Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  In October 1974 Pat Ferns flew to Jersey to negotiate a deal with Gerald’s television agent, Dick Odgers of Curtis Brown – ‘The best agent I ever encountered,’ Ferns remembers. ‘He was a gentleman, he was fair, and he represented Gerry brilliantly.’ The series got under way with the filming of a gorilla birth shortly afterwards, and principal photography began on 8 May 1975. ‘It was obviously a difficult period in Gerry and Jacquie’s relationship,’ Ferns recalled. ‘During filming Jacquie would walk straight on to the set if the mood took her and start berating Gerry for something or other with the cameras rolling!’

  That summer Gerald, Jacquie, Peggy Peel and Penny Roche, a local Jersey girl, set off in two cars for the South of France, where they were to stay at the Mazet for much of the summer. Much of his time there Gerald spent working on the commentary script for The Stationary Ark, for which David Cobham’s short promo film of the same title now turned out to be a kind of pilot. The series presented a detailed look at the workings of the Jersey Zoo and Trust, above all the captive breeding agenda.

  During the year Gerald’s friend David Hughes paid a series of visits to the Durrell ménages in Jersey and the South of France to gather material for a proposed biographical memoir about Gerald, which had been contracted by Collins. Hughes found Gerald and Jacquie strangely semidetached, occupying the same living space without making any but the most routine and perfunctory contact. They had gone far beyond the staleness or even boredom of a long marriage, and had reached a stand-off in which there was no sharing of interests or meeting of minds. ‘Sadly Gerry’s and my relationship had deteriorated over the years,’ Jacquie was to record, ‘something we both did our best to hide from outsiders, for we hated displaying our woes in public and always presented a “happy face” for the benefit of the Trust.’ But by the mid-seventies it was becoming apparent to some people at the zoo that the marriage was in serious trouble.

  To Hughes it seemed Jacquie was the background figure who addressed her husband as often as not by means of a shouted question or instruction from a distant room – ‘What are our plans?’ ‘Where are we lunching?’ ‘How can I do lunch for ten people single-handed?’ – to which Gerald would respond with a nod, or a grunt, or by raising his eyes to heaven, no more. Jacquie was the practical major domo of the household who kept things in running order. In France it was she who masterminded the daily shopping, did the packing, drove the car, planned the route, checked the petrol, oil and water, booked the restaurant, paid the bills, kept an eye on the booze, brought Gerald round when he ate and drank too much. On Jersey she acted as his business manager, controlling the secretariat, supervising the cash flow, handling the schedules and appointments. When Jacquie spoke, Hughes noted, she was clear and cool in tone, with a touch of a Mancunian accent. ‘The round face ended in a firm chin,’ he recorded, ‘that suggested both determination and the humour to use it wisely. I felt at ease with her acerbic attitude to Gerry and his excesses, the way he pushed his luck, his tendency to domineer given half a chance, the boyish need to be king of the castle. She was both Durrell’s match and more than a match for Durrell. She detested cant. She loved wit. She shared his humour.’

  But they didn’t share much else. She had gone on record as saying that from the day they first met in grey old Manchester more than a quarter of a century ago they had never had a thing in common except animals and travel. Although that was quite a lot, the things that divided them were more – especially when it came to human beings, for while Jacquie was a socialist who supported the aspirations of the working man, Gerald viewed the human race as a failed, stupid and infinitely destructive species, and in response adopted a stance that some (Jacquie for one) would say was right-wing and misanthropic. Once, in half-hippie Avignon with Jacquie and David Hughes, Gerald surveyed with distaste the throng of jeans-clad, guitar-toting teenagers wandering through the main square, and remarked: ‘Man is an unattractive mammal. These are the very people for whom I am slaving out my guts.’

  Gerald liked to travel in the grand manner of an Edwardian satrap, and to live on a gargantuan scale which often pained his more prudent and thrifty wife. Money meant little to him, and when he ran out he would sit down and scribble away to make some more. Though Gerald had earned a fortune in the last twenty years, he had little to show for it in terms of property or capital, for the flat on Jersey was a grace-and-favour dwelling, while the Mazet was rented from his brother. Most of the money had gone on the good life, on travel, expansive dinners for his friends, expensive presents – and, of course, the zoo.

