Larry, by contrast, came to the opposite conclusion: ‘Gerry has turned his watchful animal-lover’s eye upon his own family with a dreadful biological fidelity. He has successfully recreated his family with the devastatingly faithful eye of a thirteen-year-old. This is a very wicked, very funny, and I’m afraid rather truthful book – the best argument I know for keeping thirteen-year-olds at boarding-schools and not letting them hang about the house listening in to conversations of their elders and betters.’ There were two first-rate portraits in the book, Larry added: that of his mother, which was executed with feeling and perfect fidelity; and that of Corfu, whose beauty and peace had been captured ‘with tenderness and poetic skill’. As for Gerry’s portrait of Larry himself – ‘the grouch with the heart of gold’, as one critic described it – it was, he wrote to his friend Richard Aldington, a ‘wicked pen portrait of the genius at the age of twenty-one’.
Margaret, it seems was rather put out at being portrayed as empty-headed and boy-mad, but was big-hearted enough to let it pass. There is no record of Leslie’s reaction. As for Jacquie, who was not in the book, she laughed uproariously when she was reading the manuscript, only to inform Gerald that it was his spelling that amused her, for not only was it a book about childhood seen through the eyes of a child, but it was even written in the spelling of a child.
Was it all true? Or was it, as some critics believed, more fictive than fact, spun like a spectacular candyfloss out of a spoonful or so of real sugar? Had Gerald adopted the method of his mythomaniac Corfu tutor Kralefsky, of one of whose tales he had written: ‘It was a wonderful story and might well be true. Even if it wasn’t true, it was the sort of thing that should happen, I felt.’
In his preface to the book, Gerald wrote: ‘I have been forced to telescope, prune, and graft, so that there is little left of the original continuity of events.’ For the sake of the unity of his concept of the Family, for example, he had cut Larry’s wife Nancy out of the script, and moved Larry, who in reality had lived a mostly separate existence, back to the family villas in the vicinity of Corfu town. At times he had appropriated Leslie’s actions to himself, so that in the book it is he who has the bizarre conversation with the man who turns out to be a murderer on leave from prison.
As Huck Finn remarked of Mark Twain’s book about his pal Tom Sawyer: ‘There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.’ This was, of course, not unusual in non-fiction, and the same principle of selection and synthesis underpins all great autobiographies, particularly autobiographies of childhood – Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie, for example, and Gavin Maxwell’s House of Elrig. Even so, some asked, how could Gerald possibly remember with such precision and detail, across a gap of some twenty years, so much about so many creatures, and all those places and landscapes, and their inhabitants, and everything they said and did?
‘Gerald’s extraordinarily popular story may well be true,’ declared Jane Lagoudis Pinchin, a Professor of English in New York. ‘But truth is, after all, not an important concern. Gerald Durrell is after fiction. Moreover he is after a particular kind of fiction. Actual names and known places are the real illusion, for they allow us to willingly enter an island idyll.’
Gerald himself denied this: ‘I would like to make a point of stressing that all the anecdotes about the island and the islanders are absolutely true,’ he wrote in his preface. Later he was to claim that he could recall the events of any single day during his five childhood years on Corfu, stored like a collection of photographs in his head. ‘I have a memory like everyone else. I think mine is colour, with 3-D built-in smells and sounds.’ Of Corfu he could remember an infinity of sights, smells and sounds, significant or trivial, with blinding clarity and precision:
I can remember the curve of a wrist, the glint of a smile, a wart, a blackhead, an old hand as twisted and misshapen with arthritis as an iris corm patting my shaggy blonde head while toothless gums beamed glisteningly and the yellow rimmed eye peered down and the voice said, ‘Na pas sto kako, phili mou, na pas sto kalo’ – a traditional benediction. I can remember the smell of musty clothes, like the wrappings of a mummy, stale sweat, bread, oil, olives and garlic, stockings washing. In her armpits where the hair grew rampant as her head hair, her brassiere grey with water. Peasants drying tea when we had finished with it, popcorn in Maria’s house, warm rain …
The accuracy of Gerald’s descriptions of animal behaviour, and the precision with which he conjures up those long-lost landscapes of Corfu – as anyone who retraces his footsteps today can verify – lend credence to his claims that his memory was uncannily infallible. The guts of the book were true – anthropomorphised here and there, caricatured now and then, souped up a bit when it suited, and humourised in the Durrell family tradition – to the spirit, and often to the letter, of a small boy’s first reactions to the wonders of life on a Mediterranean island in those unspoiled halcyon years. And there could be no greater authentication of the book than that by Theodore Stephanides, who vouched for its accuracy, strict chronology apart.
