Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  My handful of memories of this time were just little sharply etched vignettes in brilliant colour, with sight and sound and smell and taste added – the scarlet of the sunsets, for example, the harsh singing cries of a peacock, the smell of coriander and bananas, the tastes of different kinds of rice, especially the wonderful taste of my favourite breakfast, which was rice boiled in buffalo milk with sugar. I remember I used to wear little suits made out of tussore. I remember the lovely colour of it – a very pale biscuit brown – and the delicious soft silky feel of it and the rustling sound it made as my ayah dressed me in the morning. I remember my ayah refused to wake me in the morning unless it was to the strains of Harry Lauder on the gramophone, because otherwise I would be grumpy and morose and she couldn’t do anything with me. The gramophone was a wind-up one and although it was very scratchy, like a lot of mice in a tin box, it was wonderful to my ears, and I would wake up with a beaming smile on my face, which made my ayah heave a sigh of relief.

  It was in the India of his infancy that Gerald’s intense sense of colour was born, but it was the young child’s first glimpse of other life forms that was to have the profoundest impact on him. That glimpse was brief and unpromising, but for Gerald it was unforgettable, and from it all else was to follow. He was walking with his ayah, he remembered, and happened to wander to the edge of the road, where there was a shallow ditch.

  Here I found two enormous slugs, at least they appeared enormous to me, though they were probably not much more than three or four inches long. They were pale coffee colour with dark chocolate stripes and they were slowly sliding about over each other in a sort of dance and the slime from their bodies made them glitter as though they were freshly varnished. They were glutinous and beautiful and I thought they were the most marvellous creatures I had ever seen. When my ayah discovered I was slug-watching she pulled me away and told me that I must not touch or even watch such disgusting creatures as they were dirty and horrible. I could not understand, even at that age, that she could think such beautiful creatures could be dirty, and throughout my life I have met so many people who think things are disgusting or dirty or dangerous when they are nothing of the sort but miraculous pieces of nature.

  Before long the infant Gerald really did set foot inside his first zoo, and his life was transformed for evermore. The zoo was in Lahore (not, as he was later to recall, in Jamshedpur), and the impact of this modest establishment was overwhelming. Gerald was to recall of this landmark in his life:

  The rich ammonia-like smell coming from the tiger and leopard cages, the incredible chatter and screams from the small group of monkeys and the melodious song of the various birds that inhabited the little zoo captivated me from the start. I remember the lovely black freckles on the leopard’s skin, and the tiger, as he walked, looking like a rippling golden sea. The zoo was in fact very tiny and the cages minuscule and probably never cleaned out, and certainly if I saw the zoo today I would be the first to have it closed down, but as a child it was a magic place. Having been there once, nothing could keep me away.

  According to his mother, ‘zoo’ was one of the first words Gerald ever uttered, and whenever he was asked where he wanted to go he would say ‘zoo’, loudly and belligerently. If he didn’t go to the zoo his screams of frustration could be heard ‘from the top of Everest to the Bay of Bengal’. Once, when he was too ill even to visit the zoo, Gerald was provided with a sort of substitute zoo of his own by the family butler, Jomen, who modelled a whole menagerie of animals – rhinoceros, lion, tiger, antelope – out of red laterite clay from the garden. Perhaps it was this collection of little mud replicas that gave Gerald the idea – that was to become an idée fixe by the time he was six – of having a real zoo of his own one day.

  Other creatures that reinforced Gerald’s love of animals made their appearance at this time:

  One day my Uncle John, Mother’s favourite brother, a great shikar [hunter] who lived at Ranchi, and was employed by the government to shoot man-eating tigers and rogue elephants, sent us, in a moment of aberration, two fat Himalayan bear cubs. They were weaned but had come straight from the wild and no attempt had been made to tame them. They had very long, sharp claws and very sharp, white teeth and uttered a series of yarring cries of rage and frustration. They were housed temporarily under a big, dome-like basket on the back lawn and a man was detailed to look after them. Of course, having your own bears was a wonderful thing, even though they did smell very lavatorial. Unfortunately, at that age Margaret was ripe for any sort of mischief, and as soon as the bears’ minder went off for some food she would overturn the bears’ basket and then run screaming into the house, shouting, ‘The bears are out! The bears are out!’ After two or three days of this my mother’s nerves could stand no more. She was terrified that the bears would escape and find me sitting on my rug and proceed to disembowel me. So the bears were packed up and sent down to the little zoo.

