Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  With the Assam expedition far from ready to proceed, and his marriage in ruins, Gerald found himself in an unendurable limbo in Jersey, still cohabiting with Jacquie, though he was no longer meaningfully married to her. It was then that Jacquie came up with an idea: Gerry was not well, she told his personal assistant John Hartley. Why didn’t John take him off somewhere sunny and warm? As it happened, for the last two or three years the Trust had had a growing interest in conservation problems on Mauritius, the island that was, appropriately, the graveyard of the long-extinct dodo, the emblem of the Jersey Zoo and Trust. Compared to Assam, Mauritius was easy to travel around, and local contacts were already well-established. A six-week fact-finding mission to Mauritius and offshore Round Island was quickly organised, with the departure date set for the end of March.

  For her part, Jacquie was keen to go to Australia to gather material for a book on the conservation work of Australian women – a trip which would also give her a perfect opportunity to reassess her life and the future of her relationship with her husband. Reluctantly Gerald accepted this proposition, but insisted she take someone with her, and suggested Sue Bateman, who had resigned as his secretary just before Christmas.

  Gerald meanwhile had gone to hole up in the Palace Court Hotel in Bournemouth, promising to contact both Alan Ogden, the family GP, and his sister Margaret. But the solitude and bleakness of his situation soon threatened to unhinge him. Drinking heavily while he passed his time morosely thumbing through the whole nine volumes of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which he had bought at Commin’s Bookshop (‘Anyone who breeds rare animals knows how important sex is,’ he was to claim in justification of his obsession with the subject at that time), he began to slide towards the abyss of another acute depression. Concerned about her husband’s state of mind, Jacquie rang Alan Ogden, who found Gerald drinking heavily and in a dreadful state, and had him transferred to a private nursing home. He rang Jacquie and warned her that it might be advisable to postpone her Australian trip. It could unravel Gerald’s psyche still further – and she might be needed. Reluctantly she agreed and set off for the house near Grasse instead. There she stayed for the whole of the separation period from January to March. It had not taken her long to realise that there was indeed no mileage left in the marriage, and she found that she rather liked being able to do what she wanted to do, and to have space and time to think of other things. ‘I remember saying to myself: “It’s now or never!”’ she recalled. ‘I only wish I’d done it before.’

  There was one other casualty in all this. David Hughes went to see Gerald in his Bournemouth hotel, to be told that, with Jacquie’s decamping from the scene, his biographical memoir of Gerald Durrell and his world, on which he had laboured for most of the previous year, was now unpublishable. The implosion of the marriage was not the sole reason. Gerald considered there was too much conversation and not enough conservation in the book – ‘Not you at your best, dear boy,’ he later told Hughes. Collins cancelled the contract without paying the last instalment of the advance, and Hughes departed for the stiller but more profitable waters of American academic life.

  Gerald returned to Jersey in a distraught state. John Hartley picked him up at the airport, and realised at once that he was in no condition to be left on his own. ‘He was tearful, sullen and very distressed,’ Hartley recalled. ‘I saw a person I was fond of at the end of his tether. The zoo was a lonely place at night and there wouldn’t be many friends passing by. I felt the best thing would be to move into the manor house myself during the next few critical days.’ John went home, told his wife what he was doing, picked up a few basic things and returned to the manor to camp there for as long as he thought was necessary. ‘We talked a lot,’ he remembered, ‘played music, had a few drinks and generally decided the world was a miserable place.’

  For Gerald this was the inner circle of hell, the dark night of the soul. Shortly afterwards his sister Margaret arrived to lend a hand, followed in due course by Tom Lovejoy from America. ‘Gerry was very broken up,’ Margaret recalled. ‘He couldn’t bear one millimetre of loneliness. He’d always had to have a woman around, even if she was only banging around in the kitchen, and he felt unnerved when there wasn’t one. But in spite of his state of mind, he said to me one day: “If ever Jacquie is in a bad way and knocks at your door, I hope you will let her in.”’ From time to time friends came to keep him company. ‘He was very, very down,’ recalled David Cobham. ‘In fact he had reached rock bottom. It was very sad. I know he drank too much and I’m sure he was difficult to live with, but he was a wonderful man doing tremendous things, and it was a shame he had come to this.’

