Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  There was a frustrating wait for the expedition Land-Rovers to arrive on a ship which had been delayed by storms at sea, and then they were ready. ‘At last we are off,’ Gerald wrote in his letter,

  having in the meantime engaged two charming ruffians called Sadu and Lamin as cook steward and small boy. We set off in great style on the hour we said we would. We had planned to make Kenema that day (it can be done) but on reaching Bo John was so exhausted that we crept into the U.A.C. [United Africa Company] rest house and spent the night. The next day we set off and just outside Bo we hit the laterite, with attendant corrugations and dust. At one point we were so covered with red laterite that we decided to stand in the next local elections.

  At Kenema they were informed they could put up at a deserted chrome mine up in the foothills about fourteen miles out of town – a convenient spot, they were assured, to make a base.

  Having told Hartley what terrible privations we would suffer once we got up-country, I was slightly taken aback. The mines themselves were at the base of the escarpment, which is about 800 foot high. Then there is a twisty road leading upwards with something like ten or fifteen perfectly good houses absolutely empty since the mine closed down. Our house is about the size of John Henderson’s [in Mamfe]. Big living-dining room, large bedroom, bath and loo, larder place and kitchen attached by covered-in way. Running water and electricity. Bedroom with mosquito proofed windows. From the back veranda we look down over a vast plain with a series of smoothly rounded hills in the distance. We get up before sun up and the whole of the plain is covered with thick white mist, just the tops of the hills showing through. Then the sun comes up directly opposite us looking like a frosted blood orange. We were having tea the other morning and in a tree about fifty yards down the hill a troop of five Red Colobus were feeding: as the sun came up it hit the tree and floodlit it. You can imagine: a vivid green tree with pink fruit full of monkeys that are jet black on the back with rich fox red on the tummy, throat and insides of arms and legs, all making purring noises like gigantic bees. Behind them was the backdrop, ever changing, of the mist and the mountains … It is quite weird living here, like a ghost town, or being the last people left in the world …

  Darling, I wish you had come on this trip. I wish it for a great variety of personal reasons, but particularly because I know you would have enjoyed it: it has been really Waldorf Astoria all the way, what with air conditioned flats, bathing on Lumley beach, chauffeur driven cars and now this wonderful house cut off from everything. The climate here is not a bit like Cameroons, but more like Corfu, and perched up here in this house it’s cool enough in the early morning and evening to wear a sweater. Also the forest is not as high nor so impersonal as the Cameroons: it seems to welcome you. I have never seen so many flowers of so many different colours; everywhere you look there is pink, purple, scarlet, white or yellows in great masses. It’s an enchanting country and would give you a completely new idea of West Africa …

  If the trip is not a success it will not be due to lack of help from both Africans and Europeans. Oh, yes, I have got the Prime Minister to agree to appear in one of the films. I quite frighten myself with my own powers sometimes.

  After seeing you briefly in Las Palmas I expected you to write and say you wanted to leave me. I wouldn’t have blamed you as I’m far from the perfect husband, but the thought did not make me feel happy.

  Darling, life’s so bloody short, let’s try not to be parted again, either mentally or physically. I know I’m difficult to live with and very demanding, but I will try and reform. The trouble is that when I feel you drifting away from me I get so hurt and angry that I get bloody minded and this makes you drift still further. Let us both love in our own silly ways and try and shove that love on to a sort of no-man’s-land where we can both meet.

  I miss you terribly. I must end now. I love you. Keep safe and return. Have a wonderful time and return refreshed to me. Send for me should you need me and don’t take risks. By God’s Power we have a lot more loving to do yet.

  I love you now and always.

  Gerald’s plan was to make a start with the animal collection, so that by the time the BBC crew arrived a fortnight or so later the collecting would be in full swing and they could start shooting without any delay. By the time Gerald wrote to Jacquie again, on 25 February, he had renamed the chrome mine, for some obscure reason, ‘The Treacle Mine’. He was later to change the name again, more appropriately, to ‘The Beef Mine’.

