Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  As usual, Gerald and Lee went down to the Mazet for the summer. ‘The greenhouse is now so full of undergrowth,’ he complained in a letter to the McGeorges, ‘that I have to employ three local Arabs to cut my way to my desk with machetes.’ Lee had taken up horticulture in a big way, he wrote, and the Mazet was now beset by a large number of highly malignant plants: ‘There is a sort of creeper thing, with leaves as round as an elephant’s fundament and long pink tendrils. Every time I go and sit in the greenhouse these tendrils (which grow about a yard a minute when you’re not watching) change direction and start creeping towards me. It cuts into your drinking time of an evening to have to continuously glance over your shoulder to make sure you are not about to be garrotted. There is another plant that looks like the gangrenous remains of a green Pekinese. This thing climbs out of its pot and tries to sit on your feet, with God knows what intent on your manhood …’

  Though Gerald now had a fabulous new study, he seldom wrote there, for to do so meant incarcerating himself alone, and being alone was one thing he could never abide. His preferred place for writing was a small table at one end of the Mazet’s long sitting-room, from which he could look out on to the terrace in one direction and in to the kitchen in another, so that he was rarely out of sight of another human being (preferably his wife) while he practised his lonely craft.

  By the early nineties, however, his writing had begun to wind down somewhat. Nearly ten years had gone by since his last significant work, The Amateur Naturalist, and that had been written with substantial input from Lee. How to Shoot an Amateur Naturalist was an engaging spin-off book, while Durrell in Russia was an almost literal transcription of his Soviet travel diaries (with informative input from Lee’s). In the five years since then he had written six more books, five of them short fiction works, and only one aimed at adult non-fiction readers. His recent productivity as an author, therefore, had been continuous but thin, largely depending for its content on his imagination rather than on his own real-life adventures – a situation dictated by the deterioration of his hips and eyes in recent years.

  Anthea Morton-Saner had taken over as Gerald’s fourth literary agent at Curtis Brown in the mid-eighties, though she had met him a number of times in France before then when she had been staying at Sommières with Lawrence, for whom she also worked as agent. ‘By then Gerry’s best books were in the past,’ she was to say, ‘though you have to remember that by now he was a very famous person and no longer a free spirit. Having ceased to be a voice in the wilderness, he was no longer free to write the kind of books he used to write. Gerry outshone all his peers, except when Larry was present, when both of them had an equally commanding presence. Gerry’s rich voice, his incredible gentleness, his quick wit, all combined to have a calming influence on those around him. Nothing was taken too seriously, except his work, which really, really mattered. His anger came to the fore if he heard people mistreating animals, and as the years went by he became more uncivil and impatient and expected you to accept it as part of his friendship.’

  Two of the children’s books – Keeper (1990), a picture book about a boxer dog who works as a zoo keeper, and Toby the Tortoise (1991) – never sold many copies. But The Fantastic Dinosaur Adventure – published in 1989 as a sequel to The Fantastic Flying Journey, and similarly splendidly illustrated – did a great deal better. In the new adventure a villain steals a time machine and travels back to the age of the Dinosaurs to hunt down the creatures for personal gain. ‘He’s probably catching baby dinosaurs at this very moment, and the only way he can do that is to shoot the mothers first,’ cries the anguished hero at one point, in an uncanny rerun of Gerald’s transforming experience of hippo-hunting in the Cameroons in his youth. The story was not merely an entertainment but an education as well, and children loved it.

  A new book for adults, Marrying off Mother and Other Stories (1991), was no less ingenious and a good deal more hilarious. The stories ranged in location from Paraguay to the Perigord and featured a wonderfully eccentric cast of characters, including Gerald’s own family back in pre-war Corfu (among them the mother they were trying to marry off), a gambling nun in Monte Carlo, a prize truffling sow called Esmeralda, an ageing Memphis belle and an alcoholic small-town hangman on the Parana river. ‘All these stories are true,’ Gerald was to fib with nerveless aplomb, correcting himself a second later: ‘To be strictly accurate, some are true, some have a kernel of truth.’

  The Ark’s Anniversary, published in Britain in 1990, was also occasionally funny, though its underlying theme and final message were deadly serious. ‘If you can make people laugh and at the same time get a message across,’ Gerald had once confided to his conservation colleague John Burton, then Secretary of the Fauna Preservation Society, revealing his secret formula for the first time, ‘you’re three-quarters of the way there.’ As an account of the struggles and achievements of the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust over the past twenty-five years the book was indubitably true – in many ways (though there were inevitably failures and tragedies) triumphantly so. But it was impossible to lose sight of the importance of what was at stake, and the reviewers picked up the bitter-sweet mixture. ‘Mr Durrell presents his case for captive breeding with the sincerity and sensitivity of someone who has watched first hand the terrible rape of wild things, both plant and animal,’ wrote the New York Times, ‘yet he always manages to blend in a healthy dose of humor.’ The San Francisco Chronicle concurred: ‘It is impossible for Gerald Durrell to write anything that is less than exuberant, eccentric and amusing. The Ark’s Anniversary is as sobering as it is delightful.’

