Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  The fact is that Gerald’s fund-raising trips to America were utterly terrifying for him, and he tended to suffer various psychosomatic illnesses during the run-up to his departure. Before a later such tour he went down with ‘flu and then collapsed into a depressive mess, so that Lee had no alternative but to leave him behind and fly to the States to do the speech-making by herself. ‘It may sound surprising, but he was such an unbelievably insecure person,’ Simon Hicks recalled. ‘He was very contradictory. On the one hand he could be relaxed, laid back, totally cosmopolitan. On the other hand he could make himself ill with worry at the prospect of a formal visit from the Lieutenant-Governor or our royal patron, for example. He hated being unprepared, hated being taken by surprise. He would never make a speech without rehearsing it first, even giving a talk to a bunch of kids screwed him up dreadfully. And it was obvious to all of us in Jersey that the prospect of going to America just made him ill.’

  On 2 April Gerald and Lee returned to Jersey, and Gerald reported to Alan Thomas that he was now ‘if not completely healed, at least reasonably with it’. He was well enough, at any rate, to accept an invitation to lunch with the Queen at Windsor Castle in honour of the President of the United Republic of Cameroon on 23 April. Gerald thought it was ironic that he and Lee had been invited to such a grand occasion on the basis of a couple of comic books he had written about his adventures hunting for beef in the Cameroons bush when he was a young man who could barely rub two pennies together. But he enjoyed the fare – Avocats Britannia, Pointe de Boeuf Braisée aux Primeurs, Épinards en Branches, Pommes Purèes à la Crème, Salade, Chocolate Perfection Pie – and gratefully quaffed as much Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Kabinett and Chambolle Musigny 1969 as he was allowed.

  At the end of April Pat Ferns and Paula Quigley came over from Toronto for a pre-production conference about the television series based on The Amateur Naturalist, which had excited the interest of CBC in Canada and Channel 4 in Britain. Channel 4 saw the project as a rival to David Attenborough’s enormously popular BBC natural history programmes, with Gerald as a different kind of pundit, exploring a more accessible natural world – a genial, spontaneous, boyish uncle figure, who explored the wilderness on his hands and knees, as it were, in a way that the audience could both understand and emulate.

  Pat Ferns’s plans for the Durrells did not stop at The Amateur Naturalist, and in early June there were discussions about a big follow-up series, Durrell in Russia. Gerald and Lee were now committed to a heavy schedule from the second half of 1982 to the first half of 1984.

  On 12 July 1982, a few days after the Ark on the Move series began transmission on BBC TV, Gerald and Lee travelled to Unst in the Shetland Islands for the start of filming for The Amateur Naturalist. Jonathan Harris – ‘dark and somewhat glowering,’ Gerald was to recall, ‘handsome in a Heathcliffian sort of way’ – was directing.

  The opening shots proved to be among the most challenging Gerald had ever done. The six-hundred-foot cliffs of Hermaness are the home of one of the great seabird colonies of northern Europe, and the idea was to spend a day filming all the seabird footage for the cliffs and rocky shore programme. The problem was that Gerald had suffered all his life from serious vertigo – flying in an aeroplane always made him panic – and he viewed the filming at Hermaness with considerable trepidation, especially as the script required that he make his way down the cliff from top to bottom. He was to record later:

  Soon we came to the cliff edge. Some six hundred feet below us, the great smooth blue waves shouldered their way in between the rocks in a riot of spray like beds of white chrysanthemum. The air was full of the surge of surf and the cries of thousands upon thousands of seabirds that drifted like a snowstorm along the cliffs. The mind boggled at the numbers. Hundreds and hundreds of gannets, kittiwakes, fulmars, shags, razorbills, gulls, skuas, and tens of thousands of puffins.

  ‘Now we go down the cliff,’ said Jonathan Harris.

  ‘Where?’ I asked.

  ‘Here,’ he said, pointing to the cliff-edge that, as far as I could see, dropped sheer, six hundred feet to the sea below.

