Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  Then, to my alarm, it discovered my ear. ‘Here,’ it seemed to say to itself, ‘must lurk a beetle larva of royal proportions and of the utmost succulence.’ It fondled my ear as a gourmet fondles a menu and then, with great care, it inserted its thin finger. I resigned myself to deafness: move over Beethoven, I said to myself, here I come. To my astonishment, I could hardly feel the finger as it searched my ear like a radar probe for hidden delicacies. Finding my ear bereft of tasty and fragrant grubs, it uttered another faint ‘humph’ of annoyance and climbed up into the branches again.

  I had had my first encounter with an aye-aye and I decided that this was one of the most incredible creatures I had ever been privileged to meet. Since it needed help, help it we must …

  A local soothsayer was consulted; he gave them a guarantee of success – ‘provided your motives are pure’ – and the aye-aye hunts began, day and night. A video of Verity was shown to the local schoolchildren to encourage interest, but after five weeks the television crew had to leave, the sound recordist desperately ill with cerebral malaria, blood poisoning and hepatitis, their budget exhausted, their schedule completed and only Verity to show for their efforts. Ironically, soon after they left, two local farmers brought an aye-aye mother with baby, and helpers caught another baby, then an adult male. By the time the Durrell expedition left the island, a full complement of six aye-aye had been acquired. These were immediately despatched by air to Jersey, where they quickly adapted to their new surroundings and settled down to breed – the only aye-ayes in captivity at that time, apart from those at the Duke University Primate Center in North Carolina.

  Back in Tana the Durrells were joined by Edward and Araminta Whitley. Edward was on a reportage mission round the JWPT’s overseas project areas, a journey that would result in his book Gerald Durrell’s Army, and at lunch in Tana he found Gerald in good form, eulogising expansively on Madagascar, which had all the good things of France (including a local wine and a native whisky) without the French, and working his way through a hearty dish of frogs’ legs – a duty, he claimed, for the legs belonged to an ecologically undesirable form of frog that had been unwisely introduced from India and had all but wiped out the native Malagasy varieties.

  From the moment of his arrival at Lake Alaotra, however, Gerald became unwell. Attacked by a dysenteric bug, he was subject to devastating and painful stomach cramps and diarrhoea – ‘as though someone were operating on my nether regions with a chainsaw’. Things became so bad that he began to review his life: ‘Why, I asked myself, do you do this to yourself ? At your age you should know better and stop acting as if you were still twenty-one. Why don’t you retire as other men do and take up golf, bowls or soap-carving? Why do you flagellate yourself in this way? Why did you marry a much younger wife who encourages you in these ridiculous acts? Why don’t you just commit suicide?’

  Gerald’s condition was exacerbated by the dismal conditions at Lake Alaotra. The tree cover in the region had long been chopped down, and as a result the surrounding hills had begun to disintegrate, so that now the soil was sliding into the lake and choking it with silt. The area had once been the ricebowl of Madagascar; now the island had to import its staple food. The place was a metaphor for the fate of the country – a progressive suicide for the human race, a holocaust for the other species, among them the gentle lemur, whose only home was the diminishing fringe of reed bed around the lake, currently being burnt off to create yet more rice paddies. All the indications were that unless emergency action were taken now, the gentle lemur – a creature about the size of a half-grown cat, with bronze-greenish fur, huge golden eyes and enormous hands and feet – would soon follow the fate of two species of lakeside birds which were believed to have become extinct recently.

  A little before Christmas the Whitleys joined up with the Durrells at Alaotra. Despite Gerald’s state of health, things went well. Gerald’s method of hunting for gentle lemur, Edward noted, was to go round the villages asking if anyone had any they were willing to sell. One gentle lemur was obtained by these means on the first day, and within three days the required number of ten had been acquired, including four babies, which were fed milk and banana mash by syringe. The animals were flown out to Tana, where they were looked after by Joseph Randrianavo-ravelona, a Madagascar-born graduate from the Trust’s International Training Centre, before being flown to Jersey.

  Araminta left at this point to return to England, and Gerald, Lee and Edward met up with John and Sylvia Hartley and Quentin Bloxam at their camp, thirty miles from Morondava, in a parched patch of forest that was being ecologically managed by a Swiss aid agency. Around the camp a series of traps had been set up near the entrances to the burrows of the giant jumping rat, and within days the quotas for these creatures – bulky animals that stood a foot tall and bounded along the ground on their hind legs like kangaroos – had been fulfilled, along with those for the flat-tailed tortoise.

