Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  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 pou
ring 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.

  Yet another feature of the diary is Gerald’s growing appreciation of the beauty and preciousness of this primordial world, his mounting sense of wonder and awe. Every patch of sky, every bend in the river, every clearing in the forest held some surprise and joy for him. Increasingly, as the weeks went by, all his hard-bitten, tough-guy posturing began to melt away, and in its place emerged a rather less hearty, more sensitive and reflective young man, increasingly aware of the immense privilege of being where he was and seeing what he sa
w.

  Finally, the diary reveals Gerald’s dawning gift for literary expression. As he strove to put into words his simple yet subtle reactions to the wonders all around, his powers of observation grew sharper, his sense of comedy more incisive, his story-telling more practised, and his handling of language more fluent and expressive. In his diary entry for 3 March, for example, describing a foray by dugout canoe down the Mamfe River, one can begin to detect a real writer in the making, trying hard to find an authentic voice:

  Really, even if one does not capture anything of real value on these jaunts, the experience itself is worth while. It is wonderful to walk along knee-deep in the brown, slowly moving water, with the great glittering sandbanks like huge white ribs in the river, each having on it the carcasses of giant forest trees that have been uprooted in the rains and are now left high and dry. On either bank the forest climbs upwards, an almost solid mat of lianas, ferns, and a thousand variety of plants. The only sound, apart from the cries of the insects, is the faint swish of your movements through the blood-warm water. Suddenly a Wattled plover will flap off the bank before you, with shrill and twittering cries, or a Fishing eagle will fly over on silent wings, or a foolish Hornbill threshing the air, honking wildly. If you sit on the smooth slopes of grey stone in the evening you will see the monkeys coming down to drink, leaping from tree to tree in a crash and rustle of branches. There seems to be no time here: you lose all sense of it: it may be ten or two for all you know, for the forest has no time. When it’s dark the day has finished, when it’s light the day has begun. All the time you are only aware of the present, the everlasting Now.