Victoria was merely a curtain-raiser to the real show, and ‘small beef’ were small beer compared to the ‘big, big beef’ they hoped to find in the wild interior. Much of the first week was spent sorting themselves out and stocking up with supplies for the six months of adventures that lay ahead. Their immediate plan was to drive two hundred miles to the small up-country town of Mamfe, which would be their springboard to the wilder country of the primeval rainforest that stretched all around.
On Monday, 5 January 1948, they finally set off in a manner to which they were soon to become accustomed. For a start, the lorry turned up four hours late and turned out to be crowded with the driver’s relatives, whom Gerald had to clear out, along with their household goods and livestock. The driver himself did not inspire much confidence, for as he was turning the lorry for loading he twice backed into the rest house wall and once into the hibiscus hedge. The expedition’s baggage was tossed into the back with such wild abandon that Gerald wondered if any of it would arrive intact in Mamfe. ‘I need not have worried,’ he noted later. ‘It turned out that only the most indispensable and irreplaceable things got broken.’ The name of the lorry – ‘The Godspeed’ – was painted in large white letters above the windscreen. ‘It was not until later,’ Gerald was to write, ‘that we discovered what a euphemism the name really was.’
So the great adventure began. Gerald’s letters to Mother (never published before) provide a raw and spontaneous day-by-day account of its gradual unfolding.
Eventually we were ready to start, and John and I got in the front, and sat there looking as regal as circumstances would let us. We whizzed out of Victoria and had got about five miles down the road, the lorry making a most impressive roaring noise, when there was a terrific gurk and the engine stopped. We got out of the lorry, and while the driver, with the rest of the staff, probed into the bowels of the engine, Pious (the steward) put cushions at the side of the road, poured out beer, and fanned the flies away from our recumbent forms. After half an hour everything was ready, and once again we set off, tearing madly along at about 15 m.p.h. Ten miles further on the damn thing broke down again, and the same process was repeated. Before we reached Kumba (the place where we had arranged to spend the night) we had broken down four times.
About ten miles out of Victoria the palm nut plantations gave place to forest proper, and John and I just sat with our mouths open, in a sort of daze. You have no idea how beautiful it was: giant trees, hundreds of feet high, leaned over the road, each one festooned with tree ferns, long strands of grey moss, and lianas as thick as my body. On the solitary telegraph wire sat lots of kingfishers, each no bigger than a sparrow, orange and blue in colour. In the trees flocks of hornbills were feeding, and on the rocks along the sides of the road there were lots of a very beautiful kind of lizard, with orange head, bright Prussian blue body and tail, and splashed with red and yellow and grass-green all over. They are unbelievably bright in the sun. Once there was a great shout from the back of the lorry and we pulled up quickly under the impression that the cook had fallen out and been killed. It turned out they had seen a Nile monitor (a lizard about three feet long – John thought nearer to four feet) by the side of the road. We all rushed back and spread out in a circle. We closed in on it and it made a dash at the driver, who, thinking that discretion was the better part of valour, ran like hell. The last we saw of it was a tail going into the bush.
The country is very hilly, and all thickly forested. Each hill we went up we had to put up with the frightful noise made by the driver with his gear box. Every time we came down the other side we had to cross a river in a deep ravine, spanned by what John calls a ‘death trap’ – four planks with a few rotten beams, no railings or anything pansy like that. After about the fourth we got quite used to them and we could open our eyes a bit.
At around five o’clock, much to their surprise, they reached Kumba, where they stayed the night at the house of the local medic – ‘a charming fat little Scotsman and a keen ornithologist’ – who had assembled a prodigious collection of bird skins. At dawn they were off again for another day of death traps and breakdowns, arriving in the late afternoon at a place called Bakebe, where they were to stay for three days till the rest house at Mamfe became free.
