Gerald Durrell: The Authorised Biography

When I left Whipsnade I was still determined to have a zoo of my own, but I was equally determined that if I ever achieved this ambition my zoo would have to fulfil three functions in order to justify its existence.

Firstly, it would have to act as an aid to the education of people so that they could realise how fascinating and how important the other forms of life in the world were, so that they would stop being quite so arrogant and self-important and appreciate the fact that the other forms of life had just as much right to existence as they had.

Secondly, research into the behaviour of animals would be undertaken so that by this means one could not only learn more about the behaviour of human beings but also be in a better position to help animals in their wild state, for unless you know the needs of the various species of animal you cannot practise conservation successfully.

Thirdly – and this seemed to me to be of the utmost urgency – the zoo would have to be a reservoir of animal life, a sanctuary for threatened species, keeping and breeding them so that they would not vanish from the earth for ever as the dodo, the quagga and the passenger pigeon had done.

All that lay in the future. For the moment he had the more immediate problems of his first – his great – expedition to grapple with. As the weeks went by he became obsessed with the adventure and romance of the idea. Lacking the gift of hindsight, his ambition at this stage was unclouded by any doubts as to the ethics of what he was proposing. At an early age Gerald had set himself a dual agenda for his working life – first, collecting animals in the wild for the world’s zoos, and later establishing a zoo of his own. These two components may have had animals in common, but they had paradoxically contrasting effects: while the zoo of Gerald’s dreams might save species from extinction, the practice of collecting often condemned individual animals to death – an outcome Gerald did not clearly foresee and never fully acknowledged, even to himself, though the poacher would turn gamekeeper soon enough.

SEVEN Planning for Adventure 1946–1947 (#ulink_7f60a562-0a24-561a-bcc7-993c981456c3)

Gerald went home to Bournemouth to make preparations for his expedition. Only one cloud darkened the family reunion – the erratic behaviour of Leslie, who had been giving cause for concern.

Leslie had always been the enigma of the family, the cracked bell who was always striking a dud note. Corfu, he once said, was ‘the dangerous corner in my life, five golden, drifting, ultimately destructive years’. Larry used to have a go at Mother sometimes: ‘We must put Leslie to something,’ he’d tell her. But she would say, ‘Leave him alone, he’ll be all right.’ But, unlike his brothers, he wasn’t. The rest of the Durrells had always rallied loyally around whenever Leslie stepped out of line, for he was basically well-intentioned, and never malicious. But years later he was to remark to an interviewer: ‘It’s a funny thing, you know – however hard I try, nothing seems to go right for me. I’ve got a sort of jinx on me, I think.’

He put all of his inheritance into a fishing boat, which sank before it had even got out of Poole Harbour. Next he tried market gardening, but that failed too. Unable to settle to anything, drifting and shiftless and convinced the world owed him a living, Leslie passed himself off for a while as ‘Major-General Durrell’, trying to develop various ambitious scams, including one involving luxury yachts and motorboats, till Margaret warned him he could end up in prison for fraudulent impersonation if he didn’t watch out. He ‘helped’ his mother get through a lot of money – not having a clue herself, she always took Leslie’s advice on financial matters, for he had always been her favourite child.

Nothing much worked for Leslie. Though he was a talented painter – Gerald once described some of his work as ‘astonishingly beautiful’ – he practised his gift in a most desultory way, and never made a penny from it. In the end, Lawrence and Gerald gave up on him. Gerald was to confide years later, ‘Though my elder brother and I frequently tried to help him, he would always end up doing something that would make us lose patience with him.’

All through the war, while he toiled ingloriously in the aircraft factory, Leslie had been living in Bournemouth with his mother, Gerald (till he went to Whipsnade) and the family’s Greek maid Maria Condos. By 1945 he was twenty-seven, and he and Maria, some ten years his senior, had begun a liaison – one of several for Leslie, the love of her life for Maria. Margaret, who was closest to the drama, recalled:

I walked right into the Maria furore when I got back from North Africa to have my second baby early in 1945, and of course, as in all these family crises, it was always me who had to be the strong one, because there was nobody else around to deal with things.

Mother, of course – being Mother – hadn’t noticed anything going on. So I told her: ‘Maria’s pregnant.’ Then I had to rush around trying to find an unmarried mothers’ home for her to go to, and when the baby was born in September she kept marching up and down the street with the baby in a pram, telling all and sundry it was a Durrell baby, another Bournemouth Durrell boy, which was rather embarrassing for the family. Leslie saw him first when he was a babe in arms, but neither Gerry nor Larry ever set eyes on the child at that time. They were adamant Leslie shouldn’t marry the girl. Not that he intended to, because he was also going out with Doris by now, the manageress of the local off-licence who had kept Mother in gin during the war and who employed Leslie to make the beer deliveries after it. They were odd characters, you know, Gerry and Larry. Though they could both be very unconventional and wild, they could also be very prudish and correct, surprising though that may sound.

