Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  For company he was taking two other women in addition to Jacquie – his assistant Ann Peters, and Saranne Calthorpe, whom he invited along when it became clear her marriage was foundering. Gerald enjoyed flirting with women, and while strangers who noticed this often jumped to the conclusion that he was a compulsive womaniser, in fact he was not. ‘I’m not interested in sleeping with anyone else,’ he declared. ‘It only even occurs to me to be unfaithful when Jacquie gets on my wick (which she frequently does). I see lots of girls whom I think it would be nice to take to bed, but it’s just a harmless fancy.’ One such fancy was the beautiful Saranne, with whom he gave every impression of being infatuated. But he never stepped over the line, never spoke a word or laid a finger out of place.

  On 22 August 1969 Gerald and Jacquie travelled to London and checked in to the Buckingham Hotel for a week. On the twenty-sixth they threw a farewell dinner at Bertorelli’s. On the thirtieth they were in the Swedish port of Göteborg to catch an Australia-bound cargo ship. Next day they sailed.

  A little under six weeks later they made landfall in Australia. There they were met by the press. ‘What is it like being married to a world-famous zoologist and author?’ one newspaperman asked Jacquie. ‘“Bloody,” she says … but with a glint in her eye that makes you doubt her meaning. But there’s no doubting one thing – that marriage to Mr Durrell is a case of “love me, love my animals”. Luckily Mrs Durrell is fond of animals. “I’ve been married to them for nineteen years – but I don’t eat, sleep or drink them.” Mrs Durrell described her marriage as a successful partnership. “I do all the jobs Gerald loathes doing.”’

  When the party arrived in Melbourne they were met by Peter Grose, the Curtis Brown agency’s representative in Australia. ‘Gerry struck me on that first meeting as a great big honey bear of a chap,’ Grose recalled, ‘a bearded, boomingly extrovert, hugely overweight bon viveur who was knocking it back with great gusto. Sometimes he would go into a serious mode but basically he was jokey, fun, good company. The only odd thing was the bizarre ménage à quatre with which he was proposing to make his way around Australia. It seemed pretty clear to me that he was a bit besotted with Lady Saranne.’

  There was no evidence of Gerald’s recent breakdown – as far as Grose could see he was firing on all cylinders. The problem was his entourage. Saranne and Ann Peters did not get on at all, the latter loathing the very sight of the former, perhaps out of jealousy, for Ann Peters was infatuated with Gerald, while Gerald was infatuated with Saranne – a potentially disastrous triangle, even without counting in Jacquie. When the party set off into the outback, heading for Queensland via Canberra and the Blue Mountains, it was in an atmosphere of mounting emotional stand-off that boded ill for the harmony of the trip.

  From the rainforests of north Queensland Gerald sent a postcard to Alan and Shirley Thomas depicting ‘the famous and wondrous Curtain Fig Tree’ near Cairns – an amazing tangle of close-thicketed aerial roots. ‘Have just had my females cut through this tree,’ he joked. ‘It was hard work and two of them died – but the show must go on. Have discovered several new places and called them Sidney, Melbourne and Dicky-Pricky Creek. Found a thing with a bill like a duck but found it was Lady Calthorpe.’

  Christmas Day found Gerald and his female entourage heading out across the Great Barrier Reef aboard a small launch laden with provisions to instil some Christmas cheer into a most un-Christmas-like, scorching, tropic day – iced champagne, cold turkey and ice cream. In his time Gerald had spent a number of unusual Christmases abroad – in a waterlogged tent in West Africa nursing a sick chimpanzee; lying roasting on a cliff in Patagonia filming a vast conglomeration of fur seals below him; dining on manioc cakes and cold alligator tail while floating through the creek-lands of Guiana in a canoe. But no Christmas in his experience compared with that on the Great Barrier Reef. This one day was like a metaphor for the entire, six-month, twenty-thousand-mile expedition through Australia – a dazzling and incomparable interlude in a teeming, near-pristine Antipodean Eden – a Christmas with corals.

