Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  Three lorries and a van were needed to shift animals and stores the two hundred miles down to the coast, travelling at night when it was cooler for the animals. Every three hours they had to stop to sprinkle the boxes of frogs with cold water, and twice each night they had to stop again to bottle-feed the younger animals with warm milk kept in thermos flasks. At dawn they would pull off the road and park in the shade of the trees, unloading every cage and cleaning and feeding every animal. On the morning of 7 August they reached the docks and began to load the cages on to the forward deck of the banana boat SS Tetela – the very same ship in which Gerald had sailed home the previous year.

  One unwelcome task remained. Gerald had been told that at a banana plantation not far from the port a drainage sump had been uncovered that was found to be full of snakes. Even at this stage – in spite of having nearly died of snake-bite recently – Gerald found the prospect of a pit full of snakes irresistible. But the circumstances were not propitious. For one thing, time was short and the collecting would have to be done at night. For another, the snakes turned out to be Gaboon vipers – one of the most deadly species in West Africa. They were not only poisonous, but were equipped with particularly long fangs to enable them to inject their venom deep into the victim’s body, to much quicker effect. Moreover, their habit was to hunt for food at night, so they would be very much awake.

  With considerable trepidation Gerald was lowered into the viper pit on the end of a rope, equipped with an unreliable lamp, a collecting bag and a Y-shaped stick. As he descended he could hear ominous hisses rising up in protest, and glimpsed thirty or forty snakes writhing and spitting below him. This was the most perilous and nightmarish foray of his collecting career, requiring a very cold courage and a high degree of skill. For half an hour Gerald was in the pit. One of his shoes fell off, the pit wall was crumbly, and the lamp went out, leaving him in darkness till a replacement was lowered down. Then at a signal he was hauled slowly up, his collecting bag packed with a dozen wriggling snakes. ‘I sat on the ground,’ he was to recall, ‘smoking a much needed cigarette and trying to steady my trembling hands. Now that the danger was over I began to realise how extremely stupid I had been and how exceptionally lucky I was to come out alive.’

  Next day they set sail. Gerald’s main concern was to keep the sole surviving Idiurus alive till they got to England. The creature had developed a taste for avocado pears, and though these were out of season in the Cameroons, they were able to keep up the supply by raiding the ship’s captain’s private hoard. But in spite of all their efforts, having travelled four thousand miles and got within twenty-four hours of Liverpool, the Idiurus died. Though most of the other animals survived, including the two chimpanzees and the hairy frogs, Gerald was devastated by the loss of his last precious pigmy flying squirrel. ‘I was bitterly disappointed,’ he was to recall, ‘and black depression settled on me.’

  It was not a wildly happy homecoming when the Tetela finally nosed into Garston Docks on 25 August 1949, but Gerald and his staunch and able companion Ken Smith had much to be proud of. They had survived disease, hardship, destitution, danger, solitude, a poisonous snake-bite and the wilds of Africa. They had even survived the notorious difficulties of travelling in the Cameroons – the homicidal lorries and the deathtrap bridges. And they had returned with five hundred living creatures, representing seventy species and housed in 139 crates – eighty-one of them containing mammals, forty-two containing reptiles, fourteen containing birds and two containing land crabs. In all the expedition had cost £2500, and would probably make a modest profit of around £400, not counting the equipment, which could be resold for about £900. It was an achievement of substance.

  The press evidently thought so too. Reporters from most of the national papers swarmed on board, flashbulbs popping. ‘Two Men Sail in with a New Noah’s Ark’ ran the Daily Express headline. ‘Jungle Hunters get Bag of 500’ splashed the Star. Hot on the newsmen’s heels came the representatives of the London, Edinburgh, Manchester, Bristol, Paignton, Chester and Dublin zoos, and an animal importer by the name of Robert Jackson, who was ‘here for the snakes’. They crowded the well deck, discussing prices and zoological fashions and inspecting clawed toads, moustached monkeys and the hissing golden cat. Their vans and shooting brakes lined the quay, and business was brisk. Eventually over a third of the collection was taken by Chester Zoo, while London took some of the rarities of special scientific interest, many of them never before seen alive in Britain, including the hairy frog and a large number of insects.