  Darling,

  … All goes well with us as I hope it goes with you. We have at long last managed to assemble something like a collection. So far it consists of: two baby male chimps called Fluffy Frogsbottom and Amos Tuttlepenny. Apart from these two thugs we have two Hinge-back tortoise (to John’s delight), a Kingfisher, a young Woodford’s owl (mental), a mongoose, and the most wonderful baby Genet which measures about five inches in length and is full of personality: I think you will love it, and we can keep it in the flat if you want to. We have called it Pickin. So at least the veranda of our house here looks now as though we are collecting. A woman near Freetown is giving us a tame pair of Timothys (God Help Us All), a forest squirrel of some sort and a python …

  John Hartley is shaping very well indeed. He finds driving on these roads in this heat a bit trying (the laterite gets in his eyes) but he never complains. He is first class with the animals, who all take to him, and is very good in his dealings with the Africans … He is a very good companion, he does not get flurried and has learnt that in this sort of country a sense of humour and limitless patience are necessary unless you want to go quietly round the bend. In fact I think he’ll do.

  Darling, this trip must be doing you good: two love letters from you in such a short space of time. Your first one was an injection to my soul, as was the second. I mooned over your first letter like a love-sick schoolboy, and carried it about with me and re-read it at frequent intervals. Unfortunately, they have a mania for washing clothes here, and I had the letter in the pocket of my pyjamas (so I could re-read it last thing at night) and the idiot washboy seized them the following morning and washed them, letter and all. By the time I had discovered this all the ink had run. I was furious. Luckily I had read it so many times I knew it by heart.

  Darling, I miss you like Hell. What I miss most is that I can’t talk to you … I am hoping that when Chris and all arrive there will be so much work to do that I won’t have time to miss you, but I doubt it. I want your physical presence. It is now ten to ten: blue sky, sun, cool wind and I am writing this and drinking beer. Outside I can hear the staff giggling over some joke, the carpenter banging away, and the chimps ‘oooooing’ over some tit bit they have found. I can see the great bush of scarlet and mauve bougainvillaea at the end of the veranda alive with purple and green sun-birds. This is all fun, but you are not here and so every sound and every colour is slightly off key: like looking at a sunset through dark glasses …

  I love you so much, and I can’t wait to hold you and kiss you again. Please keep safe and don’t do anything silly; remember that a woman alone anywhere in the world is lawful prey. Come back to me safe and happy and love me a little. You say that you need me: double that feeling and you will know what my views are on my need for you – you are my life.

  Day by day the animal collection increased and the filming proceeded. Two major animal requirements were still lacking, however – leopard and colobus monkey. The only way to catch colobus, it was clear, was to organise a monkey drive through the forest with the help of the local Africans, who were well versed in this method of hunting. But dreaming up a monkey drive was one thing: pushing it through was another, as Gerald recounted to Jacquie.

  Darling,

  All goes well with us but it is, as I feared, a fight against time and African procrastination. We are working among the Mendes, and for sheer inertia they knock the Mamfe-ites into a cocked hat. Example: go to village. Flock of forty odd black and red Colobus in trees not one hundred
yards from village. Film them. Good. In village elders all swinging in hammocks: say what about monkey drive. My dear chap, they say, we get monkeys time no dere. But, should you wish to have monkey by the score we can jack it up for Tuesday. Now, are you quite sure about this, says you. Yes, says they, monkey we get time no dere; no be palaver for catch um. Good says you, we go come back Tuesday, early morning time. Ah arrrrrrrrrrrrrr! says everyone. So you go back on Tuesday morning early early and you still find the elders swinging on their hammocks. Which side monkey drive, you ask in a spirit of inquiry (I’m starting to write pidgin now)? Ah arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr they all say, dis village na small village; we do no get SURFISHNT young men for monkey drive. Ef you go bring some men from Kenema we go catch you monkey time no dere … whole day wasted by the time you have driven there, done your nut and driven back. I told the BBC that I needed time to organise this sort of thing. This is the last BBC trip I do, except on my own terms. To be paid fuck all money and be expected to produce a Hollywood epic is a bit much, and I am getting too old for it.

