Gerald Durrell: The Authorised Biography

But his grasp of the mainstream of schoolboy learning – sums and stinks and 1066 and the rest – was patchy and uncertain. Gerald was therefore a highly unorthodox teenager in the Britain of his time. The familiar routine of morning assemblies and school games and end of term exams had passed him by. His primary education was fragmentary, his secondary education nil, his chances of higher education non-existent. For a youth with such an apparently oddball background there was only one option in wartime Bournemouth – to get a job, probably a mundane and lowly one, until he was old enough to be called up and have his head shot off in the war.

The only job that Gerald could imagine tolerating was working with animals. Though it doesn’t sound much, for Gerald a day spent in a pet shop in the company of white rats was not a day wasted. He had managed to run an aviary and keep a few adders in the garden at home during these years, but the largest animal he had to cope with was a fallow deer which was given to him by a boy who lived in the New Forest and was moving to Southampton. The boy had described it as a ‘baby’ and a ‘household pet’, but when it arrived it turned out to be a petulant creature at least four years old – far from the submissive, friendly fawn Gerald had been promised. With much patience he eventually learned how to pacify the deer, which he named Hortense, by scratching the base of its antlers, but in the end he had to give way to family pressure, and Hortense was exiled to a nearby farm.

As for the war, though a few stray bombs did land on Bournemouth, one of them rocking the treasurehouse of Commin’s bookshop, Gerald admitted that he did not really know what war was, nor care very much about it.

We used to see Southampton get a pasting, eagerly enjoying the eastern sky aflame, and there were plenty of jolly dogfights upstairs – but on the whole we had a cushy war. The entire family did. We were pinned to the nine o’clock news, cheering for victory, and I followed daily the progress of the battles on whatever front it was … but only selfishly. I wanted to get the war over as fast as possible and do something interesting, like return to Greece and see how the Germans had behaved to the swallowtails and trapdoor spiders. Even so, I spent every moment out of doors – aged fifteen to twenty – risking death at the hands of the bombers on the way to Coventry or somewhere that really copped it. I helped with the harvest. I went out – not on a donkey now, but a bicycle – looking for nests and animals, rediscovering the local fauna with more patience and a maturer knowledge, like waiting for the bird to return to her nest to make sure of the species, at any hour of day or night, because I was used on Corfu to regarding the villa merely as a dormitory. The outside was home. Two hundred yards from the house I had the woods to keep an eye on, and then at the end of the road the golf links, beyond which the country started. The real country. Bournemouth in my time was a country town. It was ideal from my point of view – though of course it wasn’t Corfu.

The ‘real country’ was the moorlands of the Purbecks, the wilder woodlands of the New Forest, the broad sweep of shore and water around Poole Harbour. Once he went much further afield, on a bird-watching holiday to the outlying Scilly Isles, beyond the western tip of Cornwall.

Gerald found England stiff and starchy after the relaxed lifestyle of his Mediterranean island, especially when it came to sex and girls. He had reached puberty on Corfu, and with a little help from a young local girl he had discovered sex – or at least its preliminaries – without suffering any of the inhibitions and sense of guilt that tormented so many of his contemporaries in England. On Corfu sex had seemed something pure and natural – a romp and a tumble in the olive woods and myrtle groves, a giggle and a tangle of limbs.

On Corfu all his tutors had taught him about sex, and it was discussed quite freely at home. In England, by contrast, it was Presbyterian black and sin-laden. ‘I couldn’t understand why in England boys of my age found something dirty and furtive about it. And I was soon to realise with girlfriends in Bournemouth that I couldn’t treat them with quite the same gay abandon in case they thought me naughty and wicked. In some confusion I was forced to retreat to a chaste and stolen kiss on the brow. It was like being suddenly flung out of Rabelais into William Morris.’

Gerald was a good-looking youth, with an attractive, open face and engaging manner. His good looks were almost to prove his undoing when a local girl was raped, strangled and mutilated, and her body found under the rhododendrons in one of the local beauty spots called the Chines. The Bournemouth Echo reported that the police were anxious to interview a tall, fair young man with blue eyes and a charming personality – Gerald to a tee. Mother, of course, immediately saw the hempen rope being adjusted around her son’s neck.

