Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  In his diary Gerald described a strange modification of the traditional ceremony – a modification for which he was entirely responsible:

  By this time I had drunk about five glasses of mimbo, and was feeling very pleased with life. Then to my horror a table was brought and on it were two glasses and a bottle of gin – a brand I have never heard of and never want to again. The Fon poured out about four fingers for me, and I asked for some water. The Fon gave a rapid command in his own tongue, and a man rushed forward with a bottle of bitters. ‘Beeters,’ said the Fon proudly, ‘you like gin wit dis beeters?’ Yes, I assured him, it was very fine, and the first sip of the drink nearly burnt out my throat: it was the most filthy raw gin I have ever tasted. Even the Fon blinked a bit. He had another sip, mused a bit, and then leant over and confided to me: ‘We go give dis strong one to all dis small small man, den we go for my house, for inside, and we go drink WHITE HORSHE …’ We both smacked our lips. I wondered how I would feel with White Horshe on top of gin and mimbo.

  By this time an endless series of men had been streaming into the compound carrying an amazing variety of food and drink. There were calabashes of palm wine, mimbo and corn beer; huge stems of plantains and bananas; meat in the shape of cane rats, mongooses, bats, hunks of python meat, all smoked and spitted on bamboo. There were dried fish, crabs and dried shrimp; red and green peppers, pawpaw, oranges, mango, cassava, sweet potatoes and so on. This was the feast for the people. While they started on it, the Fon called his counsellors one by one and poured gin into their mimbo. Then we rose and proceeded to his house, where the White Horshe was produced.

  While we finished the bottle we discussed many things ranging from various types of guns to the Russian question. Then the Fon, by now well lit up, sent for his wives and made them play and dance in the courtyard outside. They played some special dances, and one of the tunes had a perfect Conga rhythm. Feeling then very bright I suggested to the Fon that I should teach him a special European dance. He was thrilled to bits and we adjourned to the dance hall. Here, with the Fon sitting in state, I stood up and asked him to let me have five council members to teach. Five of them rose and joined me on the floor.

  In the deathly silence you could hear their robes swishing as they approached. I made them all join on behind me, holding on to each other’s waists, gave the band a nod and off we went: One, two, three, four, five, KICK, one two, three, four, five, KICK. It was a huge success: all the other council members took the floor, and about thirty of the Fon’s wives, all joining on behind. Nothing loath, the Fon, supported by a man on each side, tagged on behind.

  We must have danced about two miles. I led them all over the Fon’s courtyards, up and down steps, in and out of rooms, with the band running behind us beating like mad. I did every step I could think of, leaping, twisting, turning, and the huge tail of followers all repeated them, grinning all over their faces and shouting at the tops of their voices ‘ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE … YAARRRRRR … ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE … YAARRRRRR.’ In the end we all collapsed in a sweating and panting heap. The Fon, who had fallen down once or twice during the dance, was escorted to his chair gasping and panting, and beaming with delight. He clapped me on the back, nearly dislocating my spine, and told me that my dance was ‘foine, foine, vera foine.’ Then we had some more mimbo and started all over again. I did everything I could think of, a dreadful combination of ballroom and jitterbug, with a bit of ballet, Fred Astaire and Victor Sylvester thrown in.

  After about two hours of this the Fon quite suddenly called over a girl of about fourteen, one of his daughters, and pushed her into my lap, saying that she was mine and I must marry her. I had to think damn quick. Taking a hasty look round to see how many of the council members had spears, I wiped the sweat from my brow and wondered what to do. If I accepted, there was a chance he would remember in the morning and hold me to it; and yet he was so drunk that I could see my refusal would have to be very tactful not to annoy him. I started by saying that I was deeply grateful for this great honour he was doing me, but that of course, being so well versed in the stupid customs of Europeans, he realised that by the laws of my country I was only allowed one wife. He nodded sagely and agreed that it was a stupid custom. This being the case, I continued, he would realise how very sad I felt at having to refuse his kind honour, as I already a wife in my own country; but I assured him that if this was not the case I would gladly have married the girl and settled in Bemenda for the rest of my life. This was greeted with loud cheers, and the Fon wept a bit that this wonderful thing could never be realised. Then the party broke up, the Fon and everyone accompanying me to the steps of the house doing the Durrell Conga.