  Hell on earth though it may have been, in the long run the break-up was probably as good for Gerald as it was for Jacquie. By any definition of the term ‘marriage’, this one had fallen apart long ago. The pain Gerald felt was partly because he had lost a loved one and partly because Jacquie’s departure had left him alone – a state he found intolerable. ‘Had I not been the first to make the move towards our separation when I did,’ Jacquie later observed, ‘we would eventually have come to the conclusion that it would be the best course for either of us to take. Remember the old adage – once respect goes, love follows? Gerry, of course, was very angry and told me he would do all he could to erase my memory and all my connections with the zoo. And he certainly kept that promise. I think he was upset because my departure left such a large gap in his life. Although Gerry fervently and continually protested that he did not want me to go, I sincerely feel that it was not only because of his professed great love for me but because it was also a great inconvenience to him. He had become totally dependent on me and my judgement. I did everything for him. Even though I was no longer involved with the zoo, I had continued to be his business manager, his bank manager, his filing systems manager and so on. So now he was bereft. Not emotionally, especially, but practically. It wasn’t till I left that Gerry realised how much I did for him. It was rather telling that he protested to his own lawyer that he had been forced to employ three people to do what I had done single-handedly throughout our married life.’

  As a cure for heartache and nervous collapse Gerry distracted himself by writing animal verse, just as he had done after his crack-up in the late sixties. On 27 February 1976 he wrote to Shirley Thomas from the zoo: ‘I am, in my spare time, trying to outdo my elder brother by writing poetry. I am doing a series of animal poems called “Anthropomorphia”, and I am hoping that they will allow me to illustrate them myself. Naturally, my poetry has a much more mystical, philosophic quality to it than Larry’s has, as you will see from the enclosed piece. I feel that there is nothing quite like a good dramatic piece of poetry to make one feel better when one is suffering.’

  Given the circumstances, the ‘enclosed piece’, the subject of which was one of the endangered species in the zoo, was remarkable.

  Up in the snow covered Andes,

  There’s only one beast you will see,

  Who is clever enough to learn all the stuff

  That one needs to obtain a degree.

  The Spectacled Bear is a wonder,

  The Spectacled Bear is no fool,

  The Spectacled Bear, with a wisdom that’s rare,

  Paid attention when he went to school.

  The Spectacled Bear learnt Spanish,

  The Spectacled Bear learnt to draw,

  The Spectacled Bear with time and with care,

  Could multiply twenty by four.

  The Spectacled Bear was a paragon, Gerald went on. He learned to write, paint, knit, weave and sing. He learned history and how to add up his sums without using his thumbs. But one thing made him ‘awfully depressed’ – he couldn’t spell, and had to sign his name with a cross.

  But one day someone gave him a parrot,

  (A bird that was badly behaved),

  But one thing it did well, and that was to spell,

  So the Spectacled Bear was saved.

&nb
sp; With this bird as his constant companion

  He writes letters to friends now with glee,

  And always you’ll find they are carefully signed:

  ‘Spectickled Bere, B.Sc.’

  So if ever your teacher should ask you

  To spell words like ‘Zephyr’ or ‘Claret’,

  The thing I’d suggest that would be the best

  Is to go out and purchase a parrot.

  On 25 March 1976, shortly before his departure for Mauritius, Peggy Peel met Gerald in London and noted in her diary: ‘Jacquie was not there. I asked no questions but suspected she had left Gerry. He was very low. Ann Peters was with him and I gathered she was going with him to Mauritius too.’ As his girlfriend, it should be said – ‘the first girl on Gerry’s rebound’, as John Hartley put it.

