Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  In the second week of May Gerald, Lee and most of the film crew returned to Mauritius to film sequences that had been missed first-time round due to time lost at the beginning of the production. Their original director, Michael Maltby, was no longer with them. At Nosy Komba the tension between him and Gerald had become unbearable, and he had been replaced by Alastair Brown. But, after three and a half months on the move, under often arduous and stressful conditions, Gerald’s emotional insecurity finally erupted in a most dramatic and unexpected way.

  In the first year or two of his marriage to Lee Gerald was always on tenterhooks, afraid some handsome young man would come along and take her away from him. His anxiety reached its most acute stage during the making of Ark on the Move, as the series’ producer Paula Quigley recalled: ‘The film crew consisted of mostly young, presentable, masculine kind of guys. If we went into the forest there would be two or three good-looking young men along with us.’ Gerald’s jealousy occasionally burst to the surface in full-blown apoplectic rages, and his problems with the original director, were largely due to his groundless suspicions that he had his eyes on Lee. Things reached an astonishing climax one night in Mauritius, as Paula Quigley was to relate:

  We were shooting a special event – a sega dance – out at a special patch of ground. It was night and we’d brought in lights and food and drink, everything to help the thing along, and as the night wore on Gerry was sitting in the middle of it like a great Buddha with everyone around him paying court. Eventually John Hartley had a bright idea to move things along. In Madagascar he had learned a special native dance called a crocodile dance. Why didn’t he and Lee do a crocodile dance to keep everyone amused? The director thought this was a good idea, so John and Lee went into the middle, the music started up and they started doing a crocodile dance, jerking themselves across the grass in the press-up position in a series of little jerks – a crocodile mime. There was nothing suggestive about this, there wasn’t even any touching, but suddenly out of nowhere up storms Gerry, roaring with rage, standing there among all those people bellowing his head off, utterly enraged, a deep, seething, volcanic rage from the pits of his being – primordial jealousy incarnate. Well, the music stopped dead, and there was absolute silence, and John was running one way, into the dark of the forest, and Lee was running another way, and Gerry was being led into the shadows, away from the film lights, and the film crew just stood there, totally shell-shocked.

  Next morning the crew turned up at the unit hotel at the appointed time, but Gerald didn’t show up. Paula went to his room, and found him terribly contrite that he had been so unprofessional as to miss his start time. He was very kind and sweet to the crew after that, but never said anything about the extraordinary events of the night before. But John Hartley wanted Paula to buy him an air ticket home, and eventually Paula told Gerry that he would have to apologise unreservedly to John, which he did, in a most profuse and heartfelt manner.

  At the time of the filming of Ark on the Move, Paula wouldn’t have given good odds on Gerald and Lee’s marriage surviving. But after a year or so things began to get easier, and by the time of the next big series Gerald was feeling much more secure about Lee. Paula was also able to head off recurrences of Gerald’s outburst, making sure, for example, that he always came out to locations with Lee, and that Lee wasn’t left alone with young men.

  Gerald and Lee went home to Jersey, where for three weeks they were busy shooting the zoo sequences which opened each episode of the series. Then they were free to spend the summer as they chose. In Jersey Gerald generally tried to steer clear of the island social round, and he had few intimates outside the world of the zoo. He was a naturally shy man, and though his outsize personality and worldwide fame tended to steer him into the company of the rich and the famous, the great and the good, he preferred to mix with them on informal terms, and could only really cope with formal functions with the help of a generous (though discreet) libation or two. There were times, however, when Gerald – a bon viveur at heart – entered into the spirit of the big bash or grand do with gusto. His wedding had been one example, and in the summer of 1981 it seemed he planned to continue in that vein.

  It began with a visit to the opera at Glyndebourne, one of the finest small opera houses in the world, set in a beautiful mansion and a lovely old garden in the depths of the Sussex countryside. Gerald was determined that Lee should appear looking like a princess. During his travels in India before his marriage he had bought her a quantity of native saris, and in Jersey he found a dressmaker who was able to transform this material into something completely different. ‘With her hair up and in this ensemble,’ he wrote to Lee’s parents, ‘she looked like something straight out of Hollywood. I was the envy of every man at Glyndebourne, and there was not a woman there who could touch Lee for either looks or appearance.’