  Pause while we go on monkey drive.

  Later. Well, after all the unkind things I writ above we have at last met with success. We organised a big drive in a village and it really came to something. We had fifty-three Africans (so you can imagine the noise) and they tracked down some red and black Colobus, drove them into a suitable tree, and then proceeded to hack down all undergrowth around the tree. Then a fire was lighted at the base of the tree and the monkeys all dashed down and into the nets. It was terribly noisy (perfect for sound on film) and exciting. The monkeys behaved wonderfully, all getting themselves caught within a few feet of the camera. Every time they caught a monkey all fifty-three Africans would break into a sort of triumphant chant … wonderful stuff that makes the stuff in Zulu look tame. It will make a wonderful climax if we don’t get pigmy hippo (and I don’t think we will) and so Chris is like a dog with two tails. But it really is tremendously spectacular stuff … knocks David [Attenborough] into a cocked hat … and the sound on film makes the whole thing so real. We jacked up a sequence the other day of John and I catching a huge monitor lizard in a pool. As I rushed after it I got my foot caught between two rocks under the water: ‘Oh, bugger it,’ says I, ‘I’ve got my bloody foot caught.’ Chris is going to leave this in, so we are really trying to get naturalness into the programmes …

  Just recently we have all had a mild go of sandfly fever. Hartleypools first, then Chris, and now me. So I am writing this in bed where they have insisted I go. But this is a much more healthy place than the Cameroons, and we have all been very well. I must say our staff (an irritating, shiftless, ham handed, mentally defective and utterly charming bunch) have thrown themselves into the work with wild delight. Every new arrival is crooned over, they listen to the recording we make with great attention, and take part in the film shots acting and delivering their line with consummate acting ability.

  Now to more important matters. Darling, I love you so much. Nothing I do or see or eat or feel is the same, because you are not here. And then, after all I have written to you, I find that you haven’t got the bloody letters. I think of you all the time, and I have never wanted to get back from a trip so much. I want to lie in a warm bed with you and kiss you and feel your silky body under my hands; I want to see you in a rage when you go all white and lose your breath; I want to see you in the bath with your hair all covered with soap, looking about five years old. I want you more than hunger or thirst affects one …

  I love you G.

  PS … I am dirty, love-sick and full of faults. But I love you and, if ever one human being can possess another, you have me. I wish you were here.

  To say that I miss you is stupid, it’s rather like saying: ‘Isn’t it curious, the sun fell out of the sky yesterday … do you find it dark?’ It’s rather like being deprived of both arms and a pair of eyes. If you are willing, I never intend it to happen again – not of my making. You said I have changed, and everyone does, but the one thing that has changed in the right direction (probably the only thing I have done that has) is that my love for you has increased to the extent where it is not just a feeling but a physical pain, rather like walking round with a few red-hot coals under your ribs. We do not live forever and while I am alive I want nobody else but you. If you left me tomorrow, and this was best for you, then OK … With you – and without anything else – I have the whole world. Without you I am nothing.

  Goodnight and I wish to fucking hell you were here.

  I love you. G.

  Then came the setbacks. Though the black and white Colobus monkeys that had been caught in the monkey drive gradually settled down, the red and black ones grew sullen and morose and seemed to withdraw into themselves, eating next to nothing. Eventually it became obvious that there was no alternative but to let them go, and this, with great regret, Gerald did. At around the same time Gerald suffered an accident that threatened his further participation in the venture. He had been sitting on the tailgate of the BBC Land-Rover when the vehicle hit an enormous bump at speed and he was thrown upwards and sideways, badly bruising (perhaps cracking) the base of his spine and breaking two ribs. Henceforth he was in pain every time he sat down, or bent down, or even breathed. Doing the filming and the work that the collection required was difficult, and as the pain increased Gerald realised he would need help on the voyage home. He sent a cable asking Jacquie, who had recently arrived back in Britain, if she could possibly come out to join him, which she did.

