Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  Attaining such heights had been far from effortless, of course, and for several years it had been literally painful, for Gerald’s arthritic hips made it agonising simply to get about, and he now walked with the help of a stick. He had borne this crippling, sometimes excruciating, condition with fortitude, and his rugged forays into the USSR had tested him to the utmost. In February 1986 he underwent an operation for a replacement hip, and duly regaled his in-laws with the details:

  My room was pleasant enough, one window showing a fine view of a church and churchyard and the other a tall, mysterious brick chimney that belched forth oily black smoke at intervals in the most suggestive and macabre way. After the eleventh nurse had asked me which hip I was having done my faith in British medicine struck rock bottom. I protested loud and long until my surgeon was forced to visit me with a huge magic-marker to put a cross on my left hip. Then I was given a scalding hot iodine bath that made me smell like any well-run mortuary and then they wheeled me away to the theatre. I took a surreptitious look under my night-gown to make sure my magic-marker cross had not got washed off. We arrived, and the anaesthetist gave me a massive injection which mercifully obliterated everything. I woke after about five seconds, to instant awareness, no sickness, no pain in the hip and a pretty nurse with dimples exhorting me to breathe in oxygen through a dinky little plastic mask. On enquiring when they were going to stop messing about and get on with the operation, I was informed that I had had it. So, free from pain and euphoric as a firework, I recanted. With tears pouring down my cheeks, I blessed the medical profession. I blessed the nurses. I told them that I would build a new wing to the hospital as soon as my wife’s new book is published. I even tried to kiss Matron. After a struggle they sedated me …

  Well, the great day came when I had my first walk – two steps to the door and two steps back to the bed, where I lay feeling as though I had climbed Everest without oxygen. But pretty soon I got better at it and was soon zooming up and down the corridors like a drunken bat. Then they said I could go home and Lee came to fetch me. All the nurses wept and kissed me. I gave them all copies of my books. The night nurses were not on duty, which enabled me to inscribe their books: ‘In memory of the wonderful nights we spent together.’

  Gerald’s morale was raised even further when he received word that the Association for the Promotion of Humour in International Affairs in Paris had awarded him the Noble Prize, an annual accolade accorded to humorist writers.

  Within a few weeks things really began to look up when Durrell in Russia began its run on Channel 4 on 13 April to favourable reviews, coinciding with the publication of the handsomely illustrated book of the series, written jointly by Gerald and Lee, which reached the top ten best-selling list of non-fiction hardbacks in Britain. Then on 19 April Gerald’s old colleague and mentor Sir Peter Scott opened the latest facility at the zoo, the Nubel Bird Propagation Centre, another stage in the unending modernisation and improvement of Jersey’s facilities. By now Lee had begun work on an ambitious book of her own – State of the Ark: An Atlas of Conservation in Action – a comprehensive overview of the conservation situation around the world, commissioned and researched by the IUCN. Gerald reported to her parents on 21 April:

  Your daughter, of course, is busy being an authoress up in the attic and gets up at seven in the morning and only appears for meals. I am seriously thinking of suing for divorce, but I understand from my lawyer that a computer cannot be cited as co-respondent. Of course, in addition to having to worry about the extermination of wildlife all over the world, I have to do all the cooking and try and entertain my sister, who is staying with us and shows absolutely no sign of ever leaving. So you can see my lot is not a happy one. However, I can now walk without a stick.

  That summer Gerald, Lee, Margaret, Lee’s sister Hat, Simon Hicks and his wife and three young daughters all headed off to Corfu. Though Gerald had become disenchanted with what he saw as the reckless spoliation of Corfu by uncontrolled tourist development, and had vowed he would never go back there ‘except in a coffin’, he still couldn’t quite keep away from the place, still yearned for the distilled essence of the old magic of his island childhood. ‘The most precious moment in my whole life,’ he told Simon Hicks, ‘was waking up one morning in Corfu when I was a boy. Everything was perfect – the sun, the insects, the colours, the lot. Just simple things. The most wonderful, beautiful things in life are the simple things which we have all forgotten.’ They had rented an old converted olive press on the beach at Barbati, which had been one of Gerald’s favourite picnic spots in earlier years, and from there they would sally forth, usually by boat. ‘He didn’t want to see the vast new hotels that they’d erected on that lovely and once pristine coast,’ Simon Hicks recalled. ‘So we’d warn him when they were coming up, and he’d sit and look the other way, out across the water towards Albania, and we’d tell him when we’d gone past and he’d turn round and look at Corfu, the lovely olive hills he remembered so well, the bright little horse-shoe bays. One night when the others had gone to bed we sat outside at the olive press and settled into the whisky. There was a most glorious full moon shining on the water and a great breathless silence across the sea, and I asked him: “Is it terribly depressing coming back?” And he looked out at this magical scene and thought a bit and then he said, looking up at the moon: “Well, that doesn’t change.”’

