As a well-known author, journalist, lecturer, broadcaster and television film-maker, he wrote, he was exceptionally well placed to generate immense publicity for the zoo-park:
My publishers are extremely keen that I should do a book dealing with the ‘birth of a zoo’, to be followed by subsequent books on its growth and activities, quite apart from any books I might write dealing with collecting expeditions undertaken for such a Zoo-Park. A Zoo-Park of this kind could make a great contribution to both education and science, and with the growing popularity of television the making of animal films of all types should be a major part of a zoo’s programme. As my wife and I are professional still and cine photographers we could therefore undertake this work.
Gerald’s first port of call was the local MP for Bournemouth East, Nigel Nicolson, son of Sir Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, an independent-minded publisher and politician. When Gerald sent him a copy of the zoo-park memo he received an almost immediate reply. ‘I think that it is first-rate,’ Nicolson wrote, ‘and exactly what is required to convince a stuffy Alderman.’ As a first step he would send it to the town clerk of Bournemouth – ‘a man of great sense and imagination’ – and take it from there.
But neither Durrell nor Nicolson had counted on the infinite potential for procrastination of Bournemouth Council and its labyrinthine committees. It was late October before they responded. They liked the idea, they said, and were prepared to cast around for a suitable site. But as they had no intention of coming up with the money for it, perhaps it would be better if the proposed zoo-park was scaled down somewhat and turned into a pets’ corner.
By now the Cameroons expedition had gathered an irresistible momentum, and Gerald had no time to wrestle with the apparatchiks at the town hall. He was disappointed by their response, but remained as determined as ever to start his own zoo for the captive breeding of endangered species.
Gerald’s grasp of the nature and origins of the environmental and conservation problems facing planet earth had grown broader and deeper over the years. Even in the middle of the twentieth century such matters were the concern of an extreme minority, and were below the threshold of awareness of the general public in most of the world. Gerald was now in the vanguard of this minority. On 29 August 1956, in a talk entitled Man and Nature broadcast through the fairly obscure medium of the BBC German Service, he uttered his first public protest at the role of man in the destruction of nature.
Let us consider man, the strange biped that has taken over the earth. Let us consider him scientifically …
A genus of catarrhine primate, Homo sapiens is to be distinguished anatomically from living catarrhines by a large brain of about 1500cc, and distinguished in behaviour by walking upright, by using tools with his hands, and by speech …
Or let us consider him as the poet sees him:
‘What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!’
In fact man is not unlike the Brown Rat. By his adaptability and cunning he has succeeded in establishing himself all over the world, from the coldest and most windswept highlands to the thick, steamy tropical forests. And, like the Brown Rat, wherever man has gone he has created havoc with the balance of nature.
Gerald went on to relate, in a few brief and haunting minutes, a horror story that was global in its range and centuries old, a story fuelled and driven by the need, greed and stupidity of man. He told of the destruction of much of the world’s temperate forests, of the overgrazing and destruction of the grasslands that took their place, culminating in dust-storms and deserts. He told of the destruction of animal life wrought by man’s familiars – the dog, the cat, the pig, the house mouse and the brown rat: ‘While man was busy plundering the land, they were at work hunting and killing the animal life, exterminating creatures that could never be recreated.’
Extermination, he explained, meant the driving out or killing of a species. Carried to extremes it led to the extinction of a species. The most notorious case of this kind was that of the dodo, which would eventually be closely associated with Gerald Durrell and his works for ever more:
The Dodo was a great ponderous waddling pigeon the size of a fat goose. Secure in its island home it had lost the power of flight and, like the ostrich, lived and nested on the ground. It seems that it must also have lost the power of recognising an enemy, for it appears to have been a tame and almost confiding creature. Mauritius was discovered by the Portuguese about 1507. The settlers brought with them the usual collection of goats, dogs, cats and pigs and released them on the island. These at once set about the task of exterminating the unfortunate bird. The goats ate the undergrowth which provided the Dodo with cover, dogs and cats harried and killed the old birds, while the pigs grunted their way round the island devouring the eggs and young. By 1681 this huge, harmless pigeon was extinct … as dead as the Dodo.
