Virtually overnight Gerald’s present life, and probably his future career, had been transformed. His brother Lawrence, who had been writing for years but had as yet attained neither fame nor fortune, greeted his instant success with generosity. ‘Don’t you think the little devil writes well?’ he commented. ‘His style’s like fresh, crisp lettuce.’ To his friend Henry Miller he reported: ‘My younger brother has scored a tremendous success with his first book, and he is making a deal of money. How marvellous to have one’s career fixed at 25 or so and to be able to pay one’s way.’ And to Richard Aldington he wrote: ‘My brother Gerry? He is delightful, Irish gift of the gab on paper … do you know these blasted books about animals sell thousands of copies. My agent says that it is the only sure-fire steady eternal market. I wish I liked animals enough.’ Lawrence did not experience – or at any rate betray – a shred of envy, not even when Alan Thomas, who was now running Commin’s bookshop in Bournemouth, reported that a woman who had read a good review of Reflections on a Marine Venus telephoned the shop and told him: ‘I want to order a book by a Mr Durrell. Not THE Mr Durrell, it’s not about animals at all.’
Rather to his surprise, Gerald was now passably well off. He was also becoming a celebrity. When he appeared on the popular BBC TV magazine programme In Town Tonight to promote the book and chat about his unusual career, he was followed by the dazzling London-based Swedish film star Mai Zetterling, who had just returned from Hollywood. As it happened, she was to become one of Gerald’s greatest friends, and to marry one of his greatest friends. It is a measure of the dramatic change in his social and professional status that from living on bread and tea in a seaside garret he was soon to move effortlessly within the aura of Hollywood’s stars.
TWELVE
Of Beasts and Books
1953–1955
Gerald was now better off than he had ever been. Rather than invest his new-found money in property or shares, he decided to embark on another collecting expedition, his fourth. Jacquie had hardly travelled at all, and never outside Europe, so to her fell the choice of destination. Perhaps because of the romantic resonance of the name, perhaps because of the evocativeness of the images she associated with it – tango, gaucho, pampas, Evita Perón – Argentina had always cast a siren spell for her. ‘Durrell, of course, was carried away by the thought of South America,’ she recalled, ‘and had visions of embracing Chile and perhaps Paraguay in our itinerary.’
The preparations began. Gerald was still in the middle of writing his third book, The Bafut Beagles, and though it helped that Jacquie was on hand to shoulder much of the burden of organising the Argentine expedition, it was soon obvious that too much was happening for the two of them to cope alone. What they needed was a secretary. A suitable person was soon found. This was Sophie Cook, whose mother had been a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, a quiet, rather shy, totally dedicated woman of around forty – the first of a band of secretaries who were to underpin a crucial part of Gerald’s future life and work. Sophie typed up the manuscript of The Bafut Beagles, corrected Gerald’s spelling and took over most of the secretarial burden of the Argentine expedition. It was a memorable but uncomfortable time. With three people crammed into the small flatlet in Margaret’s boarding house there was barely room to move – especially when the room began to fill up with expedition paraphernalia, from lambs’ teats and hummingbird feeding-pots to film cameras and hot-weather clothing. ‘Our small flat really did look like a junk shop,’ Jacquie was to write, ‘and poor Sophie could hardly get in in the mornings, never mind reach her desk. But she never grumbled or fussed, and stoically went on with her typing and tea-making.’
With a third person on board, everything proceeded smoothly. On the advice of Larry, who had had plenty of experience of Argentinean red-tape, Gerald dealt with the diplomatic side of things at the highest level in the Argentine Embassy and Foreign Office in London, with the result that the expedition acquired the status of an ‘official mission’. But never had an official mission set off in more incongruous style. Their travel agent had booked them on a ship bound for Buenos Aires, promising them quality accommodation at a knockdown fare. Towards the end of November 1953, in great expectation – for Gerald and Jacquie intended to enjoy the voyage out as the honeymoon they had never had – they bade farewell to the family assembled to see them off at Bournemouth Central, joined the boat train at King’s Cross and disembarked at Tilbury Docks, where their ship was waiting.
