A Zoo in My Luggage

by Gerald Durrell

  GERALD DURRELL

  A Zoo in My Luggage

  WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

  Ralph Thompson

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  A Word in Advance

  Mail by Hand

  PART ONE: EN ROUTE

  1. The Reluctant Python

  2. The Bald-headed Birds

  PART TWO: BACK TO BAFUT

  3. The Fon’s Beef

  4. Beef in Boxes

  5. Film Star Beef

  6. Beef with Hand Like Man

  PART THREE: COASTWARDS AND ZOOWARDS

  7. A Zoo in Our Luggage

  8. Zoo in Suburbia

  The Last Word

  Acknowledgements

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  A ZOO IN MY LUGGAGE

  Gerald Durrell was born in Jamshedpur, India, in 1925. He returned to England in 1928 before settling on the island of Corfu with his family. In 1945 he joined the staff of Whipsnade Park as a student keeper, and in 1947 he led his first animal-collecting expedition to the Cameroons. He later undertook numerous further expeditions, visiting Paraguay, Argentina, Sierra Leone, Mexico, Mauritius, Assam and Madagascar. His first television programme, Two in the Bush, which documented his travels to New Zealand, Australia and Malaya was made in 1962; he went on to make seventy programmes about his trips around the world. In 1959 he founded the Jersey Zoological Park, and in 1963 he founded the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust. He was awarded the OBE in 1982. Encouraged to write about his life’s work by his novelist brother Lawrence, Durrell published his first book, The Overloaded Ark, in 1953. It soon became a bestseller and he went on to write thirty-six other titles, including My Family and Other Animals, The Bafut Beagles, Encounters with Animals, The Drunken Forest, A Zoo in My Luggage, The Whispering Land, Menagerie Manor, The Amateur Naturalist and The Aye-Aye and I. Gerald Durrell died in 1995.

  For Sophie

  In memory of Tio Pepe, Wiener Schnitzel,

  and dancing kleek to kleek

  A Word in Advance

  This is the chronicle of a six-month trip that my wife and I made to Bafut, a mountain grassland kingdom in the British Cameroons in West Africa. Our reason for going there was, to say the least, a trifle unusual. We wanted to collect our own zoo.

  Since the end of the war I had been financing and organizing expeditions to many parts of the world to collect wild animals for various zoological gardens. Bitter experience over the years had taught me that the worst and most heart-breaking part of any collecting trip came at the end when, after months of lavishing care and attention upon them, you had to part with the animals. If you are acting as mother, father, food-provider and danger eradicator to an animal, half a year is enough to build up a very real friendship with it. The creature trusts you and, what is more important, behaves naturally when you are around. Then, just when this relationship should begin to bear fruit, when you ought to be in a unique position to study the animal’s habits and behaviour, you are forced to part company.

  There was only one answer to this problem, as far as I was concerned, and that was to have a zoo of my own. I could then bring my animals back knowing what type of cages they were going to inhabit, what sort of food and treatment they were going to receive (a thing which one cannot, unfortunately, be sure about with some other zoos), and secure in the knowledge that I could go on studying them to my heart’s content. The zoo, of course, would have to be open to the public so that, from my point of view, it would be a sort of self-supporting laboratory in which I could keep and watch my animals.

  There was another and, to my mind, more urgent reason for creating a zoo. I, like many other people, have been seriously concerned by the fact that year by year, all over the world, various species of animals are being slowly but surely exterminated in their wild state, thanks directly or indirectly to the interference of mankind. While many worthy and hard-working societies are doing their best to tackle this problem, I know a great number of animal species which, because they are small and generally of no commercial or touristic value, are not receiving adequate protection. To me the extirpation of an animal species is a criminal offence, in the same way as the destruction of anything we cannot recreate or replace, such as a Rembrandt or the Acropolis. In my opinion zoological gardens all over the world should have as one of their main objects the establishment of breeding colonies for these rare and threatened species. Then, if it is inevitable that the animal should become extinct in the wild state, at least we have not lost it completely. For many years I had wanted to start a zoo with just such an object in view, and now seemed the ideal moment to begin.

  Any reasonable person smitten with an ambition of this sort would have secured the zoo first and obtained the animals afterwards. But throughout my life I have rarely if ever achieved what I wanted by tackling it in a logical fashion. So, naturally, I went and got the animals first and then set about the task of finding my zoo. This was not so easy as it might seem on the face of it, and looking back now I am speechless at my audacity in trying to achieve success in this way.

  This, therefore, is the story of my search for a zoo, and it explains why, for some considerable time, I had a zoo in my luggage.

  Mail by Hand

  From my seat on the bougainvillaea-enshrouded verandah I looked out over the blue and glittering waters of the bay of Victoria, a bay dotted with innumerable forest-encrusted islands like little green, furry hats dropped carelessly on the surface. Two grey parrots flew swiftly across the sky, wolf-whistling to each other and calling ‘coo-eee’ loudly and seductively in the brilliant blue sky. A flock of tiny canoes, like a school of black fish, moved to and fro among the islands, and dimly the cries and chatter of the fishermen came drifting across the water to me. Above, in the great palms that shaded the house, a colony of weaver-birds chattered incessantly as they busily stripped the palm fronds off to weave their basket-like nests, and behind the house, where the forest began, a tinker-bird was giving its monotonous cry, toink … toink … toink … , like someone beating forever on a tiny anvil. The sweat was running down my spine, staining my shirt black, and the glass of beer by my side was rapidly getting warm. I was back in West Africa.

