The moment Gerald’s back was turned, the monkeys in the garage saw their chance and bolted. The first Margaret knew about it was when a huffy neighbour called Lord Booth telephoned her.
‘There is an animal in my bedroom,’ he growled, ‘that has knocked over the light and is eating my tobacco!’
Shortly afterwards a police car pulled up outside the house.
‘Good morning,’ one of the officers said. ‘Are you missing anything? Some monkeys, perhaps?’
Twelve had gone missing, and only three had been sighted so far. The rest had made their way into town, where the local paper started a daily column with news of sightings and of the escapades they had been involved in. Gerald arrived to take charge, and one by one the prodigals returned. ‘They greeted their foster father with recognisable cries of welcome and touching shows of affection,’ Margaret recalled. ‘Touching, that is, to those who had not suffered the galling indignities of chasing a monkey, or its bites!’
Jacquie, meanwhile, had come of age and no longer needed parental consent to be married, but this only made life with father at home more strained. It was a relief, therefore, when Margaret invited her to visit Bournemouth for a long weekend in the late autumn. Margaret was getting married again, and thought this was a good opportunity for Jacquie to meet the rest of the family, especially as it looked as if she might become a part of it herself in due course.
Gerald brought her down to Bournemouth, and it was quite late by the time they reached the boarding house, the new fulcrum of the Durrells’ family life. Any prior knowledge Jacquie had about the family was based on what Gerald had sketched out for her – but that was enough. ‘I was quite frankly terrified at the thought of meeting them all,’ she admitted. ‘It would be unpleasant to live so close to them if I was not completely accepted.’
Her first encounter was with Margaret and her second-husband-to-be, a strapping twenty-one-year-old corporal in the Life Guards by the name of Malcolm Duncan. Margaret was sitting on a divan in a long tartan housecoat, in a room with ‘what looked like half an orchard protruding out of the fire’. The walls were covered with brightly coloured oriental rugs and picture postcards of faraway places. To Jacquie’s untravelled eye the ambience of Margaret’s home in this staid part of the South of England was unexpectedly Bohemian.
Margaret greeted the new arrivals with a cheerful grin. Mother had grown tired of waiting up and had gone to bed, she said. There was food in the larder and their beds had been made up. They sat around the fire, talking and eating. If ever Gerald and Jacquie did get married, she said, she could put them up in one of her flats till they got themselves sorted out. So far so good.
But not everyone was pleased to see Jacquie, as Margaret recalled: ‘When Gerald was staying with me he had a bit of a fling with one of my lodgers, an attractive young nurse, a rather Swedish-looking girl with dyed blonde hair, and a lot of fun. She was really very fond of Gerry and she was terribly upset when he brought Jacquie down to stay and realised it was all over between them. I don’t think that she knew he had been playing the field around Bournemouth, and had also been going out with a young redhead whose family lived at the bottom of the hill.’
Next morning Gerald introduced Jacquie to Mother. ‘I was astonished,’ Jacquie recalled of that first encounter with the linchpin of the family. ‘She was completely different from how I had imagined her; instead of the tall, rather forbidding woman I had always pictured, here was a tiny, gentle person with merry blue eyes and silver hair.’
‘Thank God you’re not a blonde, dear,’ said Mother, grinning wickedly.
‘I gathered later that all her favourite son’s past girlfriends had been blonde and blue-eyed – cow-like is how Mrs Durrell described them – and she had an absolute horror of one of them becoming her daughter-in-law.’
It was not just Mother who was surprised by the girl Gerald seemed to have chosen to marry. Petite, pretty, elfin, boyish, Jacquie was almost adolescent to look at, and was so different from anyone Gerald had ever come home with before that Margaret and Mother wondered what had induced him to fall in love with her. Not even Jacquie herself was sure of the answer – but they took to her immediately.
Two down and only the two other brothers to go. Larry was away in Yugoslavia with the Foreign Service, but Leslie’s turn came later in the day. ‘He came bursting into the living-room, looking for his mother, scowled at me, turned on his heels and went into the kitchen,’ Jacquie recounted later. ‘Gerry brought him back into the room and introduced us. He was a dark-haired young man with penetrating blue eyes, and like the rest of the family, apart from Gerry, not much taller than me.’ Jacquie liked Leslie, indeed she liked them all, and she found it hard to drag herself away from the warm, cheery, supportive family home and return to the oppressive, disapproving atmosphere of her father’s hotel up north.
