Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  Not even encounters with a vast range of dramatic species – from a fer de lance snake that could kill in seconds and an anaconda eight feet long and as thick as a male ballet dancer’s thigh, to a score or more of delicate little squirrel monkeys which, when clustered along a branch, looked (so Gerald noted) ‘like a bed of pansies’ – could entirely obliterate the image of the young Manchester girl from his mind. Not even a no less dramatic brown-skinned girl called Rita could do so. Gerald had met Rita at an ‘at home’ held in a Mrs Clarabelle’s Georgetown boarding house. Among the host of beautiful girls of all colours who filled the room, his attention was riveted by one whose beauty made all the others fade into insignificance. ‘She had very pale, chestnut-coloured skin,’ he was to write in a private memoir, ‘the sort of shade you get by mixing half a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate with a pint of cream. Her hair was long, black, curly and as magnificent as a lion’s mane. She was slender, lithe, warm and tenacious, with superb legs, wonderfully expressive hands and a rich, musical laugh, as fresh and enchanting as a lark’s song. I sat down beside her.’

  ‘My name is Gerry,’ he said, opting for the near ultimate in chat-up lines, ‘and you are the most beautiful girl in the world.’

  ‘And you,’ said Rita, opting for the near ultimate in brush-offs, ‘are something else, man.’

  By April they had run out of money, and it was decided that Gerald should return to England with the main bulk of the collection, leaving Ken Smith behind until Gerald could remit funds to pay the debts incurred by the expedition, as well as the freight charges and the cost of Smith’s ticket home. Gerald sailed on the cargo boat Arakaka on 27 April 1950. It was not an agreeable voyage. Quite apart from the worry about present debts and future insolvency, he went down with a recurrence of the malaria he had contracted in the Cameroons.

  It was a shock to Jacquie when she found Gerald back in the living-room of her father’s hotel one May afternoon, ‘looking extremely fit and well and (even to my jaundiced eye) attractive’. Gerald was in Manchester because that was where the majority of the animals from British Guiana were being housed. His plan was to sell them off as soon as possible and send the proceeds out to Ken Smith, so that he could catch another batch of animals before returning home. Though Gerald was out for much of the day and night cleaning and feeding his charges, Jacquie was ‘appalled at the idea of having this disturbing influence around for so long’, and ‘even more determined to be off-putting’.

  But, to her discomfort, Gerald appeared to be developing a more sharply focused interest in her. She was not his normal type – not one of the ‘clumping carthorse blondes’ (as he once called them) towards whom he had instinctively veered in the past. ‘I always used to go like a bullet for the blondes,’ he confided to a friend a long time later, ‘but the ones I gave my heart to were the dark ones.’

  Jacquie, it seems, had a precursor, her name lost to memory, but her physical form evidently became the prototype to which Gerald’s eventual ‘true love’ would have to conform. ‘My first amour,’ he recalled of this proto-Jacquie, ‘swam into my life when I started dancing lessons in Bournemouth, and there she was, looking extraordinarily like Jacquie. In years I only kissed her once.’ When the real thing came along, therefore, Gerald recognised her at once – love not at first but at second sight. With her petite frame, large brown eyes, pert mouth, dark brown hair and youthful manner Jacquie was attractive enough. But she was more than that, as Gerald perceived early on.

  For one thing, she was a personality in her own right, intelligent, perceptive, and highly individual. She had a mind of her own and often spoke it, in the frank, forthright manner of the North Country. As a person she was mature beyond her years, self-assured, poised. Crucially, she was possessed of a keen sense of humour, and was quick to appreciate the humour of others, especially when it was as unpredictably original and fantastical as Gerald’s. In many ways she was a complement to Gerald, possessing some of the qualities he lacked. Where he was dreamy and romantic, she was practical and down-to-earth. Where he dithered, she was decisive. Where he was incompetent, she was competent. In her company Gerald became twice the man he was, the pipe dream became a blueprint, and the impossible possible. Above all, she never bored him. ‘There’s only one person I could tolerate for any length of time,’ he once told a friend, ‘and that’s Jacquie … She’s so quick, she stimulates the mind like an extra dose of adrenaline.’

