Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  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 sug
ar) 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

  EIGHT

  To the Back of Beyond

  First Cameroons Expedition 1947–1948

  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.* 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 an
d 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!’