Gerald’s reluctance to move from Mamfe may have had more deep-seated reasons than disappointment at the reception he had received from the colonial authorities or problems about proceeding inland to the gorilla country in the Assumbo. Indeed, the British were later to give every sign of respect for his zoological status by inviting him to act as the government’s advisor in planning a zoological garden in the capital Victoria. Rather, there appeared to be some deep angst troubling him, a spiritual or emotional affliction that snapped his springs of action. Bob Golding had not been privy to Gerald’s dealings with the authorities, but during the seven months he spent in Gerald and Jacquie’s company it became obvious to him that their relationship was under great strain. ‘I had just turned nineteen,’ he was to remember later. ‘I found the whole trip amazing, exciting and quite frightening. I was just out of school and really wet behind the ears. I had never been out of Europe before, never been in a place like this before, lived a lifestyle like this before, been in the company of people like Gerry and Jacquie before. But it was obvious even to me that Gerry and Jacquie were getting on very badly. There was no rapport between them, no shred of affection or compassion, no physical, emotional, even personal connection – not to each other or for that matter to me.’
At Mamfe Gerald began to crack up. He started drinking heavily, and became depressed, morose and quarrelsome. One evening he had a tremendous row with Pious, his devoted ‘boy’, for whom he had always shown respect and affection. In a mad after-dinner bet with the District Officer at Mamfe, the two men had run a race round and round the house, during which Gerald, dashing like a madman in his bare feet on sharp gravel, had torn his feet so badly that he had to be hospitalised for the best part of two weeks.
By the time the permits allowing the party to film (but not catch) gorilla in the Assumbo had arrived, Gerald’s condition had deteriorated catastrophically. ‘I suddenly collapsed and actually lost my sight for a brief spell,’ he recorded at the time. ‘Rather frightened by this, we sent for the local African doctor, who told me to rest and not to worry. This left me in a quandary – was it fair to either my companions or myself to attempt the three day trek to the Assumbo. After a discussion with both them and the District Officer I decided against it.’ For a time it seemed the expedition would have to be abandoned, and to one animal collector in his employ Gerald dropped a note which read: ‘I do not want the Horned Puff-Adder, and as I am returning to England sooner than I planned, please do not bother to obtain more animals for me. I regret to have to tell you that I have been very ill, and for this reason I am leaving your country much earlier.’
It was at this low point, with the entire expedition on the point of foundering, that Jacquie asked a basic question that was to change everything: Why collect a lot of animals for other people’s zoos if he was aiming to start up one of his own? ‘When we had been considering what we would do with our animal collection when we eventually reached England,’ she was to record, ‘in a fit of demented enthusiasm I had suggested to Durrell that we keep this collection and use it to blackmail the Bournemouth Council into giving us a suitable zoo site in the town.’ From that point forward he would not be collecting animals for other zoos – he would be collecting them for his own.
A new plan was hatched. They would divide their forces. Bob Golding would go on alone to N’Dop to collect reptiles, Gerald and Jacquie would carry on up to Bafut, and Sophie would remain behind to look after the collection at base camp in Mamfe until Bob’s return in mid-April, when they would move up to Bafut to join the others.
So the party split up. For Bob Golding his lonely foray to the wilds of N’Dop was an experience of absolute isolation – physical, mental, emotional, social – such as he had never known before and would never know again. Left behind in sweaty Mamfe, meanwhile, Sophie was bombarded with letters, demands and wild beasts by that legendary hunter from Eshobi, Elias Eyong, who had been a star turn in The Overloaded Ark and was now a man of status and an up-and-coming local politician. On 1 April he wrote:
Dear Ma,
Receive from bearer one animal of the same nature with the first two. I asked you to send me a bar of soap but you sent me a block of ‘Sunlight’. Also I want some matches plus two empty cases for animals. If you are still anxious to get this particular type of animal, please inform me. I will like to know the time Mr Durrell will be returning from Bamenda.
