Gerald Durrell: The Authorised Biography

Early in 1928 Gerald’s father fell seriously ill. Though the illness was never satisfactorily diagnosed, the symptoms suggest a brain tumour of some kind. Margaret remembered her father suffering from severe headaches, and talking and behaving in a very odd and frightening manner. One day, for example, she was dismayed to see him reach for the inkwell on his desk and drink its contents as if it were a glass of whisky or a cup of tea. Friends and relatives suggested it might help if the ailing man was taken up into the cool of the hills, away from the heat of the Lahore plains, and eventually he was transported to the hill station of Dalhousie, which at a height of nearly eight thousand feet crowned the most westerly shoulder of a magnificent snowy range of the lower Himalayas. Dalhousie had a small English cottage hospital looking out over the mountains, the air was crisp and the ambience calm.

Lawrence Samuel was made as comfortable as possible, but his condition continued to deteriorate. Louisa stayed at the hospital to be near him, while the younger children were billeted at a nearby house with their Irish governess. Sometimes the family would drive out into the surrounding hills, where in the cool pine forests, loud with the rustle of the trees, the throbbing chorus of birdsong and the bubbling of the shallow, brownwater streams, Gerald was given a broader vision of the world of nature. Occasionally he was given rides on his father’s large bay horse, surrounded by a ring of servants in case he fell off. Not even the death of the horse, which fell down a cliff when Gerald suddenly startled it as it grazed with its feet tethered near the edge one day, could wean him off his burgeoning passion for the animal world.

On 16 April 1928, when Gerald was three years and three months of age, his father died of a suspected cerebral haemorrhage, and was buried the next day at the English cemetery at Dalhousie. Neither Gerald nor Margaret attended the funeral. Mother was entirely shattered.

Within the family there was a general feeling that Father’s premature death, at the age of forty-three, was brought on by worry and overwork. He had made a fortune as a railway-builder, but had fared less well when he turned to road construction, on one occasion undertaking to build a highway on a fixed-price contact, only to find that the subsoil was solid rock. His sister Elsie believed he had ‘worked himself to death’, and was told that at the moment he was taken ill he was ‘out in the heat of the midday sun supervising a critical piece of work on a bridge’. According to Nancy Durrell (who would have got it from her husband Lawrence), her father-in-law had quarrelled with the Indian partners in his business. ‘They apparently turned a bit nasty, and there was a very gruelling lawsuit, which he handled all by himself, he wouldn’t have a lawyer. But he got overexcited, and what exactly happened I don’t know, but in the end he had a sort of brainstorm, and he died rather quickly.’

In July 1928 Lawrence Samuel’s will was granted probate, and Louisa, now embarking on almost half a lifetime of widowhood, was left the sum of 246,217 rupees, the equivalent of £18,500 at the exchange rate of the time, or more than half a million pounds in today’s money. Financially enriched but emotionally beggared, she was left bereft: grieving, alone and helpless. So great was her despair that years later she was to confess she had contemplated suicide. It was only the thought of abandoning Gerry, still totally dependent on her love and care, that restrained her. Mother and child were thus bound together for ever in a relationship of mutual debt and devotion, for each, in their different ways, had given the other the gift of life.

‘When my father died,’ Gerald was to recall, ‘my mother was as ill-prepared to face life as a newly hatched sparrow. Dad had been the completely Edwardian husband and father. He handled all the business matters and was in complete control of all finances. Thus my mother, never having to worry where the next anna was coming from, treated money as a useful commodity that grew on trees.’

Gerald himself was seemingly unscathed by the family tragedy:

I must confess my father’s demise had little or no effect upon me, since he was a remote figure. I would see him twice a day for half an hour and he would tell me stories about the three bears. I knew he was my daddy, but I was on much greater terms of intimacy with Mother and my ayah than with my father. The moment he died I was whisked away by my ayah to stay with nearby friends, leaving my mother, heartbroken, with the task of reorganising our lives. At first she told me her inclination was to stay in India, but then she listened to the advice of the Raj colony. She had four young children in need of education – the fact that there were perfectly good educational facilities in India was ignored, they were not English educational facilities, to get a proper education one must go ‘home’. So mother sold up the house and had everything, including the furniture, shipped off ahead, and we headed for ‘home’.

