays into various part of the countryside in search of a house, the fourteen-year-old Gerald – now wearing his first pair of long trousers – was free to explore the capital. ‘I found London, at that time, fascinating,’ he would later recall. ‘After all, the biggest metropolis I was used to was the town of Corfu, which was about the size of a small English market town, and so the great sprawling mass of London had hundreds of exciting things for me to discover.’
Sometimes he would spend the afternoon in the Coronet cinema round the corner, absorbed in the illusory adventure and romance on the silver screen before him – a lifelong passion. At other times he would go to the Natural History Museum or the zoo, which only strengthened his belief that working in a zoo was the only real vocation for anyone.
It was in the London of the so-called ‘Phoney War’ – no air raids as yet, no nights spent in cellars or bomb shelters – that Gerald started his first job, as junior assistant in a pet shop called The Aquarium, not far from where he was living. It was a remarkably well-stocked shop, with rows of great tanks full of brilliant tropical fish, and glass-fronted boxes containing grass snakes, pine snakes, big green lizards, tortoises, newts with frilled tails like pennants and gulping, bulbous-eyed frogs. His job was to feed all these creatures and clean out their tanks and cages, but it soon became clear that he knew a great deal more about their needs and habits than the shop’s owner, who was astonished by the boy’s detailed knowledge and instinctive feeling for the animals’ welfare.
Before long Gerald had introduced a change in the creatures’ previously unvarying diet, forgoing his lunchtime sausage and mash in order to collect woodlice in Kensington Park for the reptiles and amphibians, and tipping pots of little water fleas into the fishtanks as a change from the fishes’ usual fare of tubifex worms. Then he began to improve the animals’ living conditions, putting clumps of wet moss into the cages of the large leopard toads so that they had some damp and shade, bathing their raw feet with olive oil and treating their sore eyes with Golden Eye ointment. But his pièce de résistance was the redecoration of the big tank in the shop window, which contained a large collection of wonderfully coloured fish in what looked like an underwater blasted heath.
I worked on that giant tank with all the dedication of a marine Capability Brown. I built rolling sand dunes and great towering cliffs of lovely granite. And then, through the valleys between the granite mountains, I planted forests of Vallisneria and other, more delicate, weedy ferns. And on the surface of the water I floated the tiny little white flowers that look so like miniature water-lilies. When I had finally finished it and replaced the shiny black mollies, the silver hatchet fish, the brilliant Piccadilly-like neon-tetras, and stepped back to admire my handiwork, I found myself deeply impressed with my own genius.
So was the owner. ‘Exquisite! Exquisite!’ he exclaimed. ‘Simply exquisite.’ Gerald was promptly promoted to more responsible tasks. Periodically he was sent off to the East End of London to collect fresh supplies of reptiles, amphibians and snakes. ‘In gloomy, cavernous stores in back streets,’ he remembered, ‘I would find great crates of lizards, basketfuls of tortoises and dripping tanks green with algae full of newts and frogs and salamanders … and a crate full of iguanas, bright green and frilled and dewlapped like any fairytale dragon.’ On one such jaunt 150 baby painted terrapins escaped from the box in which he was carrying them on the top of a double-decker bus. But for the help of a Blimpish, monocled colonel who also happened to be on the bus and who crawled up and down the aisle ‘heading the bounders off,’ Gerald would have experienced the first catastrophe of his professional career. ‘By George!’ cried the colonel. ‘A painted terrapin! Chrysemys picta! Haven’t seen one for years. There’s one going under the seat there. Tally-ho! Bang! Bang!’
By the time Mother had found what she was looking for, a family-sized house at 52 St Alban’s Avenue in the Bournemouth suburb of Charminster, much of the family was dispersed to the four winds. Lawrence and Nancy were in Athens, where their daughter Penelope was born in April 1940. Early that year Lawrence got word that his sister Margaret had married her flier, Jack Breeze, in Bournemouth, with Leslie (who was living in the house in St Alban’s Avenue) giving the bride away. When Jack was posted to South Africa with Imperial Airways, Margaret went with him, and she was to spend the whole of the war in Africa, moving gradually north, first to Mozambique and then to Ethiopia, till, like Larry, she ended up in Egypt.
When the German armies crossed the Greek border and rolled south towards Athens in April 1941, the king and government left the capital for Crete, and Lawrence and Nancy followed their example. It was a perilous and close-run thing. They escaped from the Peleponnesus by caïque one day before the Germans invaded, and after six nightmare weeks under German air attack in Crete they left on almost the last passenger ship to get out, arriving in Alexandria two days before Greece fell. Lawrence soon got a job as foreign press officer at the British Embassy in Cairo, and was to remain in Egypt for the rest of the war, but in July 1942, with the Egyptian cities under threat from the advancing Germans, Nancy and Penelope were evacuated to Palestine, a parting which effectively marked the end of the marriage. A year later Lawrence fell in love with an Alexandrian girl, Eve Cohen, who was eventually to become his second wife.
For Mother, the move back to England, with its blackouts, gasmasks and ration books, was just one more in a series of upheavals that had punctuated her life ever since, far away and long ago, she had married her much-loved and much-missed husband in India, the land of her birth. To this latest uprooting she responded as she had always done – without complaint, without fuss, making do, always there. But after the cheap living and favourable exchange rate of the Corfu years, the move back to England was a backward step financially, and leaner times now loomed. Much of the money her husband had left to her had been dissipated in imprudent disbursements before the war, and when in due course the Japanese overran Burma a substantial proportion of her remaining assets, which were invested in Burmah Oil, were lost for ever. The steady decline in the family’s standard of living in Bournemouth during the war was barely perceptible to friends and relatives who saw them on a regular basis, but to Lawrence, who was away for all of that time, its extent was quite shocking when he saw it for himself on his return.
For all that, Louisa continued to cluck and fuss over her remaining brood, an unfailing (if faintly vague) source of culinary aromas and mother love for the two sons still in her care. But for Leslie, sadly, the return to England marked a big step in his gradual descent into waste and oblivion. At the outbreak of hostilities he had hoped to join the Royal Air Force, which had both glamour and guns galore. But he had loosed off one shotgun too many in his time on Corfu, and a military medical board declared that his hearing was defective, and that he was unfit for military service. Barred from doing his bit with the RAF, Leslie was condemned to spend the war toiling away at inglorious, menial tasks in the local aircraft factory.
As for Gerald, now fifteen, the retreat to Blighty – from a sun-drenched Mediterranean island to whose human and animal fauna he had closely related, to a mist-shrouded North Sea island to which he barely related at all – was more than just a migration from one kind of habitat to another: it was like a flight into limbo, an existential near-void about which he was to say little in future years, and to write next to nothing till near the very end. The shock was palpable, and considerable adjustments were required for him to adapt to his new physical and cultural environment.
Gerald was no longer a boy, but an adolescent, with all that that turbulent transitional phase of development entailed. He was also, as a result of his upbringing on Corfu, part Greek in manners and outlook. More, he had no education – none, at any rate, that the authorities in the United Kingdom would recognise as such. Nor was he ever likely to receive any, for he was now almost past the statutory age of compulsory education in Britain. Not only had he long ago parted company with any school syllabus worthy of the name, but he stood no chance of passing any exam of any sort anywhere at any time.
Not that Mother didn’t give his education one last try, taking him along to a minor public school outside Bournemouth in the hope that the place might fire his enthusiasm. The visit was only a partial success. The headmaster chose to test the boy’s scholastic potential by asking him to write out the Lord’s Prayer, but Gerald could only remember the first six words, and invented the rest. A visit to the labs with the biology master was more promising – the man turned out to have once spent a holiday in Greece – but Gerald was rated no higher than ‘backward but bright’. Not that it mattered much, for Gerald had no wish to go to any school.
Believing, as always, that her children knew what was best for them, his mother tried a private tutor instead. Harold Binns was a neat, quiet man, with a face scarred by shrapnel in the Great War. He had written a study of the English poets, and was oddly addicted to eau de Cologne, often popping into the toilet to give himself a quick squirt. Mr Binns bestowed two great gifts upon his ill-educated student – how to unlock the treasures contained within the British public library system, and how to appreciate to the full the words of the English language in all their associations and assonances, nuances and overtones. His method was to teach Gerald for an hour, then fetch a volume of verse from his bookshelf for Gerald to browse through on his own. In an unpublished autobiographical fragment written in the last year of his life, Gerald recalled Mr Binns and the excitement he generated for the music and the magic of the language.
He would burst into the room in a tidal wave of eau de Cologne. ‘Now, dear boy,’ he would say, eyes raised to Heaven, hands outstretched. ‘Time to remove the cobwebs from the mind, eh? Leave that geometry which appears insoluble to you and let’s have a look at Swinburne. You know Swinburne? I think you’ll find he has something in common with you – yes – um – yes – um – this for a start.’
He would thrust a book into my hands and gallop out of the room trailing eau de Cologne like a bride’s train behind him.
A little later, bustling back into the room, he would ask: ‘Did you like him?’
‘I think the poetry is fascinating,’ I said, ‘and I love alliteration.’
‘So do I,’ he said fervently. ‘The whole poem is an example of what poetry should be. So few modern poets chime in the ear like a seashell whispering mysteries. At least he conjures up lantanas in your mind, illuminating your brain with fabulous words …’
All this was a revelation to Gerald, and would greatly influence him, as brother Larry had previously done, in his approach to his own writing.
While Mr Binns endowed Gerald with access to knowledge and reinforced the love of words Lawrence had encouraged on Corfu, there was no one to teach him the biology which fascinated him. Working his way at random through the textbooks in the Bournemouth public library and elsewhere, Gerald taught himself as best he could. There were advantages to this eclectic exploration of the subject, for it allowed him to approach it from eccentrically revelatory angles. But there were enormous disadvantages too, great gaps in his knowledge, and his grasp of the science could hardly be said to rest on sound foundations.
He was always conscious of this, especially when he became a high-profile practitioner and spokesman of the very science he had never been formally taught. Much later, he was to say:
Yes, a degree might have helped – but would it? In the long run it might have killed the other side of me. Because of no job, which was because of no degree, only the need to write for a living compelled me to write at all. Also, the degree idea is waved about like a flag to such an extent that one thinks one needs it – when it’s only society needing it. These absolute dolts in my own field have the application to store knowledge like a squirrel and regurgitate it all over ruled paper at the right moment. That shows a sense of inferiority on my part, doesn’t it?
More than compensating for his lack of formal qualifications, Gerald was endowed with a highly developed and inventive intelligence. His Corfu childhood under the tutelage of Theo Stephanides had provided him with a superlative insight into the phenomena of natural life, an education in hands-on biology largely denied to his peers in the United Kingdom, and his brother Lawrence had instilled in him the principles of creative literature in a way no classroom lessons could have done. The rest of the family, his mother especially, also contributed. ‘She encouraged us in everything we wanted to do,’ he was to recall. ‘She would say, “Well, try it, dear,” and if it failed, it failed. I was allowed to read anything I wanted to. Every question I asked was answered absolutely honestly, if it could be answered. In a funny way, I got a unique education which included dealing with an endless procession of eccentrics – so now, nothing a human being does surprises me.’
But his grasp of the mainstream of schoolboy learning – sums and stinks and 1066 and the rest – was patchy and uncertain. Gerald was therefore a highly unorthodox teenager in the Britain of his time. The familiar routine of morning assemblies and school games and end of term exams had passed him by. His primary education was fragmentary, his secondary education nil, his chances of higher education non-existent. For a youth with such an apparently oddball background there was only one option in wartime Bournemouth – to get a job, probably a mundane and lowly one, until he was old enough to be called up and have his head shot off in the war.
The only job that Gerald could imagine tolerating was working with animals. Though it doesn’t sound much, for Gerald a day spent in a pet shop in the company of white rats was not a day wasted. He had managed to run an aviary and keep a few adders in the garden at home during these years, but the largest animal he had to cope with was a fallow deer which was given to him by a boy who lived in the New Forest and was moving to Southampton. The boy had described it as a ‘baby’ and a ‘household pet’, but when it arrived it turned out to be a petulant creature at least four years old – far from the submissive, friendly fawn Gerald had been promised. With much patience he eventually learned how to pacify the deer, which he named Hortense, by scratching the base of its antlers, but in the end he had to give way to family pressure, and Hortense was exiled to a nearby farm.
As for the war, though a few stray bombs did land on Bournemouth, one of them rocking the treasurehouse of Commin’s bookshop, Gerald admitted that he did not really know what war was, nor care very much about it.
We used to see Southampton get a pasting, eagerly enjoying the eastern sky aflame, and there were plenty of jolly dogfights upstairs – but on the whole we had a cushy war. The entire family did. We were pinned to the nine o’clock news, cheering for victory, and I followed daily the progress of the battles on whatever front it was … but only selfishly. I wanted to get the war over as fast as possible and do something interesting, like return to Greece and see how the Germans had behaved to the swallowtails and trapdoor spiders. Even so, I spent every moment out of doors – aged fifteen to twenty – risking death at the hands of the bombers on the way to Coventry or somewhere that really copped it. I helped with the harvest. I went out – not on a donkey now, but a bicycle – looking for nests and animals, rediscovering the local fauna with more patience and a maturer knowledge, like waiting for the bird to return to her nest to make sure of the species, at any hour of day or night, because I was used on Corfu to regarding the villa merely as a dormitory. The outside was home. Two hundred yards from the house I had the woods to keep an eye on, and then at the end of the road the golf links, beyond which the country started. The real country. Bournemouth in my time was a country town. It was ideal from my point of view – though of course it wasn’t Corfu.
The ‘real country’ was the moorlands of the Purbecks, the wilder woodlands of the New Forest, the broad sweep of shore and water around Poole Harbour. Once he went much further afield, on a bird-watching holiday to the outlying Scilly Isles, beyond the western tip of Cornwall.
Gerald found England stiff and starchy after the relaxed lifestyle of his Mediterranean island, especially when it came to sex and girls. He had reached puberty on Corfu, and with a little help from a young local girl he had discovered sex – or at least its preliminaries – without suffering any of the inhibitions and sense of guilt that tormented so many of his contemporaries in England. On Corfu sex had seemed something pure and natural – a romp and a tumble in the olive woods and myrtle groves, a giggle and a tangle of limbs.
On Corfu all his tutors had taught him about sex, and it was discussed quite freely at home. In England, by contrast, it was Presbyterian black and sin-laden. ‘I couldn’t understand why in England boys of my age found something dirty and furtive about it. And I was soon to realise with girlfriends in Bournemouth that I couldn’t treat them with quite the same gay abandon in case they thought me naughty and wicked. In some confusion I was forced to retreat to a chaste and stolen kiss on the brow. It was like being suddenly flung out of Rabelais into William Morris.’
Gerald was a good-looking youth, with an attractive, open face and engaging manner. His good looks were almost to prove his undoing when a local girl was raped, strangled and mutilated, and her body found under the rhododendrons in one of the local beauty spots called the Chines. The Bournemouth Echo reported that the police were anxious to interview a tall, fair young man with blue eyes and a charming personality – Gerald to a tee. Mother, of course, immediately saw the hempen rope being adjusted around her son’s neck.
‘You’re not to go out, dear,’ she warned Gerald. ‘You might be arrested as the murderer. You’re to stay at home. You know what the police are like. Once they’ve arrested you they’ll never stop till they’ve hung you. And hanging’s no laughing matter.’
Within a day or two, a couple of detectives did indeed call at the house in order to eliminate the young naturalist from their inquiries. Satisfied with Gerald’s answers to their questioning, they left without even taking his fingerprints. When they had gone, Mother reappeared.
‘Now, tell me what you said, dear,’ she insisted. ‘It’s very important to get our stories to match when we’re in court.’
In some ways Gerald at this time was almost feminine in his looks. But he did his best to disguise it, partly because he had found, to his embarrassment, that he was becoming attractive to homosexual men. This sometimes got him into difficulties, and was all the more galling because he was totally heterosexual himself. ‘In those days I used to plaster my pale blond hair with vaseline,’ he recalled, ‘hoping it would become a manly dark brown and thus attract all the ladies who would otherwise have thought me too weak and pretty. Little did I know that this treatment plaited my long locks into something closely resembling an eel migration of some magnitude and only the kindliest and ugliest of girls would consent to be seen with me.’
This phase didn’t last long, and soon Gerald’s interest in girls was matched by his ability to arouse their interest in him. ‘I’ve always had a fair amount of attraction for women,’ he said, ‘but I hope I’ve never used it – except to seduce them, of course.’ He was, he reckoned, a consummate seducer, though never a cynical or dishonest one: ‘I treated women as human beings, which is of course fatal.’ In the early days of what he would later refer to as his sexual career it was all pretty much hit and miss anyway: ‘I must admit that at the age of sixteen I was still of the opinion that the idea was “to get the girl aboard the lugger” and that was the end of it.’
As well as appreciating their physical allure, Gerald genuinely liked and respected the opposite sex. Perhaps because, unlike most English boys of his class and generation, he had not been to boarding school, he felt at ease in the company of women and at home with the feminine side of human nature. Indeed, he preferred the company of women to that of men, though on the whole he trusted animals more than either. He could admire, and sometimes even adore, individuals of the opposite sex, but he never entirely lost his head over them. In any case, he was continually reminded of the fact that women could be as flawed and clay-footed as the rest of the human species, as an incident towards the end of the war years forcibly reminded him:
Dark hair, huge glistening eyes, like chestnuts newly polished, a face composed and gently supported by bone structure as beautiful as a coral reef. A mouth moist, wide and gentle, a loving mouth. A body as eloquent as a teenage birch tree. Brown hands like starfish, which when they moved illuminated what she was saying, as a conductor to an orchestra. She was a girl who not only filled your eye and heart but made you stop and listen to the magic of her voice and the tapestry of what she said. Her wonderful head carefully positioned on a neck as slender and beautiful as Nefertiti’s. I longed to know her, to have the privilege of taking her into a secret garden full of night jasmine, tangerine and flowering creatures that would attempt to emulate her beauty but could only enhance it. She was the pure Garden of Eden for which Adam sacrificed his navel. For her I would have sacrificed much more. The waiter brought the bill and I paid. As I passed the table of this lovely, delicate paragon I heard her say – loud as a conch shell being blown – ‘You stupid, sodding twit, I can’t think why I married you. Your balls are as big as warm eggs and as much use.’ I have never felt the same about women since.
