Gerald Durrell, of course, had done nothing of the kind. I turned to Kate. ‘That’s all wrong,’ I said. ‘Someone ought to do something to get it right. Come to think of it, someone ought to do something about writing a proper biography of Gerald Durrell.’
Kate, who was a Durrell fan, replied: ‘Perhaps you ought to write it yourself.’
It was not a totally wild idea. I had already written two books about traveller-naturalists, and my recently published biography of the author-naturalist Gavin Maxwell had been well enough received for me to begin to think about writing some kind of sequel. I had read most of Gerald Durrell’s books, I had even reviewed one or two for the national press, I felt I understood his world and mind-set, I had even – dammit! – shaken the man by the hand in the Butterfly House. As soon as I returned to England I phoned Gerald Durrell’s personal assistant at Jersey Zoo, and on his advice wrote to Durrell’s literary agent enclosing a copy of my latest book and, for good measure, proposing myself as her client’s future biographer.
Within a few hours my book was in Durrell’s hands in a London hospital ward, where he lay gravely ill after a major operation. He knew of Gavin Maxwell, of course, and had reviewed Ring of Bright Water for the New York Times. He opened the book and read the first lines of the preface: ‘The sea in the little bay is still tonight and a full moon casts a wan pallor over the Sound and the hills of Skye. A driftwood fire crackles in the hearth of the croft on the beach, and through the open window I can hear all the sounds and ghosts of the night – the kraak of a solitary heron stalking fish in the moonlight at the edge of the shore, a seal singing softly in the bay, the plaintive child-like voice rising and falling like a lullaby in the dark …’ Here in the noisy bedlam of the public ward, a world of bedpans, drips, catheters, trolleys and rubber sheets, of pain, squalor and despair, his weary head sunk deep into his hard starched pillow, his wild white hair strewn about him, he recognised at once a kind of mirror image of his own past life and dreams. He turned the page. ‘A guru of the wilds among a whole generation, Gavin Maxwell was ranked with John Burroughs, W. H. Hudson and Gerald Durrell as one of the finest nature writers of the last hundred years …’
Durrell sat up a bit. For some time he had been putting together scattered fragments of his own autobiography. But lately, as the ceaseless cycle of fever and crisis, relapse and remission continued seemingly without end, he had put aside his notebook and pen. From time to time in recent years he had been approached by authors or would-be authors who had put themselves forward as his prospective biographer. Many of these had been wishful-thinkers and no-hopers, but one or two had been serious candidates. So long as he was well and active the story of his life was his own copy, and his alone. But now the situation had changed. He asked his wife Lee to read the book aloud to him, and as she read he began to feel that perhaps he had found his biographer. Henceforth the biography was a reality, something to aim at, a goal to achieve. In the highly adverse circumstances in which he found himself, it was to be one of the last preoccupations of his life.
Gerald was anxious to meet up with me in order to talk about the project face to face, and to come to a decision. But each time Lee called me with a date on which to visit the hospital she would have to ring back to reschedule, because Gerald was back in intensive care. Our meeting was not to be. Shortly after his death in January 1995, Lee authorised me to write a full and frank account of his life and work.
Over the next two years, I came to know more about Gerald Durrell than I did about myself. I thought I had got the measure of the man. Then one day I came upon an extraordinary, and utterly unexpected, sequence of private love letters. Here was a man moved by passion, joy, fear, romantic and erotic love, and by gratitude to the love of his life and to life itself and to the world. As I read, I inwardly sang and laughed and declaimed with him. And then I came to a letter written on 31 July 1978, and I fell silent:
I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like golden coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers … I have felt winds as tender and warm as a lover’s breath, winds straight from the South Pole, bleak and wailing like a lost child … I have known silence: the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the silence when great music ends … I have heard tree frogs in an orchestration as complicated as Bach singing in a forest lit by a million emerald fireflies. I have heard the cobweb squeak of the bat, wolves baying at a winter’s moon … I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms. I have seen whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea. I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of dolphins … All this I did without you. This was my loss …
As I read, I began to realise, first with disbelief and then with some degree of unease, that the voice inside my head was no longer my own. I had heard enough of Gerald Durrell’s soft, beguiling, cultured English diction on tapes of interviews and radio and television broadcasts to be able to identify it with certainty. There was no doubt. The voice reading this impassioned love letter was Durrell’s own. Not only had I got the measure of Gerald Durrell; Gerald Durrell, it seemed, had got the measure of me. I recalled something Sir David Attenborough had said at the farewell celebration of the man in London after his death: ‘Gerald Durrell was magic.’
This, then, is the biography of Gerald Durrell – naturalist, traveller, raconteur, humorist, visionary, broadcaster, best-selling author, one of the great nature writers of the twentieth century, one of the great conservation leaders of the modern world, champion of the animal kingdom, founder and Honourary Director of Jersey Zoo and the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust, saviour of endangered species, champion of the lowly, the defenceless and the doomed.
I don’t think it is hyperbole to say that though Gerald Durrell was not a particularly saintly man – his warts were several, and sometimes spectacular – he led a saintly life in pursuit of a saintly mission: simply put, to save animal species from extinction at the hands of man. In his way he was a latter-day St Francis, confronting a problem that St Francis could never have conceived in his worst nightmare. Since his struggle with that problem helped to kill him, it could be said that Gerald Durrell laid down his life for the animal kingdom and the world of nature he loved.
From the outset this biography was conceived as a full, searching and rounded portrait of the man, his life and his work. It was Lee Durrell’s wish, when she authorised the book after her husband’s death, that it should be so. In other words, though this book is described as the ‘authorised’ biography, I have had carte blanche in the writing of it, and the portrait of the man and the narrative of the life are mine and mine alone – though none of it could have been put together without the help of many others.
What ‘authorised’ actually means in this case is that I have been allowed exclusive access to the personal and professional archives of Gerald Durrell (which are voluminous) and to the files of the organisation he founded and directed, the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust (now renamed the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust). I also enjoyed unqualified freedom in approaching anybody involved in the Gerald Durrell story, of whom there are many.
I would especially like to thank Dr Lee Durrell, Gerald Durrell’s widow and Honorary Director of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, for her unstinting support and tireless assistance during the researching and writing of this biography. I am doubly grateful to her, first for allowing me unconditional access both to the Durrell private archives and the archives of Jersey Zoo and Trust, and second for allowing me to refer to and quote from the unpublished works of Gerald Durrell in this book. I would also particularly like to thank Jacquie Durrell, who plays a crucial part in this story at several key stages, for her tremendous help and encouragement in the preparation of the first half of this biography, as well as those who have contributed to this story from its very centre – Margaret Duncan (née