Mother, Margaret and Gerald took a train that bore them across half the breadth of India to Bombay, where they were to stay with relatives while they waited for the passenger liner that was to carry them, first class, to England. So Gerald sailed away from the land of his birth, not to return till almost half a century had gone by and he was white-haired and bushy-bearded. Like most of the other children on board, he was a good sailor – unlike the grown-ups. ‘Two days out,’ he wrote in his unpublished memoir, ‘we were struck by a tumultuous storm. Huge grey-green waves battered the ship and she ground and shuddered. All the mothers immediately succumbed to sea-sickness, to be followed very shortly by the ayahs, who turned from a lovely biscuit brown to a leaden jade green. The sound of retching was like a chorus of frogs and the stifling hot air was filled with the smell of vomit.’

The reluctant crew were forced to take charge of a dozen or more children of around Gerald’s age. Twice a day the children were linked together by rope like a chain gang, so that none of them could fall overboard, and taken up on deck for some fresh air, before being taken back down again to play blind man’s buff and grandmother’s footsteps in the heaving, yawing dining saloon. One of the crew had a cine projector and a lot of ‘Felix the Cat’ cartoon films, and these were shown in the club room as a way of diverting the children during the long haul to Aden and Suez.

‘I was riveted,’ Gerald remembered. ‘I knew about pictures but I had not realised that pictures could move. Felix, of course, was a very simplistic, stick-like animal, but his antics kept us all enthralled. We were provided with bits of paper and pencils to scribble with, and while the others were scribbling I was trying to draw Felix, who had become my hero. I was infuriated because I could not get him right, simple a drawing though he was. When I finally succeeded, I was even more infuriated because, of course, he would not move.’

Whether it was a real live creature, or an animated image, or a drawing on a page, the child brought with him a passion and a tenderness for animals so innate it was as if it was embedded in his genes. In the years to follow, come hell or high water, this affinity was not to be denied.

So young Gerald came to a new home in a new country – and a new life without a father. The loss of the family’s patriarch was to have a profound effect on the lives of all the Durrell siblings, for, deprived of paternal authority, they grew up free to ‘do their own thing’, decades before the expression came into vogue.

TWO ‘The Most Ignorant Boy in the School’ England 1928–1935

The house at 43 Alleyn Park, in the prosperous and leafy south London suburb of Dulwich, now became the Durrell family home. It was a substantial house, befitting the family of a servant of empire who had made his pile, with large rooms on three floors and a big garden enclosing it. Before long Mother had installed Gerald’s Aunt Prudence, a butler and a huge mastiff guard dog that chased the tradesmen and according to Gerald devoured two little dogs a day. But the new house was vast, expensive to run, and haunted: one evening Mother saw the ghost of her late husband, as plain as day, smoking a cigarette in a chair – or so Gerald claimed.

Early in 1930, therefore, when Gerald was five, the family took over a large flat at 10 Queen’s Court, an annexe of the sprawling Queen’s Hotel, a Victorian pile stuck in the faded south London suburb of Upper Norwood. Mother’s cousin Fan lived here, along with other marooned refugees from the Indian Army and Civil Service, so for her the place felt almost like home. The family’s new abode was a strange, elongated flat in the hotel grounds. The entrance was through the hotel, but there was a side door which allowed access to the extensive garden, with its lawns, trees and pond. ‘The flat itself consisted of a big dining room cum drawing room,’ Gerald recalled, ‘a room opposite which was for Larry, then a small room in which I kept my toys, then a minuscule bathroom and kitchen, and finally Mother’s spacious bedroom. Lying in bed in her room, you could look down the whole length of the flat to the front door.’

Mother’s susceptibility to the paranormal showed no signs of abating, for this place too turned out to be haunted, one ghost being visible, two others audible. The first took the form of a woman who appeared at the foot of Mother’s bed when she woke from a siesta one day. The woman smiled at Mother, then faded slowly away. She appeared again a few weeks later, this time witnessed by Gerald’s cousins Molly and Phyllis, who came running into the kitchen shouting, ‘Auntie, Auntie, there’s a strange lady in your room.’