  The long, golden days of Gerald’s privileged infancy, with an army of servants and all the perks of an imperial elite, were to come to an abrupt stop in a tragedy of great consequence for all the Durrells.

  Early in 1928 Gerald’s father fell seriously ill. Though the illness was never satisfactorily diagnosed, the symptoms suggest a brain tumour of some kind. Margaret remembered her father suffering from severe headaches, and talking and behaving in a very odd and frightening manner. One day, for example, she was dismayed to see him reach for the inkwell on his desk and drink its contents as if it were a glass of whisky or a cup of tea. Friends and relatives suggested it might help if the ailing man was taken up into the cool of the hills, away from the heat of the Lahore plains, and eventually he was transported to the hill station of Dalhousie, which at a height of nearly eight thousand feet crowned the most westerly shoulder of a magnificent snowy range of the lower Himalayas. Dalhousie had a small English cottage hospital looking out over the mountains, the air was crisp and the ambience calm.

  Lawrence Samuel was made as comfortable as possible, but his condition continued to deteriorate. Louisa stayed at the hospital to be near him, while the younger children were billeted at a nearby house with their Irish governess. Sometimes the family would drive out into the surrounding hills, where in the cool pine forests, loud with the rustle of the trees, the throbbing chorus of birdsong and the bubbling of the shallow, brownwater streams, Gerald was given a broader vision of the world of nature. Occasionally he was given rides on his father’s large bay horse, surrounded by a ring of servants in case he fell off. Not even the death of the horse, which fell down a cliff when Gerald suddenly startled it as it grazed with its feet tethered near the edge one day, could wean him off his burgeoning passion for the animal world.

  On 16 April 1928, when Gerald was three years and three months of age, his father died of a suspected cerebral haemorrhage, and was buried the next day at the English cemetery at Dalhousie. Neither Gerald nor Margaret attended the funeral. Mother was entirely shattered.

  Within the family there was a general feeling that Father’s premature death, at the age of forty-three, was brought on by worry and overwork. He had made a fortune as a railway-builder, but had fared less well when he turned to road construction, on one occasion undertaking to build a highway on a fixed-price contact, only to find that the subsoil was solid rock. His sister Elsie believed he had ‘worked himself to death’, and was told that at the moment he was taken ill he was ‘out in the heat of the midday sun supervising a critical piece of work on a bridge’. According to Nancy Durrell (who would have got it from her husband Lawrence), her father-in-law had quarrelled with the Indian partners in his business. ‘They apparently turned a bit nasty, and there was a very gruelling lawsuit, which he handled all by himself, he wouldn’t have a lawyer. But he got overexcited, and what exactly happened I don’t know, but in the end he had a sort of brainstorm, and he died rather quickly.’

  In July 1928 Lawrence Samuel’s will was granted probate, and Louisa, now embarking on almost half a lifet
ime of widowhood, was left the sum of 246,217 rupees, the equivalent of £18,500 at the exchange rate of the time, or more than half a million pounds in today’s money. Financially enriched but emotionally beggared, she was left bereft: grieving, alone and helpless. So great was her despair that years later she was to confess she had contemplated suicide. It was only the thought of abandoning Gerry, still totally dependent on her love and care, that restrained her. Mother and child were thus bound together for ever in a relationship of mutual debt and devotion, for each, in their different ways, had given the other the gift of life.

  ‘When my father died,’ Gerald was to recall, ‘my mother was as ill-prepared to face life as a newly hatched sparrow. Dad had been the completely Edwardian husband and father. He handled all the business matters and was in complete control of all finances. Thus my mother, never having to worry where the next anna was coming from, treated money as a useful commodity that grew on trees.’

