Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  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 Commi
n’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.