  Gerald had a special interest in the Great Barrier Reef. A great bastion of coral guarding Australia’s north-eastern shore against the gnawing blue rollers of the Pacific, the reef sheltered a string of coral islands within its protecting wall and an underwater world that contained one of the most breathtakingly beautiful, complex and extraordinary animal communities on earth. It was a place of a very special order, a world of nature quite unlike any he had ever experienced – ‘more colourful than a Matisse,’ he was to record, ‘more intricate than the Bayeux tapestries, structurally much more beautiful than the Acropolis’. Though he never wrote his intended book about the reef, he did leave behind a rhapsodic account of a day beyond compare spent exploring this as yet unravaged paradise.

  Their first stop, as they throbbed their way across the milk-smooth sea, was a group of small islands that formed part of the breeding area of a bird he had long wanted to meet, the Torres Strait pigeon. Dropping anchor in water as transparent as gin, they scrambled ashore over a graveyard of coral that scrunched and disintegrated under their feet – ‘like walking over the whitened bones of a million dinosaurs’. The pigeons, large and milk-white, with huge jet-black liquid eyes, showed little fear of man, and this was costing them dear, for though they were a protected species they were mercilessly poached, and their numbers had dropped alarmingly.

  They sailed on across a placid sea towards the outer rim of the reef, then put on flippers and masks and submerged in the lukewarm water. Gerald had known roughly what to expect, but what he saw so stunned him that he cried out in astonishment and swallowed a lungful of water for his pains:

  The coral gardens lay spread in a million different shapes and colours and textures. It was like floating over the multicoloured roofs of a medieval city, here a church spire picked out in russet red, gold, and magenta, there a row of lesser houses with steeply canted roofs, white and brittle as sugar, studded with gold and blue cowries. Moving busily through all this were red and white spotted crabs, yellow and black eels, and above all, fish – large fish and fish so small they were like little glinting embers, fish green-gold as a tiger’s eye, working their way assiduously over the craniums of brain coral, each the size of a dining-room table. There were beds of anemones, pink and white and as frilly as a Victorian bonnet. And everywhere, it seemed, prowled that great enemy of the Barrier Reef, the crown of thorns starfish, each the size of a soup plate or bigger. The variety of living things was bewildering. It was an enormous biological firework display.

  It wasn’t just the colours – it was also the shapes. There were fish encrusted with spines like hedgehogs, others with horns like cows, others shaped like a box or elongated like a tape-measure, some shaped like harps or hatchets, some like boomerangs and some like kites. ‘We were like children in a toyshop, clinging to coral, pointing out to each other the fish that nosed gently around us, and everywhere the great rainbow-coloured sculptures of coral.’ ‘You realise,’ Gerald added happily, ‘that nature can still do things better than Hollywood.’

  They climbed out of this underwater Arcadia to have Christmas dinner, then, replete with turkey and champagne, sank gratefully back into that primordial maelstrom of colours. It was late in the day before they could tear themselves away. The evening sky was pale leaf-green. Their bodies were burnt scarlet by the sun, their skin rough with dried salt, their heads spinning. Then, across the water, they saw something strange. ‘We looked to where the sky seemed to have developed a hundred twinkling stars,’ Gerald wrote, ‘which shot nearer to us until we realised they were the wing beats of the Torres Straits Pigeons flying back to their nests, cool white against the green sky, gleaming like shooting stars.’

  Gerald vowed to spend another Christmas on the Barrier Reef before he died, and though he never did, this incomparable marine wonderland remained for ever dear to his heart. Not surprisingly, he took up the cudgels during the controversy that ensued when it was proposed
that drilling for oil should be permitted on the reef. Though conservation had made great strides in Australia since his first visit eight years before, the local politicians (like politicians all over the world) seemed oblivious of the issues at stake. ‘The average Australian,’ he protested in a public letter to a Melbourne newspaper, ‘now realises he lives in one of the most fascinating and biologically unique continents in the world and he is aware of the necessity of trying to preserve what is left of it before it is too late. Unfortunately, he appears to be badly served by his politicians, who display an astonishing ignorance on any subject that is not immediately connected with sheep, opals, minerals or anything else that can make them a quick buck … The problem the conservationist has is a difficult one: it is how to educate the politicians, for by and large they are like retarded children.’

