Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  Like Louisa Durrell, the Browns were looking for a house to buy, and finally settled on Bournemouth, a salubrious seaside resort on the south coast, stuffed with decaying ex-members of His Majesty’s Forces and genteel ladies eking out modest pensions, but warmer and sunnier than most towns in England, and surrounded by beautiful countryside. Mother decided to follow her friends’ example and move to Bournemouth, and early in 1931 the family became the proud possessors of Berridge House, at 6 Spur Hill, Parkstone, complete with a butler, a housekeeper and two servants. This marked the beginning of the Durrells’ close association with Bournemouth, which has lasted to the present day.

  Berridge House was a huge Victorian mansion standing in four acres of grounds, part woodland, part orchard, with a lawn on which two games of tennis could be played at once and a herbaceous border which was, Gerald remembered, ‘slightly wider than the Nile and home to nearly every known weed, with the exception of Mandrake’. When Mother was asked if the house was not a trifle large for a widowed lady and a six-year-old boy – Margaret was now at Malvern, Leslie at Dulwich and Larry at a crammer’s – she answered, rather vaguely, that she had to have room for her children’s friends. To the young Gerald the place looked like a gigantic dolls’ house, with a bewildering quantity of bedrooms, bathrooms and attic rooms, a huge drawing room, dining room and kitchen, a cellar and a parquet-floored basement ballroom that ran the length and width of the house. On rainy days this vast ballroom was his playroom, where he could indulge in ingenuity and uproar without knocking anything over or disturbing anyone upstairs.

  To celebrate the move Mother bought Gerald a Cocker spaniel, the first dog of his very own. It arrived in a cardboard box, and when Gerald opened it the creature inside took his breath away – ‘a dog all soft and squidgy, with hair the colour of ripe corn and big brown eyes and a loving disposition’. Gerald named the dog Simon, and from the moment he lifted him from his cardboard box he became his devoted companion.

  There was no comparable companion for Mother, however, and the reality of her lonely state began to take its toll of her. ‘The difficulties of living in a great, echoing, empty house with only a small boy as a companion began to tell on Mother’s nerves,’ Gerry was to write in his memoir. She devoted herself to her cooking and teaching Gerald how to cook, and to tending the herbaceous borders in the garden, but then came the evening, and solitude. ‘She was lonely,’ Gerald wrote, ‘and she took to mourning the death of my father in earnest with the aid of the Demon Drink, resorting to the bottle more and more frequently.’

  It helped, perhaps, that Gerald shared her bed with her. ‘At the end of the day I would have my bath and then, with a clothes brush, I would climb into the bed that I shared with Mother and dust it carefully to make sure there was not a speck of dust anywhere. Then Mother would come to bed and I would curl up against her warm body in its silk nightgown and frequently I would wake to find myself pressed up against her in a state of arousal.’ For many years to come, mother and child were to remain closer to one another than to any other human beings.

  Eventually, matters reached a crisis. ‘Mother departed,’ Gerald remembered, ‘to have what in those days was called a “nervous breakdown” and Miss Burroughs entered my life.’ Miss Burroughs was Gerald’s first and last English governess. ‘She had a face,’ he recalled, ‘which disappointment had crumpled, and embedded in it were two eyes, grey and sharp as flints.’ Miss Burroughs had never had to deal with a small boy before. Terrified for some reason that Gerald might be kidnapped, she instituted a regime of locked doors, as though he were a dangerous prisoner. ‘I was locked in the kitchen, the drawing room and the dining room, but the worst thing was that she banished Simon from my bedroom, saying that dogs were full of germs, and locked me in at night, so that by morning my bladder was bursting, and as I didn’t dare wet the bed I had to lift a corner of the carpet to relieve myself.’

  Miss Burroughs’ cooking left a lot – indeed, ‘virtually everything’ – to be desired. She was, Gerald recollected, the only person he had ever met who put sago in the gruel she called soup – ‘like drinking frog-spawn’. If the weather was bad, he was confined to the ballroom, where he and Simon invented their own games. Boy and dog built up an astonishing rapport, understanding completely how each other’s human and canine imaginations were working.

