‘The crux of the meeting,’ Gerald explained, ‘was that Madagascar was getting inundated with requests from foreign scientists to work there and all these were ending up on Madame Berthe’s desk and she had no way of knowing which ones were good and which ones were not; so for the last seven years she has just been saying “no” to everybody, which has frustrated the scientific world enormously and also was no help to conservation in Madagascar. The idea of this meeting was to try and find a way round this impasse.’ This they did. Gerald related:
This was really a very great triumph for the Trust and for Lee, because all these scientists, plus the WWF, plus the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, had been trying to achieve this for nearly ten years without success, and to do it within twenty-four hours was really miraculous and it showed the amount of hard work and thought that had gone into it. In addition to this, Madame Berthe brought another agreement, which we signed, between the Madagascar government and the Trust here, which allows us carte blanche to go and collect animals from Madagascar and bring them back here to form breeding colonies. Also part of the agreement was that we should train two Malagasy who will come over to us some time during the course of this year. The whole thing was a tremendous tour de force and we are all very excited by it.
On 15 February 1983 Gerald received his OBE at Buckingham Palace. He was enormously proud to be given the honour, though always insisting that the real meaning of the initials was ‘Other Buggers’ Efforts’. ‘The OBE is quite a handsome little cross thing, made out of gold,’ he reported to his Memphis in-laws, ‘so when Lee and I get hard up, we can always sell it … I was the only OBE to get press coverage.’
It was Gerald’s understanding that the next item on the agenda was lunch with Lord Craigton, an influential Trustee of the Jersey Trust, and his wife. He was therefore surprised to find so many other guests waiting on the pavement outside the restaurant, among them Eamonn Andrews, the compere of the popular television programme This is Your Life – on which, as Gerald described it to Lee’s parents, ‘a steady stream of people that you have not seen for ninety years’ pounce on you from behind a screen. Instead of the slap-up meal he had been expecting, he was whisked away to a secret room in the BBC studios, where he was kept in purdah from the other guests and fed on sandwiches and champagne.
Then the show started, before a large audience. The first people to appear from behind the screen were Gerald’s secretary Joan Porter, Catha Weller, Jeremy Mallinson, Simon Hicks, Shep Mallett and Betty Boizard. Brian Bell had been flown over from New Zealand, and Wahab Owadally and Yousoof Mungroo from Mauritius. An interview had been shot with Larry, who could not come as he had a commitment to make another film. Also present were Gerald’s kindergarten teacher, Miss Squires (‘at the age of eighty-seven looking as though she would outlive us all’), Mai Zetterling, Dinah Sheridan, Sir Peter Scott, Margaret and her son. There was even a film clip of Theodore Stephanides, who was apparently too unwell to attend the show.
Or so it seemed. Gerald was thunderstruck when suddenly the real Theo stepped gingerly on to the set – frail and elderly, but as impeccably turned-out and as sharp-witted as ever, and beaming hugely. This was the reunion to end all reunions. Master and pupil embraced as only two old friends whose friendship went back nearly half a century could, knowing that it might be for the last time – as indeed it was. Then Gerald seized Theo’s hand and led him forward towards the camera, raised the old man’s hand and lifted it high above his head in a gesture of salutation, triumph and love.
Then it was back to The Amateur Naturalist. For the next six months Gerald and Lee were on the road, moving from one continent and habitat to another – in March the Umfolzi reserve in South Africa, for the grassland shoot; in April the Sonora Desert in Arizona, for the desert shoot; in May New York City (‘one of the most squalid, repulsive, dirty, beautiful and exciting of cities’) to film the wildlife of city dump, cemetery, vacant lot, backstreet eat-house, slum, golf course and apartment block for the city programme; then in England and Wales for the wettest June ever, location shooting for the pond, river and hedgerow programmes, crisscrossing back and forth to catch a patch of sun; then to Corfu for the garden programme, Matchbox Menagerie; followed by Canada for the whole of July and August and into September, working on post-production in Toronto and shooting the mountain and remaining coniferous sequences in Banff and the Riding Mountains.
