I am sure that you are both agog to know all the details of my hypochondria. Everyone kept telling me that what I was suffering from was a spastic colon, so twice I went over to London and they pushed a thing that looked like a gigantic telescope into me and showed me all my internal organs in cinemascope and technicolor on a television screen. There was a strange, small, white, dagger-like thing hanging down and I said to myself, ‘so that is where my penis has gone’. I was rather disappointed to find that it was my appendix. However, everything looked rather rosy in every sense of the word and so they kept saying ‘it quite obviously is a spastic colon’.
Reassured to some degree, in spite of the continuing pain, Gerald and Lee drove back down to the Mazet in early December. By now Gerald had set aside his autobiography – he had reached the age of twenty-two in a discursive kind of way – and was concentrating all his energies on getting through each day as best he could. ‘Starting around Christmas and into January Gerry was feeling awful,’ Lee recalled. ‘He’d get these terrible, awful stomach pains; they were so bad he’d cry with pain, and of course he’d drink more to deaden them. This was BIG pain, so intense that every afternoon it made him weep.’
Gerald wrote to his parents-in-law: ‘The pain became so intense that I simply could not work, could not think and was driving Lee mad because I am not the most docile of patients. So she phoned up our GP and he said ‘Tell your husband to give up smoking instantly’; which lowered my faith in him somewhat since I gave up smoking thirty years ago. Then they popped me into the local hospital and got an expert liver man.’
He was in the hospital in Nîmes for four days. On the third day the senior consultant called Lee into his office. The scans, he said, showed a massive cirrhosis of the liver. They also showed a tumour. ‘I have no doubt,’ he told Lee, ‘that your husband has got cancer of the liver.’
‘I made the decision not to tell Gerry that,’ Lee recalled. ‘I did tell him there was some cirrhosis, because that was no big surprise – it had been spotted in previous investigations – but the tumour was absolutely brand new.’
From the Mazet Lee rang their GPs in Jersey and London, Dr Jeremy Guyer and Dr Guy O’Keeffe, and asked their advice. Both recommended that Gerald should come straight back to London, where at least he could swear in his native language, and Guy O’Keeffe arranged for him to be admitted to the private Cromwell Hospital for further tests. Gerald and Lee flew to London on 18 February 1994. Over nearly a month of tests, the original diagnosis was confirmed.
‘It was the doctor who broke the news to Gerry,’ Lee was to relate. ‘He talked it through with him, tried to come up with something positive for him to cling on to. There were treatments available for this sort of thing, he said, and they could put him on morphine to control the pain. They didn’t tell him he wouldn’t make it to Christmas, which is what they were saying amongst themselves. In fact one of my doctors told me he didn’t think he would last more than two or three months without a liver transplant, which was his only option. There was a lot of discussion as to whether he could be transplanted or not. It was his only hope, but there were a lot of things against it, apparently.’
Gerald was a highly marginal candidate for a transplant. He was over the normal age limit of sixty-five, he had an alcohol problem, and his tumour was large and very advanced. What tipped the balance were the facts that his chances of surviving without a transplant were effectively zero – probably no more than three or four months – and that he was a man who was doing good works in the world at large, and who with luck could go on doing so.
So the decision was taken. Gerald was free to go home to Jersey and wait for a replacement organ of the right blood type to become available. He would then be required to return to London virtually instantly. On 18 March 1994, the day following his return to Jersey, he advised Lee’s parents in astonishingly courageous and cheery tones of the fate that awaited him:
Dearest Both
I am sorry that I have been so dilatory about writing to you but, as Lee will have told you, I spent the summer being a real old hypochondriac and when I am in pain I can’t concentrate on writing. However, they have got me on morphine, which makes my eyes glitter like a Venetian virgin’s at a ball, and at last has subdued the pain. At first, it made me feel woozy but now I feel almost as fit as a fiddle, but almost as weak as a kitten.
So I am now back in Jersey, trying to tidy up my affairs, like, for example, whether I should leave my liver to Lee or not, and various matters of moment such as that.
I hope this in some way explains and mitigates my neglect of you. Rest assured, we will keep you informed of every step of the Hypochondriac’s Gallop into Hell.