But the story was not wholly negative. Man was learning to control the balance of nature:
All over the world there is springing up a new awareness of nature and a desire to preserve rather than destroy, for by helping nature preserve her capital man can be rewarded by the interest. Laws have been passed to check the pollution of rivers and lakes. Reforestation programmes are under way to try and check erosion and recreate the great forests that were destroyed. The protection and reintroduction of game and fur-bearing animals is meeting with great success. Other species of animal are also being protected, for man has at last realised that it is important to protect all forms of life whether directly beneficial to him or not. Large areas of the world are being set aside, untouched, as Reserves and National Parks, where the flora and fauna can exist untouched, a living museum for future generations.
In 1956 Gerald Durrell might well have had grounds for feeling optimistic about the future of the embryonic conservation movement, and believed that he would himself be one of the standard bearers in a new moral crusade, even if little of this way of thinking could be found in his books.
Shortly afterwards, his account of the childhood in which his part in that crusade had its genesis finally appeared. My Family and Other Animals was a runaway success from the moment it was published on 11 October 1956. Each of Gerald’s previous books had sold more than a hundred thousand copies in Britain, and almost as many in other countries. My Family outsold them all. The first two impressions were sold out before publication, and within a month it was the number two non-fiction best-seller, behind only Winston Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples. In the Soviet Union the book sold two hundred thousand copies in six days. It was to continue to outsell all Gerald’s other books, and in forty years it has never been out of print.
My Family and Other Animals was an archetypal story that appealed to something fundamental in the human psyche, and it was to make its author a household name throughout the world. Its British paperback sales alone are now in the region of one and a half million, and its appeal to other media forms has been constant. Three separate attempts were made to produce a movie version (one of the scripts, the best, being co-written by Gerald himself) before eventually the BBC produced a lavish ten-part drama series shot entirely on location on Corfu in 1987. There was also talk of the book being staged as a Broadway musical to be directed by Stanley Donen, who had directed the hit films Singin’ in the Rain and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and of an operatic version to be composed by David Fanshawe.
The reviewers articulated the enthusiasm of the fans. My Family, they concurred, was ‘a bewitching book’, ‘the happiest of books’, ‘a joyous narrative’, ‘a glorious story’, ‘an uproarious comedy’ and ‘even more of a spellbinder than any of his previous records of zoological adventure’. All praised his vivid and meticulous observation of the natural world of Corfu. ‘The life of every natural thing was to him a perpetual feast,’ effused th
e Sunday Times, ‘and his fellow human beings aroused in him a loving if irreverent response … Across the pages troop and gobble the bent, the bearded and the zany; talk and laughter, dismay and love, fill the villas; chameleon spiders, cicadas, fireflies shimmer and twitter; toads bloat and curunculate, gaze out reproachfully from heavy eyes laced with golden filigree; scorpions dance, claw clasping claw in angular saraband.’
But it was the family – ‘marvellously and most attractively crazy’ – who stole the show. ‘One of the most enchanting collection of pleasantly dotty mortals I’ve ever come across,’ proclaimed a BBC books programme. ‘They are ridiculous, illogical, at times infuriating but almost always adorable, and above all they are real.’ All the critics were doubled up by the sheer comedy. ‘As the antidote to a Northern winter this book is invaluable,’ wrote Kenneth Young in the Daily Telegraph. ‘I read the Widdle and Puke incidents and the affair of the good ship Bootle-Bumtrinket in a train, but I was obliged to close the book for fear my lowering fellow-Goths should think me unbalanced.’ Fellow-author Peter Green summed it up: ‘This is an enchanting and utterly unique book, by turns comic, lyrical, mocking, tender and absurd. Mr Durrell is a kind of cross between Fabre the naturalist and a nearly grown-up Kenneth Grahame, with the compulsive fascination of both.’ The appeal of the book, suggested the Durrells’ family friend Alan Thomas, was that it enabled those who had compromised with life, and become middle-aged straphangers, to withdraw into Arcadia. It was largely on account of My Family and Other Animals that Gerald now received the first formal honour of his life, being made a Fellow of the International Institute of Arts and Letters. And his books were to become, in their way, a part of the British popular culture of the late 1950s and the sixties.
