Читать книгу Gerald Durrell - Douglas Botting - Страница 18

The ship broke down three more times, and in the Bay of Biscay the sea was so rough that Gerald and Yealland were thrown out of their bunks, along with all their kit. The weather hotted up by the time they reached the Canaries, and they watched entranced as the warm-water creatures of the ocean began to make their appearance around the ship, along with exotic insect stragglers – butterflies, dragonflies and a solitary orange ladybird – from the unseen African shore beyond the eastern horizon.

‘We have seen a great number of Flying fish,’ Gerald wrote to his mother. ‘Porpoise and Dolphin have been playing round the ship, and yesterday we saw three Whales blowing about fifty feet off the ship. Also there have been a lot of Portuguese Man of War, a kind of jellyfish which puts up a small sail and goes whizzing about on the surface carried by the wind. These sails are vivid magenta in colour, and when there are several dotted about on the blue sea they look beautiful.’

What with the breakdowns and delays, the ship was still at sea, some forty miles off the Senegal coast, on Christmas Eve. The occasion was celebrated with bacchanalian fervour. First there was a huge dinner in the dining room, followed by lashings of whisky in the second officer’s cabin, and then a carol-singing party in the smoking room. By this time Gerald was well into his first recorded binge. Though he was too far gone to remember anything himself next morning, Yealland duly noted it all down in his diary:

Such is the strength of the intoxicants on board that Gerry, who had formerly held the little holy man and his wife in considerable detestation, waxed more and more friendly towards him. They retired rather early, but when he came back to get a book he had left behind, Gerald seized him round the neck, stuffed a cigarette into his mouth, and speaking French with unheard-of fluency implored ‘mon très cher ami’ to have a drink. Just then the holy one’s wife came in with her hair down and saved him from a fate worse than death, and on catching sight of her Gerry exclaimed: ‘Voilà! La femme de moi!’

A few days later they finally reached their African landfall. For Gerald it was a moment of overwhelming magic:

The ship nosed its way through the morning mist across a sea as smooth as silk. A faint and exciting smell came to us from the invisible shore, the smell of flowers, damp vegetation, palm oil, and a thousand other intoxicating scents drawn up from the earth by the rising sun, a pale, moist-looking nimbus of sun seen dimly through the mists. As it rose higher and higher, the heat of its rays loosened the hold the mist had on land and sea, and gradually the bay and the coastline came into view and gave me my first glimpse of Africa.

Ahead, across the glittering waters, he could see a scatter of jungly islands, and behind them the coastlands that rose in forested waves upwards to where Mount Cameroon loomed, ‘dim and gigantic’, in the early morning light. Across the islands flocks of grey parrots were making their way towards the forested shore, the air full of their clownish excited screams and whistles. Astern, in the glistening wake of the ship, Gerald saw a fish eagle swoop out of the dispersing mist, and two brown kites circling overhead, scavenging for scraps. And then he smelled that magic smell again – ‘stronger, richer, intoxicating with its promise of deep forest, of lush reedy swamps, and wide magical rivers under a canopy of trees’ – the smell of Africa. ‘We landed,’ he recalled, ‘as in a dream.’

Years later, remembering that first landfall with aching nostalgia, he confided to a friend: ‘It had such a powerful impact that I was drugged for hours, even days, afterwards. One glass of beer that morning and I was as high as an eagle. To sit there, drink a beer, watch a lizard, vivid orange and swimming-pool blue, just nodding his head on the balcony. It’s there for ever in my mind, much more than reality, because it was alive and I was alive.’

For Gerald and his friend John Yealland every minute of those first few days in Africa – every sight, every sound, every face, every creature, every plant – was a source of wonder and delight. It was as if they had been born again – nothing was familiar, nothing expected. Hither and thither they went, ecstatic and bemused, like men in a mescaline trance. ‘On the very first night,’ Gerald recalled, ‘we had dinner and drifted down to the little botanical gardens there. The British always had a habit of making botanical gardens, like country clubs, wherever they went. And with torches we walked down a tiny stream with all this lush undergrowth. And like a couple of schoolkids we picked up whatever we found, tree frogs, woodlice, centipedes, anything, carted it all back to the rest house in jars and boxes, and oohed and gooed over them all until three in the morning.’

From the little white rest house on top of a hill in the flower-filled little capital town of Victoria (population a meagre 3500), Gerald wrote to his mother in the first paroxysm of enthusiasm: ‘The country around here is simply beautiful, and John and I go round gasping at the birds and flowers.’ Wherever they turned they found a myriad of exotic creatures. On a palm nut plantation a little out of town they discovered giant millipedes – ‘our first catch, six inches long and as thick as a sausage’. Down on the beach they were amazed to find a strange species of crab – ‘purple in colour, with one huge claw and one small’ – and a score of mud skippers, ‘a small fish with a head like a hippo’. ‘If everything is as plentiful,’ Gerald wrote home, ‘we should make a fortune in no time.’

Often they had to enlist the help of local Africans, communicating as best they could in pidgin English – a genuine lingua franca at which Gerald soon became highly adept. To his mother he described a typical encounter.

ME: Goodmorning. (Very British)

NATIVE: Goodmorning, sah. (Taking off filthy rag which is his hat)

ME: We look for small beef.^* You have small beef here?

NATIVE: Sah?

ME: Small beef … SMALL BEEF.

NATIVE: Ah! Small beef, sah? Yes, we hab plenty, sah, plenty.

ME: (In Victorian tones) Where dis small beef, ay?

(Native now makes remark which I can’t understand, and points)

ME: (Pretending to understand) Ah ah! Dis place far far?

NATIVE: No, sah, you walker walker for fibe minutes, sah.

ME: (With lordly wave of hand) Good, you show me.

And so the procession started: the two natives in front, John and I behind, feeling like a Hollywood film set. We marched like this for half a mile, and then we found the two natives arguing on the banks of a very fast river. I asked one of them how we were supposed to get across, and he said he would carry us. Thinking we would have to get used to this sort of thing, I uttered a short prayer and got on his back. How he got across I don’t know: the water was up to his thighs, and the river bed was made up of these huge boulders. To my surprise he got me over safely and returned for John. I have never seen anything so funny – John clutching his topee, with one arm round the native’s neck and a huge bag of specimen boxes slung on his back. When they reached the middle of the stream, the most difficult part, John started to laugh, and this started the native off. They both stood there, swaying in the middle of the stream, hooting with laughter, and I expected at any moment to see them fall into the water and all my valuable specimens floating down stream.