  The tedious details of daily life were beneath Gerald. He seldom carried either cash or a chequebook, for both bored and irritated him, and on the very rare occasion when he had to pay for a taxi himself, he would pull a wad of notes out of a pocket and tell the driver to take what he needed, as he had no knowledge of the denominations. He was an inveterate traveller but rarely if ever drove a car. The necessary arrangements to support his highly peripatetic and eccentric life plan he left to others. He adored the more creative side of cooking, but the routine preparation and clearing up he delegated to minions.

  Gerald loved to throw large parties, and took pleasure in giving pleasure and entertaining in every sense of the word. But often he would pass through one mood after another, and the flow of wine was a matter of ceaseless vigilance and altercation on Jacquie’s part. ‘What we all need is a drink,’ Hughes records Gerald brightly piping up at the end of a long, vinous lunch party at the Mazet, to which Jacquie crisply riposted: ‘Oh, do shut up, Gerry! Everyone’s had quite enough, including you.’ His favourite leitmotif, uttered at virtually any time of day, ran along the lines of: ‘The moment has arrived to press a tiny glass of red wine to the left kidney.’ If this got short shrift, he would try a more plaintive version, such as: ‘Can we stop somewhere and press to our lips, like a little nosegay, a pungent little pastis?’ While Jacquie – slim, trim and brimming with energy – toiled unglamorously in the house or garden, Gerald – ‘a Herculean chunk of hero with a beard’, as Larry described him – would sit in the shade in Olympian fashion and declaim his lofty thoughts on man, nature, creation and the inner workings of the universe and his own sometimes troubled mind.

  Gerald’s intense, abiding, undeflectable passion, Hughes noted, was ‘a single vast issue’. It was Archilochus, one of the lesser-known poets of ancient Greece, who divided people, or at any rate writers and thinkers, into those who resemble the fox and those who resemble the hedgehog. The hedgehog relates everything to a single central vision, a universal organising principle, while the fox pursues many unrelated and contradictory ends, without any single overriding moral principle. Gerald was a hedgehog (like, say, Dante), whereas his brother Larry was a fox (like, for example, Shakespeare). As Hughes observed at first hand, the brothers were both serious men of similar temperament, always mischievous, for ever laughing, but where Larry was ultimately a dazzlingly clever man without faith of any kind, Gerry was a simple man of unshakeable conviction. In short, one was an intellectual and the other a believer. Lawrence not only believed in nothing, but believed that nothing could be done, while Gerald not only believed in something but believed that something should be done, even though he might well lose the battle in the end.

  But the price was high. ‘His vision of the world’s future,’ David Hughes was to write, ‘was entirely at his own expense, inconveniencing him at every turn, wrecking his bank balance, disturbing his peace of mind.’ Being a celebrity is itself a kind of penance, for the more the adulation is piled on, the more worthless the recipient may feel himself to be. ‘I am a charlatan,’ Gerald was to repeat like a litany, wrongly. ‘I suppose self-deprecation helps to keep me sane, if you can call me sane, which you can’t. I have to be constantly on my guard against adulation. For a cause like mine it’s quite in order to boast a certain amount, but not to believe what you boast yourself. In the end you’re taken in by whatever you’re shouting, by which time, like all propaganda, it has
become quite untrue. What I’m after is truth. No, that’s pretentious. Validity. That’s what I’m after.’ He had accomplished very little in his life, he claimed: ‘My achievement has been like chipping away at the base of Mount Everest with a teaspoon.’ The sheer size and gravity of the problem inevitably put him in his place. And if he compared his achievements at fifty with those of Darwin or Fabre, they shrank to nothing. ‘Where the hell did they find the bloody time?’ he complained, with some reason. ‘In Jersey I go mad trying to locate half an hour to do anything in.’