Just as three years previously, when Gerald’s first book, The Overloaded Ark, and Lawrence’s Prospero’s Cell were published virtually simultaneously to ecstatic reviews, the brothers were once again being fêted by the literary world. Lawrence’s Selected Poems had recently been published in Britain, his novel Justine, the first volume of the celebrated Alexandria Quartet, was already at the printers, and his third and arguably best island book, Bitter Lemons, a portrait of Cyprus during the troubles, was finished in six weeks flat and would sell twenty thousand copies in three months.
Though he was almost completely broke, Lawrence’s luck was changing, just as Gerald’s had changed. Within a few months his American publishers, Dutton, were to buy the whole of the unfinished Alexandria Quartet, plus Bitter Lemons. He had recently resigned from his post in Cyprus, where he had been a marked man in daily danger of his life, and had returned to England with his new love, a married woman called Claude Forde, a writer like himself, born in Alexandria (of all places), the daughter of a French banker and a Jewish mother. The couple were temporarily holed up in a borrowed cottage in the depths of the country at Donhead St Andrew, near Shaftesbury, in Dorset, looking after Lawrence’s young daughter Sappho while his wife Eve, who was petitioning for divorce, searched for a job in London.
The Durrell family saw little of Lawrence and Claude during their sojourn in ‘Pudding Island’, and after Gerald’s departure for Africa they took off for France, where they were to become permanent residents, eking out an existence (till the money rolled in) in a primitive rented cottage in Sommières in Provence, then later moving to a small farmhouse, or mazet, near Nîmes. Lawrence’s move to France was one day to prove of the greatest significance in the life of his younger brother.
By Christmas Gerald, Jacquie and the rest of the party were at sea, three days out of Southampton and heading south across Biscay on board the SS Tortugeiro, a banana boat with no other passengers. ‘It was,’ Jacquie reported, ‘rather like having one’s own private yacht.’ The fact that Gerald had converted £2000 of bank securities into cash to pay for the trip helped sustain the illusion. Ahead lay good old Africa and sweaty old Mamfe and the proud old Fon and the whole of a world Gerald hadn’t set eyes on for eight years or so. He popped another cork and led the ship’s company in another hearty carol as the boat ploughed on. It was going to be a good trip. He felt it in his bones. But he was wrong.
Gerald’s intended destination was a new area that had been recommended to him by Ivan Sanderson – the wild and forested Tinta Valley in the Assumbo in the north-west part of the Mamfe Division. This was one of the few places in the British part of the Cameroons where, it was believed, lowland gorilla were to be found in any quantity. The main objects of the expedition were to make a colour film of the gorillas and other animals in the area; to bring back as complete a collection as possible of live specimens of these animals, along with skin and spirit specimens of mammals and reptiles for the British Museum of Natural History; to make a report for the Fauna Preservation Society in London on the status of the gorillas in the area and the problems connected with their protection; and to investigate Sanderson’s 1935 report of a giant bat in the region. In addition, the expedition would make sorties to the highlands, the flooded N’Dop Plain, the Oku crater lakes and the border country of the French Cameroons, where they hoped to find an incredible amphibian called the giant frog (Rana goliath). ‘All these places,’ Gerald noted in his initial statement of intent, ‘generally yield a tremendous variety of creatures, ranging from mice to porcupines and from pythons to toads.’ Last but far from least, Gerald would write a book about his adventures, which would be the main means of recouping his costs.
That was the plan – and it had excited the press. ‘Wife off to Film Love Life of the Gorilla,’ proclaimed a headline in the Sunday Express. ‘We hope to find out if a gorilla beats his wife on a Saturday night,’ Jacquie was reported as saying, ‘but we shall be lucky if we see anything of their courting.’
On 7 January 1957 the ship sailed slowly into Victoria Bay. Though the view was still breathtakingly the same, time had moved on since Gerald Durrell was last there. The Cameroons were undergoing environmental change and approaching independence. As for Gerald, he was no longer the young tiger in the depths of the forest, but was travelling in a rather grander style more befitting a best-selling author, with a wife, a secretary, a teenage assistant and (later) a photographer from Life magazine. They ran into trouble the moment they set foot in Africa, as Jacquie vividly recalled.