The child, named Anthony Condos, had early recollections of the house in St Alban’s Avenue. His mother slept in a cot in the kitchen, and he remembered ‘monkeys climbing over the furniture and snakes in chests of drawers’. Since Leslie took no interest in either the baby or Maria, Mother paid up as usual and Maria went and got a job in a laundry in Christchurch, and then a council house, and brought the baby up on her own. ‘After my mother and I left the folds of the family,’ Tony Condos recalled, ‘we lived in various places, moving from flat to flat and room to room around Bournemouth. I think that Margaret, another woman, may have felt sympathy for my mother. My mother kept up a good relationship with her for many years and we were always kindly received at her house at number 51. But mother had to work incredibly hard to raise me and had a very difficult life.’ Maria remained very much in love with Leslie, Margaret was to say: ‘Years later she’d still remember him adoringly as “my roula-mou” – that’s Greek for “darling” – in fact deeper, more tender than darling.’

Tony Condos grew up never knowing if his father was dead or alive. ‘Though my mother obviously loved him very much,’ he was to reflect, ‘her feelings towards him oscillated between love and hate, and it made me very confused in my younger days. My main regret in life is that I never knew my father. For many years I felt extreme animosity towards him and the rest of the family. But as I grew older I started to appreciate the situation that the whole Durrell family must have been in with regard to my mother and me. Now I have only sadness that I was not one of them, the family … And oddly enough, I am proud of being a Durrell, albeit nameless.’

Gerald, meanwhile, was grappling with a small nightmare of his own. For a novice, an animal collecting expedition in the wilds of a distant continent represented a daunting challenge. How should he set about it? Where should he go? What should he catch? How much would it cost? There was no apprenticeship, no one to help him, and a mountainous number of bureaucratic restrictions to overcome. In the aftermath of the war, much of the world remained difficult of access, and some countries were still off-limits.

Months went by while Gerald struggled with a host of imponderables to produce a plan of action. He had long cherished a dream to see Africa, and within that continent one country stood out as a prime target for any would-be animal collector – the undeveloped and little-visited territory known as the British Cameroons, a remote, narrow backwater of empire on the eastern frontier of Nigeria, unsurpassed not only for the wild beauty of its high mountains and tropical forests but for the spectacular richness of its wildlife, from the gorilla, the pangolin and the rare angwantibo to the hairy frog, giant water shrew and giant hawk eagle.

Having settled the problem of where, Gerald turned his attention to other pressing questions – when, how, with whom and for what. The details took months to work out. Foreign travel was still an exotic pastime in 1946, beyond the reach of all but a privileged few, and information was scant. His plans took a leap forward when he made contact with a collector naturalist by the name of John Yealland, a highly regarded aviculturist and ornithologist almost twice his age but with interests close to his own. A few months after Gerald left Whipsnade, Yealland had helped Peter Scott found the nucleus of his Wildfowl Trust at Slimbridge, on the edge of the Severn mudflats in Gloucestershire, and later he was to become Curator of Birds at the London Zoo. Gerald told Yealland of his ambition to collect rare animals in the Cameroons, and Yealland responded with encouraging enthusiasm. They agreed to pool their talents and see the thing through together.

So now there was a team. And before long there would be a plan, a schedule, an itinerary – even a departure date. But not much else. As one newspaper was to report: ‘Their bring-’em-back-alive expedition was their first safari into the jungle. No one knew where they were going, no one placed any orders with them, and no one in the Cameroons knew they were arriving.’ In fact five zoos – London, Bristol, Chester, Belle Vue (Manchester) and Paignton – had expressed an interest in seeing anything that the expedition brought back, and had even quoted prices for the rarer species, though none was prepared to put money up front.

The Durrell family were first surprised, then excited by Gerald’s ambitious plans. As far as they were concerned his life to date – for all his lively enthusiasm and quirky originality – had seemed about as unpromising as his brother Leslie’s.

During 1947 Gerald was increasingly drawn to London. The capital had many advantages for the intending expeditionary, including a world-class zoo and museums to visit, experts to consult, specialist dealers to advise about a legion of purchases, libraries to bone up in and bookshops to buy from. London also had, at that time, Peter Scott, the only son of Scott of the Antarctic, a war hero, portrait painter and successful painter of wildfowl who was already making a name for himself as a naturalist and pioneer conservationist in a world still largely oblivious of conservation and all it stood for.