  By December 1986 Gerald was confined to a wheelchair, his unoper-ated-on right hip giving him ‘Hell with a capital H’. The weeks that followed were ‘fairly horrific’, he was to complain. Much of the time was spent in London recording the commentary for yet another thirteen-part television series, Ourselves and Other Animals, an exploration of the relationship between man and animals, scheduled for transmission in the coming spring. Like Gerald’s previous big documentary series – The Stationary Ark, Ark on the Move, The Amateur Naturalist and Durrell in Russia – it was being made by Pat Ferns’ Primedia Productions. Unlike its predecessors, however, it was largely based on archive footage, although Gerald and Lee were required to shoot several live-action sequences (including one in the Canaries and one with Lee covered in tarantulas), to top and tail the series to camera and to read the voice-over narration.

  The series was not essentially Gerald’s – he was just the vehicle for it – but it elicited a warm response from his many fans, including Spike Milligan, who wrote: ‘What is very good about it is showing the human race as being the drawback in any environmental progress. Everyone who makes a programme like yours should shout out that there are too many people in the world and they are getting manyer.’

  Pat Ferns hoped that Gerald’s next series would be set in China, but sadly the plan never came to anything. They did do one more programme together, however, a one-hour special on Gerald’s work entitled Durrell’s Ark, co-produced with the BBC. Incorporating archive footage, some special shooting at Jersey, sequences from the previous series and a filmed interview with Princess Anne, the show was presented at a fund-raising gala at the Calgary Zoo on Valentine’s Day 1988 during the Calgary Winter Olympics.

  The programme would mark the end of the long, extraordinarily rich working relationship between Pat Ferns and Gerald and Lee. Now, and for some while to come, Gerald’s main preoccupation was to be the battle for his own body. In mid-January 1987 he underwent a second operation, this time for the replacement of his right hip. ‘The operation was successful,’ Gerald reported to his in-laws on 12 February, ‘but much more painful than the other one because the joint had been in worse condition. However, I made rapid progress and was soon able to pinch the bottoms of the more attractive nurses.’

  Gerald’s morale rose higher still when he was handed a telex from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia informing him that he had been awarded the prestigious Richard Hooper Day Medal, ‘in recognition of your many contributions to natural history research and wildlife conservation’. So in fine fettle Gerald was discharged from hospital, as he reported to his w
ife’s parents: ‘Wedged in a wheelchair, I was wheeled out of the King Edward VII Hospital between rows of cheering nurses. I will draw a veil over the scene at Southampton Airport. My wheelchair was backed into a freezing corner and all attention was fixed on Patterson [Lee’s pet Mexican red-kneed tarantula]. His passport was examined minutely by a bevy of heavy-breathing customs officers, his finger-prints were taken and his birth certificate examined. Finally we were allowed on board and everyone was so interested in Patterson that they did not even notice that now both my hips sounded like Middle Eastern gunmen as they went through airport security. Patterson did not need a drink during the flight, but I did …’

  Gerald had always known that his powers, either as an individual or as the head of a single organisation dedicated to saving animals from extinction, were strictly limited. It might be possible to slow the remorseless tide of biological extinctions that afflicted the planet, but to staunch it, let alone stop it, seemed beyond his – or for that matter anybody’s – reach. This did not mean that one did not have a duty to try, for even a single species saved was a triumph. And since the current wave of extinctions was largely the work of one species (man), it was always possible that in the longer term it could be brought to an end by changing the mind-set and the behaviour of its principal cause. But the realistic goal of animal conservation was damage limitation, not absolute victory over the forces of extinction. It was therefore a matter of profound sorrow, bordering almost on personal insult, for Gerald when he learned that on 14 July 1987 the dusky seaside sparrow of Florida was officially declared to be extinct – an event sad enough in itself, but as a metaphor for the fate of species at the hand of man a tragic and lamentable case. ‘Like the canary who warned miners that oxygen was low,’ wrote a local Florida newspaper in memoriam, ‘the extinction of the dusky seaside sparrow sends a message to us: We are all in peril.’