The honeymoon boat turned out to be an immigrant ship, a former wartime troopship that now ferried Spanish and Portuguese immigrants out to Latin America. The Durrells’ tourist-class ticket entitled them to accommodation a notch above the near slave-trade conditions of the other passengers – but only just. Their cabin – ‘like an overgrown coffin’, Jacquie recalled – had no portholes, no fresh air, no daylight. Their beds consisted of two bunks one on top of the other, and there was barely room to stand, let alone store baggage. Gerald was beside himself with fury, but things were to get worse. The ship was infested with cockroaches, the communal bath was filthy, the gloomy, rudimentary saloon served only beer, and the food was execrable. Perversely perhaps, Jacquie enjoyed the trip. ‘I loved every minute of it,’ she was to write, remembering the tropic nights on deck, the immigrant passengers singing and dancing to their guitars, and the exotic ports of call. ‘But poor Durrell could not get over his acute disappointment.’
The ship made its first landfall in the New World at Recife, in northern Brazil, then made its coasting south, first to Rio and then to Santos, before shuffling up the muddy Rio de la Plata to where the beautiful skyline of Buenos Aires loomed through the morning mist. Gerald’s spirits lifted. Nothing could compare with arriving in a new land on board an old ship. On 19 December 1953 the delayed honeymoon couple set foot on Argentine soil for the first time.
Since they were on what was ostensibly an official mission, the press were there to greet them. The journalists of Buenos Aires were bemused that the couple should have come all this way to scrabble around in the backlands looking for dumb beasts. ‘When you’re interested in animals,’ Gerald was to recall, ‘people are generally kind wherever you are because they think you must be feeble-minded.’ The Argentinean press duly hailed Gerald and Jacquie – stylishly dressed as a smart couple about town – as ‘scientific adventurers in an heroic world’, the latest in a valiant line of conquistadors that stretched from Cortes and Pizarro to Bougainville, La Condamine and Darwin.
‘Gerald Durrell is no old-style big game hunter,’ reported the weekly news magazine Vea y Lea. ‘He works for science. He looks for unknown animals which he takes back to England alive to study their behaviour and breed them in captivity.’ ‘And Jacqueline’s job?’ one reporter enquired. ‘I’m going to use her as live bait to catch jaguars,’ Gerald replied, without a hint of a smile.
‘They are a perfect young couple,’ reported El Hogar. ‘She is small and slender with a charming fringe that looks like the last memento of childhood. In fact, she looks like a little girl at her husband’s side. He is a youthful looking man, a bit dishevelled and on the lean side, with auburn hair and the bright clear eyes of a boy. At every step in his quest for strange beasts in the wilds of Africa and British Guiana he has risked sudden death.’
Anyone arriving in a strange country to look for wild and possibly dangerous creatures needs a fixer. Shortly before Gerald sailed for Argentina, Larry had sent him a note suggesting he contact Bebita Ferreyra, a friend who lived in Buenos Aires. ‘She was the nearest approach to a Greek goddess I have ever seen,’ Gerald was to write. ‘We fell under Bebita’s unique spell during our first meeting, and from then on we practically lived at her flat, eating tremendous and beautifully constructed meals, listening to music, talking nonsense. Very soon we came to rely on her for nearly everything. The most fantastic requests never ruffled her, and she always managed to accomplish something.’ But not even a fixer of Bebita’s abilities could arrange everything, and the e
xpedition was to be blighted by events beyond even her control.
It had always been part of Gerald’s plan to venture into the bleak southern wilderness of Tierra del Fuego to collect ducks and geese for Peter Scott’s Severn Wildfowl Trust, so he was mortified to learn that his chances of getting a flight down to that part of the world in the immediate future were practically nil. As a fall-back, he and Jacquie decided to make a short journey to the pampas beyond Buenos Aires, staying with Anglo-Argentinean friends at their estancia ‘Los Ingleses’.