  In April, following Gerald’s departure, Jacquie returned to the flat in the manor house at the zoo for the last time, to do Gerald’s accounts and collect a few personal items. It was at this point of terminal flux that a new appointee, Simon Hicks, arrived to take up the senior post of Zoological Co-Ordinator at the Trust (later Trust Secretary). ‘There was a sort of subtle chaos afoot,’ he recalled of his first few days, ‘and I just walked straight into it. Goodness, I said to myself, what have I let myself in for? Gerald Durrell had gone abroad, and his wife was clearly packing up and walking out. There was a TV crew there. “Mr Durrell here?” they asked. “No,” I said. “He’s miles away. I’m new here and I can’t keep up with these two. I’m totally confused.” No one let me into the secret, they just let me clump around all over it. I couldn’t work out what was happening, except that the situation was grave.’ When Jacquie left she directed a parting word to Jeremy Mallinson: ‘Well, goodbye, and I hope I never see this bloody place again.’

  By this time Gerald was far away in body and mind. He had first become involved with Mauritius, second largest of the Mascarene Islands to the east of Madagascar, in a rather casual and roundabout way, little dreaming that one day it would become the scene of the Trust’s longest-running and most defining conservation project.

  In March 1976, stressed and ailing, his marriage in ruins, Gerald flew to Mauritius with John Hartley and Ann Peters for a six-week foray which was originally intended to be no more than – as John put it – ‘a bit of R&R in the sun’. Mauritius was still a relatively remote and little-known island then, and Gerald’s first glimpse from the air – ‘green and smouldering, mountains smudged blue and purple, ringed with the white foamed reef on the dark blue of the Indian Ocean’ – was voluptuous and reassuring. Ecologically, though, the island was in many ways a wreck, and it seemed fitting that the plane should land on a runway from which the skeletal remains of the long-dead dodo had been recovered in past years. Most of the island’s unique fauna had been exterminated by early human interlopers or the no less lethal animals they had introduced – dogs, cats, pigs, rats, monkeys, mongoose and the rest. Within a remarkably short time the island’s giant parrot, giant tortoise and dugong had followed the dodo into extinction. ‘All that was left of a unique and harmless fauna,’ Gerald wrote, ‘was a handful of birds and lizards. These, together with what is left of the native forest, face enormous pressures.’ None more so than the Mauritius kestrel, pink pigeon and echo parakeet, which qualified as the world’s rarest kestrel, pigeon and parakeet – victims of marauding troops of Javanese macaque monkeys that wreaked havoc on their eggs and chicks.

  Inevitably, as Gerald learned more about the plight of the island’s wildlife, what had originally been planned as a holiday with a conservation agenda attached became a conservation agenda with a holiday attached. His first port of call, therefore, was the headquarters of the Conservator of Forests, Wahab Owadally, with whom he and John Hartley formed an immediate friendship. He was helpful and enthusiastic, and insisted that as well as the haunts of the pink pigeon and the Mauritian kestrel and parakeet, the party should visit nearby Round Island, which in his opinion was ‘Mauritius’ answer to the Galapagos’, but was in grave ecological danger.

  To find pink pigeons in the wild would be difficult, given the bird’s puny numbers, and as the only viable method was by torchlight at night when the bird was roosting. But for Gerald the foray into the cryptomeria groves of Pink Pigeon Valley in pursuit of the elusive birds was a timely adventure, for it took him far from the pain of his broken marriage and the cares of Trust business in Jersey, and he found himself once again in a close-contact world of animals, resembling his long-ago boyhood in Corfu. Just how close-contact astonished – and delighted – even Gerald. At sundown, perched high in a tree waiting for the pigeons to come flighting in to roost, he found himself an object of intense curiosity to a flock of passing birds. He was to write later:

  The sun was now very low and the sky turned from a metallic kingfisher-blue to a paler, more powdery colour. A group of zosterops, minute, fragile, green birds, with pale, cream-coloured monocles round each eye, appeared suddenly in the branches above me, zinging and twittering to each other in high-pitched excitement as they performed strange acrobatics among the pine needles in search of minute insects. I pursed up my lips and made a high-pitched noise at them. The effect was ludicrous. They all stopped squeaking and searching for their supper, to congregate on a branch near me and regard me with wide eyes from behind their monocles. I made another noise. After a moment’s stunned silence, they twittered agitatedly to each other and flipped inch by inch nearer to me until they were within touching distance. As long as I continued to make noises, they grew more and more alarmed and, with their heads on one side, drew closer and closer until they were hanging upside down a foot from my face, peering at me anxiously and discussing this strange phenomenon in their shrill little voices.

