Jill Johnson was Gerald’s partner in this operation. She recalled:
I used to milk the goats, and Gerry used to take the bottle of goat milk to feed the deer. But it was a bit of a nuisance doing it this way, because the deer kept swallowing the teats. So one day we decided to take the nanny goat in to the deer so that they could suck from her direct. This worked pretty well when the deer were small, but eventually they grew bigger than the nanny and would butt under her and lift her up in the air, legs sprawling, and feed from her like that …
After that venture we moved on to looking after sick and orphaned animals, and were even allowed to help with operations by the vet. But the Père David’s deer may well have given Gerry his first glimpse into the possibilities of captive breeding. We used to talk about them perhaps breeding in the Park and then being reintroduced into China. It was just a dream then, but later it did happen.
At Whipsnade Gerald continued to compile his own list of animals in danger of extinction. He was moved, he later confided to a friend, by a mixture of horror, despair, determination and love, quoting Cecil Rhodes’ alleged dying words, ‘So much to do, so little done.’
Jill Johnson thought Gerald must have been rather a lonely soul at Whipsnade, his class and intelligence distancing him from his fellow keepers. His family never visited him, as far as she could tell. Eventually he moved out of the Baileys’ house and into a room in a bleak and chilly place called the Bothy – he referred to it as the Brothel – a huddle of four or five keepers’ cottages opposite a pub called Chequers at the bottom of the zoo. Sometimes he was invited for a curry (West African style with lots of chilli peppers) at the home of Captain and Mrs Beal – ‘So hot,’ he told Jill, ‘it makes me sweat like a fever.’
Among Gerald’s friends at Whipsnade was Guinea Pig Gus. ‘As a romantic figure,’ he recalled, ‘Gus had little to commend him.’ His skull sloped back from his nose like a Neanderthal’s. His nose looked like some fungus squashed on his face. He suffered acutely from acne, had adenoids and bit his nails. ‘He was quite the most unattractive human being I had ever encountered,’ Gerald wrote in his autobiographical jottings years later, ‘yet he had the kindest of hearts.’ It was Gus who walked all the way to Dunstable and back to get patches and glue when Gerald punctured his bicycle tyres. It was Gus who brought him half a bottle of whisky – ‘God knows from where, for at that time a bottle of whisky was as valuable as the Koh-i-noor diamond’ – when he had pleurisy and thought he was going to die. It was Gus who took Gerald’s shoes to be soled and heeled so that he didn’t have to do it on his day off.
Gus’s heart belonged to the guinea pig, and all his spare cash went towards materials for the palace he was planning to build for these favoured creatures. When it became clear to Gerald that Gus would never have enough money to finish it, he decided it was time to repay him for all his past kindness, and to break his vow to live on his meagre salary by hook or by crook and never to write home for funds. ‘I wrote to my mother,’ he recorded, ‘explaining about Gus and his guinea pigs. By return came a letter containing ten crisp pound notes. In her letter, my mother said: “Don’t hurt his feelings, dear. Tell him an uncle who liked guinea pigs died and left it to you.”’
So the Guinea Pig Palace was completed, and the grand opening day arrived. ‘It was a splendid occasion,’ Gerald recalled, ‘attended by no lesser personages than Gus’s mother and father, his dog, his cat, me, his goldfish, his frog, and the girl from next door, as exciting as a dumpling. The Guinea Pigs took the move from their old home with great aplomb and dignity. Three jugs of beer from the pub and some elderberry wine and the party got so convivial that Gus’s mother fell into the goldfish pond and Gus at last succeeded in kissing the girl next door.’
The Guinea Pig Palace, which also contained other species of rodents, became the place where Gerald took his girlfriends. It was, he reckoned, the most romantic spot available. Not all the girls agreed. Gerald recalled:
The first one, a town girl, suddenly said:‘’Ere, you’re paying more attention to them rats than wot you are to me. I can tell, your eyes get all unfocused like.’ I felt this was unfair, since most of her clothing was scattered about the hazel grove, but I must admit the dormice were enchanting, and enchanted by us.
At last I met an adorable girl with a Devonshire accent like cream out of a jug and dark blue-grey eyes fringed with eyelashes as long as hollyhocks. She loved dormice, but this was the trouble.
‘No, don’t, not now,’ she would say. ‘You’ll disturb them, dear wee mites. And anyway – you never know – they might be watching.’
Gerald finally struck lucky with a policeman’s daughter – ‘buxom, blonde and willing’ – who ran Pets’ Corner. Her office was in a wooden hut which was often locked from the inside at lunchtime. ‘We were poking the living daylights out of each other at every opportunity,’ Gerald later confided to a friend. ‘I thought I would marry her in the end.’ Gerald took her home to Bournemouth to meet the family once or twice. ‘Really she was quite hefty and rotund,’ his sister Margaret recalled. ‘Gerry was very keen on her at the time. But then, what young man isn’t very keen at the time?’ It was not to last, though, as the policeman’s daughter turned out to have another boyfriend hovering in the wings.
How Gerald Durrell saw himself in his leisure hours at Whipsnade – a Lothario among the paddocks – was not quite how others saw him. Jill Johnson recalled:
The waitresses in the cafeteria said he looked like a Greek god, but really he was not the most handsome, though he had a nice face. He wasn’t particularly macho, either, but nor was he the opposite. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember him having any close girlfriends at all. If anyone went out with him it was me, but I was only a friend who happened to be a girl. We were close, but we never had a romance. Neither of us was interested in boyfriends and girlfriends, we were interested in learning as much as we could about the animals. There wasn’t much to do in the evenings, nowhere much to go, no TV in those days. We used to go out for bike rides in the evening, and sometimes he’d take me up into the hay barn. You’d think we were up to something, but we weren’t. He’d say: ‘Sshh … be quiet … they won’t know where we are. I’m going to read some Housman; see if you like him.’ And he’d read out loud to me, in his beautiful voice:
Oh, when I was in love with you,
Then I was clean and brave,
And miles around the wonder grew
How well did I behave …
Gerry would provide much more intelligent conversation than any of the keepers who used to go down to the pub in the evening. He was quite a deep thinker, but he was fun too. Sometimes, sitting up in the dark, watching over a sick animal, he’d tell the most wonderful stories – some of them really quite rude. He did have a special way of treating women – rather cosmopolitan, a bit Latin perhaps. One day I was with another girl in the office and he came rushing in, and he got down on one knee in front of this other girl and made a most elaborate and passionate speech to her. ‘There is a question I have got to ask you,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know how to put it.’ We both thought he was going to ask her to marry him. Then he burst out: ‘Can you tell me where the gentlemen’s lavatory is?’ So he was great fun, very lively, very bright, very special, a nice, kind, unusual person to know.
Lucy Pendar, the teenage daughter of the resident engineer at Whipsnade, remembered Gerald less as a ladykiller than as a generous and supportive young man with a highly developed, rather bawdy sense of humour:
Gerry’s stay at Whipsnade brought a new dimension to our lives. A slim young man with unusual blue eyes, his long