Gerry was enormous fun, Lucy Pendar remembered. He was always bursting into lusty renderings of ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ or ‘The Last Rose of Summer’, or piping up with ribald verses like ‘Little Mary’.
Little Mary, in the glen,
Poked herself with a fountain pen.
The top came off, the ink ran wild
And she gave birth to a blue black child.
And they called the bastard Stephen …
They called the bastard Stephen …
They called the bastard Stephen …
’Cos that was the name of the ink.
When Lucy fell ill, it was Gerry who read to her. When she had doubts, it was he who encouraged her to stick at it. When she tripped him up during a romp at a VJ-Day party, so that he sprawled headfirst into a cow pat – ‘I always lay claim to fertilising that brain,’ she joked later – he took it in good part. ‘It is unbelievable the influence one person can have upon another in so short a time,’ Lucy Pendar was to reflect, ‘but he was ever after indelibly imprinted on my memory. A wonderful man. We had the faith in him the adults did not, and we were right.’
At Whipsnade Gerald learned that zoo keeping, like many jobs, was not quite as romantic as it sounded. Most of a keeper’s time was spent on routine work such as feeding and cleaning. Gerald worked in a number of sections, each of which took its name from its principal animals. The lion section, for example, where he started, also included wombats, Arctic foxes, tigers and polar bears, which could be very dangerous if sufficiently annoyed. From ‘lions’ he moved on to ‘bears’, where there were also wolves, warthogs, zebras and gnus. But though Gerald enjoyed his work at Whipsnade, and was able to find time to learn more about the animals in his charge, it sometimes seemed to him that the only knowledge he had acquired was how to muck out and how to avoid a goring. The most dangerous animals, he discovered, were not necessarily the ones with the most fearsome reputations. Even a velvet-eyed zebra could be transformed into a raging demon that would treat one’s behind like a kettle drum given half a chance, while the much-feared wolf did not deserve its terrible notoriety at all.
Gerald was acquiring a priceless grounding in the daily running of a first-class, up-to-date zoo. But there were some minuses. He was disappointed at the lack of scientific expertise at Whipsnade, and at the reluctance of his fellow keepers, fearful for their jobs, to impart their knowhow to him. He was also alarmed by certain aspects of the animal management procedures, and convinced that some of the keepers were putting his life in danger. Gerald had a wonderful way with animals, but he was no fool. Most of the animals at Whipsnade were half wild. Some of the keepers thought they knew the ways of the creatures in their charge, but they didn’t, and one day, Gerald was sure, there would be an accident. Often the keepers asked him to do things which he was reluctant to do because he knew he could be injured. One day he was asked to fetch a baby water buffalo from its mother, a nearly suicidal undertaking. He managed to get hold of the baby and make a run for it, but the enraged mother caught up with him and rammed him with her horns, smashing his hand against the metal bars of the paddock and breaking several bones.
One exception among the keepers was a new man, recently discharged from the RAF, by the name of Ken Smith. Early on Gerald had struck up a rapport with Smith, who was then in charge of the Père David’s deer, and this friendship was to continue for many years, with great significance for the careers of both men.
On 7 January 1946 Gerald celebrated his twenty-first birthday and came into his inheritance – a sum of £3000 (worth over £60,000 in today’s money) which had been set aside for him in his father’s will. Suddenly Gerald – who until now could barely afford the price of half a pint of watery bitter or a packet of Woodbines – was a man of means. He had already decided to leave Whipsnade some months before. His ambition was still to go animal collecting and start his own zoo one day, and he knew he was not going to further either ambition if he stayed where he was.
Every evening he would sit in his little cell-like room in the cold, echoing Bothy, writing painstaking letters to any animal collectors who were still in business asking if they would take him on one of their expeditions if he paid his own expenses. These fearless, resourceful frontiersmen were a legendary breed of men. But their replies all said the same thing – as he had no collecting experience, they could not take him with them. If he ever managed to acquire some experience, then he should by all means write again.
‘It was at this point in my life, depressed and frustrated, that I had a brilliant idea,’ Gerald recalled. ‘If I used some of my inheritance to finance an expedition of my own, then I could honestly claim to have had experience and then one of these great men might not only take me on an expedition but actually pay me a salary. The prospects were mouthwatering.’
This, he decided, was what he would do. He would try his hand as a freelance animal-catcher, paying his way on his own expedition collecting animals for zoos. He now had capital, and this was how he proposed to invest it. Though the war had largely put an end to the animal-catchers’ unusual way of earning a living, with the coming of peace many zoos needed to restock their dwindling collections, and for the rarer and more exotic animals the demand was considerable and prices high.
At Gerald’s farewell curry dinner at Whipsnade, however, Captain Beal was less than enthusiastic. ‘No money in it,’ he warned in doleful tones. ‘You’ll be chuckin’ money away, mark my words.’
‘And watch out,’ warned a keeper called Jesse. ‘It’s one thing to have a lion in a cage and another to have the bugger creeping up behind you, see?’
The next morning, Gerald went the rounds saying goodbye to the animals. ‘I was sad,’ he recalled, ‘for I had been happy working at Whipsnade but, as I went round, each animal represented a place I wanted to see, each was a sort of geographical signpost encouraging me on my way. Everywhere the animals beckoned me and strengthened my decision.’
On 17 May 1946 Gerald Durrell left Whipsnade in pursuit of his dream. His time there had taught him many valuable and practical things about the profession upon which he was now embarked. No less importantly, his experience at Whipsnade had crystallised his thinking about zoos in general, and the ideal zoo in particular. He later wrote:
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