Gerald Durrell: The Authorised Biography

‘I am, darling,’ replied Ursula. ‘Don’t you think my kissing’s improved?’

They sat down at their table.

‘I don’t suppose you’d like me now,’ Ursula said wistfully. ‘I’ve reformed. I’ve become very dull.’

‘Do you think so?’ asked a still-infatuated Gerald.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, looking at him solemnly with her great blue eyes. ‘I’m afraid I’m now what they call one of the petty beaujolais.’

Gerald did not intend to linger long in England. Partly the spell of Africa had got into his blood. Partly there was nothing for him to do in Britain. No longer a novice, but a fully-fledged old hand, he planned a second Cameroons expedition, aiming for bigger and infinitely more profitable ‘stuff’ this time round, including gorilla, hippo and elephant, all valued by British zoos at up to £1000 per animal (around £20,000 in today’s money). His ambition to collect the really big game was not based entirely on greed, but also on the imperatives of personal survival. His first expedition had cost him roughly half his inheritance. The second was likely to cost the same, possibly more. He had to succeed – or go under.

It was an enormous fillip that Herbert Whitley, the wealthy owner of a large private collection of rare animals at Paignton, which later became the basis of Paignton Zoo, had agreed to buy half his collection on his return, plus any animals that London Zoo did not want. Gerald found Whitley highly eccentric – he was so shy that if anyone came to see him he would run through the house locking the doors, then flee in a special lift – but he was to have more than a passing influence on the young Gerald, for he was at the forefront of captive breeding. ‘He tried to breed an alligator and an all-yellow salamander for a while,’ Gerald was to recall. ‘He had a particular obsession for breeding blue things. Part of this was to confound experts. He bred blue pigeons, blue Great Danes, blue ducks.’

John Yealland was not available to accompany Gerald back to the Cameroons, so in his place Gerald invited the experienced Ken Smith, a near neighbour in Bournemouth whom he had first met at Whipsnade. Smith was senior to Gerald both in terms of age (he was thirty-seven) and status (he was to be superintendent of Paignton Zoo) – but in Gerald’s eyes his role made him the junior partner. Though physically Smith was hardly cast in the Tarzan mould, and was rather less gung-ho than his younger friend in face-to-face encounters with the larger and more fearsome beasts of the jungle, he knew his business, and was to prove a loyal and tireless companion in the long slog that lay ahead.

With Smith’s help Gerald began to assemble a more sophisticated and better targeted range of expedition stores, including bigger and better guns, folding cages, a gallon of cod liver oil and twelve dozen babies’ teats for the younger animals, several roll-neck pullovers ‘to keep a gorilla warm on the ship back’ and a splendid wedding marquee to house the animals at the base camp in the bush.

The second expedition was not intended simply to be a rerun of the first, for though Gerald would again work the rainforest around Mamfe, he also proposed to strike north into new territory – the high grassland region of central Cameroons, which offered a completely different range of fauna.

Early in January 1949, a few days before his twenty-fifth birthday, Gerald boarded the cargo boat MV Reventazon at Liverpool docks, together with his companion and all the paraphernalia of a major African collecting expedition. The press, who had witnessed his return from the first trip six months before, were back to witness his departure on the second, for his unusual way of earning a living had begun to attract some popular interest. ‘He’s off to Darkest Africa’, went one headline. ‘Mr Durrell, who is a bachelor, will journey inland for about 500 miles by lorry, then begin an eight-day safari. He is after gorilla and may also have a shot at capturing a buffalo or even a hippopotamus. “We shall try to get the gorillas in a sort of giant mousetrap,” he said. “They can be very nasty.”’

The ship sailed on time, and the voyage out was uneventful. Only Smith provided Gerald with much diversion. ‘He wakes in the morning,’ Gerald wrote to his mother, ‘and tells me that he has been dreaming about catching Gorilla with the help of the stewardess and the Liverpool representative of Grindlays Bank. The other night he was reading a bit about Buffalo. That of course set him off and about twelve o’clock he fought with his bedclothes for about an hour and a half, sweat pouring down his face, uttering wild cries.’

On 10 February the ship nudged in towards the coast of Cameroons and Gerald noted in his diary: ‘We were on deck about six, a bit unsteady after the farewell party last night. The islands in the bay loomed up through the mist, overloaded with vegetation … It’s wonderful to be back again.’ Then, in case he forgot the reason he was there, he added: ‘I am going to make a packet on this trip. I feel it in my bones, and Smith feels it in his varicose veins.’

The magic of Africa overwhelmed him once more – every crack in the wall a menagerie, every tree jam-packed with a hierarchy of species, the road at sundown paved with nightjars, the woods loud with the cry of the touracou, the songs of the bulbul and currichane thrush on the mountain ‘sweet and liquid like the English blackbird and song thrush’. Gerald wrote home: ‘Victoria is as beautiful as ever. Now all the trees are in bloom, and every one of them is covered in huge waxy flowers of every colour: yellow, blue, mauve, and scarlet. Hibiscus hedges are simply aflame with flower, and huge masses of bougainvillaea and canna lilies are everywhere. Ken has been walking around in a daze, with his mouth so wide open that I am afraid his teeth will drop out.’