‘You’re not to go out, dear,’ she warned Gerald. ‘You might be arrested as the murderer. You’re to stay at home. You know what the police are like. Once they’ve arrested you they’ll never stop till they’ve hung you. And hanging’s no laughing matter.’

Within a day or two, a couple of detectives did indeed call at the house in order to eliminate the young naturalist from their inquiries. Satisfied with Gerald’s answers to their questioning, they left without even taking his fingerprints. When they had gone, Mother reappeared.

‘Now, tell me what you said, dear,’ she insisted. ‘It’s very important to get our stories to match when we’re in court.’

In some ways Gerald at this time was almost feminine in his looks. But he did his best to disguise it, partly because he had found, to his embarrassment, that he was becoming attractive to homosexual men. This sometimes got him into difficulties, and was all the more galling because he was totally heterosexual himself. ‘In those days I used to plaster my pale blond hair with vaseline,’ he recalled, ‘hoping it would become a manly dark brown and thus attract all the ladies who would otherwise have thought me too weak and pretty. Little did I know that this treatment plaited my long locks into something closely resembling an eel migration of some magnitude and only the kindliest and ugliest of girls would consent to be seen with me.’

This phase didn’t last long, and soon Gerald’s interest in girls was matched by his ability to arouse their interest in him. ‘I’ve always had a fair amount of attraction for women,’ he said, ‘but I hope I’ve never used it – except to seduce them, of course.’ He was, he reckoned, a consummate seducer, though never a cynical or dishonest one: ‘I treated women as human beings, which is of course fatal.’ In the early days of what he would later refer to as his sexual career it was all pretty much hit and miss anyway: ‘I must admit that at the age of sixteen I was still of the opinion that the idea was “to get the girl aboard the lugger” and that was the end of it.’

As well as appreciating their physical allure, Gerald genuinely liked and respected the opposite sex. Perhaps because, unlike most English boys of his class and generation, he had not been to boarding school, he felt at ease in the company of women and at home with the feminine side of human nature. Indeed, he preferred the company of women to that of men, though on the whole he trusted animals more than either. He could admire, and sometimes even adore, individuals of the opposite sex, but he never entirely lost his head over them. In any case, he was continually reminded of the fact that women could be as flawed and clay-footed as the rest of the human species, as an incident towards the end of the war years forcibly reminded him:

Dark hair, huge glistening eyes, like chestnuts newly polished, a face composed and gently supported by bone structure as beautiful as a coral reef. A mouth moist, wide and gentle, a loving mouth. A body as eloquent as a teenage birch tree. Brown hands like starfish, which when they moved illuminated what she was saying, as a conductor to an orchestra. She was a girl who not only filled your eye and heart but made you stop and listen to the magic of her voice and the tapestry of what she said. Her wonderful head carefully positioned on a neck as slender and beautiful as Nefertiti’s. I longed to know her, to have the privilege of taking her into a secret garden full of night jasmine, tangerine and flowering creatures that would attempt to emulate her beauty but could only enhance it. She was the pure Garden of Eden for which Adam sacrificed his navel. For her I would have sacrificed much more. The waiter brought the bill and I paid. As I passed the table of this lovely, delicate paragon I heard her say – loud as a conch shell being blown – ‘You stupid, sodding twit, I can’t think why I married you. Your balls are as big as warm eggs and as much use.’ I have never felt the same about women since.

In his early manhood Gerald’s sex appeal was so overt and palpable that it was assumed by those who did not know him that he was a ladykiller. In his maturer years his tendency to flirt with every woman in the room led many to believe he was a womaniser. In his old age he told so many stories about the intimate encounters of his youth that he gave the impression his bachelor years had been one long serial orgy. All this probably exaggerates his sexual propensities. ‘He wasn’t a particularly sexy man,’ Margaret remembered. ‘I mean, I don’t think he was a highly sexed man, to be honest – not like Larry – and though he gave the impression that he was to some people, and sometimes even said he was, it was really just flirting, purely harmless. In fact I would say Gerry was more mother-orientated than sex-orientated. Sex was probably the dream but I honestly don’t think it was his scene. Basically he didn’t like to be on his own. He always liked to have a woman around, even if she was only messing about in the kitchen.’ In his later years Gerald was to confirm his sister’s view: ‘I wasn’t too preoccupied with sex, because I had too many other matters to absorb me … I wouldn’t worry if nothing happened.’