  From Queensland the party headed up across the northern half of Australia, and in March 1970, shortly before setting sail for home, Gerald filed a progress report for the Trust’s newsletter back in distant Jersey:

  I’m writing this from Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, and the temperature is 104 in the shade if you can find any. Travelling by road, as we have done, gives you a much better impression of the country and its vastness, and we are unanimous in our conviction that this is one of the most fascinating continents in the world. We have been lucky enough to see a great cross-section of Australian wildlife, from the Pigmy Flying Possums the size of a walnut to Red Kangaroos as tall as a man, from the bizarre duck-billed platypus to the almost equally strange green mountain possum, from the spectacular Wedge-tailed Eagles and huge and brilliant Cockatoos down to the tiny Spinifex bird and weeny multicoloured Parrakeets.

  But it wasn’t just the wildlife that delighted them. The Australian people they met, including many members of the Trust, impressed them greatly – ‘all dedicated in one way or another to the conservation not only of Australia’s unique fauna but also the magnificent landscape it lives in’.

  Early in May 1970 Gerald, Jacquie, Saranne Calthorpe and Ann Peters returned at last to Jersey. A little later Gerald had lunch with his publisher in London. He might do a book on Australia, he said. He had even thought of a title for it: ‘Bonking Round Oz with Three Sheilas’.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Pulling Through

  1970–1971

  During the course of 1970 Gerald’s life seemed to return to a more even keel. He had got over the worst of his nervous breakdown, though he was not yet back to work. He had managed to kick whisky and nicotine (he now smoked cigarettes without inhaling), and as an antidote to stress he eventually turned to yoga. Rising early, he would drink his first cup of tea of the day, then gently lower his corpulent frame on to the floor, where he would not only look like Buddha but act like Buddha, sitting practically immobile as he began to ease himself into a slow-motion half-hour routine of cobra, lotus, headstand and bow. If it hadn’t been for yoga, he reckoned, he didn’t know how he would have coped after his crack-up – it virtually saved his life. The exercises were relaxing, but it was what they did to his mind that was so important. Yoga, he once told a friend, was like a perfect wife – ‘It only asks what you want to give it.’ If he had had his way he would have made it compulsory in schools, instead of football.

  By now Gerald was taking little other exercise. He was not a physically active man. When the world traveller and bushwhacker was at home he would remain strictly within his own confined orbit, and might move no further than fifty feet from his chair or desk or kitchen table in a day. Though he was a nomad at heart, he was sedentary by inclination, and his pleasures were mostly domestic ones. ‘I adore cooking,’ he was to reiterate time and again. ‘It’s very soothing. My idea of bliss is to have eight people round to dinner and cook a gorgeous repast for them.’ He was a passionate and highly accomplished cook, with no moral reservations about cooking and eating animals, be they fish, flesh or fowl. ‘Of course I will eat a salmon,’ he once declared defiantly, ‘provided it’s not the last salmon.’ ‘You can’t be sentimental and run a zoo,’ he would say. ‘You have to feed animals to the animals. Can you imagine feeding a lion on dog biscuits?’

  In his time Gerald had eaten all sorts of creatures: iguana (‘revolting’), crocodile (‘unpleasant’), hippopotamus (‘even more unpleasant’), python (‘high grade blotting paper’), cane rat and pouched rat (‘both delicate and delicious’), bear’s paw (‘wonderful’), beaver (‘a test for all your organs’), porcupine (‘wonderful casseroled or smoked’), guanaco (‘pleasant but you don’t yearn for a second helping’), paca (‘delicious gamey meat’), horse (‘delicious if cooked carefully’), seagull (‘never again’), peacock (‘heavy and rich’), penguin (‘ugh’), black swan (‘very good’) and rook (‘nice’), along with anaconda, emu eggs, conger eel, termites, locusts and much else besides.