Life with father went from bad to worse. Though Jacquie no longer needed his approval to get married, she hoped at least for his blessing. But he bitterly opposed the idea of her marrying Gerald – indeed, he probably opposed the idea of her marrying anyone. ‘Nothing would make my father relent,’ she remembered sadly, ‘and in the end he even refused to discuss it with me.’ A crisis loomed. Gerald was pressing her for a decision. Margaret renewed her offer of accommodation. Mother Durrell said she could help financially till Gerald, who had finished his stint at Belle Vue, was earning again. ‘I felt dreadful,’ Jacquie wrote later. ‘I didn’t want to alienate my father or go against his wishes, and yet I felt that this was my one opportunity to break free once and for all and have a life of my own.’
Jacquie lived in a whirl of indecision. There were many things to consider. Gerald had no job and no money, and her father would cut her off without a penny if she married against his wishes. She had a promising career in music which she would have to forgo if she married Gerald. Gerald needed someone who shared his interest in animals and foreign travel, and she was not sure she could commit herself to all that. True, he was an amusing and charming companion, and she felt she could rely on him utterly. On the other hand, she recorded, ‘there was the question of temperament – we had absolutely nothing in common … Ours was the attraction of opposites. With our totally different natures we complemented each other perfectly.’ She was left-wing and he was right-wing. She was fascinated by history and politics, but he wasn’t. She was a city-lover, while he hankered for wide-open spaces. She loved cricket, but he couldn’t stand the game – or indeed any games at all. She was thrifty and took life seriously, while he was extravagant and lived for the moment. The only points of contact between them were animals and possibly music, but here again, while she loved opera and jazz, he did not.
A resolution to the dilemma came unexpectedly. Towards the end of February 1951, Jacquie’s father had to go away for a few days on business. Shortly after he had gone Gerald arrived unexpectedly at the hotel. There was nothing else for it – Jacquie would have to make up her mind once and for all, and in short order. ‘If you’re going to marry me,’ he told her, ‘you’ve got to break your strings with your father, so do it sensibly.’ She promised him an answer within forty-eight hours. For the next two days neither of them raised the matter, and at the end of that time they went out to see a film and have supper. It was late when they got back, and everyone in the hotel had gone to bed. The two of them sat in the living-room and talked and talked, though not about marriage. ‘Suddenly I felt very tired and was horrified to see that it was five o’clock,’ Jacquie recounted afterwards. ‘In our mad rush to get out of the door we both somehow jammed in the doorway, and as we were disentangling ourselves Gerry said very quietly, “Well, will you marry me?” As my resistance is always at its lowest ebb at that hour of the morning, I said, “Yes, of course I will,” and so the trouble was over.’
Father was due back any time now. There was only one course – to elope. Jacquie and Gerry decided to run off to Bournemouth and get married as soon as they could. They only had £40
in the world between them, but it was enough. To the consternation of Jacquie’s stepmother, the pair spent much of the next day feverishly packing up Jacquie’s possessions – and not a few of Gerald’s – into tea chests, boxes and brown-paper parcels. By six the next morning they were piling into two taxis with all their baggage and heading for the station to catch the first train south. As they piled the stuff in to the carriage, an elderly guard looked mournfully on.
‘Are you two getting married?’ he asked at length.
Struggling with her pile of bursting parcels, Jacquie answered a frantic ‘Yes.’
‘Well Gawd ’elp yer,’ the guard replied, and waved his flag.
‘The guard was right, of course,’ said Gerald a long time later, ‘but then fortunately He has.’
As the train bore the eloping couple in the direction of London, Jacquie’s father returned to find no daughter, a wildly agitated wife, and a brief explanatory note. He never forgave her: ‘I never saw my father, or my stepmother, or my two half-brothers, or my two half-sisters, or any of my family ever again.’