  Much of Gerald’s dark side – his despair, his sporadic rage, his misanthropy, his recourse to food, drink, travel, sun in larger and larger doses as means of escape – was a direct result of his gnawing fear that it was possible his life had been in vain, and that nothing he had done, or could ever do, would stem the tide of destruction at the hand of man. Every hour of every day at the zoo, reports came in from all round the world chronicling the remorseless erosion of wilderness, wildlife and resources – myriad cases of eco-vandalism in every shape and form, initiated at international, governmental, corporate, private or individual level, all spelling out the same accelerating and catastrophic trend. ‘If I live to be seventy,’ Gerald blazed away at David Hughes, ‘the whole deteriorating mess will just about see me out.’ And then, changing tack somewhat, he gave utterance to a holistic credo that left a tiny chink for faith and hope: ‘As far as I’m concerned there’s only one world, and I’m in it and it’s inside me, like the duck we had for lunch, and those louts in the square, and Jacquie, and the handful of mountain gorillas getting fewer every day, and wine, and my horrible cousins, and Larry writing his incomprehensible masterpieces, and breeding white eared pheasants and anything human, animal and alive.’

  Even now – overweight, disillusioned, off whisky but with his marriage creaking – Gerald Durrell retained his intense, boundless reverence for life, his gentle, humble love of the creatures of the world. The alertness and appreciativeness with which he beheld an ant or a wasp or a flight of birds across the rising sun was something solid and permanent in his life, where all else might seem to be shifting sand. ‘His gravity of manner,’ David Hughes wrote of Gerald’s concentrated fascination with the micro-wildlife that crawled and buzzed around his chair on the patio at the Mazet, ‘often suggested a child trying to be grown-up. His enthusiasm for the swiftly identified butterfly, the ants dragging overweight seeds, was infectiously boyish. All his life he had kept this freshness; his interest in nature, in animals, was obsessive from birth.’

  But all was not well. Since March Judy Mackrell, who had first met the Durrells on Corfu a few years previously, had been the Trust secretary. When she went down to the Mazet that summer she found Gerald and Jacquie behaving ‘like two very lost people’. ‘They weren’t even friends,’ she recalled. ‘There was not a single spark of affection.’ Jacquie was very lonely, Judy reckoned. ‘As for Gerry, I think he was probably never a really emotionally mature person, and romantically I suspect he was a rather inexperienced, frightened kind of man, for all his harmless flirting. He was a wonderful person and he did amazing things but he was undoubtedly difficult to live with, what with his impatience and his distress at what was happening to the world. One day Jacquie told me she had thought of a sequel to her book Beasts in my Bed. She was going to call it “My Life with an Animal”. But she did share Gerry’s conservation vision and his love of animals, no matter how lowly. Before she had a shower, for example, she would pick up all the spiders very carefully and take them out of the bathroom. And when she’d finished they’d all trundle back in.’

  As the summer went by, Lawrence was forced for tax reasons to decide against selling the Mazet to his brother, and asked him to move out. Jacquie and Peggy Peel set off to find another suitable rental in the Alpes Maritimes region of the South of France, and after a great deal of searching they found a house, ‘La Chèvre Blanche’, at Le Tignet in the vicinity of Grasse, a country of scented limestone plateaux and splendid olive-covered hills. In late November 1975, just before Jacquie’s forty-sixth birthday, she, Gerald and their new secretary Sue Bateman, along with Peggy Peel and David Hughes, drove down to the Mazet to pack up all the Durrells’ belongings there. Then they set about getting the new house – ‘perched up like an eagle’s nest over a big valley’, Gerald told Larry – organised.

  The atmosphere was tense. Gerald was drinking and moody and irritable, and David Hughes was feeling lost and footloose after the break-up of his marriage to Mai Zetterling the year before. ‘The house was almost a metaphor for the emotional state of the people inside it,’ Hughes recalled. ‘It was stark, blank-walled, almost empty, terribly modern and totally topsy-turvy – the bedrooms were where you went in and downstairs was where you went to sit or eat. Gerry and Jacquie were getting on appallingly badly. There was a lot of verbal violence hurtling about, most of it from Gerry. Jacquie seemed to be at her wits’ end. “I’m wedded to someone who’s wedded to something else,” she said. It was all a bit like something out of Scott Fitzgerald – a terribly fraught emotional atmosphere taking place in terribly expensive restaurants, everyone eating and drinking enormously well but dying deep down inside. I think by the end of this Jacquie was going right off the male sex, which of course stoked Gerry up even more.’

  It didn’t help much when Hughes began a tentative flirtation with Sue Bateman, which annoyed Gerald, though he left it to Jacquie to remonstrate with them. ‘I was virtually sent back home on the next flight,’ Hughes recalled. ‘And at my own expense, I need hardly add. £80 one way.’ That was the last time David Hughes ever set eyes on Jacquie.