  ‘Sometimes, miraculously, Simon would become a pride of lions,’ Gerald was to record, ‘and I a lone Christian in an arena. As I prepared to strangle him, he would behave in the most un-lionlike way, slobbering over me with his moist, velvet-soft mouth and crooning endearments. At other times I would change into a dog and follow him round the ballroom on all fours, panting when he panted, scratching when he scratched and flinging myself down in abandoned attitudes as he did.’

  Simon, Gerald noticed, was basically a coward, for whom ‘a lawnmower was a machine from hell’, and sadly it was his cowardice, which should have saved his life, that was to cause his death. Startled by a chimneysweep driving away from the house on a motorcycle and sidecar, he turned and fled down the drive, into the road and under the wheel of a car, which, Gerald was to lament, ‘neatly crushed Simon’s skull, killing him instantly’.

  Gerald was left as alone as his mother, now returned from her cure and, for the moment, recovered from her addiction. It was high time, she decided, for him to begin some kind of formal education and to mix with other children. Down the hill from Berridge House was a kindergarten called The Birches, run by a large old lady called Auntie and a dapper, kindly, intelligent woman called Miss Squire, better known to the children as Squig. Gerald remembered The Birches with fondness. It was the only school he ever attended where he completed the course.

  Gerald loved The Birches because both Auntie and Miss Squire knew exactly how to teach and treat young people. Every morning he would take a tribute of slugs, snails, earwigs and other creepy-crawlies down to Squig, sometimes in matchboxes and sometimes in his pocket, thus forming a zoo of a kind. ‘The boy’s mad!’ exclaimed brother Lawrence when he learnt of this. ‘Snails in his pockets …!’

  ‘Aren’t they lovely?’ Gerald would tell Squig.

  ‘Oh, yes dear, quite beautiful,’ Squig would reply, ‘but I think they would probably be happier in the garden.’

  Noticing the interest that Gerald’s wrigglies aroused in his fellow pupils, Squig bought and installed an aquarium with some goldfish and pond snails in it, and they would all watch the antics of these creatures absolutely enthralled. It was about this time that Gerald, still only six, announced to his mother his wish to have a zoo of his own one day. He had kept a collection of small toy animals made of lead – camel, penguin, elephant, two tigers – in a wooden orange-box at the Queen’s Hotel, but one day as he walked along the Bournemouth promenade with his mother he described to her his blueprint for a collection of real creatures, listing the species, the kinds of cages they would be housed in, and the cottage in which he and his mother would live at his zoo.

  In 1932 the family moved a short distance to a brand new house at 18 Wimborne Road, Bournemouth, which Mother named Dixie Lodge in honour of her family. Though still substantial, it was a rather smaller property than Berridge House, in less extensive grounds, and so easier and cheaper to run. In Gerald’s view it was a pleasanter place altogether, and the garden contained a number of climbable trees which were home to all sorts of strange insects. Here he settled down – ‘quite happily’, he said, ‘under the raucous but benign influence of Lottie, the Swiss maid’.

  But then, when he was eight, disaster struck out of a clear blue sky:

  Mother did something so terrible that I was bereft of words. She enrolled me in the local school. Not a pleasant kindergarten like The Birches, where you made things out of plasticine and drew pictures, but a real school. Wychwood School was a prep school where they expected you to learn things like algebra and history – and things that were even greater anathema to me, like sports. As both my scholastic achievements and i
nterest in sports were nil, I was, not unnaturally, somewhat of a dullard.

  Football and cricket were an utter bore for Gerald, gym and swimming lessons an absolute torture, bullying a constant menace. The only part of the curriculum that appealed to him was the one and a half hours per week devoted to natural history. ‘This was taken by the gym mistress, Miss Allard,’ he remembered, ‘a tall blonde lady with protuberant blue eyes. As soon as she realised my genuine interest in natural history, she went out of her way to take a lot of trouble with me and so she became my heroine.’