  At the end of July Gerald and Lee flew out to Corfu in order to be present for the last few days of the BBC shoot of My Family and Other Animals, to be screened as a ten-part drama series on BBC 1 starting in October. The £2 million production was a combined effort by the BBC’s Drama Department and Natural History Unit. It was intended that there should be at least three minutes of natural history footage for every half-hour episode, and twenty scorpions, ten praying mantises, three giant toads, a number of snakes, tortoises, terrapins, barn owls and pigeons trained to dance had been brought to Corfu, together with six hundred frozen mice, as food for the snakes. Hannah Gordon played Mother, Brian Blessed was Spiro, Evelyn Laye the eccentric Mrs Kralefski, and a fair-haired thirteen-year old boy from a comprehensive school in Kent by the name of Darren Redmayne, who had almost no previous acting experience but looked right for the part, was given the challenging role of Gerald Durrell – a role doubly challenging when the real Gerald Durrell, now nearly five times that age, and legendary, bearded and leaning on a stick, turned up for the shoots at the real locations. Gerald had given invaluable advice to the production team at the scripting stage, demanding the power of veto over only one thing – the casting of his mother. He felt Hannah Gordon fitted the bill perfectly: ‘She’s absolutely superb. She picks up beautifully my mother’s slightly flustered, not-quite-with-it-half-the-time air, and not knowing, if the family were squabbling, whose side to take.’

  Gerald’s presence on the shoot provided a tremendous fillip to the entire production team, and gave enormous delight to Gerald himself, though he found it a curious sensation to watch his own childhood being re-enacted so faithfully in front of him. None of the family’s three villas proved to be suitable locations fifty years on, and substitutes had to be found (for the record, the Villa Fundana near Skripero stood in for the Strawberry-Pink Villa, the Curcumeli Villa at Afra was used for the interiors of the Daffodil-Yellow Villa and the Bogdanos Villa near Pyrghi for the exteriors, while the Snow-White Villa was impersonated by Kyriakis’ House at Poulades). But it was not so much the visual changes as the sounds of the 1980s that proved most intrusive – the noise of cars, mopeds, motorboats and jet planes. ‘In spite of a few setbacks,’ Gerald reported to a friend, ‘including snow when they arrived, two technicians down with heart attacks and a bright Greek technician who walked backwards into his wind machine and was turned into halva, they seem to be getting along well and are pleased with the results.’

  Gerald’s enchanted childhood on his enchanted island was finally, after so many false starts, immortalised on film. To celebrate the achievement Gerald sent out a home-made invitation, decorated with his cartoon animals, for all concerned to come to a party and barbecue at the grand and lovely old Curcumeli mansion at Afra:

  The Real Durrells invite the Other Durrells, Spiro, Theo and all who worked on the production (even the Producer). For the sake of the reputation of the BBC, please endeavour to remain sober for at least fifteen minutes.

  In the late summer Gerald and Lee were down at the Mazet, enjoying the now familiar routine of rest and recuperation, reading and writing. Both of them were early risers – 6.30 or so. Gerald would usually bring Lee a cup of tea in bed, then they would make themselves busy – Lee wrestling with her plants, perhaps, Gerald scribbling away in his exercise book. Some mornings they might go to the market in Nîmes and have a coffee in the square, but Gerald didn’t like to venture far these days. For some years it had been his habit to take a siesta after lunch on the terrace. He would get up around tea-time and get down to another stint of writing or whatever happened to be on the stocks. Then in the early evening he might start to cook dinner – though he always insisted that he did not cook: he built a soup, or constructed a curry. Sometimes he played the romantic love songs of Arietta, his favourite Greek chanteuse, on the cassette player; but he banned anyone from trying to sing or play ‘Danny Boy’, with its melancholy intimations of impending death.

