Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  The transplant itself had been a success, but as the weeks went by, with Gerald laid low time after time by an endless series of life-threatening fevers and virtually continuous diarrhoea, he began to weaken, and hospital psychosis set in. As a special treat when he was feeling low he was allowed to share a bottle of champagne with the nursing staff while he took a bath. But one day at the end of June, while trying to get to the bathroom using the drip stand as a support, his feet shot from under him and he fell and broke his collarbone, lying helpless on the floor for half an hour till a nurse came. ‘That really shook him,’ Lee remembered. ‘That was the first clear indication to him how far he’d gone down. That was the beginning of his steep decline.’

  It was the long-term prognosis that concerned Dr Guy O’Keeffe. ‘I told Lee that I feared Gerry might die,’ he was to relate. ‘It could happen any time. There could be a burst of infection that would be untreatable and could carry him away. There were a couple of occasions when I thought that might have happened. Lee was very shocked by that.’

  At about this time, something magical began to happen. In the days of their courtship Gerald had often referred to Lee, only partly in fun, as a ‘zoo-digger’, and he often claimed to be the only man in history to have been married for his zoo. ‘I so profoundly wanted to be part of Gerry’s dream and take it forward,’ Lee was to recall later, ‘that I married without romantic love. I was not worthy of Gerry’s enormous love because I did not return it – not at first – though at least I was honest with him from the beginning. But when Gerry became really ill, I began to feel strongly protective towards him, and then, when I realised what I could lose, I began to realise what I had, and I finally fell in love with my husband. I loved him then, and began to tell him so, and he was astonished, as I had for so long refused to use the “L” word, and he was pleased, in a rather childlike way, so sweet, never castigating me for being so stupid and taking so long. Even before the end my heart was breaking.’

  In mid-July Gerald was started on a course of steroids. This only treated the symptoms, not the cause, of his sickness, but it made him feel stronger. By the end of the month he seemed to be getting better enough for Lee to take the opportunity to fly to Memphis to see her mother, who was seriously ill with cancer. On the third day she had a phone call from Paula Harris in London: Gerry was in intensive care with a desperately high fever, and it wasn’t certain if he was going to live. Lee returned on the first plane, but by the time she got back to London Gerald had pulled through, though he was still on a ventilator.

  So the summer passed, with Gerald growing thinner, weaker and more demoralised by the day. Lee was tireless in her support. At the back of the Cromwell Hospital was a tiny private park. She managed to get hold of a key, and a few times she was able to liberate Gerald from the confines of the hospital and take him out in his wheelchair so that he could see the trees and the sky and feel the breeze in his face and watch the sparrows and pigeons and the occasional cat and dog – humble little urban representatives of the great kingdom of the animals on whose behalf he had pleaded and battled for the greater part of his life.

  Neither Gerald nor Lee had any doubt that he was going to pull through, and he remained interested in and in touch with events as far as he was able. Jonathan Harris visited him, and was shocked by his wasted condition, but impressed by his positive attitude and unflagging generosity of spirit. ‘When I told him that as a new departure I was writing a thriller,’ he recalled, ‘Gerry was terribly keen to help and spelled out his three golden rules: always try and solve a problem before you stop writing for the day, don’t leave it till the morning. Always aim to write no more than you can really manage in a day. Always finish on a high and stop writing when you feel happy about what you’ve written. And he repeated his brother Larry’s Eleventh Commandment for all writers: “Thou shalt never become a bore”. Sometimes Paula Harris went to see Gerald about the fund-raising she was organising for the London end of the Trust. ‘He never lost his drive when it came to the main thing in his life,’ she recalled, ‘even when he was ill. He was as keen as ever about what was going on and getting the best out of everybody involved.’ But Gerald tired easily now, and soon all thought of continuing with his autobiography was abandoned, and his papers and tape recorder were put aside.