My Family and Other Animals presented a very different view of the island to that of Gerald’s brother Lawrence in his Corfu book, Prospero’s Cell. Both brothers tried to recreate heaven, but they were very different heavens. Lawrence’s was the knowing world of his early manhood. Gerald’s was a boy’s heaven, an innocent, prepubertal heaven, ignorant of evil, a domestic heaven in which Mother is always there, with a ladle and a steaming tureen and a table from which no one is turned away, in a home to which he can return at the end of every momentous day, bringing friends and strays, be they two-legged, four-legged, six-legged, hundred-legged, or entirely legless. The passage of time ensured that such a heaven, once left, could never be revisited – except, perhaps, through the medium of pen and paper, and the exercise of memory and a vivid reconstructive imagination.
* * *
* Unusually, Theo was wrong about this: it should have been ‘Marathon’ and not ‘Thermopylae’, as the book’s Greek publishers eventually pointed out.
FOURTEEN
Man and Nature
1955–1956
By late 1955 Gerald Durrell had written six books in three years, and had carried out five expeditions and foreign assignments in eight. Though in later life he sometimes described himself as ‘lazy and timid’, this was ramming speed by any standards, representing a huge expenditure of energy, both physical and mental. But he now began to make a significant change of course. Fed up, for the moment, with the confined, sedentary life of an author, he longed again for the relative freedom and adventure of the wilds, and his mind turned to the possibility of another major collecting expedition. Jokingly, he said that as his family were about to file a libel writ against him for what he had written about them in My Family and Other Animals he needed ‘to go and hide in some tropical forest’.
In fact he had great ambitions for his next expedition. At first, it was to be the mixture as before: he would once again collect rare or interesting animals for zoos and dealers in Britain and (hopefully) America and Europe. He now knew only too well that collecting animals in the wilds, viewed simply as a commercial venture, was an arduous way of going slowly broke; but these trips provided terrific material for his books, and it was his books that kept him in funds. He also wanted to break into making natural history and travel films for television, in spite of the failure of his filming ventures in Argentina and Cyprus, and the adventures of an animal collector in the wilds was a rich subject for any number of films.
He gave the new expedition’s destination a lot of thought before deciding it should once again be the Cameroons, in particular the upland kingdom of his old friend the Fon of Bafut. It would help the filming, he reckoned, if he knew the country already, and it would help the collecting if he knew the people and the animals they would help him collect. At first his main aim was to go for the really big, sensational beasts, even though he liked his readers to believe he specialised in the smaller, scientifica
lly interesting, seldom collected creatures. From its early stages the expedition was riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions as Gerald evolved from old ways of thinking towards new ideals.
His first act was to get in touch with the legendary American ‘bring-’em-back-alive’ zoo collector Ivan Sanderson, whose accounts of a long safari in search of great beasts in pre-war Cameroons had first fired his imagination as a boy on Corfu. Gerald wanted to pick the great man’s brains about certain rare, valuable and mythic animals, in particular gorilla and a mysterious giant bat that Sanderson had reported seeing along a jungle river at dusk on one of his expeditions. It was not a propitious time to approach Sanderson. The winter quarters of his famous jungle zoo in New Jersey had just burned down, with all the animals in it. But Sanderson’s reply was warm and informative:
I know all about your past work, and for some time have been a keen admirer of your activities.