In his early manhood Gerald’s sex appeal was so overt and palpable that it was assumed by those who did not know him that he was a ladykiller. In his maturer years his tendency to flirt with every woman in the room led many to believe he was a womaniser. In his old age he told so many stories about the intimate encounters of his youth that he gave the impression his bachelor years had been one long serial orgy. All this probably exaggerates his sexual propensities. ‘He wasn’t a particularly sexy man,’ Margaret remembered. ‘I mean, I don’t think he was a highly sexed man, to be honest – not like Larry – and though he gave the impression that he was to some people, and sometimes even said he was, it was really just flirting, purely harmless. In fact I would say Gerry was more mother-orientated than sex-orientated. Sex was probably the dream but I honestly don’t think it was his scene. Basically he didn’t like to be on his own. He always liked to have a woman around, even if she was only messing about in the kitchen.’ In his later years Gerald was to confirm his sister’s view: ‘I wasn’t too preoccupied with sex, because I had too many other matters to absorb me … I wouldn’t worry if nothing happened.’
Among the other matters that absorbed the young Gerald was his dedicated self-education. He spent a lot more time with books than he ever did with girls. Books were his entrée into another world, a world of boundless knowledge and endless diversion, an alternative world of the imagination, a real world of science and fact. He worked the public library system for all it was worth, and when he could afford it he bought books at Commin’s in Bournemouth town centre. Later he was to say: ‘I believe that books are an essential of life. To be surrounded by them, to read and re-read them gives you a carapace of knowledge so that you can lumber through life, as a tortoise does, carrying a library in your skull. Books surround you like a womb of knowledge.’
In idle moments in later years he found it fun to beachcomb through his memory for the flotsam of books he remembered reading in his youth. These ranged from children’s classics to Victorian adventure books for boys and on to more ambitious literary works like Shakespeare, Rabelais, the Bible, Lamb’s Essays of Elia and the novels of Rudyard Kipling and D.H. Lawrence, as well as the books of comic writers such as Edward Lear, Jerome K. Jerome, P.G. Wodehouse, James Thurber and Patrick Campbell. He even set about gnawing his way through those two daunting paper megaliths, Larousse and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His reading in works of natural history was even more voracious and wide-ranging, with a broad base of classics – Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace, Henry Bates, Henri Fabre, Gilbert White, Richard Jefferies, W.H. Hudson – and a broad trawl of more contemporary works, from the popular nature books of ‘Romany’ (who preached the gospel of ‘the balance of nature’) to Julian Huxley and H.G. Wells’ comprehensive biological overview The Science of Life.
In many ways it is probable that his lack of a formal education was the making of Gerald Durrell. It left his innate, highly original intelligence unfettered and unchannelled, free to roam at will, to explore far and wide, to make connections outside the orthodoxy of the teaching of the time, develop new trajectories of thought and pioneer new lines of progression that could not have emerged, except with difficulty, from an institutionalised mind indoctrinated within the conventions of a traditional education. Gerald believed this himself: ‘I think the set routine of an average school kills the imagination in a child. Whereas the way I was brought up, the imagination was allowed to grow, to blossom. It taught me a lot of things which you’re not normally taught in school and this proved very valuable to me in dealing with animals and as a writer. My eccentric upbringing has been of great value to me.’
By way of example, it was his lack of a conventionally programmed education that enabled him, very early on, to stumble on the matter of declining animal populations (he was particularly struck by the parlous state of the black-footed ferret of the Great Plains of North America). He was barely out of his teens when he began to compile his own ‘rather shaky and amateurish’ version of a Red Data Book of endangered species
(#ulink_e2917249-7efe-526f-8ebf-49d5a4740d1a) – one of the earliest compilations of its sort in the United Kingdom. If he had gone to university to read zoology, he would have come away with a thorough grasp of comparative anatomy and the Linnaean order of species, but it is doubtful if the world at large would ever have had reason to know his name
So Gerald’s adolescence passed. Towards the end of 1942, when the tide of war had just begun to turn in the Allies’ favour – though years of bloody slaughter still remained – he received his call-up papers. Now nearly eighteen, he reported for his army medical in Southampton. First he and his fellows were marshalled – ‘rather like cattle in a slaughter house’ – and told to strip. Then they were each given a beaker and told to pee in it. Gerald had drunk several pints of beer beforehand to make sure he had a full bladder, but unfortunately he had overdone it. The beaker filled up and slopped over. ‘’Ere!’ cried the orderly. ‘Slopped all over the place. I ’opes you ain’t got no infectious bleeding diseases.’ In an unpublished account, Gerald recalled:
My next nerve-shattering encounter was with a small, fat doctor, who looked exactly like one of the less prepossessing garden gnomes. He peered in my mouth, peered in my ears and finally placed a stubby finger on the end of my nose.
‘Follow my finger,’ he said, as he drew it away, so I followed it. I remember wondering at the time what subtle medical trick this was to expose the mechanism of your body.
‘I don’t mean follow my finger,’ he snapped.
‘But you just told me to,’ I said, bewildered.
‘I don’t mean follow my finger, I mean follow my finger,’ he said irritably.
‘But that’s what I was doing,’ I said.
‘I don’t mean follow it with your whole body.’
I was beginning to doubt the mental stability of this man.
‘I can’t follow your finger without my body,’ I explained patiently.
‘I don’t want your whole body, I just want your eyes,’ he snapped.
I began to wonder which lunatic asylum he had escaped from and should I tell the other doctors about his condition. I decided to be patient and calming.
‘But you can’t have my eyes without my body,’ I explained, ‘they’re attached to it, so if you want my eyes you have to have the body too.’
His face went the colour of an old brick wall.
‘Are you an idiot?’ he enquired simmeringly.
‘I don’t think so, sir,’ I said placatingly. ‘I just don’t see how you can have my eyes without the body thrown in, as it were.’
‘I don’t want your Goddamed eyes,’ he shouted. ‘All I want you to do is follow my finger.’
‘But I did, sir, and then you got angry.’
‘Follow it with your eyes, you imbecile,’ he bellowed, ‘with your Goddam bloody eyes.’
‘Oh, I see, sir,’ I said, although to tell the truth I didn’t.
I wandered off to the next member of the medical profession, who was a dismal man with greasy hair, and looked somewhat like a failed Maitre d’Hôtel on the verge of suicide. He examined me minutely from stem to stern, humming to himself gently like an unhappy bear sucking its paw. He smelt of cinnamon and his eyes were violet coloured, very striking and beautiful.
‘And now,’ he said, ‘I want to look up your nose, so we’ll draw the curtains and be in the dark.’
Here, I thought to myself, we have another lunatic.
‘Wouldn’t you see it better in daylight, sir?’ I asked.
‘No, no, darkness, because I’ve got to stick something into your mouth,’ he explained.
‘What sort of thing?’ I asked, determined to guard my honour to the last redoubt.
‘A torch,’ he said. ‘It won’t hurt, I assure you.’
So the curtains were drawn and a slim pencil torch was inserted in my mouth and switched on.
‘Damn,’ he said, ‘the batteries have gone.’
He removed the torch, which shone as brightly as a bonfire.
‘That’s funny,’ he said and stuck the torch back into my mouth.
‘What,’ he said ominously, ‘have you stuffed up your nose?’
‘Nothing,’ I said truthfully.
‘Well, why can’t I see the light? I can’t see the light,’ he said querulously. ‘I should be able to see your sinuses, but there’s nothing there.’
‘They’ve been mucking about with my nose for years, sir,’ I explained, ‘and it never seems to do any good.’
‘My God!’ he explained. ‘You must go and see a specialist. I’m not taking responsibility for this. Why, your sinuses look like – look like – well, they look like the Black Hole of Calcutta!’
Gerald was sent to see Dr Magillicuddy, a sinus specialist, who stood no nonsense.
Sitting behind a huge desk he read my medical report carefully, darting fierce glances at me from opal-blue eyes.
‘Come over here,’ he said gruffly, his Scottish r’s rolling out of his mouth like bumble bees.
He stuck a torch in my mouth. There was silence for a moment and then he let out a long, marvelling sigh.
‘Hoots, mon,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen sinuses like yours. It’s like gazing at a bit of Edinburgh Castle. If anyone wanted to clean that up they’d have to excavate your skull with a pickaxe.’
He went back to his desk, sat down, laced his fingers and gazed across them at me.
‘Tell me truly, laddie,’ he said, ‘you don’t want to go into the army, navy or air force, do you?’
This was the moment when I realised truth was the only answer.
‘No, sir,’ I said.
‘Are you a coward?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir,’ I answered.
‘So am I,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think they’ll want a coward with sinuses like the Cheddar Gorge. Off you go, young man.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, and as I got to the door he barked –
‘Dinna underestimate yourself – it takes courage for a man to admit he’s a coward. Good luck to you.’
Eventually Gerald received a letter informing him that he was unfit for military service, but would have to do something to aid the war effort. He had two choices. He could work in a munitions factory or on the land. Unsurprisingly, he plumped for the latter. ‘Does it matter what sort of farm?’ he asked the clerk at the Labour Office, for he preferred the idea of a farm with sheep and cows to one growing cabbages and corn. ‘Personally,’ sniffed the clerk, ‘I don’t care which sort of farm. They’re all shit and smell to me.’
So Gerald set off on his bicycle in search of the ideal farm. His luck was in. He found Brown’s, a riding school at Longham, to the north of Bournemouth, that kept a few cows. Mr Brown was a short, round, ruddy-faced man with a treble voice who lived with his mother and never wore anything but hacking jacket, jodhpurs and flat cap. With this jolly fellow – ‘like a gigantic choir boy’ – Gerald struck a bargain. In return for his mucking out and grooming the twenty-two horses in the stables and leading people around on half a dozen rides a day, Mr Brown would assure the authorities he was helping to run a farm. And this Gerald did till the end of the war, congenially occupied in giving riding lessons to horsy local ladies and American GIs with cowboy delusions stationed in the vicinity.
Looking back on that aimless but idyllic limbo time, Gerald recalled with exquisite nostalgia (and perhaps a degree of romantic mythomania) his amorous entanglements with some of the more beautiful women who came to him for lessons. This had less to do with his own attractiveness or powers of seduction, he reckoned, than with the headily romantic context in which they found themselves, the seclusion and magic of the woods they rode through, alone in a world of their own. They were like shipboard affairs, these erotic rides – amorous adventures that were permissible because they were so far from the routines and obligations of port and home (or so, for a few hours, it seemed). Longer-lasting were the girls who were his friends, like Jean Martin, a nice country type who also worked at Brown’s stables, and of whom he was very fond, though he never even bestowed a kiss upon her, let alone any promises of eternal love.
Before long Gerald had a horse of his own, called Rumba, and on his days off he would ride out alone down the silent glades of the pine woods. He formed a very close relationship with his horse, and would spend hours in the saddle, letting his mind wander, making up poetry, breathing deeply of the very breath of nature. Often the horse, a creature of habit, bore him, dreaming, to his favourite pub in the forest, and refused to budge until he had finished off a pint of ale ‘for the road’.
So the months passed in this agreeable fashion. Gerald did not believe he was ducking his wartime duty, or letting the side down. What side? He did not feel that England was his country, even by adoption, and so was moved by no great stirrings of patriotic fervour. His grasp of the nature of the war was too tenuous for him to realise that England was not fighting for England alone.
At last, in May 1945, the guns in Europe fell silent. Gerald’s obligation to contribute to the war effort came to an end, and within a few weeks he had taken his first step towards his true life goal. By his own account he had long ago – as far back as Corfu, even – worked out what he wanted to do in life. First he would travel the world collecting animals for zoos, then he would establish a zoo of his own. Both objectives were highly unusual and extraordinarily difficult, and both required an expertise he did not possess in 1945. ‘I realised,’ he was to record later, ‘that if I wanted to achieve my ambitions, it was necessary for me to have experience with creatures larger than scorpions and sea horses.’ There seemed to be only one thing he could do – get a job in a zoo.
Having decided this, I sat down and wrote what seemed to me an extremely humble letter to the Zoological Society of London, which, in spite of the war, still maintained the largest collection of living creatures on one spot. Blissfully unaware of the enormity of my ambition, I outlined my plans for the future, hinted that I was just the sort of person they had always been longing to employ, and more or less asked them on what day I should take up my duties.
Normally, such a letter as this would have ended up where it deserved – in the waste-paper basket. But my luck was in, for it arrived on the desk of a most kindly and civilised man, one Geoffrey Vevers, the Superintendent of the London Zoo. I suppose something about the sheer audacity of my letter must have intrigued him for, to my delight, he wrote and asked me to attend an interview in London. At the interview, spurred on by Geoffrey Vevers’ gentle charm, I prattled on interminably about animals, animal collecting and my own zoo. A lesser man would have crushed my enthusiasm by pointing out the wild impracticability of my schemes but Vevers listened with great patience and tact, commended my line of approach to the problem, and said he would give the matter of my future some thought. I left him even more enthusiastic than before.
A few weeks later Gerald received a courteous letter informing him that unfortunately there were no vacancies for junior staff at London Zoo, but if he wished he could have a position as relief keeper at Whipsnade, the Zoological Society’s country zoo.
As a relief keeper, Gerald would be the lowest of the low. But since he was clearly a special case, and not at all typical of the usual recruit to the ranks of zoo keepers, Geoffrey Vevers thought up the grandiose title of ‘student keeper’ for him. ‘If he had written offering me a breeding pair of snow leopards,’ Gerald recalled, ‘I could not have been more delighted.’
A few days later – ‘wildly excited’ – Gerald set off for Whipsnade. He had two suitcases with him, one full of old clothes, the other containing natural history books and many fat notebooks in which he intended to jot down everything he observed of his animal charges and everything he learnt from his fellow keepers. On 30 July 1945 he began his lifelong involvement with zoos. If his adolescent reading had provided his secondary education, Whipsnade was to be his university.
* (#ulink_ba2b0682-9338-5feb-aed8-a50bd5ab8843) Red Data Books, regularly compiled by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), list all known endangered or extinct species worldwide.
SIX Odd-Beast Boy Whipsnade 1945–1946 (#ulink_ba957427-3b30-5e4b-8d66-6be77c054f4e)
Gerald’s first port of call at Whipsnade was the office of the zoo’s superintendent, Captain William Beal, a former army veterinary officer from the Gold Coast (now Ghana). Gerald found him sitting behind a large desk in his shirtsleeves, sporting handsome striped braces:
As the captain stood up, I saw that he was a man of immense height and girth. He came lumbering round the desk and stared at me, breathing heavily through his nose.
‘Durrell?’ he boomed interrogatively. ‘Durrell?’
He had a deep voice and he spoke in a sort of muted roar.
‘Think you’ll like it here?’ asked Captain Beal so suddenly and so loudly that I jumped.
‘Er … yes, sir, I’m sure I shall,’ I said.
‘You’ve never done any of this sort of work before?’
‘No, sir,’ I replied, ‘but I’ve kept a lot of animals at one time or another.’
‘Ha!’ he said, almost sneeringly. ‘Guinea pigs, rabbits, goldfish – that sort of thing. Well, you’ll find it a bit different here.’
Shortly afterwards, Gerald was told he was to start work straight away next morning – on the lions.
Whipsnade village, Gerald discovered, was a tiny place with one pub and a handful of cottages scattered among valleys full of hazel copses. His digs turned out to be an oak-beamed room in one of the cottages, the bee-loud, flower-bowered home of Charlie Bailey, who worked with the elephants up at the zoo, and his wife. Gerald was a rather surprising lodger for this modest couple, for with his upper-class accent and sophisticated ways he was more like a toff than a lowly trainee keeper.
‘What made you come to Whipsnade, Gerry?’ asked Charlie, not unreasonably, over a huge supper of country fare.
‘Well,’ Gerald replied, ‘I’ve always been interested in animals, and I want to become an animal collector – you know, go out to Africa and places like that and bring back animals for zoos. I want to get experience with some of the bigger things. You know, you can’t keep big things down in Bournemouth. I mean, you can’t have a herd of deer in a suburban garden, can you?’
‘Ah,’ Charlie agreed. ‘No, I see that.’
Eventually, stuffed with food, Gerald made his way up to his room. ‘I climbed into bed,’ he recalled, ‘and heaved a great sigh of triumph. I had arrived. I was here at Whipsnade. Gloating over this thought I fell asleep.’
He could not have been more fortunate in his place of work experience, for Whipsnade was a very special kind of zoo. Occupying five hundred acres of a former farm estate perched high on the Dunstable Downs in Bedfordshire, thirty-five miles north-west of London, Whipsnade had been opened in 1931. From the outset it had been conceived as a country zoo park – the first public one in Britain – where all the animals could, as far as possible, live in natural surroundings instead of in the barren and insanitary cages that were their lot in most of the zoos around the globe. The idea was not new: the great German animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck had created the first modern zoological garden in Hamburg back in the middle of the nineteenth century. But Whipsnade went far beyond the confines of the zoological garden. As an open-plan zoo park, lions and tigers could roam through Whipsnade’s dells, zebra and antelope could graze freely in the great rolling paddocks, and wolves could wander in a pack through the woods. Gerald noted that it was ‘the nearest approach to going on safari that one could attempt at that time’.
But the purpose of Whipsnade was not simply to display animals to the public in ideal surroundings. It was also intended as a place for preserving some of the world’s dwindling natural resource of wild animals, and it soon became internationally renowned for its success in the captive breeding of endangered species, from the nearly extinct white Chartley cattle and Przewalski’s Mongolian wild horse to the American bison, the musk ox and Père David’s deer. With unerring good fortune, Gerald Durrell had pitched up at a more than passable combination zoo and propagation centre, not perhaps up to the standards of the San Diego Wild Animal Park or New York’s World of Birds, but doing its best to cope in wartime. Its influence on his future life and career was to prove immeasurable.