  In August, during Lee’s brief absence in America, Jersey Zoo was fire-bombed by a deluded animal rights extremist who claimed it was a ‘Noah’s Ark for cute or weird species’ who were being exploited for money. The attack destroyed the £330,000 visitor centre, although no person or animal was harmed. Added to this, Gerald was also worried about the state of his personal finances, for he had been able to do little paid work for some time. ‘I’m overdrawn,’ he confided to his sister Margaret when she went to visit him. ‘Really, Gerry,’ she remonstrated. ‘You’re getting as bad as Mother.’

  Towards the end of September, BUPA, which had been paying for Gerald’s prolonged treatment, suddenly terminated his insurance. Cover, they announced, was available for acute cases only, whereas Mr Durrell, a valued customer, was a chronic case. He would be required to leave private patient care within the week. On 25 September an ambulance took him back to King’s College Hospital, where he was put in a public ward containing five other liver patients, all of them in a serious condition, and one or two of them occasionally demented, so that they would rave incoherently all night and climb in and out of the wrong beds. For Gerald and Lee the move seemed to herald a descent to another circle of hell. After the luxury of the Cromwell, the food was indifferent, and the nursing staff were so desperately overworked that sometimes Gerald, who was now chronically incontinent, would lie for hours, as Dr O’Keeffe put it, ‘up to his ears in poo’. The medical care, however, was of the highest standard, as befitted an NHS teaching hospital with a full research team in support.

  There were one or two compensations to be found in the public ward in King’s which Gerald had not counted on. At the Cromwell he had had a soundproofed room of his own, in which he sometimes felt as alone and detached from the world as if he were in a one-man space capsule suspended in an uninhabited void. But now there was bustle and commotion all around him. He began, bit by bit, to relate to the other five patients in the ward, for lying flat in a hospital bed all were equal in the eyes of the ward sister, let alone the Almighty. His curiosity and powers of observation had not abandoned him even now. He hadn’t set eyes on an animal for some while, but man was an animal, one of the oddest of animals, and Gerald set out to observe his fellow man, preferably the female kind of fellow man, like the nurses. Gerald had always been a flirt and he wasn’t going to stop now.

  ‘He was a brave fellow,’ Dr O’Keeffe recalled, ‘and he seemed better than he was. I don’t think he ever lost his self-esteem, which is maybe why he did so well. He was also a naughty fellow and he was always cracking jokes with the nurses and being naughty with them. He could be rather inappropriately flirtatious with the nurses. He’d make them blush a bit. But all the nurses liked him. He was an attractive man and he acted like an attractive man to the end. He knew that he was loved. And in turn he loved his life and he loved women. That’s quite a motivating factor – quite a mainspring to survival. It confused the doctors. “Oh, he can’t be that bad after all,” they’d say.’

  Gerald was amazingly sweet-tempered, considering. ‘Even when he was in a shocking state,’ Dr O’Keeffe observed, ‘he didn’t behave as if he was in a shocking state. Most people are on a very short fuse when they’re as ill as he was. Sure, Gerry could be very depressed. “I just don’t seem to be getting better,” he’d say. But he was never nasty. Neither, for that matter, was Lee. She was extraordinarily calm and strong throughout this long nightmare. I think she really, really loved that man. She was totally devoted to him. There was nothing she would not do for him, even when she must have been absolutely exhausted and fed up herself.’

  When Gerald was moved to King’s, Lee moved into Sarah Kennedy’s apartment,
which was relatively close at hand, and from there she visited Gerald twice a day, once in the morning, staying through lunch, then again in the early evening, staying till ten. It was obvious that Gerry was going steadily downhill now. Dr Tibbs was shocked at the sight of him when he returned to King’s: ‘I hadn’t seen him for a while, and now he presented a very different picture. He had lost four or five stone in weight, he wasn’t eating anything and he was very weak. Not surprisingly, life was pretty gloomy.’

  The fevers continued unabated, and Gerald would become semiconscious, delirious, not recognising anybody. The diarrhoea got worse till it became virtually unstoppable, so that he was dehydrating badly and losing most of his daily nutrition. To these two ceaselessly recurring components of his personal hell was now added a third – recurring seizures. For the last four or five years Gerald had been taking medication to head off his bouts of grand mal. He was taken off this medication when he went in for his operation, and now the seizures returned. With each one he would vanish into a world of his own, sometimes for a whole week at a time, and there was nothing much anyone could do about it, nor any way they could reach him.