Now as to the ‘giant bat’: I must assert that the darned thing, whatever it was, did not attack me – it was just passing by and dipped down to have a look at us. I gained the impression that it was fishing for frogs that sat in the stream in quantities. Whatever the thing was, it was enormous, had teeth and at least a six foot wingspan, flew slowly, and was apparently known to the locals and regarded with awe by them – and they are NOT easily awe-struck folk but just about as matter-of-fact and logical as any people I have ever met, much more so than most Europeans and certainly Americans! … The accompanying map shows exactly, almost to the half-mile, where we saw it.* … As to Gorilla, there used to be swarms of them all along the ridge from the huge bare rock mountain to the North which we called the ‘Rustic Teat’ to way over Bamenda way. The Assumbo knew all the family groups and it was all we could do to stop them catching all the youngsters by killing the mothers and then running very fast. You ought not to have any trouble getting babies but I do not envy you getting them down to the coast.
… Are you going to take some Potamogale back alive? If so, try and ship me a pair – I’ll pay a lot of good American dollars for them!
Sanderson ended with an afterthought concerning an odd coincidence. ‘Do look up my mother,’ he wrote, ‘who is living at the Berry Court Hotel, Bournemouth. She is a perfectly fabulous woman, and if you like good food you’ll get it with her.’
Gerald replied five days later. The information about the giant bat was fascinating, and made him all the more determined to investigate it. He also wanted to look for a creature resembling a pterodactyl that had reportedly been sighted in the swamps on the Congo-Rhodesian border and might have worked its way across to the Cameroons. ‘If we see it and by some fluke I can obtain it,’ he told Sanderson, ‘I will certainly let you know.’
Regarding the list of stuff that you would like, I love the way you say: ‘Are you going to take some Potamogale back alive?’ It sent my blood pressure up several degrees when I read it. I have obtained these water shrews, but I found, as you did, that they refuse to eat anything. I shall most certainly make an attempt to get some, and, if I succeed, I am afraid you will have to pay a lot of good American Dollars for them, if only to compensate me in some small degree for the mental anguish these beasts have caused me!
The timing of Gerald’s second letter to Ivan Sanderson was even less propitious than the first, as the luckless Sanderson’s reply makes plain:
This answer to yours of the 28th July has been delayed by considerable disturbances around here, among which some 53 feet of water travelling at about 20 knots roared over my zoo for 36 hours. One of my men got all the animals out singlehanded but we lost everything else. This is the third time we’ve been cut down to the ankles in twelve months. First a hurricane that blew us into the river, loss $7000. Then a fire that killed all my animals and eliminated all my scientific equipment, lab, dispensary, etc, loss $29,000. Now this, at a mere $10,000. Unfortunately I am not Standard Oil of New Jersey, and even here no man can earn an honest living and $45,000 in one year, so we are having to sell the animals and discharge the staff and go out of business. Hence the delay in writing …
If you catch a Pterodactyl you won’t only ‘let me know’, you’ll damned well name it after me!
What with one thing and another, notably the writing of My Family and Other Animals, it was some months before Gerald returned to his plans for what he was now calling the Durrell Third Cameroons Expedition. In early 1956 the planning began in earnest. Jacquie, with Sophie’s secretarial back-up, shouldered much of the organisational load, writing off to manufacturers around the country asking for aid in kind in return for future publicity. Soon Margaret’s boarding house was piled high with crates and boxes containing all the arcane paraphernalia required to keep a collecting expedition up and running in the wilds of tropical Africa for half a year or more. ‘We had enough stuff to equip an army,’ Jacquie recalled, and when the time came to leave, two large trucks were needed to shift the expedition’s stores down to the docks.
