Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  Potto: 1 male, 2 females: Obtained Eshobi. Behaviour: It is possible to sex adult Pottos by smell, for when frightened the testicles of the male give off a quite strong odour like pear drops.

  Collared Peccary. Obtained: Jujuy, Argentina, March 1959. True pair. Behaviour: Both of them frequently rub their faces on their mate’s scent gland. When excited they indulge in a ‘waltz’-like action: the male seizes the female’s hind leg in his mouth, and she seizes his hind leg, and then, grunting and squealing, they revolve round and round for a few minutes.

  The most spectacular (and expensive) beast in residence was N’pongo, a young lowland gorilla born in the Congo, who had been purchased from a dealer in Birmingham and at the beginning spent most of her time on Mother’s lap. Later she was to become the favourite playmate of Caroline, Ken and Trudy Smith’s two-year-old daughter, whose nickname was Moonbeam. Gerald noted:

  Although the young ape is bigger than Moonbeam, and tremendously powerful (it takes three adults to get her back into her cage if she doesn’t want to go back), when playing with Moonbeam she is astonishingly gentle and tolerant. To watch them sharing a bag of candies is a sight worth seeing. Both sit there, looks of extreme concentration on their faces, while Moonbeam carefully opens the bag and rations out the candies into N’pongo’s immense black paw. When the candies have been equally divided they will sometimes sit back to back, like a couple of bookends, while they eat, both of them occasionally spitting the semi-masticated sweets out into their hands to have a close look at them.

  N’pongo loved nothing better than a game of tag. If she played with Gerald she usually managed to bring the zoo’s Honorary Director to the ground with a determined rugby tackle. If it was Moonbeam, however, she would content herself with plucking at the little girl’s clothes in a teasing, gentle way. ‘Both love to be tickled,’ Gerald observed, ‘and they will roll about in the grass hysterically when you do it. Moonbeam’s shrill giggles contrasted strangely with N’pongo’s gruff laughter.’

  Since there were no funds to finance the purchase of N’pongo, Gerald had rung all the wealthiest people on the island, inviting them to buy a share in the first gorilla at the zoo – Gerald’s first foray into begging-bowl fund-raising, an activity that would preoccupy him for much of the rest of his life. Among those he approached was the Earl of Jersey, who recalled their first encounter vividly.

  When we met, Gerry asked for a subscription to a fund to raise £1000 to buy the gorilla N’Pongo. I was sure he would never do that in subs of £25. On the other hand I felt that if the island was to have a zoo it had better be a good zoo – and a good zoo must have a gorilla. In the event I guaranteed him an overdraft for £1000 so he could get’ N’Pongo at once. As a baby N’Pongo was great fun and gurgled like a human if you tickled her tummy. I need hardly say that when the bank wanted to close the account I had guaranteed, I was presented with a bill for £900 – and a few pence. Gerry had no sense of money. He had an almost pathological antipathy to people he thought of as Bankers. He seemed to picture them sitting at large mahogany desks wearing bowler hats and saying ‘No.’ (Incidentally I myself was also a Banker.) Discussing some new venture I would tell him: ‘We will have to wait till we can save enough money.’ He would scoff at this. ‘Oh! Nonsense,’ he would say. ‘Pennies from Heaven. We’ll start at once.’ Maddeningly, of course, pennies did always seem to come from heaven.

  The zoo occupied every minute of Gerald’s waking thought. He was absorbed by it, lost in it, utterly enthralled. It was a world of its own, always engaging, idiosyncratic, full of incongruities, as he was to record in an account of an average day written during the first year:

  If you lie with half-closed eyes in the first light of dawn, you sometimes wonder exactly where you are in the world, for robins and blackbirds are endeavouring – not very successfully – to out-shout seriemas and crested screamers from South America, glossy starlings from Africa, and the jay thrush from Asia … It is very wearing to the nerves of even the most ardent ornithologist to be awakened at half-past five every morning by a chorus of peacocks under his bedroom window, all yelling ‘Help … help … hel … l … l … p!’ in harsh and despairing tones …

  One of the chief difficulties of living in your own zoo is that there is so much going on the whole time that you are constantly being lured away from the stern duty of writing articles or books. A message is sent up to you that one of the rare lizards is indulging in a courtship display, and so you have to rush down to watch it. Someone tells you that the bushbaby is giving birth, and so, casting the typewriter aside, you dash to gloat over the smug mother and a baby the size of a walnut – and apparently composed entirely of eyes – that muzzles into her soft fur.