  There have been many times, in different parts of the world, when I have been scared, but the descent of that cliff was the most terrifying thing I have ever undertaken. The others had strolled along the barely discernible path as if it had been a broad, flat highway and here I was, crawling on my stomach, clutching desperately at bits of grass and small plants, inching my feet along the six-inch-wide path, trying desperately not to look down the almost sheer drop, my arms and legs trembling violently, my body bathed in sweat. It was a thoroughly despicable performance, and I was ashamed of myself, but I could do nothing about it. The fear of height is impossible to cure. When I reached the bottom, my leg muscles were trembling so violently that I had to sit down for ten minutes before I could walk. I said some harsh things about Jonathan’s ancestry and suggested several – unfortunately impracticable – things that he could do to himself.

  ‘Well, you got down here all right,’ he said. ‘All you’ve got to worry about now is getting up.’

  Afterwards Gerald was to say that that cliff had taken ten years off his life. ‘It wasn’t much fun when Gerry lost his rag with you,’ Jonathan Harris recalled. ‘He lost it on that cliff in Shetland. Later on he lost it again when Lee went white-water rafting through the rapids on the River Wye. I did several takes, during which Gerry got very tense, and then I asked for one more take and he went bananas. He was absolutely Vesuvian when he did that.’

  But Jonathan had liked Gerald from the moment they met. ‘It was the way he came across to me,’ he reckoned. ‘He wasn’t always nice – he could get into terrible moods and say absolutely horrid things about people. But he had a charisma that could transfix a whole room, and though I had a father I suppose there was an element of the father thing. He was terribly proud of Lee, his pretty young wife. He was not a really big number in television – it wasn’t really his scene. Not that he didn’t care. The impression given by many that Gerry just did television to fund his other work and lifestyle is quite wrong. As a creative person Gerry needed an audience and wanted to perform. And he was delighted to have a new audience for his message about the world in the form of a multitude of television viewers who would never read his books. But the TV pundits didn’t rate him a true star performer when I got to know him. For a start, he was terribly unfit. You could only get four hours of work out of him per day on a shoot. He liked to have a break and a siesta – as did the crew – and then begin again when the light got softer at the end of the day. The crucial thing was to get the good animal shots first and then thread in the human shots later. When I grumbled about how uncontrollable the animals were he used to say: “The animals are not under contract.”’

  In the last week of July Gerald and Lee were back in Jersey with the film crew to shoot the rocky shore sequences for the programme they had begun in the Shetlands. From 9 August to 2 September they were in Zambia, with a diversion for a day or two in Zimbabwe. In Zambia Gerald once again saw hippopotamus in the wild. ‘They’ve got rosy behinds like a bishop,’ he was to relate, ‘and they get terribly coy and turn their backs on you with those huge behinds. Then they run off on tiptoe like a fat woman in a tight skirt running for a bus. I’d never realised they were so charming.’

  On 13 August, during Gerald’s absence abroad, his sad, baffled brother Leslie, who called himself a civil engineer but was still working as a janitor in the block of flats at Marble Arch, died of a heart attack in a pub not far from his home in Notting Hill, at the age of sixty-five. None of the family went to his funeral – Gerald was in any case in Zambia, and Margaret (who had sometimes stayed with Leslie and Doris in London) was recovering from an operation. Only his ever-loyal and long-suffering wife, the loud, laughing Doris, and her son Michael Hall, who still lived in Kenya, truly mourned the wayward and luckless Leslie’s passing. As for Maria Condos, who had always loved him and who a long time ago had borne his child, s
he now lived in a world of her own, struck down by advanced Alzheimer’s.