  What a hangover I will have.

  Collecting wild animals, as Gerald and his African hunters knew only too well, was an activity fraught with risk, for the animals as well as the humans, especially if less kindly methods were used to catch them. Gerald’s care for the halt and the lame knew no bounds. He recounted in his diary on 21 March:

  A man came with a female Patas which had been caught in one of those bloody steel gins. Three toes are missing from one of her hind feet, and the whole foot was swollen and starting to smell revolting. The poor little thing must have been in the trap about two days, as she was so exhausted she just collapsed as soon as I took the rope off her. My first thought was to kill her, an idea I did not relish, but then I thought I would have a shot at getting her well. The first thing to do was to get some food into her. She was too far gone to take any solid food, so I made her some Horlicks and managed to get about half a cup down her. She seemed a little brighter. Then I had to attend to her foot, a job which nearly made me sick. The bones of the three toes were sticking out quite free of flesh, and these I had to amputate. Then I discovered that the whole pad of the foot was filled with pus, and this had to be squeezed out and dettol and water poured into the cavity. Then I bandaged the foot up and wrapped her in a blanket and put her in a box to sleep. About five o’clock she woke up and ate a small bit of banana and drank some more Horlicks; but I don’t like the look of her foot. However, she is keeping the bandage on, which is something for a monkey. The poor little thing has decided that I am trying to help her, and will let me handle her, though she gets very frightened if the boys come near. I do hope I can save her.

  Gerald himself had so far led a charmed life, wading up snake-infested rivers and rummaging in animals’ burrows with his bare hands; but now he was to suffer a series of misadventures. Perhaps because of bad luck, perhaps because of increasing exhaustion or recklessness or over-confidence, he had several near-misses at the hands of a variety of animals, followed by a palpable and very nearly fatal hit, which almost put an end to his life, not to mention his career as an animal collector.

  The first close shave occurred when he bungled an attempt to put down an injured cobra with a formalin injection in the head. Then on 22 March a full-grown booming squirrel bit right through his glove and into a vein in his wrist, so that he bled ‘like a stuck pig’. Shortly afterwards, dressed only in shorts and sandals, he was attacked by three very agile and very deadly green vipers. ‘Boy, did I jump!’ he wrote laconically in his diary. ‘It gave me quite a fright.’

  On 24 March he drove the entire Bafut collection to date back to Mamfe, ‘leaving Smith with a tent full of animals all shouting and screaming’. Gerald was now showing distinct signs of over-tiredness and irritability, especially on days of solid rain. In this enervated, lacklustre state he was to encounter nemesis in the form of what he thought was a harmless burrowing snake, brought to the guest house one morning by a tribeswoman clad only in a slender G-string. On 13 April, more than two weeks after his last diary entry, he recounted what then transpired.

  Having ascertained, as I thought, that it was a blind burrowing snake, I tipped it out on to the ground to have a look at it. It certainly looked like a burrowing snake, so I picked it up by the neck. As I looked at its head I saw it had a pair of large, evil black eyes,
while a burrowing snake is quite blind. Still, like a bloody fool, I kept hold of it instead of dropping it, only remarking to Pious that it had eyes. As I made this classic discovery the brute turned its head slightly and drove one fang into the ball of my thumb.

  I dropped the snake as if it had suddenly become red hot. I squeezed frantically, while rushing into the house. It was fortunate that Pious had been well drilled in what to do, and within three seconds I had a tie round the base of my thumb, and, not without an effort, had slashed the bite with a razor blade and rubbed in P. of Potash. By this time the thumb was quite swollen and beginning to throb slightly. My pulse, as far as I could tell, was normal. This was about five minutes after the bite.