Emerging from the river adventure safe and sound and laden with ‘small beef’, but dripping with sweat and very hot, the Englishmen asked if there were any coconuts about – coconut milk being the only safe thing to drink in these parts.

We punched holes in the nuts and sat by the side of the road drinking. About half a mile down from us they were pruning the tall palms, and we could see the men high up in the trees, sitting in the grass rope seats, chopping the great fronds off. Each time one fell it made a loud swish, and then a big thonk as it hit the ground. The workers were singing to each other as they worked, and it was most attractive to listen to. They make up a short verse about anything that takes their fancy and each verse ends with a prolonged wail like: Eoooo Eoooo. When the D.O. came along in his car they sang: ‘The D.O. is here in his car … eooooo eoooo.’ Then there was a short pause, and another one would sing out: ‘He is going to Bemanda to get milk … eoooo eoooo.’ And so on. What with the birds singing, the crickets shouting, the swish of the falling fronds, and this curious wailing song echoing through the trees, it was a wonderful experience. John sat there with sweat dripping down his face, his topee tilted back, swigging at his coconut and ejaculating at intervals: ‘Bloody marvellous, boy!’

Victoria was merely a curtain-raiser to the real show, and ‘small beef’ were small beer compared to the ‘big, big beef’ they hoped to find in the wild interior. Much of the first week was spent sorting themselves out and stocking up with supplies for the six months of adventures that lay ahead. Their immediate plan was to drive two hundred miles to the small up-country town of Mamfe, which would be their springboard to the wilder country of the primeval rainforest that stretched all around.

On Monday, 5 January 1948, they finally set off in a manner to which they were soon to become accustomed. For a start, the lorry turned up four hours late and turned out to be crowded with the driver’s relatives, whom Gerald had to clear out, along with their household goods and livestock. The driver himself did not inspire much confidence, for as he was turning the lorry for loading he twice backed into the rest house wall and once into the hibiscus hedge. The expedition’s baggage was tossed into the back with such wild abandon that Gerald wondered if any of it would arrive intact in Mamfe. ‘I need not have worried,’ he noted later. ‘It turned out that only the most indispensable and irreplaceable things got broken.’ The name of the lorry – ‘The Godspeed’ – was painted in large white letters above the windscreen. ‘It was not until later,’ Gerald was to write, ‘that we discovered what a euphemism the name really was.’

So the great adventure began. Gerald’s letters to Mother (never published before) provide a raw and spontaneous day-by-day account of its gradual unfolding.

Eventually we were ready to start, and John and I got in the front, and sat there looking as regal as circumstances would let us. We whizzed out of Victoria and had got about five miles down the road, the lorry making a most impressive roaring noise, when there was a terrific gurk and the engine stopped. We got out of the lorry, and while the driver, with the rest of the staff, probed into the bowels of the engine, Pious (the steward) put cushions at the side of the road, poured out beer, and fanned the flies away from our recumbent forms. After half an hour everything was ready, and once again we set off, tearing madly along at about 15 m.p.h. Ten miles further on the damn thing broke down again, and the same process was repeated. Before we reached Kumba (the place where we had arranged to spend the night) we had broken down four times.

About ten miles out of Victoria the palm nut plantations gave place to forest proper, and John and I just sat with our mouths open, in a sort of daze. You have no idea how beautiful it was: giant trees, hundreds of feet high, leaned over the road, each one festooned with tree ferns, long strands of grey moss, and lianas as thick as my body. On the solitary telegraph wire sat lots of kingfishers, each no bigger than a sparrow, orange and blue in colour. In the trees flocks of hornbills were feeding, and on the rocks along the sides of the road there were lots of a very beautiful kind of lizard, with orange head, bright Prussian blue body and tail, and splashed with red and yellow and grass-green all over. They are unbelievably bright in the sun. Once there was a great shout from the back of the lorry and we pulled up quickly under the impression that the cook had fallen out and been killed. It turned out they had seen a Nile monitor (a lizard about three feet long – John thought nearer to four feet) by the side of the road. We all rushed back and spread out in a circle. We closed in on it and it made a dash at the driver, who, thinking that discretion was the better part of valour, ran like hell. The last we saw of it was a tail going into the bush.

The country is very hilly, and all thickly forested. Each hill we went up we had to put up with the frightful noise made by the driver with his gear box. Every time we came down the other side we had to cross a river in a deep ravine, spanned by what John calls a ‘death trap’ – four planks with a few rotten beams, no railings or anything pansy like that. After about the fourth we got quite used to them and we could open our eyes a bit.

At around five o’clock, much to their surprise, they reached Kumba, where they stayed the night at the house of the local medic – ‘a charming fat little Scotsman and a keen ornithologist’ – who had assembled a prodigious collection of bird skins. At dawn they were off again for another day of death traps and breakdowns, arriving in the late afternoon at a place called Bakebe, where they were to stay for three days till the rest house at Mamfe became free.

It was wonderful at Bakebe because we were right in the heart of the forest. I engaged a hunter the next day, and two boys, and armed with a shotgun sallied into the jungle, à la Frank Buck. In the depths of the forest itself there is a sort of green twilight, with huge termite nests, each built like a mushroom, and an extraordinary white butterfly which flits among the trees like a whisp of white lace. In the sunny clearings there were many other sorts of insect life, including some black ants an inch and a half long. Unfortunately they discovered me before I saw them, and it was very painful. I was dancing around while the hunters were plucking the ants off, all saying ‘Sorry Sah’ loudly, as though they had put them there. When you trip over a root you hear about three voices behind you saying ‘Sorry Sah.’ We saw several monkeys feeding in the trees, and tracks of Duikers, small rats, and Leopard. Then we discovered the tracks of a Red River hog and followed them up. We walked for about four miles and stumbled right into a herd of them. One baby broke only about twenty feet from me.

The collecting business now began to gather momentum. The next day Gerald went back into the forest, and among other things caught a creature that in the fullness of time and in the most indirect way was to prove pivotal to his future career. This was the hairy frog – ‘a large frog,’ he explained in his letter home, ‘with curious filaments like hairs on its legs and the sides of its body.’ But most of the growing list of animal acquisitions were caught or donated by others. The United Africa Company agent at Bakebe presented his pet dog-faced baboon, the doctor at Kumba sent two baby giant kingfishers, a DO who lived a hundred miles out in the sticks proposed giving them his three-year-old chimpanzee, a local boy brought in ‘a lovely rat with red fur and a yellow tummy’, and a man from a nearby village turned up dragging along a baby drill (today one of the most endangered monkey species in Africa) on a bit of string.