  Gerald himself was seemingly unscathed by the family tragedy:

  I must confess my father’s demise had little or no effect upon me, since he was a remote figure. I would see him twice a day for half an hour and he would tell me stories about the three bears. I knew he was my daddy, but I was on much greater terms of intimacy with Mother and my ayah than with my father. The moment he died I was whisked away by my ayah to stay with nearby friends, leaving my mother, heartbroken, with the task of reorganising our lives. At first she told me her inclination was to stay in India, but then she listened to the advice of the Raj colony. She had four young children in need of education – the fact that there were perfectly good educational facilities in India was ignored, they were not English educational facilities, to get a proper education one must go ‘home’. So mother sold up the house and had everything, including the furniture, shipped off ahead, and we headed for ‘home’.

  Mother, Margaret and Gerald took a train that bore them across half the breadth of India to Bombay, where they were to stay with relatives while they waited for the passenger liner that was to carry them, first class, to England. So Gerald sailed away from the land of his birth, not to return till almost half a century had gone by and he was white-haired and bushy-bearded. Like most of the other children on board, he was a good sailor – unlike the grown-ups. ‘Two days out,’ he wrote in his unpublished memoir, ‘we were struck by a tumultuous storm. Huge grey-green waves battered the ship and she ground and shuddered. All the mothers immediately succumbed to sea-sickness, to be followed very shortly by the ayahs, who turned from a lovely biscuit brown to a leaden jade green. The sound of retching was like a chorus of frogs and the stifling hot air was filled with the smell of vomit.’

  The reluctant crew were forced to take charge of a dozen or more children of around Gerald’s age. Twice a day the children were linked together by rope like a chain gang, so that none of them could fall overboard, and taken up on deck for some fresh air, before being taken back down again to play blind man’s buff and grandmother’s footsteps in the heaving, yawing dining saloon. One of the crew had a cine projector and a lot of ‘Felix the Cat’ cartoon films, and these were shown in the club room as a way of diverting the children during the long haul to Aden and Suez.

  ‘I was riveted,’ Gerald remembered. ‘I knew about pictures but I had not realised that pictures could move. Felix, of course, was a very simplistic, stick-like animal, but his antics kept us all enthralled. We were provided with bits of paper and pencils to scribble with, and while the others were scribbling I was trying to draw Felix, who had become my hero. I was infuriated because I could not get him right, simple a drawing though he was. When I finally succeeded, I was even more infuriated because, of course, he would not move.’

  Whether it was a real live creature, or an animated image, or a drawing on a page, the child brought with him a passion and a tenderness for animals so innate it was as if it was embedded in his genes. In the years to follow, come hell or high water, this affinity was not to be denied.

  So young Gerald came to a new home in a new country – and a new life without a father. The loss of the family’s patriarch was to have a profound effect on the lives of all the Durrell siblings, for, deprived of paternal authority, they grew up free to ‘do their own thing’, decades before the expression came into vogue.

  TWO

  ‘The Most Ignorant Boy in the School’

  England 1928–1935

  The house at 43 Alleyn Park, in the prosperous and leafy south London suburb of Dulwich, now became the Durrell family home. It was a substantial house, befitting the family of a servant of empire who had made his pile, with large rooms on three floors and a big garden enclosing it. Before long Mother had installed Gerald’s Aunt Prudence, a butler and a huge mastiff guard dog that chased the tradesmen and according to Gerald devoured two little dogs a day. But the new house was vast, expensive to run, and haunted: one evening Mother saw the ghost of her late husband, as plain as day, smoking a cigarette in a chair – or so Gerald claimed.

  Early in 1930, therefore, when Gerald was five, the family took over a large flat at 10 Queen’s Court, an annexe of the sprawling Queen’s Hotel, a Victorian pile stuck in the faded south London suburb of Upper Norwood. Mother’s cousin Fan lived here, along with other marooned refugees from the Indian Army and Civil Service, so for her the place felt almost like home. The family’s new abode was a strange, elongated flat in the hotel grounds. The entrance was through the hotel, but there was a side door which allowed access to the extensive garden, with its lawns, trees and pond. ‘The flat itself consisted of a big dining room cum drawing room,’ Gerald recalled, ‘a room opposite which was for Larry, then a small room in which I kept my toys, then a minuscule bathroom and kitchen, and finally Mother’s spacious bedroom. Lying in bed in her room, you could look down the whole length of the flat to the front door.’