  When television producer Chris Parsons called by to help cheer up his old friend and fellow expeditionary, he was appalled by the deterioration in Gerald’s condition. ‘He looked like a shrivelled monkey on the sheet,’ he told a friend. ‘He surely can’t last long at this rate.’ ‘I was shocked when I saw him in that hospital,’ remembered Margaret. ‘He was in such a mess. In fact, when I turned up he said, “Have you come to say goodbye?” And I said, “No, of course not.” But it looked as if he was in a death ward. He looked ghastly; he looked as if he was dying. He said he’d even contemplated suicide, and if they did one more thing to him he’d feel like going off his head.’

  Day and night Gerald was on drips and infusions and transfusions and high-protein liquid feeds that delivered nutrition in drips through a feeding tube threaded up his nose and down into his stomach. By mid-November he had been in hospital without a break for eight months, and was becoming severely depressed. ‘Gerry would watch this constant flow of other people coming in, getting better, going home,’ Dr Tibbs remembered, ‘and he’d say, “Why am I still stuck in this bloody bed?” During that year we did 165 transplants at King’s and only lost two. But the way he was going, Gerry could be the third. I don’t think he ever lost the will to go on. Some people do, and then they turn their face to the wall and die very quickly.’

  In the end the staff at King’s couldn’t think of anything more to do for him. He was suffering from a general systemic illness for which there was no apparent cure. It might be better, they suggested to Lee, if he went home to Jersey. Psychologically it might do him good to see his zoo again, to be on his home patch at Christmas. Jersey had a perfectly good hospital, they said, and if they ran into any problems they could always ring King’s. Lee recalled: ‘I talked to Gerry about it and he said, yes, yes, let’s do it. So we did.’ ‘Going back to Jersey,’ Dr Tibbs concluded, ‘was a tacit admission that we were not going to get Gerry back to full health and that it was likely to be a pre-terminal event. Whether Gerry realised that or not I don’t know. He must have done.’

  On 14 November 1994 Gerald and Lee flew to Jersey on a little ambulance plane paid for by the island’s public health services. At the hospital in St Helier Gerald was bedded down in a small public ward, and Lee reported the glad tidings to her sister-in-law Françoise, Lawrence’s widow: ‘We are back in Jersey – ENFIN!!’

  A couple of times Lee was able to drive Gerald around the zoo. At one point three little golden-headed lion tamarin monkeys climbed through the open car window and sat on Gerry’s lap, to his intense delight and joy – after almost a year, ashen and haggard, he was back in the world of his beloved animals where he most truly belonged. ‘The day before Christmas Eve,’ she remembered, ‘I was told he could come home for Christmas, which was wonderful. I got the guest-room ready for him, because there was no way he could make it up the stairs to the main bedroom – and then he came home. Jeremy was there to greet him at the manor and he helped me get Gerry through the front door and up the stairs to the flat, which was next to impossible. There was a Christmas tree to cheer him up and a lot of Christmas cards for him to read. I cooked some pigeons – his favourite – and we ate our Christmas dinner together in the dining-room, with candles and holly and everything, and Gerry ate a bit, though he was probably forcing it down, but he didn’t have any alcohol, because he hadn’t had a drop for months, he didn’t fancy it any more. And then in the afternoon we went into the sitting-room and watched Mary Poppins on TV, and Gerry seemed to enjoy that, but he got very tired later and said he wanted to go back to bed.

  ‘From this point forward Gerry began to get tireder and tireder and weaker and weaker, and after a few days I had our GP in and he reckoned Gerry was anaemic and fatigued. So on New Year’s Eve we rang the hospital and said he had to come back. So he went back in, feeling weak, rotten and dehydrated – and he didn’t come out.’