The Drill is the sweetest little thing, standing about a foot high. He is very young, and the pink patches on his behind only the size of a shilling. He was very wild the first day, but is quite tame now, and when I return from a trip into the forest he comes running to meet me, uttering loud screams, and climbs up my leg and then wraps his arms round my waist and clings there making little crooning noises. I am sure I shall not want to part with him when the time comes.

There is no doubt that Gerald loved the country he had come to. He was held in thrall by the stillness and grandeur of the primeval forest, and adored the birds he saw flying free and the animals running wild no less than the curious assortment of creatures that came into his care. But it is clear from his letters and field notes that the Gerald Durrell of up-country Cameroons in 1948 was not yet the Gerald Durrell the world was to come to know in later years; and in one important respect the unreformed twenty-three-year-old might have dumbfounded his future fans. The young man of 1948, though he dearly loved animals, was fully prepared to slaughter them if there was a good enough reason to do so. He had brought to the Cameroons a rifle and a shotgun he had borrowed from his brother Leslie, and he knew how to use these weapons and was prepared to do so. Partly this was standard practice. No self-respecting expedition to the African interior in those days would have dreamed of setting off without guns of some sort – to shoot game to supplement their rations and feed the carnivores they collected. But the young Gerald Durrell sometimes succumbed to the hunting instinct in a way that would have dismayed the man of later years.

Only a day or two after his arrival at Bakebe, for example, he had tried to shoot a red river hog, thinking it would make good eating (forgetting the £150 – some £3000 in today’s money – he could get for a live specimen back in England). On 7 January, his twenty-third birthday, he shot a black kite that had been stealing chickens, spectacularly blasting the bird out of the air with his shotgun in the middle of a juju dance in the village street, winning uproarious acclaim from the populace. ‘I was swept down the main street by the mob,’ he recorded, ‘surrounded by yelling and capering juju dancers. I presented the corpse to the chief, and there was much bowing and exchange of compliments. I felt like a scene out of a Tarzan film and departed secure in the knowledge that the White Man’s Prestige had been upheld.’

On Saturday, 10 January, the expedition prepared to set off for Mamfe at last. Its troubled procession north now turned from penance to pantomime, as Gerald reported:

The morning we moved from Bakebe to Mamfe was the funniest thing to date. The scene was indescribable. Our stuff was piled six feet high, boxes full of birds, rats, insects and frogs, and squatting about were Pious the steward, Fillup the cook, Emanuel, Daniel and Edward, the hunters, the carpenter and his wife and child, the hunter’s wife and child, the chief’s wife and the U.A.C. man’s three children, all hoping for a lift to Mamfe, plus about fifty relatives who had come to see them off. It was now twelve and the lorry should have been there at eight and by this time I was nearly mental. At last the lorry arrived, and thank God it was a large one – the driver had brought six relatives along for the joy ride. How we got everything on to the lorry I shall never know. There were about sixty people in a solid wedge around the back of the lorry, all shouting at once and endeavouring to climb on, the air full of whirling bundles full of sweet potatoes, yams and bananas. I was overwhelmed by a fighting horde of natives, my feet were trodden on, also my hand. When they had all piled on I remounted the lorry, and pointing to the crates of birds and animals explained that if one was dead or injured when we reached Mamfe they would all go before the D.O. After that they sat like mice, and must have been damn stiff when we reached Mamfe.

Mamfe was situated at the highest navigable point of the Cross River, on the edge of a vast swathe of uninhabited country – a pestilential place where malaria was rife and leprosy common. Gerald and John spent a little over a week there, often dining with the local DO, a helpful Englishman by the name of Robin, whose house was situated on a steep hill four hundred feet above the river. Gerald was profoundly enchanted by this spot, deep in the untamed heart of Africa, far, far from anywhere, and yet surrounded by all the comforts of privilege.

The house overlooks the place where two rivers meet. It forms a wide stretch of water like a lake. On each side is the jungle, and in the centre a dazzling white sandbar. Sitting on the terrace in the evening, you can see a herd of five hippo which live here, swimming about. Then, when it grows dark, you can hear them blowing and snorting and roaring below you. The two rivers flow through steep rocky gorges, and are spanned by so-called suspension bridges. The termites have had a wonderful time with these for the past twenty years, and the planks rattle and groan when you walk over them, a hundred and twenty feet above rocks and water. Down below you can see kingfishers and red and blue swallows nesting, and in the trees you can see monkeys in the evening.

There were few pleasures and interests to divert the scattering of European expatriates who lived in this land other than those which age-old Africa could provide. There were no hotels, no restaurants, no shops, no cinemas, no libraries, next to no electricity and – Gerald made a particular note of this – next to no white girls. By way of compensation however, the stranded Brits could avail themselves of a lifestyle little changed since the high noon of Empire. Gerald took to this sybaritic life like a duck to water, and could not resist writing home to let his family know of the contrast with the austerity Britain he had left only a few weeks ago.

Apart from the hard work we have to do with the animals, our lives are like those of the upper-classes in pre-war Britain: real luxury. Think of being able to change your shirt five times a day if you want to. Writing this letter I am taking half an hour off: I am sitting in a deck chair, a glass of beer at my elbow, and Pious the Steward is standing behind my chair ready to refill my glass when it is empty and give me another fag when I have finished the one I am smoking. Pious is only sixteen, but he is simply wonderful. It’s he that has got the whole rest house in order, beds up, table laid for a meal, bath water ready, and so on. Now the table is laid for lunch and a fragrant smell is wafted towards me – the cooking is very fine. A chicken costs three shillings in a place like this, bananas are a penny a hand (about twelve). We are rationed to four bottles of whiskey a month, but I get it all as John does not like it. We smoke cigars (5/- for 50) at dinner in the evening. Our staff now consists of two cooks, two stewards and a washboy – and the carpenter whom we pay two shillings a day. In fact it is collecting in luxury.

It is clear from Gerald’s frank, unguarded letters to his mother that within a very short time of setting foot in Africa he had adapted both to the country and to the lifestyle as to the manner born. This was his first experience of the world outside Europe (early infancy apart), and it was essentially a colonial experience, and an old-fashioned one at that. By virtue of his race and nationality he had automatically joined an élite caste – that of the British imperium – from the moment he arrived in the Cameroons. Indeed, in his attitude to the African underclass and his perception of his own status and authority among them, he quickly became more colonial than the colonials, a kind of super DO, peerless and fearless in his dealings with both man and beast. From time to time in his letters he even refers to himself, not altogether jokingly, as ‘Empire Builder’, ‘Sanders of the River’ and ‘the Great White Master’.