  To every silver lining there is always a cloud, however, and the cloud at the Durrell camp took the form of a plague of flies – houseflies, horseflies, sweatbees and many more – that swarmed apocalyptically in the heat (4o°C by eight in the morning). ‘They committed suicide in your beer ten at a time,’ Gerald recorded. The tent poles and camp tables were black with them. They settled in clouds over arms, legs and faces. They stung, Gerald wrote, ‘as if some malignant millionaire was extinguishing a large and expensive Havana cigar on the exposed parts.’ But nature in even its most tiresome form never failed to enthral him. ‘Look at a dismembered housefly and mosquito under a microscope,’ he was to note, ‘and immediately you become captivated by the architectural beauty of their construction. The compound eye of the housefly, for example, is a miracle of design. Indeed, once you have seen the component parts of some of these creatures magnified, you have a faint, guilty feeling at swatting one and crushing such a structural miracle.’ Edward Whitley’s abiding memory of this profoundly uncomfortable camp was the bedlam of all the creatures of the night – the frogs, birds and animals – in a ‘great croaking, honking, roaring mass’, above which he could hear a thunderous noise emanating from Gerald and Lee’s tent. ‘Gerry,’ he noted, ‘was triumphantly asleep against all comers.’

  The aye-aye expedition provided Gerald and Lee with an opportunity to check the state of the ploughshare tortoise (or Angonoka) breeding project on Madagascar – a project which was Lee’s specific concern. The ploughshare (so called because of the projection which grows from the shell beneath its neck) was the largest and most spectacular of the four species of tortoise endemic to the island, sometimes reaching almost two feet in length and weighing up to forty pounds. Found only in the scrub country in the Baly Bay region of the north-west, it had become the rarest tortoise in the world, shrinking in range and numbers as a result of the annual burning of the scrubland in which it lived and, apparently, the depredations of the voracious African bushpig, an introduced animal.

  In 1985 the JWPT had been asked by the Tortoise Specialist Group of the Species Survival Commission of the IUCN to undertake a rescue operation for the ploughshare tortoise. A site for the project was found at the Ampijoroa Forestry Station near the town of Mahajanga, and in due course Don Reid – ‘a herpetological paragon’ – was put in charge of the tortoise captive breeding programme there, later assisted by Germain Rakotobearison, a Malagasy trained at the International Training Centre on Jersey. The tortoises had been breeding ever since, as Lee and Edward Whitley could now see.

  Gerald had been too ill with fever to travel to Ampijoroa, and had sensibly elected to stay behind in the comfortable Hotel Colbert in Tana, with its cool shuttered rooms, cold beer, cold showers and hot frogs’ legs. But an encounter with the tortoise babies on another occasion provoked in him a rhapsodical response. ‘Holding four tiny ploughshare tortoise offspring in his hand,’ he was to write, ‘was like holding four tiny, sun-warmed cobbles, beautifully fretted and sculpted by wind and waves.’ Lee crooned over them, admiring the brightnes
s of their tiny eyes like chips of onyx, their sharp, manicured claws, legs encased in meticulously carved scale like fossilised leaves from a pigmy tree: ‘There is nothing like seeing and holding the fruit of your labours. Taking these almost circular, still-soft fragments of wriggling life in our hands made all the struggles and begging for money, all the persuasion of bureaucracy, all the months of toil and planning fade away. Cupped in our hands, these funny little pie-crust babies represented the future of their race. Guarded from harm, we knew that these extraordinary antediluvian creatures could breed and go lumbering on into new centuries to remind us how the world began.’

  Gerald and Lee took the opportunity to make a return trip to Mauritius, where for the last fifteen years the JWPT had become increasingly involved in conservation rescue operations. A lot of progress had been made in that time. When Gerald first visited the island the Mauritian kestrel was down to four birds and the pink pigeon to about twenty, while on nearby Rodrigues the beautiful golden fruit bat which was native to the island numbered just 120, and on the small islet of Round Island the unique reptile and plant populations were threatened with ecological disaster by the rabbits and goats thoughtlessly imported in the early nineteenth century.

