When Ursula stood up to get off the bus, Gerald saw that she was tall, with long, beautifully shaped legs and ‘one of those willowy, coltish figures that turn young men’s thoughts to lechery’. He reckoned, sighing, that it was unlikely he would ever set eyes on her again. But within three days she was back in his life, and remained so off and on for the next five years.
Encountering her again at a friend’s birthday party, where she greeted him effusively as ‘the bug boy’, Gerald, by his own account, ‘gazed at her and was lost’. It was not just her looks that infatuated him, it was also the sounds she made – ‘her grim, determined, unremitting battle with the English language’. For this svelte and spirited beauty suffered from a sort of oral dyslexia, and was for ever forcing words and phrases to do her bidding, expressing meanings they were never meant to express. There was no guessing what fantastical imagery she would conjure up next. She would speak excitedly of ‘Mozart’s archipelagoes’, of having bulls ‘castigated’, and of ‘ablutions’ to prevent ‘illiterate babies’. In Ursula’s world there was never fire without smoke, and rolling moss gathered no stones. In the prim confines of Bournemouth society ‘she dropped bricks at the rate of an unskilled navvy helping at a building site’.
There began a lengthy (and possibly unconsummated – the evidence is unclear) game of romantic cat and mouse. To give Ursula the impression that he was her equal in wealth, class and breeding, Gerald persuaded Margaret’s ex-husband Jack Breeze to drive him to his rendezvous with her in the vintage Rolls-Royce Jack owned at the time, with Jack smartly turned out in his BOAC officer’s uniform, for all the world like some pasha’s personal chauffeur. Ferried around in style, Gerald took Ursula to dinner at the Grill Room (‘She has the appetite of a rapacious python,’ he was warned, ‘and no sense of money’); to a symphony concert at the Pavilion (where her Pekinese puppy jumped out of its basket and created havoc in the auditorium); and into the country for gin and shove ha’penny at the ancient Square and Compass pub, where the aged yokels were mesmerised by her unique brand of English (‘A fine young woman, sir,’ commented one pickled veteran, ‘even though she’s a foreigner’). Gerry never got on terribly well with his girlfriends’ fathers in those days, and Ursula’s, stuffy and well-heeled, was conventional enough to brandish a horse-whip one night when he brought her home late, threatening to thrash him within an inch of his life if it ever happened again.
But while Ursula was Gerald’s distraction, it was the animal wilds of Africa that were his obsession, and she was convinced that sooner rather than later her beloved would end up tied in knots by a gorilla, or devoured by a lion before breakfast. One day she telephoned him. Her voice was so penetrating that he had to hold the receiver away from his ear.
‘Darling,’ she cried, ‘I’m engaged!’
‘I confess that my heart felt a sudden pang,’ Gerald was to write of this poignant moment, ‘and a loneliness spread over me. It was not that I was in love with Ursula; it was not that I wanted to marry her – God forbid! – but suddenly I realised that I was being deprived of somebody who could always lighten my gloom.’
Ursula duly married her intended. A long time later, she and Gerald met one last time, at a smart but stuffy old Edwardian café called the Cadena, among the elderly seaside gentry. As she came through the door it was obvious she was far gone with her second child.
‘Darling!’ she screamed. ‘Darling! Darling!’
‘She flung her arms round me,’ Gerald remembered, ‘and gave me a prolonged kiss of the variety that is generally cut out of French films by the English censor. She made humming noises as she kissed, like a hive of sex-mad bees. She thrust her body against mine to extract the full flavour of the embrace and to show that she cared, really and truly. Several elderly ladies, and what appeared to be a brigadier who had been preserved (like a plum in port) stared at us with fascinated repulsion.’
‘I thought you were married,’ said Gerald, tearing himself from her with an effort.
‘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.