Having cast himself in this imperious role, the accounts he wrote home of his behaviour on trek in the Cameroons sometimes make embarrassing reading. One especially trying morning in Mamfe, for example, he was told a hunter had just brought in a particularly rare bird to sell.

I found the hunter sitting down on the ground, hat on the back of his head, cigarette in his mouth, explaining to the crowd how clever he had been to capture this creature. He said good morning without bothering to get up, remove his hat, or take the cigarette out of his mouth. By this time I was quite angry with everyone and everything. ‘Get up, take your hat off, take that thing out of your mouth and then say good morning properly!’ I snarled in my best Sanders of the River voice. He obeyed like a naughty schoolboy.

Fifty years on, this sort of thing can make uncomfortable reading. Yet in the context of the time and place it was a normal, even a prescribed, adaptation to the colonial ambience – the ‘remember you’re British’ syndrome. For a tyro colonial boy like Gerald there was no other model – apart from ‘going native’ – and any departure from the unwritten rules of the imperial game would have been looked on as letting the side down.

What was different in Gerald’s case was the impact of instant privilege and power on his own personality. He was a charismatic young man of great self-assurance and persuasiveness, but as with many young men, his self-confidence could turn into arrogance, his egotism into selfishness, and his ebullience into boorishness. In a word, his was a big personality, full of charm, leavened by a tremendous sense of comedy and fun, but veering to temper and contempt when frustrated, and tending to dominance when given his head. In the polite, inhibited middle-class society of the Home Counties England of the forties such an original and spirited, not to say eccentric, personality was in large measure restrained by the mores of his milieu. But out here in Africa, a fully-paid-up member of the white man’s club, let loose in the dark interior, Gerald blossomed. It was as if, here in the depths of the rainforest, a genie had popped out of a bottle. If it was not always a totally admirable genie, it was a genie nonetheless; and in the course of time, a Gerald Durrell broadly recognisable as the persona of his maturer future would step tentatively on to the stage, and the overpowering ego of his youth would be replaced by the wisdom and compassion of the man who would take on some of the cares and responsibilities of the wider world beyond.

The two Englishmen now decided to split up: John Yealland to establish a main base at Bakebe, which he reckoned would be a good place for birds; Gerald to set up a subsidiary camp at Eshobi, a tiny village on the edge of a huge swathe of equatorial forest that stretched hundreds of miles northwards to the mountains where the gorilla had its stronghold – virgin territory for collecting animals and reptiles.

On Wednesday, 18 January 1948, Gerald’s party left the comforts of Mamfe for the dubious pleasures of Eshobi. In the environs of this distant village, from all reports, there was plenty of ‘stuff’, as Gerald and John termed the animals they sought – but not much else. As there was no motorable track, the party had to travel on foot, with carriers to shoulder the stores in time-hallowed style. It was to prove an even more vexing departure than normal, for driver ants had caused havoc in the night, and a mêlée of Africans swarmed about the compound.

In the middle of all this my ten carriers arrived for their loads. They were such a band of cut-throats that John said I would be eaten three miles out of Mamfe. I thought that I had better have my hair cut before plunging into the unknown, so hot on the heels of the carriers came the village barber.

The scene in the compound beggars description. There was the staff leaping about trying to get the ants out of the stores, the carriers leaping about fighting as to who should have the smallest load, John leaping about imploring someone to get fish for his kingfishers, and in the middle of all this there sat I enthroned on a rickety chair, snarling at the barber and stamping my feet to keep the ants from crawling up …

At last the party was ready to start. The loads were lifted on to the heads of the carriers, the staff shuffled into Indian file, and at a word from Gerald the column lurched off down the road and into the forest in the direction of Eshobi. Clinging to Gerald’s waist were two baby baboons, and in his hand a baby crocodile wrapped in a blanket. ‘My ten evil-looking carriers marched ahead with the loads,’ he wrote, ‘and on either side of me, guard of honour, marched Pious and the cook, while behind marched my personal smallboy, Dan, carrying my money-bag and field-glasses. We passed over two suspension bridges in great style, looking like Stanley looking for Livingstone.’ John Yealland accompanied them as far as the rusting suspension bridge that spanned the Cross River. At the other side of the bridge Gerald looked back and waved to his companion, then turned and was swallowed up by the forest.

He was to describe the track to Eshobi as ‘the worst bush path I know’ – convoluting course, one-in-three gradient, six-inch width, six-mile length, but feeling like sixty. He wrote in a letter home:

Sometimes it’s there and sometimes it isn’t. You spend most of your time leaping up huge boulders about six foot high, crawling under or over fallen trees, and tripping over creepers. The baby baboons were awfully good; they clung on by themselves without my having to hold on to them, occasionally making little wailing noises to show me they were still there. After the first hour they went to sleep, and then I had to put my hand under their bottoms or they would have fallen off. When we stopped for a rest and a drink of beer, Amos [the baby drill] seized the chance to do a wee-wee all over me, but as I was already soaked in sweat it didn’t matter much. Just before we reached the village we came to a stream, which had the usual supply of dangerous stepping stones. I reached the last one with a cry of triumph and leapt on to the bank. Here I found I had landed on a slide of clay, and my feet shot up and I fell heavily into about two foot of dirty water. The baboons uttered wild cries of fright and scrambled up on to my head. I was helped out, dripping, by Pious and the cook in a perfect gale of ‘Sorry Sah’s’, and so we reached the village at last.

Gerald was now at the sharp end of the bushwhacking life. He reached Eshobi drenched in sweat, tired, thirsty and querulous. A few days ago he had sent a government messenger ahead to make prior arrangements and prepare a base camp. Gerald took one look at the camp site and (as he informed Mother) ‘nearly fainted’. This was no Hollywood-style safari encampment, but a shanty pitched on a midden that had once been a banana patch. He rounded on the messenger and ordered him to summon labour from the village at once to level the site and make a proper camp.

‘The labour brigade turned up,’ he wrote to Mother, ‘and appeared to consist entirely of quite the most ugly set of old women I had ever seen. They were clad only in dirty bits of cloth round their waists, and all were smoking short black pipes.’ After half an hour he decided to retire to the village for some beer. ‘Pious made the owner of the only chair and table in the place produce them, somewhat reluctantly, and I was enthroned in state under the only tree in the middle of the village street.’

In Eshobi Gerald came face to face with the reality of tribal life out in the bush for the first time – the destitution, deprivation and sickness. ‘All around me stood the population in a solid wedge, giving a wonderful display of disease ranging from yaws to leprosy. Even little kids of four and five were covered from head to foot with the huge sores, all mattering and fly-covered, of yaws. One female had the entire heel of one foot eaten away. Another delightful man had no nose and half his fingers missing.’ Gerald drank his beer with an effort and returned to the camp site, dismayed and a little chastened, hardly guessing that before many weeks were out he too would be among the diseased and ailing of this unhealthy place.