Best and sincere greetings. Yours truly. Elias.
N.B. Do not put this animals in the same box/case because they fight and kill each other.
By now Gerald and Jacquie had reached the cooler, more open grassland country of Bafut. The Fon had not been in the best of health when they arrived, and was unable to attend a welcoming drink with them on the first evening. ‘Good morning to you all,’ he wrote to them cheerfully next day:
I was sorry for I failed coming to drink with you, due to the sickness. I was grateful for the bottle of whiskey and the medicine which you sent me. The thing which is giving me trouble is cough. If you can get some medicine for it, kindly send it to me through bearer. I think the whiskey will also help, but I do not know yet. Please send me some gin if any. I am lying on my bed.
Your good friend, Fon of Bafut.
In a short time the Fon was back on his feet. ‘He greeted us very warmly,’ Jacquie recalled. ‘When Gerry told him about the palaver at Government House he was furious and told Gerry how much he had enjoyed his books, including the one which included himself. “Dis book you done write,” he said, “I like um foine. You done make my name go for all the world. Every kind of peoples ’e know my name, na foine ting you do.” The Fon really was larger than life – a fantastic looking man with enormous energy, and a wonderful dancer.’ Jacquie should know, for one night she and the Fon danced the samba in the Fon’s dancing hall, whirling about to the music of the royal band, he standing six foot three inches, she five foot one, and almost completely hidden by his swirling robes. ‘People think Gerry had exaggerated him in his written account, but he hadn’t – if anything he had underplayed him. The Fon didn’t have much time for Europeans in general, but he adored Gerry.’
But Gerald was seriously out of sorts, and generally depressed. He hated anything changing, and had had fond expectations that the Cam-eroons would be the same magical place it had been when he first arrived there all those years ago. He became more gloomy and disappointed with each day that passed, and according to Jacquie he stopped eating and drank a bottle of whisky a day instead. Then, because he smoked in bed and burned holes in his mosquito net, he went down with malaria again, followed by piles. Finally both he and Jacquie picked up a bug that chewed up their red blood corpuscles, and they began to look like death. Jacquie recalled:
In spite of all the setbacks, Gerry loved this sort of life. He got on terribly well with the native people. One of the greatest compliments he was paid was that he didn’t behave like the English. In the Cameroons he’d sit up at night with the boys on upturned kerosene cans, smoking with them and discussing politics, saying for God’s sake don’t get rid of the white man overnight, stick with him and learn what you can from him, and in a lot of ways the Africans appreciated that he was concerned about them, because he saw that it would be the poor little bush man who would suffer – the fat cats, the ones with some education, could look after themselves.
By the middle of May the animal collection was so large that it spread right round the veranda on all four sides of the Fon’s rest house. Hundreds of cages contained anything from chimpanzees to mice, eagles to sunbirds the size of a thimble, coal-black cobras and multi-coloured Gaboon vipers. And though they had no gorilla, either on film or in the flesh, they did have a small, wizened baby chimp called Cholmondeley, in honour of his ill-fated predecessor, who grew in mischief as he grew in size, and another called Minnie, who had been wished on them by a local coffee planter and who screamed like a banshee when she wanted attention.
By early June it was time to leave Bafut be
fore the rains made the road to the coast impassable. On their last night the Fon threw a farewell party, and presented Gerald with the robes of a Deputy Fon of Bafut. At dawn they were off on the three-hundred-mile drive to the waiting ship, a banana boat called the SS Nicoya. Staring at all the cages and baggage strewn about the deck before they sailed, one of the ship’s stewards remarked: ‘I’ve seen some queer things in my time, mate, but I’ve never seen anyone with a zoo in his luggage.’
* * *
* Sanderson’s sketch map shows that the giant bat was seen a little north of Tinta, along a river that flows through a valley dividing the Mountains of Ogoja and the Mountains of Bemenda. There is an account of the incident in his book Animal Treasure (London, 1937, pp. 300–1).