Jill Johnson, an eighteen-year-old girl who looked after the huskies and Shetland ponies at the zoo, remembered encountering Gerald on his first working morning at Whipsnade. ‘I was called down to meet a new boy,’ she recalled:
I went down to the office and there stood a fair-haired boy with a nice, open, friendly face, wearing an open-necked white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was taller than me, about five foot eight or so, and he had bright blue eyes, I remember. I said: ‘What’s your name?’ and he said: ‘You can call me Gerry or Durrell.’ So I said: ‘Gerry will do. Get a bike and follow me.’ As we rode along I asked him: ‘Why aren’t you in the forces?’ and he explained that he was a Greek citizen and that he wanted to be a big animal collector one day, which I treated with a pinch of salt. I took him to see the huskies and showed him around and after that we became good friends and got to know each other very well.
Though Gerald was officially described as a ‘student keeper’, his real role was that of ‘odd-beast boy’, at the very bottom of the heap in terms of status. But by dint of his personality he defied all conventional classification among his friends and colleagues at the zoo. The odd-beast boy was at everyone’s disposal, and could be assigned to any task with any creature, big or little, docile or lethal. In terms of learning the ropes at a premier zoo – the hands-on care of large and dangerous animals (including lions and tigers, bears and buffalo), daily routine and standard zoo practice – the job was exactly what Gerald wanted. But he wanted to learn more than that.
Gerald continued his voracious reading, but now he focused his interest much more on zoo business. Almost without exception, he realised, most of the world’s zoos since Victorian times had served merely as peep-shows, places of public entertainment, where people went to be amused in much the same spirit that their ancestors used to visit lunatic asylums. Scientific research at most zoos was virtually nil, and if an animal died it was simply replaced from what was taken to be Nature’s unending bounty. Before long, it dawned on Gerald that this bounty was in fact being rapidly exhausted:
As I pursued my reading, I began to learn with horror of man’s rapacious encroachment upon the world and the terrible devastation that he was producing among animal life. I read of the dodo, flightless and harmless, discovered and exterminated in almost the same breath. I read of the passenger pigeon in North America, whose vast numbers darkened the sky, who were so numerous that their nesting colonies measured several hundred square miles. They were good to eat; the last one died in Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. The quagga, that strange half horse, half zebra once so common in South Africa, was harried to extinction by the Boer farmers; the last one died in London Zoo in 1909. It seemed incredible, almost impossible, that people in charge of zoos should have been so ignorant that they did not realise that these animals were tottering on the border of extinction and that they did not do something about it. Surely this was one of the true functions of a zoological garden, to help animals that were being pushed towards extinction?
Jill Johnson remembered Gerald saying, ‘A lot of animals are going to become extinct. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if one could breed these animals and put them back where they came from?’ But then he would have doubts, and remark: ‘Perhaps they’re becoming extinct because they’re meant to, because the world is changing. Perhaps they’re becoming extinct like the sabre-toothed tiger became extinct, because it’s in the order of things, because they’re meant to be replaced by something else.’ But was it in the order of things for one species to commit biocide against all the others? For man to take it into his own hands to speed half the animal kingdom to extinction? Sixty million buffalo once trampled the Great Plains of America – the greatest animal congregation that ever existed on earth. Then the white man came and began to kill them off at the rate of a million a year, so that by the 1880s there were just twenty left in the whole USA. A man could ride a thousand miles across the plains and never be out of sight of a dead buffalo and never in sight of a living one. Was that in the order of things? Nothing in Gerald’s life so far gave him greater insight into the acuteness of this problem, and its potential solution, than his encounter with Père David’s deer.
Père David’s deer had provided the world with a classic case of near-extinction and captive breeding undertaken by default. A distant relative of the red deer, it was once widespread in China, but by the end of the nineteenth century it had been hunted almost to extinction, and during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 the few that remained were killed in the emperor’s garden in Peking. Or so it seemed. As it happened, before their total extinction in their natural homeland a few specimens had been sent to Woburn Park, not far from Whipsnade, by an English aristocrat, the Duke of Bedford. From this small group the numbers of the almost vanished species were increased by haphazard natural breeding in captivity to a point where Père David’s deer can now be found all over the world. Gerald was well aware of this extraordinary story, and he was fascinated when four newborn specimens of the famous deer – still rare at that time – were sent to Whipsnade to be hand-reared:
They were delightful little things with long gangling limbs over which they had no control, and strange slanted eyes that gave them a distinctly oriental appearance … They had to be fed once during the night, at midnight, and again at dawn … I must say I rather enjoyed the night duties. To pick one’s way through the moonlit park towards the stable where the baby deer were kept, you had to pass several of the cages and paddocks, and the occupants were always on the move. The bears, looking twice as big in the half light, would be snorting to each other as they shambled heavily through the riot of brambles in their cage. At one point the path led through the wolf wood, with the moonlight silvering the trunks and laying dark shadows along the ground through which the wolf pack danced on swift, silent feet, like a strange black tide, swirling and twisting among the trunks.
Then you’d reach the stable and light the lantern. The baby deer would start moving restlessly in their straw beds, bleating tremulously. As you opened the door they’d rush forward, wobbling on their unsteady legs, sucking frantically at your fingers or the edge of your coat, and butting you suddenly in the legs with their heads, so that you were almost knocked down. Then came the exquisite moment when the teat was pushed into their mouths and they sucked frantically at the warm milk, their eyes staring, bubbles gathering like a moustache at the corners of their mouths. In the flickering light of the lantern, while the deer sucked and slobbered over the bottles, I was very conscious of the fact that they were the last of their kind, animal refugees living a precarious existence on the edge of extermination, dependent for their existence on the charity of a handful of human beings.
Jill Johnson was Gerald’s partner in this operation. She recalled:
I used to milk the goats, and Gerry used to take the bottle of goat milk to feed the deer. But it was a bit of a nuisance doing it this way, because the deer kept swallowing the teats. So one day we decided to take the nanny goat in to the deer so that they could suck from her direct. This worked pretty well when the deer were small, but eventually they grew bigger than the nanny and would butt under her and lift her up in the air, legs sprawling, and feed from her like that …
After that venture we moved on to looking after sick and orphaned animals, and were even allowed to help with operations by the vet. But the Père David’s deer may well have given Gerry his first glimpse into the possibilities of captive breeding. We used to talk about them perhaps breeding in the Park and then being reintroduced into China. It was just a dream then, but later it did happen.
At Whipsnade Gerald continued to compile his own list of animals in danger of extinction. He was moved, he later confided to a friend, by a mixture of horror, despair, determination and love, quoting Cecil Rhodes’ alleged dying words, ‘So much to do, so little done.’
Jill Johnson thought Gerald must have been rather a lonely soul at Whipsnade, his class and intelligence distancing him from his fellow keepers. His family never visited him, as far as she could tell. Eventually he moved out of the Baileys’ house and into a room in a bleak and chilly place called the Bothy – he referred to it as the Brothel – a huddle of four or five keepers’ cottages opposite a pub called Chequers at the bottom of the zoo. Sometimes he was invited for a curry (West African style with lots of chilli peppers) at the home of Captain and Mrs Beal – ‘So hot,’ he told Jill, ‘it makes me sweat like a fever.’
Among Gerald’s friends at Whipsnade was Guinea Pig Gus. ‘As a romantic figure,’ he recalled, ‘Gus had little to commend him.’ His skull sloped back from his nose like a Neanderthal’s. His nose looked like some fungus squashed on his face. He suffered acutely from acne, had adenoids and bit his nails. ‘He was quite the most unattractive human being I had ever encountered,’ Gerald wrote in his autobiographical jottings years later, ‘yet he had the kindest of hearts.’ It was Gus who walked all the way to Dunstable and back to get patches and glue when Gerald punctured his bicycle tyres. It was Gus who brought him half a bottle of whisky – ‘God knows from where, for at that time a bottle of whisky was as valuable as the Koh-i-noor diamond’ – when he had pleurisy and thought he was going to die. It was Gus who took Gerald’s shoes to be soled and heeled so that he didn’t have to do it on his day off.
Gus’s heart belonged to the guinea pig, and all his spare cash went towards materials for the palace he was planning to build for these favoured creatures. When it became clear to Gerald that Gus would never have enough money to finish it, he decided it was time to repay him for all his past kindness, and to break his vow to live on his meagre salary by hook or by crook and never to write home for funds. ‘I wrote to my mother,’ he recorded, ‘explaining about Gus and his guinea pigs. By return came a letter containing ten crisp pound notes. In her letter, my mother said: “Don’t hurt his feelings, dear. Tell him an uncle who liked guinea pigs died and left it to you.”’
So the Guinea Pig Palace was completed, and the grand opening day arrived. ‘It was a splendid occasion,’ Gerald recalled, ‘attended by no lesser personages than Gus’s mother and father, his dog, his cat, me, his goldfish, his frog, and the girl from next door, as exciting as a dumpling. The Guinea Pigs took the move from their old home with great aplomb and dignity. Three jugs of beer from the pub and some elderberry wine and the party got so convivial that Gus’s mother fell into the goldfish pond and Gus at last succeeded in kissing the girl next door.’
The Guinea Pig Palace, which also contained other species of rodents, became the place where Gerald took his girlfriends. It was, he reckoned, the most romantic spot available. Not all the girls agreed. Gerald recalled:
The first one, a town girl, suddenly said:‘’Ere, you’re paying more attention to them rats than wot you are to me. I can tell, your eyes get all unfocused like.’ I felt this was unfair, since most of her clothing was scattered about the hazel grove, but I must admit the dormice were enchanting, and enchanted by us.
At last I met an adorable girl with a Devonshire accent like cream out of a jug and dark blue-grey eyes fringed with eyelashes as long as hollyhocks. She loved dormice, but this was the trouble.
‘No, don’t, not now,’ she would say. ‘You’ll disturb them, dear wee mites. And anyway – you never know – they might be watching.’
Gerald finally struck lucky with a policeman’s daughter – ‘buxom, blonde and willing’ – who ran Pets’ Corner. Her office was in a wooden hut which was often locked from the inside at lunchtime. ‘We were poking the living daylights out of each other at every opportunity,’ Gerald later confided to a friend. ‘I thought I would marry her in the end.’ Gerald took her home to Bournemouth to meet the family once or twice. ‘Really she was quite hefty and rotund,’ his sister Margaret recalled. ‘Gerry was very keen on her at the time. But then, what young man isn’t very keen at the time?’ It was not to last, though, as the policeman’s daughter turned out to have another boyfriend hovering in the wings.
How Gerald Durrell saw himself in his leisure hours at Whipsnade – a Lothario among the paddocks – was not quite how others saw him. Jill Johnson recalled:
The waitresses in the cafeteria said he looked like a Greek god, but really he was not the most handsome, though he had a nice face. He wasn’t particularly macho, either, but nor was he the opposite. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember him having any close girlfriends at all. If anyone went out with him it was me, but I was only a friend who happened to be a girl. We were close, but we never had a romance. Neither of us was interested in boyfriends and girlfriends, we were interested in learning as much as we could about the animals. There wasn’t much to do in the evenings, nowhere much to go, no TV in those days. We used to go out for bike rides in the evening, and sometimes he’d take me up into the hay barn. You’d think we were up to something, but we weren’t. He’d say: ‘Sshh … be quiet … they won’t know where we are. I’m going to read some Housman; see if you like him.’ And he’d read out loud to me, in his beautiful voice:
Oh, when I was in love with you,
Then I was clean and brave,
And miles around the wonder grew
How well did I behave …
Gerry would provide much more intelligent conversation than any of the keepers who used to go down to the pub in the evening. He was quite a deep thinker, but he was fun too. Sometimes, sitting up in the dark, watching over a sick animal, he’d tell the most wonderful stories – some of them really quite rude. He did have a special way of treating women – rather cosmopolitan, a bit Latin perhaps. One day I was with another girl in the office and he came rushing in, and he got down on one knee in front of this other girl and made a most elaborate and passionate speech to her. ‘There is a question I have got to ask you,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know how to put it.’ We both thought he was going to ask her to marry him. Then he burst out: ‘Can you tell me where the gentlemen’s lavatory is?’ So he was great fun, very lively, very bright, very special, a nice, kind, unusual person to know.
Lucy Pendar, the teenage daughter of the resident engineer at Whipsnade, remembered Gerald less as a ladykiller than as a generous and supportive young man with a highly developed, rather bawdy sense of humour:
Gerry’s stay at Whipsnade brought a new dimension to our lives. A slim young man with unusual blue eyes, his long fair hair fell over his eyes and he wore suede shoes. To me, he looked more like a poet than a keeper! His burning ambition was to be a wild animal collector. We’d heard of Wilfred Frost and Cecil Webb, the Great White Hunters, but this was our first encounter with anyone aspiring to such a dangerous and thrilling occupation! What a captivated audience we were as this new person in our midst told us about his early life. He related splendid stories as we sat, spellbound, on the oatsacks or on the grass. He expounded, at length, his pet theories on the care of animals in captivity, many of which he subsequently put into practice. The slim, aesthetic young man was a great deal tougher than he looked. None of us had any doubts that he would ultimately achieve anything he set his sights on.
Gerry was enormous fun, Lucy Pendar remembered. He was always bursting into lusty renderings of ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ or ‘The Last Rose of Summer’, or piping up with ribald verses like ‘Little Mary’.
Little Mary, in the glen,
Poked herself with a fountain pen.
The top came off, the ink ran wild
And she gave birth to a blue black child.
And they called the bastard Stephen …
They called the bastard Stephen …
They called the bastard Stephen …
’Cos that was the name of the ink.
When Lucy fell ill, it was Gerry who read to her. When she had doubts, it was he who encouraged her to stick at it. When she tripped him up during a romp at a VJ-Day party, so that he sprawled headfirst into a cow pat – ‘I always lay claim to fertilising that brain,’ she joked later – he took it in good part. ‘It is unbelievable the influence one person can have upon another in so short a time,’ Lucy Pendar was to reflect, ‘but he was ever after indelibly imprinted on my memory. A wonderful man. We had the faith in him the adults did not, and we were right.’
At Whipsnade Gerald learned that zoo keeping, like many jobs, was not quite as romantic as it sounded. Most of a keeper’s time was spent on routine work such as feeding and cleaning. Gerald worked in a number of sections, each of which took its name from its principal animals. The lion section, for example, where he started, also included wombats, Arctic foxes, tigers and polar bears, which could be very dangerous if sufficiently annoyed. From ‘lions’ he moved on to ‘bears’, where there were also wolves, warthogs, zebras and gnus. But though Gerald enjoyed his work at Whipsnade, and was able to find time to learn more about the animals in his charge, it sometimes seemed to him that the only knowledge he had acquired was how to muck out and how to avoid a goring. The most dangerous animals, he discovered, were not necessarily the ones with the most fearsome reputations. Even a velvet-eyed zebra could be transformed into a raging demon that would treat one’s behind like a kettle drum given half a chance, while the much-feared wolf did not deserve its terrible notoriety at all.
Gerald was acquiring a priceless grounding in the daily running of a first-class, up-to-date zoo. But there were some minuses. He was disappointed at the lack of scientific expertise at Whipsnade, and at the reluctance of his fellow keepers, fearful for their jobs, to impart their knowhow to him. He was also alarmed by certain aspects of the animal management procedures, and convinced that some of the keepers were putting his life in danger. Gerald had a wonderful way with animals, but he was no fool. Most of the animals at Whipsnade were half wild. Some of the keepers thought they knew the ways of the creatures in their charge, but they didn’t, and one day, Gerald was sure, there would be an accident. Often the keepers asked him to do things which he was reluctant to do because he knew he could be injured. One day he was asked to fetch a baby water buffalo from its mother, a nearly suicidal undertaking. He managed to get hold of the baby and make a run for it, but the enraged mother caught up with him and rammed him with her horns, smashing his hand against the metal bars of the paddock and breaking several bones.
One exception among the keepers was a new man, recently discharged from the RAF, by the name of Ken Smith. Early on Gerald had struck up a rapport with Smith, who was then in charge of the Père David’s deer, and this friendship was to continue for many years, with great significance for the careers of both men.
On 7 January 1946 Gerald celebrated his twenty-first birthday and came into his inheritance – a sum of £3000 (worth over £60,000 in today’s money) which had been set aside for him in his father’s will. Suddenly Gerald – who until now could barely afford the price of half a pint of watery bitter or a packet of Woodbines – was a man of means. He had already decided to leave Whipsnade some months before. His ambition was still to go animal collecting and start his own zoo one day, and he knew he was not going to further either ambition if he stayed where he was.
Every evening he would sit in his little cell-like room in the cold, echoing Bothy, writing painstaking letters to any animal collectors who were still in business asking if they would take him on one of their expeditions if he paid his own expenses. These fearless, resourceful frontiersmen were a legendary breed of men. But their replies all said the same thing – as he had no collecting experience, they could not take him with them. If he ever managed to acquire some experience, then he should by all means write again.
‘It was at this point in my life, depressed and frustrated, that I had a brilliant idea,’ Gerald recalled. ‘If I used some of my inheritance to finance an expedition of my own, then I could honestly claim to have had experience and then one of these great men might not only take me on an expedition but actually pay me a salary. The prospects were mouthwatering.’
This, he decided, was what he would do. He would try his hand as a freelance animal-catcher, paying his way on his own expedition collecting animals for zoos. He now had capital, and this was how he proposed to invest it. Though the war had largely put an end to the animal-catchers’ unusual way of earning a living, with the coming of peace many zoos needed to restock their dwindling collections, and for the rarer and more exotic animals the demand was considerable and prices high.
At Gerald’s farewell curry dinner at Whipsnade, however, Captain Beal was less than enthusiastic. ‘No money in it,’ he warned in doleful tones. ‘You’ll be chuckin’ money away, mark my words.’
‘And watch out,’ warned a keeper called Jesse. ‘It’s one thing to have a lion in a cage and another to have the bugger creeping up behind you, see?’
The next morning, Gerald went the rounds saying goodbye to the animals. ‘I was sad,’ he recalled, ‘for I had been happy working at Whipsnade but, as I went round, each animal represented a place I wanted to see, each was a sort of geographical signpost encouraging me on my way. Everywhere the animals beckoned me and strengthened my decision.’