  Dragging my attention away from a large, orange-headed lizard that had climbed on to the verandah rail and was busily nodding its head as if in approval of the sunshine, I turned back to my task of composing a letter.

  The Fon of Bafut,

  Fon’s Palace,

  Bafut,

  Bemenda Division, British Cameroons.

  I paused here for inspiration. I lit a cigarette and contemplated the sweat-marks that my fingers had left on the keys of the typewriter. I took a sip of beer and scowled at my letter. It was difficult to compose for a number of reasons.

  The Fon of Bafut was a rich, clever and charming potentate who ruled over a large grassland kingdom in the mountain area of the north. Eight years previously I had spent a number of months in his country to collect the strange and rare creatures that inhabited it. The Fon had turned out to be a delightful host, and we had many fantastic parties together, for he was a great believer in enjoying life. I had marvelled at his alcoholic intake, at his immense energy and at his humour, and when I returned to England I had attempted to draw a picture of him in a book I wrote about the expedition. I had tried to show him as a shrewd and kindly man, with a great love of music, dancing, drink and other things that make life pleasant, and with an almost childlike ability for having a good time. I now wanted to revisit him in his remote and beautiful kingdom and renew our friendship; but I was a little bit worried. I had realized – too late – that the portrait I had drawn of him in my book was perhaps open to misconstruction. The Fon might well have thought that the pictur
e was that of a senile alcoholic who spent his time getting drunk amid a bevy of wives. So it was with some trepidation that I sat down to write to him and find out if I would be welcome in his kingdom. That, I reflected, was the worst of writing books. I sighed, stubbed out my cigarette and started.

  My dear friend,

  As you may have heard I have returned to the Cameroons in order to catch more animals to take back to my country. As you will remember when I was last here I came up to your country and caught most of my best animals there. Also we had a very good time together.

  Now I have returned with my wife and I would like her to meet you and see your beautiful country. May we come up to Bafut and stay with you while we catch our animals? I would like to stay once more in your Rest House, as I did last time, if you will let me. Perhaps you would let me know?

  Yours sincerely,

  Gerald Durrell

  I sent this missive off by messenger together with two bottles of whisky which he was given strict instructions not to drink on the way. We then waited hopefully, day after day, while our mountain of luggage smouldered under tarpaulins in the sun, and the orange-headed lizards lay dozing on top of it. Within a week, the messenger returned and drew a letter out of the pocket of his tattered khaki shorts. I ripped open the envelope hastily and spread the letter on the table, where Jacquie and I craned over it.

  Fon’s Palace,

  Bafut, Bemenda.

  25th January 1957.

  My good friend,

  Yours dated 23rd received with great pleasure. I was more than pleased when I read the letter sent to me by you, in the Cameroons again.

  I will be looking for you at any time you come here. How long you think to remain with me here, no objection. My Rest House is ever ready for you at any time you arrive here.

  Please pass my sincere greetings to your wife and tell her that I shall have a good chat with her when she come here.

  Yours truly,

  Fon of Bafut

  PART ONE

  En Route

  Mail by Hand

  To: The Zoological Officer.

  U.A.C. Manager’s House,

  Mamfe.

  Dearest Sir,

  I have once been your customer during your first tour of the Cameroons and get you different animals.

  I send here one animal with my servant, I do not know the name of it. Please could you offer what price you think fit and send it to me. The animal has been living in my house almost about three weeks and a half.

  With love, sir.

  I am,

  Yrs sincerely,

  Thomas Tambic, Hunter

  Chapter One

  The Reluctant Python

  I had decided that, on the way up country to Bafut, we would make a ten-day stop at a town called Mamfe. This was at the highest navigable point of the Cross River, on the edge of an enormous tract of uninhabited country; and on the two previous occasions when I had been to the Cameroons I had found it a good collecting centre. We set off from Victoria in an impressive convoy of three lorries, Jacquie and myself in the first, our young assistant Bob in the second, and Sophie, my long-suffering secretary, in the third. The trip was hot and dusty, and we arrived at Mamfe in the brief green twilight of the third day, hungry, thirsty and covered from head to foot with a fine film of red dust. We had been told to contact the United Africa Company’s manager on arrival, and so our lorries roared up the drive and screeched to a halt outside a very impressive house, ablaze with lights.

  The house stood in what was certainly the best position in Mamfe. It was perched on top of a conical hill, one side of which formed part of the gorge through which the Cross River ran. From the edge of the garden, fringed with a hedge of the inevitable hibiscus bushes, you could look straight down four hundred feet into the gorge, to where a tangle of low growth and taller trees perched precariously on thirty-foot cliffs of pleated granite, thickly overgrown with wild begonias, moss and ferns. At the foot of these cliffs, round gleaming white sandbanks and strange, ribbed slabs of rock, the river wound its way like a brown, sinuous muscle. On the opposite bank there were small patches of farmland along the edge of the river, and beyond that the forest reared up in a multitude of colours and textures, spreading endlessly back until it was turned into a dim, quivering frothy green sea by distance and heat haze.