  A close acquaintance since the days of The Amateur Naturalist, Jonathan Harris was a shrewd observer of Gerald’s private life. ‘He drank anything going,’ Jonathan recalled, ‘sometimes starting with a cold beer after breakfast and sipping steadily all through the day. He was generally OK but if he was really down for some reason he would turn to the whisky, and that was really bad news. I don’t think he had lots of close friends – I mean intimate friends with whom he had long heart to hearts. I was one of his closest friends and I can’t remember any occasion when he and I were in that situation. He had lots of acquaintances, but he was never really ever alone with any one of them – in fact he was never alone at all. He was pretty much at the public disposal most of the time. His society was his wife, his family and the “boys”. He did have a proximity with Larry and he was always very anxious that Larry, who began to get a bit reclusive in later years, should come over for Christmas dinner, so Lee would have to ring him for days in advance.’ Gerald’s rapport with his eldest brother had never faltered. Neither saw the other as an angel: Lawrence thought Gerald drank too much, and Gerald always thought Lawrence should have treated his women better. But each would rally to the other’s support in times of crisis.

  Meanwhile Gerald’s new, splendidly illustrated children’s book, The Fantastic Flying Journey, inspired by the balloon flight that had so thrilled him during the making of The Amateur Naturalist a few years previously, had been published, and by Christmas was third in the children’s UK hardback best-seller list. The book (which at the time of writing is being made into an animated television series for children) recounted the events of a 365-day aerial voyage round the world by Great Uncle Lancelot and his niece and twin nephews on board a magic balloon – an extraordinary ecological flying machine powered by tree sap, lit by electric eels and heated by solar panels. The voyagers are given the power to talk to animals, and are introduced to the marvels of animal and plant life from the Amazon to the Arctic – marvels that humans are selfishly threatening with extinction. In promoting the book Gerald lost no opportunity to spread his conservation message: ‘It’s vital for the future that the young should be mad
e aware of the world,’ he told a reporter, ‘but instead of wagging my finger I wanted to make the book fun. The conservation movement has made several mistakes. They picked out sexy animals like pandas, and everyone thought that was all they were interested in. They didn’t explain that it was the whole ecology, our ecology too, and that we too will suffer. With the world as it is, greed is the first of the deadly sins. As a species we are one of the most loathsome on earth, and certainly the most dangerous.’

  On 20 November Gerald and Lee embarked on a twelve-day Indian Ocean ‘Tropical Adventure Cruise’ as celebrity guest-speakers on board a new luxury German cruise liner, the Astor, sailing from Mombasa to the Seychelles, Mauritius, Reunion and Madagascar. Competing with other attractions such as fancy dress parades, bingo, dance classes and morning jog, they were billed as wildlife experts who would introduce their own exotic worlds of adventure in five slide and video lectures, including ‘Gerald Durrell on Corfu’, ‘Durrell in Russia’, and ‘Madagascar – The Great Red Island’. Though Gerald was to complain that ‘I am put on the list of Astor extras as if I were a commodity like Coca Cola or, even worse, Corn Flakes,’ the voyage was agreeable, the company congenial, and Lee a star.

  Christmas of 1987 was spent again in Memphis. It was almost like old times. Gerald wrote to Hal and Harriet McGeorge on his return to Jersey, ‘Many thanks for what was one of the happiest Christmases I have spent since we used to have old-fashioned Christmases when my family was all together.’ Then it was back to England and in to hospital for the third New Year in a row – this time for a minor but exquisitely painful operation for arthritis in a toe. Both he and Lee were on a diet, and he had cut his alcohol intake by half, a singularly drastic measure. Indeed, by May things had come to such a pass that Gerald felt obliged to complain to Lee’s parents about ‘the nine years of almost intolerable suffering that I have had since you forced me to marry your daughter’. However, Lee herself looked very well on it, he said: ‘I cannot understand why, when I look in the mirror, I look so much older and more carunculated and when I look at her face on the pillow she looks more beautiful than ever. I think it has something to do with the fact that I have a cataract in one eye.’ Later in the year the cataract – though not his carunculated vision of himself – was fixed by a lens implant, the first of two such operations.