It was not certain how much time there would be before the call came from the hospital – assuming it came at all. In this precious interregnum, with Gerald out of pain at last thanks to a heady cocktail of morphine laced with alcohol, he and Lee made the best of their time together. ‘We put our ducks in a row,’ she recalled, ‘and made sure our wills were OK. Then Gerry had a farewell chat with the senior members of the Council and the staff. Geoff Hamon, the Chairman of the Trust Council, was there, and Robin Rumboll, the Treasurer, John Hartley, Gerry’s personal assistant, and Simon Hicks, the Trust Secretary.’ ‘Gerry got very emotional, understandably,’ Robin Rumboll recalled. ‘He thought he was saying goodbye, and broke down and had to leave the room. He was concerned that Lee should be protected and that he was leaving behind a structure that would endure.’
Meanwhile, Simon Hicks reminded Jeremy Mallinson about the matter of the overall review of the Trust’s present and future goals, so that no one would be in the dark if its founder did not survive his looming ordeal. Gerald last worked on this memo while in the Cromwell Hospital on 20 February. Entitled ‘Statement of the Founder’, it read:
We are dedicated to saving endangered species for which captive breeding is considered necessary to ensure their survival, and particularly those species for which breeding programmes would be neglected by zoological parks because of their lack of ‘public appeal’.
Our first and foremost priority is to operate or support these breeding programmes, both in situ and ex situ.
Our second but equally important task is to engage in activities directly designed to ensure these species’ ultimate viability in the wild, including research, training and education, protection or restoration of habitats, and reintroduction into the wild.
Gerald Durrell’s ultimate strategic goal, however, was rather more drastic. It was to close the zoo down and wind up the Trust. ‘This was another of his metaphors,’ Simon Hicks explained, ‘and it’s very clever and very clear. In fact it’s more than a metaphor, it’s more like a parable. He meant that if there were no longer any species in danger of extinction, he would close the Trust down, because it had fulfilled its purpose and he had no desire to run a conventional zoo. That was the ultimate goal – the impossible dream. Wouldn’t it be marvellous, he used to say, to think that one day that could happen.’
By the time Simon went to see Gerald on Trust business on the morning of 27 March, the odds against his mentor’s survival had shortened considerably. Simon was anxious to tidy things up in case the worst came to the worst. ‘By the end of the discussion he had got very tired,’ he remembered. ‘He was not feeling at all well, he was in pain. And he turned to me and he said: “Simon, don’t be afraid of talking about death. Either there’s nothing there at all – or it’s a whole new adventure.” And then he put his hand in the air and fluttered it in a way that was very typical of him, and that was the last time I saw this wonderful spark – the last time I saw him whole and in the round as we all remembered him.’
That evening Gerald and Lee were watching television up in the flat when at around seven o’clock the phone rang. It was the Liver Unit at King’s College Hospital in London. They had a donor organ of the right blood group, B. A plane would be arriving at Jersey at about nine, so an ambulance would be at the zoo
at 8.30. ‘I went back into the sitting-room and told Gerry,’ Lee recalled. ‘I said, “That’s the call. It’s all OK. When you want I’ll pour you another drink. In the meantime I’ll go up and pack the bags.” Gerry seemed to be OK. He was just sitting in his chair as usual. He’d only had a single drink. “I’ll be down in a tick,” I said. So I was messing about upstairs for twenty minutes or so when suddenly I heard a great crash.
‘I came running down and there was Gerry flat out on the drawing room floor with his head at an angle against the bookcase, just lolling there with blood spouting out of the top of his head where he’d hit his crown on a little wooden tortoise. “Oh my God,” I cried, “what have you done?” I got a pillow to put under his head and a kitchen towel to soak up the blood, and he said, “I don’t know, I think I tried to turn a record over on the record player.” It wasn’t drink, he just became disorientated and lost his balance. I immediately rang Jeremy Guyer, our local GP, but he was out of town, so the call was referred to his partner. I didn’t know whether to cancel the operation because of Gerry’s injury, so I rang the liver people to tell them what had happened, and they said it would probably be all right, let’s proceed as planned.’