Though there were a number of things Gerald did not have in common with Scott (background and personality being but two), they overlapped in two essential regards. Scott’s trail-blazing Wildfowl Trust at Slimbridge on the Severn marshes, which had been set up the previous year, was a model of the type of conservation establishment Gerald himself dreamed of founding one day. And Scott’s reverence for animal life was very close to Gerald’s own as yet unarticulated view. ‘My interest in the processes of evolution,’ Scott was to write, ‘has produced in me a kind of reverence for every species of flora and fauna, which have as much right to their place on earth as does homo sapiens. The prospect of extinction of any existing species then appears as a potential disaster which man’s conscience should urge him to avert.’ The destruction of nature and its living forms was, Scott felt, ‘a crime against an undefined but immutable law of the universe’.

Scott was living at the time in Edwardes Square, Kensington, and it is likely that the young Gerald Durrell went there to seek the advice of the older, more established professional. But though Gerald was a relative ingenu, Scott was aware that he already had enough clout to persuade John Yealland, Scott’s own first curator at Slimbridge, to go off to the wilds of the Cameroons with him.

Besides all its resources and experts, London also had women. Between the age of sixteen and twenty-two, a number of girls had drifted in and out of Gerald’s life. But though he was far from virginal, he was still a naïf in his relations with the opposite sex. This was now to change.

It was at lunch in a Greek restaurant in the West End, where he had gathered with Larry and a bunch of fawning failed poets, that Gerald met the woman who was to indoctrinate him into the deeper mysteries of love. He called her Juliet, but whether that was her real name may never be known. She was in her late twenties, six or seven years older than Gerald, married (but separated) with two young children. Gerald fell for her almost at once. She was not pretty, but she had a memorable face and beautiful eyes, and besides, she looked pale and sad, so that Gerald felt protective as well as drawn towards her.

‘What do you do?’ he asked.

‘I paint horses,’ she said.

Gerald had some problem with this. ‘I could not believe it – the mind boggled,’ he was to recall, ‘but surrounded by Greeks anything was possible.’

‘You mean you take a shire horse and a bucket of paint and accost him with it?’ he asked her.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I paint pictures of them – for their owners. Pedigree horses, of course.’

‘Of course,’ said Gerald gravely, adding tentatively: ‘Can I come and see your etchings some time?’

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘How about tomorrow? Come and have lunch.’

So the tryst was made. Gerald caught a bus to Juliet’s, clutching a dozen gulls’ eggs for lunch in the hope that they would prove an efficacious aphrodisiac. Her house, he recalled, smelled of coffee and oil paints having a bath together. She showed him her paintings – ‘she wasn’t as good as Stubbs,’ he recalled, ‘but damned near it’ – and he stayed so long that they went out to dinner. Within a few days he had moved out of his Aunt Prue’s house in Drayton Gardens, Chelsea, which had been his base in town, and installed himself and his baggage at Juliet’s. ‘She was,’ he sighed with nostalgia for lost love, ‘the most wonderful woman in the world.’ ‘Juliet was Gerry’s first real affair, his first complete realisation of love and sex and all that,’ his sister Margaret remembered. ‘She really opened his eyes to it. Not that he saw much future to it.’

The affair lingered on and off for two years, punctuated by Gerald’s long absences abroad. He took it seriously enough to have thoughts of marrying the woman, which looking back he reckoned would have been a disaster. But there was no future to it. One morning he popped down to Bournemouth on some business or other and returned that evening to find a letter from Juliet waiting for him on the dressing table. It was, he recalled, ‘a note in the traditional manner, using all the trite phrases out of the novels we secretly enjoy but pretend are bad, like “we’re growing too fond of each other” and this sort of crap’. Distraught at this unexpected turn of events, Gerald got wildly drunk, and then cracked up. He had deeply cared for the woman after all. Eventually, in sadness and anger, he gathered his books together, packed his bags and sloped back to Aunt Prue’s with his tail between his legs. Not that it mattered much in the end. The wild world beckoned, and before long he would again be off to bigger and more challenging horizons.

In the meantime, Gerald concentrated on the real matter in hand. As the boxes of traps, guns, lanterns, socks, salt, suet, fish-hooks, maps, field guides and medicines began to clutter up the family home, word got about in Bournemouth that young Gerry, the former pet shop assistant and riding instructor, had turned into a naturalist and explorer, and was about to set off to Darkest Africa in search of pythons and apes. Earlier in the year his brother Lawrence had thought his career was tending in an entirely different direction, writing to Henry Miller from Rhodes: ‘My younger brother Gerry’s emerging as a poet. He is rather an iconoclast at present – feels he has to assert his individuality – thinks you a bad writer and me a terribly bad writer.’ In April 1947 Lawrence had to revise his opinion. After visiting Bournemouth with his new Egyptian wife Eve – the first time the whole family had been together since the Corfu days before the war – he wrote to Miller: ‘Gerald has turned out as a zoologist as he wanted and is leaving for Nigeria in September.’ Margaret, who now had two young sons, was soon to divorce her airman, Jack Breeze, and would use her legacy from her father to buy a large house across the road from Mother, while Leslie moved in with Doris Hall, a laughing, booming divorcee with a son of her own. Substantially older and bigger than Leslie, Doris still ran the off-licence half a mile down the road.

