Jacquie had noticed this curious reclusive trait too, but could never coax an explanation from her husband. Was it shyness? Or disappointment that the reality did not measure up to the dream? Or a sense that in the struggle to survive his place as general was not down in the trenches with the chaps, but in the command post, masterminding the battle? Or something altogether more elusive and deeply buried in the psyche, an inner feeling of solidarity with the creatures he had brought here, perhaps, a sense that if it was he that kept them cooped up in their cages in the grounds, the least he could do was to keep himself cooped up in the flat? ‘I think Gerry was taken aback at what having a place like that entailed,’ Jacquie believed. ‘Although he had a really dedicated staff – something he genuinely appreciated – he still had to face many unpleasant things, and I think he found it hard.’
Gerald and Jacquie had been planning to have another get-together at Christmas 1963, with Lawrence and Claude coming up from Languedoc and Alan and Ella Thomas over from London, and a number of other friends besides; but it was not to be. The year had taken its toll of all the members of the Durrell family in the Les Augrès Manor flat. Writing to the Thomases on 14 December to apologise for cancelling the festivities, Jacquie explained: ‘We really are both nearly demented with the awful pressures of this last gruelling year and felt we could not cope with being even basically sociable.’
There was, besides, an added complication. Mother was getting on for eighty now. She was growing frail and had begun to develop cataracts in both eyes. There were indications, too, that she was growing weary of life, and was feeling lonely and abandoned. Jacquie arranged for her to go on a short cruise with Sophie Cook, and while she was staying with Sophie in Bournemouth before their departure, she fell seriously ill. According to one account, she reverted to a favourite old remedy for moments of crisis, and drank a bottle of gin. If she did, it didn’t work – or worked only too well. She became irrational and disorientated. Alan Ogden was summoned, and recommended that the old lady be moved to a small nursing home nearby. There she was successfully treated for heart trouble and pneumonia, but she began to go downhill fast. ‘She was not her normal self,’ her daughter Margaret recalled. ‘She was very subdued, hardly spoke, just lay on the bed staring blankly out of the window in a strange, abstract sort of way. I think she just wanted to die.’ Margaret began to get a room ready for her in St Alban’s Avenue, but Mother’s condition continued to decline, and it was clear that there was something seriously wrong. Renal failure was diagnosed, and the prognosis was grave.
It was Sophie Cook who sat with the old lady as she lay dying, for none of her children could bear the prospect. On 24 January 1964 Louisa Durrell passed away. Her last words were: ‘Is that brandy on the sideboard for medicinal purposes, dear?’ Margaret recalled: ‘When Mother died, all she had were a few belongings you could wrap in a handkerchief like a Buddhist priest – a prayer book, a St Anthony, one or two things like that.’ Her one significant asset was the rights to My Family and Other Animals, which Gerald had given her some years before. In her will those rights were bequeathed to her daughter-in-law, Jacquie.
Mother’s death was a colossal blow to Gerald. She had always been there in his life, the body beside him in the bed when he was a boy, the shoulder to cry on, the guardian angel and protecting spirit. And now she was gone. He was beside himself. The funeral at the crematorium in Queen’s Park was an oddly muted affair. Jacquie didn’t go. Larry came over from France, and seemed numbed by the wintry bleakness of the occasion – the low-key, suburban setting and the Protestant rites. Gerald could hardly bear it. With Alan Thomas’s support he was half-carried in to the back of the church, but when his mother’s coffin was borne into the chapel he rushed outside, choked with anguish.
Back at Nîmes, Lawrence wrote to Henry Miller: ‘I’ve just got back from the decent burying of my mother. She had an obsession about “being a trouble to people” and this time she performed her ploy to such purpose that she almost slipped away before anyone knew where they were.’ ‘Everyone missed her,’ Jacquie was to write, ‘for she was one of those rare people whom everyone loved, even if they had only met her quite casually. The house was a very sad place without her.’