On 17 May 1946 Gerald Durrell left Whipsnade in pursuit of his dream. His time there had taught him many valuable and practical things about the profession upon which he was now embarked. No less importantly, his experience at Whipsnade had crystallised his thinking about zoos in general, and the ideal zoo in particular. He later wrote:
When I left Whipsnade I was still determined to have a zoo of my own, but I was equally determined that if I ever achieved this ambition my zoo would have to fulfil three functions in order to justify its existence.
Firstly, it would have to act as an aid to the education of people so that they could realise how fascinating and how important the other forms of life in the world were, so that they would stop being quite so arrogant and self-important and appreciate the fact that the other forms of life had just as much right to existence as they had.
Secondly, research into the behaviour of animals would be undertaken so that by this means one could not only learn more about the behaviour of human beings but also be in a better position to help animals in their wild state, for unless you know the needs of the various species of animal you cannot practise conservation successfully.
Thirdly – and this seemed to me to be of the utmost urgency – the zoo would have to be a reservoir of animal life, a sanctuary for threatened species, keeping and breeding them so that they would not vanish from the earth for ever as the dodo, the quagga and the passenger pigeon had done.
All that lay in the future. For the moment he had the more immediate problems of his first – his great – expedition to grapple with. As the weeks went by he became obsessed with the adventure and romance of the idea. Lacking the gift of hindsight, his ambition at this stage was unclouded by any doubts as to the ethics of what he was proposing. At an early age Gerald had set himself a dual agenda for his working life – first, collecting animals in the wild for the world’s zoos, and later establishing a zoo of his own. These two components may have had animals in common, but they had paradoxically contrasting effects: while the zoo of Gerald’s dreams might save species from extinction, the practice of collecting often condemned individual animals to death – an outcome Gerald did not clearly foresee and never fully acknowledged, even to himself, though the poacher would turn gamekeeper soon enough.
SEVEN Planning for Adventure 1946–1947 (#ulink_7f60a562-0a24-561a-bcc7-993c981456c3)
Gerald went home to Bournemouth to make preparations for his expedition. Only one cloud darkened the family reunion – the erratic behaviour of Leslie, who had been giving cause for concern.
Leslie had always been the enigma of the family, the cracked bell who was always striking a dud note. Corfu, he once said, was ‘the dangerous corner in my life, five golden, drifting, ultimately destructive years’. Larry used to have a go at Mother sometimes: ‘We must put Leslie to something,’ he’d tell her. But she would say, ‘Leave him alone, he’ll be all right.’ But, unlike his brothers, he wasn’t. The rest of the Durrells had always rallied loyally around whenever Leslie stepped out of line, for he was basically well-intentioned, and never malicious. But years later he was to remark to an interviewer: ‘It’s a funny thing, you know – however hard I try, nothing seems to go right for me. I’ve got a sort of jinx on me, I think.’
He put all of his inheritance into a fishing boat, which sank before it had even got out of Poole Harbour. Next he tried market gardening, but that failed too. Unable to settle to anything, drifting and shiftless and convinced the world owed him a living, Leslie passed himself off for a while as ‘Major-General Durrell’, trying to develop various ambitious scams, including one involving luxury yachts and motorboats, till Margaret warned him he could end up in prison for fraudulent impersonation if he didn’t watch out. He ‘helped’ his mother get through a lot of money – not having a clue herself, she always took Leslie’s advice on financial matters, for he had always been her favourite child.
Nothing much worked for Leslie. Though he was a talented painter – Gerald once described some of his work as ‘astonishingly beautiful’ – he practised his gift in a most desultory way, and never made a penny from it. In the end, Lawrence and Gerald gave up on him. Gerald was to confide years later, ‘Though my elder brother and I frequently tried to help him, he would always end up doing something that would make us lose patience with him.’
All through the war, while he toiled ingloriously in the aircraft factory, Leslie had been living in Bournemouth with his mother, Gerald (till he went to Whipsnade) and the family’s Greek maid Maria Condos. By 1945 he was twenty-seven, and he and Maria, some ten years his senior, had begun a liaison – one of several for Leslie, the love of her life for Maria. Margaret, who was closest to the drama, recalled:
I walked right into the Maria furore when I got back from North Africa to have my second baby early in 1945, and of course, as in all these family crises, it was always me who had to be the strong one, because there was nobody else around to deal with things.
Mother, of course – being Mother – hadn’t noticed anything going on. So I told her: ‘Maria’s pregnant.’ Then I had to rush around trying to find an unmarried mothers’ home for her to go to, and when the baby was born in September she kept marching up and down the street with the baby in a pram, telling all and sundry it was a Durrell baby, another Bournemouth Durrell boy, which was rather embarrassing for the family. Leslie saw him first when he was a babe in arms, but neither Gerry nor Larry ever set eyes on the child at that time. They were adamant Leslie shouldn’t marry the girl. Not that he intended to, because he was also going out with Doris by now, the manageress of the local off-licence who had kept Mother in gin during the war and who employed Leslie to make the beer deliveries after it. They were odd characters, you know, Gerry and Larry. Though they could both be very unconventional and wild, they could also be very prudish and correct, surprising though that may sound.
The child, named Anthony Condos, had early recollections of the house in St Alban’s Avenue. His mother slept in a cot in the kitchen, and he remembered ‘monkeys climbing over the furniture and snakes in chests of drawers’. Since Leslie took no interest in either the baby or Maria, Mother paid up as usual and Maria went and got a job in a laundry in Christchurch, and then a council house, and brought the baby up on her own. ‘After my mother and I left the folds of the family,’ Tony Condos recalled, ‘we lived in various places, moving from flat to flat and room to room around Bournemouth. I think that Margaret, another woman, may have felt sympathy for my mother. My mother kept up a good relationship with her for many years and we were always kindly received at her house at number 51. But mother had to work incredibly hard to raise me and had a very difficult life.’ Maria remained very much in love with Leslie, Margaret was to say: ‘Years later she’d still remember him adoringly as “my roula-mou” – that’s Greek for “darling” – in fact deeper, more tender than darling.’
Tony Condos grew up never knowing if his father was dead or alive. ‘Though my mother obviously loved him very much,’ he was to reflect, ‘her feelings towards him oscillated between love and hate, and it made me very confused in my younger days. My main regret in life is that I never knew my father. For many years I felt extreme animosity towards him and the rest of the family. But as I grew older I started to appreciate the situation that the whole Durrell family must have been in with regard to my mother and me. Now I have only sadness that I was not one of them, the family … And oddly enough, I am proud of being a Durrell, albeit nameless.’
Gerald, meanwhile, was grappling with a small nightmare of his own. For a novice, an animal collecting expedition in the wilds of a distant continent represented a daunting challenge. How should he set about it? Where should he go? What should he catch? How much would it cost? There was no apprenticeship, no one to help him, and a mountainous number of bureaucratic restrictions to overcome. In the aftermath of the war, much of the world remained difficult of access, and some countries were still off-limits.
Months went by while Gerald struggled with a host of imponderables to produce a plan of action. He had long cherished a dream to see Africa, and within that continent one country stood out as a prime target for any would-be animal collector – the undeveloped and little-visited territory known as the British Cameroons, a remote, narrow backwater of empire on the eastern frontier of Nigeria, unsurpassed not only for the wild beauty of its high mountains and tropical forests but for the spectacular richness of its wildlife, from the gorilla, the pangolin and the rare angwantibo to the hairy frog, giant water shrew and giant hawk eagle.
Having settled the problem of where, Gerald turned his attention to other pressing questions – when, how, with whom and for what. The details took months to work out. Foreign travel was still an exotic pastime in 1946, beyond the reach of all but a privileged few, and information was scant. His plans took a leap forward when he made contact with a collector naturalist by the name of John Yealland, a highly regarded aviculturist and ornithologist almost twice his age but with interests close to his own. A few months after Gerald left Whipsnade, Yealland had helped Peter Scott found the nucleus of his Wildfowl Trust at Slimbridge, on the edge of the Severn mudflats in Gloucestershire, and later he was to become Curator of Birds at the London Zoo. Gerald told Yealland of his ambition to collect rare animals in the Cameroons, and Yealland responded with encouraging enthusiasm. They agreed to pool their talents and see the thing through together.
So now there was a team. And before long there would be a plan, a schedule, an itinerary – even a departure date. But not much else. As one newspaper was to report: ‘Their bring-’em-back-alive expedition was their first safari into the jungle. No one knew where they were going, no one placed any orders with them, and no one in the Cameroons knew they were arriving.’ In fact five zoos – London, Bristol, Chester, Belle Vue (Manchester) and Paignton – had expressed an interest in seeing anything that the expedition brought back, and had even quoted prices for the rarer species, though none was prepared to put money up front.
The Durrell family were first surprised, then excited by Gerald’s ambitious plans. As far as they were concerned his life to date – for all his lively enthusiasm and quirky originality – had seemed about as unpromising as his brother Leslie’s.
During 1947 Gerald was increasingly drawn to London. The capital had many advantages for the intending expeditionary, including a world-class zoo and museums to visit, experts to consult, specialist dealers to advise about a legion of purchases, libraries to bone up in and bookshops to buy from. London also had, at that time, Peter Scott, the only son of Scott of the Antarctic, a war hero, portrait painter and successful painter of wildfowl who was already making a name for himself as a naturalist and pioneer conservationist in a world still largely oblivious of conservation and all it stood for.
Though there were a number of things Gerald did not have in common with Scott (background and personality being but two), they overlapped in two essential regards. Scott’s trail-blazing Wildfowl Trust at Slimbridge on the Severn marshes, which had been set up the previous year, was a model of the type of conservation establishment Gerald himself dreamed of founding one day. And Scott’s reverence for animal life was very close to Gerald’s own as yet unarticulated view. ‘My interest in the processes of evolution,’ Scott was to write, ‘has produced in me a kind of reverence for every species of flora and fauna, which have as much right to their place on earth as does homo sapiens. The prospect of extinction of any existing species then appears as a potential disaster which man’s conscience should urge him to avert.’ The destruction of nature and its living forms was, Scott felt, ‘a crime against an undefined but immutable law of the universe’.
Scott was living at the time in Edwardes Square, Kensington, and it is likely that the young Gerald Durrell went there to seek the advice of the older, more established professional. But though Gerald was a relative ingenu, Scott was aware that he already had enough clout to persuade John Yealland, Scott’s own first curator at Slimbridge, to go off to the wilds of the Cameroons with him.
Besides all its resources and experts, London also had women. Between the age of sixteen and twenty-two, a number of girls had drifted in and out of Gerald’s life. But though he was far from virginal, he was still a naïf in his relations with the opposite sex. This was now to change.
It was at lunch in a Greek restaurant in the West End, where he had gathered with Larry and a bunch of fawning failed poets, that Gerald met the woman who was to indoctrinate him into the deeper mysteries of love. He called her Juliet, but whether that was her real name may never be known. She was in her late twenties, six or seven years older than Gerald, married (but separated) with two young children. Gerald fell for her almost at once. She was not pretty, but she had a memorable face and beautiful eyes, and besides, she looked pale and sad, so that Gerald felt protective as well as drawn towards her.
‘What do you do?’ he asked.
‘I paint horses,’ she said.
Gerald had some problem with this. ‘I could not believe it – the mind boggled,’ he was to recall, ‘but surrounded by Greeks anything was possible.’
‘You mean you take a shire horse and a bucket of paint and accost him with it?’ he asked her.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I paint pictures of them – for their owners. Pedigree horses, of course.’
‘Of course,’ said Gerald gravely, adding tentatively: ‘Can I come and see your etchings some time?’
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘How about tomorrow? Come and have lunch.’
So the tryst was made. Gerald caught a bus to Juliet’s, clutching a dozen gulls’ eggs for lunch in the hope that they would prove an efficacious aphrodisiac. Her house, he recalled, smelled of coffee and oil paints having a bath together. She showed him her paintings – ‘she wasn’t as good as Stubbs,’ he recalled, ‘but damned near it’ – and he stayed so long that they went out to dinner. Within a few days he had moved out of his Aunt Prue’s house in Drayton Gardens, Chelsea, which had been his base in town, and installed himself and his baggage at Juliet’s. ‘She was,’ he sighed with nostalgia for lost love, ‘the most wonderful woman in the world.’ ‘Juliet was Gerry’s first real affair, his first complete realisation of love and sex and all that,’ his sister Margaret remembered. ‘She really opened his eyes to it. Not that he saw much future to it.’
The affair lingered on and off for two years, punctuated by Gerald’s long absences abroad. He took it seriously enough to have thoughts of marrying the woman, which looking back he reckoned would have been a disaster. But there was no future to it. One morning he popped down to Bournemouth on some business or other and returned that evening to find a letter from Juliet waiting for him on the dressing table. It was, he recalled, ‘a note in the traditional manner, using all the trite phrases out of the novels we secretly enjoy but pretend are bad, like “we’re growing too fond of each other” and this sort of crap’. Distraught at this unexpected turn of events, Gerald got wildly drunk, and then cracked up. He had deeply cared for the woman after all. Eventually, in sadness and anger, he gathered his books together, packed his bags and sloped back to Aunt Prue’s with his tail between his legs. Not that it mattered much in the end. The wild world beckoned, and before long he would again be off to bigger and more challenging horizons.
In the meantime, Gerald concentrated on the real matter in hand. As the boxes of traps, guns, lanterns, socks, salt, suet, fish-hooks, maps, field guides and medicines began to clutter up the family home, word got about in Bournemouth that young Gerry, the former pet shop assistant and riding instructor, had turned into a naturalist and explorer, and was about to set off to Darkest Africa in search of pythons and apes. Earlier in the year his brother Lawrence had thought his career was tending in an entirely different direction, writing to Henry Miller from Rhodes: ‘My younger brother Gerry’s emerging as a poet. He is rather an iconoclast at present – feels he has to assert his individuality – thinks you a bad writer and me a terribly bad writer.’ In April 1947 Lawrence had to revise his opinion. After visiting Bournemouth with his new Egyptian wife Eve – the first time the whole family had been together since the Corfu days before the war – he wrote to Miller: ‘Gerald has turned out as a zoologist as he wanted and is leaving for Nigeria in September.’ Margaret, who now had two young sons, was soon to divorce her airman, Jack Breeze, and would use her legacy from her father to buy a large house across the road from Mother, while Leslie moved in with Doris Hall, a laughing, booming divorcee with a son of her own. Substantially older and bigger than Leslie, Doris still ran the off-licence half a mile down the road.
Gerald’s preparations were gathering momentum. At last the byzantine negotiations with the bureaucracies responsible for export, import, animal and gun licences were resolved. A cabin and cargo space were booked on a cargo vessel bound for Victoria in the Cameroons. Late in September 1947 Gerald collected a new passport. It described him as a zoologist, domiciled in Bournemouth, eyes blue, hair brown, and five feet seven in height.
Cargo ships are notoriously erratic when it comes to schedules. The boat on which Gerald hoped to sail was due to depart from London, and he stayed at Aunt Prue’s while he waited – interminably – for the boat to arrive. One day he happened to bump into Larry emerging from a bookshop carrying a large parcel of books.
‘Oh, hullo,’ said Larry in surprise. ‘What are you doing in London?’
‘Waiting for a boat,’ replied Gerald.
‘A boat? Ah, yes, London docks and so on. Down to the sea in shops. Well, ships in my experience are notoriously tardy. Either they don’t sail at all or else they sink, which gives you time for a drink.’
Larry suggested that to while away the time Gerald should look up an old friend and champion of his, a Sinologist and poet by the name of Hugh Gordon Porteus. Interesting chap, Larry told him. Lived in a cellar in Chelsea, played the organ and lived off horsemeat. ‘Knows a lot about Chinese poetry,’ Larry continued. ‘I think you’d like him – unless you’re too bloody English to eat horse.’
Hugh Porteus’s menage was every bit as eccentric as Gerald had been led to expect. A gaggle of nubile young women were gathered in the sitting room while Porteus stirred soup in a tin bidet (a trophy from one of the best brothels in Paris) on the gas ring.
‘I gazed on the scene,’ Gerald recorded in his notebook later. ‘Most of the girls were wearing very little else but diaphanous dressing gowns and bras and exciting lace panties underneath. The soup bubbled in the bidet. The horse steaks were lying in a row on the top of the bookcase.’ At seven o’clock sharp Porteus looked at his watch, pulled a miniature organ out of a cupboard, and called for silence. An infirm old lady by the name of Mrs Honeydew lived in the room above, and it was Porteus’s custom to play her a few tunes on his organ while she listened through the floorboards as she had her beef tea.
‘All right for sound, Mrs Honeydew?’ he shouted.
A walking stick could be heard rapping sharply on the ceiling, and Porteus settled himself more firmly on his stool.
‘The next minute we were engulfed in the Blue Danube,’ Gerald recalled. ‘Everything in that enclosed space danced to the magnificent waltz. The girls’ breasts wobbled, the horse steaks on the bookcase quivered, the bidet trembled on the gas-ring, and a book by a sixth century traveller in China fell out of the bookcase. One of the girls suddenly put her warm hands in mine, drew me aloft as it were, pressed her warm and mobile mouth against mine, pressed herself to me and started to waltz.’
At this point Theodore Stephanides arrived. Now resident in London and working as a radiologist at Lambeth Hospital, Theo knew the Porters through Larry. Still every inch the Edwardian gentleman, he wore a tweed suit, 1908 waistcoat, highly polished boots and a staunch trilby, and sported a perky beard and moustache and a neat new steel-grey haircut. ‘Even I,’ noted Gerald, ‘who had known Theodore since the age of ten, would have been appalled at the idea of inserting him into such a milieu.’ The girls had never set eyes on a human being such as this before, and to the dismay of both Porteus and Gerald they greeted the new arrival with effusive admiration:
They cooed around him like doves round a fountain. They pressed olives on him and cheese biscuits. They sat round him in a ring of delicious fragrance, palpitating at each word he spoke. Theodore sat there like an ultra benevolent Father Christmas, delving into his considerable memory for jokes that Punch thought hilarious in 1898.