  After previous efforts to rectify these problems had petered out, the JWPT had stepped in to help. With the help of the New Zealand Wildlife Service and the Australian Navy (which lent a helicopter), work on Round Island began, and by the time Gerald returned to Mauritius in 1990 the problems of introduced pests on Round Island had been solved, breeding colonies of Mauritian kestrels, pink pigeons and fruit bats had been established on both Jersey and Mauritius, and the cages in the Reptile House on Jersey were overflowing with geckos, skinks and boas. Thanks to brilliant work by Carl Jones in Mauritius the plight of the island’s kestrel, once the world’s rarest bird, had been dramatically reversed. ‘If anyone can be said to have snatched a species back from the brink of oblivion,’ Gerald reported, ‘then it can be said of Carl and this diminutive hawk.’ By 1990 Carl was breeding fifty kestrels a year and had already returned 112 young birds to the wild – a prodigious feat. In one of the last stretches of indigenous forest left in the island, he and his team were now busy with releases of captive pink pigeons into the wild. Gerald wrote:

  As we were sitting around chatting, something delectable happened. There was a sudden rustle of wings and a pink pigeon flew into the tree twenty feet above us. Moreover, to our astonishment it was one of the birds we had bred in Jersey and sent out as part of the re-introduction scheme, as we could tell by its ring. It preened briefly and then sat there, full bosomed, beautiful, wearing the vacuous expression all pink pigeons have, looking exactly like one of the more unfortunate examples of Victorian taxidermy. Of course, we gave it news of its brethren, which it received in a stoical manner, and presently it flew off into the forest. It was heart-warming to see a Jersey-bred bird perching on a tree in its island home: that is what zoos – good zoos – are all about.

  Later Gerald witnessed something no less miraculous. With Lee and Carl Jones he went out to see one of the many areas where the Mauritian kestrel had been re-introduced. While Carl started a series of ‘cooee’ noises in a high soprano voice, Gerald stood like a portly Statue of Liberty holding up a dead mouse as bait:

  ‘Here they come!’ Carl shouted suddenly.

  There was the faintest angel’s wing breath of disturbed air, a flash – like an eye-flick – of a brown body, a gleaming eye, the gentlest touch of talons on my fingers as the mouse was deftly removed and the hawk flew off with it. It was an astonishing experience to have this bird, of which there had been only four specimens in the wild and which was now, with the aid of captive breeding, well on the road to recovery, swoop down and take a mouse from my fingers.

  Back on Jersey, Gerald and Lee went the round of the zoo to study the new animals they had brought back to save: the beautiful kapidolo (‘their shells agleam’); the marvellous snakes (‘smooth and warm as sea-sanded pebbles’); the giant jumping rats; the gentle lemurs (‘fur fluffed out and healthy’); and finally the fabulous creatures they had gone so far to collect and protect – ‘our little tribe of magic-fingered ones’.

  ‘I have met everything from killer whales to hummingbirds the size of a flake of ash, animals as curious as giraffe to platypus,’ Gerald wrote later. ‘Now to see aye-aye, at last, in Jersey, exploring their cages, to learn that they had settled down and were feeding well was a tremendous relief. One felt one was on the verge of something.’ An aye-aye he called ‘the little princeling’ was handed to him: ‘huge ears, magnificent, calm, but interested eyes of the loveliest colour, his strange hands black and soft, his magic finger crooked like a Victorian button hook’. Gerald reflected: ‘I thought of the animals we had saved in Mauritius. If only we could do the same for this strange cargo of creatures we had returned with. If, with our help and the help of others, remnants of the wonderful island of Madagascar can be saved and we can return the princeling’s progeny – that, in some way, would be man’s apology for the way he has treated nature.’

  The princeling looked at Gerald with shining eyes, his ears moving to and fro. The creature sniffed his beard and combed it gently. Then, with infinite care, he inserted his magic finger into Gerald’s ear. ‘We have come full circle,’ Gerald was to conclude of this unending adventure, ‘but, as we all know, circles have no end.’

