Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  ‘We started at about ten in his office,’ Doreen Evans recalled. ‘He planned the whole book first. Then he planned the chapters in his mind. He set himself a target of a chapter a day. He didn’t have any notes and he didn’t make a lot of corrections, he just walked up and down telling the story to me, and if any of it made me laugh then he’d laugh too, with that bubbly giggle of his. After lunch I’d type it up and he’d read it at the end of the afternoon in his sitting room, walking up and down smoking his Gauloises cigarettes. Most of his writing seemed to involve walking up and down when I knew him.’

  Doreen also handled Gerald’s fan mail. Though he couldn’t answer every letter himself, he always made a point of signing every reply personally, and he was particularly attentive to letters from children and young people. My Family and Other Animals had recently been chosen as a set book for GCE examinations in England, so a lot of letters from schoolchildren coming in – ‘How do I become a zoo keeper?’ or ‘There’s something wrong with my budgie and what can I do to make him better?’ ‘He treated the kids’ letters with as much attention as if it was a scientist writing about a rare species,’ Doreen remembered. ‘They were the next generation and they needed to be encouraged in their love of animals. That’s how he had been when he was a little boy and he knew how important it was to help a child.’

  In February 1966 the BBC began transmitting Catch me a Colobus, the series of six television programmes shot on the Sierra Leone expedition. It was well received. ‘There is no better practitioner in this field of interest than Gerald Durrell,’ wrote the Times Educational Supplement. ‘The Colobus is an elusive little African monkey with a fantastic capacity for leaping from tree to tree and outsmarting his pursuers. Gerald Durrell’s documentary of his efforts to capture these agile creatures has been a weekly delight, for it has involved not only the excitement of the chase but also a sympathetic and amusing depiction of the Africans whom he recruited to assist him. Gerald Durrell never cheats, he never sacrifices veracity to satisfy the whims of a cameraman. He is also a most expressive and perceptive narrator, and his running commentary has been as brilliant as the photography. He has produced one more television classic in natural history.’

  The programmes roused enough interest for the Daily Mail to send a reporter to Jersey to find out what sort of fellow Gerald Durrell was. What he was, the reporter discovered, was someone disturbingly different from the comic writer and cuddly animal-lover of his popular image. Instead, here was a man whose capacity for concern had brought him near to the end of his tether, a man close to buckling under the weight of humanity’s guilt. You could get people to watch a series like Colobus, Gerald told the reporter, but they didn’t want to know about the larger issues. They didn’t think it concerned them when forests were pulped for paper napkins, when topsoil was destroyed by the quick crops of greed, when species were made extinct. It was so difficult to get these ideas across, he said, it was like mumbling in his beard. Even other naturalists asked: ‘What are you getting aerated about, Durrell? This is an inevitable process.’ But it had to be stopped. Half the animals he had on display at the zoo were rare, threatened, or liable to be threatened.

  He handed the reporter a horned toad, handling it as if it were an Etruscan vase. ‘Get some of that mud off and it’s lovely,’ he said. ‘People ask what use it is. They never stop to wonder what use they are. Why should anything go for a burton because of greed? It’s got a right to live.’ Sometimes he felt he was doing something useful, he went on. Then a letter would come in from a television viewer who hadn’t quite got the message. ‘One of my correspondents said that I was the most evil man he knew. It was against God’s law to shut up little creatures in cages. If he had his way he’d have me locked in a cage for life. There’s a snag in that argument somewhere, don’t you think?’

  On 16 May 1966 Gerald, Jacquie and Doreen Evans left Jersey to drive in slow and easy stages through France and Italy – ‘eating every mile of the way’ – to Venice and the leisurely sea-ferry voyage down the unspoiled Dalmatian coast to Corfu. Gerald had four aims – to take time off on his beloved island, to dictate another book, to look at locations for a proposed BBC film about his childhood on Corfu, and to find an old villa to live in or land to build on. They stayed in a flat belonging to Philippa Sanson, Theo Stephanides’ sister – a huge apartment occupying three sides of the top floor of an old Venetian building at 35 Arseniou Street on Corfu town’s waterfront overlooking the harbour. The flat was sparsely furnished, so they were obliged almost to camp in it.

