Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  Gerald’s first port of call in the Soviet Union was this breeding centre, at Priokso-Terrasny – a five-hundred-acre range set aside for the bison inside a twelve-thousand-acre nature reserve. Here seventy bison were kept as breeding stock, and the offspring were transported to the Caucasus or the Carpathians when they were two years old, joining other two-year-olds from other breeding stations in the Soviet Union, and released in small herds in the late summer. As a result of this intensive programme, a model of its kind, there were by this time around a thousand bison living wild in the Soviet mountains. Gerald was fascinated by the breeding station, a specialist counterpart of his own establishment in Jersey, but was even keener to see the reintroduced herds in the Caucasus. So after a few days they flew to the resort town of Sochi on the Black Sea coast, and from there, on 28 October, they were flown to the Kafkaz Reserve in the mountains by helicopter.

  It was a magnificent flight at low level, over autumn forests, bare heights streaked with snow and great, glittering snowfields. At first it seemed they were out of luck, with not a bison to be seen in the whole of that autumnal wilderness, but as they juddered noisily across a huge hillside patched with snow, they saw them – thirty or so massive animal shapes at full gallop. The pilot landed the helicopter immediately, and Gerald and the others tumbled out and set off in pursuit. But the snow was knee-deep, and soon they were gasping and panting in the thin air, while the bison swept up the hillside, as Gerald put it, ‘like woolly express trains’.

  The next morning, after a large, vodka-lubricated dinner in their freezing stone-built base in the mountains they set off again, this time by jeep. It grew very cold as they climbed higher, the leaves edged with ice, the snow falling in hard icy flakes that in the intense silence pattered loudly among the trees. They moved on, ever upwards, through the rhododendron zone to where the snowfield lay surrounded by amphitheatres of craggy rock. This was the kingdom of the tur, the chamois and the snow grouse. The tur were there – they could see them silhouetted against the snow. Then the clouds began to well up and they beat a retreat through the snow flurries and banks of cloud like freezing smoke.

  Gerald and Lee spent the next evening at the home of the local forester and his wife at Psluch. The stay made a big impression on Gerald. Doing such a job in such an out-of-the-way place, this attractive couple, ex-actors who had lit out from the big city for a life in the backwoods, seemed to have slipped through the interstices of the all-enveloping Soviet state, living a life that was seemingly free and time-hallowed. ‘After usual food by camp fire and toasts (endless),’ Gerald scribbled in his diary, ‘we were whisked off to Victor’s and Natasha’s place. MAGNIFICENT. Two tiny rooms crammed with possessions: bundles of herbs, pictures printed by Victor’s son, photographs of their animal pets (chamois, bear, etc.) and endless books and manuscripts. We were put to bed in such love and comfort.’ Next morning Natasha had a splendid Caucasian breakfast ready for them – fresh milk warm from the cow, two types of soured cream like yoghurt (one sour, one sweet), goat cheese, cakes, freshly baked scones, fresh walnuts and tiny wild pears in syrup, and endless tea made from the great-grandmother’s huge and resplendent silver-plated samovar.

  ‘The Caucasus are absolutely fascinating and the Georgian people were marvellous, kind and warm-hearted and generous,’ Gerald wrote to his parents-in-law. ‘They are very like the Greeks in many ways and go in for endless toasts in vodka and much kissing. I think I must have kissed more male Russians in three weeks than Oscar Wilde did in his whole career. They also, for some reason, kept kissing Lee, which led me to suppose that a Communist regime needs very careful watching.’

  He had reservations about the Soviet Union in general, however, as he reported to the McGeorges after he and Lee had returned to Jersey at the end of their first trip in the middle of November: ‘All I can say is that we are suffering from a sort of love/hate relationship with the Soviet Union at the moment. We saw much that we loved and were enchanted by. We also saw much that we did not care for. I think on balance probably our feelings are that it is a pity that so many nice people are subjected to a system that I personally would not want to live under, and this is made worse by the fact that one has the shrewd suspicion that they know it but cannot confess it.’

