Jacquie had been somewhat daunted at the prospect of meeting Larry. She had heard a lot about him – about his brilliance, his intellectual energy, his avant garde attitudes and Bohemian lifestyle, his ways with women – and his reputation had grown ever more formidable in his absence. She was relieved that the encounter, in the end, proved less fraught than she had feared: ‘Although a meeting with the genius of the family was a bit awe-inspiring, I must admit that he was far nicer than I had ever imagined. Larry was small and stocky and instantly recognisable as a Durrell, with all the Durrell charm and humour, though far more sophisticated and suave.’
Larry was greatly concerned to hear that Gerald was down on his uppers, and without a job.
‘Why on earth don’t you write a book about these dreadful trips you go on, and make some money for a change,’ Jacquie remembered him hectoring his recalcitrant young brother. ‘After all, the British simply love stories about fluffy animals and jungles, and it’s so easy to do.’
Gerald was unconvinced, but reckoned he could just about squeeze a book out of his three expeditions.
‘My dear boy,’ said Larry, aghast, ‘you are not seriously suggesting that you write three trips up as one book, are you? You must be mad. Surely to heaven you can get a book out of each one?’
Gerald was unmoved. He couldn’t write. He had nothing to write about. He hadn’t even got a typewriter. It was a rotten idea. He wanted nothing to do with it. But Larry persisted. Try it and see, he told him. He’d be happy to read the first few chapters and give an honest opinion and any practical help he could. He was even prepared to give Gerald an introduction to his own publishers, Faber & Faber. ‘Take my advice,’ he warned, ‘don’t bother with agents. They cheat you and take your money for nothing. They only put themselves out when you are a success.’
Alan Thomas drove Larry and Eve up to Oxford, and at the end of May Eve duly gave birth to a daughter, Sappho. In Bournemouth, meanwhile, Gerald’s malaria lingered on, and Alan Ogden came to check him over. ‘Gerry was lying on a mattress on the floor in a sparsely furnished room,’ he recalled. ‘He would often come back from trips to the tropics and ask me what was wrong with him, and often I’d have to say “G.O.K.” – God Only Knows. This time it was the malignant malaria again, a serious condition of the Plasmodium falciparum variety. I started him on quinine, but when I suggested to Jacquie that she should give him a very light, high-fluid diet, she asked if bread and tea would do, as that was all they had.’
Jacquie realised something had to be done. ‘We were holed up in a room measuring twelve foot by nine and costing £2.10.0 a week and we were subsisting on a diet of bread and tea,’ she recalled, adding wryly: ‘We would still be sitting there living on bread and tea if I hadn’t kicked his butt and forced him to get up and do something.’ Gerald’s resistance to the very idea of writing began to break down before her persistent cajoling. The turning point came a few days after Larry and Eve had left. Gerald had been listening to a BBC radio talk about life in West Africa, and complained how bad it was. Jacquie rounded on him. If he thought he could do better, then why didn’t he give it a go? ‘Promise me that you’ll do it,’ she insisted. ‘At least it’s better than rotting here.’
Several days passed, and nothing more was said. Then one morning Jacquie overheard Gerald asking Margaret if she had any friends who could lend him a typewriter. Jack Breeze had an old one, Margaret told him, but he was away, so Gerald would have to wait till he got back. But by now Gerald had got the bit between his teeth. He couldn’t wait. He’d hire a typewriter. Since he couldn’t afford the charge, he’d sell some of his precious books to raise the money. The loss of the books seemed to spur him on. He sat down and began to make tentative notes about his African adventures, searching for an episode that might make a fifteen-minute radio script.
‘I’ve got it,’ he proudly announced to Jacquie one morning. ‘I’m going to write about the Hairy Frog and how I caught it.’
So Gerald Durrell embarked on his first piece of professional writing. Reluctantly seated at the tiny desk in the tiny room at the back of Margaret’s house, kept going by endless pots of tea supplied by the ever-attentive Jacquie, the agonised tyro tap-tapped with finger and thumb on his clackety old hired typewriter, and slowly, laboriously, painfully, with much staring into space and many sighs and groans and (to the alarm of Jacquie) occasional total silences, the words went down, the lines filled up, the story unfolded and The Hunt for the Hairy Frog began to take shape.