At the camp the ground had now been cleared, a kitchen built, the tent erected more or less upright. A start had been made on a house for the staff and another – the ‘Beef House’ – for the animals. The village chief paid a courtesy visit, the staff settled down to their bush routine, and Gerald’s first real stint as an animal collector in the wilds began.

It did not begin very well. During the first night a great thunderstorm broke over Eshobi, the rain fell in torrents, the tent leaked, and by morning everything was sodden – bed, books, Gerald, everything. He noted in his diary for 22 January:

Woke up wet and cold after a filthy night and drank some neat whiskey with my tea. Found after this that death was not so near, so got up and shaved. The croc bite on my finger has gone septic, so must do something about it. In the middle of the morning I found Pious sick. He had fever, though his pulse was normal. Having no medicines at all I dosed him with whiskey and aspirin, covered him with all the blankets I could get hold of and left him to sweat. By three o’clock he was OK again and after another shot of whiskey resumed work. Must get the birds out of the beef box, as it is most unsuitable for them. If John could see them he’d have a fit, dear old ostrich.

Almost immediately the animals started pouring in. He sent Mother a list of his acquisitions:

Four Bush-tailed Porcupine (five shillings each); one Mongoose (two shillings); one Fruit Bat (one shilling); four baby Crocodiles (five bob each – the longest is four foot long); two Pangolin (five bob each); nine Tortoises (one shilling each); ten rats for two shillings (these are green with bright rufous bottoms and noses); one full-grown Yellow Baboon for two quid; and one Red-eared Monkey for two bob.

It was difficult for even Gerald Durrell to relate to some of these species, but one or two particularly took his fancy, none more than the yellow baboon and the red-eared monkey.

The Yellow Baboon (whom I have called George) was brought to me all the way from the French Congo (some five hundred miles away). You see how the news spreads – they even know in the French Congo that I am buying animals. He stands about two feet high and is as tame as a kitten. When you tickle him under the armpits he lies on his back and screeches with laughter. The staff were very afraid of him at first, but now they love him and he spends most of his time wreaking havoc in the kitchen. If dinner is late it is always due to George having upset the soup or something.

The Red-eared Monkey is simply sweet. Its back is brindled green, its legs and arms lovely slate grey, white cheeks, red ear tufts and a red tail about two feet long. Bright red. It has the largest eyes I have ever seen in a monkey, light brown. It makes a delightful twittering noise like a bird. Its fingers are long and boney like an old man’s and it looks so sweet when you give it a handful of grasshoppers, it sits there cramming its mouth, twittering, and examining its fingers carefully to make sure it hasn’t missed any.

Before long the impact of Gerald’s collecting expedition on the impoverished economy of the locality had turned into something like an oil strike, relatively speaking. The inhabitants of the area would come in at all times of day and night from miles around, with a range of creatures so motley and diverse that any zoologist would have been seriously challenged to identify half of them. One of the joys of the business was that it was impossible to know what kind of animal would turn up next – large or small, rare or common, dangerous or docile.

At two o’clock one night, for example, Gerald was woken by a trembling watchnight (the local term for a night watchman) who informed him that a man was on his way with a large python. Gerald got out of bed expecting to see some backwoodsman with a snake about two feet long. ‘Instead of which,’ he recorded, ‘a crowd, as always, roared into the compound with hurricane lamps and in their midst were four carriers on whose shoulders was an enormous wicker basket about six foot long. They dumped the thing outside my tent and I found it contained a twelve foot python. Next came the jolly task of getting the bloody thing out of the basket and into the box.’ When it proved impossible to shake the snake out, Gerald tried to pull it out by the tail, and when that failed he grabbed it by the head and pulled. When this didn’t work either, he had no alternative but to cut the basket clean away and shake like mad. ‘He went into the box with an angry hiss and a bump, and I went into the tent and had a quick whiskey, as it had all been rather nerve-wracking. I am now Number One Juju Man in the village, because I touched the head and tail of the python and still remain alive.’

Most of the animals brought into camp were of the commoner varieties. To obtain the rarer species Gerald had to go out and find them himself. And so he entered the mysterious depths of the rainforest for the first time, and was bewildered and enchanted and for ever won over by the sights and the sounds and the scents of this almost holy wilderness.

‘The leafmould alone,’ he was to write of his first day in the forest,

contained hundreds of insects I had never seen or heard of before. Roll over any rotting log and I found a world as bizarre as anything dreamed up by science fiction. Each hollow tree was an apartment block containing anything from snakes to bats, from owls to flying mice. Every forest stream was an orchestra of frogs, a ballet of tiny fish, and from the canopy above came a constant rain of fruit, twigs and pirouetting blossoms thrown down by the great army of creatures – mammals, birds, reptiles and insects – that inhabit this high, sunlit, flower-scented realm. I did not know where to look next. Every leaf, flower, liana, every insect, fish, frog or bird was a lifetime’s study in itself, and I knew that there was another hidden, secretive army of creatures that would emerge at night to take over. As any naturalist knows, there is nothing like a rainforest for replacing arrogance with awe.

Gerald felt his own sense of life echoing back to him from the surrounding jungle. ‘In the Cameroons I was walking in a cathedral,’ he recalled, ‘staring endlessly upwards, only just able to glimpse the frescoes on the ceiling. That was rainforest for me. As a naturalist you have no idea, until you’ve experienced the tropical forest, how complex, astonishing and differentiated it is. When I first read Darwin’s outpourings in The Voyage of the Beagle I thought they were poetic licence – only to discover, in Africa, that he was grossly understating it.’

Hunting in this primordial world was an arduous and occasionally perilous task at which Gerald rapidly became highly expert. Not that he ever felt afraid during these forays. In pursuit of the most sought-after prizes, he clearly believed that the ends justified the means.

I have been doing something very illegal, hunting at night with lights. The lights are carbon-burning ones like the miners use. You wear them on your forehead and with the terrific beam they throw out you can see the animals’ eyes reflected, and it dazzles them so that you can get close enough to catch them. I have been going out every other night with seven hunters, combing the forest for a very rare Lemur called an angwantibo. If I can get one my stock with London Zoo will rocket to heaven. So far no luck.