  Gerald’s predicament was dire. A quick check in a reference book revealed that the snake that had bitten him was a burrowing viper, whose poison causes death within twelve hours through paralysis of the heart and nervous system. Only the appropriate serum could save him, and there was none in Bafut, and very possibly none further afield, for this was a true backwater of bush Africa. There was a British medic in Bemenda, some forty miles away across rough country – a five-hour drive – and perhaps he had some serum. If not, Gerald Malcolm Durrell, twenty-four, animal collector, would very likely be dead by nightfall. His diary entry continued:

  While I sat in a state of scientific panic, noting my symptoms, a boy had been despatched for the driver of the Fon’s kitcar to take me into Bemenda. I was doubtful if they had any serum there, but at least there was a doctor. Within half an hour my thumb and a part of my hand and wrist was very swollen and getting very painful. The skin was red, which may have been due to the tightness of the tie, but the area immediately around the bite was quite white.

  The driver arrived and of course the bloody kitcar would not start and had to be pushed up and down the road while I stood on the steps of the house gulping a brandy and shouting curses at the two hundred odd people who were pushing the car. By the time the car was started the glands in both my armpits were swollen and painful, and my right arm (I was bitten in my right thumb) was aching.

  In fact his right forearm was now as big as his leg, and the glands under his arm as big as walnuts. And his head and neck ached furiously and he felt ‘ghastly’.

  We dashed off as fast as the road would permit and first stopped at the Basle Mission. Here there was a nursing sister, who was not sure what to do, but tied two bandages round my arm, one on the forearm and one on the biceps. These were so tight that my hand turned quite blue within a few seconds. Then the Basle man, Angst by name, took me into Bemenda in his car, as it was faster than the kitcar. So, within an hour of being bitten, I was descending a trifle unsteadily at the doctor’s house. ‘Hallo, Durrell,’ the doctor said cheerily, ‘what’s bitten you?’ To my surprise, he had some serum, and I was rushed inside and given five injections, three in my thumb and two in my arm. These were very painful, and I got quite dizzy and stupid with the pain. When the doc had finished he gave me a large whisky, which I made short work of. Then I had a hot bath and was shoved into bed on a light supper. My arm was still very painful, but what with fright, exhaustion and relief I slept like a top. The doctor told me that when I arrived the pupils of my eyes were contracted to pinpoints.

  As my arm was swollen and stiff, for several days I could not type this epic, nor could I do any work. I had to go back to Mamfe at the end of the week and was a bit depressed as no beef worth while had been brought in. Then came the climax, the day before I left. I was lying down before tea, when Pious came in to say that a man had brought a ‘bush dog’, and I staggered out expecting it would turn out to be a civet or genet. The fellow was clutching a large bag, from inside of which came the most fearsome noises. We proceeded to open the bag carefully. As I peered inside I could have yelped with surprise, for there was a half-grown Golden Cat, hissing and snarling in the bottom of the bag.

  London Zoo, Gerald reflected with triumph, had not had a golden cat for fifty years.

  Towards the end of April it was apparent to Gerald that the expedition was running into trouble. A collecting expedition, he began to realise, is subject to a kind of inverse mathematical law, and its very success contains the seeds of its impending failure: the more animals you collect, the more time you must devote to looking after them, therefore the less time you have to collect more of them and the fewer you succeed in collecting. Though they had acquired a substantial number of smaller animals, some of them were ailing in captivity, and every day a few more died from sickness, trauma or dietary problems, absorbing Gerald’s available time. His detailed inventory of the collection up to 26 April showed that of the 394 animals caught to date, thirty-four had escaped and 108 had died – nearly half of them Idiurus – a loss rate of almost 40 per cent.

  However, a cold statistic is not a fair way of judging Gerald’s skill as a collector. Some animals are easy to take into captivity. Some are very difficult indeed. Some are virtually impossible, as Gerald found to be the case with the Idiurus. A collector’s ability should be measured by the way he looks after his animals – how much he cares for them, how clean they are, how well sheltered, how well fed and so on – and by this yardstick Gerald measured up to the highest possible standard. But it was a very, very difficult job. On 28 April he noted in his diary the death of the royal antelope and the only surviving hairy frog, along with two of the remaining Idiurus. ‘Now I have only one young specimen of Idiurus left,’ he lamented. ‘I put in some ordinary potato tonight and to my delight he ate quite a large amount of it. If only I can get them eating that sort of stuff they will be simple to get back alive.’