  Gerald was not there to greet her when she disembarked at Freetown, and arrived to find her standing in the docks and ‘looking mutinous’. The reunion was unusually tense, as he recorded later.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she said, as a nice, wifely greeting.

  ‘Trying to get on to the bloody docks,’ I said.

  She came forward to kiss me and I said, ‘Don’t squeeze me too hard because I’ve got a broken rib.’

  ‘What the hell have you been doing?’ she asked belligerently. ‘Have you been to see a doctor? Are you strapped up?’

  So, after this demonstrative greeting of a husband and wife who had been parted for some four months, we made our way to the Land-Rover and drove back to the flat.

  A fleet of army lorries took the animals down to the docks, and the cages were slung on board, followed by Gerald, Jacquie, John Hartley and Ann Peters (a ‘brisk and efficient blonde’ who had flown out to help), along with Chris Parsons and his cameraman and sound recordist. The voyage home was uneventful, but the onward flight from Liverpool to Jersey was a nightmare. ‘How Durrell stood the strain of coping with his rib, his tiredness and the worry of the animals, I shall honestly never know,’ Jacquie was to recall, ‘but I felt he was pretty near to collapse.’ By comparison, most of the animals were completely unaffected by the stress and strain, and happily settled into their new quarters in the zoo.

  ‘Durrell was happy, as indeed we all were,’ wrote Jacquie, ‘and he could now collapse – at least for another twenty-four hours.’

  NINETEEN

  Volcano Rabbits and the King of Corfu

  1965–1968

  Though the expedition had not been entirely fun, it had been broadly successful. ‘Just back from Sierra Leone,’ Gerald wrote to a friend in New Zealand on 2 June 1965. ‘We got a very nice collection of 90-odd animals, the rarest and most important of which are 7 black and white colobus monkeys and a pair of nice young leopards.’ The homecoming had been gratifyingly upbeat as well. ‘One of the best bits of news on my return,’ Gerald continued, ‘was that our pair of Tuataras had hibernated, so we are keeping our fingers crossed that we will go down to their house one day and find lots of baby Tuataras galloping about the place …’

  Gerald now began to write up his account of the expedition to the Antipodes and Far East of four years before, to which he gave the same title as the television series based on it, Two in the Bush. While he was thus occupied, Jacquie decided to try her hand at writing her own ac
count of her life with Gerald, his family and other animals – to be called Beasts in my Bed – and advertised in the local paper for a secretary with shorthand to take it down and type it up. One of the applicants was an attractive young blonde by the name of Doreen Evans, whose parents had recently moved to Jersey. When she turned up at the manor for her interview, she was confronted not just by Jacquie, but by Gerald and Catha Weller as well. Halfway through, Gerald leaned across and put a question to her.

  ‘Would you,’ he asked, ‘be prepared, if need be, to breastfeed a baby hedgehog?’

  His voice was deadpan, but Doreen could tell from his eyes that it was a joke. ‘That’s when I realised we had a lot in common,’ she recalled ‘– that and a common love of nature and the countryside.’

  During the early part of 1966 Doreen typed Jacquie’s book in a small office at the top of the manor, with two lovebirds in a cage for company. When she had finished she was asked if she would like to stay on as Gerald’s secretary and take down his next book as well.

  This book was to mark a departure for Gerald. He now found himself confronting the dilemma which eventually faces all non-fiction authors whose books are based on their own adventures: the adventures begin to dry up – or at any rate, the zest and sense of novelty that the author once felt in undertaking them. Travelling round Sierra Leone with a film crew at the age of forty was not the same as plunging into the Cameroon rainforest for the first time at the age of twenty-two. One way out of the dilemma was to change genre, to move from non-fiction to fiction and write about what was inside one’s head rather than in front of one’s eye. Gerald was not sure whether he had the talent to do this, but he could try. His next book, he decided, would be a fictional story for children, to be called The Donkey Rustlers and set in Greece. This was not too daunting a challenge. He was half-child himself, and a born raconteur, and he loved Greece. He chose to compose this new work in a new way – by telling the story out loud to his new secretary.