The other night we went out and had the best night yet. We walked for miles without seeing a thing, and then we came to a river. This was not very wide, but fast running, and the bed was composed of slabs of grey sandstone. The water had worn away the stone into channels, so you got a sort of canal about three feet wide and two feet deep. The sides were choked with vegetation, mostly ferns. I had only two hunters with me. These two are really very funny. Elias is short and fat, with a face like an ex-boxer and a funny waddling walk. His taste runs to highly coloured sarongs with blue and orange flowers plastered all over them. The other is called Andrai,^* and he is tall and willowy, with an extraordinary face and very long fingers. He has a wonderful swaying walk, uses his hands like a Greek, and wears sarongs of pale pastel shades. The other member of our Band of Hope was a boy whose job it was to carry all the nets and bags and was as near as makes no matter to being a half-wit.

We waded up miles of these channels, Elias first, me next, followed by Andrai and the half-wit, who made as much noise as a herd of frightened elephants. Elias said that we might see a crocodile, and had cut me a forked stick to deal with such an eventuality should it arise. I thought the possibility was very remote, so I dropped the stick when no one was looking, and no sooner had I done this than Elias came to a sudden standstill, and groped behind me, imploring me to hand him the stick. I replied that I had lost it, and he uttered a cry of pain, drew his machete and crept forward. I strained my eyes to see what it was he was trying to catch. Suddenly I saw it, something dark which glinted in the light, the same shape and size as a baby croc. Elias made a dive at it with his knife, but it wiggled through his legs and swam at great speed down the channel towards me. I made a grab, missed and fell into the water, yelling to Andrai that it was coming. Andrai leapt into the fray and was neatly tripped by the bagboy. I saw the thing swim out of the narrow channel into a broad one. Here, I thought, we had lost it for ever. However, the bagboy had got his half wit working and had noted the stone under which it had gone to ground.

We all rushed down there, making a tidal wave of water and foam, and clustered round the rock. Andrai insinuated a long arm into the hole and then withdrew it again with a shrill cry of anguish, his forefinger dripping blood.

‘This beef can bite man,’ explained Elias, with the proud air of having made a discovery.

Andrai was at last persuaded to put his hand back inside the hole after some argument and cries of ‘Go on!’ and ‘Cowardy-cowardy-custard!’ in the local dialect. He lay on his tummy in about six inches of water, his arm in the bowels of the earth, explaining to everyone how very brave he was to do this. There was a short silence, broken only by grunts from Andrai as he tried to reach the beef. Then he let out a yell of triumph and stood up holding the thing by the tail. When I saw it I nearly fainted, because instead of the baby croc I expected he was holding a Giant Water Shrew – one of the rarest animals in the whole of West Africa.

The Water Shrew soon got tired of hanging by its tail, so turned and climbed up its own body and buried its teeth in Andrai’s thumb. He leapt about three feet in the air, and let out an ear-piercing scream of pain.

‘OW … OW … OW!’ he screeched. ‘Oh, Elias, Elias, get it off. OW … MY JESUSCRI … it done kill me … OW OW OW … Elias, quickly …’

Elias and I struggled with the animal, but I was laughing so much I was not much use. At last we got it off and pushed it wiggling and hissing into the bag. Andrai had to rest on the bank, moaning softy and tut-tutting over the mud on his pale mauve sarong. When he was quite sure he was not going to die we moved on, and further down the river we caught two crocs, so altogether it was a very good night.

There was no denying the courage, perseverance and expertise demonstrated by Gerald – and by his African companions, with whom he now began to relate more closely and sympathetically – in such difficult and challenging circumstances. It was as though he had been cut out for this unusual task from the cradle. His energy and enthusiasm were inexhaustible, his sense of humour rarely flagged, he delighted in the adventure and sheer unpredictability of it all, never knowing what the next hour would bring. Night after night and day after day he marched off into the forest, rarely emerging empty-handed. And as his collection of birds and animals grew, so did the workload of looking after them. He wrote to his mother:

The day goes something like this. Six o’clock, Pious appears in the tent, beaming, with tea. After three cups I feel I might live, so go down in my dressing gown to feed the birds and see what has escaped or died during the night. By the time I have done this my hot water is ready and I wash. After this I dash into my clothes and take the monkeys out of their sleeping boxes and tie them up to their poles. By this time my breakfast is ready: pawpaw, two eggs, toast, coffee. I have this and a fag and then start the real work of the day.

First, there are about four little boys with cages of birds to look at. I pick out the worthwhile ones to keep for John and pick out the ones that are almost dead to feed to the animals that eat meat. After this I repair to the Beef House, where Dan, my ten-year-old assistant, is awaiting orders. I clean out the birds, about ten cages, while he washes out the food and water dishes and refills them.

Then we start on the animals. The Mongoose has to be given a dead bird to chew so that I can get my hand inside to clean him out without getting bitten. Then the three cages of Brush-tailed Porcupine. Of these I have one full-grown pair which stink to high heaven, one full-grown female, and one tiny baby. The latter is very sweet and in the evening goes all skittish, leaping and gambolling like a rabbit. When he is frightened he stamps his feet and rattles his spines like knitting needles. Then it’s the turn of the Fruit Bats. Eating pawpaw and bananas all night their cage is always in the most frightful stinking mess. Then the monkeys have to be fed, and while this is going on you can’t hear yourself think.

Then come the reptiles. The chameleons have to be sprayed with water and given grasshoppers. The tortoises have to have fruit and greenstuff. And the crocs have to be washed (very difficult, this).

Then it’s lunch-time: soup, chicken with sweet potatoes and green pawpaw, fresh fruit, coffee, cigar. The hardship of collecting! After this, if I have been out all the previous night hunting, I sleep until tea-time; or I plunge into the forest with the hunters. After tea we start all over again: porcupine food, bat food, rat food, monkey milk, mongoose meat, water, etc. etc. I retire about seven, feeling shattered, to my bath, taken in the open before a group of fascinated villagers. Then dinner: duck or deer or porcupine meat, peas, potatoes, sweet, coffee, cigar. Three quick whiskeys, a short stroll round to see everything is alright, and so to bed.

There is so much to tell you about that I could sit down and write ten thousand words if I had time. How a crowd of tiny toddlers appears each day clutching tins, bottles and gourds full of grasshoppers. How a villager tried to strangle his wife down by the river and how the staff and I had to rush down, lay the man out and throw the mother-in-law into the river.

Gerald had now been in Eshobi for many weeks, and the animal collection had grown to such an extent that the Beef House was virtually full. Gerald had learnt the ways of the forest and its wild creatures – and of the Africans among whom he was living. His affection and respect for them – poor people, but brave, big-hearted, loyal and talented in many different ways – had grown, as had theirs for him. Though he was still the ‘Master’, he no longer felt as alien and insecure as he had when he first arrived, and he no longer insisted on the deference he had once thought befitted his status. Indeed, Sanders of the River was even showing signs of going native. ‘Sometimes in the evenings,’ he told Mother, ‘I would go and sit in the kitchen with the staff and discuss such thrilling topics as “Home Rule for the Cameroons” and “Did God Make the World in Seven Days?”’ His departure, when it came, was a matter of some emotion on both sides.