  There was something else about Glyndebourne that excited Gerald particularly. Always a great man for seeing like in unlike, he perceived that this opera house was in its way an ideal model for his zoo. ‘I was enchanted with the whole thing,’ he explained, ‘because I have always said that what I want is for this place in Jersey to be small but perfect like Glyndebourne – I am glad that I was not disappointed in my choice of simile.’

  The next engagement on the agenda was a garden party at Buckingham Palace – ‘one of those intimate little affairs with only about three thousand other guests’ – followed by a night out to see Noël Coward’s Present Laughter in the West End and to meet up backstage with the play’s leading lady, the stage and screen star Dinah Sheridan – an encounter all the more jolly for the fact that she and Durrell were each ardent fans of the other. A few days later Gerald and Lee set off for the Mazet on a leisurely, meandering, five-day drive. They aimed to spend three months in their Languedoc retreat, for both needed to unwind, and both had books to write.

  Towards the end of 1981 Gerald’s new novel, The Mockery Bird, was published in Britain, and it came out in the United States a few months later. In some ways the book was a new departure for him – a story with a message for grown-ups, his ‘political book’ – but its publishing history had caused him considerable aggravation. At the time of his set-to with Collins the previous summer he had complained to his in-laws in Memphis:

  Let me tell you of the thing that almost gave me fourteen coronaries in rapid succession. About ten days ago, I received the page proofs of my new novel (I had not seen galleys) and discovered to my horror that they had passed it over to some awful illiterate little editor who had the audacity to practically rewrite the thing. Snorting wrath I rushed round to my publishers while I was in London and told them they would have to hold up publication on the book. As a result of that, one of the senior members of the firm is flying over here this evening and has been instructed by me to be at the Zoo at 6 o’clock tomorrow morning; we are going to go through every page of the manuscript and put it back to what it originally was – a mammoth undertaking which I could well do without at the moment – however I can’t let such a travesty go out under my name.

  Inevitably the book came out late, but at least in a form that conformed with Gerald’s sense of authorial integrity.

  A cautionary and moralistic tale on a conservational theme, with a few satirical digs at conservationists of the conference-hopping variety thrown in – some of them allegedly thinly disguised real people – The Mockery Bird was an ingeniously spun story of events on the mythical island of Zenkali (a fictional version of Mauritius), home of the extinct but revered Mockery Bird and the no less extinct Ombu tree. The hero is a born-again conservationist by the name of Peter Foxglove, who discovers fifteen pairs of Mockery Birds and four hundred Ombu trees all alive and well in a valley scheduled to be flooded as part of a dastardly British plan to turn Zenkali into a military base, complete with a deep-water harbour and hydro-electric dam. Eventually it becomes clear that the economy of the entire island depends on the Mockery Bird, so in alliance with the island’s benev
olent monarch, Kingy by name, and the genial eccentrics who comprise his court, Foxglove foils the plan and saves the island paradise.

  The Mockery Bird was an ingenious and, by Gerald’s standards of fiction, relatively ambitious tale, but though it received some good reviews – the New Yorker praised it as ‘delightful’ – it found relatively little favour compared with many of his other books, a reflection perhaps of its troubled genesis.

  Gerald meanwhile stumped round the halls on the mainland, drumming up publicity for the book. On 6 December, for example, he gave an after-dinner speech, billed as ‘Meet Best-Seller Gerald Durrell’, at the Europa Gallery in Sutton. On 9 December he was guest speaker at the London Evening Standard Literary Luncheon at the Barbican Centre. His name still pulled the crowds, and there was never an empty seat at these events, and rarely anything but a rapt and appreciative response.