  Gerald’s routine was invariable, Doreen recalled.

  He’d get up at crack of dawn, around five-ish, and make me a cup of tea with condensed milk in a big thick green cup. Then I’d get dressed and he’d start dictating, walking up and down the huge sitting room with its wonderful view over the sea and the little islands. He’d do this till about mid-morning and then that would be it for the day, and I’d type it all up while Jacquie was out buying things for lunch – chicken and tomatoes and fresh bread and yoghurt and so on – and then we’d all set off for an olive grove by the sea somewhere. Barbati was a favourite place, a long unspoiled beach some way out to the north of the town. There’d be no one else there in those days, just the keeper of the olives, and we’d swim and have a picnic under the olives and the almond trees, and then Gerry would read what I’d typed and perhaps make a few corrections and have a siesta. Then when the sun started going down we’d potter slowly back. Sometimes we’d stop at a little place called Luciola’s at Ipsos, which hadn’t been built up like it is now. There was a little restaurant there which sold the most wonderful chicken pies and had green tree frogs in the trees, and we’d sit there having our evening meal, which in Corfu could take a long time, and drinking our wine. Occasionally we’d go for a picnic to the south of the island, which was further away, and then when we got back we’d eat in Gerry’s favourite restaurant in town, called Themis, near the Platia, which was run by a friend of his called Vassili. Quite rarely we ate in and Gerry would do the cooking. His fish pies were very good, but his prawn Provençale, with prawns fresh out of the sea and herbs fresh out of the ground, was absolutely brilliant. We’d sit in camp chairs round the huge dining table and have a few drinks while Jacquie played her favourite classical music on the gramophone, and the air outside would be warm and the sea starlit.

  One day they went to a cricket match between Corfu and the British Fleet – a match the Fleet had strict instructions to lose – and one evening they went night fishing, the phosphorus shining like fire on the water and their hands, trailed in the sea, coming up ‘dripping with diamonds’. So the summer passed.

  In early September they were back in Jersey. Lawrence and Claude moved into a big house they had bought in Sommières at the end of that month, and Gerald and Jacquie took over the Mazet near Nîmes on a two-year lease, the beginning of an association that was to last the rest of Gerald’s life.

  By now Two in the Bush, Gerald’s account of his six-month filming expedition through New Zealand, Australia and Malaya in search of rare animals with the BBC Natural History Unit, had been published in Britain. By this time Gerald had changed publishers. Amid some bitterness and recrimination he had (at Jacquie’s suggestion) moved from Hart-Davis, who had subbed him at the start of his careers as an author and zoo-owner, to the richer pastures of William Collins, who ran a large and successful natural history list. The reviews of Gerald’s first Collins book were mostly favourable. The Daily Mail thought it ‘delightfully readable and often very funny’, while the Evening Standard proclaimed that it would ‘delight fans and armchair naturalists everywhere’. Maurice Wiggin in the Sunday Times found it ‘Easy to read, difficult to put down, with many sidelights on the human side of the expedition. This absorbing narrative reveals the ardours, ironies and disappointments, the organisational miracles and the hilarious human mishaps, which lie beneath the bland, sure surface of Mr Durrell’s nature films.’

  Towards
the end of 1966 the Trust held its annual grand fund-raising ball for members, well-wishers and the island’s high society. The event was a great success, the highlight being the arrival of a regal-looking, dark-skinned, clean-shaven gentleman, splendidly garbed not in the statutory dinner jacket but the robes of the deputy chief of the kingdom of Bafut. He was greeted as the celebrated Fon himself, but closer examination revealed a pair of twinkling blue European eyes and a voice that spoke pidgin English in an unexpectedly cultured accent. So the ruse was laid bare – Gerry had arrived at the Black and White Ball disguised as the all-black Fon, having shaved off his beard for the first and only time in his life in order to perfect the disguise.

