Simon Hicks, the new Trust Secretary, was bright, energetic and devout. He looked on his work as not only a privilege and a joy but a calling – ‘serving God by saving his creatures’. When he was young Gerry had been his hero (‘Wasn’t he everyone’s?’), but his ‘epiphany’ had come when, in Africa after army service, he spent two days and a night with George Adamson and his lions under Mount Kenya. After that experience there was only one course for his career to take. He first found himself at Jersey Zoo as a field officer in charge of a squad from what would later be called the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers, digging a pond, building bridges, felling and planting trees. Gerald had been impressed by ‘his enthusiasm, the efficiency with which he which handled his team … It seemed that Simon was heaven-sent, if we could get him.’ Eventually, by luring him back to Jersey on the pretext of looking at more ponds, Gerald did get him. ‘The chance to serve another conservation cause in the making,’ Simon conceded, ‘was just too much to resist.’ He arrived on April Fool’s Day 1976 – the beginning of a unique adventure in close association with an extraordinary man.
‘To Gerry people were just as much part of the animal kingdom as animals,’ Simon believed. ‘So he saw people as fascinating specimens of the species. In his books people were animals and animals were people. That’s why people loved his books – and hence the title My Family and Other Animals. Gerry saw people as a child sees people – as characters in a storybook, larger than life, with extraordinary characteristics, usually very funny ones. And if you were in Gerry’s company for any length of time, you’d start seeing people as he saw them. People you wouldn’t have looked at twice were suddenly transformed into extraordinary characters.
‘He not only liked people, he was terribly interested in them. There were times in Gerry’s company when you almost began to feel that you were as interesting as he was. He was an amazing listener, and when he talked it was seldom about himself. He had a wonderful way of putting things, a great gift for simile. Once we were having lunch in France and eating haricot beans and I said, “Oh, I love these beans, the way they squeak in your teeth,” and quick as a flash he said, “Yes, just like gum-boots in the snow.” And that’s the only squeak you can compare with beans in the teeth. To him the natural world was magic, and he was a conservationist because he hated the idea of the world losing its magic’
Tony Allchurch had been doing veterinary work at the zoo since 1972, and was later to become its full-time general administrator as well as veterinarian. Though he was within Gerald’s charmed circle of ‘the boys’ at the zoo, he was never on such easy and intimate terms with him as the others. In part this was due to the reservations Gerald had about vets in zoos – ‘The two most dangerous animals to let loose unsupervised in a zoo,’ he once declared, ‘are an architect and a veterinary surgeon.’ But Allchurch was unfazed: ‘Over the years I’d begun to realise that what was going on here was something very exciting, very challenging, very purposeful. For a vet this is the best job that anybody could ever have, in the best zoo in the world. I work ridiculously hard for a salary that is far less than what I’d be earning if I was still in general practice. But I’m the envy of all my veterinary colleagues.’ At Jersey Zoo a vet could be confronted with patients that ranged in size, shape and temperament from a lowland gorilla to a Pacific island snail, the only things they had in common being the fact that neither could explain their symptoms and both were in danger of extinction.
Most veterinary work was handled in-house at the zoo’s own small veterinary hospital. But for really major surgery involving sizeable animals a surgical team would decamp from Jersey Hospital bringing all their equipment and support staff – and in the old days, when things were rough and ready, a policeman would stand guard with a loaded gun in case of trouble. From the very beginning, when Gerald’s local GP, Dr Hunter, had sometimes been called in to help an animal through a crisis, the emphasis had been on prevention as much as cure. ‘If animals are properly looked after,’ Tony Allchurch believed, ‘properly fed and cared for under the right conditions by people who have a humane approach to them, then diseases and accidents and injuries are going to be rare intrusions into the progress of conservation.’
