Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  Music was important to Gerald, and his tastes were catholic and far-flung, though he played no instrument and only rarely sang. His preferences in classical music were different from Jacquie’s: while she loved the soaring sounds of romantic grand opera, he preferred what she called ‘piddle music’ – Mozart and Vivaldi. And while she was a great jazz fan, Gerald’s tastes in popular music veered towards cabaret and musicals, though he was also an early aficionado of what is now called world music, the popular music of other lands and cultures. When he appeared on the marathon-running BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs on 7 August 1961, his eight chosen records included parts of Beethoven’s 8th Symphony and Mozart’s The Magic Flute, ‘A Hymn to Him’ from My Fair Lady, Eartha Kitt singing ‘An Old-Fashioned Millionaire’ and Flanders and Swann performing ‘The Gnu Song’, as well as Zulu music, an Andean tune and a Greek folk song he had first heard on Corfu when he was a boy. As his luxury item he chose writing materials (much as he claimed to loathe writing), and for his book he cheated a little and asked for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  Drawing, especially cartoons, was another favourite pastime, and when combined with his charisma and his talents as a raconteur, his lightning sketches could keep an audience spellbound. ‘He was able to hold a capacity audience at a Cambridge University meeting of the Fauna and Flora Preservation Society for two hours,’ John Burton, then the society’s secretary, was to recall, ‘with nothing more than a few sheets of paper and a felt pen – and he raised several hundred pounds at the end of the evening by auctioning off his vivid cartoons … He could be even more hilarious when describing certain members of the zoological and conservation establishment. It was humour without malice, but he was a doer and had little time for conservationists who spent most of their time going from conference to conference.’

  Little of Gerald’s occasional writing ever saw the light of day, though its range, variety and ingenuity was considerable. He was for ever bubbling with ideas, and at one time or another he sketched out a stage play called ‘Uncle Amos’, set on a Greek island; an animation film idea for children called ‘AESOP’ (Animal Emergency Survival Operation); an unpublished collection of short stories; a cookery book called ‘Cholesterol Cooking’; a spy novel and a thriller called ‘Mengele’; an autobiographical television series; and a musical set in Dracula’s castle in Transylvania entitled ‘I Want a Stake in Your Heart’ (with songs that included ‘It’s a Lovely Day for Doing a Bit of Evil’ and ‘You have Something to Hide, Dr Jekyll’).

  His favourite form of literary doodle was the limerick. These could pop into his head at any time of day or night, especially with a drink inside him, and would be scribbled down on whatever was to hand – beer mat, menu card, nightclub notepad – wherever he happened to be. In the spring of 1970, by way of a little creative psychotherapy to speed his recovery along, he turned to a form of his own devising, the bawdy limerick with animals, and before long he had elaborated this into a grander scheme – an illustrated bestiary of creatures, twenty-one in number, each the subject of its own limerick. To this concoction Gerald gave the name ‘The Lady Saranne’s Bestiary’. The least ribald of the limericks convey the work’s broad flavour.

  The Llama

  There was once a newly wed Llama

  Who was given a copy of ‘Kama’

  He tried ninety-six ways

  In forty-one days

  Which did more to alarm her than calm her.

  The Song of Saranne

  A voluptuous young mink called Saranne

  Said ‘I’ve thought of an excellent plan

  If we have a reversal

  Of what’s universal

  Then I could be wearing a man.’

  With the help of these diverting little five-finger exercises Gerald perked up sufficiently to face the world again. For much of the summer he pottered around the South of France, eating, drinking and making merry with friends on a strict convalescent regime of wine, women and uproar. Towards the end of June he pitched up at the Hôtel le Select in Arles with a large ‘harem’ in tow (including Jacquie, Saranne Calthorpe, Peggy Peel and an American assistant by the name of Anne Valentine) to meet up with Chris Parsons for discussions about a possible BBC television programme on his favourite naturalist, Henri Fabre, and a recce of key locations. But Gerald did not linger long, confessing to Parsons: ‘I was faintly at the end of my tether, so you were well shot of me.’ He and his entourage moved on to visit Lawrence at Sommières. ‘My brother turned up with an entourage of females,’ Lawrence reported to Henry Miller. ‘He travels with a permanent seraglio like a Turkish potentate. Or do I mean imbroglio? It often amounts to the same thing.’ By 7 July the party had headed off to the family flat of Odette Mallinson, Jeremy’s wife, at Cros de Cagnes on the Côte d’Azur, where they parted from Saranne and hoped to meet up with ‘the Zets’, Mai Zetterling and David Hughes.