  After the Durrells got back from Africa in early September they were almost continuously involved in the filming of The Amateur Naturalist until early December. In the middle of September they were based in Arles, shooting material for the wetlands programme, Salt Water Sanctuary, in the Camargue. During the last week of October they were shooting scenes for the deciduous woodland programme, A Monarchy of Trees, in the New Forest. When Gerald went down with gout in early November the desert shoot for the programme Territory of the Sun had to be postponed, and the Durrells retreated to Jersey to allow him to recover. Perhaps it was because of faint intimations of mortality that on 1 November 1982 David Niven wrote Gerald a cautionary letter from his home at the Château d’Oex in Vaud, Switzerland: ‘One thing I beg you,’ he entreated, ‘don’t work too hard. I can tell you on the finest authority that if you overstretch the elastic it’s bloody hard to get back! PS. How’s my hairy godchild?’

  By now the book on which the series was based had been published in Britain by Hamish Hamilton. It could have had no sterner critic than Theo Stephanides, who in a sense was its distant progenitor. When Gerald sent him a signed copy, his old mentor, now living in the house of his ex-wife in Kilburn, surrounded as ever by his books and slides, was enthralled. ‘A red-letter day!’ he wrote back. ‘How I wish that I had had such a book when I first came to Corfu in 1907 at the age of eleven.’

  It was indeed a splendid book. Published for an international market, and as appropriate for use in the Caribbean as in the Home Counties, it received correspondingly worldwide reviews. ‘The beauty of this book,’ wrote one Trinidadian reviewer, ‘is you don’t have to toil up El Tucuche or wade through the Caroni, Nariva and Oropouche swamps or trudge through our tropical forests to study the wealth of wildlife in Trinidad and Tobago … The reading is easy, often amusing … The need for us all – young, middle-aged and old – to know more about nature is never more important than now, when man-made bushfires have wreaked more havoc with cane harvests and protective forest cover on our hills.’ On the other side of the world, South African radio singled the book out as ‘the year’s best buy’. Far to the north the Irish Times saw it as a perfect remedy for the shameful neglect of native natural history in Irish schools: ‘Durrell is a world traveller. He does it with his eyes and ears open, and the book is something of a distillation of his career as a naturalist and conservationist … The Amateur Naturalist will open a whole new world of wonder and delight which will stay with the child as an adult. To give and encourage the gift of wonderment is the greatest gift of all.’ Fifteen years later, with over one and half million copies sold and countless millions borrowed, the book has spread this ‘greatest gift’ around the world.

  On 20 November Gerald and Lee arrived in Panama to shoot the reef and rainforest programme, Tapestry of the Tropics – the last shoot of the year. No jetlag could quench their happiness at being back in the tropics again, at seeing glittering hummingbirds and butterflies the size of your fist, above all ‘to feel the moist, scented hot air, like the smell of plum cake from a newly opened oven, that told you that you were once more in that richest area of the earth’s surface’.

  This time the director was Alastair Brown, who had worked with Gerald and Lee on Ark on the Move. Gerald thought he had probably turned to film as his chosen medium of communication because of the difficulty he had communicating by any other means, for he spoke like a telegram, in a staccato code of unconnected half-sentences.

  ‘Jetlag over?’ he said to Gerald when they met again. ‘Good. I thought … you know … San Blas first. Reefs like … or perhaps more like … forests, fish really, like birds only no wings. Don’t you think? So islands … pretty … you don’t … see when we get there. Then, we know for, er, Barro Colorado, don’t we?’

  It was up to Paula Quigley, the series producer, to translate. As she had been with Ark on the Move, Paula was the linchpin of the production. Gerald called her ‘Quiggers’, and described her in a thumbnail sketch as ‘slender, petite, mop of dark curly hair, snub nose like a Pekinese, curious eyes that can be both blue and green, long eyelashes that can only be equalled by a giraffe, pleasantly feminine soprano speaking voice, but capable of a bellow that came in extremely useful, as we had not budgeted for a megaphone’.

  ‘What Alastair is saying, honey, is this,’ Paula explained. ‘If we are going to try to compare the forest with the reef, he thinks the reef is going to be more difficult because it is underwater filming, so he suggests we go to the San Blas Islands first. OK?’

