Gerald’s father was clearly a man of exceptional ability, determination and industry who rose from relatively modest beginnings to become a trail-blazing railway builder and civil engineer of the kind celebrated by the laureate of the Raj, Rudyard Kipling – an empire-builder in the classic mould. Dedicated to playing his part in laying down the infrastructure of a modern, industrialising India, from the construction of roads, railways, canals and bridges to the building of hospitals, factories and schools, Lawrence Samuel slogged away in monsoon and jungle, carting his family around with him like a band of privileged gypsies, and earning the highest commendations from his employers. ‘A splendid man at his work,’ went one report, ‘full of energy and careful over details … With tact and gentle persuasion, Mr Durrell has managed his workmen splendidly.’
By 1918 Lawrence Samuel was Chief Engineer with the Darjeeling and Himalaya Railway on the India-Tibet border, leaving two years later to found his own company – Durrell & Co., Engineers and Contractors – in the new industrial boom town of Jamshedpur, planned and built as a ‘garden city’ by the giant Tata Iron and Steel Company, but in those days a raw-edged place in the middle of a hot, dusty plain. In the four years preceding Gerald’s birth he became one of the fat cats of British India, successful, rich – and desperately overworked.
Most of the major construction projects that Durrell & Co. helped to build in Jamshedpur still stand today, among them extensions to the Tata works, the Tinplate Company of India, the Indian Cable Company, the Enamelled Ironware Company and much else beside, including ‘Beldi’, the home in which Gerald was born and in which he spent the first years of his life. ‘Beldi’ was a regulation D/6 type bungalow in European Town, Jamshedpur, a residence appropriate to Lawrence Samuel Durrell’s status as a top engineer – a rung or two below the Army and the Indian Civil Service, a rung or two above the box-wallahs and commercials. It was not grand, but it was comfortable, with cool, shuttered rooms, a large veranda with bamboo screens against the heat of the sun, and a sizeable garden of lawn, shrubs and trees, where Gerry the toddler took his first steps.
Gerald was never much aware of his three older siblings during his infant years in India. His elder brother Lawrence had already been packed off to school in England by the time he was born, and Leslie (now back in India) and Margaret (five years his senior), had advanced far beyond baby talk and infant toys. He was even less aware of the outer fringes of the Durrell family network – the army of aunts and his daunting paternal grandmother, Dora, the overweight, doom-preaching, oppressive and rather terrifying matriarch known as ‘Big Granny’, who circulated around the family and was destined not to expire until 1943. For much of his time Gerald was left in the company of his Indian surrogate mother, or ayah. ‘In those days children only saw their parents when they were presented to them at four o’clock for the family tea,’ Margaret was to recall. ‘So our lives revolved around the nursery and our Hindu ayah and Catholic governess. Gerry would have had more to do with the ayah than we older children did, so the biggest influence in his Indian years would have been the Indian rather than the European part of the household.’
In later years Gerald claimed to remember a number of incidents from his early life in Jamshedpur. One of the most vivid of these, often recounted, was his first visit to a zoo, an experience so memorable that he attributed to it the beginning of his lifelong passion for animals and zoos. In fact there was no zoo in Jamshedpur in Gerald’s day, though there is one now. Even if there had been a zoo, it is highly unlikely that Gerald could have remembered it, for when he was only a toddler of fourteen months he left Jamshedpur with his father, mother, sister Margaret and Big Granny Dora, never to return. On 11 March 1926 the Durrell party sailed from Bombay for England on board the P&O ship SS Ranchi, and by April they were in London.
In the India of that time it was normal for British servants of the Raj to take a furlough in Britain roughly every two years, but it seems that the Durrells also had a mission to perform during their visit. Lawrence Samuel was keen to find a property to buy in London, either as an investment or as a place to retire to, or both. As a successful engineer of empire he had begun to amass a small fortune, and had already invested in a large fruit farm in Tasmania, which he had purchased unseen. He was now forty-two, and his workload was punishing. Many years later his future (albeit posthumous) daughter-in-law Nancy, first wife of his eldest son Lawrence, was to recall as she lay dying: ‘Father decided he’d had enough of this sort of life and wanted to go to England and live an entirely different sort of life. His ambition was to go on the stage and partner Evelyn Laye in the music hall.’ Whether this was true (which seems improbable) or was one of Lawrence’s numerous canards (which seems very possible), it appears that Father did intend to strike camp at some time, and leave an India where the clamour for self-rule was growing noticeably more vociferous and militant. But not yet. In due course he purchased a suitably grand eight-bedroomed house at 43 Alleyn Park in Dulwich, not far from Lawrence and Leslie’s schools.
On 12 November 192.6 Big Granny sailed back to Bombay on board the SS Rawalpindi after a six-month spell in England. A little later Louisa, Leslie, Margaret and Gerald followed her. They returned not to Jamshedpur but to Lahore, where Lawrence Samuel, who was engaged on contract work in the region, had established a new home in a substantial bungalow at 7 Davis Street. It was in Lahore that such memories as Gerald retained of his life in India were formed – though these were fragmentary and fleeting, and undoubtedly coloured by what his mother, brothers and sister later told him.
From an early age, it seems, Gerald was endowed (like his brother Lawrence) with a highly developed, almost photographic memory. He was to recall in an unpublished memoir:
My handful of memories of this time were just little sharply etched vignettes in brilliant colour, with sight and sound and smell and taste added – the scarlet of the sunsets, for example, the harsh singing cries of a peacock, the smell of coriander and bananas, the tastes of different kinds of rice, especially the wonderful taste of my favourite breakfast, which was rice boiled in buffalo milk with sugar. I remember I used to wear little suits made out of tussore. I remember the lovely colour of it – a very pale biscuit brown – and the delicious soft silky feel of it and the rustling sound it made as my ayah dressed me in the morning. I remember my ayah refused to wake me in the morning unless it was to the strains of Harry Lauder on the gramophone, because otherwise I would be grumpy and morose and she couldn’t do anything with me. The gramophone was a wind-up one and although it was very scratchy, like a lot of mice in a tin box, it was wonderful to my ears, and I would wake up with a beaming smile on my face, which made my ayah heave a sigh of relief.
It was in the India of his infancy that Gerald’s intense sense of colour was born, but it was the young child’s first glimpse of other life forms that was to have the profoundest impact on him. That glimpse was brief and unpromising, but for Gerald it was unforgettable, and from it all else was to follow. He was walking with his ayah, he remembered, and happened to wander to the edge of the road, where there was a shallow ditch.
Here I found two enormous slugs, at least they appeared enormous to me, though they were probably not much more than three or four inches long. They were pale coffee colour with dark chocolate stripes and they were slowly sliding about over each other in a sort of dance and the slime from their bodies made them glitter as though they were freshly varnished. They were glutinous and beautiful and I thought they were the most marvellous creatures I had ever seen. When my ayah discovered I was slug-watching she pulled me away and told me that I must not touch or even watch such disgusting creatures as they were dirty and horrible. I could not understand, even at that age, that she could think such beautiful creatures could be dirty, and throughout my life I have met so many people who think things are disgusting or dirty or dangerous when they are nothing of the sort but miraculous pieces of nature.
Before long the infant Gerald really did set foot inside his first zoo, and his life was transformed for evermore. The zoo was in Lahore (not, as he was later to recall, in Jamshedpur), and the impact of this modest establishment was overwhelming. Gerald was to recall of this landmark in his life:
The rich ammonia-like smell coming from the tiger and