  PART FIVE

  A Long Goodbye

  THIRTY-TWO

  ‘Details of my Hypochondria’

  1992–1994

  Though Gerald Durrell had swashbuckled around the jungles and mountains of half the wild places on earth in the course of his travels in search of animals, he had never been a physically rugged man. As a child he had tended to be on the delicate side – ‘a slightly sick creature,’ his brother Lawrence recalled, ‘always a little bit ailing, fragile and wandlike.’ When he was small he had chronic catarrh and found it difficult to sleep at night, and by the time he was in his teens his sinuses were so bad that he failed his army medical. ‘You now see this Herculean chunk of a hero with a beard,’ Lawrence had once confided. ‘But Gerry was enormously fragile as an adolescent and physically timid. Frail, slender, lanky, psychically nervous, jumpy, shy … We’ve all had stresses and strains, but Gerry has had a much harder time of it than any of us. It’s quite a remarkable feat to turn yourself into a toughie while remaining friable and tender inside.’

  Even as a fully grown, apparently sturdy young man in Africa, Gerald had suffered a more than average number of physical and medical setbacks, from malaria, sandfly fever and dysentery to blood infections and ulcerous sores. Though he was determined and tenacious, driven by a dream and sense of mission, his inner sensitivity and delicacy made him more than averagely vulnerable to the stresses and strains of the life he had chosen, making him subject to depressions and breakdowns. Age had brought other travails: two arthritic hips, cataracts in both eyes, heart malfunctions, a small bladder cancer and diabetes, residual tertiary malaria – a whole litany of wear and tear.

  Although alcohol had helped Gerald get through the day, the year, the life, it had brought its own torments in its wake. In later years his intake returned to a level so high that some kind of pay-off was unavoidable. He had already suffered a number of grand mal seizures which were probably alcohol-related. His brother Lawrence – like Gerald a heavy drinker – had been subject to similar seizures, during which he would fall to the ground, have convulsions, bite his tongue and sometimes lose control of his bladder and bowels. There were times when the two brothers wondered whether their shared affliction might not have an inherited genetic origin quite apart from alcohol.

  By the early 1990s Gerald was a far from well man. He was all too aware of the ravages
he had suffered, and would regard the steady disintegration reflected back at him by the mirror with increasing dismay. At the end of 1991 he looked so awful that his friend Sarah Kennedy, the well-known radio and television broadcaster, was convinced he did not have long to live. She had first met Gerald and Lee in the late eighties when she came to Jersey with the author and zoologist Desmond Morris to shoot a television programme called The Animal Country Awards. In January 1992., convinced that Gerald was dying, Sarah held a dinner at her flat in London to cheer him up, inviting David Attenborough and Desmond Morris as surprise guests.

  ‘Sarah said to me: “Gerry’s not long for this world,” Desmond Morris recalled. ‘This surprised me – I’d thought he was OK. But Sarah was very sensitive; she could see he was ill and going downhill. Personally I loved the old rogue. We had a very friendly relationship and I felt close to him emotionally. I had a similar attitude towards animals but we never talked shop because somehow we never needed to – we had this immediate understanding that we shared the same basis of thinking.’

  The dinner was to be a get-together of the country’s three greatest living naturalists (Sir Peter Scott – ‘the man who laid down the bedrock on which international conservation now stands,’ as Gerald once said of him – having died over a year before). ‘I had to do it,’ Sarah Kennedy recalled, ‘because I knew instinctively that it would be the last time these three would all be together. Though they all approached the phenomena of the natural world from different directions, they all respected each other very much.’

  The surprise was carefully laid. Gerald and Lee arrived first. Gerald was sat in a chair with a bottle of his favourite J&B malt whisky beside him, and Sarah put a record on. After a while the entry-phone buzzed. Sarah picked it up. She could hear David and Desmond downstairs ‘giggling like schoolboys’. Determined to spin out the surprise for as long as she could, she said firmly, ‘Well, it’s a bit bloody late in the day to be delivering the wine now. But I suppose you’d better bring it up.’

  The doorbell rang, and the two surprise guests walked in. ‘Gerry’s eyes were on stalks,’ Sarah recalled. ‘His mouth fell open and then he grinned hugely. He could be terribly rude to people he was really fond of. He turned to me and he said: “You bitch!” There was not a pause for breath after that. The conversation flowed along like silk. They talked about all their lives – they had so much in common. David talked about the time he and Gerry had met in Buenos Aires, when they were both caring for a collection of animals in a different part of the town. What times they were. It was a memorable evening. And as it turned out it was the last time they all met up.’

  As the year wore on Gerald’s letters to Hal and Harriet McGeorge in Memphis began to be increasingly preoccupied with the state of his health. Though he bravely did his best to turn his succession of encounters with the medical profession into yet another funny story, the fact that he wrote about them at all was indicative of his underlying concern. On 5 February he wrote from Jersey: ‘I am having to go into hospital for twenty-four hours because the medical profession want to take a peep into my bladder. They can’t believe that it is solid whisky.’ On 17 March he reported that the problem was getting worse:

  Over the years I have produced something so pale and blonde that it might easily have passed for one of the more delicate Loire wines. Imagine, then, my consternation when instead of this I produced something that looked like a very non-vintage Châteauneuf du Pape. My wife was in the kitchen. Do you think I got sympathy? I was berated for not looking after myself, eating too much, drinking too much, staying up late. So into hospital I went. The Jersey Hospital is famous for its beautiful nurses and for the fact that if you go in to have your appendix out you wake up to find both legs missing and a beautiful nurse pouring boiling pitch over the stumps. Then I was wheeled into a sort of dungeon place where I was strapped – protesting – to a slab and my veins filled with iodine.