Gerald was never to be quite the same man again. He now felt himself alone in a strange, awesome sense. ‘I have always thought his mother’s death was a major catastrophe for him,’ Jacquie was to reflect. ‘He never came to terms with it, he was utterly unable to accept it, he couldn’t even grieve for her, in fact he refused to grieve for her, so the hurt was never assuaged.’ In Jacquie’s view, his response to Mother’s death was typical of him: ‘As a child his life was so idyllic, especially in Corfu, that he came to believe that life would always be like that, and when it wasn’t, when something untoward occurred, he just couldn’t cope. He would run away from problems, and just drink, or take drugs such as tranquillisers, or combinations of both.’
Though Gerald was to sparkle with charm and fun and infectious humour until the end, his underlying mood was to grow darker from this time forth. The severance from his roots that his mother’s death had brought about; the growing sterility of his marriage; the frustration caused by the ceaseless difficulties with the zoo; the mounting anger he felt at the ways of man, hell-bent on mayhem in the world of nature – all these things began to affect him, and to bow him down, inch by bitter inch.
The change in the nature of the inner man was reflected in the physical appearance of the outer one. As if to acknowledge his growing status in the world at large, Gerald’s latest passport gave his height as five feet eleven inches, miraculously a full four inches taller than in the one issued when he was twenty-two and fully grown. But his passport photo revealed a different story. When David Attenborough had met him in Buenos Aires less than five years previously, he described Gerald as looking ten years younger than his age. Now he was beginning to look ten years older, his bearded face presenting a wearier, fuller, rather battered image to the unforgiving lens.
If nothing else, the face revealed the cost of Gerald’s journey. Until recently he had been lean of visage and slender of frame. No matter how much he ate and drank he had remained as slender as a beanpole. But in the last few years he had been steadily filling out, and was now emerging as the stout, round-faced man most of his fans were to remember. According to Jacquie, this metamorphosis had begun soon after his return from his third expedition to the Cameroons. The bug he had picked up in Africa had left him anaemic, and to remedy this in the most agreeable kind of way, Alan Ogden had suggested he take a daily drop or so of Guinness, which was rich in iron as well as alcohol. Gerald took to this medication with alacrity, and was soon knocking back not a bottle a day, but a crate. ‘That’s when he started ballooning out,’ Jacquie recalled. ‘When I complained to Dr Ogden, he said he hadn’t expected Gerry to take him so literally – or the Guinness so copiously.’ As the expense of the elixir began to soar, Jacquie wrote to their accountant enquiring whether Guinness consumed for medicinal purposes was tax deductible (it wasn’t).
For Gerald, Jersey had meant not only a change of location but a change of life. He became not just an individual, but an institution. He no longer worked on his own behalf, but on behalf of the animal life of the world. There was a price to pay for a career of dedication such as this. Gerald’s ark and all it stood for had already cost him his privacy, his peace of mind, and to a degree his happiness and well-being; in time would cost him his marriage, his health, and perhaps even his life as well.
Gerald Durrell was a square peg, a rebel. ‘He was looked on by the zoo establishment as a meddling upstart, a dangerous lunatic,’ a friend and colleague was to recall. ‘Here’s this chap, they said, no degree, no qualifications, goes around giving interviews saying we’re making a mess of things and tapping funds that could be better spent. My God, we can’t have amateurs wandering round the world causing trouble. Dammit, his chimps are bonking! What’s more, he seems to think it’s a good
idea! Gerry always used to think he was under siege, an outsider, didn’t have the respectability, the backing. He had to start with a blank piece of paper and create his own structure – so you could hardly blame him for feeling paranoid. His sense of isolation – I’m a man against the universe – came out a lot in conversation. Never bitterly, but he felt rejected because ideas he thought central were regarded as bone-headed and eccentric.’
When a symposium on zoos and conservation was held at the Zoological Society of London in the summer of 1964, Gerald was not invited to contribute. Instead he sent a memo to the organisers drawing attention to the mission of the new-look Jersey Zoo and Trust, particularly building up colonies of threatened species, including smaller creatures that were normally neglected because they were not spectacular enough, and therefore not commercial enough, to be of interest to the general public. ‘I believe we will be the first zoo in the world to attempt to devote all our resources and energy towards conservation in this manner,’ he proclaimed. ‘I believe that eventually the zoo here will be unique, as everything that the public sees will be underlining the importance of conservation.’