It was wonderful at Bakebe because we were right in the heart of the forest. I engaged a hunter the next day, and two boys, and armed with a shotgun sallied into the jungle, à la Frank Buck. In the depths of the forest itself there is a sort of green twilight, with huge termite nests, each built like a mushroom, and an extraordinary white butterfly which flits among the trees like a whisp of white lace. In the sunny clearings there were many other sorts of insect life, including some black ants an inch and a half long. Unfortunately they discovered me before I saw them, and it was very painful. I was dancing around while the hunters were plucking the ants off, all saying ‘Sorry Sah’ loudly, as though they had put them there. When you trip over a root you hear about three voices behind you saying ‘Sorry Sah.’ We saw several monkeys feeding in the trees, and tracks of Duikers, small rats, and Leopard. Then we discovered the tracks of a Red River hog and followed them up. We walked for about four miles and stumbled right into a herd of them. One baby broke only about twenty feet from me.
The collecting business now began to gather momentum. The next day Gerald went back into the forest, and among other things caught a creature that in the fullness of time and in the most indirect way was to prove pivotal to his future career. This was the hairy frog – ‘a large frog,’ he explained in his letter home, ‘with curious filaments like hairs on its legs and the sides of its body.’ But most of the growing list of animal acquisitions were caught or donated by others. The United Africa Company agent at Bakebe presented his pet dog-faced baboon, the doctor at Kumba sent two baby giant kingfishers, a DO who lived a hundred miles out in the sticks proposed giving them his three-year-old chimpanzee, a local boy brought in ‘a lovely rat with red fur and a yellow tummy’, and a man from a nearby village turned up dragging along a baby drill (today one of the most endangered monkey species in Africa) on a bit of string.
The Drill is the sweetest little thing, standing about a foot high. He is very young, and the pink patches on his behind only the size of a shilling. He was very wild the first day, but is quite tame now, and when I return from a trip into the forest he comes running to meet me, uttering loud screams, and climbs up my leg and then wraps his arms round my waist and clings there making little crooning noises. I am sure I shall not want to part with him when the time comes.
There is no doubt that Gerald loved the country he had come to. He was held in thrall by the stillness and grandeur of the primeval forest, and adored the birds he saw flying free and the animals running wild no less than the curious assortment of creatures that came into his care. But it is clear from his letters and field notes that the Gerald Durrell of up-country Cameroons in 1948 was not yet the Gerald Durrell the world was to come to know in later years; and in one important respect the unreformed twenty-three-year-old might have dumbfounded his future fans. The young man of 1948, though he dearly loved animals, was fully prepared to slaughter them if there was a good enough reason to do so. He had brought to the Cameroons a rifle and a shotgun he had borrowed from his brother Leslie, and he knew how to use these weapons and was prepared to do so. Partly this was standard practice. No self-respecting expedition to the African interior in those days would have dreamed of setting off without guns of some sort – to shoot game to supplement their rations and feed the carnivores they collected. But the young Gerald Durrell sometimes succumbed to the hunting instinct in a way that would have dismayed the man of later years.
Only a day or two after his arrival at Bakebe, for example, he had tried to shoot a red river hog, thinking it would make good eating (forgetting the £150 – some £3000 in today’s money – he could get for a live specimen back in England). On 7 January, his twenty-third birthday, he shot a black kite that had been stealing c
hickens, spectacularly blasting the bird out of the air with his shotgun in the middle of a juju dance in the village street, winning uproarious acclaim from the populace. ‘I was swept down the main street by the mob,’ he recorded, ‘surrounded by yelling and capering juju dancers. I presented the corpse to the chief, and there was much bowing and exchange of compliments. I felt like a scene out of a Tarzan film and departed secure in the knowledge that the White Man’s Prestige had been upheld.’
On Saturday, 10 January, the expedition prepared to set off for Mamfe at last. Its troubled procession north now turned from penance to pantomime, as Gerald reported:
The morning we moved from Bakebe to Mamfe was the funniest thing to date. The scene was indescribable. Our stuff was piled six feet high, boxes full of birds, rats, insects and frogs, and squatting about were Pious the steward, Fillup the cook, Emanuel, Daniel and Edward, the hunters, the carpenter and his wife and child, the hunter’s wife and child, the chief’s wife and the U.A.C. man’s three children, all hoping for a lift to Mamfe, plus about fifty relatives who had come to see them off. It was now twelve and the lorry should have been there at eight and by this time I was nearly mental. At last the lorry arrived, and thank God it was a large one – the driver had brought six relatives along for the joy ride. How we got everything on to the lorry I shall never know. There were about sixty people in a solid wedge around the back of the lorry, all shouting at once and endeavouring to climb on, the air full of whirling bundles full of sweet potatoes, yams and bananas. I was overwhelmed by a fighting horde of natives, my feet were trodden on, also my hand. When they had all piled on I remounted the lorry, and pointing to the crates of birds and animals explained that if one was dead or injured when we reached Mamfe they would all go before the D.O. After that they sat like mice, and must have been damn stiff when we reached Mamfe.