  In many ways, evening is the best time in the zoo. The public has gone, the sun has sunk, and all the night animals are on the prowl. The slender, elongated genet, in its handsome gold coat spotted with black, performs miracles of acrobatics among the branches in its cage; the bush-babies are awake, staring at you with enormous eyes, taking prodigious leaps about their cage, landing with as much sound as a piece of thistledown.

  Now is the time when you can take a tinful of succulent snails and go down to the Reptile House. There the Guiana dragon awaits you, his mouth curved in a perpetual and benign smile. His great, dark eyes watch you anxiously as you tip the snails out into his pond, and then he slides into the water and mumbles one of them into his great jaws. He throws back his head, half closes his eyes in ecstasy, and scrunches the unfortunate snail to bits, with a noise like someone walking very slowly over a gravel path.

  Then you make your way back to the manor house and as you pass beneath the arches you hear the lion quietly trying out his new trick: roaring. Then, from the cage by the archway, comes a soft, sweet voice saying ‘Goodnight, darling,’ and you wish the cockatoos ‘Goodnight.’

  No, it’s not much like being a country squire, but it’s a lot more fun.

  Though funds were low and Gerald had a publisher’s contract to fulfil, he found it hard to lock himself away in a room to finish his infinitely neglected book about his Cameroons expedition of over two years before, A Zoo in My Luggage, let alone to embark on a new book about his recent expedition through the Argentine. It required ceaseless nagging on Jacquie’s part to extract even a minimum of words from the recalcitrant author. It didn’t help that Sophie Cook had had to resign in order to go and look after her gravely ill mother.

  Lesley Norton, who as a teenager fresh from school had come to the zoo in its first months, took over as Gerald’s secretary (her mother, Betty, was a great friend of Gerald’s mother). ‘He’d make every excuse, every excuse,’ Lesley recalled, ‘not to write a word or go near his typewriter to type a word. I mean, days on end would go by and you’d be trying to shuffle the pages under his nose, but he obviously found writing very, very difficult at that time.’ Working for Gerald, Lesley found, was like being an intern in a hospital. ‘It was like working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.’

  It says much for Gerald’s professionalism that A Zoo in My Luggage was to prove one of the most popular and enduring of all his books, and was received with enthusiasm by the critics when it was published in England in 1960. The Daily Telegraph’s reviewer spoke for most of them: ‘He describes the individual personality traits of his captive creatures with a hilarious fondness, and though an ape is an ape, one such as Cholmondeley St John (otherwise referred to as “you bloody ape”) soon becomes a very deep anthropoid friend of ours … He has a novelist’s ear for dialogue and a poet’s sensitivity to the mood of the African landscape. He has, too, a genuine humorist’s awareness of the incongruous and tells many very funny stories.’

  It puzzled the zoo’s staff that they saw less of the establishment’s founder than they had expected. At first this was put down to Ken Smith’s proprietorial pride. As Superintendent his job was to keep the place running with military precision, and he achieved this using the factory-style working prac
tices typical of many zoos at that time. It was Smith who rang the zoo bell for work to start and work to stop. It was Smith who made it a habit once or twice a day to tick someone off or dress someone down pour encourager les autres. During the first few months after Gerald took up residence at the manor, Smith discouraged him from involving himself in the day-to-day running of the zoo or having much close contact with its staff. Gerald Durrell was a famous author who wanted to be left alone to get on with his own work, Smith explained to his workers, which was writing, not zoo-keeping, and under no circumstances was he to be disturbed. So the affable Gerald, to whom the zoo owed its entire existence, was seen at first as a remote founder figure who remained mostly holed up inside the manor house and was very rarely spotted outside in the zoo of his creation.

  Meanwhile, ‘the zoo of his dreams’, built on a shoestring, left much to be desired. The cages were for the most part makeshift and rudimentary, cobbled together out of any material that came to hand. Inevitably, from time to time animals fells sick, and a few died. Though holiday-makers continued to pass through the turnstiles in a steady stream at two shillings a head, money was desperately short.

