Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  ‘The Garden of the Gods was a particularly enjoyable film to make,’ Chris Parsons recalled, ‘because it involved such a delightful mixture of topics. There was a little of the history of Corfu, something of its music and dance, beautiful scenery, and running through it all, a series of incidents concerning wildlife – usually linked to memories of Gerry’s childhood experiences or lessons with Theodore.’

  But there were jarring undertones. ‘For me,’ Parsons confessed, ‘the experience was spoilt a bit by a running battle with Jacquie going on in the background.’ This was due in large part to Jacquie’s determination to keep Gerald’s workload to a minimum following a mild heart disturbance he had suffered in Jersey earlier in the year. For Gerry things were spoiled by the sheer impossibility of revisiting paradise, let alone recreating it, in the irreverent, knockabout ambience of a film crew on location. He grew morose, feeling the emotional burden of his past was being compromised by the human mêlée of the present, and he complained loudly to camera about the plastic bottles, ice-cream cartons and other debris left by the tourist trade along the island’s once-pristine shores. ‘In such a vein,’ Parsons recalled, ‘Gerry wouldn’t listen to reason and he could become maddeningly opinionated and bigoted and extraordinarily irritating. But he was so endearing and charming in other respects you just put up with it.’ On screen Gerald, still only forty-two, looked fit and well, swam and rowed boats with gusto, presenting a charismatic, powerful, unusually serious presence – so serious, indeed, that he gave little impression of having much sense of humour at all.

  This was to be the last film Chris Parsons would make with Gerald, whose personality, he believed, never quite came across on camera. ‘He would be terribly polite and self-effacing in front of camera,’ Parsons recalled. ‘He was at his best when he was relaxed and informal, and then the Durrell charm would come out and he’d become a different person – a terrific raconteur, totally indiscreet, very rude, utterly bawdy – the sort of stuff you couldn’t put on air except on some obscure cable channel in the middle of the night.’

  King Constantine of Greece was staying on Corfu that summer with his wife Queen Anne-Marie and his mother Frederika, an ardent conservationist and animal lover. When he heard that Gerald was making a film on the island he invited him and Jacquie to lunch at his palace. The other guests included the King’s uncle Prince George of Hanover and his wife Sophia and the future Queen of Spain. ‘I am not a royalist and approached them with some doubts and misgivings,’ Jacquie recalled, ‘but I was won over by their “normalcy”. We found them all a charming, amusing bunch and thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing. I remember the King and his sister exchanging bread rolls over the heads of the others; the wine flowed and the food was excellent (not Greek!) The King was genuinely interested in Gerry’s views on everything and Gerry didn’t tone down his remarks at all, save for not swearing, as was his wont when talking about contentious subjects and human folly. Both appeared to be in agreement about most things. Queen Frederika naturally took part, and the King offered to fly Gerry around the mainland and the islands to see the environmental situation for himself. But it was not to be. Greece was now under the rule of the Colonels and before long the Monarchy was abolished and the Royal Family sent into exile.’

  Gerald and Jacquie returned to Jersey in the middle of September 1967. Not long afterwards, Gerald’s attention was drawn to the plight of a strange little rabbit called the volcano rabbit, or teporingo, which was found only on the slopes of the volcanoes round Mexico City and was in imminent danger of extinction, through encroachment by cattle and crops. On paper the volcano rabbit was a protected species, but the Mexican authorities found it almost impossible to patrol the area in which it lived, and though its flesh was not good to eat and its fur was useless for commercial purposes, local hunters liked to use it for target practice and for training their hunting dogs. ‘This, I thought, was a job for the Trust,’ Gerald was to record. ‘It was an animal we could easily cope with because of its small size, and I felt certain that, with a certain amount of patience and perseverance, we would be able to do it.’ There were some technical problems – the rabbit fed exclusively on zacaton grass (alfalfa), which was unobtainable in Jersey, and lived at altitude, while Jersey was at almost sea level – but Gerald reckoned it was worth a shot. So the Mexican expedition was born, a kind of conservation lightning strike, the plan being to secure enough rabbits to form a viable breeding colony at Jersey Zoo and thus save the species from extinction.