When we were ready to leave Eshobi the village threw a dance in my honour and I was escorted to the main square by the staff and all the village elders and enthroned in state in the front row. Everyone had on their best clothes, ranging from cheap print dresses to shorts made out of old flour bags. Elias, my hunter, was the M.C., clad in a green shirt and pinstripe trousers – God knows where he got them. He had an enormous watch-chain with a huge whistle on it, which he blew loudly to restore order. They do the most curious dances, which are a mixture of nearly every known dance, with the barn dance predominating. Elias, wagging his bottom in the centre, roared the instructions to the dancers: ‘ADvance!! … right turn … meet and waltz … let we set … all move … back we set again … ADvance … right turn … meet and waltz … conduct for yourself … etc. etc.’ When the dance was over the chief made a speech to me. It was really rather funny, because he stood in the centre of the square and so the poor boy who acted as interpreter had to keep running about twenty yards to tell me what he was saying and then run back to hear the next sentence. The speech went something like this:

‘People of Eshobi! You know why we are here tonight … to say goodbye to the Master who has been with us so long. Never in the whole history of Eshobi have we had such a Master … money has flowed as freely from him as water in the river-bed. Those who had the power went to bush and caught beef, for which they were paid handsomely. Those who were weak, the women and children, could obtain money and salt by bringing white ants and grasshoppers. We, the elders of the village, would like the Master to settle here. We would give him land and build him a fine house. We can only hope that he tells all the people in his country how we, the people of Eshobi, tried to help him, and to hope that on his next tour he will come back here and stay even longer.’

This was followed by loud and prolonged cheers, under cover of which the interpreter fainted into the arms of a friend. Then the band, consisting of three flutes and four drums and a triangle, struck up a red-hot version of ‘God Save the King’, and the party broke up.

So, very nearly, did Gerald himself. By now he was in a fairly exhausted condition. He had given his all in an unhealthy and enormously demanding environment. He had been bitten and stabbed by an extraordinary variety of fangs, spines, teeth, beaks, probosces, claws and jaws. He had had jiggers in his toes, ants in his pants, lice in his hair, bugs in his bed, and rats in his tent. He had reckoned on staying up all night packing, so as to be able to leave Eshobi before dawn and get to Mamfe around ten, before the sun got too hot for the animals. But after supper he began to feel very out of sorts, and by nine o’clock he was staggering about as though he was drunk. By ten he could barely walk, and had to be carried out to the latrine by Pious and George, the washboy. He collapsed on his bed, leaving it to the staff to pack up camp. Every five minutes Pious would creep in and peer down at him, making a solicitous ‘tch tch’ noise. Once George came in and tried to cheer him up, telling him that if he died they would never be able to find another Master like him.

‘This was the beginning of the best bout of sandfly fever I’ve had to date,’ Gerald wrote reassuringly to Mother. ‘It’s bloody awful: it doesn’t kill you, or harm you in any way, but while you’ve got it you feel quite sure you’re going to die. You walk as though you are dead drunk, and everything further away than ten feet is blurred and out of focus. You sweat like Hell and your head feels about four times normal size.’

In this condition Gerald now faced the prospect of a five-hour trek through the bush under the blazing equatorial sun. Leaning on the faithful Pious, and tap-tapping along with the aid of a stick, the ailing young white man shuffled along behind a column of sixty black carriers, half of them women. At the first small river he came to he had to be carried across by an elder who had come along to say goodbye. ‘Nearly I cried when I see you carried,’ Pious told him. ‘I make sure you going to die then.’ The track steepened after that, running up a hill at a gradient of one and three, and Gerald had to be half-dragged and carried up by Pious. The main column marched on till it was out of sight. ‘Every two hundred yards we would stop for five minutes,’ Gerald recalled, ‘while I sank down on the path and sweated like a hero in a film and Pious fanned me with a hat.’

One way or another, Gerald got to Mamfe by half-past ten, and by two he was eating lunch with John Yealland at Bakebe. The reunion was heartfelt. Gerald had formed a high opinion of John’s qualities as an ornithologist and a man, relishing his slow drawl and dry humour, his wisdom and kindness. It was a pleasure to be with a fellow-countryman again, to speak plain English, swap the news of the last few months, and inspect each other’s impressive collections of birds and animals.

After three days’ rest at Bakebe, Gerald began to feel much better, only suffering from the disappointment of not having got an angwantibo. This disappointment was to be short-lived. One day, not long after his return to Bakebe, Gerald set off for a reconnaissance of the nearby mountain N’da Ali, which had almost sheer sides thickly covered with forest. Gerald’s aim was to find a camp site and to spend ten days or so trying to catch some of the large numbers of chimpanzees reputed to live there. He wrote home:

I set off early one morning on a borrowed bike, a small boy on the crossbar with a bag of beer and other nourishment, to meet the hunter who was going to lead me up. We had gone about four miles, and I was just wondering if my legs were going to hold out, when in the distance I saw a man marching along with a bag made out of palm leaves in his hand. Thinking it was yet another Pouched Rat or Brush-tailed Porcupine, I dismounted and waited for him. When he got near I saw to my surprise that he was one of my ex-hunters from Eshobi. When he got to within hailing distance I asked him what he had got, and he replied that it was small beef. I regret to say that on peering into the basket the only sound I could produce was a sort of strangled ‘Arrrrr …’ Then I loaded the hunter with my gear, threw the boy off the crossbar, and hanging the Angwantibo round my neck fled frantically back home again.

Gerald had obtained his first angwantibo in the nick of time, for shortly afterwards there came word from England – a tip-off from his Whipsnade friend Ken Smith – that the legendary collector Cecil Webb of the London Zoo had set sail for the Cameroons with the express intention of catching angwantibo. A veteran of expeditions all over the world, Webb regarded Durrell and Yealland as novices and upstarts. For their part, they saw him as an irritating rival who was over the hill.

Eventually, Webb caught up with them. ‘He is a huge, lanky man (six foot six, I believe),’ Gerald reported to Mother, ‘with a protruding jaw and faded blue eyes. We found him clad in faded blue jeans and an enormous sort of straw sun-bonnet which made me want to giggle. He asked, with a careless air that almost strangled him, if we had still got the Angwantibo, to which we replied that it was thriving. I am going up to Bemenda in a few days time and will pass through Mamfe, where he is now. I shall then take great pleasure in telling him that we have now got three (3) Angwantibo!!!!!!!!’