  The staff lived on a pittance. Even some years later, when Quentin Bloxam joined the zoo as a live-in helper on £5 a week, he found himself having to work seven days a week, with two afternoons off, in extremely primitive and labour-intensive conditions. ‘There were no hoses to wash down the yards, for instance,’ he recalled, ‘and we had to carry the water around in old metal milk churns instead. Even shovels and wheelbarrows were unobtainable, as all the money went on food and veterinary services for the animals. Staff turnover was high, and this wasn’t helped by the fact that we had to live three to a room in very damp conditions. But a small nucleus of people stayed on, out of loyalty to Gerry and a kind of missionary zeal arising from a belief in what we were doing.’

  To run a zoo properly – that is to say for the benefit of the animals to the utmost possible degree – is a colossal undertaking, requiring tremendous expertise, ceaseless care and vigilance, and not inconsiderable sums of money. Gerald Durrell wanted to have the best small zoo in the world, a zoo moreover that was dedicated to the welfare and salvation of animals and the enlightenment and understanding of man. In the early days it was a steeply uphill struggle, partly because he was finding his way, and partly because there was never enough money.

  The shadow of bankruptcy was always just around the corner. One day, a year or so after the zoo had opened, all the staff were summoned to a meeting. The ship was almost on the rocks, they were told. Maybe it would sink, maybe it would not, but anybody who wished to leave should do so now. Nobody volunteered. Instead they rallied to keep the zoo going by all possible means. Peanuts dropped near the monkey cages by one lot of visitors were gathered up, rebagged and resold to the next lot. The island’s rubbish dump was rummaged over for discarded park railings, wire netting and old packing cases that could be recycled as cages. A local cabaret duo called Tony and Dot (stage name ‘Katinga the Queen of the Snakes’) devoted all their spare time to scouring St Helier’s market for junked fruit and vegetables for the animals. With meat for the carnivores in short supply, John Hartley and Shep Mallet would rush out with knives and food bins whenever they heard news of the death of a carthorse on a farm, cutting up the carcase and sawing off the legs and head, half asphyxiated by the stomach gases. Even Gerald’s elderly mother joined the battle. ‘Mother was frail but very anxious to help,’ Alan Ogden recalled. ‘Gerry suggested to her that if she really wished to assist, she could look after the ladies’ loo and take the money, as that part of the complex generated a better cash-flow than any other.’

  The survival of the zoo that had been founded to save animals from extinction was itself under threat, and for the first few years it was a far cry from its founder’s revolutionary vision. ‘There was a big credibility gap,’ Jeremy Mallinson recalled of that time. ‘We thought about the things Gerry was saying, we even talked about them, but he’d have had a hard job matching his vision with any signs of it at the zoo.’

  The gruelling zoo routine was broken now and then. Sometimes a keeper got bitten. Old Etonian Tony Lort-Phillips was bitten three times by the monkeys (‘They all wanted to bite his bottom,’ a colleague recalled), but it was Mike Armstrong who was the most accident-prone. Early on he put his back out for three weeks when he jumped off a high wall while in pursuit of an escaping goliath heron. Later he was bitten on the behind by N’pongo (‘She wasn’t being nasty,’ he recalled, ‘it was just play, really’) and half squeezed to death when Bali the female orang utan got him in a love hug while she was on heat. Finally he suffered a straight left to the nose when he tried to give a temperamental chimp called Beebee her milk. ‘It was a terrific punch,’ he remembers. ‘It nearly floored me. I staggered out of the cage with the milk bottle and Beebee ran off somewhere, and do you know my nose has never been the same since. I’ve got what boxers get. My nose is much narrower on one side than the other and gets all stuffed up at night.’

  More often some creature escaped. Birds were the most frequent absconders, usually just vanishing out to sea, but Chumley the chimp was the most accomplished. He had little difficulty with locks and cages, and he and his girlfriend Lulu soon found a way of unravelling wire mesh like knitting. Before long Chumley was often to be seen making his way across to the manor, where he would lollop up the stairs for a cuddle with the ever-patient Mother. One evening she heard a loud bang at the door and found both Chumley and Lulu on the stairs, looking cheerful and expectant. Nothing daunted, she invited them in, sat them down on the sofa and opened a large box of chocolates and a tin of biscuits. When Gerald remonstrated with her for letting them in, she protested: ‘But dear, they came to tea – and they had jolly sight better manners than some of the people you’ve had up here.’