  On 15 January 1968 Gerald and Jacquie, Doreen Evans and Peggy Peel, a BBC friend, sailed from Antwerp on board the German cargo boat the SS Remschied. Three weeks later they arrived in Vera Cruz, Mexico, and shortly afterwards were joined by Shep Mallet, Curator of Birds at the zoo, and an Anglo-American student by the name of Dix Branch, resident in Mexico, who acted as interpreter, driver and general factotum.

  During the first week the party travelled south to the Guatemalan border looking for various species of rare birds, particularly the thick-billed parrot, another creature in danger of extinction. Then they set up their headquarters in a flat in Mexico City, within easy reach of the volcanoes where the rabbits eked out their perilous existence. The prospects were not wildly promising. No visitors from abroad had ever shown any interest in the rabbits before, the local zoo had no specimens and the Mexican Fauna Department could offer little assistance. Most people who heard about Gerald’s plans shook their heads sombrely and declared the project would be muy dificil.

  One difficulty was the very scarcity of the animals on the ground. Another was the terrain where they lived – the vast, rough and (at ten to sixteen thousand feet) exceedingly high slopes of the great snow-capped volcanoes of Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl. Another difficulty was that the guards of the Popocatepetl National Park, who were supposed to protect the rabbits, often caught and ate them instead.

  The first foray after the rabbits was to prove typical. Gerald wanted to be on the spot before dawn, hoping to find the rabbits as they came out of their burrows, so the party had to leave their flat at four-thirty in the morning. By the time the sun was rising they were high on the slopes of Popocatepetl, bouncing about in their Land-Rover across Alpine terrain, everything still and no sign of life anywhere. All day they searched and toiled, breathless in the thin, high air. At one point a volcano rabbit scuttled across their path and vanished into the thick grass. In a clearing in a wood they found some rabbit droppings, and first one burrow, and then another. But the first was found to be empty, and the second contained nothing but a tuft of fluff. All day they dug in the black lava soil – volcano rabbit burrows can be forty feet long – but not another rabbit did they see.

  The disappointment was acute, and Gerald lapsed into a state of gloom. Back in the flat in Mexico City he sat slumped in silence in a chair. He barely moved, his face was dark and haggard-looking, and Peggy Peel began to wonder whether he might not be suffering from something more substantial than mere disappointment – the beginnings of some sort of clinical depression, perhaps.

  On their second sortie the party drove to a different part of the volcanoes, climbing up to fifteen thousand feet from the little town of Amecameca. They had the help of a number of local Indians this time, and after working hard all morning they achieved their first success, digging out a female teporingo. The excitement was palpable. They were on their way – or so they thought. The teporingo was an appealing little creature, chocolate brown in colour and very small. ‘Gerry pointed out how she differed from the rabbits we know,’ noted Peggy Peel. ‘Apart from a difference in skull formation, her ears were much smaller and her tail almost invisible, hidden in her fur. Apparently teporingos don’t hop in a rabbit-like way, but run everywhere. And they have a “voice” – they communicate through little, muffled squeaks. But one of the most interesting things about them are their fleas. It’s a kind of prehistoric flea, only previously found in fossils, before it was discovered alive and kicking on the teporingo.’


  The rabbit was borne off in triumph to Mexico City, where she readily adapted to a diet of apples, carrots and alfalfa, and soon became very tame. But what good was a single rabbit if your plan was to establish a breeding colony? Gerald abandoned the idea of catching the rabbits himself – the altitude was too exhausting, the rabbits too elusive. Instead he resorted to a method he had first refined in his early days as an animal collector in the Cameroons – pay the locals to catch the animals for you. For three weeks the search continued as the local Indians dug away in the hot, dusty ground high on the volcanoes. But time was running out, and Gerald grew increasingly despondent, for he faced the prospect of returning to Jersey with only a single rabbit to show for an expensive three-month expedition – an absolute failure by any standards. Then, in the middle of March, four more volcano rabbits were brought in – but all of them were female. And that, it seemed, was that. No male – so no breeding colony in Jersey.