The second ghost took the form of a voice that kept telling Mother to put her head in the gas oven, and the third manifested itself in Larry’s room one night when he was playing in a jazz band up in town. In Larry’s room reposed the great teak roll-top desk that his father had had built to his own design. When the roll-top was raised or lowered the noise, Gerald recalled, was indescribable. That night, while Mother lay smoking in bed, waiting anxiously for Larry’s return, she heard the unmistakable racket of the roll-top opening and closing. ‘Taking me firmly by the hand,’ Gerald was to recount, ‘we went down the length of the flat, listening to the constant clatter of the lid being pulled shut and then opened again, but the moment we opened the door and looked into the room there was nothing to be seen.’

It was in the garden of the Queen’s Hotel, while he was trying to catch birds by putting salt on their tails, that Gerald first came face to face with the more sensual side of life, in the form of a beautiful young woman called Tabitha. ‘She had big, melting brown eyes,’ he recalled, ‘brown and glossy as new horse chestnuts, a wide smile, brown hair bobbed and with a fringe like a Christmas cracker.’ Before long Tabitha was looking after him in her tiny flat whenever Mother went off house-hunting. She had a cat called Cuthbert and two goldfish called Mr Jenkins and Clara Butt, as well as a lot of gentlemen friends who came and went and seemed to spend a shorter or longer time in her bedroom – to talk business, she told her young friend.

‘I loved the days I spent with Tabitha,’ Gerald wrote in his private memoir:

In fact I loved Tabitha very much. She was so gentle and gay, her smile engulfed you with love. She smelt gorgeous too, which was important to me, since Mother smelt gorgeous as well. She was not only very sweet and kind but very funny. She had a squeaky wind-up gramophone and a pile of records of Harry Lauder and Jack Buchanan, so we would clear away the furniture and Tabitha would teach me how to do the Charleston and the waltz. At times we went round and round so fast that eventually we would collapse on the sofa, she with peals of laughter and me giggling like a hysteric. Tabitha also taught me lots of songs, including one which enchanted me:

Iz ’e an Aussie, iz ’e, Lizzie?

Iz ’e an Aussie, iz ’e, eh?

Iz it because ’e iz an Aussie

That ’e makes you feel this way?

But alas, somehow or other Mother got to hear of Tabitha’s business associates and my visits to her flat were ended. So Tabitha’s lovely brown eyes and wonderful smell disappeared from my world, and I mourned the fact that I could no longer waltz and Charleston and sing silly songs with this enchanting girl.

Looking back in later years, it struck Gerald as odd that Mother should have been so prim. ‘After all,’ he noted, ‘she was rearing a brood of offspring who became sexually precocious and pursued their own interests with the relentlessness of dynamos. Still, her fledglings managed to erode her Victorian attitudes and train her into more broad-minded ways, so that when, at the age of twenty-one, I went home one weekend with a girlfriend, I found a note from my mother which said: “I have made up two beds, dear, and the double bed, since you didn’t tell me whether you are sleeping together or not. The sheets are aired and the gin is in the dining room cupboard.”’

It was while living at the Queen’s Hotel annexe that Mother got to know the Brown family – a matriarchy of English provenance who had recently come over from America, consisting of Granny Richardson, her daughter Mrs Brown, and Mrs Brown’s young daughter Dorothy. Like the Durrells, the Browns had a garden flat at the hotel, and the two mothers soon became good friends, for both were exiles who had returned to a foreign motherland. Dorothy Brown was eleven when she first encountered Gerald, who had just turned five. ‘He was a bright little spark,’ she recalled, ‘and even then he was very fond of animals. When our cat had kittens he was always there on the doorstep, clamouring to see them. He was very much a mother’s boy and always terribly fond of her. As far as he was concerned she could do no wrong.’

Like Louisa Durrell, the Browns were looking for a house to buy, and finally settled on Bournemouth, a salubrious seaside resort on the south coast, stuffed with decaying ex-members of His Majesty’s Forces and genteel ladies eking out modest pensions, but warmer and sunnier than most towns in England, and surrounded by beautiful countryside. Mother decided to follow her friends’ example and move to Bournemouth, and early in 1931 the family became the proud possessors of Berridge House, at 6 Spur Hill, Parkstone, complete with a butler, a housekeeper and two servants. This marked the beginning of the Durrells’ close association with Bournemouth, which has lasted to the present day.