  Gerald came to hate the school so vehemently that it was all Louisa could do to keep him there at all. ‘He used to be taken to school by his mother in the morning,’ recalled a visitor to Dixie Lodge; ‘at any rate she tried to take him – and he would cling onto the railings on the way, screaming, and then he’d have to be taken home, and then he’d get a temperature and the doctor would say, it’s no good, you’ll have to keep him away from school.’ Eventually the GP diagnosed Gerald’s recurring condition as a chronic form of what he called ‘school pain’ – a psychosomatic reaction which prevented the boy from ever completing his prep school education.

  Soon after the Durrells moved into Dixie Lodge, Lawrence (who lived there off and on, as did Leslie and Margaret) had struck up a friendship with Alan Thomas, the assistant manager at Bournemouth’s famous Commin’s bookshop, a young man of about Lawrence’s age who shared many of his intellectual and literary interests. Enormously tall, thin, bearded and ‘spider-like’, Alan lived in nearby Boscombe, and soon got to know the family well, becoming a kind of extra brother to the boys and a lifelong friend. It was not long after Gerald had joined the unhappy ranks of Wychwood that Alan happened to spot the headmaster browsing in his shop.

  ‘I believe you have the brother of a friend of mine at your school,’ said Alan.

  ‘Oh?’ said the headmaster. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Durrell. Gerald Durrell,’ Alan replied.

  ‘The most ignorant boy in the school,’ snapped the headmaster, and stalked out of the shop.

  Gerald stumbled with difficulty through his lessons, until one day, falsely accused of a misdemeanour by the school sneak and given six of the best on his bare bottom by the headmaster, his mother took the mortified boy away from the school for good, thus terminating his formal schooling for ever at the age of nine.

  To help Gerald get over the trauma of his beating, Mother decided to buy him a present, and took him down on the tram to Bournemouth town centre to choose a dog at the pet shop. Gerald recalled:

  There was a whole litter of curly-headed black puppies in the window and I stood for a long time wondering which one I should buy. At length I decided on the smallest one, the one that was getting the most bullying from the others, and he was purchased for the noble sum of ten shillings. I carried him home in triumph and christened him Roger and he turned out to be one of the most intelligent, brave and lovely dogs that I have ever had. He grew rapidly into something resembling a small Airedale covered with the sort of curls you find on a poodle. He was very intelligent and soon mastered several tricks, such as dying for King and Country.

  Roger was destined one day to become famous – and, in a sense, immortal.

  Relieved of the intolerable burden of schooling, Gerald reverted to his normal cheerful, engaging self, exploring the garden, climbing the trees, playing with his dog, roaming around the house with his pockets full of slugs and snails, dreaming up pranks. It was Gerald, Dorothy Brown recalled, who would put stink-bombs in the coal scuttle when he came over with the family for Christmas. Mother presided over the moveable feast that was life at Dixie Lodge. ‘No one was ever turned away from her table,’ Dorothy remembered, ‘and all her children’s friends were always welcome. “How many of you can come round tonight?” she would ask, and they would all sit down, young and old together. Mother was very small but she had a very big heart. She was very friendly and a good mixer and she was a wonderful cook.’

  The delicious aromas that drifted out of Mother’s kitchen, the range and quality of the dishes she brought to the dining table, and the enthusiasm, good cheer and riotous conversation enjoyed by the company that sat down at that table had a deep and permanent impact on her youngest child. Gerald emerged into maturity as if he had been born a gourmet and a gourmand. Much of her cooking Louisa had learned from her mother, the rest from her Indian cooks in the kitchens of her various homes, where she would secretly spend hours behind her disapproving husband’s back. When she returned to England she brought with her the cookbooks and notebooks she had carted around the subcontinent during her itinerant life there. Some of Louisa’s favourite recipes – English, Anglo-Indian and Indian – had been copied out in a perfect Victorian copperplate by her mother: ‘Chappatis’, ‘Toffy’, ‘A Cake’, ‘Milk Punch’, ‘German Puffs’, ‘Jew Pickle’ (prunes, chillies, dates, mango and green ginger). Most, though, were in her own hand, and embraced the cuisine of the world, from ‘Afghan Cauliflower’, ‘Indian Budgees’ and ‘American Way of Frying Chicken’ to ‘Dutch Apple Pudding’, ‘Indian Plum Cake’, ‘Russian Sweet’, ‘All Purpose Cake’, ‘Spiral Socks’ (a mysterious entry) and ‘Baby’s Knitted Cap’ (another). But Indian cookery was her tour de force and alcoholic concoctions her hobby: dandelion wine, raisin wine, ginger wine (requiring six bottles of rum) and daisy wine (four quarts of daisy blossoms, yeast, lemons, mangoes and sugar).

