By six or seven in the morning Gerry was virtually unconscious. Later the house doctor called Lee in. He was not going to make it, he told her. There was nothing that could be done. Gerald’s GP, Jeremy Guyer, agreed. ‘He couldn’t have been kept going much longer. He was desperately ill and had shrunk to around a quarter of his original body weight. He was resigned to it. I’m quite sure he knew he was going to die when he came back to Jersey. He seemed to be quite happy about it. The septicaemia he went down with would have killed a healthy patient, let alone one in his condition.’
Lee rang Jeremy Mallinson, and he arrived at noon. ‘They had stopped resuscitation,’ she recalled. ‘They were just sitting about, waiting. Jeremy and I talked about it and in the end we decided to let him go. Gerry had an oxygen mask over his face and his breath was very laboured. I could hear him struggling to breathe the oxygen in, and the gaps between his breathing grew longer and longer. I was sitting beside him, holding his hand. Jeremy was there with me in the room, and the nurse. Gerry’s breathing got slower and weaker and eventually he stopped breathing altogether. It was over.’
Durrell’s luck had finally run out – as, someday, somewhere, it was always bound to have done. A nurse fetched the house doctor, and he wrote the report there and then: death due to septicaemia.
Gerald Durrell died at about two o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, 30 January 1995. Within a few hours the Press Association had put out a news flash in two slugs a minute apart:
DEATH DURRELL. AUTHOR AND NATURALIST GERALD DURRELL, 70, DIED IN JERSEY GENERAL HOSPITAL TODAY … DURRELL, WHO HAD A LIVER TRANSPLANT LAST YEAR, FOUNDED JERSEY ZOO. HIS WIFE LEE AND ZOO DIRECTOR JEREMY MALLINSON WERE AT HIS BEDSIDE. ENDS.
Already the press obituaries were being put together and film footage assembled for the early evening news broadcasts. It was a big story. The demise of a giant of his kind.
‘I think it’s a great mistake to feel that when your patient dies you have failed,’ Dr Tibbs was to comment later. ‘I don’t think we failed. To me the success of the latter part of the battle to save Gerald Durrell was to get him back to Jersey, where he could celebrate Christmas, and have his birthday, and see his zoo and his animals again, say his goodbyes – a very important part of the dying process. So I think we gave him the opportunity of coming to terms with it and tying up loose ends and making a dignified exit.’
Gerald had always said he wanted to be cremated, but Lee decided that his close friends and family should say their goodbyes at the undertakers rather than the crematorium – it was more intimate, less industrial. So on the Thursday they foregathered in an undertakers’ tiny parlour in a side street in St Helier. Sister Margaret, the last surviving member of the remarkable Durrell brood, came over from Bournemouth, and her son Gerry and granddaughter Tracy, and Larry’s daughter Penny, and Lee’s sister Hat from Memphis. They were joined by Jeremy and Odette Mallinson, John and Sylvia Hartley, Simon and Sarah Hicks, Tony and Maggie Allchurch, and Sam and Catha Weller. It was not a funeral. There was no priest, no formal service or prayers, no music.
‘Lee had never believed Gerry was going to die,’ Jeremy Mallinson recalled, ‘so she wasn’t quite sure what to do. But she knew what Gerry wouldn’t have wanted, and she knew what she didn’t want as well. So she evolved a very simple but terribly poignant farewell as she went along.’ Standing there in the tiny funeral parlour, she asked if anyone wanted to say something – tell a story, anything they felt like – that would commemorate the passing of the man they had loved and followed. One by one they stood up, those who wanted to, and spoke a little. ‘There were not many dry eyes in that room,’ Lee remembered. ‘The women were especially affected – but so were the boys.’ Then Lee led them one by one or two by two into the side room, the tiny chapel of rest where Gerry’s coffin lay. And there they said their last goodbyes.
The obituaries in the press and on television and radio were lengthy and fulsome. No one could have been left in any doubt that a great man had gone. Letters of grief and condolence poured in from around the world – from prime ministers and royals, celebrities and peasants, schoolchildren and total strangers who had been touched by the life of this man. Colleagues and friends paid tribute to a pioneering genius who was not only a colossus but a unique and idiosyncratic human being as well. Some of the tributes culled quotes from Gerald Durrell’s own dicta, celebrating his vision of the miracle of life, the wonder of nature and the blindness and arrogance of man:
A sparrow can be as interesting as a bird of paradise, the behaviour of a mouse as interesting as that of a tiger. Our planet is beautifully intricate, brimming over with enigmas to be solved and riddles to be unravelled.
Many people think that conservation is just about saving fluffy animals – what they don’t realise is that we’re trying to prevent the human race from committing suicide … We have declared war on the biological world, the world that supports us … At the moment the human race is in the position of a man sawing off the tree branch he is sitting on.
Look at it this way. Anyone who has got any pleasure at all from living should try to put something back. Life is like a superlative meal and the world is the maître d’hôtel. What I’m doing is the equivalent of leaving a reasonable tip … I’m glad to be giving something back because I’ve been so extraordinarily lucky and had such great pleasure from it.