  Only when two pink pigeons flew in and Gerald raised his binoculars to watch did his Lilliputian audience take flight. Eventually the first pigeon was caught, dazed with sleep, and Gerald plucked it from the special catching net:

  I received it reverently into my cupped hands. It lay quietly, without struggling, merely blinking its eyes in what appeared to be mild curiosity at this strange experience. It was a remarkably handsome bird. Gazing at it, feeling its silken feathering against my fingers and sensing the steady tremor of its heart-beat and its breathing, I was filled with a great sadness. This was one of the thirty-three individuals that survived; the shipwrecked remnants of their species, eking out a precarious existence on their cryptomeria raft. So, at one time, must a tiny group of Dodos, the last of their harmless, waddling kind, have faced the final onslaught of pigs, dogs, cats, monkeys and man, and disappeared for ever, since there was no one to care and no one to offer them a breeding sanctuary, safe from their enemies. At least with our help the pink pigeons stood a better chance of survival.

  Not that the pink pigeon exactly did a lot on its own behalf, he noted: its notion of reproducing seemed to involve perching on the end of a branch and releasing its egg into the void below.

  The next stop was Round Island, which lay fourteen miles north-east of Mauritius. In area it was no more than 375 acres, yet it contained a remarkable range of unique or endangered plant and animal life, including eight species of native reptile, six of them endangered (two geckos, two skinks, two snakes); at least ten species of threatened native plants (six of them endemic); and the only known breeding ground of the rare Round Island petrel. ‘This volcanic island,’ Gerald was to report, ‘probably has more unique and threatened species per acre than any other piece of land in the world.’ Introduced goats and domestic rabbits had ravaged the landscape, browsing down the vegetation, including the dense forests of rare palms and hardwood trees such as ebony, till the island looked like a moonscape. In the process the cover and insect food supply of the island’s rare lizards and snakes had been destroyed. The Mauritian government was aware of the dangers, and was contemplating steps to reduce the goat population, eliminate the rabbit and re-afforest the island, though little as yet had been done.

 
; But Gerald was bullish. ‘When this is an accomplished fact (in perhaps thirty or forty years’ time),’ he wrote, ‘Round Island will have been pulled back from the brink of total obliteration and serve as one of the most exciting examples of conservation as it should be practised.’ Meanwhile the party had a chance to save some of the island’s threatened creatures. Gerald had been given permission to bring back some of the rare endemic lizards, and after four days he departed with a breeding nucleus of Round Island geckos and skinks.

  The visit to Rodrigues was a more far-flung venture. Some 350 miles east of Mauritius, and only forty square miles in area, this dry and dusty island had once been the haunt of the giant tortoise and the strange solitaire bird – both exterminated by ruthless hunting and habitat destruction by French venturers in the eighteenth century. Gerald and John’s aims were to carry out the first proper survey of the fruit bat population for a number of years – they arrived at a figure of between 120 and 130 – and to catch enough of them to form captive breeding colonies in Jersey and Mauritius, using mist nets and a bait consisting of nearly rotting fruit, including the sweetly-sick stinking jak fruit.

  The Rodrigues woods at night were not a place for the faint-hearted. The mosquitoes half-devoured Gerald and his friends, and the torrential rain half-drowned them. The locals built crude banana-leaf huts for them, but these were half-chewed-up by an army of noisily browsing giant land snails. Eventually, however, they were successful in their quest, returning to Mauritius after four days with eighteen bats.