  Feeding such a diversity of creatures was a nightmare. None of the carnivorous animals cared for goat meat, but they would gobble up brains from any source. Some liked their meat bloody, some liked it with fat in it, others liked it chopped into little pieces. All the insectivorous birds adored winged termites, and Gerald would spend hours collecting them round the lamp at night. The fruit bats preferred their bananas with the skin on; the pangolins lapped up egg and milk but refused it if it was sweetened, the golden cat was more partial to it if brains were added; and the young owls had to have bits of cotton wool in their food as roughage. One species of monkey only ate oranges, throwing away the fruit and eating the peel. The precious Idiurus remained an almost insuperable problem. ‘I have never met such stubborn creatures,’ Gerald recorded.

  Gerald had so far been unable to secure any spectacular big-game animals – elephant, hippo, leopard – which would have solved the expedition’s financial problems at a stroke. Worse, his application to the local authorities for a gorilla permit had been turned down, though he still hoped to acquire a specimen from the French side of the Cameroons border. He now pinned his hopes on trapping a hippo from a colony near the camp on the Mamfe River by laying a grass noose trap along one of the hippos’ nocturnal trails on a mid-river sandbank. But this plan depended on the assistance of his unreliable band of hired hippo hunters. ‘Still no signs of the bloody hippo hunters,’ he scrawled on 24 April. ‘If we don’t get a hippo we are really in the soup financially, and won’t be able to go collecting again.’ He fumed with frustration as he listened to the hippos snorting and bellowing barely two hundred yards from the camp. ‘Bugger the bloody bastards!’ he fumed, referring to the hunters, adding for good measure: ‘Blast the bloody complacent sods of zoo officials who think collecting is easy.’

  Though Ken Smith assured him that what they had collected already would cover the cost of the trip, they were down to their last £50, and on 28 April Gerald had no alternative but to write to his mother asking her to bail them out. ‘A hundred or two would cover us wonderfully,’ he wrote. ‘There is no danger of it being not paid back because we will definitely sell our present stuff for a thousand minimum. That is without hippo. If we get hippo we shall be making a profit, and seriously, the chances are about ninety to ten for. If you can’t spare it don’t worry. We shall raise the wind somehow.’ A few
days later Ken wrote a follow-up letter to Mrs Durrell and Leslie, even more bullish in tone, in which he assessed the value of the collection at up to £2500 (£50,000 in today’s money) ‘at minimum market values’.

  Still, getting a hippo was critical to the expedition’s fortunes. Several attempts at snaring a specimen from the colony near the camp proved abortive, much to the relief of Smith, who was less convinced of his immortality in the proximity of big game than was his younger companion. ‘If your mother knew I had let you go down on to that bloody bit of sand surrounded by hippo and with no retreat,’ he remonstrated with Gerald after one night-time foray, ‘she would never forgive me.’

  Before long the villagers were objecting to these escapades, on the grounds that the nearby hippo colony was juju. Gerald was advised to try a more distant herd near Asagem, four hours downriver by canoe, and on 30 April he set off on one last major effort to catch a hippo. ‘Gerald left yesterday for Asagem,’ Smith wrote in a reassuringly avuncular letter to the long-suffering Mrs Durrell, ‘to attempt to bring the hippo hunt to a successful conclusion. I have stressed to him the importance of conducting the task without undue risks, and I think my constant insistence on this point has driven the matter home.’

  The wild habitats of the tropical lowlands of the Cameroons consisted of the river and the forest. The forest was opaque and potentially hostile, a treasure house of fauna to be plundered and admired with caution. The river, by contrast, was open and friendly, a dreamland ribbon of wilderness where the cavalcade of nature slid past as if on a rotating stage. In his diary entry for 30 April Gerald recounts his impressions of the day spent drifting down the Mamfe to Asagem, allowing his new-found narrative gift full range in prose that is simple, vivid and measured.