  I was, however, in no mood to admire views as I uncoiled myself from the red-hot interior of the lorry and jumped to the ground. What I wanted most in the world at that moment was a drink, a bath and a meal, in that order. Almost as urgently I wanted a wooden box to house the first animal we had acquired. This was an extremely rare creature, a baby black-footed mongoose, which I had purchased from a native in a village twenty-five miles back when we had stopped there to buy some fruit. I had been delighted that we had started the collection with such a rarity, but after struggling with her for two hours in the front seat of the lorry, my enthusiasm had begun to wane. She had wanted to investigate every nook and cranny in the cab, and fearing that she might go and get tangled up in the gears and perhaps break a leg I had imprisoned her inside my shirt. For the first half-hour she had stalked round and round my body, sniffing loudly. For the next half-hour she had made several determined attempts to dig a hole in my stomach with her exceedingly sharp claws, and on being persuaded to desist from this occupation, she had seized a large portion of my abdomen in her mouth and sucked it vigorously and hopefully, while irrigating me with an apparently unending stream of warm and pungent urine. This in no way improved my already dusty and sweaty appearance, and as I marched up the steps of the U.A.C. manager’s house, with a mongoose tail dangling out of my tightly buttoned, urine-stained shirt, I looked, to say the least, slightly eccentric. Taking a deep breath and trying to seem nonchalant, I walked into the brilliantly lit living-room, and found three people seated round a card table. They looked at me with a faint air of inquiry. ‘Good evening,’ I said, feeling rather at a loss. ‘My name’s Durrell.’

  It was not, I reflected, the most telling remark made in Africa since Stanley and Livingstone met. However, a small, dark man rose from the table and came towards me, smiling charmingly, his long black hair flopping down over his forehead. He held out his hand and clasped mine, and then, ignoring my sudden appearance and my unconventional condition, he peered earnestly into my face.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘Do you by any chance play Canasta?’

  ‘No,’ I said, rather taken aback, ‘I’m afraid I don’t.’

  He sighed, as if his worst fears had been realized. ‘A pity … a great pity,’ he said; then he cocked his head on one side and peered at me closely.

  ‘What did you say your name was?’ he asked.

  ‘Durrell … Gerald Durrell.’

  ‘Good heavens,’ he exclaimed, realization dawning, ‘are you that animal maniac head office warned me about?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘But my dear chap, I expected you two days ago. Where have you been?’

  ‘We would have been here two days ago if our lorry hadn’t broken down with such monotonous regularity.’

  ‘These local lorries are bloody unreliable,’ he said, as if letting me into a secret. ‘Have a drink?’

  ‘I should love one,’ I said fervently. ‘May I bring the others in? They’re all waiting in the lorries.’

  ‘Yes, yes, bring ’em all in. Of course. Drinks all round.’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ I said, and turned towards the door.

  My host seized me by the arm and drew me back. ‘Tell me, dear boy,’ he said in a hoarse whisper, ‘I don’t want to be personal, but is it the gin I’ve drunk or does your stomach always wriggle like that?’

  ‘No,’ I said gravely. ‘It’s not my stomach. I’ve got a mongoose in my shirt.’

  He gazed at me unblinkingly for a moment.

  ‘Very reasonable explanation,’ he said at last.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and true.’

  He sighed. ‘Well, as long
as it’s not the gin I don’t mind what you keep in your shirt,’ he said seriously. ‘Bring the others in and we’ll kill a noggin or two before you eat.’

  So we invaded John Henderson’s house and within a couple of days we had turned him into what must have been the most long-suffering host on the West Coast of Africa. For a man who likes his privacy to invite four strangers to live in his house is a noble deed to start with. But when he has no liking for, and a grave mistrust of, any form of animal life, to invite four animal-collectors to stay is an action so heroic that no words can describe it. Within twenty-four hours of our arrival not only a mongoose, but a squirrel, a bushbaby and two monkeys were quartered on the verandah of John’s house.

  While John was getting used to the idea of having his legs embraced by a half-grown baboon every time he set foot outside his own front door, I sent messages to all my old contacts among the local hunters, gathered them together and told them the sort of creatures we were after. Then we sat back and awaited results. They were some time in coming. Then, early one afternoon, a local hunter called Agustine appeared, padding down the drive, wearing a scarlet-and-blue sarong and looking, as always, like a neat, eager, Mongolian shopwalker. He was accompanied by one of the largest West Africans I have ever seen, a great, scowling man who must have been at least six feet tall, and whose skin – in contrast to Agustine’s golden bronze shade – was a deep soot black. He clumped along beside Agustine on such enormous feet that at first I thought he was suffering from elephantiasis. They stopped at the verandah steps, and while Agustine beamed cheerily, his companion glared at us in a preoccupied manner, as though endeavouring to assess our net weight for culinary purposes.