It was around this time, when the Trust stood on the brink of a challenging but uncertain future, that Jacquie began to undergo a profound change. When she had arrived back from the Far East she had told a magazine journalist: ‘Despite the unusual situations that stimulate our lives I am enormously happy as Gerry’s wife. I have become as interested as he is in his collection of wild creatures, in which he sometimes even includes me.’ But now she began to think differently. Despite the establishment of the Trust, Gerald seemed to be even more taken up with the zoo and Trust matters than before: ‘I seldom saw him alone or had a conversation that was not interspersed with zoo problems,’ she remembered. ‘I began to loathe the zoo or anything to do with it. The flat was becoming a second office, with a constant procession of people trailing up. I finally put my foot down and made Durrell promise to discuss zoo and Trust matters in his office downstairs, and leave us one small haven where we could relax and be on our own. But it was an uphill struggle and I often felt that I had married a zoo and not a human being.’
On the face of it, Gerald need not have chosen the difficult path he did. At his best he was one of the great nature writers in the English language – perhaps in any language. He was up there with the classic nature writers of the past – Thoreau, Richard Jefferies, W.H. Hudson, John Burroughs, William Beebe – and the best of his own time – Henry Williamson, Jim Corbett, Konrad Lorenz, Gavin Maxwell, Joy Adamson, George Schaller, and was also a masterly practitioner of comic writing. His books sold by the millions. He could well have afforded to retreat to a life of comfort and tranquillity in the South of France like his brother, writing a book a year. But he eschewed the easy way, the life of the self. He did not choose to do what suited him best, but was driven to do what he considered right.
In the spring of 1964 Gerald and Jacquie joined Lawrence and Claude for a short holiday on Corfu. On their return to Jersey, it was mayhem as usual. ‘Since our return,’ Gerald wrote to Alan and Ella Thomas on 2 May, ‘we have had a right basin-full. We have been fighting to save our lioness and she is still very ill, but we have great hopes of pulling her round. On top of this, there has been a thousand and one things to do for the Trust, so I am afraid that we have lost all sense of time and everything else.’
In an effort to keep part of their lives private and free, Jacquie withdrew her active support for the Trust and the zoo. The immediate cause was her reaction to what she perceived as her exclusion by Gerald from the daily affairs of the zoo, but the overriding motive was her disillusionment with the life she was living. Though Jacquie continued to run his personal and business affairs, she and Gerald were no longer a duo with a shared aim. Up to now he had relied enormously on her dynamism and support. It was she who had started him off on his career as a best-selling author, encouraged his ambition to establish his own zoo, suggested Jersey as its site and kept a practical and disciplined eye on its development during its critical early years. From this point forward, however, the work and achievements of the Trust, and the programme it had set itself to save animals from extinction, would be down to Gerald alone. At this point his life went into contrary motion, his professional career advancing, his personal life retreating. For while Jersey Zoo began to take off at last and the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust to go ahead full-blast, Gerald’s marriage began to fall apart piece by piece – and with it much else besides.
The extent of the schism soon became apparent. Jacquie was anxious for them both to get away from Jersey, and at this critical moment Chris Parsons intervened, suggesting they undertake another filmed expedition ‘before the glow of Two in the Bush has gone off’. Gerald responded favourably to the idea, but was unclear where they could go that others hadn’t been to before. Argentina, Guiana and India were rejected. An island-hopping journey through the West Indies, ending up on Little Swan Island, home of a unique hutia, a type of Caribbean rodent that would one day become extinct, was rejected as too expensive. ‘So that,’ Gerald informed Parsons, in a curiously myopic view of the world’s wild places, ‘only leaves West Africa really, and I’ve already written three books about that area.’
‘Well, you once mentioned Sierra Leone as a possibility,’ Parsons replied.