Among the other matters that absorbed the young Gerald was his dedicated self-education. He spent a lot more time with books than he ever did with girls. Books were his entrée into another world, a world of boundless knowledge and endless diversion, an alternative world of the imagination, a real world of science and fact. He worked the public library system for all it was worth, and when he could afford it he bought books at Commin’s in Bournemouth town centre. Later he was to say: ‘I believe that books are an essential of life. To be surrounded by them, to read and re-read them gives you a carapace of knowledge so that you can lumber through life, as a tortoise does, carrying a library in your skull. Books surround you like a womb of knowledge.’

In idle moments in later years he found it fun to beachcomb through his memory for the flotsam of books he remembered reading in his youth. These ranged from children’s classics to Victorian adventure books for boys and on to more ambitious literary works like Shakespeare, Rabelais, the Bible, Lamb’s Essays of Elia and the novels of Rudyard Kipling and D.H. Lawrence, as well as the books of comic writers such as Edward Lear, Jerome K. Jerome, P.G. Wodehouse, James Thurber and Patrick Campbell. He even set about gnawing his way through those two daunting paper megaliths, Larousse and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His reading in works of natural history was even more voracious and wide-ranging, with a broad base of classics – Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace, Henry Bates, Henri Fabre, Gilbert White, Richard Jefferies, W.H. Hudson – and a broad trawl of more contemporary works, from the popular nature books of ‘Romany’ (who preached the gospel of ‘the balance of nature’) to Julian Huxley and H.G. Wells’ comprehensive biological overview The Science of Life.

In many ways it is probable that his lack of a formal education was the making of Gerald Durrell. It left his innate, highly original intelligence unfettered and unchannelled, free to roam at will, to explore far and wide, to make connections outside the orthodoxy of the teaching of the time, develop new trajectories of thought and pioneer new lines of progression that could not have emerged, except with difficulty, from an institutionalised mind indoctrinated within the conventions of a traditional education. Gerald believed this himself: ‘I think the set routine of an average school kills the imagination in a child. Whereas the way I was brought up, the imagination was allowed to grow, to blossom. It taught me a lot of things which you’re not normally taught in school and this proved very valuable to me in dealing with animals and as a writer. My eccentric upbringing has been of great value to me.’

By way of example, it was his lack of a conventionally programmed education that enabled him, very early on, to stumble on the matter of declining animal populations (he was particularly struck by the parlous state of the black-footed ferret of the Great Plains of North America). He was barely out of his teens when he began to compile his own ‘rather shaky and amateurish’ version of a Red Data Book of endangered species* – one of the earliest compilations of its sort in the United Kingdom. If he had gone to university to read zoology, he would have come away with a thorough grasp of comparative anatomy and the Linnaean order of species, but it is doubtful if the world at large would ever have had reason to know his name

So Gerald’s adolescence passed. Towards the end of 1942, when the tide of war had just begun to turn in the Allies’ favour – though years of bloody slaughter still remained – he received his call-up papers. Now nearly eighteen, he reported for his army medical in Southampton. First he and his fellows were marshalled – ‘rather like cattle in a slaughter house’ – and told to strip. Then they were each given a beaker and told to pee in it. Gerald had drunk several pints of beer beforehand to make sure he had a full bladder, but unfortunately he had overdone it. The beaker filled up and slopped over. ‘’Ere!’ cried the orderly. ‘Slopped all over the place. I ’opes you ain’t got no infectious bleeding diseases.’ In an unpublished account, Gerald recalled:

My next nerve-shattering encounter was with a small, fat doctor, who looked exactly like one of the less prepossessing garden gnomes. He peered in my mouth, peered in my ears and finally placed a stubby finger on the end of my nose.

‘Follow my finger,’ he said, as he drew it away, so I followed it. I remember wondering at the time what subtle medical trick this was to expose the mechanism of your body.

‘I don’t mean follow my finger,’ he snapped.

‘But you just told me to,’ I said, bewildered.

‘I don’t mean follow my finger, I mean follow my finger,’ he said irritably.