In the end, all things considered, he preferred the world of animals: ‘They are so much more straightforward and honest. They have no sort of pretensions. They don’t pretend they are God. They don’t pretend they are intelligent, they don’t invent nerve gas and above all they don’t go to cocktail parties.’
A little more than a month later, on 9 March 1995, Gerald Durrell’s ashes were laid to rest beneath a small marble plinth in a corner of the garden of Les Augrès Manor, that ancient and burnished pile of local granite where he had spent the last thirty-five years of his life, first with Jacquie and then with Lee, struggling to realise a dream and achieve a goal. It was a blustery, greying evening, with scudding clouds and a few shafts of sun and a hint of rain. The guests – family, friends, colleagues, staff, students from Les Noyers – gathered in loose clusters in front of the low little plinth that covered Gerald’s ashes. Wrapped up against the sniping wind, they were serious, solemn, respectful, remembrance-full. Geoff Hamon, the Chairman of the Trust, spoke a few words of farewell. The General Curator, Quentin Bloxam, said a few more. As he spoke, the fitful cries of the lemurs came drifting into the courtyard on the eddying wind.
We are all indebted to this remarkable man who was so many years ahead of his time in realising the potential of captive breeding as a discipline for the protection of endangered species. We will all miss his humour and guiding hand, but we are all determined to continue to be one of the role models in the field of captive breeding. Our commitment to Gerald Durrell’s philosophy is absolute …
Afterwards the people who had gathered there laid small bunches of spring flowers and heather around the plinth, and read the words inscribed on it, written almost ninety years before by an early American prophet of the conservation movement, William Beebe:
The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanishing harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.
Gerald Durrell was a man of the world and a man for all time and for all living things. And there was another part of this rich and rounded prodigy that could rightly be celebrated – his great gift for friendship, for generosity, for love and loving kindness, for honest laughter and good cheer – for in this part, as in all others, he was remarkable.
And so it was ended, and he was in another place, bequeathing his love for this one, entrusting it to our care. ‘Now let me tell you something,’ he had once said: it was his affirmation and credo, a prayer of a kind in celeb
ration of a world he saw as endlessly wonderful and infinitely precious.
I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises,
on land where it floods forest and mountains with honey coloured light:
I have seen a thousand moons …
I have felt winds as tender and warm as a lover’s breath; winds that carried the moist rich smell of a forest floor, the smell of a million flowers …
I have known silence: the hot, drugged silence when everything is stilled by the eye of the sun;
the silence when great music ends …
Now he has gone, but it remains.
Afterword
The memorial celebration was held in the great hall of the Natural History Museum in London – a cathedral to the world of animals and plants – on a hot and sultry evening in June 1995. More than a thousand people, public and guests, Trust members and fans, came to rejoice and give thanks for the life and work of Gerald Durrell. The queue stretched up Exhibition Road and past the Science Museum, and the audience was packed in round the great dinosaur skeleton in the hall and on the gothic galleries above.
Arranged and directed by one of Gerald’s closest friends at the Trust, the celebration encompassed his entire life and work. There were speeches and photographs and clips of his films on a giant screen and readings from his writings and renderings of songs and music from Noël Coward and the Cameroons. Sir David Attenborough spoke of the Durrell magic, that had touched so many people’s lives on a personal level because he was a crusader. Gerald had been a man before his time, he said, who had harboured a dream of owning a zoo – a special zoo whose main role was the survival of species. Princess Anne read out the message Gerald had addressed to future generations, exhorting them to treasure and honour the natural world and to cherish the earth’s diversity of species – a message she herself had buried in a time capsule in the zoo grounds. From America Tom Lovejoy and Robert Rattner, Honorary Chairman and President of Wildlife Preservation Trust International, gave their own vivid recollections and reflections. The voices and the music echoed among the arches and cloisters and then died. Gerald had been given a big goodbye, and it was over.
Or was it? One morning in the early spring following Gerald’s death I had walked with Lee through the grounds of the zoo he had founded on a wing and a prayer all those years ago. It was one of those plangent blue Channel Island mornings. The zoo was a haven of peace within a haven of peace, its leafy tranquillity only broken by an occasional heart-arresting jungle shriek or a collective brouhaha from the lemurs, an outburst full of sound and fury signifying territory.
I was a new boy then. I knew the broad ground-plan of the story but little of the details, and my casual encounters with man and beast around the zoo of Gerald Durrell’s creation was an enlightening series of shocks and puzzles which grew curiouser and curiouser by the minute. Everywhere I looked I could see little bears cavorting, orang-utans climbing and swinging, lemurs dangling from the branches of an oak tree or titup-ping along the rope lines above the path, golden-headed lion tamarins skittering in and out of the camellia bushes, white owls staring, pink pigeons fluttering, tortoises lumbering, an aye-aye climbing a tree stump with infinite gradualness in its darkened enclosure. Everywhere I looked I observed seemingly contented, purposeful animal play and endeavour. Only the female snow leopard looked grumpy. ‘It takes ten dumb animals to make a fur coat,’ read the placard outside the creature’s enclosure, indicating the cause of its endangeredness, ‘but only one to wear it.’