‘There is this – um – you know – a sort of tongue twister. I don’t know if you’ve heard it,’ ventured Theodore. “What noise annoys an oyster most – er – um – ha! A noisy noise annoys an oyster most.’
The girls rippled with liquid laughter, crowding closer to Theodore’s feet. This was the kind of humour they had not encountered before and to them it was as marvellous as finding a fully working spinning wheel in the attic.
So the frustrating evening wore on. Gerald and Porteus sat together disconsolate, ignored by the girls, who pressed round the scholarly, stuttering Theo. He reminisced about a friend of his in Paris, a freshwater biologist who kept a most interesting collection of Crustacea in a complex system of fourteen interconnecting bidets in his room. Dipping into his mushroom soup, he expounded at length on the lethal potential of this kind of dish – some 2841 different kinds of fungi, he said, and more than two thousand of them poisonous or deadly. ‘Gold, green, blue, hazel and olive-black eyes,’ Gerald recalled, ‘regarded Theo like a group of children who are being told the true story of Bluebeard.’
‘Did you know,’ later confided a wide-eyed girl whom Gerald particularly fancied, ‘that the gorilla has a brain capacity almost that of a man?’
‘I knew that,’ growled Gerald morosely, ‘when I was seven.’
At length Gerald received news that a vessel bound for the Cameroons was loading up in Liverpool – a banana boat in the form of an old German rustbucket seized by the British as war booty and due to sail at the beginning of December. He took the first train north, and secured his passage. Now at last, it seemed, he was on his way. Within a day or two Yealland had joined him, the expedition stores had been safely stowed in the hold and the personal baggage packed in the cabin. The good luck telegrams were delivered, the last goodbyes said and the gangway drawn up. And the ship refused to budge an inch from the dock.
On 2 December 1947, after three days on board, with the ship still defiantly tied up to the jetty, Gerald unpacked his portable typewriter and started his first missive to Mother – the first lengthy, coherent narrative he had written in his life.
Dear Mother,
We are still at Garston Docks in Liverpool. The bloody boat being a German one, no one seems to know anything about the inside of her. Something in the engines has given out, and so hordes of sweaty men are messing about in pools of oil. We have however had three days board and lodging at the expense of the firm, so that’s not too bad. What we object to is the view from our porthole: a very dirty length of jetty with a pile of rotting bananas on it. John says it might be rather pretty in the spring, if we stay long enough …
Their cabin was large and well-appointed, but what really staggered Gerald, long accustomed to rationed austerity in post-war Britain, was the food. ‘For breakfast,’ he crooned, ‘I had rolled oats (lots of milk and sugar) followed by kidneys and bacon with potatoes, toast and marmalade and butter (in a dish as big as a soup plate) and coffee.’ Even better, the booze was stunningly cheap, and flowed like water: ‘Beer (pre-war quality) costs us ten pence, whiskey and gin a shilling (two fingers), and we get fifty cigarettes for three shillings.’ The captain, Gerald noted, was ‘a stupid, pompous idiot of the worst kind’, but the rest of the officers were ‘sweet’. As for the other passengers, they were a ‘very queer lot’. But all were charming to the two young animal catchers, and were reassuringly encouraging about the abundance of animals there.
Don’t worry about us, as we are having a wonderful time. We spend most of the day screaming with laughter. We hope to leave tomorrow morning, with luck this evening.
Love
Gerry
But it was not until 14 December, a full fortnight after the pair had first clambered on board, and with their laughter worn a little thin by the interminable wait, that the ship finally cast off, eased out of the docks, turned left at the mouth of the Mersey and butted its way south down the Irish Sea, throbbing along towards the equator and the sun and the blue.
PART TWO Promise Fulfilled (#ulink_94e21944-bfa7-50c6-b218-21be62587cb0)
EIGHT To the Back of Beyond First Cameroons Expedition 1947–1948 (#ulink_134f0980-47ab-538b-babd-bb455f88ec83)
The ship broke down three more times, and in the Bay of Biscay the sea was so rough that Gerald and Yealland were thrown out of their bunks, along with all their kit. The weather hotted up by the time they reached the Canaries, and they watched entranced as the warm-water creatures of the ocean began to make their appearance around the ship, along with exotic insect stragglers – butterflies, dragonflies and a solitary orange ladybird – from the unseen African shore beyond the eastern horizon.
‘We have seen a great number of Flying fish,’ Gerald wrote to his mother. ‘Porpoise and Dolphin have been playing round the ship, and yesterday we saw three Whales blowing about fifty feet off the ship. Also there have been a lot of Portuguese Man of War, a kind of jellyfish which puts up a small sail and goes whizzing about on the surface carried by the wind. These sails are vivid magenta in colour, and when there are several dotted about on the blue sea they look beautiful.’
What with the breakdowns and delays, the ship was still at sea, some forty miles off the Senegal coast, on Christmas Eve. The occasion was celebrated with bacchanalian fervour. First there was a huge dinner in the dining room, followed by lashings of whisky in the second officer’s cabin, and then a carol-singing party in the smoking room. By this time Gerald was well into his first recorded binge. Though he was too far gone to remember anything himself next morning, Yealland duly noted it all down in his diary:
Such is the strength of the intoxicants on board that Gerry, who had formerly held the little holy man and his wife in considerable detestation, waxed more and more friendly towards him. They retired rather early, but when he came back to get a book he had left behind, Gerald seized him round the neck, stuffed a cigarette into his mouth, and speaking French with unheard-of fluency implored ‘mon très cher ami’ to have a drink. Just then the holy one’s wife came in with her hair down and saved him from a fate worse than death, and on catching sight of her Gerry exclaimed: ‘Voilà! La femme de moi!’
A few days later they finally reached their African landfall. For Gerald it was a moment of overwhelming magic:
The ship nosed its way through the morning mist across a sea as smooth as silk. A faint and exciting smell came to us from the invisible shore, the smell of flowers, damp vegetation, palm oil, and a thousand other intoxicating scents drawn up from the earth by the rising sun, a pale, moist-looking nimbus of sun seen dimly through the mists. As it rose higher and higher, the heat of its rays loosened the hold the mist had on land and sea, and gradually the bay and the coastline came into view and gave me my first glimpse of Africa.
Ahead, across the glittering waters, he could see a scatter of jungly islands, and behind them the coastlands that rose in forested waves upwards to where Mount Cameroon loomed, ‘dim and gigantic’, in the early morning light. Across the islands flocks of grey parrots were making their way towards the forested shore, the air full of their clownish excited screams and whistles. Astern, in the glistening wake of the ship, Gerald saw a fish eagle swoop out of the dispersing mist, and two brown kites circling overhead, scavenging for scraps. And then he smelled that magic smell again – ‘stronger, richer, intoxicating with its promise of deep forest, of lush reedy swamps, and wide magical rivers under a canopy of trees’ – the smell of Africa. ‘We landed,’ he recalled, ‘as in a dream.’
Years later, remembering that first landfall with aching nostalgia, he confided to a friend: ‘It had such a powerful impact that I was drugged for hours, even days, afterwards. One glass of beer that morning and I was as high as an eagle. To sit there, drink a beer, watch a lizard, vivid orange and swimming-pool blue, just nodding his head on the balcony. It’s there for ever in my mind, much more than reality, because it was alive and I was alive.’
For Gerald and his friend John Yealland every minute of those first few days in Africa – every sight, every sound, every face, every creature, every plant – was a source of wonder and delight. It was as if they had been born again – nothing was familiar, nothing expected. Hither and thither they went, ecstatic and bemused, like men in a mescaline trance. ‘On the very first night,’ Gerald recalled, ‘we had dinner and drifted down to the little botanical gardens there. The British always had a habit of making botanical gardens, like country clubs, wherever they went. And with torches we walked down a tiny stream with all this lush undergrowth. And like a couple of schoolkids we picked up whatever we found, tree frogs, woodlice, centipedes, anything, carted it all back to the rest house in jars and boxes, and oohed and gooed over them all until three in the morning.’
From the little white rest house on top of a hill in the flower-filled little capital town of Victoria (population a meagre 3500), Gerald wrote to his mother in the first paroxysm of enthusiasm: ‘The country around here is simply beautiful, and John and I go round gasping at the birds and flowers.’ Wherever they turned they found a myriad of exotic creatures. On a palm nut plantation a little out of town they discovered giant millipedes – ‘our first catch, six inches long and as thick as a sausage’. Down on the beach they were amazed to find a strange species of crab – ‘purple in colour, with one huge claw and one small’ – and a score of mud skippers, ‘a small fish with a head like a hippo’. ‘If everything is as plentiful,’ Gerald wrote home, ‘we should make a fortune in no time.’
Often they had to enlist the help of local Africans, communicating as best they could in pidgin English – a genuine lingua franca at which Gerald soon became highly adept. To his mother he described a typical encounter.
ME: Goodmorning. (Very British)
NATIVE: Goodmorning, sah. (Taking off filthy rag which is his hat)
ME: We look for small beef.
(#ulink_61d142da-ae7a-53f0-bbcd-88554da4aa6a) You have small beef here?
NATIVE: Sah?
ME: Small beef … SMALL BEEF.
NATIVE: Ah! Small beef, sah? Yes, we hab plenty, sah, plenty.
ME: (In Victorian tones) Where dis small beef, ay?
(Native now makes remark which I can’t understand, and points)
ME: (Pretending to understand) Ah ah! Dis place far far?
NATIVE: No, sah, you walker walker for fibe minutes, sah.
ME: (With lordly wave of hand) Good, you show me.
And so the procession started: the two natives in front, John and I behind, feeling like a Hollywood film set. We marched like this for half a mile, and then we found the two natives arguing on the banks of a very fast river. I asked one of them how we were supposed to get across, and he said he would carry us. Thinking we would have to get used to this sort of thing, I uttered a short prayer and got on his back. How he got across I don’t know: the water was up to his thighs, and the river bed was made up of these huge boulders. To my surprise he got me over safely and returned for John. I have never seen anything so funny – John clutching his topee, with one arm round the native’s neck and a huge bag of specimen boxes slung on his back. When they reached the middle of the stream, the most difficult part, John started to laugh, and this started the native off. They both stood there, swaying in the middle of the stream, hooting with laughter, and I expected at any moment to see them fall into the water and all my valuable specimens floating down stream.
Emerging from the river adventure safe and sound and laden with ‘small beef’, but dripping with sweat and very hot, the Englishmen asked if there were any coconuts about – coconut milk being the only safe thing to drink in these parts.
We punched holes in the nuts and sat by the side of the road drinking. About half a mile down from us they were pruning the tall palms, and we could see the men high up in the trees, sitting in the grass rope seats, chopping the great fronds off. Each time one fell it made a loud swish, and then a big thonk as it hit the ground. The workers were singing to each other as they worked, and it was most attractive to listen to. They make up a short verse about anything that takes their fancy and each verse ends with a prolonged wail like: Eoooo Eoooo. When the D.O. came along in his car they sang: ‘The D.O. is here in his car … eooooo eoooo.’ Then there was a short pause, and another one would sing out: ‘He is going to Bemanda to get milk … eoooo eoooo.’ And so on. What with the birds singing, the crickets shouting, the swish of the falling fronds, and this curious wailing song echoing through the trees, it was a wonderful experience. John sat there with sweat dripping down his face, his topee tilted back, swigging at his coconut and ejaculating at intervals: ‘Bloody marvellous, boy!’
Victoria was merely a curtain-raiser to the real show, and ‘small beef’ were small beer compared to the ‘big, big beef’ they hoped to find in the wild interior. Much of the first week was spent sorting themselves out and stocking up with supplies for the six months of adventures that lay ahead. Their immediate plan was to drive two hundred miles to the small up-country town of Mamfe, which would be their springboard to the wilder country of the primeval rainforest that stretched all around.
On Monday, 5 January 1948, they finally set off in a manner to which they were soon to become accustomed. For a start, the lorry turned up four hours late and turned out to be crowded with the driver’s relatives, whom Gerald had to clear out, along with their household goods and livestock. The driver himself did not inspire much confidence, for as he was turning the lorry for loading he twice backed into the rest house wall and once into the hibiscus hedge. The expedition’s baggage was tossed into the back with such wild abandon that Gerald wondered if any of it would arrive intact in Mamfe. ‘I need not have worried,’ he noted later. ‘It turned out that only the most indispensable and irreplaceable things got broken.’ The name of the lorry – ‘The Godspeed’ – was painted in large white letters above the windscreen. ‘It was not until later,’ Gerald was to write, ‘that we discovered what a euphemism the name really was.’
So the great adventure began. Gerald’s letters to Mother (never published before) provide a raw and spontaneous day-by-day account of its gradual unfolding.
Eventually we were ready to start, and John and I got in the front, and sat there looking as regal as circumstances would let us. We whizzed out of Victoria and had got about five miles down the road, the lorry making a most impressive roaring noise, when there was a terrific gurk and the engine stopped. We got out of the lorry, and while the driver, with the rest of the staff, probed into the bowels of the engine, Pious (the steward) put cushions at the side of the road, poured out beer, and fanned the flies away from our recumbent forms. After half an hour everything was ready, and once again we set off, tearing madly along at about 15 m.p.h. Ten miles further on the damn thing broke down again, and the same process was repeated. Before we reached Kumba (the place where we had arranged to spend the night) we had broken down four times.
About ten miles out of Victoria the palm nut plantations gave place to forest proper, and John and I just sat with our mouths open, in a sort of daze. You have no idea how beautiful it was: giant trees, hundreds of feet high, leaned over the road, each one festooned with tree ferns, long strands of grey moss, and lianas as thick as my body. On the solitary telegraph wire sat lots of kingfishers, each no bigger than a sparrow, orange and blue in colour. In the trees flocks of hornbills were feeding, and on the rocks along the sides of the road there were lots of a very beautiful kind of lizard, with orange head, bright Prussian blue body and tail, and splashed with red and yellow and grass-green all over. They are unbelievably bright in the sun. Once there was a great shout from the back of the lorry and we pulled up quickly under the impression that the cook had fallen out and been killed. It turned out they had seen a Nile monitor (a lizard about three feet long – John thought nearer to four feet) by the side of the road. We all rushed back and spread out in a circle. We closed in on it and it made a dash at the driver, who, thinking that discretion was the better part of valour, ran like hell. The last we saw of it was a tail going into the bush.
The country is very hilly, and all thickly forested. Each hill we went up we had to put up with the frightful noise made by the driver with his gear box. Every time we came down the other side we had to cross a river in a deep ravine, spanned by what John calls a ‘death trap’ – four planks with a few rotten beams, no railings or anything pansy like that. After about the fourth we got quite used to them and we could open our eyes a bit.
At around five o’clock, much to their surprise, they reached Kumba, where they stayed the night at the house of the local medic – ‘a charming fat little Scotsman and a keen ornithologist’ – who had assembled a prodigious collection of bird skins. At dawn they were off again for another day of death traps and breakdowns, arriving in the late afternoon at a place called Bakebe, where they were to stay for three days till the rest house at Mamfe became free.
It was wonderful at Bakebe because we were right in the heart of the forest. I engaged a hunter the next day, and two boys, and armed with a shotgun sallied into the jungle, à la Frank Buck. In the depths of the forest itself there is a sort of green twilight, with huge termite nests, each built like a mushroom, and an extraordinary white butterfly which flits among the trees like a whisp of white lace. In the sunny clearings there were many other sorts of insect life, including some black ants an inch and a half long. Unfortunately they discovered me before I saw them, and it was very painful. I was dancing around while the hunters were plucking the ants off, all saying ‘Sorry Sah’ loudly, as though they had put them there. When you trip over a root you hear about three voices behind you saying ‘Sorry Sah.’ We saw several monkeys feeding in the trees, and tracks of Duikers, small rats, and Leopard. Then we discovered the tracks of a Red River hog and followed them up. We walked for about four miles and stumbled right into a herd of them. One baby broke only about twenty feet from me.
The collecting business now began to gather momentum. The next day Gerald went back into the forest, and among other things caught a creature that in the fullness of time and in the most indirect way was to prove pivotal to his future career. This was the hairy frog – ‘a large frog,’ he explained in his letter home, ‘with curious filaments like hairs on its legs and the sides of its body.’ But most of the growing list of animal acquisitions were caught or donated by others. The United Africa Company agent at Bakebe presented his pet dog-faced baboon, the doctor at Kumba sent two baby giant kingfishers, a DO who lived a hundred miles out in the sticks proposed giving them his three-year-old chimpanzee, a local boy brought in ‘a lovely rat with red fur and a yellow tummy’, and a man from a nearby village turned up dragging along a baby drill (today one of the most endangered monkey species in Africa) on a bit of string.
The Drill is the sweetest little thing, standing about a foot high. He is very young, and the pink patches on his behind only the size of a shilling. He was very wild the first day, but is quite tame now, and when I return from a trip into the forest he comes running to meet me, uttering loud screams, and climbs up my leg and then wraps his arms round my waist and clings there making little crooning noises. I am sure I shall not want to part with him when the time comes.
There is no doubt that Gerald loved the country he had come to. He was held in thrall by the stillness and grandeur of the primeval forest, and adored the birds he saw flying free and the animals running wild no less than the curious assortment of creatures that came into his care. But it is clear from his letters and field notes that the Gerald Durrell of up-country Cameroons in 1948 was not yet the Gerald Durrell the world was to come to know in later years; and in one important respect the unreformed twenty-three-year-old might have dumbfounded his future fans. The young man of 1948, though he dearly loved animals, was fully prepared to slaughter them if there was a good enough reason to do so. He had brought to the Cameroons a rifle and a shotgun he had borrowed from his brother Leslie, and he knew how to use these weapons and was prepared to do so. Partly this was standard practice. No self-respecting expedition to the African interior in those days would have dreamed of setting off without guns of some sort – to shoot game to supplement their rations and feed the carnivores they collected. But the young Gerald Durrell sometimes succumbed to the hunting instinct in a way that would have dismayed the man of later years.