  On 7 January 1995 Gerald Durrell celebrated his seventieth birthday. The occasion did not go unnoticed in the media. ‘Happy birthday Gerald Durrell,’ rejoiced the Guardian, ‘seventy today and charismatic mega fauna, prolific raconteur and writer, flamboyant ruler of your Jersey Zoo for endangered animals. Your contribution to two generations’ thinking about beasties and zoos has been immense.’ Lee had organised a little bedside birthday party at the hospital for some of his oldest and closest friends. In spite of everything, Gerald had lived well, achieved much, carried on long after most people had hung up their hats, and finally notched up his three scores years and ten. It pleased him enormously that he had made it to his seventieth. It had been a target to aim for. A bottle of champagne was popped, and Gerald was given half a small glass. He took a few sips, then put it aside. By midday he was visibly tiring, and everyone prepared to leave. He had so much appreciated their coming, he said. It had been such a wonderful treat. Most of them he was never to see again.

  Soon afterwards Gerald started going down. A week later the hospital telephoned Lee in the middle of the night. Gerald was delirious, they told her. His temperature had shot up stratospherically. He might not make it through the night. She drove down to St Helier as fast as the dark, narrow lanes of Jersey permitted. At the hospital she was given a bed in Gerald’s room while a group of young doctors tried to concoct a cocktail of antibiotics to knock this latest emergency on the head. At four in the morning the antibiotics were finally administered intravenously, together with a strong dose of steroids.

  Four hours later Gerald woke. As Lee could see, his eyes were bright, his mind was in order, the fever had gone, he was as happy as a lark. When Sarah Kennedy visited she was amazed at what she saw: ‘The man I looked down on in his hospital bed was like Gerry as he must have been when he was a young man. He’d lost a tremendous amount of weight, so all the jowls and puffiness had gone. His skin had become totally clear and his eyes were an incredible brilliant blue, like the waters of Corfu. I could see how stunning he must have been when he was young. He really did look incredibly good at the end.’ Gerry gave Sarah a big smile, and after she’d gone he half sat up in bed.

  He was feeling great, he told Lee, and wanted to ring his sister. ‘Marg,’ he said when he got through, ‘I’m feeling terrific. They’ve worked out a new course of drugs for me. I’m going to pull through.’ Margaret recalled: ‘He sounded just like the old Gerry. He had the old voice, the old light-heartedness, the old enthusiasm. It was as though he’d made a total recovery.’ When Jeremy Mallinson went to see his old guru in the hospital he seemed almost his former self. ‘When did you start working for me, Jeremy?’ he asked. When Jeremy told him it was thirty-five years ago, he exclaimed: ‘Thank God I only employed you on a temporary basis!’

  Gerald still more or less refused to eat. Lee would spend hours trying to get him to suck soup through a straw or to take a few sips of a highly nutritious but horribl
y sweet medical milkshake, which he hated. He was now very weak and emaciated, and by Friday, 27 January, he was running a slight temperature. Dr Guyer asked him next day how he was feeling. ‘Bloody awful,’ Gerald replied. These were the last coherent words he ever uttered. Simon Hicks went to see him and came away near to tears. ‘I was confronted for the first time with this hundred-year-old man,’ he remembered. ‘The most dreadful thing was that I couldn’t actually see him, the real him, even when I looked in his eyes. Three-quarters of his spirit had gone. I just couldn’t get near him – I could have wept. It was the end, really.’

  Gerald was not speaking at all now. The nurse put some music on the record player for him – Mozart, Vivaldi, his favourites – but he was no longer listening; he had turned his face to the wall. On Sunday evening the nurse asked Lee whether she wanted to stay at the hospital for the night, but she said no, she’d been through this many times before, and went back to the lonely flat at the zoo. The countryside was dark and wintry, hardly a light anywhere. Black, lowering cloud swept in from the sea and hid the stars. The manor was empty and quiet as the grave when Lee got back. She had a drink, then went to bed, trying to shut it all out, but slept fitfully. At two in the morning the phone rang. It was the hospital. She ought to come down. There was a change happening.