‘Everyone seems to remember me,’ he wrote in his diary on his second day, ‘and everyone is most charming and so very helpful.’ The word went out on the bush telegraph that the animal collectors were back, and within a few days the pace of events accelerated dramatically. ‘Now for some extraordinary news,’ Gerald wrote excitedly to his mother on the fourteenth. ‘We have started our collection with a bang by obtaining a young male Chimpanzee!! A planter and his wife have him and are willing to give him to us. He is a dear little chap, and when I picked him up he pushed out his lips and kissed me.’

Gerald’s growing reputation for eccentricity was enhanced when he brought the chimpanzee, Charlie by name, to Victoria on the back of a bike, the chimp hanging round his neck ‘hooting with joy and occasionally sticking his fingers in my eyes, so that I narrowly missed running over several members of the Victoria populace’. Both Gerald and Ken Smith were regarded as slightly mad, and were known as the ‘animal maniacs’ to the white community and as the ‘beef masters’ to the black. But whereas Gerald was regarded as largely unconventional, Smith was entirely comical, not least to his younger companion. While going for a swim in an up-country river, for example, he earned a thunderous round of applause from a large crowd of watching villagers when he suddenly sneezed, projecting his dentures some distance into the water.

Gerald already knew that animal collecting was a business which required some odd, exotic qualities in its practitioners. He later wrote:

Most people’s idea of an animal collector is a brawny, Tarzan-like kind of bloke, but in fact most animal collectors look half dead from birth. To be successful at his job it’s best if a collector is born a bit mental and grows up with a highly developed sense of humour and no sense of smell (I mean, have you ever smelled a monkey cage first thing in the morning?). It’s also helpful if he has a private income, so it doesn’t matter so much if he doesn’t make a penny from the business. Of course, there are all sorts of ways of catching animals – traps, nets, smoking out caves and hollow trees, hunting with dogs, hunting at night (very good for reptiles) – but contrary to popular belief, collecting wild animals is not particularly dangerous – or at any rate only as dangerous as the collector is stupid.

Really it’s not catching the animals that is so difficult, it’s keeping them once you’ve caught them. Having a collection of animals is like having two or three hundred pernickety babies with stomachs as delicate as debutantes, all with different likes and dislikes. Naturally when life is spent in close proximity with these creatures you get involved in many embarrassing and irritating matters, particularly their lavatorial habits. For example, I had a hyrax that would only go to the toilet in the DO’s hat, and a pouched rat that would only do big jobs in its drinking bowl. Sometimes a collector has to share his bed with a baby animal for warmth, and this can lead to all sorts of strange experiences, especially if the creature in question is a porcupine.

The plan was to establish the marquee base camp at a suitable site overlooking the river near Mamfe, and for this to be used as the central depository for all the animals coming in from the surrounding area and from further afield. Ken Smith would be more or less permanently billeted at the Mamfe base as keeper-cum-vet, while Gerald roamed far and wide in the neighbouring forests and the mountain grasslands to the north, hunting for creatures on the wanted list which would then be despatched back to Mamfe.

On 18 February the little party headed off for the interior, overnighting at Kumba on their way to Mamfe. ‘We started fairly early this morning,’ Gerald noted in his diary, ‘and made Kumba in good time. The ride was wonderful and it was lovely to feel we were at last heading for bush.’ Two days later they reached Mamfe, and in due course, with the help of thirty panting labourers and to the amazement and delight of a surging crowd of villagers, the great canvas mass of the English wedding marquee was hauled and pulled into position till it stood, four-square and proud as a medieval tented pavilion, on the bank of the slow brown river at the edge of the primeval forest.

There was still another week of preparations – cages to be erected, ponds dug, food supplies laid on, chiefs propositioned with lists of wanted animals, a hundred and one things – before systematic collecting could start. By the beginning of March they were all set, and Gerald ventured forth into the surrounding wilds on his second great quest in search of rare ‘beef’. From this point forward he was to be subject to a life of such relentless physical endeavour and such sensory richness and intensity that his diary reads like the breathless log of some inter-galactic voyager, every day a new adventure, every minute a mind-blowing revelation. It is difficult to do justice here to the extraordinary document he typed with two fingers and a thumb every evening in the yellow circle of light from the hurricane lamp in his jungle camp, exhausted almost to the point of collapse; but various important features emerge from it.

The first is that the Gerald Durrell who is thinking aloud, so to speak, in the 1949 diary, seems quite a different young man from the one who had first arrived in the country the year before. Gone are all the imperial pretensions and colonial posturings. Now he responds to the phenomena of Africa and the Africans in his own way. Though still inclined to paternalism now and then, he finally seems to have perceived that the bush Africans with whom he was to spend most of the seven months to come were individuals every bit as eccentric, engaging, irritating, talented or flawed as the rest of the animal species known as man – himself and Ken Smith included. He also knew that without the help and support of the local Africans the entire enterprise would fail, for virtually everything depended on them, from collecting to cooking. And in the course of this second expedition he would grow so close to the people of the Cameroons that he would become almost a blood brother to one of them, with whom his name would be associated for the rest of his life.

Another feature that emerges powerfully from Gerald’s diary is his sense of the overwhelming prodigality of the Africa through which he travelled – an ancient Africa still largely virgin, still largely wild, still host to a nature as beautiful as it was cruel – an Africa where the concept of ‘extinction’ seemed to bear little relation to the seemingly endless procession of flying, running, hopping, crawling, slithering, swimming species that daily crossed the traveller’s line of sight or range of hearing.