‘Shooting The Amateur Naturalist was very demanding,’ Paula Quigley recalled, ‘but I think for Gerry it was in general a very happy eighteen-month period (and I should know because I had to supply the scotch!). We had excellent and easy-to-live-with film crews. Gerry knew that he personally was being made to look good and that the animal footage was first rate. Gerry also knew that, for the first time, Lee was being treated seriously (in Ark on the Move she was used as window-dressing) and that we were helping to establish her credibility and own identity as a Durrell. And I think he knew he would get a helluva book out of it.’
Perhaps there was no happier period in the whole year’s filming than that spent on Corfu – Gerald’s first visit to the island since his catastrophic breakdown in 1968. ‘Gerry was quite, quite wonderful in Corfu and did, literally, relive his childhood,’ Paula Quigley recalled. Many of the sequences were filmed in and around the Snow-White Villa at Pérama, no longer white, but damp-stained, cracking and decayed, on the terrace of which Gerald, at ease with himself and the camera, did a beautiful piece about the joys of being an amateur naturalist. Further afield he caught terrapins in his favourite pond, caught lizards in his favourite olive grove, sailed in a caïque down his favourite coastline, explained how to start a mealworm farm, studied the denizens of a drop of puddle water through the old brass microscope he had used on Corfu as a boy, and sung the praises of a wild, uncultivated garden like the Snow-White Villa’s, rich in hidden life.
Wherever he went on the island he was greeted like the wanderer returned. ‘People fell all over him,’ Paula recalled. ‘People he knew from years and years ago. They were so excited to see him back. It was incredible. I hadn’t realised how many people directly related their own prosperity to Gerry’s book. They really did believe he had brought them a livelihood they had never had before. One day we all went to a celebratory lunch in an out-of-town restaurant given in Gerry’s honour by a Corfiot family he had known for years. Afterwards we went for a stroll among the houses and suddenly a man of around Gerry’s age stepped out from behind a house and came forward very reluctantly, obviously concerned that Gerry wouldn’t recognise him. But Gerry did – they were old boyhood friends – and they hugged each other and chatted away in Greek, and the man was so thrilled to have been recognised and so thrilled to be with Gerry again – it was really very, very touching.’
Gerald and Lee had covered half the world to make the series, travelling forty-nine thousand miles by every means available to the ingenuity of man. In England alone they had flown a hot-air balloon, paddled a rowing boat (sinking up to its gunnels under the combined weight of talent and crew), pedalled a bicycle made for two, ridden a steam train and walked on water on a snowshoe-like affair devised by ‘some imbecile inventor’. (‘If successful,’ Gerald quipped, ‘I intend to change my middle name from Malcolm to Oliver by deed poll, so that my initials will more closely resemble my activities and abilities.’) At the end of it all they had made a wonderful series which looked at life on earth through the unusual perspective of the eyes of an amateur naturalist – or a child.
One chance encounter in a New York backstreet with that most dangerous and unpredictable species the New Yorker set them back on their heels. Gerald’s description of this encounter, besides being an example of his comic writing at its best, is an unnerving examination of the validity of what they had been about all this time.
To show how quickly nature could claim back even a part of a big city when the chance arose, the crew had chosen to film on a rubble-covered, dogshit-p
lastered vacant lot on the corner of traffic-bound West 87th Street. They had brought along some live specimens of the tent caterpillar, a major pest in America but, as Gerald put it, ‘really quite fascinating, in the same way as human beings are’. As they were lovingly arranging the caterpillars on the branches of a deformed cherry tree that struggled for existence in the middle of this urban wasteland, they noticed that a local inhabitant was watching their activities open-mouthed.
‘What are youse all doing?’ asked the woman, shifting her bulk uneasily in her tight pants and denim jacket.
‘We’re making a film about wildlife in a city,’ said Paula. ‘We want to show how even in the depths of a city like New York nature can still be found.’
‘Is that what them bugs is for?’
‘Yes,’ said Paula kindly. ‘They’re called tent caterpillars.’
‘They don’t live here, though,’ said the woman. ‘You brung ’em.’
‘Well, yes. You see, there weren’t any here, so we had to bring them for the film,’ said Paula, slightly flustered by now.