  A few days later Shep Mallet flew home, taking with him the five female teporingos and some rare birds (most notably three pairs of thick-billed parrots, along with breeding groups of Mexican black-bellied tree ducks and Emerald toucanets). Five days later the rest of the party sailed from Mexico on board the cargo boat Sonderburg, bound for Antwerp on a five-week voyage via the southern United States. Dix Branch remained behind, charged with the task of finding a male teporingo by fair means or foul, somewhere, sometime, somehow …

  On the voyage out to Mexico Gerald had dictated the first half of his new book, a long-awaited sequel to My Family. On the long voyage home he managed to dictate the second half, but his thoughts remained with the volcano rabbits, and after arriving back in Jersey in early May he waited anxiously for word from Dix Branch. Eventually Branch was able to procure six more rabbits, two of them male, and had them flown to London at once. Held up by red tape at London Airport while awaiting onward freighting to Jersey, one of the males died. In Jersey the remaining male and two of the females died of a disease called coccidiosis, and though four baby volcano rabbits were born at the zoo, all of them were female and three of them died in infancy. This left a non-viable colony of eight female rabbits – all there was to show for months of endeavour. Today the volcano rabbit is still threatened with extinction.

  This failure was counterbalanced by success with the white eared pheasant – Jersey Zoo’s first really significant breakthrough in the captive breeding of endangered species. The white eared pheasant was a graceful and beautiful bird which once inhabited the highlands of China and Tibet, but due to hunting and habitat destruction was on the verge of extinction. Only eighteen birds existed in captivity, none of them capable of breeding. Jersey Zoo was fortunate to obtain two pairs of white eared pheasant from a dealer in Holland, and, against the odds, succeeded in breeding them. Gerald wrote: ‘It was a red-letter day for us when Shep Mallet and I stood gazing fondly at no less than thirteen delicate and fluffy babies clad in fawn down marked with chocolate blotches, who peeped and trotted around their bantam foster-mother like so many wind-up clockwork toys.’ If these birds were indeed extinct in the wild state, as was feared, Jersey Zoo had made a major contribution to their conservation.

  By the time Gerald had settled back into the manor house he had completed his new book and given it the title Birds, Beasts and Relatives. Spencer Curtis Brown seemed to like it, Gerald told Alan Thomas, ‘but whether any of the family will still be speaking to me after it is published I really don’t know’.

  As an antidote to the desecration of modern Corfu, Gerald found it therapeutic to try and recreate yet again the unspoiled wonderland of his childhood. Corfu never lacked the power to reawaken in him the yearning for the sensuous languor, the freedom and wonder of his island childhood, as his latest book again made clear.

  Birds, Beasts and Relatives was published the following year to unanimous family approval and highly favourable reviews. ‘A delightful book, full of simple, long-known things,’ wrote Gavin Maxwell in the New York Times Book Review, ‘but above all, childhood moulded by these things and recalled intimately in middle age.’ The Sunday Times went further: ‘He effortlessly immerses us in the glittering bays and sun-shivered olive groves, teeming with weird astonishments – the private life of the rotifer, the mating of snails in impassive hermaphrodite bliss, the use of a female cuttlefish on heat to catch ardent, undistractable males. The expert’s scrutiny is blended with the boy’s wondering gaze in a way Hudson himself never excelled. The crystal-clear dreamworld he has made of it, that gives delight and hurts not, expands the spirit and demands our gratitude.’

  In June there was another tremor in the ranks of the Durrell family when brother Leslie and his wife Doris precipitately decamped from Kenya, arriving back in England with only the clothes they stood up in and £75 between them. They were put up in the attic flatlet of Margaret’s house in St Alban’s Avenue while they tried to sort themselves out.

  Leslie, it seemed, had got himself into a bit of a mess in Africa, and Gerald had first heard of the developing scandal the previous autumn. On 6 October 1967 a Mr Wailes had written to Gerald from South Devon to inform him that ‘your brother Leslie has got himself into considerable financial trouble and this unfortunately involved my mother, at Diani Beach, Mombasa. Leslie informs my mother that he has written to you in this connection.’ Leslie, it seems, had conned the woman out of a substantial sum while he was working as bursar at a school near Mombasa on the Kenyan coast. Gerald immediately fired off an angry letter to his brother: ‘It seems you have implied that I would be willing to get you out of whatever mess you have got yourself into,’ he fumed. ‘I am not in any position to help you financially and I do strongly object to receiving letters from complete strangers implying that my only function in life is to rescue you and save their mothers.’ Not only would Gerald not help; he wanted nothing to do with a criminal sibling whose antics might taint the reputation of the Trust if ever the press got hold of the story. With nowhere else to turn, the helpless Leslie lost his job and the house that went with it. With Africanisation in full swing in Kenya following independence, his prospects of finding another job were virtually zero, so he and Doris had no option but to take the first plane out, leaving all their possessions behind.