  From the outset Gerald refused to be put off by Jacquie’s rebuffs. ‘She could be very brusque,’ he was to relate. ‘All her other boyfriends were comparatively inexperienced, whereas I was the first semi-adult she had encountered – she was a bit scared and didn’t know how to handle me. She knew that I was a man of the world, whatever that means, that I’d actually had “affairs” with “ladies”. So I suppose she found me a bit off-putting, fighting a rearguard action in case what did happen might happen.’

  His first move was to try and fire her interest in what impassioned him most – the animal world. He had to draw up a lot of long lists of the animals he had brought back from South America for the zoos, he told her. Was there any chance she could help him type them up on her father’s typewriter? Jacquie agreed, calculating that the sooner Gerald completed his business the sooner he would be gone. But the task proved gargantuan. She had never guessed that there were so many different birds and animals in the world, with so many strange and incomprehensible names. She bombarded Gerald with endless questions, enabling him to make his second move. Perhaps, he suggested, she ought to come-up to the zoo to see all the creatures she was asking about with her own eyes.

  ‘This did not appeal to me at all,’ Jacquie wrote later,

  as I held very strong views on the ethics of keeping any wild creatures in captivity. Strangely enough, Gerry did not try to persuade me or pressure me into going with him the next day, neither did he defend zoos in general, but he did try to explain what the real function of a well-run zoo should be, and how vital it was, in the face of the population explosion and the spread of civilisation, that wildlife should be preserved for future generations.

  Zoos, he argued, would eventually be the last sanctuary for wild things as man increased in numbers and slowly encroached on the natural habitat. It was inevitable that when the interests of man conflicted with those of wildlife, the animals would go to the wall. His most cherished ambition in life was to create a special zoo where he could keep and breed some of these creatures in the hope that they would not be completely exterminated, and the one thing he felt passionately about was that all zoos must cease to be mere showplaces and become true scientific institutions where the welfare of the animals was of paramount importance.

  They reached Belle Vue Zoo and entered the large wooden building which housed Gerald’s loudly squealing and chattering South American collection. Jacquie’s previous experiences of zoos had convinced her that they were ‘horrible, smelly places where I would not dream of keeping a dead cat’. It was immediately obvious that this was different. The prevailing odour was sweet and pleasant, a mixture of fresh straw, good food and warm animal bodies. Even more impressive was Gerald’s relationship with the creatures in his care:

  Suddenly, this seemingly shallow young man became a different person. Gone was the diffident air as he walked solemnly up and down the lines of cages, giving each creature titbits and talking to them. He really cared about them, and they, in a funny way, returned this love and interest with obvious trust. Like small children, they would scream out to attract his attention, or jump up and down eagerly, waiting to be noticed. I followed slowly behind him along the passageways and peered, I admit rather timidly, into each cage, becoming quite absorbed by these lovely creatures. Without doubt all these animals knew that they were being looked at in a special way, and yet they did not appear to resent my being there.

  We spent quite a long time there, while Gerry gave every animal a second feed and renewed any wet straw, and I just sat on a box and watche
d him. He worked quietly and efficiently, obviously enjoying himself, and talking to every animal as he passed. He had certainly forgotten that I was there, and concentrated his entire attention on the animals. The whole thing fascinated me.

  Following the zoo visit, the friendship between the two developed fast. Jacquie was working in her father’s town office, and the phone never stopped ringing as Gerald bombarded her with invitations to dinner, coffee, tea, theatre, cinema. Noticing the amount of time she was spending out of the office, her father grew worried that she was succumbing to the attentions of a man who was, as she put it, ‘totally different from my usual male friends’.

  The crisis seemed to have been averted when Gerald announced one morning, much to the relief of Jacquie’s father, that the time had come for him to leave Manchester. All the animals he was keeping there had now gone to their various zoos, and it was time he paid a visit to his mother, whom he had not seen since he left England in January.