  By this time much of the fund-raising on the island was in the hands of Lady Saranne Calthorpe, a young woman who had become a close friend of Gerald and Jacquie. She had first come into their life a year or so before, when Gerald had met her by chance at Jersey airport selling flags for a local charity, and was bowled over by her beauty, intelligence and Irish charm. Born in Eire, she had been an Aer Lingus air hostess before marrying one of its pilots, a hereditary Irish peer by the name of Peter Somerset, Lord Calthorpe. At Gerald and Jacquie’s invitation, Saranne Calthorpe teamed up with Lady Jersey to organise many of the Trust’s fund-raising events on the island – balls, recitals and the like – and to approach Jersey’s richer residents for donations.

  But funds raised in this way could provide only a drop in the ocean of what was now desperately needed. During the winter of 1966–67 the zoo faced its worst crisis yet. There was no money to pay the staff’s wages or the bills for the animals’ feed. With the National Provincial Bank in St Helier on the verge of foreclosing, Gerald sought out its manager, Ray Le Cornu, to make a last-ditch plea for a stay of execution. He was in bed at home with ‘flu, but Gerald knocked on his door one evening clutching a bottle of champagne – his panacea for all ills. For an hour he sat on the edge of the bank manager’s bed, desperately pleading his case and using all his formidable powers of persuasion to change the sick man’s mind. At last Le Cornu agreed to give the zoo one more chance, then turned over, exhausted, and fell into a fitful slumber as a grateful Gerald tiptoed out of the house. From that moment everything changed. Upon receipt of the news, Lord Jersey stepped in, offering to pay the staff’s wages and to help keep the place afloat till the spring.

  At this time most of the animals were still housed in the makeshift cages the zoo had started with, and the main thrust of the enterprise, captive breeding, was not yet properly under way. If the zoo was to develop, it was clear that substantial funds would have to be raised.

  ‘We have formulated a ten-year plan,’ Gerald announced, ‘which will require £200,000 to complete [£2 million in today’s money]. Of this £100,000 will be spent on property expansion and new buildings and £100,000 for the wider objects of the Trust.’ The public could help by becoming members of the Trust, or by making donations or sponsoring particular projects.

  Even while he was writing this report, Gerald reckoned, four animal species had been irretrievably lost to the world for ever, and the fate of four more – the orang utan, the okapi, the whooping crane and Leadbeater’s opossum – hung in the balance. The situation was dire, the need over-whelming.

  In the meantime he remained preoccupied with Corfu. Earlier in the year he had approached his BBC friend Chris Parsons about a possible television adaptation of My Family and Other Animals. For a few days that summer he had taken Parsons around some of the key locations on Corfu. Beguiled by both the story and the locations, Parsons had proposed devoting an entire evening to Corfu on BBC 2, which was about to start Britain’s first colour television service under its new controller, David Attenborough. Parsons’ idea was for the Corfu evening to be structured around an adaptation of My Family, with travel and natural history programming thrown in.

  When David Attenborough pointed out that the Natural History Unit had no experience of drama production, Gerald came up with the idea of a more straightforward documentary, to be called The Garden of the Gods, in which he would revisit the haunts of his island childhood. Gerald dreamed up the device of travelling round the island with his town-bred ‘godson’, played by Andreas Damaskinos (son of Corfu’s Director of Tourism), a kind of junior doppelgänger invented for the film, who would look at the wonders of Corfu through the eyes of just such a boy as Gerald had been, but with Gerald as his mentor; at the same time Gerald would be accompanied by his own real-life mentor from boyhood days, the now-venerable Theo Stephanides.

  Gerald looked forward with great anticipation to the making of the film on Corfu during the coming summer. But his spirits were quickly dashed by dire news from France. On New Year’s Day 1967 Claude – the one real love of Lawrence’s life – died in a Geneva clinic, succumbing quite suddenly to pulmonary cancer, leaving Lawrence bereft and Gerald ‘very upset and worried’ about his brother.

