But four years of struggle were to follow, as Gerald and Jacquie battled desperately against the odds to establish the zoo on a firm footing. Every new problem – veterinary, cash flow, personnel, personal – was an exercise in crisis management. Through all this time, failure and the dissolution of Gerald’s lifelong dream was but a breath away.
Gerald’s first and most urgent task was the overriding question of funds. Though he always had difficulty with detailed accountancy, he had a visionary’s grasp of strategic finance. It was clear to him that the zoo had to raise more capital. It was still a new venture, and it would take a little time for it to become an established attraction for the island’s holiday-makers, who represented its only significant source of income at that time. Gerald therefore decided to approach the bank again for another £10,000 loan, and once again Rupert Hart-Davis agreed to guarantee that sum.
Jacquie was horrified. Their total indebtedness now amounted to £20,000 – almost a quarter of a million pounds at today’s values. Night after night she would lie awake wondering how the money was ever going to be repaid. This burden was compounded by the fact that from the outset Gerald had insisted that his position as Director of the zoo should be entirely honorary, and that the zoo should not be encumbered by having to pay him and his wife a salary. All they would receive would be the flat to live in and free electricity to run it, while Gerald supported them entirely by his writing, which would also serve to publicise the work of the zoo and to spread the word of Gerald’s long-term, worldwide mission. All he asked was that the zoo in its turn should be solvent and self-supporting.
Confronted with this financial imperative, Gerald began to write in earnest. During 1960 and 1961 he followed his Cameroons book with two children’s books – Island Zoo (in collaboration with the celebrated photographer Wolf Suschitsky), a Disneyish, highly anthropomorphised collection of stories about some of his favourite animals in the zoo, and Look at Zoos, a young person’s guide to zoo-going – and an account of his Argentine venture, The Whispering Land. To these he added various radio talks and television appearances on television, a series of articles for the Observer and an anecdotal portrait of a favourite animal for a children’s magazine called June every week for a year – a task so interminable that Jacquie took over the writing of the last few.
It was not all toil, though it mostly was. And there was respite ahead, for Gerald was planning to return at last to the idyll of his youth.
SEVENTEEN
‘We’re All Going to be Devoured’
Alarms and Excursions 1960–1962
In May 1960 Gerald wrote to his brother Lawrence to tell him that he and Jacquie were taking Mother to Corfu for six weeks – their first view of the island since their enforced departure twenty-one years previously: ‘I expect to find Corfu hideously changed, but they can’t possibly change the colour of the sea or its transparency, which is what I am really going for.’ In a reference to Larry’s cohabitation with Claude, Gerald added: ‘I think it’s disgusting my own brother should be living in sin.’
Gerald looked forward to his return to the land of his childhood idyll with tremendous anticipation – but also trepidation. ‘There is always an element of risk,’ he wrote, ‘in returning to a place in which you were happy, and the risk is greatly increased if it is a place in which you spent a part of your childhood.’ Twenty-one years was a long time, and anything could have happened. Endlessly on the journey he eulogised the island to Jacquie – the giant moon, the million fireflies, skies blue as jade, sea transparent as soap bubbles. On 26 May the party took a small plane for the last hop from the toe of Italy, and suddenly there it was, lying like a misshapen scimitar in the sea – his beloved island.
It was colder and greyer than he remembered it, and the hailstones were the biggest he had seen in his life. The worst summer in history, his island friends told him. But he need not have feared. The unseasonable weather passed – and nothing had changed at all. The lobsters were still as sweet as he remembered, the moon as large and burnished, the view from Pérama across to Mouse Island as enchanted. Only his knowledge of Greek had changed, sunk to a deeper layer inside his skull, with only the zoological bits at easy beck and call.
They took a short lease on a tiny, secluded cottage called ‘The Annexe’ near the beach below the sea-cliff at Pérama, on the other side of the road from the hill where his two childhood homes – the Strawberry-Pink Villa and the Snow-White Villa – were situated. In the evening they would repair to a tiny café down the road. ‘Here at a table under the mimosa trees,’ Gerald was to recall, ‘we would watch the sunset on the sea, turning it from blue to silver, and then, suddenly, lighting it up with a blurred peacock iridescence that was unbelievable. Presently, drifting casually through the gloom, our friends would arrive to join us. Wine would be drunk in silence until the last faint colours had been smudged from the sea, and then the singing would begin …’ No, he was not disappointed, the magic was as it had always been. One day, he reckoned, he would be back to find a new home here and revive the island idyll so long interrupted. Or so he hoped, little guessing that Corfu might have other plans.