‘If there were none here, why did you brung ’em?’
‘For the film,’ snapped Alastair Brown, who was trying to concentrate on whether he wanted the caterpillars to walk from right to left or from left to right.
‘But that’s faking,’ said the woman, arousing herself out of her lethargy. ‘You brung ’em here, and they don’t live here. That’s faking. You brung them bugs here deliberate.’
‘Of course we brung them here,’ said Alastair irritatedly. ‘If we had not brung them, there wouldn’t be any for us to film.’
‘That’s faking,’ said the woman. ‘That’s not true.’
‘Do you realise, madam,’ Gerald intervened in the role of peacemaker, ‘that 90 per cent of films you see on wildlife, like Walt Disney, are faked? The whole process of filming is in a sense a fake.’
‘Walt Disney doesn’t fake,’ said the woman belligerently. ‘Walt Disney is an American. What youse is doing is faking, and faking on our lot.’
‘We have permission from the Mayor’s office,’ said Paula.
‘Have you got permission from the 87th Street Block Association?’ asked the woman, swelling as a turkey to a gobble.
Other locals from the 87th Street Block Association joined in the general outrage. No more faking nature on their lot, they cried. And no more funny bugs. The light in the meantime began to fade, and the crew were forced to abandon the shoot and lock the caterpillars up in the unit van. ‘Frustrating and annoying though this was,’ Gerald was to write, ‘the incident had a certain charm. It was nice to feel that in that giant, brash, apparently uncaring city there were people willing to take up cudgels about a vacant lot covered with dog droppings.’
In the midst of all this, Theo Stephanides, who had played such a critical part in putting the boy Gerald on the path he was to follow when he became a man, died peacefully in his sleep on 13 April 1983, at the age of eighty-seven. Gerald broke the news to his brother Larry: ‘Theodore is dead – another dinosaur extinct. He died peacefully. He left a letter for the matron of the hospital saying he wanted his eyes and any other bits of his body used for scientific research, but with a p.s. to ask if they would make quite sure if he was dead before they did. So he ends not on a bang or a whimper but a Victorian joke.’
Alan Thomas spoke for them all when he wrote to Gerald on 19 April:
What an irreplaceable gap this is going to leave in our lives. I knew him for almost fifty years. The breadth of his mind, his interests and experiences was greater than that of any other man I know. If we had guests in the house, learned professors would ask him about esoteric aspects of classical learning, simple workmen would listen spellbound while he talked about the moon. But it wasn’t only what he knew, but what he was. He had come to maturity, in Corfu, before 1914. He was the perfect embodiment of a classical culture developed in a sane, leisured and peaceful world, such as we shall never see again, and we are fortunate indeed to have experienced it through Theo. And then there was his gentle kindness, his sense of humour, his humility. He was humble in the way that truly remarkable characters sometimes are. As for you, Gerry, I can hardly comprehend what this loss will mean to you. Comfort yourself that you have immortalised Theo. That people all over the world will know Theo through your books. And people as yet unborn will know him.
In memory of the most important man in his life Gerald opened a special fund in his memory at Jersey. Donations to ‘Theo’s Fund’ would be used to plant a grove of trees in the grounds of the Trust, and to contribute towards the education of children in the identification, character and relationships of wild organisms. Gerald also dedicated his new book, The Amateur Naturalist, to the man who had showed him the way: ‘my mentor and friend, without whose guidance I would have achieved nothing’. Lee for her part dedicated the book to her grandfather, a similar kind of mentor, who had encouraged her early interest in wildlife, ‘especially by building palatial homes for my animals’.
On 9 September there was a pre-transmission screening of The Amateur Naturalist in London. The reception was enthusiastic. ‘I think you’ve got an absolutely super series,’ television distributor Richard Price wrote to Gerald and Lee. ‘Both of you come over very well indeed, and I think it is one of the best examples I have seen of an entertaining but highly educative documentary. I am sure it is going to rate well on both sides of the Atlantic.’ It was destined to do even better than that, selling to stations in over forty countries and reaching 150 million viewers.