  Jacquie took Gerald to the station, bade her goodbyes, and returned to her office. Soon afterwards, her father rang. Had Gerald caught the train all right? Yes, she said, he had gone. As she put the phone down the door burst open, and there stood Gerald, framed in the doorway, thrusting a large bunch of faded chrysanthemums in her direction.

  ‘These are for you,’ he said.

  He half turned to leave, then hesitated.

  ‘You wouldn’t like to marry me, would you?’ he asked.

  Receiving no positive response, he shrugged his shoulders and gave a wry grin. ‘I didn’t think you would.’

  Gerald made his second exit of the morning, and this time he didn’t come back. But soon, by every post, letters, postcards, parcels and lengthy telegrams began to arrive at the hotel. Jacquie’s father was dismayed. What was going on between her and the Durrell chap, he demanded. Obviously the Durrell chap was hoping to take advantage of her, if he hadn’t already. The world was full of men who led innocent young women astray. The Durrell chap was obviously one of them. ‘After all, who is he?’ her father asked. ‘On his own admission he comes from a very dubious background, and he certainly has no money, nor is ever likely to have.’ If Jacquie was going to marry anyone, it would have to be someone more substantial, ‘like a lawyer or a doctor,’ she recalled, ‘who could support me if my singing voice ever gave out’.

  Looking back, Jacquie could see that he did have a point. ‘My father had no reason to believe that Gerry would be any different in the future than what he seemed to be then.’ Gerry gave every impression of being indolent and unambitious. He was penniless and thriftless, carting about with him a suitcase of unopened bills. He believed that he was washed up, that he would never go on another collecting expedition. And having acquired a taste for whisky in Africa, he frequently resorted to it in England, in the belief that it had the power to dissolve all his problems away. It was this, probably, that alarmed Jacquie’s father most of all. ‘My father’s father died at a relatively early age through alcohol,’ Jacquie remembered. ‘Father himself, given a couple of drinks, turned into a raving lunatic. So, with this built-in abhorrence of drink, anyone who to his mind was inclined that way had to be left severely alone, especially if this chap wanted to get mixed up with his daughter.’

  But Gerald would not give up. When Jacquie angrily rebuked him over the phone for pestering her with letters and gifts, he quietly suggested he come up to Manchester to talk with her father and straighten everything out. Two days later he was back at the hotel, closeted in a room with Jacquie’s father. But instead of the raised voices and vituperation Jacquie had expected to hear, there came only the sounds of chat and laughter. Gerald eventually emerged, smiling happily. Her father had no objections to him personally, he told Jacquie, nor to him going out with his daughter. As Jacquie was to comment later: ‘Gerald took it as a right to get everything he wanted, and frankly no one could refuse him.’

  Jacquie was furious with Gerald for persisting, and with her father for giving ground. To punish her father, she calculatedly encouraged her suitor. If her father really believed she was emotionally involved with Gerry and might run off with him – well, she would be. She persuaded Gerald to stay on a few more days, then spent every available moment with him, staying out until all hours, infuriating the older man while leading the younger one on. ‘I had entered into this game as a way of getting back at stupidity,’ Jacquie recalled, ‘but I suddenly realised that our attitude to each other had changed. Having spent every spare minute together, it soon began to dawn on us that we were getting emotionally involved and that it would not be easy to say goodbye.’

  Gerald returned to Bournemouth. By now Mother’s house was in the process of being sold, and she had moved into Margaret’s house across the road, most of which Margaret had converted into a number of small flats for rent. A warren of rooms on three floors was inhabited by a troupe of eccentric lodgers, from jazz trumpeters and a painter of nudes to a battered wife and a Maltese transsexual. Margaret recalled Gerald’s arrival vividly:

  His arrival eclipsed all else for the next twenty-four hours. Mother’s face, unlike mine, cheered delightedly at the sight of her youngest son. I groaned aloud as the familiar boyish face, very like my own, grinned at the mob racing to the gate to greet him. He stepped from the car, tall, fair and debonair, holding a sack carefully in one hand as if carrying a rare gift, but I knew better than that. There was an involved gesticulated discussion which seemed to involve the house, the garage and the large wooden cage that was resting on the boot of the taxi. I knew the meaning of the sack and the wooden box.