‘Argentina is one of the few countries in the world where you can go on a journey, and when halfway there you see both your starting point and your destination,’ Gerald recalled. ‘Flat as a billiard table, the pampa stretches around you, continuing, apparently, to the very edge of the earth.’ It was in the pampas around ‘Los Ingleses’ that Gerald began collecting, his first captures including eight burrowing owls and a pair of Guira cuckoos. The most common of the birds around ‘Los Ingleses’ were also the most endangered. These were the chajás, or ‘great screamers’, goose-like birds that earned the wrath of the local farmers for devastating their fields of alfalfa. Few birds Gerald ever collected in his entire life proved as memorable as Eggbert, a baby chajá he acquired in those few days at the estancia:
He was quite the most pathetic, the most ridiculous-looking and the most charming baby bird I had ever seen. He could not have been much more than a week old. His body was about the size of a coconut, and completely circular. At the end of a long neck was a huge, domed head, with a tiny beak and a pair of friendly brown eyes. His legs and feet, which were greyish-pink, appeared to be four times too big for him, and not completely under his control. He was clad entirely in what appeared to be a badly knitted bright yellow suit of cotton wool. He rolled out of the sack, fell on his back, struggled manfully on to his enormous flat feet, and stood there, his ridiculous wings slightly raised, surveying us with interest. Then he opened his beak and shyly said ‘Wheep’. As we were too enchanted to respond to this greeting, he very slowly and carefully picked up one huge foot, swayed forward, put it down and then brought the other one up alongside. He stood and beamed at us with evident delight at having accomplished such a complicated manoeuvre. He had a short rest, said ‘wheep’ again, and then proceeded to take another step … Now I have met a lot of amusing birds at one time or another. But I have never met a bird like Eggbert, who not only looked funny but also acted in a riotously comical manner whenever he moved. I have never met a bird, before or since, that could make me literally laugh until I cried.
The Durrells’ next destination was Paraguay, and the small settlement of Puerto Casado on the Paraguay River, where they planned to explore the swampy cactus plains of the hinterland, the Chaco. From Casado there were three ways of entering the Chaco – on horseback, by ox-cart, or by autovia, a beaten-up Ford 8 motor car mounted on a narrow-gauge railway that ran for two hundred kilometres. With the help of the autovia they began collecting, though sometimes, to reach areas where the autovia could not go, they took to horseback, discovering at every turn the unexpected delights of a strange land – like the river of flowers they encountered one day as they crossed a prairie of golden grass.
Halfway across the grass field we found it was divided in two by a wide, meandering strip of wonderful misty blue flowers which stretched away in either direction like a stream; as we got close to it I discovered that it really was a stream, so thickly overgrown with these blue water-plants that the water was invisible. There was the haze of blue flowers and, underneath, the glint of glossy green leaves growing interlocked. The blue was so clear and delicate that it looked as though a tattered piece of the sky had floated down and settled between the ranks of brown palm-trunks. We took our horses across the river, and their hooves crushed the plants and flowers and left a narrow lane of glittering water. When we reached the other side and entered the shade of the palm-forest again, I turned in the saddle and looked back at the magnificent lane of blue flowers, across which was marked our path in a stripe of flickering water, like a lightning flash across a summer sky.
So the days passed in the wide wastes of the Chaco, under the big sky, in the orbit of soaring wings and galloping claws and plopping amphibian bodies, never knowing what the day would bring. Their own efforts, combined with the help of the area’s male population, soon produced a flood of fauna, from Budgett frog to yarará (or fer de lance), crab-eating racoon to bare-faced ibis. After two months the collection was vast. Since the Chaco was such a paradise for birds, they outnumbered all the other creatures in the collection by two to one.
‘In any collection of animals there are bound to be two or three which endear themselves to you,’ Gerald noted, citing Cai the douracouli monkey, Pooh the baby crab-eating racoon and Foxey the grey pampas fox. But none could compare with Sarah Huggersack, a baby giant anteater. Sarah was only a week or so old, measured just two and a half feet from the tip of her curved snout to the end of her tail, and made a noise ‘like a foghorn suffering from laryngitis’.