  The days passed happily in a blur of excursions, shopping, swimming, lunches, siestas and dinners. Gerald often stayed behind when the rest of the party sallied out for the day in order to get on with a new book of short stories, Fillets of Plaice, and on 22 July he finished it. Not long afterwards, on 4 August, he suffered a serious relapse in the middle of dinner. ‘He had his first seizure,’ Jacquie recalled, ‘an attack of grand mal, the first and only attack that I know of in the time I was with him. The local French doctor and later a consultant neurologist in Nice told me that his attack was solely due to the horrendous drug treatment he had been prescribed in England plus the booze, and if he stayed with the regimen given by the French doctor things would stabilise themselves.’ This regimen prescribed half a bottle of red wine as the limit of his daily alcohol intake – a fraction of what he had grown used to. But he stuck to it, and as a result began to lose all the weight he had gained through his previous illness, and to look better and younger than he had for years.

  At the end of August Gerald and Jacquie finally returned to Jersey. They had been away, a few short visits apart, for the best part of a year and a half. For Gerald the recuperation from his near total collapse in 1968–69 had been a long one. In October Jacquie wrote to Lawrence: ‘You will be pleased to hear that Gerry is still looking absolutely marvellous and he is actually keeping to his regime. Whatever it was that affected him in France certainly was miraculous because all the tensions and general woes have gone and he is now like his old self.’

  This was all too evidently true. In November Chris Parsons visited Gerald in Jersey to talk further about the proposed programme on Henri Fabre. Gerald had ambitious ideas for an elaborate dramatic treatment of the French naturalist’s life, but Parsons felt that this might prove too costly for the BBC. After Parsons left, Gerald wrote him a characteristically mischievous letter, enclosing a revised treatment of the subject.

  Dear Wellington,

  It was, as usual, a horrible experience having you here but one from which we are recovering. I know that you spend ninety percent of your time in bed with a blonde, so I felt that I ought to write and jog your memory. I watched the Modigliani programme as you suggested and it has given me lots of ideas on how to do the Fabre film. I enclose a rough draft of the opening sequence which I am sure will win your approval.

  Yours

  Napoleon

  The rough draft was brief but original.

  This film opens simply but, I think, effectively with an enormous close-up of Fabre’s external genitalia. Across the screen crawls a small dung beetle dragging behind it a banner on which we have the title, ‘Furry Fabre, the Prick of Provence’. As the beetle reaches the edge of the screen, it is hit with a bottle and the screen goes black and remains that way for approximately three and a half minutes, during which a rather soulful Provencal tune is played on a comb and paper … That is as far as I have got so far, but I think you will agree that the meat of the Fabre story is coming over.

  Parsons suggested a less Rabelaisian approach, but Gerald lost interest in the project, and ceased to be invo
lved in it.

  When Parsons came out to Provence with his wife and a BBC crew to shoot the film in the summer of 1972, he had barely checked into his hotel before the manager brought along a bottle of champagne which had been left, he explained, by a Mr Gerald Durrell in the hope that it ‘might help Mr Parsons overcome his shyness’. Asked what this was supposed to mean, the manager replied that Mr Durrell had told him (falsely, of course) that the couple were on their honeymoon, and needed all the help they could get. The incident was to generate hoax and counter-hoax. When Parsons arranged for a telegram to be delivered to the Mazet with the message ‘FILM DEAL NOW IMMINENT STOP IMPERATIVE YOU FLY NEW YORK IMMEDIATELY’, Gerald plotted an elaborate riposte. Parsons recalled:

  The next day we were all due to drive north to a party at the lovely old Provençal farmhouse of Elizabeth Frink, the sculptress. After the meal, when everyone was in jovial mood, Elizabeth’s husband, Ted, brought out a curious package addressed to me which he said had been left by an eminent zoologist who had heard I was in the area. I opened it suspiciously, finding inside six objects resembling the cocoons of emperor moths – one of the subjects we had been filming. Curious to see how the cocoons had been made I started unpicking one of them, for I could hear something rattling inside. I discovered a small piece of paper, tightly rolled. Unravelling it I saw it bore a message – it was something extremely rude about the BBC. Once more Durrell had somehow managed to have the last word.