Berridge House was a huge Victorian mansion standing in four acres of grounds, part woodland, part orchard, with a lawn on which two games of tennis could be played at once and a herbaceous border which was, Gerald remembered, ‘slightly wider than the Nile and home to nearly every known weed, with the exception of Mandrake’. When Mother was asked if the house was not a trifle large for a widowed lady and a six-year-old boy – Margaret was now at Malvern, Leslie at Dulwich and Larry at a crammer’s – she answered, rather vaguely, that she had to have room for her children’s friends. To the young Gerald the place looked like a gigantic dolls’ house, with a bewildering quantity of bedrooms, bathrooms and attic rooms, a huge drawing room, dining room and kitchen, a cellar and a parquet-floored basement ballroom that ran the length and width of the house. On rainy days this vast ballroom was his playroom, where he could indulge in ingenuity and uproar without knocking anything over or disturbing anyone upstairs.

To celebrate the move Mother bought Gerald a Cocker spaniel, the first dog of his very own. It arrived in a cardboard box, and when Gerald opened it the creature inside took his breath away – ‘a dog all soft and squidgy, with hair the colour of ripe corn and big brown eyes and a loving disposition’. Gerald named the dog Simon, and from the moment he lifted him from his cardboard box he became his devoted companion.

There was no comparable companion for Mother, however, and the reality of her lonely state began to take its toll of her. ‘The difficulties of living in a great, echoing, empty house with only a small boy as a companion began to tell on Mother’s nerves,’ Gerry was to write in his memoir. She devoted herself to her cooking and teaching Gerald how to cook, and to tending the herbaceous borders in the garden, but then came the evening, and solitude. ‘She was lonely,’ Gerald wrote, ‘and she took to mourning the death of my father in earnest with the aid of the Demon Drink, resorting to the bottle more and more frequently.’

It helped, perhaps, that Gerald shared her bed with her. ‘At the end of the day I would have my bath and then, with a clothes brush, I would climb into the bed that I shared with Mother and dust it carefully to make sure there was not a speck of dust anywhere. Then Mother would come to bed and I would curl up against her warm body in its silk nightgown and frequently I would wake to find myself pressed up against her in a state of arousal.’ For many years to come, mother and child were to remain closer to one another than to any other human beings.

Eventually, matters reached a crisis. ‘Mother departed,’ Gerald remembered, ‘to have what in those days was called a “nervous breakdown” and Miss Burroughs entered my life.’ Miss Burroughs was Gerald’s first and last English governess. ‘She had a face,’ he recalled, ‘which disappointment had crumpled, and embedded in it were two eyes, grey and sharp as flints.’ Miss Burroughs had never had to deal with a small boy before. Terrified for some reason that Gerald might be kidnapped, she instituted a regime of locked doors, as though he were a dangerous prisoner. ‘I was locked in the kitchen, the drawing room and the dining room, but the worst thing was that she banished Simon from my bedroom, saying that dogs were full of germs, and locked me in at night, so that by morning my bladder was bursting, and as I didn’t dare wet the bed I had to lift a corner of the carpet to relieve myself.’

Miss Burroughs’ cooking left a lot – indeed, ‘virtually everything’ – to be desired. She was, Gerald recollected, the only person he had ever met who put sago in the gruel she called soup – ‘like drinking frog-spawn’. If the weather was bad, he was confined to the ballroom, where he and Simon invented their own games. Boy and dog built up an astonishing rapport, understanding completely how each other’s human and canine imaginations were working.

‘Sometimes, miraculously, Simon would become a pride of lions,’ Gerald was to record, ‘and I a lone Christian in an arena. As I prepared to strangle him, he would behave in the most un-lionlike way, slobbering over me with his moist, velvet-soft mouth and crooning endearments. At other times I would change into a dog and follow him round the ballroom on all fours, panting when he panted, scratching when he scratched and flinging myself down in abandoned attitudes as he did.’

Simon, Gerald noticed, was basically a coward, for whom ‘a lawnmower was a machine from hell’, and sadly it was his cowardice, which should have saved his life, that was to cause his death. Startled by a chimneysweep driving away from the house on a motorcycle and sidecar, he turned and fled down the drive, into the road and under the wheel of a car, which, Gerald was to lament, ‘neatly crushed Simon’s skull, killing him instantly’.