Mamfe was situated at the highest navigable point of the Cross River, on the edge of a vast swathe of uninhabited country – a pestilential place where malaria was rife and leprosy common. Gerald and John spent a little over a week there, often dining with the local DO, a helpful Englishman by the name of Robin, whose house was situated on a steep hill four hundred feet above the river. Gerald was profoundly enchanted by this spot, deep in the untamed heart of Africa, far, far from anywhere, and yet surrounded by all the comforts of privilege.
The house overlooks the place where two rivers meet. It forms a wide stretch of water like a lake. On each side is the jungle, and in the centre a dazzling white sandbar. Sitting on the terrace in the evening, you can see a herd of five hippo which live here, swimming about. Then, when it grows dark, you can hear them blowing and snorting and roaring below you. The two rivers flow through steep rocky gorges, and are spanned by so-called suspension bridges. The termites have had a wonderful time with these for the past twenty years, and the planks rattle and groan when you walk over them, a hundred and twenty feet above rocks and water. Down below you can see kingfishers and red and blue swallows nesting, and in the trees you can see monkeys in the evening.
There were few pleasures and interests to divert the scattering of European expatriates who lived in this land other than those which age-old Africa could provide. There were no hotels, no restaurants, no shops, no cinemas, no libraries, next to no electricity and – Gerald made a particular note of this – next to no white girls. By way of compensation however, the stranded Brits could avail themselves of a lifestyle little changed since the high noon of Empire. Gerald took to this sybaritic life like a duck to water, and could not resist writing home to let his family know of the contrast with the austerity Britain he had left only a few weeks ago.
Apart from the hard work we have to do with the animals, our lives are like those of the upper-classes in pre-war Britain: real luxury. Think of being able to change your shirt five times a day if you want to. Writing this letter I am taking half an hour off: I am sitting in a deck chair, a glass of beer at my elbow, and Pious the Steward is standing behind my chair ready to refill my glass when it is empty and give me another fag when I have finished the one I am smoking. Pious is only sixteen, but he is simply wonderful. It’s he that has got the whole rest house in order, beds up, table laid for a meal, bath water ready, and so on. Now the table is laid for lunch and a fragrant smell is wafted towards me – the cooking is very fine. A chicken costs three shillings in a place like this, bananas are a penny a hand (about twelve). We are rationed to four bottles of whiskey a month, but I get it all as John does not like it. We smoke cigars (5/- for 50) at dinner in the evening. Our staff now consists of two cooks, two stewards and a washboy – and the carpenter whom we pay two shillings a day. In fact it is collecting in luxury.
It is clear from Gerald’s frank, unguarded letters to his mother that within a very short time of setting foot in Africa he had adapted both to the country and to the lifestyle as to the manner born. This was his first experience of the world outside Europe (early infancy apart), and it was essentially a colonial experience, and an old-fashioned one at that. By virtue of his race and nationality he had automatically joined an élite caste – that of the British imperium – from the moment he arrived in the Cameroons. Indeed, in his attitude to the African underclass and his perception of his own status and authority among them, he quickly became more colonial than the colonials, a kind of super DO, peerless and fearless in his dealings with both man and beast. From time to time in his letters he even refers to himself, not altogether jokingly, as ‘Empire Builder’, ‘Sanders of the River’ and ‘the Great White Master’.
Having cast himself in this imperious role, the accounts he wrote home of his behaviour on trek in the Cameroons sometimes make embarrassing reading. One especially trying morning in Mamfe, for example, he was told a hunter had just brought in a particularly rare bird to sell.