As each page filled up with type it was passed over to Jacquie, who gave her comments and corrected his spelling by a painstaking method that entailed typing each correction on to sticky paper, cutting it out and pasting it over the offending word – ‘a tedious business, but it did get the damn thing finished’. Jacquie recalled: ‘I became engrossed in the story of the strange amphibian with thick hair-like filaments on its hind legs, that Gerry had found, captured and brought back to the London Zoo, and I simply could not wait for the pages to roll off the typewriter.’
The story began:
Our base camp in the Cameroons was in a clearing on the banks of the Cross River, at the edge of the forest. Here we erected a huge marquee, and in this we lived, together with our specimens. As the news of our arrival spread, hunters from all parts came to our camp clearing, bringing animals to sell to us. Sometimes the capture would be in a basket, sometimes wrapped in leaves or tied on the end of a stick, and occasionally it would arrive wrapped up in its owner’s loin cloth, and the hunter would stand there naked and unembarrassed while he bargained fiercely with us over the price …
Jacquie anxiously turned the page as the story moved on.
All the hunters that we interviewed knew the animals we wanted. They knew them all, that is, except the one we wanted most … the Hairy Frog. They had never even heard of such a thing: frogs, certainly, but frogs with hairs …! With the air of someone humouring a child they would suggest that perhaps what I meant was a water rat. No, I did not mean a water rat. A frog with hair on its legs was what I wanted, and nothing less would please me.
Another page emerged from the tiny room where the tethered Gerald sipped his tea and tapped his keys. Jacquie read:
Night after night the hunters and I would wade up and down these icy watercourses, turning over rocks and looking into holes, shouting to make ourselves heard above the roar of the waterfalls. I had just decided that we were going to be unsuccessful once again, when I caught sight of my first Hairy Frog. He was perched on a rock at the side of a deep pool, a great, fat, beautiful, chocolate-coloured frog, big enough to cover a saucer, and his legs and sides were covered with a thick pelt of hair. I knew that if he jumped into those dark waters there was no chance of catching him, so I flung myself forward and grabbed him by one leg. But I had overlooked this frog’s defensive armoury: his claws …
Jacquie was beside herself. The man could write after all. And he could write like a dream. Gerald’s simple, seemingly artless, deceptively straightforward story, devoid of literary pretensions, embodied everything that he had learnt from his haphazard reading and desultory literary discussions with Larry in years gone by, and went beyond the best of the set-piece descriptive passages in his Africa diaries. Vivid, fluent, direct, accessible, funny and enlightening by turns, Gerald’s writing possessed the common touch but also a fully fledged professional expertise.
The script was posted off to the BBC Talks Department, and the couple waited in hope and mounting penury for the reply. But no reply came, and soon Gerald was mooning about the tiny flat just as before. ‘You do realise, don’t you, that Larry has had many things rejected,’ he told Jacquie. ‘So don’t pin your faith on one little talk.’ Later, inexplicably, he said: ‘Why don’t you have your hair cut? I’m tired of you looking like a central European refugee.’ Without more ado Gerald and Margaret took Jacquie to the bathroom and sheared her locks off with a pair of scissors. By the time they had finished she looked more like a boy tha
n ever, but she and Gerald were pleased with effect, which emphasised her elfin good looks. Jacquie was to wear her hair short for ever more.
Finally, in the autumn, they received a letter from a Mr T.B. Radley, a BBC talks producer. He had read the hairy frog script and enjoyed it very much, he wrote. In fact he thought it was quite delightful. Could Mr Durrell give him a ring at Broadcasting House so that they could discuss it further? There was great excitement at 51 St Alban’s Avenue – but no phone, so they all rushed down to the off-licence where Leslie lived with Doris. In some trepidation Gerald picked up the handset, dialled the number he had been given and was put through. Yes, Mr Radley confirmed, he wanted to broadcast the hairy frog script. The fee would be fifteen guineas, and he wanted Gerald to read the script himself.