  ‘If he puts one foot over my threshold,’ I said in a voice of doom, ‘I’m done for.’

  ‘Too late, dear,’ said Mother in a queer voice, as many hands lifted the crate and it cleared the gate tipped at a crazy angle.

  ‘Just a few monkeys,’ Gerald called out airily, seeing Mother and me for the first time and throwing a saucy eye heavenwards towards an upstairs window, where two half-clad female bodies, disturbed from their slumbers, watched him.

  ‘I hope there is nothing dangerous in that sack, dear,’ Mother enquired, kissing her youngest tenderly.

  ‘It’s a six-foot python,’ Gerald replied carelessly, ‘but harmless.’

  Gerald was now penniless – ‘living on ten Woodbines a day and a lot of tea’. He had not made the killing he had hoped for from his expeditions, his assets amounted to no more than £200, and he had no job. Worse, his health began to go steadily downhill, probably the after-effect of the malignant malaria he had contracted in the Cameroons.

  What to do? It was a difficult situation. As things stood, marriage was impossible. For one thing, Jacquie was still under age. The best option would be for Gerald to get a job. The only thing he knew anything about was the animal world, but zoo jobs were hard to get, and his hopes were not high. It was a dire handicap that he had fallen foul of George Cansdale, the Superintendent of the London Zoo and a powerful figure in the Federation of Zoological Gardens of Great Britain and Ireland.

  ‘Cansdale hated Gerry’s guts,’ Jacquie recalled, ‘and did everything in his power to thwart him. Cansdale was extremely jealous of Gerry because he regarded himself as “the only” authority on West African fauna and deeply resented anyone who intruded into his private domain. The thing that really sealed Gerry’s fate was when he brought back an extremely rare mammal that had eluded Cansdale called an angwantibo. It was the first time a live specimen had been brought back to the UK and naturally caused a zoological stir at that time. Apart from this, Gerry was never slow to criticise zoos, and London Zoo in particular. He regarded them all as commercial sideshows, not much better than circuses.’

  David Attenborough, a near contemporary of Gerald’s whose first Zoo Quest series for BBC Television in 1954 told the story of a London Zoo collecting expedition to West Africa, believes that Gerald had every reason to be critical: ‘A great proportion of the animals were not bred in the zoo, so specimens had continually to be tak
en from the wild; and the zoo still had the Victorian idea that a scientific zoo had to exhibit the maximum number of species, like a stamp collection. George Cansdale could be very overbearing and was not really a popular man at the zoo. Eventually he was sacked for alleged irregularities of one kind or another and quite a lot of people were very pleased to see him go. So to have an ex junior trainee from Whipsnade pipe up and say all this was nonsense would not have pleased him at all.’ And indeed it did not. Gerald was blackballed by the British zoo establishment – in the form of an ad hoc group of directors of non-commercial zoos – to whom Cansdale sent a round-robin letter unfairly accusing him of neglecting his animals and incompetence as a collector.

  From the hubbub of Margaret’s house, whose collective night noises reminded him of the Amazon rainforest before a storm, Gerald continued the fruitless search for suitable work. Finally, despairing of finding a more senior post, he used his contact with the Belle Vue Zoo to obtain a short-term job looking after its aquarium, sometimes keeping an eye on the reptile house as well, and this kept him busy for much of the second half of 1950. Gerald was never to write a word about this obscure period of his working life, mentioning it only twice, once as an aside to a friend, and once in a letter to his bank. Despite his diffidence about it, this relatively low-key post kept him in funds after the losses he had incurred on his last expedition; and more importantly, it kept him close to Jacquie, at whose hotel home he was to live throughout that time.

  Margaret remembered Gerald’s eventual departure from Bournemouth almost as clearly as his arrival: ‘Disorganising the entire household, Gerald collected up his python with a showy tenderness and, putting me in unwilling protesting charge of the monkeys in the garage, he left me with the unhappy thought that he would be back soon, the only consolation being that so far none of my lodgers had given notice.’