Only a day or two after his arrival at Bakebe, for example, he had tried to shoot a red river hog, thinking it would make good eating (forgetting the £150 – some £3000 in today’s money – he could get for a live specimen back in England). On 7 January, his twenty-third birthday, he shot a black kite that had been stealing chickens, spectacularly blasting the bird out of the air with his shotgun in the middle of a juju dance in the village street, winning uproarious acclaim from the populace. ‘I was swept down the main street by the mob,’ he recorded, ‘surrounded by yelling and capering juju dancers. I presented the corpse to the chief, and there was much bowing and exchange of compliments. I felt like a scene out of a Tarzan film and departed secure in the knowledge that the White Man’s Prestige had been upheld.’
On Saturday, 10 January, the expedition prepared to set off for Mamfe at last. Its troubled procession north now turned from penance to pantomime, as Gerald reported:
The morning we moved from Bakebe to Mamfe was the funniest thing to date. The scene was indescribable. Our stuff was piled six feet high, boxes full of birds, rats, insects and frogs, and squatting about were Pious the steward, Fillup the cook, Emanuel, Daniel and Edward, the hunters, the carpenter and his wife and child, the hunter’s wife and child, the chief’s wife and the U.A.C. man’s three children, all hoping for a lift to Mamfe, plus about fifty relatives who had come to see them off. It was now twelve and the lorry should have been there at eight and by this time I was nearly mental. At last the lorry arrived, and thank God it was a large one – the driver had brought six relatives along for the joy ride. How we got everything on to the lorry I shall never know. There were about sixty people in a solid wedge around the back of the lorry, all shouting at once and endeavouring to climb on, the air full of whirling bundles full of sweet potatoes, yams and bananas. I was overwhelmed by a fighting horde of natives, my feet were trodden on, also my hand. When they had all piled on I remounted the lorry, and pointing to the crates of birds and animals explained that if one was dead or injured when we reached Mamfe they would all go before the D.O. After that they sat like mice, and must have been damn stiff when we reached Mamfe.
Mamfe was situated at the highest navigable point of the Cross River, on the edge of a vast swathe of uninhabited country – a pestilential place where malaria was rife and leprosy common. Gerald and John spent a little over a week there, often dining with the local DO, a helpful Englishman by the name of Robin, whose house was situated on a steep hill four hundred feet above the river. Gerald was profoundly enchanted by this spot, deep in the untamed heart of Africa, far, far from anywhere, and yet surrounded by all the comforts of privilege.
The house overlooks the place where two rivers meet. It forms a wide stretch of water like a lake. On each side is the jungle, and in the centre a dazzling white sandbar. Sitting on the terrace in the evening, you can see a herd of five hippo which live here, swimming about. Then, when it grows dark, you can hear them blowing and snorting and roaring below you. The two rivers flow through steep rocky gorges, and are spanned by so-called suspension bridges. The termites have had a wonderful time with these for the past twenty years, and the planks rattle and groan when you walk over them, a hundred and twenty feet above rocks and water. Down below you can see kingfishers and red and blue swallows nesting, and in the trees you can see monkeys in the evening.
There were few pleasures and interests to divert the scattering of European expatriates who lived in this land other than those which age-old Africa could provide. There were no hotels, no restaurants, no shops, no cinemas, no libraries, next to no electricity and – Gerald made a particular note of this – next to no white girls. By way of compensation however, the stranded Brits could avail themselves of a lifestyle little changed since the high noon of Empire. Gerald took to this sybaritic life like a duck to water, and could not resist writing home to let his family know of the contrast with the austerity Britain he had left only a few weeks ago.
Apart from the hard work we have to do with the animals, our lives are like those of the upper-classes in pre-war Britain: real luxury. Think of being able to change your shirt five times a day if you want to. Writing this letter I am taking half an hour off: I am sitting in a deck chair, a glass of beer at my elbow, and Pious the Steward is standing behind my chair ready to refill my glass when it is empty and give me another fag when I have finished the one I am smoking. Pious is only sixteen, but he is simply wonderful. It’s he that has got the whole rest house in order, beds up, table laid for a meal, bath water ready, and so on. Now the table is laid for lunch and a fragrant smell is wafted towards me – the cooking is very fine. A chicken costs three shillings in a place like this, bananas are a penny a hand (about twelve). We are rationed to four bottles of whiskey a month, but I get it all as John does not like it. We smoke cigars (5/- for 50) at dinner in the evening. Our staff now consists of two cooks, two stewards and a washboy – and the carpenter whom we pay two shillings a day. In fact it is collecting in luxury.
It is clear from Gerald’s frank, unguarded letters to his mother that within a very short time of setting foot in Africa he had adapted both to the country and to the lifestyle as to the manner born. This was his first experience of the world outside Europe (early infancy apart), and it was essentially a colonial experience, and an old-fashioned one at that. By virtue of his race and nationality he had automatically joined an élite caste – that of the British imperium – from the moment he arrived in the Cameroons. Indeed, in his attitude to the African underclass and his perception of his own status and authority among them, he quickly became more colonial than the colonials, a kind of super DO, peerless and fearless in his dealings with both man and beast. From time to time in his letters he even refers to himself, not altogether jokingly, as ‘Empire Builder’, ‘Sanders of the River’ and ‘the Great White Master’.
Having cast himself in this imperious role, the accounts he wrote home of his behaviour on trek in the Cameroons sometimes make embarrassing reading. One especially trying morning in Mamfe, for example, he was told a hunter had just brought in a particularly rare bird to sell.
I found the hunter sitting down on the ground, hat on the back of his head, cigarette in his mouth, explaining to the crowd how clever he had been to capture this creature. He said good morning without bothering to get up, remove his hat, or take the cigarette out of his mouth. By this time I was quite angry with everyone and everything. ‘Get up, take your hat off, take that thing out of your mouth and then say good morning properly!’ I snarled in my best Sanders of the River voice. He obeyed like a naughty schoolboy.
Fifty years on, this sort of thing can make uncomfortable reading. Yet in the context of the time and place it was a normal, even a prescribed, adaptation to the colonial ambience – the ‘remember you’re British’ syndrome. For a tyro colonial boy like Gerald there was no other model – apart from ‘going native’ – and any departure from the unwritten rules of the imperial game would have been looked on as letting the side down.
What was different in Gerald’s case was the impact of instant privilege and power on his own personality. He was a charismatic young man of great self-assurance and persuasiveness, but as with many young men, his self-confidence could turn into arrogance, his egotism into selfishness, and his ebullience into boorishness. In a word, his was a big personality, full of charm, leavened by a tremendous sense of comedy and fun, but veering to temper and contempt when frustrated, and tending to dominance when given his head. In the polite, inhibited middle-class society of the Home Counties England of the forties such an original and spirited, not to say eccentric, personality was in large measure restrained by the mores of his milieu. But out here in Africa, a fully-paid-up member of the white man’s club, let loose in the dark interior, Gerald blossomed. It was as if, here in the depths of the rainforest, a genie had popped out of a bottle. If it was not always a totally admirable genie, it was a genie nonetheless; and in the course of time, a Gerald Durrell broadly recognisable as the persona of his maturer future would step tentatively on to the stage, and the overpowering ego of his youth would be replaced by the wisdom and compassion of the man who would take on some of the cares and responsibilities of the wider world beyond.
The two Englishmen now decided to split up: John Yealland to establish a main base at Bakebe, which he reckoned would be a good place for birds; Gerald to set up a subsidiary camp at Eshobi, a tiny village on the edge of a huge swathe of equatorial forest that stretched hundreds of miles northwards to the mountains where the gorilla had its stronghold – virgin territory for collecting animals and reptiles.
On Wednesday, 18 January 1948, Gerald’s party left the comforts of Mamfe for the dubious pleasures of Eshobi. In the environs of this distant village, from all reports, there was plenty of ‘stuff’, as Gerald and John termed the animals they sought – but not much else. As there was no motorable track, the party had to travel on foot, with carriers to shoulder the stores in time-hallowed style. It was to prove an even more vexing departure than normal, for driver ants had caused havoc in the night, and a mêlée of Africans swarmed about the compound.
In the middle of all this my ten carriers arrived for their loads. They were such a band of cut-throats that John said I would be eaten three miles out of Mamfe. I thought that I had better have my hair cut before plunging into the unknown, so hot on the heels of the carriers came the village barber.
The scene in the compound beggars description. There was the staff leaping about trying to get the ants out of the stores, the carriers leaping about fighting as to who should have the smallest load, John leaping about imploring someone to get fish for his kingfishers, and in the middle of all this there sat I enthroned on a rickety chair, snarling at the barber and stamping my feet to keep the ants from crawling up …
At last the party was ready to start. The loads were lifted on to the heads of the carriers, the staff shuffled into Indian file, and at a word from Gerald the column lurched off down the road and into the forest in the direction of Eshobi. Clinging to Gerald’s waist were two baby baboons, and in his hand a baby crocodile wrapped in a blanket. ‘My ten evil-looking carriers marched ahead with the loads,’ he wrote, ‘and on either side of me, guard of honour, marched Pious and the cook, while behind marched my personal smallboy, Dan, carrying my money-bag and field-glasses. We passed over two suspension bridges in great style, looking like Stanley looking for Livingstone.’ John Yealland accompanied them as far as the rusting suspension bridge that spanned the Cross River. At the other side of the bridge Gerald looked back and waved to his companion, then turned and was swallowed up by the forest.
He was to describe the track to Eshobi as ‘the worst bush path I know’ – convoluting course, one-in-three gradient, six-inch width, six-mile length, but feeling like sixty. He wrote in a letter home:
Sometimes it’s there and sometimes it isn’t. You spend most of your time leaping up huge boulders about six foot high, crawling under or over fallen trees, and tripping over creepers. The baby baboons were awfully good; they clung on by themselves without my having to hold on to them, occasionally making little wailing noises to show me they were still there. After the first hour they went to sleep, and then I had to put my hand under their bottoms or they would have fallen off. When we stopped for a rest and a drink of beer, Amos [the baby drill] seized the chance to do a wee-wee all over me, but as I was already soaked in sweat it didn’t matter much. Just before we reached the village we came to a stream, which had the usual supply of dangerous stepping stones. I reached the last one with a cry of triumph and leapt on to the bank. Here I found I had landed on a slide of clay, and my feet shot up and I fell heavily into about two foot of dirty water. The baboons uttered wild cries of fright and scrambled up on to my head. I was helped out, dripping, by Pious and the cook in a perfect gale of ‘Sorry Sah’s’, and so we reached the village at last.
Gerald was now at the sharp end of the bushwhacking life. He reached Eshobi drenched in sweat, tired, thirsty and querulous. A few days ago he had sent a government messenger ahead to make prior arrangements and prepare a base camp. Gerald took one look at the camp site and (as he informed Mother) ‘nearly fainted’. This was no Hollywood-style safari encampment, but a shanty pitched on a midden that had once been a banana patch. He rounded on the messenger and ordered him to summon labour from the village at once to level the site and make a proper camp.
‘The labour brigade turned up,’ he wrote to Mother, ‘and appeared to consist entirely of quite the most ugly set of old women I had ever seen. They were clad only in dirty bits of cloth round their waists, and all were smoking short black pipes.’ After half an hour he decided to retire to the village for some beer. ‘Pious made the owner of the only chair and table in the place produce them, somewhat reluctantly, and I was enthroned in state under the only tree in the middle of the village street.’
In Eshobi Gerald came face to face with the reality of tribal life out in the bush for the first time – the destitution, deprivation and sickness. ‘All around me stood the population in a solid wedge, giving a wonderful display of disease ranging from yaws to leprosy. Even little kids of four and five were covered from head to foot with the huge sores, all mattering and fly-covered, of yaws. One female had the entire heel of one foot eaten away. Another delightful man had no nose and half his fingers missing.’ Gerald drank his beer with an effort and returned to the camp site, dismayed and a little chastened, hardly guessing that before many weeks were out he too would be among the diseased and ailing of this unhealthy place.
At the camp the ground had now been cleared, a kitchen built, the tent erected more or less upright. A start had been made on a house for the staff and another – the ‘Beef House’ – for the animals. The village chief paid a courtesy visit, the staff settled down to their bush routine, and Gerald’s first real stint as an animal collector in the wilds began.
It did not begin very well. During the first night a great thunderstorm broke over Eshobi, the rain fell in torrents, the tent leaked, and by morning everything was sodden – bed, books, Gerald, everything. He noted in his diary for 22 January:
Woke up wet and cold after a filthy night and drank some neat whiskey with my tea. Found after this that death was not so near, so got up and shaved. The croc bite on my finger has gone septic, so must do something about it. In the middle of the morning I found Pious sick. He had fever, though his pulse was normal. Having no medicines at all I dosed him with whiskey and aspirin, covered him with all the blankets I could get hold of and left him to sweat. By three o’clock he was OK again and after another shot of whiskey resumed work. Must get the birds out of the beef box, as it is most unsuitable for them. If John could see them he’d have a fit, dear old ostrich.
Almost immediately the animals started pouring in. He sent Mother a list of his acquisitions:
Four Bush-tailed Porcupine (five shillings each); one Mongoose (two shillings); one Fruit Bat (one shilling); four baby Crocodiles (five bob each – the longest is four foot long); two Pangolin (five bob each); nine Tortoises (one shilling each); ten rats for two shillings (these are green with bright rufous bottoms and noses); one full-grown Yellow Baboon for two quid; and one Red-eared Monkey for two bob.
It was difficult for even Gerald Durrell to relate to some of these species, but one or two particularly took his fancy, none more than the yellow baboon and the red-eared monkey.
The Yellow Baboon (whom I have called George) was brought to me all the way from the French Congo (some five hundred miles away). You see how the news spreads – they even know in the French Congo that I am buying animals. He stands about two feet high and is as tame as a kitten. When you tickle him under the armpits he lies on his back and screeches with laughter. The staff were very afraid of him at first, but now they love him and he spends most of his time wreaking havoc in the kitchen. If dinner is late it is always due to George having upset the soup or something.
The Red-eared Monkey is simply sweet. Its back is brindled green, its legs and arms lovely slate grey, white cheeks, red ear tufts and a red tail about two feet long. Bright red. It has the largest eyes I have ever seen in a monkey, light brown. It makes a delightful twittering noise like a bird. Its fingers are long and boney like an old man’s and it looks so sweet when you give it a handful of grasshoppers, it sits there cramming its mouth, twittering, and examining its fingers carefully to make sure it hasn’t missed any.
Before long the impact of Gerald’s collecting expedition on the impoverished economy of the locality had turned into something like an oil strike, relatively speaking. The inhabitants of the area would come in at all times of day and night from miles around, with a range of creatures so motley and diverse that any zoologist would have been seriously challenged to identify half of them. One of the joys of the business was that it was impossible to know what kind of animal would turn up next – large or small, rare or common, dangerous or docile.
At two o’clock one night, for example, Gerald was woken by a trembling watchnight (the local term for a night watchman) who informed him that a man was on his way with a large python. Gerald got out of bed expecting to see some backwoodsman with a snake about two feet long. ‘Instead of which,’ he recorded, ‘a crowd, as always, roared into the compound with hurricane lamps and in their midst were four carriers on whose shoulders was an enormous wicker basket about six foot long. They dumped the thing outside my tent and I found it contained a twelve foot python. Next came the jolly task of getting the bloody thing out of the basket and into the box.’ When it proved impossible to shake the snake out, Gerald tried to pull it out by the tail, and when that failed he grabbed it by the head and pulled. When this didn’t work either, he had no alternative but to cut the basket clean away and shake like mad. ‘He went into the box with an angry hiss and a bump, and I went into the tent and had a quick whiskey, as it had all been rather nerve-wracking. I am now Number One Juju Man in the village, because I touched the head and tail of the python and still remain alive.’
Most of the animals brought into camp were of the commoner varieties. To obtain the rarer species Gerald had to go out and find them himself. And so he entered the mysterious depths of the rainforest for the first time, and was bewildered and enchanted and for ever won over by the sights and the sounds and the scents of this almost holy wilderness.
‘The leafmould alone,’ he was to write of his first day in the forest,
contained hundreds of insects I had never seen or heard of before. Roll over any rotting log and I found a world as bizarre as anything dreamed up by science fiction. Each hollow tree was an apartment block containing anything from snakes to bats, from owls to flying mice. Every forest stream was an orchestra of frogs, a ballet of tiny fish, and from the canopy above came a constant rain of fruit, twigs and pirouetting blossoms thrown down by the great army of creatures – mammals, birds, reptiles and insects – that inhabit this high, sunlit, flower-scented realm. I did not know where to look next. Every leaf, flower, liana, every insect, fish, frog or bird was a lifetime’s study in itself, and I knew that there was another hidden, secretive army of creatures that would emerge at night to take over. As any naturalist knows, there is nothing like a rainforest for replacing arrogance with awe.
Gerald felt his own sense of life echoing back to him from the surrounding jungle. ‘In the Cameroons I was walking in a cathedral,’ he recalled, ‘staring endlessly upwards, only just able to glimpse the frescoes on the ceiling. That was rainforest for me. As a naturalist you have no idea, until you’ve experienced the tropical forest, how complex, astonishing and differentiated it is. When I first read Darwin’s outpourings in The Voyage of the Beagle I thought they were poetic licence – only to discover, in Africa, that he was grossly understating it.’
Hunting in this primordial world was an arduous and occasionally perilous task at which Gerald rapidly became highly expert. Not that he ever felt afraid during these forays. In pursuit of the most sought-after prizes, he clearly believed that the ends justified the means.
I have been doing something very illegal, hunting at night with lights. The lights are carbon-burning ones like the miners use. You wear them on your forehead and with the terrific beam they throw out you can see the animals’ eyes reflected, and it dazzles them so that you can get close enough to catch them. I have been going out every other night with seven hunters, combing the forest for a very rare Lemur called an angwantibo. If I can get one my stock with London Zoo will rocket to heaven. So far no luck.