  When he was in the flat at the zoo it was generally curries that were the order of the day. Down at the Mazet, however, where life was more leisurely, he gave his repertoire full rein. He delighted most in the richer, naughtier end of classic French cooking – all calvados and cream, brandy and blood, calories and cholesterol: bisque de homard, hare with olives in wine, quails stuffed with raisins and pine nuts, marinated venison. This was the kind of fare he defined as ‘sexy’ – ‘The way to a girl’s bedroom,’ he once remarked, ‘is through her stomach.’

  Entertaining was part of the same pleasure, but it had to be strictly on his own terms. He was generally uncomfortable at other people’s parties, and always happiest at his own. In London the venue could be Bertorelli’s restaurant, where the company as often as not included Theodore Stephanides, Peggy Peel, Peter Bull and Alan Thomas and his wife. In France it was the Mazet and his brother Larry and his present companion, David Hughes and Mai Zetterling, the sculptor Elizabeth Frink and her husband, and his artist neighbour Tony Daniells. In Jersey (eschewing island society for the most part) it was the flat and his closest and most trusted friends and colleagues at the zoo, including Sam and Catha Weller, Jeremy Mallinson, John Hartley, and later Simon Hicks and Tony Allchurch – the last four comprising a group Gerald knew affectionately (to their embarrassment) as ‘the boys’. ‘In Jersey,’ noted Peter Grose, who was now at the London office of Curtis Brown, and had taken over Gerald’s literary affairs from Richard Scott Simon, ‘Gerry never ran a salon for interesting new faces but often held a court of familiar old faces. If you went to stay at the manor the same people would come to dinner every time – huge meals in which Gerald himself would play a huge part, serving up enormous plates of dead animals galore. He always kept a coterie of close and trusted friends, but when he travelled the faces would change and he would set off with an entourage, usually of women, because he was at home in the company of women and liked to flirt with them all.’

  Gerald loved giving, and his generosity knew no bounds. He would take his friends out to lunches and dinners at the very best restaurants for the very best food and wine, all paid for out of his own pocket. His generosity was not the flamboyant, self-serving kind, but an expression of genuine love and friendship. When his film and television agent Dick Odgers had to go to hospital, Gerald went to some pains to have two bottles of champagne delivered to his bedside ‘to cheer the old bugger up’. When his former secretary Doreen Evans, who had become an air hostess, was badly injured after falling out of an aeroplane, Gerald sent her an unusual get-well present – a huge scarab beetle of the kind sacred to the ancient Egyptians, which had been blown across to Corfu by the khamsin wind early one hot summer, and which he had found and had mounted and framed especially for her. Birthday and Christmas celebrations were fulsome and unstinted. Anniversary or invitation cards were usually designed by Gerald himself with pen-and-ink artwork, often depicting cartoon animals or himself and Jacquie.

  Reading was a lifetime’s passion. ‘Apart from my own books, which I always read at bed time as a soporific,’ he once declared, ‘I am omnivorous in my tastes and, to most people’s horro
r, I read five or six books at once, leaving them in different parts of the house and devouring a few pages as I pass. It might be anything from the latest Dick Francis (a splendid writer – I’m very jealous), to a book of poetry, an erudite tome on the sex life of the Patagonian weasel or the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. To me, a house without books is an empty shell. To have well-stocked bookshelves cuddling you is like having a thousand sights, sounds, smells and sparkling ideas. Books are things to be cherished in the same way people cherish jewels, great paintings or great architecture. It is an honour to turn the pages of a book.’ When he was in the right mood and in congenial company he would recite his favourite verse or prose passages, usually comic ones, from memory. He could reduce an audience to tears with his rendition of Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’. If his memory failed him he would invent his own limericks, most of them rude.

  Often he would switch on the television in the sitting-room at the flat as a way of marking the end of the working day – the more mindless the programme the more definitive the demarcation. He was an avid film-watcher – almost always on television, for he virtually never went out to a cinema, or for that matter anywhere else in the evening if he could help it, unless it was to a close friend’s for dinner. He had an interest in the paranormal, and particularly enjoyed horror movies with really good monsters in them. If he had not sought a career in the zoo world, he reckoned, he might have made a passable film director, for he adored the medium, and the business of story structure and visual interpretation and cutting and splicing, and felt comfortable in the company of actors and stars.