  Some distraction from the pervading family grief was provided by the new book Gerald was writing, a comic novel (his first work of adult fiction) entitled Rosy is my Relative, and by the arrival of Chris Parsons and his television crew to shoot a programme for a new series called Animal People, one of the first to be made in colour by the BBC. Each programme was to be about a well-known figure who was involved in some way with animals – Peter Scott was another of the subjects. Shot over a period of nearly two weeks, the Jersey film attempted to portray a typical day at the Trust headquarters from dawn to dusk, ending with an evening sequence in Gerald and Jacquie’s living-room in the flat in the manor house. Chris Parsons recalled:

  I knew from personal experience that this was an extremely enjoyable part of the day. I had always looked forward to the moment when the animals had the floor – literally. Firstly, there was Keeper, an amiable boxer who loafed around the Durrells’ flat most of the day. Then there were the African squirrels which lived in cages in the corner of the sitting room. Undoubtedly the squirrel with the most attractive personality of all was Timothy, an African ground squirrel. In the evening, when the traffic in and out of the Durrells’ flat had died down, Timothy’s cage was opened. This usually signalled the start of an hour’s entertainment which was better than any night-club cabaret I had seen. For it seems that African ground squirrels are nature’s comics – at least Timothy was – and his routine and thorough inspection of the room and its occupants was conducted with such mischievous showmanship and perfect timing that every little action brought ripples of applause.

  What with the camera and the lights and a room full of technicians, it took several evenings of filming before Timothy could be said to be ‘in the can’. This provoked Gerald to indulge in a little good-humoured mischief of his own. When the filming was finished, he wrote a lengthy letter to the Programme Executive at BBC Bristol, Frank Sherratt, whose facility fee for shooting at the zoo he considered none too generous, announcing that he had been appointed agent for the two animals which had performed in the film, and that he wished to negotiate terms on behalf of his clients:

  Timothy Testicle was required to have his own private room infested by a vast series of lights, combined with an array of ham-handed and apparently inebriated technicians and was then expected to go through a routine that would have made even Bertram Mills’ wife think. He was expected to do a Bolshoi ballet across the carpet; to lie supine upon a large and potentially savage carnivore, to wit a dog; to stand on his hind legs with his nose wiffling (looking not unlike a young BBC producer) and then undergo the ignominious experience of lying upside down in my wife’s hands, displaying an astonishing proportion of his more intimate anatomy, while giggling hysterically.

  I think you will agree, my dear Mr Sherratt, that as he so willingly took part in something for which he had not signed a contract, it is up to the Corporation to show a certain amount of generosity. I am therefore empowered on his behalf to request the Corporation for the following fee:

  1 cwt bag of hazel nuts

  300 copies of the Ra
dio Times (for bed-making)

  2 bottles of Chanel No 5

  A year’s supply of Smith’s potato crisps

  1 female ground squirrel, approximately 3 years old and of an uninhibited disposition.

  For Keeper the dog Gerald requested a similar ‘fee’, including a boxer bitch, four tons of chocolate drops and ‘a yearly visit from the lady at Tring whom I believe has made a life work of collecting fleas’.

  On 23 May 1967 Gerald, Jacquie and Doreen Evans arrived back on Corfu, where they again stayed in the flat in Arseniou Street. Gerald had sent Spencer Curtis Brown the typescript of Rosy is my Relative shortly before leaving Jersey, and he found a rather negative response from Collins waiting for him in Corfu: the editor wanted to change the title, it seemed, and much of the story as well. Gerald dug his toes in. ‘You know I have not got a very high opinion of myself as an author,’ he protested to Curtis Brown, ‘and am perfectly prepared to have things changed at the editor’s discretion, but I am terribly sorry I am absolutely firm on the point of the title. It is to be called Rosy is my Relative or else it is not going to be published at all and you can send the MS back to me. I am here for a rest which I desperately need, so I am not prepared to do a lot of re-writing at this juncture for what I consider to be silly reasons.’

  In July the Durrells were joined by Theo Stephanides, now a white-bearded old gentleman with the bearing of a soldier and the air of a Victorian naturalist. When Chris Parsons and an unusually large BBC production crew flew in for the start of shooting on The Garden of the Gods they checked in to the Aegli Hotel, owned by Menelaos Condos, a childhood friend of Gerald’s, on the road below the Snow-White Villa and Strawberry-Pink Villa, and conveniently close to many of the locations in the film: the chessboard fields, the Venetian salt-pans, the olive woods, the small hills, and the bay and Mouse Island just across the water. The filming was scheduled to last a month, and was timed to coincide with the festival commemorating St Spiridyon, the patron saint of Corfu, whose embalmed body is carried in grand procession through the streets in a special casket.