Returning to the Durrell ménage was like passing from night to day. The whole family had gathered to welcome the pair, bubbling over with enthusiasm for the prospective wedding. Even Larry had written from Belgrade to say how much he approved. All they had to do was fix the day. Gerald thought it ought to be as soon as possible, in case Jacquie’s father turned up with a shotgun. So plans were laid and roles delegated, and next morning Jacquie and Gerald set off to besiege the register office, while Margaret took charge of the catering and Mother and Leslie saw to the drinks. The wedding was fixed for three days’ time, Monday, 26 February 1951. The cake was ordered, the flowers arranged, the ring – ‘modest, slim, octagonal, gold’ – chosen, a little flatlet in the attic of the house made ready for the future newlyweds. ‘The whole atmosphere was absurd,’ recalled Jacquie. ‘Everyone else was thrilled and excited, whilst Gerry and I were carrying on like an ancient married couple.’ In the middle of all this turmoil Margaret’s first husband, Jack Breeze, arrived, and was instantly roped in as best man.
‘You poor thing,’ said Jack to Jacquie. ‘How did you get embroiled with the Durrells? You didn’t have to, did you?’
The morning of 26 February was, as Jacquie recalled, ‘the dreariest day, grey and muggy’. The couple duly presented themselves at the register office, with Margaret and Jack as witnesses. Jacquie was wearing an old coat, a borrowed blouse and a new pair of nylons. ‘Durrell had even cleaned his shoes,’ she recorded, ‘a really startling phenomenon.’ Though the ceremony was short, it was still long enough for Jacquie to have doubts.
‘It’s too late,’ whispered Gerry, squeezing her hand in the car on the way back to the house. ‘I’ve got you now.’
At least, that’s what Jacquie thought he said. Gerald remembered it differently. ‘Without wishing to be too unkind,’ he corrected her later, ‘and while prepared, at a pinch, to admit my memory may be at fault, I was under the strong impression that what I actually said was “It’s too late. You’ve got me now.”’
The deed was done. Gerald Malcolm Durrell, zoologist, aged twenty-six, and Jacqueline Sonia Rasen, music student, aged twenty-one, were man and wife. Like all newlyweds, they now had to live with the consequences. Most marriages are a journey and an adventure, and most have modest beginnings. Gerald and Jacquie’s was no exception. But theirs was to be no ordinary marriage, for it was also a kind of strategic alliance, at least for a while. For Gerald certainly, and for Jacquie to a lesser degree, life would never have been the same if they had not married one another. They were two utterly different people – different in both temperament and outlook – who complemented each other exactly for a period of time. Without Jacquie to prime and blast him into space, so to speak, it is possible that Gerald might never have fulfilled his potential, and no one would ever have heard of him. ‘I knew life with Gerry would involve me in an entirely different world,’ Jacquie was to say, ‘but I cared for him so much that I was certain this wouldn’t worry me.’
ELEVEN
Writing Man
1951–1953
The little flatlet in Margaret’s boarding house was fun, a tiny attic room overlooking a large back garden, with a view to the rising ground of St Catherine’s Head in the distance. There was no money for a honeymoon, but married life was novel enough in itself. ‘We had our honeymoon on the carpet,’ Gerald recalled happily of those basic beginnings, ‘in front of the sitting-room fire.’ The room was just big enough to take a double bed, a small desk, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers and one fireside chair. It was simple but cosy, especially when there was a fire burning in the little grate, and it didn’t matter much that there were no cooking facilities, as they ate downstairs en famille.
Their pleasures were simple, but they were never bored. ‘There were masses of books to read,’ Jacquie remembered, ‘lovely country for us to walk in, and dear Jack Breeze had given us an old radio. So far, Gerry had two main vices – cigarettes and tea drinking – and I was determined that whatever happened he was not going to give these up.’ Jacquie was to look back on the days in the flatlet as the happiest period of their marriage. She enjoyed a good relationship with the rest of the family, and there were no outside distractions, nothing (as yet) to knock Gerald off kilter.