  In the New Year of 1982 Gerald sent his end-of-term report to the McGeorges in Memphis. He had been given another conservation award and made an Officer of the Golden Ark by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. The reviews of Ark on the Move suggested it had gone down very well – ‘principally due to the fact that we had a good sex image in Lee, who out-acted even the animals, and that takes some doing’ – and the book of the series was going to come out in the States the following year. It had been a busy year, and they couldn’t wait to get away ‘and relax with a couple of Bloody Marys – or six’.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The Amateur Naturalist

  1982–1984

  Gerald Durrell no longer enjoyed an intimate, hands-on relationship with animals on a day-to-day basis as he used to do. He no longer had any pet animals up in his flat, and the animals out in the zoo were in the exclusive care of the staff. The truth was that he was no longer the simple animal man of his youth, but the corporate executive and chief strategist and fund-raiser of an animal preservation society whose business was global. He was also a leading campaigner and evangelist for a cause that was urgent and all-demanding – a cause whose principal tenet was that all life was sacrosanct, that all living forms were of value, that the sanctity of the gift of life was paramount, irrespective of what human politics or religion decreed.

  Yet in middle age Gerald retained much of the sense of wonder and enthusiasm of his boyhood, and down at the Mazet, away from his highly professional, ultra-scientific zoo, he was able to indulge his old-fashioned naturalist enthusiasms all over again. ‘He loves all animals, even wasps, even mosquitoes,’ reported journalist Lynn Barber after a visit to Gerald’s summer hideaway. ‘And, like the small boy that he really is (though cunningly disguised these days as a silver-haired old man) he is never without his private menagerie.’ Almost Gerald’s only personal association with wildlife these days was the little collection of tiny creatures Lee gathered on a casual basis during their lengthy stays at the Mazet and housed in a motley assortment of dishes and tanks on the terrace – a slow worm, maybe, a scorpion, a praying mantis, a large green bush cricket, a stick insect, wasps saved from drowning in the swimming pool – all of which were let go when they returned to Jersey.

  Though Gerald Durrell was one of the world’s leading animal conservationists, he remained in a sense an amateur naturalist. Amateur in the sense that (like Darwin and Fabre) he had no professional qualifications – the average schoolboy visitor to Jersey Zoo was probably better qualified on paper than he, while the Trust’s Scientific Advisory Committee could look like a bunch of Aristotles by comparison. And amateur in the sense that in the modern scientific world a naturalist pure and simple could be nothing else, given that the science of biology had moved into utterly new worlds, such as molecular biochemistry and evolutionary biology. As a newspaper in distant New Zealand elegantly put it: ‘Durrell’s passion for wild things drives his life. He has made nature into his profession, but as a naturalist he is a true amateur: one who does his work for love.’

  All things considered, therefore, it was an inspired idea to involve Gerald, with Lee, in a tailor-made project which was to occupy them both for the best part of two years. The Amateur Naturalist: The Classic Practical Guide to the Natural World was the brainchild of a young publisher by the name of Joss Pearson, then working for the London-based book-packaging company Dorling Kindersley. The basic plan, evolved early in 1980, was for a lavishly illustrated handbook that would prove essential for the army of amateur naturalists around the world who wished to learn about the best practical ways to pursue their pastime, be it in their own attic or backyard or in the natural habitats beyond. Inherent in the concept from the start was the notion that not only should the book be the best-ever guide to the subject, but the best-selling book of its sort ever. Obviously it was important that such an ambitious enterprise should have a big name attached, and early on it seems that Joss Pearson had Gerald Durrell in mind as the author. He was in many ways an obvious choice: not only was he a best-selling nature writer, but as a boy had been a notable example of the book’s ideal target reader – the dedicated young amateur naturalist.

  From the outset it was understood that Gerald and Lee would write the book jointly. Both were enthusiastic about the project. Not only did it fall within their areas of expertise, but it allowed Gerald to pursue one of his most passionate concerns – the education of the young around the world in a knowledge of and a respect for all living things and their survival and preservation. Though the initial advance of £30,000 was not over-generous in Gerald’s view, the anticipated minimum print run of 160,000 copies (in the end its sales were to be more than ten times greater) was tempting, and the royalty percentage would be the highest ever paid by Dorling Kindersley. In due course there would also be a major television series based on the book, set up initially by a young English director by the name of Jonathan Harris, who would direct six of the programmes and become a close friend of Gerald and Lee.

  Joss Pearson had already worked out the book’s basic format and design, providing an overall structure in storyboard form to which the Durrells’ input had to conform, though it was Lee who decided the order of battle of each individual chapter. The book was to be divided into twelve major ecosystems, ranging from tropical forests to seas and oceans, from meadows and hedgerows to desert and tundra. Within each habitat there would be an account of the flora and fauna of each micro-habitat comprising the whole, together with a number of mini-essays and spreads on the techniques that could be employed by the amateur naturalist in each location, and the recognition and collection of the various creatures inhabiting it.