  One Christmas Chumley led all the other chimps in a mass breakout, totally wrecking the staff’s Christmas Day lunch. The first anyone knew about it was when an American student peered in and asked: ‘Do the chimps always go out for a walk every day?’ Chumley was finally caught in a bedroom over-excitedly rummaging through the drawers, and was eventually pacified by John Hartley in a rather novel way. ‘I discovered,’ he recalled, ‘that if you put your hand behind his back legs and held his balls in the palm of your hand, it had a calming effect.’

  But it wasn’t just the chimps. One day the crashing of glass alerted the keepers to the fact that a spectacled bear had got out and was smashing its way through the cold frames in the zoo grounds. The first member of staff to encounter the bear took one look at the charging beast and locked himself in the zoo’s pay-box. Claudius the tapir got out one night and romped around a field of gladioli in a thunderstorm – ‘chomping all the flowers up and eating them like anything’. The New Guinea bush dogs were out for three days, and when Major Newgate, a wallaby, escaped, people were ringing the zoo to say: ‘Something strange has just hopped past – we think it must come from your zoo.’

  On occasion the urge to escape was almost as strong in the humans as it was in the animals. In the early days the zoo owned a huge reticulated python by the name of Pythagoras, twelve feet long and as thick, as Gerald put it, ‘as a rugger blue’s thigh’. Normally it took three keepers to clean out Pythagoras’ cage in the Reptile House – two to restrain him and another to do the cleaning out – and the golden rule was that on no account should any member of the staff attempt the job on his own. One evening at dusk after the zoo had closed Gerald happened to walk by the Reptile House when he heard a muffled cry for help coming from inside. When he investigated he found John Hartley, then a new recruit straight from school, and built (as Gerald put it) ‘on the lines of a giraffe’, bound but not quite gagged in the coils of the giant python. ‘John had done the unforgivable,’ Gerald was to record. ‘The great snake had thrown its coils around him and bound him as immobile as if in a straitjacket. Fortunately, John still had hold of his head, and Pythagoras wa
s hissing like a giant kettle.’ Wasting no time, Gerald seized the creature’s tail, but no sooner had he unwound a few coils from Hartley than the snake rewound the coils around Gerald. ‘Soon we were both as inextricably linked as Siamese twins,’ Gerald wrote, ‘and we both started to yell for help. It was after hours and I feared that the staff would have gone home. The idea of standing there all night till someone found us in the morning was not a happy one.’ So Gerald, John and Pythagoras remained entwined together coil by jowl in the hushed island dark. It was pure good fortune that eventually a member of the mammal staff heard their cries and came to the rescue. The experience of being jointly throttled by a giant snake evidently created a kind of bond, and eventually Hartley was to become a key member of Gerald’s team.

  Gerald had never run anything in his life before, and it did not come naturally to him to administer anything. He had little grasp of money or business affairs, and his approach to his subordinates was to become comradely and sociable rather than managerial. It was Jacquie who provided the modicum of steel, and she did not shirk tough action when it was required. Gerald’s nephew Gerry Breeze, who was at the zoo for the first eighteen months of its existence, recalled: ‘Uncle Gerry had a heart of gold, but Jacquie was the captain. Handing out orders was not his way of doing things. He was only concerned with the animals, not with administering anything. But if he was going to do something he would do it, and nothing could change his mind. Not even Jacquie.’

  Despite the zoo’s financial problems, Gerald was boyishly bullish. ‘We’ve got some nice new stuff,’ he wrote to his Cameroons companion Bob Golding in July 1960: ‘Pigmy Marmosets and Olingo, Emperor Tamarin and so on. Among the reptiles the Bafut Skinks are still doing wonderfully well and the babies have grown like mad. Our lovely trek Boa (the New Guinea one) is doing well, thank the Lord, and also our Madagascan Green Gecko. Perhaps the best new arrival we have had are four baby Aldabra Tortoises. I am very pleased with these as normally they won’t let you have more than a pair, but I spun the old bull about preservation, and they let me have the four.’