  While Gerald was in the thick of the Madagascar wilds, his brother Lawrence died at the age of seventy-eight. Lawrence had been ailing for several years. An inveterate heavy smoker at one time, he had contracted emphysema, and even three years previously (as Gerald had observed) it was an effort for him to so much as cross a room. In his declining days he presented a sad sight – ailing, morose, bored, depressed, drinking too much, house shuttered and bat-infested. ‘He was so weary of it all,’ a close friend reported to Gerald after visiting Larry near the end.

  On the morning of 7 November 1990, Lawrence’s last partner Françoise Kestsman was to tell Gerald, she had left the house to take her youngest son to school and go shopping for lunch. When she got back Lawrence was dead, having died instantly from a cerebral haemorrhage while having a pee in the bathroom. A few days later his body was cremated at Orange and his ashes interred in the grounds of the little Romanesque chapel in Sommières where Claude’s ashes lay.

  ‘I always considered my elder brother to be a somewhat inconsiderate man,’ Gerald was to write with mischievous affection. ‘This is borne out by the fact that I was in the middle of a highly important animal-collecting expedition in Madagascar in an area that had neither plane, fax, phones, nor even decent roads, when Larry chose to die. The news came to me several days later, when it was too late for me to comfort his two former wives, his numerous lamenting girlfriends and his numerous lamenting friends around the world.’ Larry had been his father-surrogate for most of his life, Gerald reckoned. He had always been there to help and advise. It was Larry who had made him believe in himself and who had first helped him to explore the beauties and intricacies of the English language and encouraged him in his writing. ‘So he has departed,’ Gerald wrote, ‘like a comet, leaving a twinkling tail of people who loved, admired and were amused by him. For a host of people he will leave a gap in their lives and they will miss him. So shall I.’

  Lawrence left the house at Sommières to Françoise, together with a sum of money to enable her to turn it into an institute called the Lawrence Durrell Centre. ‘What with Larry’s Durrell Institute [sic] and my Durrell Institute for Conservation and Ecology at the University of Kent,’ Gerald wrote proudly to Alan Thomas, ‘we Durrells seem to be leaving some sort of mark.’

  Gerald had been greatly downcast when he heard of his brother’s death, and he was even more dismayed when, in May 1991, it was alleged in an article in the Sunday Telegraph that Lawrence had committed incest with his daughter Sappho when she was eighteen, a year after the death of his wife Claude. The evidence for this charge was bas
ed principally on ambiguous diary entries by the self-absorbed and unstable Sappho, who in February 1985, at the age of thirty-three, had hanged herself after a series of unsuccessful suicide attempts. Unproven though they were, the newspaper revelations were damaging, and Gerald, Margaret and Jacquie were united in their outrage at the injustice of them.

  By now Gerald could smell the faint whiff of mortality in the air. His old friend Peter Bull was dead, and Alan Thomas fatally stricken with cancer. The formidable Aunt Prue, after a long and litigious life, had dropped dead of a heart attack after hurling a brick at a neighbour’s cat, leaving £25,000 to Gerald. Gerald himself was inching towards his seventies. It was time to put certain basic matters in hand, tidy up affairs of crucial concern. Most urgent in his own mind was the question of his own passing, and the matter of the succession. Accordingly, on 22 January 1991 he wrote an informal letter to Lord Craigton, the highly regarded patriarch of the Trust Council: ‘The recent demise of my brother brings home forcibly to me that none of us are immortal. Therefore, if you agree, I would deem it wise to now move Lee into a position whereby she automatically becomes Honorary Director of the Trust without any undue wrangling or acrimony, should I die.’ Lee’s academic credentials were impressive, Gerald reminded Lord Craigton – indeed she was far more highly qualified than her husband or anyone else at the Trust. Moreover, the staff respected and liked her, and had taken to bringing their problems to her, rather than to him, such was their confidence in her judgement and tact. ‘Lee is deeply devoted to the Trust and its activities and she has initiated and run the Ploughshare Tortoise captive breeding programme in Madagascar, which both WWF and IUCN consider to be a model of its kind. She will be Chairman of the Durrell Trust for Conservation Biology. She will also, at my demise, continue to carry the Durrell name, which will be helpful. One is, of course, powerless from the grave and I would rest more easily if I felt that my life’s work were in Lee’s most capable hands.’ Since it would not be appropriate for Gerald himself to bring this plan before the Council, he asked Lord Craigton to present it on his behalf. Craigton replied immediately that he would be delighted.