  Meanwhile the work of the Trust was making dramatic progress. Its ethos had been honed down to a simple agenda – simple, that is, to express, though far from simple to achieve. Gerald was to declare:

  We are not a zoo in the accepted sense of the word, we are a reservoir of threatened wildlife from all over the world. A sanctuary where they can live and breed in peace.

  Our objectives are firstly to provide a safe sanctuary for a species and then to build up a colony of them. You see, unlike a zoo, we have to deal in colonies. Once you have created your colony surplus, animals can be sent to other organisations all over the world, until the creatures are safely established under controlled conditions. Then, when it is safe, you can start on the final problem: taking your surplus animals and returning them to the wild, reintroducing the species to areas where it has become extinct.

  By now Jersey Zoo, the first collection of its kind in the world to turn its activities entirely towards conservation, had begun to earn international recognition for its work. It had established a number of breeding colonies of rare animals, many of which had never been bred under controlled conditions before. Despite the limited means at its disposal, thirty species of mammals, forty-nine species of birds and four species of reptiles had been bred there.

  All this represented a remarkable achievement for a man whose only formal education amounted to half a term at prep school. However, it was difficult to see how the organisation could ever be totally secure when it did not own the buildings and grounds on which it stood. The Trust’s lease was due to run out in fifteen years’ time, when the owner, Major Fraser, might choose to move back in or sell the estate off for development. It was clear that unless a substantial sum could be raised to secure outright ownership of the property the zoo and Trust might lose their home and to all intents and purposes cease to exist, for unless they owned their place of work no charitable foundation would be willing to give them grants.

  Sir Giles Guthrie, the financial adviser to the Trust, led the charge. Major Fraser said he would be prepared to sell the estate for £120,000, and a public appeal launched in the autumn of 1970 raised £25,000. Sir Giles was anxious to scotch rumours amongst the wealthier residents of the island that Gerald was lining his own pockets from the proceeds of the zoo and the money donated to the Trust. It was the Trust that received all moneys, he told the local press: ‘Mr Durrell gives his time freely and without payment and has in fact given over £20,000 in cash to the Trust. His expeditions are paid for out of his own pocket with the income from his books.’ Satisfied on this point, in March 1971 the States of Jersey agreed a minimal-interest loan of £60,000 to help secure the property. On 18 March Gerald wrote excitedly to a friend: ‘Life here is hectic in the extreme but there is one very big piece of news. We have at last managed to raise £120,000 to buy this property which will become ours on April 2nd. I cannot tell you what a relief this is to us. It means that we can now go to various foundations and get grants and we are also embarking on a large-scale fund-raising operation directed mainly at North America.’

  Gerald’s agent Peter Grose was always to regard Gerald as one of the three great people he had been privileged to know in his professional life, the other two being Christopher Isherwood and the Australian Nobel Prize-winner Patrick White. But it was not on account of his literary achievements that he so admired him. ‘When I took him on,’ Grose remembered, ‘his best books were well and truly behind him and he was beginning to scrape the barrel.’ Gerald had become a rather slack writer by now, Grose reckoned, and though Sir Billy Collins, the Chairman of Collins, remained a staunch champion, his editors, Adrian House and Philip Ziegler, were having to do a lot more work on his manuscripts to bring them up to scratch. The downturn in the quality of Gerald’s literary output was evident in Fillets of Place, and even more so in his long-delayed and still unfinished account of the Sierra Leone expedition, Catch me a Colobus. Not that his books did not still sell well, particularly back titles like My Family and Other Animals and The Bafut Beagles, and they were widely translated, being especially popular with the pet-starved inhabitants of the Soviet Union and Communist Eastern Europe, who loved Gerald’s slightly mutinous view of the world. Rights in three of his books were optioned for the big screen – The Donkey Rustlers, Rosy is my Relative and My Family – though none was ever made into a film.