  And so he went on for four more pages, regaling his in-laws with lurid tales of the Jack the Ripper surgeon and the Marquis de Sade orderly, the ordeal by catheter, the plasma and saline drip – ‘like a sort of spiggot and tap that made me feel like a barrel of ale in a pub’ – and the indignity of having his internal organs displayed in ‘full frontal nude’ on a giant TV screen with three nurses looking on. Then the cliffhanger of the diagnosis (‘it’s a little non-malignant warty thing’) and the doom of the cure: ‘I must, if I wanted to become sixty-eight, immediately give up women, wine, smoking, eating and drinking.’ He had gone in for twenty hours and stayed nine days.

  By May Gerald was more or less back to normal, and deeply involved in hosting a major conference on animal conservation – the Sixth World Conference on Breeding Endangered Species. When the First World Conference was held in Jersey in 1972., some of the zoological world still considered captive breeding unnecessary and misguided. Twenty years later it had been officially recognised by the World Conservation Union (the new name for the IUCN) as a significant weapon in the fight against species extinction.

  In opening the conference, Princess Anne urged the three hundred delegates from thirty countries to see their zoos as a means of conservation overseas, not as an end in themselves. The conference would be remembered for raising a new challenge – the effective management of captive and wild populations of endangered species as a single problem with a common solution. The almost extinct California condor, for example, removed from the wild under a cloud of controversy, now numbered more than sixty birds bred in two zoos, and the first pair had recently been reintroduced into the wild. The black-footed ferret (the subject of one of Gerald’s earliest conservation concerns when he was an adolescent petshop worker) had been returned to the prairies of western America after research had been carried out with a near relative, the Siberian ferret. The Mallorcan midwife toad, known only as a fossil until it was discovered alive in 1980, had been bred in captivity, then returned to secret sites, and was now breeding a new generation of wild toads. Winding up the conference, Dr George Rabb, Chairman of the Species Survival Commission of the World Conservation Union, charged the international assembly of zoologists and conservationists with transforming the nature of the modern zoo to that of a conservation centre.

  Gerald Durrell had every right to feel a smidgen of pride, for from his small acorn (and those of a few other like-minded pioneers) a great tree had grown. His own zoo and Trust was now a world leader. Sixty-one endangered species from all around the globe – from snails and lizards to golden lion tamarins, snow leopards, gorillas and spectacled bears – had found sanctuary in this state-of-the-art establishment and were involved in breeding programmes which could one day conclude with their reintroduction into the wild. The whole complex was constantly being improved and developed. Over nine hundred graduates from the Trust’s International Training Centre were working on conservation and captive breeding programmes throughout the world. The Durrell Institute for Conservation and Ecology at the University of Kent continued to promote the science of conservation biology. In a few weeks the world’s first Earth Summit would take place in Rio, and among the many urgent environmental topics it would address was that of the conservation of biological diversity.

  The wheel of the zoo world appeared to have turned full circle. At this moment the mighty Zoological Society of London, with which Gerald had sometimes skirmished furiously from the dog days of Cansdale to the imperium of Zuckerman, was on its knees – rudderless, out of touch, bitterly divided, and on the verge of closing down. Gerald had already become involved on the sidelines. The demise of London Zoo would be as terrible as the sinking of the Titanic, he declared. He had lost faith in the Zoo Council many years ago – but there was life after Zuckerman. He wrote privately to a colleague to say that he felt London Zoo’s future ought to lie in the hands of zoo professionals of calibre who could ‘invade this fossil to give it life and intelligence’.*

  A few years previously the zoo world could not have cared a fig for what Gerald
Durrell had to say about their affairs, or anything else. Now they hung on his every word and were grateful for his support. On 13 May, triumphant and brimming over with enthusiasm, Gerald reported to Lee’s parents:

  We are just letting the dust settle after a huge and very successful Conference. We were so lucky to get Annie Girl (our Patron) to open it. She made a wonderful speech and set the seal of importance on what we and other zoos are doing. She is a very remarkable lady and we are so lucky to have her as our Patron. We were also lucky with the weather. For the three days of the Conference there was not a cloud in the sky. The whole zoo looked magnificent, since it is now so park-like, and the people coming from other zoos, which are mainly cement and plastic trees, were overwhelmed. I have never seen the place looking so beautiful. We had to make a short list of people to invite up to the flat for drinks and food and it ended up by being fifty people. As I was more or less immobilised because my hips were giving me some trouble, I had to sit in a chair and everyone had to come and sit on the floor around me. To have all the most distinguished and illustrious zoo directors and conservationists in the world crouched at my feet was a position which I (an inherently modest man, as you know) did not, of course, relish.