Webb did not go away empty-handed, however, for Gerald was duty bound to hand over to him for delivery to London Zoo the most remarkable animal in his collection – Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumley) the chimpanzee. Gerald had acquired Cholmondeley from a District Officer who had asked him if he could find a home for a chimp at London Zoo. Gerald had agreed, imagining that the creature would be about a year old and around eighteen inches high. He was amazed when a lorry arrived with a large crate in the back containing a full-grown chimpanzee of eight or nine years of age, with huge arms, a bald head, a massive, hairy chest that measured at least twice the size of Gerald’s, and bad tooth growth that made him look like an unsuccessful prize-fighter.

I opened the crate with some trepidation. Cholmondeley gave a little hoot of pleasure, gathered up the long chain which was attached to a collar round his neck, hung the loops daintily over his arm, and stepped down. Here he paused briefly to shake my hand in the most regal and dignified manner before walking into the house as if he owned it. He gazed around the living room of our humble grass hut with the air of a middle-European monarch inspecting a hotel bedroom suspected of containing bed bugs. Then, apparently satisfied, he ambled over to the table, drew out a chair and sat down, crossing his legs and staring at me expectantly.

We stared at each other for a bit, and then I got out my cigarettes. Immediately Cholmondeley became animated. It was quite obvious that after his long journey he wanted a cigarette. I handed him the packet, and he removed a cigarette, carefully put it in his mouth, and then replaced the packet on the table. I handed him a box of matches, thinking this might possibly fool him, but he slid the box open, took out a match, lit the cigarette, and threw the matches back on the table. He crossed his legs again and lay back in his chair inhaling thankfully and blowing great clouds of smoke out of his nose.

Cholmondeley had other predilections. Hot, sweet tea was one. He would drink it out of a battered mug the size of a tankard, balancing it on his nose to drain the last dregs of syrupy sugar at the bottom. Then he would either hold out the mug for more or hurl it as far away as he could. He had also developed a fondness for beer, though Gerald only proffered it to him once, when he drank a whole bottle very quickly, with much lip-smacking and delight, till he was covered in froth and began to turn somersaults. After that he was given nothing stronger than lemonade or tea. Gerald parted with this extraordinary character with much regret, though he was destined to meet up with him again soon enough.

At last, in July, the time came to wind down operations and pack up the expedition. The rains were beginning, and Gerald had run out of money. He had spent heavily on stores, staff and accommodation, but especially on the birds, animals and reptiles which made up his huge collection. The situation was dire enough for him to swallow his pride and telegraph home for a loan, receiving by return the sum of £250 (more than £5000 in today’s money) from Leslie’s girlfriend Doris, the off-licence manageress.

The remaining camp stores were sold off, as John Yealland recorded in his diary:

Gerald started to sell up the home this evening and did a brisk trade with his topee and umbrella and my oilskin, along with two sacks of maize, half a sack of coconuts, crockery, pots and pans and some spare cartridges. Such was Gerald’s salesmanship that he even sold an alarm clock which never lost less than one and a half hours in twenty-four for 15 shillings. He also sold a watch which he dropped on a concrete floor at Victoria and which still ticks though it doesn’t move its hands. So now we dine off cracked plates, but at least we have some money for cables to Belle Vue and Chester Zoos.

Gerald and John had originally planned to sail on 24 June, but their collection had grown so huge that the crates and boxes – five hundred cubic feet in volume – would not fit into the hold of the ship they had booked, and it sailed without them. Eventually they were able to secure berths and cargo space on a banana boat, the SS Tetela, sailing from the port of Tiko a whole month later, on 25 July, and began to prepare for their departure.

‘You cannot just climb aboard a ship with your animals,’ Gerald pointed out, ‘and expect the cook to feed them.’ A vast hoard of foodstuffs had to be got together, gathered from all over the country, and soon the expedition hut at Kumba resembled a market, with bananas, pawpaws, pineapples, oranges, eggs, sacks of corn, potatoes and beans, and the carcass of a whole bullock strewn across the floor.

It was at this point that Gerald went down with malaria, and lay feverish and ill with a temperature of 103 for a week. The plan was to drive down to Tiko during the night of 24 July, arriving at dawn on the day the ship was due to sail. But when the doctor called on the day before their departure, he was aghast at the idea of Gerald going anywhere. ‘You should be kept in bed for at least a fortnight,’ he thundered. ‘You can’t travel on that ship.’ Otherwise, he bluntly informed the ailing Englishman, he would die.

But Gerald went, alternately sweating and shivering in the cab of the lorry as it ploughed down the mud road through the first rains of the season. A torrential downpour half-drowned the animals as they were being loaded on board at the docks, and though he felt like death Gerald insisted on drying the sodden creatures and giving them their night feed. Then the steward poured him a whisky which, he recalled, ‘could have knocked out a horse’, and he lay down in his cabin convinced he was going to die.

But he didn’t. He was lucky with the weather on the voyage home, and soon began to revive with the fresh sea air. The crew found a playpen for Sue the chimpanzee, and titbits and blankets for any monkey with a sniff or a cough. The only casualty was a mongoose that staged a breakout and jumped overboard.

At 4 p.m. on Tuesday, 10 August 1948, the Tetela tied up at Garston Docks, Liverpool, and Gerald Durrell and John Yealland stepped back on to dry land at the end of their African adventure. They had been away more than seven months, and had brought back nearly two hundred creatures all told – among them ninety-five mammals (including the three angwantibo, forty monkeys, a baby chimp and a giant white mongoose), twelve reptiles and ninety-three rare birds. This cargo was sufficiently exotic to attract the attention of the national press. ‘Awantibos, ahoy!’ cried the headlines. ‘The Awantibo is here today … only once seen alive in a European zoo!’

‘Eventually,’ Gerald was to recall, ‘the last cage was towed away, and the vans bumped their way across the docks through the fine, drifting rain, carrying the animals away to a new life, and carrying us towards the preparations for a new trip.’

The expedition had been an enormous challenge, and had turned out a considerable triumph, putting Gerald Durrell and John Yealland in the front rank of British zoo collectors and field workers, and marking the definitive starting point of Gerald’s spectacular career.

* In pidgin all animals are called ‘beef’. There are four kinds: ‘small’, ‘big’, ‘bad’ and ‘bery bad’ beef.

* Spelt ‘Andraia’ in Gerald’s later book. The correct spelling is ‘Andreas’, and the man is still alive.