The other night we went out and had the best night yet. We walked for miles without seeing a thing, and then we came to a river. This was not very wide, but fast running, and the bed was composed of slabs of grey sandstone. The water had worn away the stone into channels, so you got a sort of canal about three feet wide and two feet deep. The sides were choked with vegetation, mostly ferns. I had only two hunters with me. These two are really very funny. Elias is short and fat, with a face like an ex-boxer and a funny waddling walk. His taste runs to highly coloured sarongs with blue and orange flowers plastered all over them. The other is called Andrai,
(#ulink_2f60d2da-2831-5905-a25f-2904d5273ffa) and he is tall and willowy, with an extraordinary face and very long fingers. He has a wonderful swaying walk, uses his hands like a Greek, and wears sarongs of pale pastel shades. The other member of our Band of Hope was a boy whose job it was to carry all the nets and bags and was as near as makes no matter to being a half-wit.
We waded up miles of these channels, Elias first, me next, followed by Andrai and the half-wit, who made as much noise as a herd of frightened elephants. Elias said that we might see a crocodile, and had cut me a forked stick to deal with such an eventuality should it arise. I thought the possibility was very remote, so I dropped the stick when no one was looking, and no sooner had I done this than Elias came to a sudden standstill, and groped behind me, imploring me to hand him the stick. I replied that I had lost it, and he uttered a cry of pain, drew his machete and crept forward. I strained my eyes to see what it was he was trying to catch. Suddenly I saw it, something dark which glinted in the light, the same shape and size as a baby croc. Elias made a dive at it with his knife, but it wiggled through his legs and swam at great speed down the channel towards me. I made a grab, missed and fell into the water, yelling to Andrai that it was coming. Andrai leapt into the fray and was neatly tripped by the bagboy. I saw the thing swim out of the narrow channel into a broad one. Here, I thought, we had lost it for ever. However, the bagboy had got his half wit working and had noted the stone under which it had gone to ground.
We all rushed down there, making a tidal wave of water and foam, and clustered round the rock. Andrai insinuated a long arm into the hole and then withdrew it again with a shrill cry of anguish, his forefinger dripping blood.
‘This beef can bite man,’ explained Elias, with the proud air of having made a discovery.
Andrai was at last persuaded to put his hand back inside the hole after some argument and cries of ‘Go on!’ and ‘Cowardy-cowardy-custard!’ in the local dialect. He lay on his tummy in about six inches of water, his arm in the bowels of the earth, explaining to everyone how very brave he was to do this. There was a short silence, broken only by grunts from Andrai as he tried to reach the beef. Then he let out a yell of triumph and stood up holding the thing by the tail. When I saw it I nearly fainted, because instead of the baby croc I expected he was holding a Giant Water Shrew – one of the rarest animals in the whole of West Africa.
The Water Shrew soon got tired of hanging by its tail, so turned and climbed up its own body and buried its teeth in Andrai’s thumb. He leapt about three feet in the air, and let out an ear-piercing scream of pain.
‘OW … OW … OW!’ he screeched. ‘Oh, Elias, Elias, get it off. OW … MY JESUSCRI … it done kill me … OW OW OW … Elias, quickly …’
Elias and I struggled with the animal, but I was laughing so much I was not much use. At last we got it off and pushed it wiggling and hissing into the bag. Andrai had to rest on the bank, moaning softy and tut-tutting over the mud on his pale mauve sarong. When he was quite sure he was not going to die we moved on, and further down the river we caught two crocs, so altogether it was a very good night.
There was no denying the courage, perseverance and expertise demonstrated by Gerald – and by his African companions, with whom he now began to relate more closely and sympathetically – in such difficult and challenging circumstances. It was as though he had been cut out for this unusual task from the cradle. His energy and enthusiasm were inexhaustible, his sense of humour rarely flagged, he delighted in the adventure and sheer unpredictability of it all, never knowing what the next hour would bring. Night after night and day after day he marched off into the forest, rarely emerging empty-handed. And as his collection of birds and animals grew, so did the workload of looking after them. He wrote to his mother:
The day goes something like this. Six o’clock, Pious appears in the tent, beaming, with tea. After three cups I feel I might live, so go down in my dressing gown to feed the birds and see what has escaped or died during the night. By the time I have done this my hot water is ready and I wash. After this I dash into my clothes and take the monkeys out of their sleeping boxes and tie them up to their poles. By this time my breakfast is ready: pawpaw, two eggs, toast, coffee. I have this and a fag and then start the real work of the day.
First, there are about four little boys with cages of birds to look at. I pick out the worthwhile ones to keep for John and pick out the ones that are almost dead to feed to the animals that eat meat. After this I repair to the Beef House, where Dan, my ten-year-old assistant, is awaiting orders. I clean out the birds, about ten cages, while he washes out the food and water dishes and refills them.
Then we start on the animals. The Mongoose has to be given a dead bird to chew so that I can get my hand inside to clean him out without getting bitten. Then the three cages of Brush-tailed Porcupine. Of these I have one full-grown pair which stink to high heaven, one full-grown female, and one tiny baby. The latter is very sweet and in the evening goes all skittish, leaping and gambolling like a rabbit. When he is frightened he stamps his feet and rattles his spines like knitting needles. Then it’s the turn of the Fruit Bats. Eating pawpaw and bananas all night their cage is always in the most frightful stinking mess. Then the monkeys have to be fed, and while this is going on you can’t hear yourself think.
Then come the reptiles. The chameleons have to be sprayed with water and given grasshoppers. The tortoises have to have fruit and greenstuff. And the crocs have to be washed (very difficult, this).
Then it’s lunch-time: soup, chicken with sweet potatoes and green pawpaw, fresh fruit, coffee, cigar. The hardship of collecting! After this, if I have been out all the previous night hunting, I sleep until tea-time; or I plunge into the forest with the hunters. After tea we start all over again: porcupine food, bat food, rat food, monkey milk, mongoose meat, water, etc. etc. I retire about seven, feeling shattered, to my bath, taken in the open before a group of fascinated villagers. Then dinner: duck or deer or porcupine meat, peas, potatoes, sweet, coffee, cigar. Three quick whiskeys, a short stroll round to see everything is alright, and so to bed.
There is so much to tell you about that I could sit down and write ten thousand words if I had time. How a crowd of tiny toddlers appears each day clutching tins, bottles and gourds full of grasshoppers. How a villager tried to strangle his wife down by the river and how the staff and I had to rush down, lay the man out and throw the mother-in-law into the river.
Gerald had now been in Eshobi for many weeks, and the animal collection had grown to such an extent that the Beef House was virtually full. Gerald had learnt the ways of the forest and its wild creatures – and of the Africans among whom he was living. His affection and respect for them – poor people, but brave, big-hearted, loyal and talented in many different ways – had grown, as had theirs for him. Though he was still the ‘Master’, he no longer felt as alien and insecure as he had when he first arrived, and he no longer insisted on the deference he had once thought befitted his status. Indeed, Sanders of the River was even showing signs of going native. ‘Sometimes in the evenings,’ he told Mother, ‘I would go and sit in the kitchen with the staff and discuss such thrilling topics as “Home Rule for the Cameroons” and “Did God Make the World in Seven Days?”’ His departure, when it came, was a matter of some emotion on both sides.
When we were ready to leave Eshobi the village threw a dance in my honour and I was escorted to the main square by the staff and all the village elders and enthroned in state in the front row. Everyone had on their best clothes, ranging from cheap print dresses to shorts made out of old flour bags. Elias, my hunter, was the M.C., clad in a green shirt and pinstripe trousers – God knows where he got them. He had an enormous watch-chain with a huge whistle on it, which he blew loudly to restore order. They do the most curious dances, which are a mixture of nearly every known dance, with the barn dance predominating. Elias, wagging his bottom in the centre, roared the instructions to the dancers: ‘ADvance!! … right turn … meet and waltz … let we set … all move … back we set again … ADvance … right turn … meet and waltz … conduct for yourself … etc. etc.’ When the dance was over the chief made a speech to me. It was really rather funny, because he stood in the centre of the square and so the poor boy who acted as interpreter had to keep running about twenty yards to tell me what he was saying and then run back to hear the next sentence. The speech went something like this:
‘People of Eshobi! You know why we are here tonight … to say goodbye to the Master who has been with us so long. Never in the whole history of Eshobi have we had such a Master … money has flowed as freely from him as water in the river-bed. Those who had the power went to bush and caught beef, for which they were paid handsomely. Those who were weak, the women and children, could obtain money and salt by bringing white ants and grasshoppers. We, the elders of the village, would like the Master to settle here. We would give him land and build him a fine house. We can only hope that he tells all the people in his country how we, the people of Eshobi, tried to help him, and to hope that on his next tour he will come back here and stay even longer.’
This was followed by loud and prolonged cheers, under cover of which the interpreter fainted into the arms of a friend. Then the band, consisting of three flutes and four drums and a triangle, struck up a red-hot version of ‘God Save the King’, and the party broke up.
So, very nearly, did Gerald himself. By now he was in a fairly exhausted condition. He had given his all in an unhealthy and enormously demanding environment. He had been bitten and stabbed by an extraordinary variety of fangs, spines, teeth, beaks, probosces, claws and jaws. He had had jiggers in his toes, ants in his pants, lice in his hair, bugs in his bed, and rats in his tent. He had reckoned on staying up all night packing, so as to be able to leave Eshobi before dawn and get to Mamfe around ten, before the sun got too hot for the animals. But after supper he began to feel very out of sorts, and by nine o’clock he was staggering about as though he was drunk. By ten he could barely walk, and had to be carried out to the latrine by Pious and George, the washboy. He collapsed on his bed, leaving it to the staff to pack up camp. Every five minutes Pious would creep in and peer down at him, making a solicitous ‘tch tch’ noise. Once George came in and tried to cheer him up, telling him that if he died they would never be able to find another Master like him.
‘This was the beginning of the best bout of sandfly fever I’ve had to date,’ Gerald wrote reassuringly to Mother. ‘It’s bloody awful: it doesn’t kill you, or harm you in any way, but while you’ve got it you feel quite sure you’re going to die. You walk as though you are dead drunk, and everything further away than ten feet is blurred and out of focus. You sweat like Hell and your head feels about four times normal size.’
In this condition Gerald now faced the prospect of a five-hour trek through the bush under the blazing equatorial sun. Leaning on the faithful Pious, and tap-tapping along with the aid of a stick, the ailing young white man shuffled along behind a column of sixty black carriers, half of them women. At the first small river he came to he had to be carried across by an elder who had come along to say goodbye. ‘Nearly I cried when I see you carried,’ Pious told him. ‘I make sure you going to die then.’ The track steepened after that, running up a hill at a gradient of one and three, and Gerald had to be half-dragged and carried up by Pious. The main column marched on till it was out of sight. ‘Every two hundred yards we would stop for five minutes,’ Gerald recalled, ‘while I sank down on the path and sweated like a hero in a film and Pious fanned me with a hat.’
One way or another, Gerald got to Mamfe by half-past ten, and by two he was eating lunch with John Yealland at Bakebe. The reunion was heartfelt. Gerald had formed a high opinion of John’s qualities as an ornithologist and a man, relishing his slow drawl and dry humour, his wisdom and kindness. It was a pleasure to be with a fellow-countryman again, to speak plain English, swap the news of the last few months, and inspect each other’s impressive collections of birds and animals.
After three days’ rest at Bakebe, Gerald began to feel much better, only suffering from the disappointment of not having got an angwantibo. This disappointment was to be short-lived. One day, not long after his return to Bakebe, Gerald set off for a reconnaissance of the nearby mountain N’da Ali, which had almost sheer sides thickly covered with forest. Gerald’s aim was to find a camp site and to spend ten days or so trying to catch some of the large numbers of chimpanzees reputed to live there. He wrote home:
I set off early one morning on a borrowed bike, a small boy on the crossbar with a bag of beer and other nourishment, to meet the hunter who was going to lead me up. We had gone about four miles, and I was just wondering if my legs were going to hold out, when in the distance I saw a man marching along with a bag made out of palm leaves in his hand. Thinking it was yet another Pouched Rat or Brush-tailed Porcupine, I dismounted and waited for him. When he got near I saw to my surprise that he was one of my ex-hunters from Eshobi. When he got to within hailing distance I asked him what he had got, and he replied that it was small beef. I regret to say that on peering into the basket the only sound I could produce was a sort of strangled ‘Arrrrr …’ Then I loaded the hunter with my gear, threw the boy off the crossbar, and hanging the Angwantibo round my neck fled frantically back home again.
Gerald had obtained his first angwantibo in the nick of time, for shortly afterwards there came word from England – a tip-off from his Whipsnade friend Ken Smith – that the legendary collector Cecil Webb of the London Zoo had set sail for the Cameroons with the express intention of catching angwantibo. A veteran of expeditions all over the world, Webb regarded Durrell and Yealland as novices and upstarts. For their part, they saw him as an irritating rival who was over the hill.
Eventually, Webb caught up with them. ‘He is a huge, lanky man (six foot six, I believe),’ Gerald reported to Mother, ‘with a protruding jaw and faded blue eyes. We found him clad in faded blue jeans and an enormous sort of straw sun-bonnet which made me want to giggle. He asked, with a careless air that almost strangled him, if we had still got the Angwantibo, to which we replied that it was thriving. I am going up to Bemenda in a few days time and will pass through Mamfe, where he is now. I shall then take great pleasure in telling him that we have now got three (3) Angwantibo!!!!!!!!’
Webb did not go away empty-handed, however, for Gerald was duty bound to hand over to him for delivery to London Zoo the most remarkable animal in his collection – Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumley) the chimpanzee. Gerald had acquired Cholmondeley from a District Officer who had asked him if he could find a home for a chimp at London Zoo. Gerald had agreed, imagining that the creature would be about a year old and around eighteen inches high. He was amazed when a lorry arrived with a large crate in the back containing a full-grown chimpanzee of eight or nine years of age, with huge arms, a bald head, a massive, hairy chest that measured at least twice the size of Gerald’s, and bad tooth growth that made him look like an unsuccessful prize-fighter.
I opened the crate with some trepidation. Cholmondeley gave a little hoot of pleasure, gathered up the long chain which was attached to a collar round his neck, hung the loops daintily over his arm, and stepped down. Here he paused briefly to shake my hand in the most regal and dignified manner before walking into the house as if he owned it. He gazed around the living room of our humble grass hut with the air of a middle-European monarch inspecting a hotel bedroom suspected of containing bed bugs. Then, apparently satisfied, he ambled over to the table, drew out a chair and sat down, crossing his legs and staring at me expectantly.
We stared at each other for a bit, and then I got out my cigarettes. Immediately Cholmondeley became animated. It was quite obvious that after his long journey he wanted a cigarette. I handed him the packet, and he removed a cigarette, carefully put it in his mouth, and then replaced the packet on the table. I handed him a box of matches, thinking this might possibly fool him, but he slid the box open, took out a match, lit the cigarette, and threw the matches back on the table. He crossed his legs again and lay back in his chair inhaling thankfully and blowing great clouds of smoke out of his nose.
Cholmondeley had other predilections. Hot, sweet tea was one. He would drink it out of a battered mug the size of a tankard, balancing it on his nose to drain the last dregs of syrupy sugar at the bottom. Then he would either hold out the mug for more or hurl it as far away as he could. He had also developed a fondness for beer, though Gerald only proffered it to him once, when he drank a whole bottle very quickly, with much lip-smacking and delight, till he was covered in froth and began to turn somersaults. After that he was given nothing stronger than lemonade or tea. Gerald parted with this extraordinary character with much regret, though he was destined to meet up with him again soon enough.
At last, in July, the time came to wind down operations and pack up the expedition. The rains were beginning, and Gerald had run out of money. He had spent heavily on stores, staff and accommodation, but especially on the birds, animals and reptiles which made up his huge collection. The situation was dire enough for him to swallow his pride and telegraph home for a loan, receiving by return the sum of £250 (more than £5000 in today’s money) from Leslie’s girlfriend Doris, the off-licence manageress.
The remaining camp stores were sold off, as John Yealland recorded in his diary:
Gerald started to sell up the home this evening and did a brisk trade with his topee and umbrella and my oilskin, along with two sacks of maize, half a sack of coconuts, crockery, pots and pans and some spare cartridges. Such was Gerald’s salesmanship that he even sold an alarm clock which never lost less than one and a half hours in twenty-four for 15 shillings. He also sold a watch which he dropped on a concrete floor at Victoria and which still ticks though it doesn’t move its hands. So now we dine off cracked plates, but at least we have some money for cables to Belle Vue and Chester Zoos.
Gerald and John had originally planned to sail on 24 June, but their collection had grown so huge that the crates and boxes – five hundred cubic feet in volume – would not fit into the hold of the ship they had booked, and it sailed without them. Eventually they were able to secure berths and cargo space on a banana boat, the SS Tetela, sailing from the port of Tiko a whole month later, on 25 July, and began to prepare for their departure.
‘You cannot just climb aboard a ship with your animals,’ Gerald pointed out, ‘and expect the cook to feed them.’ A vast hoard of foodstuffs had to be got together, gathered from all over the country, and soon the expedition hut at Kumba resembled a market, with bananas, pawpaws, pineapples, oranges, eggs, sacks of corn, potatoes and beans, and the carcass of a whole bullock strewn across the floor.
It was at this point that Gerald went down with malaria, and lay feverish and ill with a temperature of 103 for a week. The plan was to drive down to Tiko during the night of 24 July, arriving at dawn on the day the ship was due to sail. But when the doctor called on the day before their departure, he was aghast at the idea of Gerald going anywhere. ‘You should be kept in bed for at least a fortnight,’ he thundered. ‘You can’t travel on that ship.’ Otherwise, he bluntly informed the ailing Englishman, he would die.
But Gerald went, alternately sweating and shivering in the cab of the lorry as it ploughed down the mud road through the first rains of the season. A torrential downpour half-drowned the animals as they were being loaded on board at the docks, and though he felt like death Gerald insisted on drying the sodden creatures and giving them their night feed. Then the steward poured him a whisky which, he recalled, ‘could have knocked out a horse’, and he lay down in his cabin convinced he was going to die.
But he didn’t. He was lucky with the weather on the voyage home, and soon began to revive with the fresh sea air. The crew found a playpen for Sue the chimpanzee, and titbits and blankets for any monkey with a sniff or a cough. The only casualty was a mongoose that staged a breakout and jumped overboard.