  Peter Grose recalled:

  Gerald never had a high regard for his writing. He saw it as a means to three ends. First, as a source of money. Second, as a platform for his ideas. Third, as a route to stardom (for he did have real star quality and a genuine affinity with showbiz and the stars) – and stardom he could use to further his real life’s mission. I used to go to that zoo and I was awe-struck – here were animals that might have ceased to be had it not been for the intervention of this man. That does seem to be a monument beyond the imagination. To have that vision and the drive to achieve it was just astounding in those days. I admired him hugely as a human being. You lose sight now of how far ahead of his time he was, and how what he was expounding in the fifties and sixties is now the current orthodoxy. In those days he was still looked upon as an upstart amateur expounding mad ideas. The pressures on him, the anxieties and doubts, were enormous. The zoo and the Trust were phenomenally expensive things to run, they chewed up money at such a rate, so fund-raising was his biggest single preoccupation – all that PR glad-handing, speeches at dinners, touting for money and so forth – he was under the same pressure as a comedian who’s got to be funny every single night. So under those circumstances he tended to drink as an anaesthetic to take the pain away. The drinking escalated as the pressure escalated, till in the end he was drinking quite ferociously. I remember staying at the manor and getting up at eight o’clock one morning and finding Gerry with an enormous brandy balloon into which he poured a huge quadruple slosh of brandy and a pint of milk on top – and that was breakfast. For elevenses he would open the first bottle of rather fine claret of the day. Drinking like that damages you – not that I ever saw him drunk or incapable when he was in working mode or at functions and engagements where he had to make speeches and be on parade.

  In April 1971 Gerald and Jacquie again repaired to France with Peggy Peel and Anne Valentine, staying at the Mazet for the summer for Gerald to get on with the writing of Catch me a Colobus. He was having immense difficulty with the book, for he had not altogether enjoyed the Sierra Leone expedition, and his antipathy towards the highly unionised BBC camera crew deprived him of a lot of the source material that a book
of this kind needed, with its reliance on eccentric human and animal characters.

  On the sixteenth Gerald took time off to drop a note to Lord Jersey, brimming with enthusiasm over his immediate plans for the zoo – a new gorilla cage, better accommodation for the Congo peacocks, and completion of the water meadows (‘a lovely focal point for the whole zoo’). ‘I have finished two chapters of a new book,’ he added, ‘and eaten a lot of delicious French food and drunk a lot of delicious French wine, so I am feeling, if not a giant refreshed, at least like a coherent pygmy.’ With Lawrence’s house at Sommiéres only a relatively short drive from the Mazet, Gerald saw a lot of his brother, meeting up for an informal meal or a binge, or a wide-ranging, deep-diving tête-à-tête in which they would put the world to rights or pick it to bits. The two had always been close, and now they were to grow closer still. Disappointingly, however, it proved impossible for Gerald to buy the Mazet from his brother as he had hoped. He could not afford the asking price, he told Lawrence on 11 June, ‘even if all three films suddenly materialised’, so he would like to rent it for five years instead.

  A few days later Sir Giles Guthrie wrote from Jersey outlining the latest Trust plans: Lady Saranne Calthorpe to raise £20,000 ‘to keep the wolf from the door’; the scientific committee to recommend a conservation programme ‘which will bring joy to all working at the zoo’; and ‘you, dear boy, to make an exploratory trip to the States in the autumn’, to be followed by a full-blown assault in the spring of 1972, when Gerald would ‘set out like a knight in shining armour to conquer the Americans and replenish the coffers at Les Augrés Manor – essential to the successful expansion of your life-work’. Later in the month Lord Jersey wrote to reinforce the importance of Gerald’s activities in America. ‘Fund raising in the States depends entirely on you,’ he wrote, and quoted a remark made by an American friend of Sir Giles: ‘If Durrell wants any money he better come and get it himself. It’s no good him sending his stooges.’