‘Jacquie was very good for Gerry in the early days,’ recalled the Durrell family’s Bournemouth GP, Alan Ogden. ‘In those days Gerry had a sense of insecurity which he tried to conceal, and he lacked the self-confidence with which he later matured. Jacquie was an uncomplaining support, accepting the tough times and providing the backing of practical optimism.’
Money was the enemy. There was none, and no obvious prospect of getting any. Gerald’s three expensive collecting expeditions had burned up his inheritance, and only earned enough to pay for their costs. The couple were too poor to afford a daily newspaper, so every day they trotted down to Bournemouth Central Library to look through the job ads. Gerald’s lack of qualifications was a handicap, as was his lack of business training or experience. When all his efforts to find a job in England came to nothing, he decided he would have to look abroad – one of the game departments in the African colonies, perhaps, or even emigration to Australia. They looked up the addresses of all the zoos in Australia, America and Canada, and fired off applications to every one of them, enclosing a CV outlining Gerald’s experience in the animal business to date. Few bothered to reply, and those that did had no vacancies. Gerald was so depressed by his situation, Margaret noted, that at times he was reduced to tears.
The feud with George Cansdale at London Zoo did little to help. ‘Cansdale behaved in an appalling way,’ Jacquie said later, ‘and tried to destroy Gerry in the most despicable ways. Fortunately Gerry did have a few friends in the zoo world who warned him of Cansdale’s intentions, so he was prepared to a certain extent. However, it was due to this vendetta that we spent the first years of our marriage without money and living in a room measuring twelve feet by nine. The whole business really soured Gerry and reinforced his determination to show the zoo world what he could do as an example of how to run an animal institution properly – where the animals came first at all times.’
As a stopgap, Gerald agreed to fill in as temporary relief manager of a little menagerie, part of a seaside funfair at Margate, belonging to a former associate of his. For Gerald the job was really the end of the world. This establishment represented everything he loathed about the zoos of the time, most of which were nothing more than peep-shows, badly-run components of the holiday business. But anything was better than nothing, and though all he would get was free food and lodging in lieu of salary, he jumped at the chance of working with animals again. For Jacquie – ‘deeply involved in skinning bananas, peeling oranges, destoning cherries, bottle-feeding babies and generally learning about animal keeping the hard way’ – the experience was a revelation.
But before long the couple were back in their tiny Bournem
outh room, still penniless and without prospects. It was then that Jacquie began to explore another possibility. In between cutting up fruit and clearing out cages in Margate she had tried to work out what untapped resources they could harness to raise a few pounds. Gerald, she knew very well, was a born raconteur, and could keep a company spellbound or splitting their sides with his tales of his childhood in Corfu and his adventures in the African wilds. Perhaps he could present these stories to a wider audience. She had no idea whether he could write, but there was already a proven writer in the Durrell family. Larry, so she gathered, had always tried to encourage Gerald to write when he was a boy, and even if Gerald couldn’t write for toffee, perhaps Larry could help. Jacquie recalled: ‘If one Durrell could write and make money out of it, why should another one not try? So began Operation Nag. Poor Durrell suffered. For days I went on and on about him writing something for somebody.’
‘I can’t write, at least not like Larry.’
‘How do you know you can’t write until you try?’
‘What can I write about anyway?’
‘Well, about those trips you’ve been on.’
‘Who on earth wants to know about all that?’
‘I do, so get on with it.’
But Gerald hated writing. And he couldn’t spell. None of the Durrells could, apart from Mother. Oblivious of the vividness and fluency of his African diaries, Gerald was convinced he had no literary talent whatsoever. It required something more positively goading than a nagging wife to force him to a desk, and in May 1951 this arrived, in the form of the ebullient and persuasive Larry, hotfoot from Belgrade with his new wife, the raven-haired and exotic Eve.
Larry had taken extended leave from his Foreign Service job so that Eve, now in the late stages of pregnancy, could have her child in England, and called in on the family in Bournemouth before continuing on to Oxford, where Eve was due to check in to the Churchill Hospital for her confinement. Eve was the third new spouse to be presented to the Durrell clan in three months, for a month after Jacquie and Gerald’s wedding, Margaret had married her Life Guard, Malcolm Duncan, with Gerald and Jacquie as witnesses.
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