When Sarah was taken from the sack in which she had arrived, she staggered round in vague circles, bellowing wildly till she discovered Jacquie’s leg and shinned up it. When Gerald unhooked the animal, she attached herself to his arm like a leech and then clambered up and arranged herself across his shoulders like a fox fur. ‘So Sarah Huggersack entered our lives,’ wrote Gerald, ‘and a more charming and loveable personality I have rarely encountered. To begin with, she was tremendously vocal. Keep her waiting for her food, or refuse to cuddle her when she demanded affection, and Sarah battered you into submission by sheer lung-power. Sarah’s one delight in life was to be hugged, and to hug in return.’
Sarah had been with the Durrells for some weeks when the first rains of the Chaco winter started. Now was the time when they would have to start thinking about travelling back the thousand-odd miles to Buenos Aires to catch their ship; but at this point revolution broke out in Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay. Gerald’s luck had run out. He was advised to get out of the country at the first available opportunity. The only way out was by light aircraft – and that meant leaving the animals behind. On receiving the dire news Gerald was plunged into one of the blackest moods of depression he could ever remember. There was no alternative but to open the doors of the cages and let the main part of the collection go. This was easier said than done, for many of the animals showed no desire for freedom at all. To encourage them Gerald arranged them in a circle round the camp, their noses pointing out towards the wide open spaces, but they just sat there, moping, waiting for their next feed. Gerald chose a handful of animals, the maximum that could fit into a small plane, to keep and take back with him to Buenos Aires – among them Sarah Huggersack.
During a lull in the fighting the plane arrived to take them back to Asunción on the first stage of their journey home. They were safe – but they were sorry. The expedition had cost Gerald virtually all the £3000 he had earned from The Overloaded Ark, and the acquisition of a few more animals in the final days in Argentina could not recompense him for the loss of most of those he had collected in Paraguay.
Soon it was time to leave South America. The animals were securely stowed on the forward deck of the Paraguay Star, with tarpaulins tied over them against the wilder Atlantic weather to come. In the smoking-room friends had gathered to bid their farewells over a parting drink. As the day faded, they filed down the gangway back to the shore. ‘We waved and nodded,’ Gerald was to write, ‘and then, as our friends started to disappear into the fast-gathering dusk, the air was full of the deep, lugubrious roar of the siren, the sound of a ship saying goodbye.’ For Jacquie especially the occasion was a sad one, for she adored Argentina, and resolved that one day she would return.
The all-demanding routine of animal care soon banished melancholy. At first light a cup of tea, then clearing out cages and washing feeding pots up on deck – an agreeable chore in tropical waters, when the birds could be sprayed without r
isk of a chill and Sarah was allowed the run of the deck three times a day, but a lot less so as the ship entered more northerly latitudes.
It was not all slog. Unlike the boat that had brought them to the Americas, the Paraguay Star was a pukka liner, and the accommodation was sumptuous, the food good, the booze ample and the service punctilious. There were good friends to make and parties to throw and hangovers to spend hung over the rails in the grey morning light. At the ship’s fancy dress ball Gerald and Jacquie, disguised as Paraguayans in traditional costume, ran off with the first prize. Only the ship’s master looked on askance at the creatures and their mess and the ceaseless distractions they caused to his junior officers.
In July the Paraguay Star tied up at London’s Victoria Docks. The animal collection was tiny, so was quickly disposed of. Paignton Zoo took most of the birds and animals, including Sarah, the star of the ship. ‘It was heart-breaking in many ways,’ Jacquie reflected, ‘to part with all these lovely creatures.’ She added, significantly: ‘I began to realise how Durrell must have felt on his previous trips and why he had this burning ambition to have a zoo of his own, so he would not be forced to part with the animals he brought back.’
From the far horizons of the pampas and the broad sweep of the Atlantic the couple returned to Bournemouth and the tiny room in Margaret’s house. Gerald attempted as best he could to focus on his literary chores and to contemplate the options in his long-term strategy of somehow, some day, starting a zoo of his own. His second book, Three Singles to Adventure, had come out in the spring, and Gerald riffled through the reviews. On the whole they were good, commending once again the charm, modesty and good humour of the author, his story-telling skills and the delight his encounters with strange animals provided.
Gerald Durrell Page 29