At the end of the year Lawrence and Claude and the young Sappho, along with Margaret and her two boys, planned to come to Jersey to celebrate Christmas at the manor. Gerald was looking forward immensely to this family reunion – as was Life magazine, which was sending one of its crack photographers, Loomis Deane, over from America to shoot a photo-feature about the celebrated author of the Alexandrian Quartet at a family gathering with his no less celebrated brother at the latter’s zoo.
Christmas was a zoo event as well as a family get-together. Since many of the staff were necessarily on duty that day, Gerald cooked a huge turkey for their Christmas dinner downstairs in the manor house, and was unstinting with the drinks at the pre-prandial warm-up. Then he went back up to the flat to rejoin his other family. Everyone lent a hand. When Claude found Mother in the kitchen stirring a big pot with one hand while holding a totally swaddled baby in the crook of her free arm, she asked if she could help. ‘Well,’ said Mother, ‘I suppose you could take him.’ Claude took the small bundle, which after a few minutes began to stir, and a long hairy arm reached out and casually wrapped itself round her neck. The baby turned out to be a young chimpanzee which had been brought into the flat for special care. Christmas passed amid the familiar family jocularity of old. But it was not an entirely peaceful occasion. From time to time there would be a tremendous rumpus from the chimps or lemurs in the zoo outside. ‘You see!’ cried Lawrence, who was never entirely at home in the company of wild beasts. ‘They’ve broken loose and we’re all going to be devoured!’
For many of the animals, especially the primates, Christmas was the most boring day of the year. There were no human visitors to stare at, no human antics and eccentricities to keep them amused, no titbits pushed through the wire netting. But the season was not without its little bonuses. Special treats had been prepared for them – crackly pieces of turkey skin for Claudius the tapir, a handful of liqueur chocolates for Pedro the spectacled bear, crystallised fruits for the marmosets, mince pies for the smaller monkeys, turkey bones for the smaller cats, grapes for the birds. The pièce de réesistance was the apes’ Christmas tea party – a sumptuous spread of sugar-covered biscuits, chocolate bars, grapes, apples and pears, a large iced cake and their favourite tipple of well-watered red wine, all laid out on a table in the courtyard in front of the manor house, complete with a Christmas tree hung with stockings stuffed with sugared almonds and marshmallows. N’pongo, Chumley and Lulu made short shrift of this seasonal set-piece. The tree disintegrated as Chumley tried to grab the fairy at the top, both chimps brawled over each other’s wine, and N’Pongo systematically stuffed herself with everything in sight. ‘We carried them, full of wine and sweets, back to their cages,’ Gerald wrote, ‘where they crawled exhaustedly into their straw beds and lay there belching gently. If they were exhausted, we were doubly so, a
nd crawled back to the flat to revive ourselves.’
The following spring Gerald and Jacquie took Mother by car for a holiday in Spain, stopping off on the way south to visit Lawrence and Claude at the Mazet, near Nîmes. This was Gerald’s first glimpse of the out-of-the-way farmhouse in Languedoc that was to play such an important role in his future existence, and he warmed at once to its rural simplicity and the spare, herb-scented hills all around. The party carried on to Spain as planned, but Gerald was not inclined to linger there, for the pull of the little mazet was too strong. From Cadaquès on the Costa Brava Jacquie wrote to Alan Thomas and his wife Ella: ‘Larry’s house is charming and the area very Greek-like. We go back there next week as Gerry does not feel like sight-seeing in Spain and wants to investigate the Camargue fauna.’