  In the spring of 1985 they were back, and on 10 April Gerald reported to the McGeorges from Moscow:

  Arrived here in one piece (with ninety two bits of baggage) and spent two days in this city, which is not my favourite place on earth. As we had appeared on national TV three days before, we were recognised by everybody. We had several good meals (strange for Moscow) and in general, enjoyed this God-awful city more than we had before. Then we had to take an overnight train to Cheripovets and from thence to the Darvinsky Reserve some 120 kms away. At the station in Moscow we were seen off by Nick Drosdov who is a very handsome, sweet and kindly TV star. He thoughtfully brought six little glasses in filigree holders and a vast quantity of brandy with which to fill them. The result was that our sleeping compartment (strictly non-smoking) was soon filled with smoke and loud singing and the clash of glasses, to the despair of our tea lady. The tea lady, I must explain, is found in every Russian railway compartment, and her job is to make tea for you at all hours of the day and night, switch the lights on and off, likewise the radio (which has the Red Army Choir singing stirring songs about the production of tractors) and tell you not to smoke in the compartment. Most of our tea ladies have had to be taken away in ambulances for a rest cure after travelling with us. Can you imagine – 10 of us (mostly foreign) drunk to the eyeballs, and singing and shouting, drinking and smoking, and, what is far, far worse Disobeying the Rules. At last ten people left our compartment and the train left Moscow. We drank a little more (for purely medicinal reasons) and went to bed. Comfy night. Dawn brought the tea lady, hollow eyed, with tea and a nervous smile. We were feeling a bit hollow-cheeked ourselves.

  Arrived at a station (twelve below zero) with elegant buildings that looked as though they had been designed by Nash in 1780. All painted in pale green with cream coloured facings. Quite lovely and unexpected. Needless to say, all the rest of the town – post Revolution – was ugly beyond belief. Met at the station by the Director of the Darvinsky Reserve, eight jeeps, lorry and a police car. Were escorted out of town, police car in the lead, blue light flashing, siren shouting, forcing all the vulgar peasants into the ditch so we could pass, roaring through red traffic lights. Drove for seven hours over a road that had to be seen to be believed – the thaw had set in, the snow was melting and the road was like chocolate pudding with bumps.

  Arrived at the reserve (a village of about fifty people) in the evening. Greeted by lady carrying red embroidered shawl on which was loaf of home made brown bread (round) and on top of it a small bowl of salt. Custom was you break a bit of bread, dip it into salt, give to Lee to eat and then do same for self. We were then taken to our own cottage, two rooms and a hall, heated by a huge stove built into the dividing wall. The lavatory (a two holer) was about a hundred yards away through the snow. Water was brought to us in a bucket from the well. An example of how cold it was, I took the lid off the bucket, filled the kettle, went into the bedroom to wake Madam and by the time I got back there was a film of ice on the bucket.

  Gerald never did finish that letter, nor post it. Darvinsky, deep in the forested heart of Old Russia, was the beginning of a punishing schedule in which the Durrells criss-crossed the length and breadth of the Soviet Union in various directions and by various means (jet plane, river boat, skidoo, dromedary, helicopter, train, swampboat, horse and carriage, jeep and shank’s pony), pitchforked from summer to winter and back again on an itinerary that defied time zones and latitudes, and stood the seasons on their heads.

  The Darvinsky Reserve had been established on the shores of a huge man-made lake to monitor ecological change and to breed capercaillies to restock forests where the bird had been shot out. It was far enough north for the water in your bucket to freeze, but
not far enough to ensure that the hibernating bear you had come all this way to film didn’t wake up and stroll off the moment you arrived, leaving only its footprints as evidence of its existence. As Gerald was to write: ‘Darvinsky, though a fascinating place, was not one of our more successful shoots.’