Gerald was left as alone as his mother, now returned from her cure and, for the moment, recovered from her addiction. It was high time, she decided, for him to begin some kind of formal education and to mix with other children. Down the hill from Berridge House was a kindergarten called The Birches, run by a large old lady called Auntie and a dapper, kindly, intelligent woman called Miss Squire, better known to the children as Squig. Gerald remembered The Birches with fondness. It was the only school he ever attended where he completed the course.

Gerald loved The Birches because both Auntie and Miss Squire knew exactly how to teach and treat young people. Every morning he would take a tribute of slugs, snails, earwigs and other creepy-crawlies down to Squig, sometimes in matchboxes and sometimes in his pocket, thus forming a zoo of a kind. ‘The boy’s mad!’ exclaimed brother Lawrence when he learnt of this. ‘Snails in his pockets …!’

‘Aren’t they lovely?’ Gerald would tell Squig.

‘Oh, yes dear, quite beautiful,’ Squig would reply, ‘but I think they would probably be happier in the garden.’

Noticing the interest that Gerald’s wrigglies aroused in his fellow pupils, Squig bought and installed an aquarium with some goldfish and pond snails in it, and they would all watch the antics of these creatures absolutely enthralled. It was about this time that Gerald, still only six, announced to his mother his wish to have a zoo of his own one day. He had kept a collection of small toy animals made of lead – camel, penguin, elephant, two tigers – in a wooden orange-box at the Queen’s Hotel, but one day as he walked along the Bournemouth promenade with his mother he described to her his blueprint for a collection of real creatures, listing the species, the kinds of cages they would be housed in, and the cottage in which he and his mother would live at his zoo.

In 1932 the family moved a short distance to a brand new house at 18 Wimborne Road, Bournemouth, which Mother named Dixie Lodge in honour of her family. Though still substantial, it was a rather smaller property than Berridge House, in less extensive grounds, and so easier and cheaper to run. In Gerald’s view it was a pleasanter place altogether, and the garden contained a number of climbable trees which were home to all sorts of strange insects. Here he settled down – ‘quite happily’, he said, ‘under the raucous but benign influence of Lottie, the Swiss maid’.

But then, when he was eight, disaster struck out of a clear blue sky:

Mother did something so terrible that I was bereft of words. She enrolled me in the local school. Not a pleasant kindergarten like The Birches, where you made things out of plasticine and drew pictures, but a real school. Wychwood School was a prep school where they expected you to learn things like algebra and history – and things that were even greater anathema to me, like sports. As both my scholastic achievements and interest in sports were nil, I was, not unnaturally, somewhat of a dullard.

Football and cricket were an utter bore for Gerald, gym and swimming lessons an absolute torture, bullying a constant menace. The only part of the curriculum that appealed to him was the one and a half hours per week devoted to natural history. ‘This was taken by the gym mistress, Miss Allard,’ he remembered, ‘a tall blonde lady with protuberant blue eyes. As soon as she realised my genuine interest in natural history, she went out of her way to take a lot of trouble with me and so she became my heroine.’

Gerald came to hate the school so vehemently that it was all Louisa could do to keep him there at all. ‘He used to be taken to school by his mother in the morning,’ recalled a visitor to Dixie Lodge; ‘at any rate she tried to take him – and he would cling onto the railings on the way, screaming, and then he’d have to be taken home, and then he’d get a temperature and the doctor would say, it’s no good, you’ll have to keep him away from school.’ Eventually the GP diagnosed Gerald’s recurring condition as a chronic form of what he called ‘school pain’ – a psychosomatic reaction which prevented the boy from ever completing his prep school education.

Soon after the Durrells moved into Dixie Lodge, Lawrence (who lived there off and on, as did Leslie and Margaret) had struck up a friendship with Alan Thomas, the assistant manager at Bournemouth’s famous Commin’s bookshop, a young man of about Lawrence’s age who shared many of his intellectual and literary interests. Enormously tall, thin, bearded and ‘spider-like’, Alan lived in nearby Boscombe, and soon got to know the family well, becoming a kind of extra brother to the boys and a lifelong friend. It was not long after Gerald had joined the unhappy ranks of Wychwood that Alan happened to spot the headmaster browsing in his shop.