Gerald, meanwhile, was sounding out the zoos of Britain and America and making formal approaches to government departments. From the Director of the Natural History Museum in London he obtained a laissez-passer and a note that ‘a gorilla skull will always find a customer’, while from London Zoo he received a request for Red River hog, from Dudley Zoo a carte blanche for reptiles of all kinds, and from Belle Vue Zoo an expression of interest in gorillas and chimps. In May he travelled to Holland, the world centre for international trade in wild animals, seeking advice from dealers as to what species were in demand, and from the colonial British authorities he received a provisional permit for guns and ammunition ‘to hunt, kill or capture animals and birds mentioned in the Schedule to the Wild Animals Preservation Ordnance’.
As the workload entailed on an expedition of this scope became apparent, Gerald added two extra pairs of hands – first Sophie Cook, who jumped at the opportunity, and later an aspiring eighteen-year-old naturalist from Bristol by the name of Robert Golding, one of many people who had written asking for a place on the team, who was finally chosen because of his specialist interest in reptiles.
To John Yealland, his companion on his first expedition to the Cameroons, now Keeper of Birds at London Zoo, Gerald wrote asking for a list of desirable birds and the feeding requirements of the more difficult species. In reply he received an irreverent letter that revealed a sense of humour not very different from his own.
Dear old Dealer,
Thanks for your insulting letter. You know perfectly well that if I give you a list of birds (desirable) you will lose it before you leave Bournemouth. Cast your mind back to when you even lost our tickets, not to mention the many lists I have previously supplied. No wonder you feel that a Cameroon expedition is not the same without me … Look forward to seeing you when you come up. The fee for all this valuable advice can be settled later. When are we finally relieved of the White Woman’s Burden? In other words when do you sail?
In the midst of all these preparations, Gerald was still actively pursuing his greater dream of starting a zoo of his own. In a clear statement of what became his credo, he was to write later:
Like many other people, I have been seriously concerned by the fact that year after year, all over the world, various species of animals are slowly but surely being exterminated in the wild state, thanks directly or indirectly to the interference of mankind … To me the extirpation of an animal species is a criminal offence, in the same way as the destruction of anything we cannot recreate or replace, such as a Rembrandt or the Acropolis. In my opinion zoological gardens all over the world should have as one of their main objects the establishment of breeding colonies of these rare and threatened species. Then, if it is inevitable that the animal should become extinct in the wild state, at least we have not lost it completely. For many years I had wanted to start a zoo with just such an object in view, and now seemed the ideal moment to begin.
It had become obvious that a zoo nearer to home made more sense than one in Cyprus or t
he West Indies or any other exotic spot, and he had decided that Bournemouth was as good a place as any – indeed, better in many respects. In the early summer of 1956, as a first practical step towards the realisation of his dream, he drafted a memo on a proposed Bournemouth Zoo-Park which included many of his notions about running a proper zoo:
Bournemouth, as the premier south coast resort, is an ideal situation for the formation of a zoological park, run on the lines of the world-famous Continental Zoo-Parks. Apart from the town’s climate and setting, its enormous popularity with summer visitors would make a Zoo-Park an immediate success.
The accent would be on well laid-out park-like surroundings, combined with the most up-to-date methods of caging the animals, wherever possible in natural surroundings. This system ensures that the visitors have excellent facilities for seeing the animals and the animals have ideal surroundings in which to live and breed. The birth of young animals, is of course, one of the main attractions of any zoo; by adopting this method of layout and caging the Continental zoos have had far greater success in the keeping and breeding of wild animals than any zoo in this country.
The entire running of the zoo-park would be under his personal control. His qualifications for the job, he argued, were more than adequate:
During the past nine years I have financed, organised and led a number of major animal collecting expeditions to Africa and the South American continent, bringing back very large collections of mammals, birds, reptiles, fish and, on occasions, even insects for the leading zoos and such institutions as the Severn Wildfowl Trust. Many of these creatures had never been collected before. I have also made a special study of zoo design and management and the problems involved in keeping and breeding wild animals in captivity.
Gerald Durrell Page 32