  On 8 April they departed for the Oka Reserve, some three hundred miles south-west of Moscow, a major breeding centre for cranes – seven of the world’s fourteen species were represented here, five of them endangered – and also notable for its bird of prey collection and for the great annual rescue of all the animals that had been marooned in the floods of the spring thaw – hares, badgers, racoon dogs, foxes and the rare and cuddly desman, a sort of large aquatic mole, half-shrew, half-vole – whole boatloads of damp, bedraggled and ungrateful creatures ferried to higher ground and then released. On 19 April they made a giant leap to eastern Siberia and the Barguzin Reserve on the still-frozen shores of Lake Baikal, the biggest and deepest body of fresh water in the world, seventeen hours and five time zones from Moscow, and conservation home of the rare and precious sable (bred back from near extinction) and the extraordinary freshwater Baikal seal (once almost hunted out, now strictly protected and back to some seventy-five thousand in number).*

  On 2 May there was another giant bound, west-south-west through more time zones, from icy Baikal into the frying pan of the Repetek Reserve, in the scorching Karakum Desert of Turkmenistan in Soviet Central Asia. The shade temperature was 114° though it was still only late spring, and the best way to travel around the desert dunes was by dromedary, a footsure but stealthy approach that gave the travellers an unusual vantage point from which to spy out the vast variety of wildlife that inhabited this hostile place.

  From Repetek it was, by Soviet standards, a mere stone’s throw of a few hundred miles or so to the ancient and legendary Uzbek city of Bukhara and the nearby desert breeding centre for the elegantly fashioned but inelegantly named goitred gazelle, whose salvation represented another triumph of captive breeding. When the species became extinct in the wild it was realised that a number of individual animals had been kept as pets, and a press and television campaign was mounted to persuade their owners to donate them to a new breeding centre that had been set aside in the desert. Within a short time some fifty goitred gazelle had been gathered, and at the time of Gerald’s visit their numbers had risen to more than six hundred. A number of mature animals had been released into the wild, and others had been sent to other breeding centres, and would be used eventually to restock the rest of their original range. Gerald was enchanted by the young fawns that had thus been rescued from eternal oblivion: ‘The youngsters were charming little creatures, with coats the colour of butterscotch, huge brilliant dark eyes, and large ears like fur-covered arum lilies. They were completely fearless and either sat in our laps sucking our fingers or else wobbled around us on their long, lanky legs.’

  Almost due east of Bukhara lay Samarkand, known to Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, final resting place of mighty Tamburlaine, staging post of Marco Polo. Gerald was bowled over by the place, by the blue domes of the mosques, by the cavalcade of national costumes in the streets, and by the great market, the trading entrepot of the whole region, where the young women looked Tibetan, the old women had ‘breasts and buttocks like watermelons’, and the old men were as ‘lean and brown as biltong and had grey beards like Spanish moss’.

  From Samarkand the party travelled into the high Tien Shan Mountains, bordered by India, China and Afghanistan. There, in a small cross-section of high mountain habitats called the Chatkal Reserve, Gerald explored an exquisite Shangri La:

  We struck the foothills of the Tien-Shan Mountains and the scenery was unbelievably beautiful. In every direction the knife-edged hills coiled like snakes, green and yellow, their flanks striped with snow. Gradually we dropped lower and lower, chasing our own shadow as it whisked over the snowfields, until we were flying down valleys with the mountains towering above us, the lower slopes shaggy with pine forests interspersed with wild apple trees heavy with blossom and great sheets of yellow flowers that looked like mustard fields. Finally we landed in a tiny valley that was ablaze with colour. The slopes were covered with the yellow flowers we had seen from the air. Amongst it grew wild rhubarb, with dark green, plate-shaped leaves and rose-pink stems, banks of red and yellow tulips, and throughout the valley groves of apple in a froth of pink and white blossom. The sun was brilliantly warm, the sky as blue as a hedge sparrow’s egg and the air cool and fresh. We decided that this was the most beautiful place we had so far visited in the Soviet Union.

  Very probably no other Westerners had ever been to this remote and ineffably lovely spot, home to some 1400 species of plants, many of them very rare, and a wide variety of butterflies, as well as spectacular birds like the huge griffon vulture and rare animals like Menzbieri’s marmot and the Siberian ibex. A welcoming party consisting of the reserve director and his helpers – ‘a cheerful group of unkempt ruffians with dark Mongolian faces and glittering black eyes’ – was there to greet the travellers.

  They shouldered our bags and equipment and strode off through the wild apple orchards, with toast-brown fritillaries, black admirals and bronze dragonflies wheeling about their legs as they threaded their way through the tulips and fennel.