  Mother’s susceptibility to the paranormal showed no signs of abating, for this place too turned out to be haunted, one ghost being visible, two others audible. The first took the form of a woman who appeared at the foot of Mother’s bed when she woke from a siesta one day. The woman smiled at Mother, then faded slowly away. She appeared again a few weeks later, this time witnessed by Gerald’s cousins Molly and Phyllis, who came running into the kitchen shouting, ‘Auntie, Auntie, there’s a strange lady in your room.’

  The second ghost took the form of a voice that kept telling Mother to put her head in the gas oven, and the third manifested itself in Larry’s room one night when he was playing in a jazz band up in town. In Larry’s room reposed the great teak roll-top desk that his father had had built to his own design. When the roll-top was raised or lowered the noise, Gerald recalled, was indescribable. That night, while Mother lay smoking in bed, waiting anxiously for Larry’s return, she heard the unmistakable racket of the roll-top opening and closing. ‘Taking me firmly by the hand,’ Gerald was to recount, ‘we went down the length of the flat, listening to the constant clatter of the lid being pulled shut and then opened again, but the moment we opened the door and looked into the room there was nothing to be seen.’

  It was in the garden of the Queen’s Hotel, while he was trying to catch birds by putting salt on their tails, that Gerald first came face to face with the more sensual side of life, in the form of a beautiful young woman called Tabitha. ‘She had big, melting brown eyes,’ he recalled, ‘brown and glossy as new horse chestnuts, a wide smile, brown hair bobbed and with a fringe like a Christmas cracker.’ Before long Tabitha was looking after him in her tiny flat whenever Mother went off house-hunting. She had a cat called Cuthbert and two goldfish called Mr Jenkins and Clara Butt, as well as a lot of gentlemen friends who came and went and seemed to spend a shorter or longer time in her bedroom – to talk business, she told her young friend.

  ‘I loved the days I spent with Tabitha,’ Gerald wrote in his private memoir:

  In fact I loved Tabitha very much. She was so gentle and gay, her smile engulfed you with love. She smelt gorgeous
too, which was important to me, since Mother smelt gorgeous as well. She was not only very sweet and kind but very funny. She had a squeaky wind-up gramophone and a pile of records of Harry Lauder and Jack Buchanan, so we would clear away the furniture and Tabitha would teach me how to do the Charleston and the waltz. At times we wentround and round so fast that eventually we would collapse on the sofa, she with peals of laughter and me giggling like a hysteric. Tabitha also taught me lots of songs, including one which enchanted me:

  Iz ’e an Aussie, iz ’e, Lizzie?

  Iz ’e an Aussie, iz ’e, eh?

  Iz it because ’e iz an Aussie

  That ’e makes you feel this way?

  But alas, somehow or other Mother got to hear of Tabitha’s business associates and my visits to her flat were ended. So Tabitha’s lovely brown eyes and wonderful smell disappeared from my world, and I mourned the fact that I could no longer waltz and Charleston and sing silly songs with this enchanting girl.

  Looking back in later years, it struck Gerald as odd that Mother should have been so prim. ‘After all,’ he noted, ‘she was rearing a brood of offspring who became sexually precocious and pursued their own interests with the relentlessness of dynamos. Still, her fledglings managed to erode her Victorian attitudes and train her into more broad-minded ways, so that when, at the age of twenty-one, I went home one weekend with a girlfriend, I found a note from my mother which said: “I have made up two beds, dear, and the double bed, since you didn’t tell me whether you are sleeping together or not. The sheets are aired and the gin is in the dining room cupboard.”’

  It was while living at the Queen’s Hotel annexe that Mother got to know the Brown family – a matriarchy of English provenance who had recently come over from America, consisting of Granny Richardson, her daughter Mrs Brown, and Mrs Brown’s young daughter Dorothy. Like the Durrells, the Browns had a garden flat at the hotel, and the two mothers soon became good friends, for both were exiles who had returned to a foreign motherland. Dorothy Brown was eleven when she first encountered Gerald, who had just turned five. ‘He was a bright little spark,’ she recalled, ‘and even then he was very fond of animals. When our cat had kittens he was always there on the doorstep, clamouring to see them. He was very much a mother’s boy and always terribly fond of her. As far as he was concerned she could do no wrong.’