  Though the expedition had failed to acquire any truly spectacular animals, the lesser creatures paraded before the crowd on board were intriguing enough. ‘Dock workers unloading bananas from the steamship Tetela,’ reported the Yorkshire Post, ‘stopped work in astonishment when a fair-haired young man on deck put his hand in a wooden crate and dragged out a wriggly, two-foot-long black object with long, hairy legs – the first creature of its kind ever to be brought into this country. The hairy frog appeared to be displeased with its first glimpse of Britain. It uttered weird, low-pitched croaks and thrashed its long, hairy legs.’

  The collectors, now attired in jackets and ties, posed for the photographers – a balding Ken Smith clutching a baby broad-fronted crocodile, a tousle-haired Gerald Durrell with a little guenon, or moustached monkey, perched on his shoulder. Though it was Charlie the chimpanzee who won the hearts of the newsmen, it was Gerald who held their attention. ‘An unconventional young man,’ as one reporter described him, ‘with his aesthetically lean face, long-fingered hands and well-cut suit.’ Others saw him differently. ‘At a glance,’ reported the Illustrated London News, ‘you might imagine Gerald Durrell, aged 24, height five-feet-eight, was a prosperous young farmer, for he has the clear eyes, fresh features and broad shoulders common to men whose working lives are spent in the open air. His conversation, however, gives no hint of crops and cows, for he is concerned with sterner aspects of nature.’ Such as snake bites and hippo hunts, juju curses on leopard traps and beagling across the grasslands of Bafut with dogs wearing little bells. It was all good, exotic stuff – and it was Gerald Durrell’s first big press call. He was a star, if only for a day or two. It was a step down a road he did not yet realise he was following.

  As he prepared to go ashore, Gerald let it be known that he and Ken Smith were planning a third collecting expedition in a few months – this time to South America. But though further encounters with the animal denizens of the tropical wilds seemed Gerald’s next goal, it was an altogether different kind of meeting that was to shape his immediate destiny. At the back of his expedition notebook he had listed the British zoos he proposed to visit in connection with his latest collection, and the last name on the list was – ‘Manchester’.

  TEN

  New Worlds to Conquer

  Love and Marriage 1949–1951

  Gerald Durrell was one of those men who genuinely liked women. Brought up in the warm, womb-like ambience of a female household, he had always seen them as a source of comfort and security, and by his late teens he saw them as something else as well. As his dallyings in the Guinea Pig Palace at Whipsnade indicate, he could be as sexually driven and obsessed as any normal young man of his age. It helped that he was exceptionally good-looking, with his fair hair flopping casually over his forehead, his frank, quizzical blue eyes that always seemed to be laughing, and his square jaw and long, rather aesthetic face. But it was his personality that proved even more alluring to women, for he was endowed not only with charm but with presence and humour as well.

  When Gerald returned to England he took every opportunity that came his way to compensate for his six-month deprivation in matters romantic, cutting a swathe through the North Country as he progressed from Chester to Dudley and Wellingborough on zoo matters. Eventually, around mid-September, he reached Manchester, where he had business at the Belle Vue Zoo, and checked in at a small commercial hotel run by a Mr John Thomas Wolfenden. Gerald’s arrival
at this seemingly unpromising venue was to be a rendezvous with fate.

  The hotel was crowded with the female corps de ballet of the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company, then spending two weeks of its provincial tour in Manchester. The arrival of a dashing young African explorer and animal catcher caused some commotion amongst the horde of dancing girls, as the hotel proprietor’s nineteen-year-old daughter – a bright, rather aloof, gamine young woman called Jacqueline, familiarly known as Jacquie – tartly noted. The chattering ballerinas, she later recorded, ‘could do nothing but talk about some marvellous being who apparently had everything any woman could possibly desire. Then one wet Sunday afternoon the peace was shattered by a mass of female forms cascading through the living-room door and dragging in their wake a rather delicate-looking Rupert-Brookish young man. Judging by their idiotic behaviour, this could only be Wonderboy himself – and it was.’