Though Gerald was close to his immediate family, he did not seem to have any great yearning to have a family of his own – not, at any rate, at this time. The reasons for this cannot be known, but they may have been reinforced by his awareness that the conservation battle he was helping to fight was against the consequences of a human population explosion that was out of control. ‘How lost in admiration and envy the fleas and rats and rabbits of this world must be,’ he used to say, ‘when they regard the fantastic reproductive record of the human race.’ ‘Gerry didn’t want any children,’ Jacquie was to state. ‘We both felt the state of the world was such that we didn’t want to bring anyone into it.’ On the two occasions when she did become pregnant – she miscarried both times – he was quite upset. ‘On the first occasion,’ she recalled, ‘he even refused to speak to me for something like three weeks, addressing me, when he had to, through a third person.’ The matter became academic when Jacquie underwent a partial hysterectomy on medical grounds in the autumn of 1961, at the age of thirty-one. Gerald was consumed with worry while she was in the nursing home, and when she came home after ten days he fussed over her like a nursemaid. ‘I had a wonderful time,’ she recalled, ‘being waited on hand and foot with nothing to do all day but read or play records while my ever-loving husband attended to everything.’
The news was more procreative, so to speak, on the zoo front. Gerald noted that ‘we have so far, in our first year of existence, bred eleven species successfully.’ The excitement attendant upon these births was considerable. Juan and Juanita, a pair of collared peccaries, were a case in point. Juan was two feet long and had been bought by Gerald in northern Argentina from an Indian who was fattening him up for Christmas. Juanita was a baby measuring only six inches in length when Gerald acquired her. Despite the discrepancies in age and Juanita’s ill health, the pair soon produced their first baby in Jersey Zoo, to Gerald’s intense gratification. ‘To look out of the kitchen window,’ he wrote, ‘and see Juanita, her husband and baby playing a new game they have invented, fills me with pride.’
But to obtain pairs of the larger endangered species was an expensive business. Gerald took to hanging a collection box on the outside of N’pongo’s cage so that visitors to the zoo could contribute some of their small change towards the £1500 needed to buy her a mate. Not long afterwards a new gorilla did arrive, but it was another female, called Nandi. She was followed by a female tapir called Claudette (a mate for Claudius), and in 1962 by a female cheetah called Paula (a mate for Peter).
During 1961 Gerald made another foray into television. Of the hoped-for six-part series he had shot in Argentina, only one programme could be salvaged for transmission in a BBC nature series called Look. Now the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol asked him to do a short series of programmes, to be called Zoo Packet, for broadcasting that summer. The idea came from Eileen Moloney, Gerald’s early radio talks producer and friend, who had recently crossed over to television. She felt that for all his palpable anxiety in front of the camera there was still a place for Gerald in television, given his charm, humour and passion for animals. Zoo Packet was intended to provide a relaxed format in which he could relate his animal stories and introduce his favourite animals from the zoo.
The logistical problems were considerable. Special display cases with glass fronts had to be constructed and the animals flown to the BBC studios in Bristol in a chartered plane. The largest dressing-room was set aside entirely for the animals, while the unflappable N’pongo was given a smaller dressing-room to herself. Far from being relaxed, Gerald was beside himself with anxiety over the well-being of his animals, their behaviour under the blinding studio lights, and his own performance. ‘It was surprising,’ said the programmes’ director Chris Parsons, ‘that he did not collapse with nervous exhaustion at the end of each show.’ Many of the animals were nocturnal or forest creatures, and retreated from view the moment the lights were switched on. Others were going to be a handful whatever the circumstances. ‘Never before have eleven representatives of the primate family been shown live together in a television studio,’ Jacquie was to write, ‘and judging by what happened, never again will they be allowed to be.’
Chris Parsons had first met Gerald when he had gone to Bournemouth to film some of the animals he was keeping in Margaret’s back garden. Now, off the set, he began to perceive in Gerald some of the qualities Eileen had so wanted to show on screen – his powers as a raconteur, his humour, his enthusiasm, his gift for friendship. ‘If Gerry started making rude remarks about you,’ Chris decided, ‘you knew that these came out of a feeling of affection rather than hostility … If Gerry had something to offer television it was most likely to be on location, where he would be relaxed amongst the animals and the wild places which he loved.’ This notion was to bear fruit before long.