  It was comprehensive, well-informed, hands-on stuff, fired by an underlying sense of wonder and a reverence for life in all its forms. Gerald wrote in the opening section, ‘On Becoming a Naturalist’:

  Throughout my life it has always astonished me that people can look at an animal or plant and say ‘Isn’t it loathsome?’ or ‘Isn’t it horrible?’ I think that a true naturalist must view everything objectively. No creature is horrible. You may not want to curl up in bed with a rattlesnake or a stinging nettle, and you may find it irritating (as I once did) when giant land snails invade your tent and eat all your food, but these organisms have just as much right in the world as we have … A naturalist is lucky in two respects. First, he enjoys every bit of the world about him. Second, he can indulge his hobby in any place at any time … He can be equally moved by the great herds on the African plains or by the earwigs in his back garden.

  The work involved in the project was considerable, and it was an enormous help that the Durrells were able to divide the task between themselves – Lee doing much of the research and draft shaping of chapters, Gerald doing most of the writing. Progress was often held up by their many other commitments, not least the filming of Ark on the Move, but by 28 January 1982 Gerald was able to report to Alan Thomas: ‘Lee and I are at the moment going quite demented trying to finish off The Amateur Naturalist book which I think will be really rather splendid when it is finished.’ It was frantic work, as Joan Porter, who ha
d taken over as Gerald’s secretary and executive secretary to the Trust a few years back, vividly recalled:

  Gerry’s writing was diabolical – very scribbly – but I could read it. He ended up dictating most of his stuff. So did Lee. Working on The Amateur Naturalist, I would take down their dictation and type it, then they would cut and paste it and I would retype it, working all hours. His books were all dictated during my time, mainly straight from his head. When he dictated his books he would become quicker and quicker as he became involved and excited. Whether he dictated his books to me directly, or sent me a tape to transcribe, I would often find myself laughing my head off at his humour. His previous secretary told me that she sometimes blushed at what she was asked to take down in shorthand and type. Perhaps because I was more mature I was never fazed at what I had to type, although I sometimes thought, ‘Cripes, what’s the shorthand for that?’ He never blew his top with me, and I loved him dearly. He was an adorable man. He appreciated effort and kindness in others. I sometimes had bunches of flowers left on my desk, and once, when he had gone off to France, he left a large note stuck on my typewriter saying ‘I love you.’ But he idolised Lee and certainly never flirted with other women.

  By February 1982 the annual fund-raising trip to America was imminent, at the end of which Gerald and Lee planned to spend some time in Memphis before going down to the Mazet. But these plans went badly awry. By the second week of February the big book – 150,000 words in length – was finished, but the struggle to finish it had evidently taken a lot out of Gerald, and on the thirteenth he was suddenly taken seriously ill at the Churchill Hotel in London, on the eve of their departure for the United States. ‘I’d seen him with bouts of short intensive depression,’ Lee recalled, ‘but this was something completely different. He’d been pretty stressed out in the past few weeks but we’d had a few days in London and he seemed OK and was sitting up in bed relaxed watching TV when all of a sudden he went rigid and had terrible convulsions and collapsed unconscious. I had never seen anything like this in my life. I had absolutely no idea what was happening. I thought maybe he was having a heart attack, so I tried to pump his heart, which turned out to be the worst thing I could have done. I called the hotel manager and he came up and peered at Gerry and he didn’t know what it was either, so he called the doctor. Then after about twenty minutes Gerry started coming round and he looked up and he saw me and a complete stranger sitting on the edge of the bed and he said to the manager: “Who the hell are you? What are you doing here? Why are you sitting on the bed with my wife?”’ Lee had witnessed her first grand mal seizure. Gerry was taken off to the Middlesex Hospital for tests, the American tour was postponed, and on 25 February he and Lee flew out on medical advice for a complete rest in the British Virgin Islands, where for two or three weeks they stayed on Guana Island, a short walk from the beach and the warm blue waters of the Caribbean