But there were disappointments as well as rewards. Unlike domestic animals, who generally recognise that the vet is trying to heal them, captive wild animals view him as a mortal enemy, blowing tranquilliser darts at them, stitching them up, pulling their teeth out, bringing back members of their group smelling of strange ointments and spirits. ‘The alienation between the patient and the physician is the thing I have found hardest to come to terms with,’ Tony was to say. ‘Having to try and care for animals who wanted to bite me or run away from me and had to be restrained or even immobilised before I could even look at them – that was hard. If Gambar, our orang-utan, spots me he will immediately go into a rage, and our gorilla Jambo would charge across his enclosure and thump the window if he saw me. I liked to think I was the angel of mercy, yet I was being treated as the angel of death.’
The zoo and the Trust opened up a whole new world to Tony Allchurch. ‘It’s like sitting on top of a volcano here – brimming with energy, bursting out in all directions. There’s no sense of plateau-ing out, the challenges are continuous, the goal is being refined all the time. All this is the creation of Gerald Durrell – his vision, his drive. There aren’t many people I’ve really loved, but he was a most lovely man. And I don’t have many heroes but I would certainly put Gerry among them. There was a sage-like quality about him. And gradually over the years I began to see the wisdom of his words.’
Gerald chose his staff more by intuition than judgement. Usually he was unerringly right in his choice. On the rare occasion he was wrong, and he found he had someone who was not on his wavelength, or who turned out to lack the initiative or independence of mind he had expected, he terminated their employment. Of those who remained, Philip Coffey was typical. He had joined the zoo in 1967, at the age of twenty-one, as its first graduate keeper-scientist, a new concept developed by Gerald and Bob Martin. Later he became the first head of the zoo’s education department. Coffey was to stay at the zoo for nearly thirty years. ‘The reason I stayed so long,’ he was to say, ‘was because of Gerald Durrell – the dream, the ethics that he put forward for conservation. One of the reasons why the zoo has gone from strength to strength is that it has never stood still, and this again is down to the driving force of Gerald Durrell. He was always happy to listen if you had any problems or any bright ideas. He was a good listener and happy to talk about virtually any subject and ask how you were and how it was going.’
One aspect of Gerald’s life and personality was to prove obdurately, intractible. By 1980 he had been drinking a lot, for a very long time. It was as much part of the man as his humour, his generosity, or his sense of wonder at the planet and its creatures. But so disciplined was his self-control during the working day that some occasional associates were not aware that he drank at all. To others, though, he displayed no embarrassment, and made no attempt at concealment. When Philip Coffey went for a job interview at the zoo early one morning, he was amazed to find his future employer unconcernedly sipping his way through a breakfast that consisted of a pint of Guinness. Gerald was easy inside his own skin about his drinking. People would have to accept him as he was – and most people did. Occasionally those closest to him would try to persuade him to change his ways. His sister Margaret recalled him telling her: ‘If you can say I ever got up drunk, then you can criticise my drinking. But I never have.’
Gerald’s fund-raising tours of America were his greatest ordeal. Sometimes he could not even make it to London Airport, so overwhelming was his terror. ‘His whole physiology would go to pieces at the very idea of it,’ Simon Hicks recalled. ‘In my view it was totally psychosomatic, but the physical reaction was quite apparent – he was ill.’ When he did make it across the Atlantic – and he usually did – he would often summon up the courage to face
his lecture audiences by downing a few doubles backstage. To the amazement of all around him, the moment he stepped on to the podium he would appear calm, assured, commanding, charismatic – and completely sober.
In the first year or two of their marriage Lee tried hard to wean her husband off alcohol, convinced that it was merely a matter of affirmation and willpower. ‘He’d go in fits and starts,’ she recalled. ‘Early in our marriage I managed to get him on the wagon for the best part of six months. The medics often tried to do the same – cut it down, or better still cut it out. But then it would creep right up back again. Alcoholism has been described as a condition that rendered you incapable of functioning socially – and there were very few times when Gerry got like that because of drink. It had always been there in his background. The whole family drank wine in Corfu when he was a boy, and Mother liked her noggin – drink was a way of life. At one level alcohol for Gerry was a matter of joie de vivre. Good wine was one of the pleasures of life, along with the good food that went with it. But at another level Gerry drank to help get him through moments of deep despair and depression, and later to bear actual physical pain.’