  If Hermaness had been the end of the world, the tiny San Blas Islands were paradise on earth. Gerald was to write:

  I can never get over the wonder of that moment when you enter the water and find your face beneath the diamond-bright surface of a tropical sea. The mask is like a magic door and you slide effortlessly through a fairyland of unimaginable beauty … With life under the sea you have to learn a whole new language. You are constantly asking yourself, why is that fish lying on its side? Or standing on its head? What was that one so busily defending and why was that one, like some streetwalker, apparently soliciting a fish of a different species?

  From the San Blas Islands in the Caribbean to Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal was only a short step – but into an utterly different world. Once again Gerald was back in the dank, vaulted gloom of the rainforest. ‘That lovely, rich fragrant smell of forest enveloped us,’ he wrote, ‘the delicate scent of a million flowers, a thousand thousand mushrooms and fruit, the perfume from a quadrillion gently rotting leaves in the simmering, ever-changing, ever-dying, ever-growing cauldron of the forest.’ He was back in the world of the forest canopy ‘as interwoven as ancient knitting’, of toucans with huge ‘banana-yellow’ beaks, of hummingbirds flipping among the tiny blossoms of the trees ‘like handfuls of opals’, of a morpho butterfly ‘like a piece of animated sky the size of a swallow’, of a column of leaf-cutter ants ‘like a Lilliputian regatta’, of the buttress roots of the giant trees ‘like the flying buttresses of a medieval cathedral’.

  The shoot was not without its adventures. The black howler monkeys, stoutly defending their patch, set up an almighty roar as the film crew pitched up – ‘like standing in the deep end of an empty swimming pool listening to the Red Army choir, each member singing a different song in Outer Mongolian’ – and when that didn’t work they dropped excreta and other rubbish on the film-makers’ heads. The leaf-cutter ants reacted with similar outrage when the director and a local hunter attempted to dig their way into the mushroom beds of an ants’ nest the size of a small ballroom. The ants swarmed up the intruders’ legs as if they were trees and attempted to nip off their private parts as if they were fruits of the forest.

  Gerald made a special plea to camera on behalf of this species-rich wonderland. The tropical forests were being destroyed at the rate of forty-three thousand square miles a year, he said. Plant and animal species were becoming extinct before they could even be identified. In about eighty-five years’ time there would be no tropical forest left. A great, self-generating storehouse of inestimable benefit to mankind would be lost for ever, and the climate and soil would undergo cataclysmic change. ‘We are behaving in a greedy, malicious and totally selfish way,’ he told his worldwide audience, ‘and this goes for everyone, regardless of colour, creed or political persuasion, for unless we move and move fast our children will never have the chance to see that most fascinating and important biological region of our planet, the tropical forest, or to benefit from it.’

  By now the Durrells had been on the move more or less incessantly for the best part of half a year. On 19 December they left Panama for Philadelphia, where they had business to discuss with the Trust’s sister organisation, the WPTI, finally coming rest at Lee’s parents’ home in Memphis for Christmas, where on the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve champagne corks popped when Gerald officially became an officer of the Order
of the British Empire, the honour being awarded for his services to conservation.

  By the second week of January 1983 they were back on location, this time in the frozen white Riding Mountains in Manitoba, shooting the coniferous forest programme, Fire and Ice. There was a short break in this driving schedule in February which enabled Gerald and Lee to return to Jersey and attend to two major items of business. The first was the signing of a ground-breaking accord with the government of Madagascar. The second was Gerald’s investiture at Buckingham Palace.

  On 1 and 2. February the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust hosted an important meeting to discuss how to aid nature conservation in Madagascar. It was attended by eminent biologists and conservationists from Austria, England, France, Madagascar, Switzerland and the USA, and was chaired by Lee, with Madame Berthe Rakotosamimanana, the Director of Scientific Research in Madagascar, on her right hand. Gerald was greatly impressed by the way his wife handled this major international conference. ‘I had never realised, until then,’ he wrote to her mother and father on 7 February, ‘that I had married a cross between Adolf Hitler and Boadicea. From the outset, she ruled them with a rod of iron and they were as good as gold, accepting with amused resignation that she should boss them about.’