I found the hunter sitting down on the ground, hat on the back of his head, cigarette in his mouth, explaining to the crowd how clever he had been to capture this creature. He said good morning without bothering to get up, remove his hat, or take the cigarette out of his mouth. By this time I was quite angry with everyone and everything. ‘Get up, take your hat off, take that thing out of your mouth and then say good morning properly!’ I snarled in my best Sanders of the River voice. He obeyed like a naughty schoolboy.
Fifty years on, this sort of thing can make uncomfortable reading. Yet in the context of the time and place it was a normal, even a prescribed, adaptation to the colonial ambience – the ‘remember you’re British’ syndrome. For a tyro colonial boy like Gerald there was no other model – apart from ‘going native’ – and any departure from the unwritten rules of the imperial game would have been looked on as letting the side down.
What was different in Gerald’s case was the impact of instant privilege and power on his own personality. He was a charismatic young man of great self-assurance and persuasiveness, but as with many young men, his self-confidence could turn into arrogance, his egotism into selfishness, and his ebullience into boorishness. In a word, his was a big personality, full of charm, leavened by a tremendous sense of comedy and fun, but veering to temper and contempt when frustrated, and tending to dominance when given his head. In the polite, inhibited middle-class society of the Home Counties England of the forties such an original and spirited, not to say eccentric, personality was in large measure restrained by the mores of his milieu. But out here in Africa, a fully-paid-up member of the white man’s club, let loose in the dark interior, Gerald blossomed. It was as if, here in the depths of the rainforest, a genie had popped out of a bottle. If it was not always a totally admirable genie, it was a genie nonetheless; and in the course of time, a Gerald Durrell broadly recognisable as the persona of his maturer future would step tentatively on to the stage, and the overpowering ego of his youth would be replaced by the wisdom and compassion of the man who would take on some of the cares and responsibilities of the wider world beyond.
The two Englishmen now decided to split up: John Yealland t
o establish a main base at Bakebe, which he reckoned would be a good place for birds; Gerald to set up a subsidiary camp at Eshobi, a tiny village on the edge of a huge swathe of equatorial forest that stretched hundreds of miles northwards to the mountains where the gorilla had its stronghold – virgin territory for collecting animals and reptiles.
On Wednesday, 18 January 1948, Gerald’s party left the comforts of Mamfe for the dubious pleasures of Eshobi. In the environs of this distant village, from all reports, there was plenty of ‘stuff’, as Gerald and John termed the animals they sought – but not much else. As there was no motorable track, the party had to travel on foot, with carriers to shoulder the stores in time-hallowed style. It was to prove an even more vexing departure than normal, for driver ants had caused havoc in the night, and a mêlée of Africans swarmed about the compound.
In the middle of all this my ten carriers arrived for their loads. They were such a band of cut-throats that John said I would be eaten three miles out of Mamfe. I thought that I had better have my hair cut before plunging into the unknown, so hot on the heels of the carriers came the village barber.
The scene in the compound beggars description. There was the staff leaping about trying to get the ants out of the stores, the carriers leaping about fighting as to who should have the smallest load, John leaping about imploring someone to get fish for his kingfishers, and in the middle of all this there sat I enthroned on a rickety chair, snarling at the barber and stamping my feet to keep the ants from crawling up …
At last the party was ready to start. The loads were lifted on to the heads of the carriers, the staff shuffled into Indian file, and at a word from Gerald the column lurched off down the road and into the forest in the direction of Eshobi. Clinging to Gerald’s waist were two baby baboons, and in his hand a baby crocodile wrapped in a blanket. ‘My ten evil-looking carriers marched ahead with the loads,’ he wrote, ‘and on either side of me, guard of honour, marched Pious and the cook, while behind marched my personal smallboy, Dan, carrying my money-bag and field-glasses. We passed over two suspension bridges in great style, looking like Stanley looking for Livingstone.’ John Yealland accompanied them as far as the rusting suspension bridge that spanned the Cross River. At the other side of the bridge Gerald looked back and waved to his companion, then turned and was swallowed up by the forest.
Gerald Durrell Page 17