Gerald and Lee had plunged into the hurly burly of television film-making almost as soon as they were married. The Edge of Extinction, shot in 1979, was a BBC documentary which took the form of a passionate plea for mankind to take more care of the world we live in and the animals that share it with us. Gerald showed the work being done to save endangered species by captive breeding at Jersey and at the Wild Animal Park in San Diego, California, and accompanied by Lee set off to Mexico in another attempt to catch a group of volcano rabbits and bring them back to Jersey – a more successful rerun of the ill-fated expedition of 1968, producing better breeding results, though this colony too died out eventually. The programme was broadcast on BBC 1 on 6 July 1980, and was well received. ‘He’s recently had a miniature heart attack,’ revealed Richard North in the Radio Times, ‘a kind of warning shot across the bows: he’s determined to take more exercise. “I’ve got to get down to twelve stone,” he says. In his hand is a gleaming – massive – glass of brandy. His eyes are as blue as the Aegean. He is a man, as they say, in the pink: a fifty-five-year-old with a lot to do. But Durrell, after a lifetime lived at what he calls “a colossal pace” may have to slow down now. “It’s a shame: this happened just when I’d decided I was immortal.’”
The heart attack had happened in the back of a taxi on his way to Jersey Airport. France, as always, was the chosen balm and panacea, and three days after the television broadcast Gerald and Lee were down at the Mazet for a family gathering, with Lee’s sister Hat and her parents Harriet and Hal in attendance, soon to be joined by local friends and neighbours, including the sculptress Elizabeth Frink, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin and his wife, the painter Tony Daniells and writer David Hughes. The sun and air of the French South in high summer, the food and drink of its country markets, the long, leisurely meals with friends and the al fresco life at the Mazet were Gerald’s very lifeblood. Not even ‘the warning shot across the bows’ had diminished his boundless appetite for living (and quaffing and scoffing) dangerously, as an illustrated ode with the double entendre title of ‘Felicity’, written in praise of the bounty of France and sent to his literary agent Felicity Bryan, exuberantly proclaimed:
What to say of La Belle France
Where arteries never have a chance?
Where every menu points with glee
The way to adiposity;
With all that wine and crispy bread …
(One more coronary – I’m dead).
Mushrooms, big as white umbrellas –
They’re minus calories they tell us –
But simmered slow in wine and cream:
Dieter’s nightmare! Glutton’s dream!
But roasted truffles are the best …
(What’s that hammering in my chest?) …
In verse after verse, Gerald hailed the coronary potential of France’s fatally irresistible cuisine – quails and suckling pigs and ‘livers from whole flocks of geese’, eggplants drowned in oil and butter, turbot, lobster and écrevisse. France, he declared, was both his joy and his undoing.
Ah! Belle France, you promised land,
Come, we’ll walk now, hand in hand
With oyster, snail and bread and butter
And vintages to make you stutter;
Creamy cheese that eats so well
(Or others with atrocious smell);
Hams and salmon, sunset pink,
Fiery Armagnac to drink …
You fill my glass, you pile my plate,
’Tis you who’ve got me in this state.
Belle France, I love you, there’s no doubt,
But one thing I must just point out –
That here and now I do attest
YOU caused my cardiac arrest!