  Jacquie was usually scornful of people she judged to be ‘shallow, spoilt and wholly extrovert’, and Gerald Durrell appeared to her to fall into this category. He looked remarkably like the American film star Dana Andrews, she thought, and behaved exactly like a cock in a hen run. Then he became aware that she was watching him, and looked in her direction. Their eyes met for the first time, his fixing hers with what she was to describe as a ‘basilisk stare’, before she looked away in embarrassment. The memory of this first moment of mutual awareness, literally across a crowded room, was permanently engraved on Gerald’s memory: ‘There, sitting by the fire, surrounded by all these girls, was something that looked like a baby robin, and I can remember it to this moment, absolutely vividly, it went boom, just like that, into my face, and I thought feebly, Gosh, she’s stunning.’

  Jacquie beat a hasty retreat from the room, disconcerted and not a little aghast at the man, though also ‘rather amused by his posturings’. She was less amused when she discovered that he was conducting simultaneous affairs with three of the ballerinas in her father’s hotel – Durrell himself in later years could only recall one – and all the more determined to have nothing to do with this objectionable but happily transient young man.

  During the remaining two weeks of Gerald’s stay Jacquie saw next to nothing of him. But one morning her stepmother asked her if she could escort Mr Durrell to the station, as (unbelievably) he appeared to have no idea where it was. Jacquie agreed, but made it plain she was doing so under protest. She recalled: ‘Having finally satisfied himself that I was not overjoyed at having him as a companion, Mr Durrell went out of his way to exert every facet of that very great charm which was so much admired by females in general. When this did not produce any marked results he switched to humour and, much to my annoyance, he did amuse me – so much, in fact, that I was sorry to see him go.’

  Never expecting to see Gerald again, Jacquie put him out of her mind and concentrated on her studies for a career as an opera singer. She had a rich contralto voice and a promising future, and went so far as to change her surname from Wolfenden to Rasen on the advice of her teachers, who thought a less cumbersome name would help her career. It was therefore something of a shock when, in the late autumn, with the hotel turned upside down for extensive renovations, the debonair young man returned. He was planning a new animal collecting expedition to British Guiana, he announced, and was visiting zoos in the area to get orders. Though he was out most days, he was in most evenings, taking his meals with the family, ‘exchanging saucy badinage with my stepmother,’ Jacquie was to record, ‘and engaging my father in long, involved discussions on current events. He quickly became everybody’s friend except mine.’

  Gerald was well aware how Jacquie felt about him, but that didn’t stop him asking her father if he could take her out to dinner one evening. ‘When I got used to the idea I was pleased,’ Jacquie remembered. ‘I was between boyfriends and thought it might be amusing to spend an evening with such a “man of the world”. Much to my astonishment, I thoroughly enjoyed myself and we got on extremely well together.’ Gerald’s adventures as an animal catcher fascinated her, and she was intrigued by his tales of his unusual family and exotic upbringing on Corfu. Jacquie had never had any real family life of her own, as her parents had separated when she was two and for some years she had been passed from one relative to another, so she envied Gerald his secure and happy childhood. She found herself telling him things she had never told anyone before. ‘By the time we returned home,’ she recalled, ‘I had lost any feelings of distrust or animosity I had had, and really felt that I had at last found a friend whom I could talk to and relax with.’

  In a day or two Gerald was off again. Preparations for the British Guiana expedition were all-preoccupying, and Jacquie did not hear any more from her new-found friend before his departure.

  Early in the New Year of 1950 Gerald found himself clambering on board yet another scruffy little cargo boat at Liverpool Docks. By now he was an established collector for all the major zoos in Britain, a profession which, he reckoned, brought him into contact with around a hundred animals for every human being he encountered. But collecting animals, he knew only too well, was not a way to get rich quickly. It was just that he couldn’t think of anything else he would rather do. ‘If it comes to that,’ he over-modestly informed an acquaintance just before he set sail, ‘I can’t think of anything else I could do, even if I wanted to. My qualifications are very elementary. I can treat snake bites, paddle a hollow-log canoe, use a rifle, ride a horse, move quietly through undergrowth, and sit still for hours on end. That’s about all I can do. Fortunately, that’s about all an animal collector has to do.’