  Eventually the press got hold of the story. Lee Langley of the Guardian tracked Leslie down to a bare flat in a basement at Marble Arch, where he and Doris were working as a caretaker couple looking after an apartment block. ‘He looks very like his brother Larry,’ Langley noted; ‘short, stocky, with a pouchy, leathery face and bright blue eyes; a quiet polite man of 53 in a stiff white collar and the sort of tweedy suit an empire builder would have put on when he was home on leave. He stirs a cup of Bovril carefully and agrees that of course he’s inhibited about having such successful brothers. “It was terrible in Africa sometimes,” he said, “when people found out I was Gerry and Larry’s brother. I felt like something out of a zoo. They’d come and stare at me …”’ The caretaker job wasn’t much, but at least it provided a home and some stability. Leslie had written a children’s book, he said, and had given up shooting: ‘I used to shoot a bit in Africa – a duck or so for dinner. But there seemed such a lot of shooting going on. I felt I could not add to it. Lost the taste for it somehow.’

  Though Margaret continued to see Leslie and Doris from time to time, neither Gerald nor Larry would have anything further to do with their wayward brother. There were those, however, who saw a different Leslie, and who held him in high regard. Among them was Peter Scott (no relation to Sir Peter Scott), who had been his friend and employer in Kenya for three years and was to testify to his reliability and kindness, and to the happiness of his marriage to Doris. Leslie was also, Scott said, a brilliant raconteur, who should have been a writer. But ‘he was one of life’s losers – a middle brother with no obviously marketable talents, scarred by a bizarre childhood. His contact with Lawrence must have been minimal. He once tried to visit Lawrence at his home in Paris, but Lawrence’
s wife refused to admit him. He probably wanted to borrow money.’

  TWENTY

  Crack-Up

  1968–1970

  In the last week of July 1968 Gerald, Jacquie and Doreen Evans set off once again for Corfu, this time in a small convoy consisting of a Rover saloon car and a four-wheel drive Land-Rover intended for the ruggeder parts of the island. They were to spend two months there, during which time Gerald was to pass from a kind of heaven to something more closely resembling a private hell.

  The sojourn had started well enough. The film rights to My Family and Other Animals had been bought by a London-based production company called Memorial Enterprises, run by the British actor Albert Finney and the producer Michael Medwin. Gerald was anxious to write a draft screenplay for the film on Corfu, in collaboration with his friend the actor Peter Bull, who was due out soon for a flying forty-eight-hour visit. Large and round, funny and kindly, a lover of all things Greek and an obsessive collector of old teddy bears, Peter had appeared intermittently in the Durrell family’s lives ever since he first met Larry in London before the war and his brother had tried to marry Margaret. Gerald and Jacquie had re-met him on Corfu a few years earlier. A favoured member of their inner circle, it was Peter who had been instrumental in persuading Albert Finney and Michael Medwin to buy the film rights in My Family.

  At the end of the first week in August Finney flew to Corfu to meet Gerald and discuss what form the film should take. By dint of concentrated application, waking Doreen Evans at six most mornings for a four-hour session on the screenplay, Gerald completed a first draft by the last week of August, and early in September Doreen retyped the whole script with three carbons – ‘an enormous task’ – in time for Finney’s return. Unfortunately Gerald and Finney were unable to form much personal rapport, for Finney regarded Gerald as an overprivileged product of the Raj – or so it seemed to Gerald – while Gerald grew weary of Finney’s exegesis of his own underprivileged working-class childhood. Of all the screenplays written around My Family, Gerald and Peter Bull’s was the best by far, but eventually Finney became disenchanted with the project and sold it on to EMI. Time and again international funding proved illusory, and sadly the film of the book was never to make the big screen.