Towards the end of 1961 Gerald wrote to Lawrence in Languedoc, giving him a progress report, a round-up of the year. The news, by and large, was good. Stanley Donen, the Hollywood director, had approached him about making a Broadway stage musical based on My Family and Other Animals, and if it was successful he would go on to make a movie version of it. He was serious, Gerald reported, and Curtis Brown was having talks with him about it: ‘I’ve got to get each member of the family to sign a chit to say they won’t sue him providing that the character on the stage is like that in the book … Mother is very thrilled and I am giving her singing lessons in case they can’t get anyone to play her part.’ That was not the last of the good news. Gerald continued: ‘The zoo has done very well this year; we are up a third on last year. This is still not good enough, and we are in for another hard winter, but I reckon that within another two years we shall be reasonably happy. The lion, you will be glad to know, is having a mate, arriving tomorrow, a gift from a fan in Uganda. The books do help sometimes.’
Now in his mid-thirties, Gerald was approaching the height of his powers. A best-selling author around the world, marathon globetrotter, budding television personality and founder of his own zoo, he was also a man of extraordinary charisma. Harold Macmillan had had him round to 10 Downing Street for an official reception during the state visit by the President of Peru, while the Queen had invited him and Jacquie to Buckingham Palace for a state banquet to mark the official visit of the President of the Cameroons. Even authentic stars were drawn into Gerald’s orbit. ‘One day,’ Gerald recalled, ‘I received a long, handwritten letter from Jamaica signed Noël Coward. Suspecting a hoax, I wrote a guarded reply. Then I got another letter, from Switzerland, and I was forced to believe that I could number the master among my fans, and I was very flattered.’ Coward, it seemed, was a devoted animal-lover and convinced conservationist, and adored Gerald’s books. They carried on corresponding for several years, and when Coward came to London to act in three of his plays, he suggested that he, Gerald and Jacquie meet up. Gerald was diffident about making contact, but Jacquie nagged him into telephoning. Coward was delighted, and asked them round to supper at the Savoy the next evening. When Gerald, still bashful, asked what he should wear, Coward thought for a second, then suggested: ‘How about leopardskin tights?’
Unlike Gerald, Jacquie was not a great fan of Coward’s, and tho
ught it might be better if Gerald went without her. ‘Don’t be silly,’ Gerald told her. ‘This is like having dinner with Oscar Wilde.’ He repeated the story over supper. ‘Oh, dear,’ responded Coward. ‘I hope it doesn’t have the same repercussions – but then, Wilde didn’t go in for beards, did he?’ Later Coward had Gerald and Jacquie to stay at his house in Switzerland.
Friends, colleagues, reporters, visitors of all kinds fell in thrall to Gerald’s magic aura. His powers of persuasion were prodigious, and his success in life was largely thanks to his ability to have an idea, a radical or even revolutionary vision, and then to persuade others to turn it into reality. He didn’t just have charm; he had (when he chose to raise his game) mega-charm. In part it was due to his physical impact: the astonishingly bright, piercing blue eyes above the raffish beard; the frank, intelligent gaze of a child; the engaging, ever-ready laugh. ‘He laughs with that infectious staccato peculiar to the Durrells,’ David Hughes wrote. ‘Joking irresistibly, he can get you hysterical in two minutes flat, setting off jokes like fireworks.’
Partly also it was the range and style of his conversation, its sideways looks, its darting insights, its unorthodox trajectories, the underlying anarchy of his approach to people and ideas, the stories conjured out of thin air, preposterous and hilarious by turns, but harbouring a kernel of truth. ‘Glass in hand,’ noted Hughes, ‘he conveys a sense of his preoccupation with worlds that are closed books to us: “boyish” is the word that fits. He comes to us adults only to share our pleasures – drink, talk, laughing – and then he pushes off. He cuts straight through our system of pretences. Class doesn’t count, prestige is drivel, the social pattern is good for a laugh. In every company he is vulgar and detached.’ Gerald’s charisma also owed much to his larger-than-lifeness, his deeply engaging eccentricity. For those who played the game and observed the rules he was an unnerving proposition, for he undermined polite conventions, promising something different – risqué perhaps, fun certainly, unpredictable always. Only when it came to animals, and their care and conservation, did the man of laughter turn to the man of steel. Animals, about which he wrote with such affectionate comedy, were in reality no laughing matter to him. Over things about which he cared deeply, Gerald Durrell was a profoundly serious man.
Gerald Durrell Page 40