I came to the enclosure for the lowland gorillas. The females and children were sitting quietly together, feeding and suckling and relating in an atmosphere of collective togetherness. The great white hope of the Jersey gorillas – the next big breeder – was pointed out to me. A hefty teenage male, he lay indolently sprawling on his back in an almost human posture of adolescent loafishness. A stranger came up to me.
‘I hear you’re writing Gerry’s biography,’ he said to me. ‘I’m writing a biography too.’
This was a strange place for a literary coincidence, I thought. ‘Oh, really? How interesting,’ I said. ‘Who of?’
‘Jambo.’
‘Jambo who?’ I asked in my ignorance.
‘Jambo,’ he repeated. ‘You know – our silverback gorilla. Gerry’s opposite number, so to speak. Jambo the patriarch.’
A gorilla biography – it seemed par for this Alice in Wonderland grand tour. We passed another enclosure, and Lee called out as a keeper emerged from it.
‘How’d it go?’
‘Like a dream,’ came the man’s enthusiastic reply. ‘She went into labour in the middle of the night. Absolutely no problem. A perfect delivery. Piece of cake.’
‘What did she have?’ asked Lee.
‘A boy and a girl,’ replied the keeper, unable to conceal his joy and pride, adding mysteriously and alarmingly: ‘With perfect markings.’
Perfect markings? I had assumed the keeper had been talking about his wife and was delighting in the birth of twins, but I had a problem envisaging them the way he had described them.
‘That was the spectacled-bear keeper,’ Lee explained. ‘One of the bears has just had babies.’
The birth of two offspring from an endangered species was reason enough for rejoicing. It was what Jersey Zoo and Trust were all about.
We came to an enclosure containing a small brown duck. It was frankly a dull little creature, one of Gerry’s classic ‘little brown jobs’. Sometimes it stood on one leg, and sometimes it stood on two. Otherwise it did nothing much, not even quack. But it was not here to divert the public on a wet afternoon. It was here to be saved from extinction, and what it looked like or what it did was not an issue. This unobtrusive creature was a Madagascar teal, the world’s most obscure duck. Only a handful had ever been seen, but it was clear its numbers were steadily going down. Nothing was known about its breeding habits – the time of year, the kind of nest, on the ground or up a tree. No nest and no eggs had ever been found. The duck didn’t seem to mind. This wasn’t Madagascar, but it wasn’t complaining. It had its own pond with nothing nasty lurking in it. There was no one with a shotgun or snare for miles. There was no one with a machete and a firebrand to destroy the leafy green bush that was its present habitat. The food was good and the natives were friendly.
It was fairly evident that every living thing in Jersey Zoo would go along with this. The animals were happy, active, and this side of extinction. Gerald Durrell the man was no more but his work lived on, and the reason for it – the embattled kingdom of living things – remained. And he had left behind an organisation and a team as dedicated to the cause and the mission as he. Lee had donned the mantle of Honorary Director of the Trust, and the Trust itself was soon to be rethought and restructured to face the challenges of the new millennium and given a new name – the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust – both in honour of its founder and in recognition of its worldwide commitments to animal conservation. Meanwhile its work would continue into the future, adapting as need be to new situations and new ideas.
Shortly after my trip to Gerald Durrell’s zoo and Trust headquarters I visited the Mazet, the old converted farmhouse he had shared with Lee in Languedoc, and found his presence still so immanent and strong that it was as if he had just gone out for a stroll, and would be back soon. Later I returned to Corfu, staying with friends at the small coastal village of Kaminaki, not far from Kalami, while I researched the life and times, haunts and homes of the young Gerald and his family on the island. The season of the festival of the fireflies – that fantastic insect spectacle so vividly described in My Family and Other Animals – was long over. What happened at Kaminaki one stifling moonless night was therefore doubly odd.
I had been dining at the taverna on the beach with my friends, and stayed on after they left, engaged in a desultory conversation with strangers. By the time I started for home it was pitch-black, and I could not find the gap at the head of the beach that led to the ancient
paved track to the house. As I wandered up and down, uncertain where to go, a tiny winking light, a curious, incessant, electric neon flash, suddenly appeared at chest height about three feet in front of me. I took a step towards it, and it backed away by the same distance, then hovered, winking steadily.
It was a firefly, I knew. But it was odd that it was around so late in the year, and so alone; and odder still that it should appear to be relating, or at least reacting, to a human being in this uncharacteristic way. I moved towards it again, and again it backed away by the same distance. And so we proceeded, the firefly always at chest height and three feet in front of me. I realised I had been led through the gap in the beach that I could not find, and that we were at the foot of the ancient track. Guided by the firefly I walked slowly up the invisible path, step by step in the total darkness.
Halfway up, the firefly stopped and hovered, winking vigorously, until I was almost abreast of it. Then it made a sharp turn of ninety degrees to the left and proceeded up another, shorter but steeper path, with me trustingly trudging behind. It stopped again, and I realised I was at the garden gate of the house where I ws staying. The firefly went over the gate, and I followed it across the unlit patio. The kitchen door was somewhere there in the dark, and the firefly flickered unerringly towards it. As I reached for the doorknob the firefly fluttered up and settled on the back of my hand, winking the while. I was home.
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