John Hartley arrived to lend a hand, followed by the doctor, and Lee held Gerry’s head while the doctor stitched him up. ‘Then suddenly we all started howling with laughter – Gerry, John and me. There was Gerry, bleeding away on the floor, about to be rushed over to London for a ghastly ten-hour operation which might save his life, but on the other hand might not – and we were in hysterics, tears of laughter pouring down our faces. The doctor had never met us before and couldn’t understand it, he didn’t know that this was what we always did in a crisis, try and make light of it. Anyway, Gerry was patched up OK, the liver people rang up to check, and then we went down to the ambulance. Gerry had bright pink hair and we were all laughing our heads off.’
After the ambulance had set off Jeremy Mallinson wrote to Gerald’s first wife, Jacquie, to let her know the gravity of what was happening. She replied by return of post:
Dear Jeremy,
Thank you so very much for telling me about Gerry. What a dreadful business, and I feel for Lee. I would like to see Gerry as and when, for I feel very strongly that it is time to settle our misunderstandings and enter a new phase. If you can explain this to Lee I would be so grateful. Basically I just want to tell Gerry that I remember our time together with affection and gratitude, and at least we both tried to repay the joys we’ve had from wild places and their inhabitants by the creation of the Zoo/Trust. I’m just sad that we left the meeting for so long. I’m deeply upset by this, Jeremy – one can’t share twenty-six years with someone without retaining some warm memories of them and all the things we did together – dreams shared and achieved. Just give him my love and blessings.
Jacquie
* * *
* Before long Gerald was to mend his long-standing differences with London Zoo to the extent that when a new Director later took over at London he was a Jersey-trained appointee.
THIRTY-THREE
‘A Whole New Adventure’
1994–1995
Lee had packed a whisky flask before they left Les Augrès Manor, and Gerry took a swig or two on the twenty-minute drive to the airport. By the time they got there he was feeling as relaxed as a condemned man after his last supper, trying to treat the whole thing as a joke. ‘We got to Jersey airport about 10.30,’ Lee was to recount. ‘It was almost deserted at that time of night, just police at the entrance and officials on duty, but as he was wheeled through to the departure gate Gerry was calling out to all and sundry: “Oh, I’m going to get a new Albanian liver, ha ha, I have an Albanian who’s got me a new liver, ha ha!” He had a few more swigs on the flight over, then we were met by an ambulance at Heathrow and driven to King’s College Hospital in Camberwell.’
The hospital personnel were a little taken aback when Gerald turned up inebriated for his liver transplant. But there was little they could do about it – the countdown had begun, and he was duly prepared for his ordeal. This was a lengthy process, and it was not completed till around six o’clock in the morning of Monday, 28 March 1994. At 6.30 Gerald was given his pre-op drugs, then wheeled along to the theatre for an operation that would last without a break for the best part of the rest of the day.
‘I was allowed to stay behind and have a nap in Gerry’s room,’ Lee related. ‘Then later in the morning our wonderful London GP, Guy O’Keeffe, came along with his two children to lend a bit of moral support.’ Periodically someone from the medical staff came to give Lee a progress report. At about 3.30 in the afternoon she was told, ‘He’s out, he’s in the recovery room. It’s been a great success, but you can’t see him yet.’ In a little while the surgeon came along to see her. The operation had gone very well, he told her, but he added rather ominously, almost as an aside, that Gerald’s pancreas didn’t look in good shape at all, but that he had decided to leave it alone.
Next morning, Gerald was still in intensive care. He was conscious, but breathing with the help of a ventilator, so he couldn’t talk, and when he saw Lee walk in he became so agitated that he was immediately sedated and put under. Almost as agitated as Gerald was the Transplant Senior Registrar at King’s Liver Unit, a young doctor by the name of Christopher Tibbs. He had been a devoted fan of Gerald Durrell ever since his father read him My Family and Animals when he was eight, and Gerald remained his lifetime hero. It was as a result of Gerald’s influence that the young Tibbs chose to read for a zoology degree at Oxford, only changing to medicine when he found that modern zoology – all maths, statistics, molecular biology and scraping around for grants – was a far cry from the long and honourable tradition of the field naturalist that Gerald Durrell represented. It was therefore an immense surprise when Dr Tibbs came across a familiar face in the intensive care unit the day after the operation. ‘My God!’ he cried. ‘That’s Gerald Durrell!’ ‘Yes,’ someone replied. ‘Didn’t you know he was on the list?’ For as long as Gerald was at King’s, Christopher Tibbs remained the senior registrar involved in his case on a daily basis.