FIFTEEN
‘A Wonderful Place for a Zoo’
1957–1959
The Nicoya docked at Liverpool on 7 July 1957. Gerald Durrell was now a veteran of five collecting expeditions. All told, he had brought back some two thousand creatures from the wilds of Africa and South America, including forty-three species that were completely new to the zoological collections of the world. But this homecoming was different. This time his animals were destined for his own zoo. The gangway had barely touched the jetty before the first reporters were on board. Gerald was anxious to use the press to prime Bournemouth Council about his plans for founding his zoo in their town.
‘Zoo Plan for Bournemouth’ ran an obliging headline in the Daily Telegraph:
Mr Gerald Durrell, 32, the writer-zoologist, hopes to start a zoo at Bournemouth. ‘We trust that the council will be sympathetic to the extent of letting us have some land,’ Mr Durrell said. ‘If they agree I shall start preparing it this winter and would like to open it next spring.’ Mr Durrell and his wife, Jacqueline, 27, have just returned from a seven-month expedition to the British Cameroons. They brought back 200 reptiles, 50 birds, 18 monkeys, 47 bush babies, a nine-month-old Chevrotain deer, thought to be the only one in the country, and a nine-month-old chimpanzee which has been named Cholmondeley St John Durrell.
This collection was to form the basis of the Durrells’ zoo. An entire railway goods van had been hired to transport the animals to Bournemouth, but the journey was an agonising one. There was only one seat for the three human beings, and the goods van was continually shunted off and on to trains and in and out of sidings. Of all the hundreds of creatures confined in it, only Cholmondeley seemed to enjoy himself, replete with bread and milk and nursed and fussed over by whoever was sitting in the seat.
After fourteen hours the Cameroons expedition finally reached Bournemouth. A fleet of furniture vans were waiting for them, and the collection from the kingdom of the Fon and beyond was quickly unloaded and transported to the sanctuary of Margaret’s house in St Alban’s Avenue. Further to the west Bob Golding, an older and wiser young man after his great adventure, reached the haven of his parental home in Bristol, where a few days later he received a meticulously typed bill for £1.10.6, the cost of the orange squash and sandwiches Jacquie had subbed him for in Liverpool.
Gerald and Jacquie were hungry, thirsty and exhausted, but they knew they could not rest until the animals were properly housed. Cholmondeley was handed over to Mother while the grand marquee was hauled into position on the back lawn to house the hardier animals like the civets, mongooses and larger monkeys. The more delicate creatures – the squirrels, bush babies, some of the birds and all of the reptiles – were put in the garage, which had been specially insulated before their arrival.
‘The animals seemed no worse for their ordeal,’ Jacquie was to write of this unusual homecoming, ‘and only wanted to be fed and left alone, while all we wanted was a hot bath and a drink and a good meal. But it was many hours before Gerry or I got it. Cholmondeley was finally put to bed in a large laundry hamper, after being thoroughly spoilt by Gerry’s mother and sister, and it was only then that we were free to crawl up to our flat and collapse.’
Within a few days the suburban menagerie was up and running. It presented an odd sight, as Gerald was to recall:
Anyone looking out at my sister’s back garden would have been forced to admit that it was, to say the least, unconventional. In one corner stood a huge marquee, from inside which came a curious chorus of squeaks, whistles, grunts and growls. Alongside it stretched a line of cages from which glowered eagles, vultures, owls and hawks. Next to them was a large cage containing Minnie the Chimp. On the remains of what had once been a lawn, fourteen monkeys rolled and played on long leashes, while in the garage frogs croaked, touracos called throatily, and squirrels gnawed loudly on hazel-nut shells. At all hours of the day the fascinated, horrified neighbours stood trembling behind their lace curtains and watched as my sister, my mother, Sophie, Jacquie and I trotted to and fro through the shambles of the garden, carrying little pots of bread and milk, plates of chopped fruit or, what was worse, great hunks of gory meat or dead rats … It was some time before they managed to rally their forces and start to complain.