‘But that’s what I was doing,’ I said.

‘I don’t mean follow it with your whole body.’

I was beginning to doubt the mental stability of this man.

‘I can’t follow your finger without my body,’ I explained patiently.

‘I don’t want your whole body, I just want your eyes,’ he snapped.

I began to wonder which lunatic asylum he had escaped from and should I tell the other doctors about his condition. I decided to be patient and calming.

‘But you can’t have my eyes without my body,’ I explained, ‘they’re attached to it, so if you want my eyes you have to have the body too.’

His face went the colour of an old brick wall.

‘Are you an idiot?’ he enquired simmeringly.

‘I don’t think so, sir,’ I said placatingly. ‘I just don’t see how you can have my eyes without the body thrown in, as it were.’

‘I don’t want your Goddamed eyes,’ he shouted. ‘All I want you to do is follow my finger.’

‘But I did, sir, and then you got angry.’

‘Follow it with your eyes, you imbecile,’ he bellowed, ‘with your Goddam bloody eyes.’

‘Oh, I see, sir,’ I said, although to tell the truth I didn’t.

I wandered off to the next member of the medical profession, who was a dismal man with greasy hair, and looked somewhat like a failed Maitre d’Hôtel on the verge of suicide. He examined me minutely from stem to stern, humming to himself gently like an unhappy bear sucking its paw. He smelt of cinnamon and his eyes were violet coloured, very striking and beautiful.

‘And now,’ he said, ‘I want to look up your nose, so we’ll draw the curtains and be in the dark.’

Here, I thought to myself, we have another lunatic.

‘Wouldn’t you see it better in daylight, sir?’ I asked.

‘No, no, darkness, because I’ve got to stick something into your mouth,’ he explained.

‘What sort of thing?’ I asked, determined to guard my honour to the last redoubt.

‘A torch,’ he said. ‘It won’t hurt, I assure you.’

So the curtains were drawn and a slim pencil torch was inserted in my mouth and switched on.

‘Damn,’ he said, ‘the batteries have gone.’

He removed the torch, which shone as brightly as a bonfire.

‘That’s funny,’ he said and stuck the torch back into my mouth.

‘What,’ he said ominously, ‘have you stuffed up your nose?’

‘Nothing,’ I said truthfully.

‘Well, why can’t I see the light? I can’t see the light,’ he said querulously. ‘I should be able to see your sinuses, but there’s nothing there.’

‘They’ve been mucking about with my nose for years, sir,’ I explained, ‘and it never seems to do any good.’

‘My God!’ he explained. ‘You must go and see a specialist. I’m not taking responsibility for this. Why, your sinuses look like – look like – well, they look like the Black Hole of Calcutta!’

Gerald was sent to see Dr Magillicuddy, a sinus specialist, who stood no nonsense.

Sitting behind a huge desk he read my medical report carefully, darting fierce glances at me from opal-blue eyes.

‘Come over here,’ he said gruffly, his Scottish r’s rolling out of his mouth like bumble bees.

He stuck a torch in my mouth. There was silence for a moment and then he let out a long, marvelling sigh.

‘Hoots, mon,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen sinuses like yours. It’s like gazing at a bit of Edinburgh Castle. If anyone wanted to clean that up they’d have to excavate your skull with a pickaxe.’

He went back to his desk, sat down, laced his fingers and gazed across them at me.

‘Tell me truly, laddie,’ he said, ‘you don’t want to go into the army, navy or air force, do you?’

This was the moment when I realised truth was the only answer.

‘No, sir,’ I said.

‘Are you a coward?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir,’ I answered.

‘So am I,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think they’ll want a coward with sinuses like the Cheddar Gorge. Off you go, young man.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, and as I got to the door he barked –

‘Dinna underestimate yourself – it takes courage for a man to admit he’s a coward. Good luck to you.’

Eventually Gerald received a letter informing him that he was unfit for military service, but would have to do something to aid the war effort. He had two choices. He could work in a munitions factory or on the land. Unsurprisingly, he plumped for the latter. ‘Does it matter what sort of farm?’ he asked the clerk at the Labour Office, for he preferred the idea of a farm with sheep and cows to one growing cabbages and corn. ‘Personally,’ sniffed the clerk, ‘I don’t care which sort of farm. They’re all shit and smell to me.’