By Wednesday Gerald was off the ventilator and out of intensive care. Everything was going well – the liver functions, the wound itself – ‘a bloody great wound called a Mercedes cut,’ Lee recalled, ‘an incredible thing running from front to back’ – and Gerald’s condition in general. By the sixth day after the operation Gerald was sitting up in bed in a side room, chatting away and as pleased as punch that he had got through the operation – for he had never believed he would.
Shortly afterwards he was moved down to the private patients’ wing, and felt well enough to ask for his book manuscript and tape recorder so that he could get on with his autobiography. Asked if there was anything he would like especially, he ordered a brandy, and when he was told he couldn’t have one, because he’d just had a liver transplant, he replied, ‘Exactly – and now I’ve got a new liver!’ He had emerged from surgery, as far as anyone could tell, the rumbustious, flamboyant Gerry of old. He was even flirting with the nurses.
On 16 April Gerald was moved back to the more comfortable private Cromwell Hospital in Kensington, whose Liver Unit, like the one at King’s, was run by Professor Roger Williams. All the signs were that the transplant had been a complete success and that the new liver was functioning perfectly. But he was not yet well enough to be allowed to travel to Jersey for the grand opening of the zoo’s new home-habitat for Sumatran orang-utans by Sir David Attenborough (as he now was) on 15 May, so he wrote David a typically jaunty letter apologising for his absence. As far as can be ascertained, it was the last letter he ever wrote.
I was so greatly looking forward to showing you around and having a little boast. If you could spare the time to pop in and see me when you get back to let me know what you think of our endeavours, I would be grateful. Quite apart from anything else, it would be nice to talk to somebody about something other than livers. Still, I shou
ld not complain, as the op has been a tremendous success, and as they only gave me six to eight months to live without it, I have reason to be devoutly thankful. Anyway, if you come to see me I will be delighted, and if you are very well behaved, I might even let you see my scar.
Attenborough’s speech at the zoo was heartfelt:
A lot has happened since I first met Gerald Durrell thirty-five years ago … This zoo, this Trust, is what Gerry Durrell started, with help from many others – and what a glorious flowering it has turned into! There are some people who argue that there is no justification for zoos. Let them come here! There are some people who say zoos can never make any difference to the great ecological disaster which everyone is talking about. How could they possibly save animals from extinction? LET THEM COME HERE!
Gerald had been put on chemotherapy to mop up any residual cancer cells which might try and form potential secondaries. It was not an intensive course, but it coincided with a sudden dramatic change in his condition. ‘He seemed to be getting better till the chemotherapy,’ Lee recalled. ‘And then suddenly, around the middle of May, he went down with a very bad bout of fever. They didn’t put him in a special unit, but they wouldn’t let him out of the hospital. Then he went down with a second intense fever and he was put in the high dependency unit.’
It is unlikely that the chemotherapy was the cause of Gerald’s fevers. To prevent the rejection of the donor liver following a transplant, the patient is normally put on a course of drugs that suppress the body’s immune system. This makes the patient much more prone to infections – in Gerald’s case bugs in the blood that caused one septicaemia episode after another. To try to identify the cause of his infection everything was cultured or tested, but nobody was any the wiser.
‘What I think was happening,’ Dr Christopher Tibbs was to observe later, ‘was related to other, different medical problems. Gerry also had pancreatitis – his pancreas was in a mess and not working properly – and this meant that you were dealing with a different biological entity to the pre-transplant phase; in post-operative terms you had completely moved the goalposts. As a result his digestive system was not working properly and he couldn’t absorb his food properly, so in addition to septicaemia he had diarrhoea and nutritional problems. Now, according to this scenario, because of Gerry’s digestive problems, he very probably had bacteria growing in the part of the gut that shouldn’t grow them – the small intestine – and from time to time these bugs would transfer across the gut wall and get into the blood system, causing septicaemia and all these raging fevers. And that went on and on and on. Probably it was the same bug constantly re-colonising in the small bowel. Once it was in the bloodstream we could combat it with antibiotics and it would eventually go away. What we couldn’t do was eradicate it from wherever it was coming from. We could do nothing about the pancreas. And we could only cut the immuno-suppressants down to a minimum. More than that and he’d have lost his liver – and that would have killed him.’
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