We arrived in the Cameroons during the run-up to independence, and shortly after we had landed we were summoned to Government House in Buea and hauled in front of the British Administration. They were not at all pleased to have Gerry back in the country. They wagged a finger at him and tore him off a strip for writing about the Fon the way he had done in The Bafut Beagles, presenting a paramount chief as a carousing black clown who spoke comic pidgin English, which is how they saw it. Today they would have called it politically incorrect. Then they just called it embarrassing and unhelpful in view of the changing political situation in Africa. They said that if Gerry was planning to go back to Bafut he should keep his mouth shut – and of course that didn’t endear them to Gerry or augur well for the trip as a whole. To make matters worse the Head of Customs, a Brit with the appropriate name of Pine Coffin, wanted to confiscate the special equipment which had been donated to us by British industry, and then tried to have Gerry arrested because he didn’t have a licence for his firearms, or so he claimed.
Even the Conservator of Forests, who was in charge of fauna and flora in the Southern Cameroons, was hostile. Grudgingly granting Gerald a permit to film and capture gorilla in the forest reserve provided humane means were used, he poured sarcastic scorn on both the man and his proposed method of capture: ‘The prospect of Mr Durrell wresting a baby gorilla from the arms of its irate mother is a pleasing one and in my opinion he should be given every opportunity to try it.’
‘Officialdom had progressed considerably in the eight years since I last visited the Cameroons,’ Gerald noted wryly. ‘Greater patience and agility are needed to cope with this than one needs with the animals. After two rather fruitless weeks we decided to move our ba
se up to Mamfe and establish a camp and wait patiently for our permits.’ By the time he got there the authorities had begun to dig their toes in, and an official appeal against granting Gerald permission to enter any forest reserve for the purpose of capturing any protected animal (including gorilla) had been lodged with the highest authority in Nigeria, which had ultimate responsibility for affairs in the British Cameroons at that time. Eventually it was explained to Gerald by the Commissioner of the Cameroons himself, who called on him in Mamfe, that since there were reckoned to be no more than thirty gorilla left in the Southern Cameroons it would require a matter of the first scientific importance for him to issue a licence to capture one. This persuaded Gerald that catching gorilla would not only be difficult, but wrong. At the very outset of the expedition, therefore, he was forced to abandon one of his main objectives.
He now planned to return again to the territory of his old friend the Fon in the grassy highlands to the north. Shortly after reaching Mamfe he wrote to the Fon announcing his intention, and two days later, on 25 January, received a reply from the Fon’s palace.
My good friend,
Yours dated 23rd. received with great pleasure. I was more than pleased when I read the letter sent to me by you, in the Cameroons again.
I will be looking for you at any time you come here. How long you think to remain with me here, no objection. My Rest-House is ever ready for you at any time you arrive here.
Please pass my sincere greetings to your wife and tell her that I shall have a good chat with her when she comes here.
Yours truly
Achirimbi II
Fon of Bafut
This bucked Gerry up a bit, for clearly, whatever the British might think, the Fon still seemed to be on his side. But the rot had already begun to set in. ‘Those first few weeks had all left a very nasty taste,’ Jacquie recalled, ‘and what with one thing or another Gerry got a mental block about proceeding up to Bafut and hung on interminably at Mamfe, which of course was home from home to him but hell on earth for Sophie and me. I mean, the climate was intolerable. One got up in the morning and had a shower and I don’t know why one bothered, because one’s clothes just stuck to you all the time, so that Sophie and I ended up covered in sweat rash and there was nothing we could do about it. And we couldn’t get Gerry to move! We were begging him to go up-country to Bafut, where at least the nights were cool. But Gerry didn’t mind it. He’d camped here before.’ Besides, they were comfortably housed, and this was good collecting country. Word had gone out that the ‘beef master’ was back, and almost immediately a large number of creatures of all sizes began pouring in.
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