Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  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,* 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.