On Friday, 7 December 1951, Gerald travelled up to London for an hour’s rehearsal in Studio 3D. On the following Sunday, 9 December, he did the real thing in Studio 3G, and the talk was beamed out live on the Home Service to whoever in the kingdom happened to be sitting near a radio set between 11.15 and 11.30 that wintry morning. Gerald proved to be a natural broadcaster, with a warm, engaging, curiously charismatic baritone voice not unlike that of Dylan Thomas, who was also broadcasting stories and poems around that time.
More radio broadcasts were to follow – Animal Mysteries, How a Zoo Gets its Animals and others – but more pressing was the question of a book. The success of the Hairy Frog had finally persuaded Gerald that it might conceivably be worth having a shot at writing a book. He had a subject – the first Cameroons expedition – and even a title: The Overloaded Ark (for if Noah had confined himself to species from the Cameroons alone, the Ark would have been overloaded). A book was a different kind of beast to a fifteen-minute radio talk, though – bigger, more complex, more time-consuming, a test of character as well as talent. Gerald began to write, sustained by an allowance of £3 a week from Mother.
This was the beginning of a strange existence which put not a little strain on the marriage. Gerald found he preferred to work at night, when the world was quiet. But Jacquie was a light sleeper, and the clatter of the ancient typewriter, only a few feet from her head in the tiny room, kept her awake for much of the night. Things improved when Jack Breeze turned up and lent Gerald his quieter portable, but the book was a physical and psychological ordeal for both husband and wife.
Though The Overloaded Ark was a first book, it was far from being an absolute beginner’s book. Gerald knew what he was striving for, and had a fair idea how to achieve it. Years later he recounted to a friend, the author and critic David Hughes, the techniques he used to tell his tale:
It all started long before, when Leslie used to come home from Dulwich on holiday and tell me Billy Bunter stories. He used to embellish them with his own bits and pieces, add a dash of his own school adventures, imitate a master or two in a very clever and vivid fashion. He had the same gift as Larry, only untutored, not so well developed, and unconsciously I must have been absorbing the fact that this was the way to tell a story. Because when I started writing The Overloaded Ark I found it difficult to convey a character until I discovered how to do it by description and a trick of speech – and most people have tricks of speech. My first impulse was to imitate physically what I was trying to get over to the reader, but you can’t imitate on paper. So I had to sit down and learn the knack of translating an imitation into words by means of timing and suitable exaggeration and knowing how, in the film sense, to cut. I was learning to edit events so that they offset one another funnily, highlighting an episode that may have happened at the tail-end of an expedition by twisting the whole plot to put it up front.
The older Gerald makes all this sound quite fun. The younger Gerald, however, loathed every second of it – it was not nearly as attractive as cleaning out a monkey’s cage. ‘As a form of manual labour,’ he said at around this time, ‘I find it one of the most unexciting and exhausting known to man. I took up writing in desperation, having spent all my capital. If I had been able to obtain an unending stream of finance I would never have written a word. But to suddenly find yourself possessed of a wife, two pelicans, a capuchin monkey and £40 in cash as your total assets is, to say the least, disconcerting.’
Often he wrote while lying on his stomach on the floor, smoking more cigarettes than he should and drinking vast quantities of tea. ‘When I show signs of flagging,’ he complained, ‘my wife, far from soothing my sweating brow, goads me on by showing me a bank statement.’
He had two main concerns as he wrote his book: how to reconstruct what he had experienced in the Cameroons, and how to present it to the reader in the most effective way. He had hoped his expedition diary would solve the first problem, but he was mistaken. ‘Diaries, I have discovered, are almost completely useless,’ he said. For one thing, they were usually written late at night after a hard day’s work. For another, the pages were full of distracting marks and stains (tea, whiskey, medicine, squashed bugs, blood) which took hours of brain-racking detective work to interpret.
There was an even more fundamental drawback. The raw material of travel diaries often reads like an inchoate muddle, a raggle-taggle of random incidents, seemingly without order or purpose. Even at this early stage in his literary career Gerald was canny enough to realise that a non-fiction author could not ignore some of the techniques necessary to a fiction author: reorganising his material by means of selection, compression, inversion and the rest, in order to leach out the inner essence of his story and recreate his experiences on paper to best effect. What he was trying to do as he struggled to complete his first book was to express an imaginative truth rather than to relay a collection of bare facts. ‘Truth and fact may be related,’ wrote another new travel writer, Gavin Maxwell, then also struggling with the mysteries of his craft, ‘but they are more often opposed, and a collection of facts, no matter how conscientious, does not constitute truth unless by accident.’ Durrell concurred: ‘Except to verify a fact or two, diaries are a dead loss.’