Gerald’s preparations were gathering momentum. At last the byzantine negotiations with the bureaucracies responsible for export, import, animal and gun licences were resolved. A cabin and cargo space were booked on a cargo vessel bound for Victoria in the Cameroons. Late in September 1947 Gerald collected a new passport. It described him as a zoologist, domiciled in Bournemouth, eyes blue, hair brown, and five feet seven in height.

Cargo ships are notoriously erratic when it comes to schedules. The boat on which Gerald hoped to sail was due to depart from London, and he stayed at Aunt Prue’s while he waited – interminably – for the boat to arrive. One day he happened to bump into Larry emerging from a bookshop carrying a large parcel of books.

‘Oh, hullo,’ said Larry in surprise. ‘What are you doing in London?’

‘Waiting for a boat,’ replied Gerald.

‘A boat? Ah, yes, London docks and so on. Down to the sea in shops. Well, ships in my experience are notoriously tardy. Either they don’t sail at all or else they sink, which gives you time for a drink.’

Larry suggested that to while away the time Gerald should look up an old friend and champion of his, a Sinologist and poet by the name of Hugh Gordon Porteus. Interesting chap, Larry told him. Lived in a cellar in Chelsea, played the organ and lived off horsemeat. ‘Knows a lot about Chinese poetry,’ Larry continued. ‘I think you’d like him – unless you’re too bloody English to eat horse.’

Hugh Porteus’s menage was every bit as eccentric as Gerald had been led to expect. A gaggle of nubile young women were gathered in the sitting room while Porteus stirred soup in a tin bidet (a trophy from one of the best brothels in Paris) on the gas ring.

‘I gazed on the scene,’ Gerald recorded in his notebook later. ‘Most of the girls were wearing very little else but diaphanous dressing gowns and bras and exciting lace panties underneath. The soup bubbled in the bidet. The horse steaks were lying in a row on the top of the bookcase.’ At seven o’clock sharp Porteus looked at his watch, pulled a miniature organ out of a cupboard, and called for silence. An infirm old lady by the name of Mrs Honeydew lived in the room above, and it was Porteus’s custom to play her a few tunes on his organ while she listened through the floorboards as she had her beef tea.

‘All right for sound, Mrs Honeydew?’ he shouted.

A walking stick could be heard rapping sharply on the ceiling, and Porteus settled himself more firmly on his stool.

‘The next minute we were engulfed in the Blue Danube,’ Gerald recalled. ‘Everything in that enclosed space danced to the magnificent waltz. The girls’ breasts wobbled, the horse steaks on the bookcase quivered, the bidet trembled on the gas-ring, and a book by a sixth century traveller in China fell out of the bookcase. One of the girls suddenly put her warm hands in mine, drew me aloft as it were, pressed her warm and mobile mouth against mine, pressed herself to me and started to waltz.’

At this point Theodore Stephanides arrived. Now resident in London and working as a radiologist at Lambeth Hospital, Theo knew the Porters through Larry. Still every inch the Edwardian gentleman, he wore a tweed suit, 1908 waistcoat, highly polished boots and a staunch trilby, and sported a perky beard and moustache and a neat new steel-grey haircut. ‘Even I,’ noted Gerald, ‘who had known Theodore since the age of ten, would have been appalled at the idea of inserting him into such a milieu.’ The girls had never set eyes on a human being such as this before, and to the dismay of both Porteus and Gerald they greeted the new arrival with effusive admiration:

They cooed around him like doves round a fountain. They pressed olives on him and cheese biscuits. They sat round him in a ring of delicious fragrance, palpitating at each word he spoke. Theodore sat there like an ultra benevolent Father Christmas, delving into his considerable memory for jokes that Punch thought hilarious in 1898.

‘There is this – um – you know – a sort of tongue twister. I don’t know if you’ve heard it,’ ventured Theodore. “What noise annoys an oyster most – er – um – ha! A noisy noise annoys an oyster most.’

The girls rippled with liquid laughter, crowding closer to Theodore’s feet. This was the kind of humour they had not encountered before and to them it was as marvellous as finding a fully working spinning wheel in the attic.