At 4 p.m. on Tuesday, 10 August 1948, the Tetela tied up at Garston Docks, Liverpool, and Gerald Durrell and John Yealland stepped back on to dry land at the end of their African adventure. They had been away more than seven months, and had brought back nearly two hundred creatures all told – among them ninety-five mammals (including the three angwantibo, forty monkeys, a baby chimp and a giant white mongoose), twelve reptiles and ninety-three rare birds. This cargo was sufficiently exotic to attract the attention of the national press. ‘Awantibos, ahoy!’ cried the headlines. ‘The Awantibo is here today … only once seen alive in a European zoo!’
‘Eventually,’ Gerald was to recall, ‘the last cage was towed away, and the vans bumped their way across the docks through the fine, drifting rain, carrying the animals away to a new life, and carrying us towards the preparations for a new trip.’
The expedition had been an enormous challenge, and had turned out a considerable triumph, putting Gerald Durrell and John Yealland in the front rank of British zoo collectors and field workers, and marking the definitive starting point of Gerald’s spectacular career.
* (#ulink_212e9610-6776-55b9-b65d-daed32fc44fe) In pidgin all animals are called ‘beef’. There are four kinds: ‘small’, ‘big’, ‘bad’ and ‘bery bad’ beef.
* (#ulink_f286d917-86ba-562f-9b64-67eadd4200ce) Spelt ‘Andraia’ in Gerald’s later book. The correct spelling is ‘Andreas’, and the man is still alive.
NINE In the Land of the Fon Second Cameroons Expedition 1948–1949 (#ulink_d734006a-b84c-54c5-8f31-459fbe32c520)
With the African animals finally settled in their English zoos, and a bit of profit jingling in his pocket, Gerald was free to go home to Bournemouth. He was greeted as if he had come home from the moon, and his residual malaria, diagnosed by Alan Ogden, the family doctor, as the particularly severe strain Plasmodium falciparum, was viewed like a badge of courage brought back from some distant battlefield. Leslie was living with Doris nearby, and Margaret and her children were still in residence at Mother’s house. At Christmas Larry and Eve returned from Argentina and temporarily rejoined the fold.
Gerald was already a very good story-teller, and he held the house in St Alban’s Avenue in thrall with tales of his extraordinary adventures. In the comforting ambience of kith and kin he began to ease up after the strenuous travails of the last year. Slowly – perhaps not so slowly – his mind turned to the long-lost local girlfriends of that far-off pre-Cameroons era of the year before, whose company he had been deprived of for so long during the chaste jungle months. He even thought of taking a holiday – a proposal that provoked an odd reaction. ‘Nothing annoys a collector more,’ he was to recall, ‘than to return after six months of bites, scratches, trouble and toil and to announce to one’s friends that one is thinking of taking a short holiday, only to be told – “But you’ve just had one!”’
It was during Gerald’s brief hometown visit that he encountered a young woman whose equivocal charms were to alternately intrigue and appall him for a long time to come. Her real name was Diane, but he was later to bequeath her the unforgettable nom d’amour of Ursula Pendragon White. His subsequent account of this flawed paragon is intricate and involved, but there is no doubting his fascination with her divine looks and her less than divine language, and the spell cast over him by both. ‘I found,’ he was to recall, ‘that she was the only one who could arouse feelings in me that ranged from alarm and despondency to breathless admiration and sheer horror.’
Ursula was an ex-public school young woman from Canford Cliffs, at the posh end of Bournemouth (though later, to disguise her identity, Gerald was to say she was from Lymington in the New Forest). Gerald first set eyes on her on the top of a double-decker bus in Bournemouth town centre, his attention initially drawn by her ‘dulcet Roedean accents, as penetrating and all-pervading as the song of a roller canary’.
Gerald’s sister Margaret remembered Ursula as ‘a young dolly bird with long blonde hair who sat around in a droopish fashion which was very irritating to the rest of us’. According to Gerald’s later description, though (again, perhaps to disguise her identity), Ursula had dark, curly hair. Her eyes were huge, fringed with long dark lashes and set under very dark eyebrows. ‘Her mouth,’ he recalled, ‘was of the texture and quality that should never, under any circumstances, be used for eating kippers or frogs’ legs or black pudding.’
When Ursula stood up to get off the bus, Gerald saw that she was tall, with long, beautifully shaped legs and ‘one of those willowy, coltish figures that turn young men’s thoughts to lechery’. He reckoned, sighing, that it was unlikely he would ever set eyes on her again. But within three days she was back in his life, and remained so off and on for the next five years.
Encountering her again at a friend’s birthday party, where she greeted him effusively as ‘the bug boy’, Gerald, by his own account, ‘gazed at her and was lost’. It was not just her looks that infatuated him, it was also the sounds she made – ‘her grim, determined, unremitting battle with the English language’. For this svelte and spirited beauty suffered from a sort of oral dyslexia, and was for ever forcing words and phrases to do her bidding, expressing meanings they were never meant to express. There was no guessing what fantastical imagery she would conjure up next. She would speak excitedly of ‘Mozart’s archipelagoes’, of having bulls ‘castigated’, and of ‘ablutions’ to prevent ‘illiterate babies’. In Ursula’s world there was never fire without smoke, and rolling moss gathered no stones. In the prim confines of Bournemouth society ‘she dropped bricks at the rate of an unskilled navvy helping at a building site’.
There began a lengthy (and possibly unconsummated – the evidence is unclear) game of romantic cat and mouse. To give Ursula the impression that he was her equal in wealth, class and breeding, Gerald persuaded Margaret’s ex-husband Jack Breeze to drive him to his rendezvous with her in the vintage Rolls-Royce Jack owned at the time, with Jack smartly turned out in his BOAC officer’s uniform, for all the world like some pasha’s personal chauffeur. Ferried around in style, Gerald took Ursula to dinner at the Grill Room (‘She has the appetite of a rapacious python,’ he was warned, ‘and no sense of money’); to a symphony concert at the Pavilion (where her Pekinese puppy jumped out of its basket and created havoc in the auditorium); and into the country for gin and shove ha’penny at the ancient Square and Compass pub, where the aged yokels were mesmerised by her unique brand of English (‘A fine young woman, sir,’ commented one pickled veteran, ‘even though she’s a foreigner’). Gerry never got on terribly well with his girlfriends’ fathers in those days, and Ursula’s, stuffy and well-heeled, was conventional enough to brandish a horse-whip one night when he brought her home late, threatening to thrash him within an inch of his life if it ever happened again.
But while Ursula was Gerald’s distraction, it was the animal wilds of Africa that were his obsession, and she was convinced that sooner rather than later her beloved would end up tied in knots by a gorilla, or devoured by a lion before breakfast. One day she telephoned him. Her voice was so penetrating that he had to hold the receiver away from his ear.
‘Darling,’ she cried, ‘I’m engaged!’
‘I confess that my heart felt a sudden pang,’ Gerald was to write of this poignant moment, ‘and a loneliness spread over me. It was not that I was in love with Ursula; it was not that I wanted to marry her – God forbid! – but suddenly I realised that I was being deprived of somebody who could always lighten my gloom.’
Ursula duly married her intended. A long time later, she and Gerald met one last time, at a smart but stuffy old Edwardian café called the Cadena, among the elderly seaside gentry. As she came through the door it was obvious she was far gone with her second child.
‘Darling!’ she screamed. ‘Darling! Darling!’
‘She flung her arms round me,’ Gerald remembered, ‘and gave me a prolonged kiss of the variety that is generally cut out of French films by the English censor. She made humming noises as she kissed, like a hive of sex-mad bees. She thrust her body against mine to extract the full flavour of the embrace and to show that she cared, really and truly. Several elderly ladies, and what appeared to be a brigadier who had been preserved (like a plum in port) stared at us with fascinated repulsion.’
‘I thought you were married,’ said Gerald, tearing himself from her with an effort.
‘I am, darling,’ replied Ursula. ‘Don’t you think my kissing’s improved?’
They sat down at their table.
‘I don’t suppose you’d like me now,’ Ursula said wistfully. ‘I’ve reformed. I’ve become very dull.’
‘Do you think so?’ asked a still-infatuated Gerald.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, looking at him solemnly with her great blue eyes. ‘I’m afraid I’m now what they call one of the petty beaujolais.’
Gerald did not intend to linger long in England. Partly the spell of Africa had got into his blood. Partly there was nothing for him to do in Britain. No longer a novice, but a fully-fledged old hand, he planned a second Cameroons expedition, aiming for bigger and infinitely more profitable ‘stuff’ this time round, including gorilla, hippo and elephant, all valued by British zoos at up to £1000 per animal (around £20,000 in today’s money). His ambition to collect the really big game was not based entirely on greed, but also on the imperatives of personal survival. His first expedition had cost him roughly half his inheritance. The second was likely to cost the same, possibly more. He had to succeed – or go under.
It was an enormous fillip that Herbert Whitley, the wealthy owner of a large private collection of rare animals at Paignton, which later became the basis of Paignton Zoo, had agreed to buy half his collection on his return, plus any animals that London Zoo did not want. Gerald found Whitley highly eccentric – he was so shy that if anyone came to see him he would run through the house locking the doors, then flee in a special lift – but he was to have more than a passing influence on the young Gerald, for he was at the forefront of captive breeding. ‘He tried to breed an alligator and an all-yellow salamander for a while,’ Gerald was to recall. ‘He had a particular obsession for breeding blue things. Part of this was to confound experts. He bred blue pigeons, blue Great Danes, blue ducks.’
John Yealland was not available to accompany Gerald back to the Cameroons, so in his place Gerald invited the experienced Ken Smith, a near neighbour in Bournemouth whom he had first met at Whipsnade. Smith was senior to Gerald both in terms of age (he was thirty-seven) and status (he was to be superintendent of Paignton Zoo) – but in Gerald’s eyes his role made him the junior partner. Though physically Smith was hardly cast in the Tarzan mould, and was rather less gung-ho than his younger friend in face-to-face encounters with the larger and more fearsome beasts of the jungle, he knew his business, and was to prove a loyal and tireless companion in the long slog that lay ahead.
With Smith’s help Gerald began to assemble a more sophisticated and better targeted range of expedition stores, including bigger and better guns, folding cages, a gallon of cod liver oil and twelve dozen babies’ teats for the younger animals, several roll-neck pullovers ‘to keep a gorilla warm on the ship back’ and a splendid wedding marquee to house the animals at the base camp in the bush.
The second expedition was not intended simply to be a rerun of the first, for though Gerald would again work the rainforest around Mamfe, he also proposed to strike north into new territory – the high grassland region of central Cameroons, which offered a completely different range of fauna.
Early in January 1949, a few days before his twenty-fifth birthday, Gerald boarded the cargo boat MV Reventazon at Liverpool docks, together with his companion and all the paraphernalia of a major African collecting expedition. The press, who had witnessed his return from the first trip six months before, were back to witness his departure on the second, for his unusual way of earning a living had begun to attract some popular interest. ‘He’s off to Darkest Africa’, went one headline. ‘Mr Durrell, who is a bachelor, will journey inland for about 500 miles by lorry, then begin an eight-day safari. He is after gorilla and may also have a shot at capturing a buffalo or even a hippopotamus. “We shall try to get the gorillas in a sort of giant mousetrap,” he said. “They can be very nasty.”’
The ship sailed on time, and the voyage out was uneventful. Only Smith provided Gerald with much diversion. ‘He wakes in the morning,’ Gerald wrote to his mother, ‘and tells me that he has been dreaming about catching Gorilla with the help of the stewardess and the Liverpool representative of Grindlays Bank. The other night he was reading a bit about Buffalo. That of course set him off and about twelve o’clock he fought with his bedclothes for about an hour and a half, sweat pouring down his face, uttering wild cries.’
On 10 February the ship nudged in towards the coast of Cameroons and Gerald noted in his diary: ‘We were on deck about six, a bit unsteady after the farewell party last night. The islands in the bay loomed up through the mist, overloaded with vegetation … It’s wonderful to be back again.’ Then, in case he forgot the reason he was there, he added: ‘I am going to make a packet on this trip. I feel it in my bones, and Smith feels it in his varicose veins.’
The magic of Africa overwhelmed him once more – every crack in the wall a menagerie, every tree jam-packed with a hierarchy of species, the road at sundown paved with nightjars, the woods loud with the cry of the touracou, the songs of the bulbul and currichane thrush on the mountain ‘sweet and liquid like the English blackbird and song thrush’. Gerald wrote home: ‘Victoria is as beautiful as ever. Now all the trees are in bloom, and every one of them is covered in huge waxy flowers of every colour: yellow, blue, mauve, and scarlet. Hibiscus hedges are simply aflame with flower, and huge masses of bougainvillaea and canna lilies are everywhere. Ken has been walking around in a daze, with his mouth so wide open that I am afraid his teeth will drop out.’
‘Everyone seems to remember me,’ he wrote in his diary on his second day, ‘and everyone is most charming and so very helpful.’ The word went out on the bush telegraph that the animal collectors were back, and within a few days the pace of events accelerated dramatically. ‘Now for some extraordinary news,’ Gerald wrote excitedly to his mother on the fourteenth. ‘We have started our collection with a bang by obtaining a young male Chimpanzee!! A planter and his wife have him and are willing to give him to us. He is a dear little chap, and when I picked him up he pushed out his lips and kissed me.’
Gerald’s growing reputation for eccentricity was enhanced when he brought the chimpanzee, Charlie by name, to Victoria on the back of a bike, the chimp hanging round his neck ‘hooting with joy and occasionally sticking his fingers in my eyes, so that I narrowly missed running over several members of the Victoria populace’. Both Gerald and Ken Smith were regarded as slightly mad, and were known as the ‘animal maniacs’ to the white community and as the ‘beef masters’ to the black. But whereas Gerald was regarded as largely unconventional, Smith was entirely comical, not least to his younger companion. While going for a swim in an up-country river, for example, he earned a thunderous round of applause from a large crowd of watching villagers when he suddenly sneezed, projecting his dentures some distance into the water.
Gerald already knew that animal collecting was a business which required some odd, exotic qualities in its practitioners. He later wrote:
Most people’s idea of an animal collector is a brawny, Tarzan-like kind of bloke, but in fact most animal collectors look half dead from birth. To be successful at his job it’s best if a collector is born a bit mental and grows up with a highly developed sense of humour and no sense of smell (I mean, have you ever smelled a monkey cage first thing in the morning?). It’s also helpful if he has a private income, so it doesn’t matter so much if he doesn’t make a penny from the business. Of course, there are all sorts of ways of catching animals – traps, nets, smoking out caves and hollow trees, hunting with dogs, hunting at night (very good for reptiles) – but contrary to popular belief, collecting wild animals is not particularly dangerous – or at any rate only as dangerous as the collector is stupid.
Really it’s not catching the animals that is so difficult, it’s keeping them once you’ve caught them. Having a collection of animals is like having two or three hundred pernickety babies with stomachs as delicate as debutantes, all with different likes and dislikes. Naturally when life is spent in close proximity with these creatures you get involved in many embarrassing and irritating matters, particularly their lavatorial habits. For example, I had a hyrax that would only go to the toilet in the DO’s hat, and a pouched rat that would only do big jobs in its drinking bowl. Sometimes a collector has to share his bed with a baby animal for warmth, and this can lead to all sorts of strange experiences, especially if the creature in question is a porcupine.
The plan was to establish the marquee base camp at a suitable site overlooking the river near Mamfe, and for this to be used as the central depository for all the animals coming in from the surrounding area and from further afield. Ken Smith would be more or less permanently billeted at the Mamfe base as keeper-cum-vet, while Gerald roamed far and wide in the neighbouring forests and the mountain grasslands to the north, hunting for creatures on the wanted list which would then be despatched back to Mamfe.
On 18 February the little party headed off for the interior, overnighting at Kumba on their way to Mamfe. ‘We started fairly early this morning,’ Gerald noted in his diary, ‘and made Kumba in good time. The ride was wonderful and it was lovely to feel we were at last heading for bush.’ Two days later they reached Mamfe, and in due course, with the help of thirty panting labourers and to the amazement and delight of a surging crowd of villagers, the great canvas mass of the English wedding marquee was hauled and pulled into position till it stood, four-square and proud as a medieval tented pavilion, on the bank of the slow brown river at the edge of the primeval forest.
There was still another week of preparations – cages to be erected, ponds dug, food supplies laid on, chiefs propositioned with lists of wanted animals, a hundred and one things – before systematic collecting could start. By the beginning of March they were all set, and Gerald ventured forth into the surrounding wilds on his second great quest in search of rare ‘beef’. From this point forward he was to be subject to a life of such relentless physical endeavour and such sensory richness and intensity that his diary reads like the breathless log of some inter-galactic voyager, every day a new adventure, every minute a mind-blowing revelation. It is difficult to do justice here to the extraordinary document he typed with two fingers and a thumb every evening in the yellow circle of light from the hurricane lamp in his jungle camp, exhausted almost to the point of collapse; but various important features emerge from it.
The first is that the Gerald Durrell who is thinking aloud, so to speak, in the 1949 diary, seems quite a different young man from the one who had first arrived in the country the year before. Gone are all the imperial pretensions and colonial posturings. Now he responds to the phenomena of Africa and the Africans in his own way. Though still inclined to paternalism now and then, he finally seems to have perceived that the bush Africans with whom he was to spend most of the seven months to come were individuals every bit as eccentric, engaging, irritating, talented or flawed as the rest of the animal species known as man – himself and Ken Smith included. He also knew that without the help and support of the local Africans the entire enterprise would fail, for virtually everything depended on them, from collecting to cooking. And in the course of this second expedition he would grow so close to the people of the Cameroons that he would become almost a blood brother to one of them, with whom his name would be associated for the rest of his life.
Another feature that emerges powerfully from Gerald’s diary is his sense of the overwhelming prodigality of the Africa through which he travelled – an ancient Africa still largely virgin, still largely wild, still host to a nature as beautiful as it was cruel – an Africa where the concept of ‘extinction’ seemed to bear little relation to the seemingly endless procession of flying, running, hopping, crawling, slithering, swimming species that daily crossed the traveller’s line of sight or range of hearing.
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