Not surprisingly, therefore, much of what is in the Cameroons diaries is not in the book, and much of what is in the book is not in the diaries – including much of their author. The Gerald Durrell who appears in the book is a reconstructed, tidied-up version of the Gerald Durrell in the diaries of four years previously. Gone (with Jacquie’s help) are the big white master and mighty African hunter posturings, the raw, brash, opinionated young man with a mercenary streak and a taste for whiskey whose ambition was to get rich by bagging the really big game. In his place emerges another, no less authentic Durrell – charming, humorous, modest, resolute and selfless, with an abiding passion for the smaller, rarer creatures in his charge and a fond respect for the African villagers on whom he depended.
The inadequacy of the diaries as a source of copy did not matter hugely. For Gerald, like his brother Larry, was gifted with almost total recall. ‘It’s almost vulgar, the way I remember photographically in the colours of a glossy magazine,’ he was to say. ‘My memory is so exact that I have to go through it mentally with a pair of scissors to make sure I don’t overwrite the bloody thing.’
As for the second problem in his writing, that of presentation and interpretation, Gerald was clear from the outset that he did not want to follow in the footsteps of a preceding generation of writers about travel and animals: ‘I have tried, firstly, not to be boring, and to try and create some sort of word picture of the lands through which I travelled. Secondly, I have tried very hard to show that even the most ugly – by human standards – mammals, birds or reptiles have some interesting or charming characteristic about them, if you will only take the trouble to watch them with an unprejudiced eye.’ So – evocation of place, uncluttered with place names, dates, facts or figures; and wild animals alive on the page in an utterly new way, not the old-style stereotypes of alien, ravening beasts, but individual characters of fascination, idiosyncrasy and delight, the intrinsically precious co-denizens of our planet.
There was o
ne other crucial ingredient in the mix. ‘I read a book in my childhood called something like Ninety Years in Tibet,’ Gerald was to tell a colleague, ‘and there wasn’t a glimpse of humour in it. I was aghast at the dullness of it and I determined that if I wrote travel books I’d put plenty of humour into them.’
The work was intense and absorbing. ‘Durrell himself worked on this book as I had never known him work,’ Jacquie was to remember, ‘and every morning there was a pile of pages for me to read and correct, and slowly the book began to take shape. We were both consumed with excitement, and again I found myself completely engrossed in the story, which was surprising as I had always loathed animal-travel books, but this was different from anything I had ever read before.’
Here again was George, the drum-playing baboon, and Chumley (short for Cholmondeley), the beer-swigging, cigarette-puffing, gentleman chimp; the rare angwantibo, black-legged mongoose, and giant water shrew; the water-snake rivers and python caves; the spectral beauty of the forest at night and the thrill of the chase in the dark; the trusty hunters Elias (‘short, stocky, with ape-like forehead and protruding teeth’) and Andraia (‘very tall and extremely thin, drooping artistically, drawing patterns in the dust with his long toes’); a carnival of strange animals, a plethora of wild places, a whale of an adventure.
There were, too, passages of hypnotic magic that had Jacquie utterly beguiled:
As you enter the forest, your eyes used to the glare of the sun, it seems dark and shadowy, and as cool as a butter dish. The light is filtered through a million leaves, and so has a curious aquarium-like quality which makes everything seem unreal. The centuries of dead leaves that have fluttered to the ground have provided a rich layer of mould, soft as any carpet, and giving off a pleasant earthy smell. On every side are the huge trees with their great curling buttress roots, their thick, smooth trunks towering hundreds of feet above, their head foliage and branches merging indistinguishably into the endless green roof of the forest … There is no life to be seen in the forest except by chance. The only sounds are the incessant rasping zither of the cicadas, and a small bird who follows you as you walk along, hiding shyly in the undergrowth …
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