So Gerald set off on his bicycle in search of the ideal farm. His luck was in. He found Brown’s, a riding school at Longham, to the north of Bournemouth, that kept a few cows. Mr Brown was a short, round, ruddy-faced man with a treble voice who lived with his mother and never wore anything but hacking jacket, jodhpurs and flat cap. With this jolly fellow – ‘like a gigantic choir boy’ – Gerald struck a bargain. In return for his mucking out and grooming the twenty-two horses in the stables and leading people around on half a dozen rides a day, Mr Brown would assure the authorities he was helping to run a farm. And this Gerald did till the end of the war, congenially occupied in giving riding lessons to horsy local ladies and American GIs with cowboy delusions stationed in the vicinity.

Looking back on that aimless but idyllic limbo time, Gerald recalled with exquisite nostalgia (and perhaps a degree of romantic mythomania) his amorous entanglements with some of the more beautiful women who came to him for lessons. This had less to do with his own attractiveness or powers of seduction, he reckoned, than with the headily romantic context in which they found themselves, the seclusion and magic of the woods they rode through, alone in a world of their own. They were like shipboard affairs, these erotic rides – amorous adventures that were permissible because they were so far from the routines and obligations of port and home (or so, for a few hours, it seemed). Longer-lasting were the girls who were his friends, like Jean Martin, a nice country type who also worked at Brown’s stables, and of whom he was very fond, though he never even bestowed a kiss upon her, let alone any promises of eternal love.

Before long Gerald had a horse of his own, called Rumba, and on his days off he would ride out alone down the silent glades of the pine woods. He formed a very close relationship with his horse, and would spend hours in the saddle, letting his mind wander, making up poetry, breathing deeply of the very breath of nature. Often the horse, a creature of habit, bore him, dreaming, to his favourite pub in the forest, and refused to budge until he had finished off a pint of ale ‘for the road’.

So the months passed in this agreeable fashion. Gerald did not believe he was ducking his wartime duty, or letting the side down. What side? He did not feel that England was his country, even by adoption, and so was moved by no great stirrings of patriotic fervour. His grasp of the nature of the war was too tenuous for him to realise that England was not fighting for England alone.

At last, in May 1945, the guns in Europe fell silent. Gerald’s obligation to contribute to the war effort came to an end, and within a few weeks he had taken his first step towards his true life goal. By his own account he had long ago – as far back as Corfu, even – worked out what he wanted to do in life. First he would travel the world collecting animals for zoos, then he would establish a zoo of his own. Both objectives were highly unusual and extraordinarily difficult, and both required an expertise he did not possess in 1945. ‘I realised,’ he was to record later, ‘that if I wanted to achieve my ambitions, it was necessary for me to have experience with creatures larger than scorpions and sea horses.’ There seemed to be only one thing he could do – get a job in a zoo.

Having decided this, I sat down and wrote what seemed to me an extremely humble letter to the Zoological Society of London, which, in spite of the war, still maintained the largest collection of living creatures on one spot. Blissfully unaware of the enormity of my ambition, I outlined my plans for the future, hinted that I was just the sort of person they had always been longing to employ, and more or less asked them on what day I should take up my duties.

Normally, such a letter as this would have ended up where it deserved – in the waste-paper basket. But my luck was in, for it arrived on the desk of a most kindly and civilised man, one Geoffrey Vevers, the Superintendent of the London Zoo. I suppose something about the sheer audacity of my letter must have intrigued him for, to my delight, he wrote and asked me to attend an interview in London. At the interview, spurred on by Geoffrey Vevers’ gentle charm, I prattled on interminably about animals, animal collecting and my own zoo. A lesser man would have crushed my enthusiasm by pointing out the wild impracticability of my schemes but Vevers listened with great patience and tact, commended my line of approach to the problem, and said he would give the matter of my future some thought. I left him even more enthusiastic than before.

A few weeks later Gerald received a courteous letter informing him that unfortunately there were no vacancies for junior staff at London Zoo, but if he wished he could have a position as relief keeper at Whipsnade, the Zoological Society’s country zoo.