  On 27 January he disembarked at Demarara, British Guiana, and set foot in the New World for the first time:

  Guiana was absolutely ravishing, because it was so different. It looked as though a florist’s shop had been emptied over every tree or bush. I heard an odd noise, quite inexplicable, and was drawn to a tree rioting with orchids and giving out this susurration far more subtle than bees, and then with difficulty – for everything so fabulously new is experienced with difficulty – I saw that something like two or three hundred hummingbirds were feeding off the orchids and making that intent perishable sound. And then on another occasion I was skimming in a canoe down the black tributaries and the whole surface was covered with water plants that had minute leaves rather like mustard-and-cress with a satiny haze of pink bloom hanging over it, so that miraculously your canoe was sliding without the faintest sound across a pinkflowered lawn. God, I must get back there, quick, quick, quick, before it’s too late. It’s getting too late everywhere. Will I ever wake up again as I did one morning in Georgetown? All so very apparently normal, like a suburban house in England, and not knowing where I was, expecting to spring awake and see the ship’s cabin around me. But I looked out hazily, all I had to do lying on my pillow was to open my eyes, and there was a huge magnolia tree with big glossy leaves like plates, all pullulating with three different species of tanager, red and black, cobalt, white and green, hovering in and out of the leaves as they fed. Such moments are beyond belief. They make me feel that at least I’m the centre of my own life. Being considered mad by everyone, mad and fanatical, suddenly makes sense. And the pampas was the closest to true peace I had ever known.

  With Ken Smith looking after the main collection in Georgetown, the capital, Gerald travelled far and wide up country in pursuit of strange animals, helped by a companionable itinerant artist by the name of Robert Lowes. They had to wade through swamps, struggle through forest and grassland, swim across lakes and rivers, sit for hours on end in narrow canoes, eat and sleep surrounded by a fantastic assortment of birds, beasts and reptiles. Their destinations were many and varied – from the small town of Adventure on the Essequibo River (where they hunted the moonshine uwarie) and the Karanambo ranch of the legendary Tiny McTurk in the Rupununi savannah far to the south (where they galloped after the giant anteater and stalked the arapaima, the largest freshwater fish in the world, and the capybara, the largest living rod
ent), to the creek lands at the ocean’s edge, an intricate system of narrow, tangled, twisting water roads, where they spent at least half their time afloat, hunting the pipa toad and paradoxical frog, the pimpla hog and tree porcupine (‘the only real comedian in the animal world’).

  The creek lands cast a magic spell. ‘We paddled back along the silent creeks,’ Gerald was to write of their haunting, primordial air, ‘the black waters reflecting the star-shimmering sky with such faithfulness that we felt the canoe was floating through space among the planets. Caymans grunted among the reeds, strange fish rose and gulped at the myriads of pale moths that drifted across the water. In the bottom of the canoe, spreadeagled in a tin, lay the amphibians that had made our evening so perfect. Every few minutes we would glance down at them and smirk with satisfaction. The capturing of an incredibly ugly toad: of such simple pleasures is a collector’s life made up.’

  Gerald had promised to write to Jacquie from British Guiana when he had a chance, but he never did, and with some relief – for she sensed the danger of getting far too involved with someone like him – she turned back to her opera studies and the long Manchester winter, and put him out of her mind.

  But Gerald had not forgotten her. Try as hard as he might, he could not. ‘Normally on a trip everyone I knew vanished,’ he recounted, ‘but this wretched face kept recurring when I was cleaning out the cages or floating down the river in a canoe; all the time it kept flashing into my mind, and I thought, Why should the others be so unmemorable while this one keeps intruding on my brain? So I made a mental note that, should I be able to inveigle her into a corner, I would try and get to know her better.’