  Our accommodation was a tiny house nestling in apple trees on the banks of a small busy river, ice cold, clear as glass, sliding down its bed of amber-coloured rocks in a great series of silver ringlets. Its endless chatter day and night was as soothing as a beehive.

  Lee and I went for a walk down the valley, along the banks of the stream. There was nothing but the murmur of water and birdsong and the cool, clear air was full of the scent of apple blossom. The great piles of blossom had attracted hosts of bee flies – russet-red, furry as teddy bears, with glittering wings. The trees were full of birds – woodpeckers tapping away like carpenters, jays flashing blue and pink as they flew, shrikes, tree sparrows and a flock of red-fronted serins, the first I had ever seen.

  As evening drew on and the shadows slid into the valley, muting the flower colours, it became very chilly and we piled on all the clothes we possessed and huddled round the fire, glad of the warmth we could extract from the director’s stock of Georgian brandy. While he had been sleeping, his band of merry men had been up the valley and returned with their hats full of field mushrooms, each as big as a doll’s parasol, fleshy and fragrant. These were added to the pilov they were constructing in an enormous battered frying pan. When it was served it proved to be delicious, and when we were stuffed to capacity we tumbled into our sheepskin sleeping bags.

  On 22 May the Durrells left Moscow for a brief rest in Jersey. On 5 June they returned for the third and final stage of their filming adventures. The plan was to visit some of the major wildlife reserves in the vicinity of the two great inland seas in the south of the country, the Caspian and the Black Sea, and on 7 June they arrived in the city of Astrakhan, their gateway to the great Astrakhan Reserve, occupying a large portion of the Volga delta where it debouches into the Caspian.

  The Astrakhan Reserve was founded on the orders of Lenin in 1918 – the first reserve in the Soviet Union and still one of the biggest, with a seaward edge of some 125 miles and more than eight hundred river channels threading their way through the reed beds, wet meadows and willow thickets. The reserve is of immense biological importance, particularly as a haven for waterfowl, which flock there to breed or moult or overwinter in prodigious numbers, estimated to exceed ten million, including five to seven million geese and duck alone in spring and autumn. However, the main task of the reserve workers is to study and monitor the delta’s ecology.

  As Gerald discovered, the relationship between the cormorant, the crow and the catfish neatly illustrates the complex ecosystem of the delta. The cormorant, a highly abundant and intensely enthusiastic fishing bird, might be expected to deplete the delta’s stock of fish, but as it flies over the waters its dropp
ings keep them rich in the microscopic plants and animals on which baby fish live. The crow, meanwhile, feeds itself by harassing baby cormorants during their parents’ absence from the nest and forcing them to disgorge their food, which the crows then snatch. But a portion of this food habitually falls into the water, and into the waiting jaws of the huge catfish, seven feet long and with heads like mastiffs, which in turn excrete waste that is rich in nitrogen and phosphorous nutrients. Because of the huge numbers of cormorants in the area, nutrients which would ordinarily take eight years to be cycled through the delta only take two to three.

  Even on the main river, the Volga, the birds were abundant, but when Gerald’s convoy of two huge, luxuriously appointed barges turned down a narrow tributary they became absolutely prolific. ‘The air was thick with them.’ he wrote. ‘After travelling several miles through this bewildering ornithological firework display, we eventually came to the reserve headquarters in a nicely laid out tiny village, where we were given a little house to live in, set in a watery meadow full of frogs calling like petulant small children. We settled in and for the next three days had one of the most wonderful times I have had in my life, for not only was the reserve marvellously beautiful, but it was also so rich in all forms of life, overflowing with such an abundance that we were hard pressed at times to know what to look at.’

  To explore the intricate network of waterways around their base, the travellers took to a fleet of small boats, using the motors to reach where they wanted to be, then drifting in silence on the current through a labyrinthine dawn of creation: gulls, terns, swallows, hawks, night herons and glossy ibis, spoonbills and little egrets, cormorant colonies and lotus beds, dragonflies and damselflies, wild boar and frogs and catfish: the air was one big blur, the sounds one big cacophony. This was the world as it had once been, and as Gerald fervently dreamed it would one day be again.