  Back on Jersey, Gerald was preparing to go to Assam in north-east India on a conservation fact-finding tour, with special regard to the desperate plight of the endangered pygmy hog. Built into the Assam expedition was a second objective – a television documentary for the BBC World About Us series entitled Animals are my Life, to be produced by David Cobham. The programme was to be as much about Gerald Durrell, his way of life and his never-ending self-imposed task of saving endangered animals from extinction as it was about Assam.

  By now Jacquie was finally resolved as to her future course of action. ‘I told Gerry I could no longer tolerate his behaviour,’ she said, ‘and proposed to go away on my own.’ This was the bombshell that Gerald had probably been long waiting for. It blew away what was left of his marriage, which by now was precious little, and shattered his entire existence. When Judy Mackrell told him she wanted to leave her job at the Trust – she loved the zoo, she said, but not life on Jersey – Gerald was so distraught that he banished her from his sight and cut her off from everything. The walls were falling in.

  Jacquie recalled of the traumatic countdown to break-up:

  He had become very difficult to live with. It wasn’t just the drink, though that was reason enough. He had become very touchy. As he got older his humour became less spontaneous and more studied. He got more cynical, took less delight in things. He became very morose and desperate about the way the world was going, the colossal destruction of nature and wildlife, the global stupidity of mankind. On his fiftieth birthday he formally announced he wouldn’t suffer fools at all, let alone gladly. That just about summed up his attitude. At the same time he became more and more bad-tempered and he would explode all over the place for no apparent reason. Mostly it was just a lot of sound and fury but it was very wearing. It’s very hard to live with someone who is so wrapped up in a project that they can’t see anything or anybody else. I began to think, what on earth am I doing here? Here I am at forty-six – there must be more to life than this. I began bitterly to regret giving up my own career as a singer.

  Living with Gerry got very difficult. You never knew what state of mind he’d be in when he got up. Little things would irritate him and he tended to bring his irritations with everybody else to me, and I just got tired of it. When I protested, he said: ‘Well, you’re my wife, that’s what you’re here for.’ I bega
n to think, what the hell! In spite of all the humour – because he could still be very funny when he chose – the day could be depressive or oppressive. He had become seriously depressive by now – ever since his breakdown in 1968, when he was depressive and suicidal as well. Gerry was never the same after the breakdown.

  It was a truly wretched period for both of us, and that is why I was determined to leave, for by this time it was getting to me and I really felt I had to escape if I was to save my own sanity. I had hung on year after year for the sake of the Trust, for the sake of the animals, really. But once the Trust was on a firm footing, which by the mid-seventies it was, I felt it was now or never. I had been married to Gerry for more than a quarter of a century – a life sentence!

  But the flak was not all one-way – it rarely is in marital cataclysms on this scale. To some close observers of the warring couple Gerald occasionally seemed to be getting almost more than he was giving. None was closer to the combatants than the Zoological Director in Jersey, Jeremy Mallinson, an old friend of both of them: ‘I was very close to the agonies of it all. It would be a wrong picture to view Gerry as the only guilty party. It was really six of one and half a dozen of the other. For her part, Jacquie appeared to be highly jealous of the zoo and Gerry’s devotion to it and his preoccupation with making it a success. There were times when she became quite vindictive towards Gerry, and by the mid-1970s things had got a lot worse. Jacquie almost caused his demise in the process. I mean, she almost destroyed him.’

  By Christmas Gerald was not his normal self. He had loved Jacquie profoundly – why, she never knew – but for a long time the marriage had been a sham. Now Jacquie had ripped the mask away. He was deeply distressed, as was all too evident at the annual Christmas party in the manor, though few were aware of the source of the problem. ‘Gerry was very peculiar,’ Sam and Catha Weller recalled. ‘There was an atmosphere. It was very strange. Gerry was really uptight and odd. Things were clearly not right between Gerry and Jacquie, there was no rapport, there was something emotional in the air.’ Michael Armstrong detected it too: ‘Gerald began to get so drunk that Jacquie actually had to manhandle him, push him away, and I heard her rebuke him with the words: “Without me you would have been nothing.”’