Felicity, my dearest girl,
Do not cast me as a churl,
But I must end, cast down my quill,
Assuring you I love you still –
So please don’t think of me a sinner –
But – seven o’clock –
It’s time for dinner.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Ark on the Move
From the Island of the Dodo to the Land of the Lemur 1980–1982
Ever since his first foray to Mauritius in 1976, Gerald had been held in the island’s spell, and he had become so intrigued by its conservation problems that his mind had begun to turn to a revolutionary way of tackling them. John Hartley recalled: ‘One morning at breakfast Gerry and I were discussing the fact that most of the small amount of conservation work being done in the country was by foreigners. For the long term, we agreed, it was clearly essential for the Mauritian community to take part. And then Gerry said:
‘“I have an idea. We are seeing the Minister this morning. What I’m going to do is offer him a scholarship for a Mauritian to come to Jersey for training on our specialist conservation programme.”’
Hartley gulped on his coffee. He had never heard of any such programme. There was no such thing.
‘What training programme?’ he asked.
‘Hartley,’ Gerald replied sternly. ‘You know what your trouble is? You always get bogged down in the minor details in life!’
‘It became obvious as we talked,’ Hartley remembered, ‘that as usual Gerald had given a great deal of thought to the idea. But at that time we had no programme, nobody trained to do the training, nowhere to house the trainee, and so on, and so on …’
The offer was made, the Minister accepted, and in the spring of 1977 Gerald paid a return visit to Mauritius with John Hartley, his sister Margaret and his New Yorker friend Trish. The selection was made, and a local schoolteacher by the name of Yousoof Mungroo became Jersey Zoo’s first trainee student.
Another aim of this second foray to Mauritius was to try to catch rare boas on Round Island – an enterprise that was not without its adventures. The party were camped under canvas on the island one evening when they were subject to one of the most bizarre manifestations of the natural world Gerald had ever witnessed:
As the green twilight faded and the sky turned velvety black, awash with stars, as if at a given signal there arose the most extraordinary noise from the bowels of the earth. It started softly, almost tunefully, a sound like distant pack of wolves, howling mournfully across some remote, snowbound landscape. Then, as more voices joined the chorus, it became a gigantic, mad mass being celebrated in some Bedlamite cathedral. You could hear the lunatic cries of the priests and the wild responses from the congregation. This lasted for about half an hour, the sounds rising and falling, the ground throbbing with the noise, and then, as suddenly as if the earth had burst open and released all the damned souls from some Gustave Doré subterranean hell, out of the holes concealed by the green meadows, mewing and honking and moaning, the baby Shearwaters burst forth.
They appeared in hundreds, as if newly risen from the grave,
and squatted and fluttered around our camp, providing such a cacophony of sound that we could hardly hear each other speak. Not content with this, the babies, being of limited intelligence, decided that our tent was a sort of superior nest burrow, designed for their special benefit. Squawking and moaning, they fought their way through the openings and flapped over and under our camp beds, defecating with great freedom, and if handled without tact, regurgitating a fishy, smelly oil all over us.
All night the bedlam continued. Towards dawn the baby birds discovered a new joy they had never known before – sliding down the tent roof, over and over again, their claws making a noise liking ripping calico on the canvas. ‘On mature reflection,’ Gerald was to record, I decided that this was the most uncomfortable night I had ever spent in my life.’ Just before dawn the travellers rose from their inadequate doze and staggered out of their tent, tripping and stumbling over the hordes of baby shearwaters scuttling back into their holes.
Early one morning the party climbed to one of the highest points on the island. From the summit Gerald could see the full, catastrophic extent of Round Island’s degradation. With the vegetation cover gone, what soil was left was being washed down to the sea, followed by rocks and boulders. At the summit even the great sheets of hard tuff had dissolved here and there in the night rain and attained the consistency of sticky chocolate. The island was eroding away. Gerald was aghast: ‘Gazing down at these slopes of tuff, you realised forcibly that here was a unique, miniature world that had, by a miracle of evolution, come into being and was now being allowed to bleed to death … this unique speck of land was diminishing day by day. It seemed to sum up in miniature what we were doing to the whole planet, with millions of species being bled to death for want of a little, so little, medicare.’
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