The first and most urgent cause of complaint was Minnie, who screamed continuously all day, and was soon removed to Paignton Zoo, where Ken Smith was Superintendent. Before long Minnie was followed by most of the more delicate animals, including all the reptiles, for Paignton could provide the heated accommodation that Margaret’s premises could not. Cholmondeley stayed on in the house, not so much a pet as an honoured guest – or perhaps something more than that, as the man from the Woman’s Sunday Mirror, one of the numerous press reporters irresistibly drawn to this unusual ménage, recorded.
At first I thought I had misheard her, but then she said it again. ‘… I’m mother to a chimp,’ she said. ‘Come and see.’ And that’s how I met Cholmondeley, dressed in a pink cardigan and playing on the dining-room carpet of an ordinary-looking house in St Alban’s Avenue, Bournemouth, just like a child. Which is the way Mrs Jacquie Durrell, 27, wants it to be. For she plans to bring up Cholmondeley exactly as if he were a human baby – her own baby. Then she explained: ‘I have decided I would never have children – the life of an ordinary housewife did not seem right for me. Now I am mother to Cholmondeley – he just steals your affection.’
Jacquie and Gerald were engaged in a serious experiment, the reporter claimed (recording more fantasy than fact). They wanted to see if it was possible to educate a baby chimp in human ways so that he could remain a member of the family when fully grown.
‘His day was a simple one,’ Jacquie recorded; ‘he was awakened in the morning with a large cup of milky tea and then dressed in the exotic sweaters that my mother-in-law had knitted for him “to keep the cold out, dear”. Then the rest of the day was spent in plaguing the inhabitants of the house until he was finally put to bed in the evening with the aid of a large mug of Ovaltine, leaving everyone else exhausted and irritated beyond recovery.’
At first the chimp slept in Mother’s room, but when it was discovered that she never put the light on for fear of waking him, he was removed to Gerald and Jacquie’s small bedsit upstairs, where he soon learnt to put up with light, noise, cigarette smoke and all the pressures of his human friends’ hectic life. ‘His favourite game,’ Jacquie recalled, ‘was to swing on the curtains in the front living-room, where he held audience every day for all the children in the neighbourhood.’ His preferred haunt was the golf links at the end of the road, where he would climb trees, turn somersaults, chase dogs, distract golfers and pelt people with pine cones. When he grew tired he was trundled home slumped in a pushchair.
‘At mealtimes,’ Gerald wrote, ‘Chumley was exceptionally well behaved. He would sit on my lap and wait patiently until I put some tit-bit on my side-plate for him. Then he would feed himself very delicately, pulling the food to the edge of the plate with his forefinger, and then picking it up with his long, almost prehensile lips. If it was something like peas, he would spit out the skins very daintily, generally managing to get fifty per cent on to the plate, and the other fifty into my lap.’
After
lunch Cholmondeley liked a spot of exercise – a game of hide and seek, or pick-pocket, or swinging on the curtains, or rocking to and fro in the rocking chair with ever-increasing speed till the chair tipped over and he rolled on to the floor. Like a human child he was extremely inquisitive, and liked to touch any new object he discovered. He had a few animal friends, including two budgerigars, one green and one yellow, though he seemed to be under the impression that the yellow one was a new kind of banana.
After games came tea. ‘Chumley would greet the arrival of the tea tray with shrill hoots of joy,’ Gerald observed, ‘and then squat as close to it as possible and watch with absorbed interest while you poured him a cup of tea. When you handed it to him he would taste it very carefully by sticking the edge of his lip into it. He was very particular about his tea: it had to be the right temperature and the right colour, not too strong or too weak, and without the slightest trace of sugar. If he felt it was too hot, or perhaps too cold, or that it had too much milk in it, he would put his cup down carefully, and then, catching hold of your hand would place it on the tea pot or the milk jug as a gentle hint that he wanted something done to his tea to make it acceptable.’
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