SEVEN Planning for Adventure 1946–1947
Gerald went home to Bournemouth to make preparations for his expedition. Only one cloud darkened the family reunion – the erratic behaviour of Leslie, who had been giving cause for concern.
Leslie had always been the enigma of the family, the cracked bell who was always striking a dud note. Corfu, he once said, was ‘the dangerous corner in my life, five golden, drifting, ultimately destructive years’. Larry used to have a go at Mother sometimes: ‘We must put Leslie to something,’ he’d tell her. But she would say, ‘Leave him alone, he’ll be all right.’ But, unlike his brothers, he wasn’t. The rest of the Durrells had always rallied loyally around whenever Leslie stepped out of line, for he was basically well-intentioned, and never malicious. But years later he was to remark to an interviewer: ‘It’s a funny thing, you know – however hard I try, nothing seems to go right for me. I’ve got a sort of jinx on me, I think.’
He put all of his inheritance into a fishing boat, which sank before it had even got out of Poole Harbour. Next he tried market gardening, but that failed too. Unable to settle to anything, drifting and shiftless and convinced the world owed him a living, Leslie passed himself off for a while as ‘Major-General Durrell’, trying to develop various ambitious scams, including one involving luxury yachts and motorboats, till Margaret warned him he could end up in prison for fraudulent impersonation if he didn’t watch out. He ‘helped’ his mother get through a lot of money – not having a clue herself, she always took Leslie’s advice on financial matters, for he had always been her favourite child.
Nothing much worked for Leslie. Though he was a talented painter – Gerald once described some of his work as ‘astonishingly beautiful’ – he practised his gift in a most desultory way, and never made a penny from it. In the end, Lawrence and Gerald gave up on him. Gerald was to confide years later, ‘Though my elder brother and I frequently tried to help him, he would always end up doing something that would make us lose patience with him.’
All through the war, while he toiled ingloriously in the aircraft factory, Leslie had been living in Bournemouth with his mother, Gerald (till he went to Whipsnade) and the family’s Greek maid Maria Condos. By 1945 he was twenty-seven, and he and Maria, some ten years his senior, had begun a liaison – one of several for Leslie, the love of her life for Maria. Margaret, who was closest to the drama, recalled:
I walked right into the Maria furore when I got back from North Africa to have my second baby early in 1945, and of course, as in all these family crises, it was always me who had to be the strong one, because there was nobody else around to deal with things.
Mother, of course – being Mother – hadn’t noticed anything going on. So I told her: ‘Maria’s pregnant.’ Then I had to rush around trying to find an unmarried mothers’ home for her to go to, and when the baby was born in September she kept marching up and down the street with the baby in a pram, telling all and sundry it was a Durrell baby, another Bournemouth Durrell boy, which was rather embarrassing for the family. Leslie saw him first when he was a babe in arms, but neither Gerry nor Larry ever set eyes on the child at that time. They were adamant Leslie shouldn’t marry the girl. Not that he intended to, because he was also going out with Doris by now, the manageress of the local off-licence who had kept Mother in gin during the war and who employed Leslie to make the beer deliveries after it. They were odd characters, you know, Gerry and Larry. Though they could both be very unconventional and wild, they could also be very prudish and correct, surprising though that may sound.
The child, named Anthony Condos, had early recollections of the house in St Alban’s Avenue. His mother slept in a cot in the kitchen, and he remembered ‘monkeys climbing over the furniture and snakes in chests of drawers’. Since Leslie took no interest in either the baby or Maria, Mother paid up as usual and Maria went and got a job in a laundry in Christchurch, and then a council house, and brought the baby up on her own. ‘After my mother and I left the folds of the family,’ Tony Condos recalled, ‘we lived in various places, moving from flat to flat and room to room around Bournemouth. I think that Margaret, another woman, may have felt sympathy for my mother. My mother kept up a good relationship with her for many years and we were always kindly received at her house at number 51. But mother had to work incredibly hard to raise me and had a very difficult life.’ Maria remained very much in love with Leslie, Margaret was to say: ‘Years later she’d still remember him adoringly as “my roula-mou” – that’s Greek for “darling” – in fact deeper, more tender than darling.’
Tony Condos grew up never knowing if his father was dead or alive. ‘Though my mother obviously loved him very much,’ he was to reflect, ‘her feelings towards him oscillated between love and hate, and it made me very confused in my younger days. My main regret in life is that I never knew my father. For many years I felt extreme animosity towards him and the rest of the family. But as I grew older I started to appreciate the situation that the whole Durrell family must have been in with regard to my mother and me. Now I have only sadness that I was not one of them, the family … And oddly enough, I am proud of being a Durrell, albeit nameless.’
Gerald, meanwhile, was grappling with a small nightmare of his own. For a novice, an animal collecting expedition in the wilds of a distant continent represented a daunting challenge. How should he set about it? Where should he go? What should he catch? How much would it cost? There was no apprenticeship, no one to help him, and a mountainous number of bureaucratic restrictions to overcome. In the aftermath of the war, much of the world remained difficult of access, and some countries were still off-limits.
Months went by while Gerald struggled with a host of imponderables to produce a plan of action. He had long cherished a dream to see Africa, and within that continent one country stood out as a prime target for any would-be animal collector – the undeveloped and little-visited territory known as the British Cameroons, a remote, narrow backwater of empire on the eastern frontier of Nigeria, unsurpassed not only for the wild beauty of its high mountains and tropical forests but for the spectacular richness of its wildlife, from the gorilla, the pangolin and the rare angwantibo to the hairy frog, giant water shrew and giant hawk eagle.
Having settled the problem of where, Gerald turned his attention to other pressing questions – when, how, with whom and for what. The details took months to work out. Foreign travel was still an exotic pastime in 1946, beyond the reach of all but a privileged few, and information was scant. His plans took a leap forward when he made contact with a collector naturalist by the name of John Yealland, a highly regarded aviculturist and ornithologist almost twice his age but with interests close to his own. A few months after Gerald left Whipsnade, Yealland had helped Peter Scott found the nucleus of his Wildfowl Trust at Slimbridge, on the edge of the Severn mudflats in Gloucestershire, and later he was to become Curator of Birds at the London Zoo. Gerald told Yealland of his ambition to collect rare animals in the Cameroons, and Yealland responded with encouraging enthusiasm. They agreed to pool their talents and see the thing through together.
So now there was a team. And before long there would be a plan, a schedule, an itinerary – even a departure date. But not much else. As one newspaper was to report: ‘Their bring-’em-back-alive expedition was their first safari into the jungle. No one knew where they were going, no one placed any orders with them, and no one in the Cameroons knew they were arriving.’ In fact five zoos – London, Bristol, Chester, Belle Vue (Manchester) and Paignton – had expressed an interest in seeing anything that the expedition brought back, and had even quoted prices for the