So the die was cast. They would make a series of six programmes telling the story of an animal collecting expedition in the wilds of Africa, from departure to return. There were a number of advantages in such a project, Gerald reckoned. It would provide substantial publicity for himself, the zoo and the book about the expedition, and would enable him to collect more animals, with the BBC funding part of the cost. But Jacquie responded bleakly to the glad tidings. If it was to be Sierra Leone, she announced, then she was not going. ‘I don’t like West Africa,’ she informed Gerald, ‘either the sticky heat or the tropical forests, and as you know I get exasperated with the Africans. So if you don’t mind, I think I’ll miss this one.’
Gerald had half expected this, but he was still hurt to the core. ‘Sierra Leone was a serious crisis in our marriage,’ Jacquie was to recall. ‘Gerry really didn’t think I’d ever come back to him. I hadn’t made up my mind either way then, but I began to think Gerry didn’t need me at all any more. He was so wrapped up in his zoo. I was just someone extraneous who managed his affairs, the hostess, and that was that. I wasn’t very important to him any more.’
They were going their own ways: and not just metaphorically. Jacquie proposed that while Gerald headed south for Africa with the BBC, she strike west to Argentina with two long-term friends and supporters of the Durrells, Hope Platt and Ann Peters, to reconnoitre a possible future collecting trip. For some months they would be continents – as well as hearts and minds – apart.
In the middle of January 1965 Gerald and his young assistant John Hartley set sail for Sierra Leone. John was aware that all was not well between Gerald and Jacquie. On their last night in London before joining the ship they had gone out to dinner, accompanied by John’s mother, and afterwards Gerald sat up very late talking to her. Next morning she took her son to one side and told him he would have to look after Gerald in Africa, as he was having a difficult time and was rather distressed. ‘I thought this a bit rich,’ John recalled. ‘I mean, here I was, twenty-two and never set foot in Africa before – I thought I was supposed to be looking to him for support.’
By an extraordinary coincidence Gerald’s boat and Jacquie’s coincided at Las Palmas in the Canaries. From his deck Gerald could see his wife standing on hers with Ann Peters and Hope Platt, and he shouted and hollered excitedly before grabbing a bottle of champagne and rushing down the gangway. When he was stopped by immigration officials he went berserk, and an unseemly altercation ensued before he was allowed to board Jacquie’s ship. For a brief, frantic and rather embarrassed quarter of an hour husband and wife were reunited before they went their different ways to opposite corners of
the South Atlantic.
Agonised by fears that his marriage was breaking up, Gerald began writing letters to Jacquie almost as soon as he set foot in Africa, expressing the depth of his love for her, the extent of his need for her. But he was addressing thin air, for few of the letters ever reached her, and those that did took an eternity. The first was written in Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown shortly after his arrival.
Darling,
Well, we’ve got this far. We arrived at the crack of dawn (both with hangovers). Freetown is quite extraordinary: it’s just like a sort of multicoloured Georgetown. A charming mess of bad new buildings and lovely clinker built houses on stilts. The first thing that hits you is the difference between these Africans and the Cameroon lot. Ninety per cent of them are really beautiful, particularly the women … a wonderful sort of refinement. Imagine a market or a street filled with male and female Harry Belafontes. They are a very lovely shade of pale bronze, and watching the women has given me as much pleasure almost as watching the Fur Seals. With lovely faces and long slender necks they drift down the streets like flocks of elegant deer.
Almost as soon as they landed, offers of help poured in. In the vanguard was the wealthy Diamond Corporation of Sierra Leone, who laid on a chauffeur-driven limousine and luxury quarters in the company’s Holly-wood-style apartments (‘the Dicorp flats’) on the edge of town. ‘They drove us through the enchanting, multicoloured streets filled with beautiful women,’ Gerald wrote to Jacquie, ‘out of Freetown and up on to a hill. Here we found the very primitive accommodation from which I am writing. A flat with two double bedrooms, bathroom, bog, sitting-cum-dining room approximately seventy feet by forty, air conditioning in the bedrooms, a steward and, most important, a fridge filled with beer. To cap it all the view from our balcony is straight down over rolling hills to Lumley Beach.’
Gerald Durrell Page 43