  Not surprisingly, Alan Thomas was soon spending almost every evening and weekend with the family. They were, he quickly realised, a most extraordinary bunch:

  There never was more generous hospitality. Nobody who has known the family at all well can deny that their company is ‘life-enhancing’. All six members of the family were remarkable in themselves, but in lively reaction to each other the whole was greater than the sum of the parts. Amid the gales of Rabelaisian laughter, the wit, Larry’s songs accompanied by piano or guitar, the furious arguments and animated conversation going on long into the night, I felt that life had taken on a new dimension.

  At this time Lawrence was writing, Margaret rebelling about returning to school, and Leslie ‘crooning, like a devoted mother, over his new collection of firearms’. As for Gerald, though he was still tender in years he was already a great animal collector, and every washbasin in the house was filled with newts, tadpoles and the like.

  ‘While one could hardly say that Mrs Durrell was in control of the family,’ Alan recalled, ‘it was her warm-hearted character, her amused but loving tolerance that held them together; even during the occasional flare-ups of Irish temper. I remember Gerry, furious with Larry who, wanting to wash, pulled the plug out of a basin full of marine life. Spluttering with ungovernable rage, almost incoherent, searching for the most damaging insult in his vocabulary: “You, you (pause), you AUTHOR, YOU.’”

  But the boy Gerald owed much to his big brother’s selfless and unstinting support: ‘Years ago when I was six or seven years old and Larry was a struggling and unknown writer, he would encourage me to write. Spurred on by his support, I wrote a fair bit of doggerel in those days and Larry always treated these effusions with as much respect as if they had just come from the pen of T.S. Eliot. He would always stop whatever work he was engaged upon to type my jingles out for me and so it was from Larry’s typewriter that I first saw my name, as it were, in print.’

  Near the end of his life, with more than half the family now dead, Gerald looked back with fondness and frankness at the turmoil of his childhood days, scribbling a fleeting insight in a shaky hand on a yellow restaurant paper napkin: ‘My family was an omelette of rages and laughter entwined with a curious love – an amalgam of stupidity and love.’

  At about the time Mother bought Dixie Lodge, Lawrence met Nancy Myers, an art student at the Slade, slightly younger than him and very like Greta Garbo to look at – tall, slim, blonde, blue-eyed. Just turned twenty, Lawrence was living a dedicatedly Bohemian, aspiringly artistic existence in London,
playing jazz piano in the Blue Peter nightclub, scribbling poetry, grappling with his first novel and reading voraciously under the great dome of the British Library. ‘My so-called upbringing was quite an uproar,’ he was to recall. ‘I have always broken stable when I was unhappy. I hymned and whored in London. I met Nancy in an equally precarious position and we struck up an incongruous partnership.’ Soon he and Nancy were sharing a bedsit in Guilford Street, near Russell Square. ‘Well, we did a bit of drinking and dying. Ran a photographic studio together. It crashed. Tried posters, short stories, journalism – everything short of selling our bottoms to clergymen. I wrote a cheap novel. Sold it – well that altered things. Here was a stable profession for me to follow. Art for money’s sake.’

  Before long Lawrence decided it was time Nancy was given her baptism of fire and shown off to the family. Many years later, Nancy vividly remembered her introduction to that unforgettable ménage.

  We drove down in the car for the weekend. I was fascinated to be meeting this family, because Larry dramatised everything – mad mother, ridiculous children, mother drunk, throwing their fortune to the winds, getting rid of everything … hellish, foolish, stupid woman. I mean, it’s wonderful to hear anybody talking about their family like that, and I was very thrilled.