In Britain The Amateur Naturalist started broadcasting on Channel 4 on 23 September 1983. Like the book on which it was based, the series was greeted with almost universally glowing reviews in the world’s press. ‘The Amateur Naturalist exudes from every frame that most beguiling of qualities – a childlike sense of wonder,’ declared the Toronto Globe and Mail in Canada. ‘Throughout, this series unobtrusively but firmly sets its face against prejudice: that against snakes, flies, spiders, rats – and women,’ wrote the Times Educational Supplement. Jonathan Harris was commended for his direction and the ‘strong whiff of locality’ he had created. ‘As performers the Durrells have class,’ said the Sunday Telegraph. ‘Gerald Durrell is now the doyen of television naturalists,’ agreed the Guardian.
Pat Ferns wanted Gerald and Lee to embark on their third thirteen-part international television series, Durrell in Russia, as soon as possible after The Amateur Naturalist. The basic concept was simple. Gerald and Lee would fulfil a long-cherished dream of studying at first hand the work being done to protect and breed endangered animals in regions as far apart as the wastes of the Soviet Arctic and the deserts of Soviet Central Asia.
But though the concept was simple, its execution was not. The practical difficulties of filming in the Soviet wilderness meant there would be little opportunity to set out with a thesis and search for the most effective way of presenting this on film. They would have to make the most of what came their way. ‘I believe it is an adventure,’ Pat Ferns told Gerald in January 1984. ‘It is an event, and the role of the director is to cover this event: its successes, its failures, its frustrations and its revelations. I see very little on-camera prepared scripting during its shooting. Thus for you as presenter the focus of your efforts will be much more in the post-production phase, particularly in the production of an effective narration script. So essentially, we are not making a natural history program, but the reason for making the program at all is natural history, and especially your concerns regarding conservation and the natural world.’
On 15 March John Hartley and the proposed series director Jonathan Harris (who had now married Paula Quigley) set off on a fortnight’s pre-production visit to the USSR. They found much enthusiasm from the Russians they met, and it was clear that the name of Durrell could provide access that few others had obtained in the past. But a viewing of Soviet natural history films in Moscow revealed that the country’s nature cameramen were much inferior to their
British counterparts, both as to technique and to ethics – one sequence, showing a tethered goat being devoured alive by wolves, nauseated the British contingent. So poor was the quality of the Russian material that it was obvious the production would have to bring its own camera crew.
Jonathan Harris, though, would not be with them. He argued with Pat Ferns that interference from Soviet bureaucracy was likely to be so pervasive, and the whole project was so underfunded, that there was no guarantee that the series would be of the standard of The Amateur Naturalist. ‘Over a somewhat difficult evening of high emotion,’ Ferns recalled, ‘I eventually asked Harris and Hartley to leave so I could pitch Gerry and Lee alone on the value of the Russia series. Fortunately I won the day, and was back in Moscow in July to negotiate our deal. I think the trip through the Soviet Union was one of the most remarkable expeditions in Gerry’s life, and despite his health problems he was able to witness a part of the world he had never hoped to visit.’ Another Canadian director, Paul Lang, was assigned in Harris’s place.
Underfunding was not likely to be Gerald and Lee’s problem, for Ferns had offered them a fee of Canadian $350,000 for the series. The books and big television series that they were making through the first half of the eighties were beginning to make them seriously well-heeled. ‘Gerry had been sidelined for a long time in television terms,’ Paula Quigley was to relate. ’Till Pat Ferns came along he hadn’t been on television since the old black and white days, other than on chat shows to promote his books. But now he had a big series on every year, and this made a sizeable difference to his profile and to the growing reputation of Jersey Zoo and Trust. It also created a real role for Lee, which was very important for her. Lee was very attractive on camera and, to be frank, she worked her butt off to do it well, and so she and Gerald were seen as a team, and that made a big difference to their relationship and to her being taken seriously in her own right. And of course Gerry earned a hell of a lot of money out of these series. This was very important, because he’d been relatively poor quite long enough up to then. The money enabled them to develop the Mazet and it put him on the road non-stop, with someone else footing the bill, so that he was able to come back with a tremendous amount of material for his next book.’
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