Ever since his first foray to Mauritius in 1976, Gerald had been held in the island’s spell, and he had become so intrigued by its conservation problems that his mind had begun to turn to a revolutionary way of tackling them. John Hartley recalled: ‘One morning at breakfast Gerry and I were discussing the fact that most of the small amount of conservation work being done in the country was by foreigners. For the long term, we agreed, it was clearly essential for the Mauritian community to take part. And then Gerry said:
‘“I have an idea. We are seeing the Minister this morning. What I’m going to do is offer him a scholarship for a Mauritian to come to Jersey for training on our specialist conservation programme.”’
Hartley gulped on his coffee. He had never heard of any such programme. There was no such thing.
‘What training programme?’ he asked.
‘Hartley,’ Gerald replied sternly. ‘You know what your trouble is? You always get bogged down in the minor details in life!’
‘It became obvious as we talked,’ Hartley remembered, ‘that as usual Gerald had given a great deal of thought to the idea. But at that time we had no programme, nobody trained to do the training, nowhere to house the trainee, and so on, and so on …’
The offer was made, the Minister accepted, and in the spring of 1977 Gerald paid a return visit to Mauritius with John Hartley, his sister Margaret and his New Yorker friend Trish. The selection was made, and a local schoolteacher by the name of Yousoof Mungroo became Jersey Zoo’s first trainee student.
Another aim of this second foray to Mauritius was to try to catch rare boas on Round Island – an enterprise that was not without its adventures. The party were camped under canvas on the island one evening when they were subject to one of the most bizarre manifestations of the natural world Gerald had ever witnessed:
As the green twilight faded and the sky turned velvety black, awash with stars, as if at a given signal there arose the most extraordinary noise from the bowels of the earth. It started softly, almost tunefully, a sound like distant pack of wolves, howling mournfully across some remote, snowbound landscape. Then, as more voices joined the chorus, it became a gigantic, mad mass being celebrated in some Bedlamite cathedral. You could hear the lunatic cries of the priests and the wild responses from the congregation. This lasted for about half an hour, the sounds rising and falling, the ground throbbing with the noise, and then, as suddenly as if the earth had burst open and released all the damned souls from some Gustave Doré subterranean hell, out of the holes concealed by the green meadows, mewing and honking and moaning, the baby Shearwaters burst forth.
They appeared in hundreds, as if newly risen from the grave, and squatted and fluttered around our camp, providing such a cacophony of sound that we could hardly hear each other speak. Not content with this, the babies, being of limited intelligence, decided that our tent was a sort of superior nest burrow, designed for their special benefit. Squawking and moaning, they fought their way through the openings and flapped over and under our camp beds, defecating with great freedom, and if handled without tact, regurgitating a fishy, smelly oil all over us.
All night the bedlam continued. Towards dawn the baby birds discovered a new joy they had never known before – sliding down the tent roof, over and over again, their claws making a noise liking ripping calico on the canvas. ‘On mature reflection,’ Gerald was to record, I decided that this was the most uncomfortable night I had ever spent in my life.’ Just before dawn the travellers rose from their inadequate doze and staggered out of their tent, tripping and stumbling over the hordes of baby shearwaters scuttling back into their holes.
Early one morning the party climbed to one of the highest points on the island. From the summit Gerald could see the full, catastrophic extent of Round Island’s degradation. With the vegetation cover gone, what soil was left was being washed down to the sea, followed by rocks and boulders. At the summit even the great sheets of hard tuff had dissolved here and there in the night rain and attained the consistency of sticky chocolate. The island was eroding away. Gerald was aghast: ‘Gazing down at these slopes of tuff, you realised forcibly that here was a unique, miniature world that had, by a miracle of evolution, come into being and was now being allowed to bleed to death … this unique speck of land was diminishing day by day. It seemed to sum up in miniature what we were doing to the whole planet, with millions of species being bled to death for want of a little, so little, medicare.’
There was a frisson of panic on their last day on Round Island when the helicopter failed to turn up on time and for a moment it seemed they might be marooned on this intriguing but inhospitable speck of land. Most alarmed was one of their local companions, a young man from the Forestry Department called Zozo who had never been off Mauritius before. Spotting Zozo sitting moodily under a palm tree nearby, Gerald decided to lighten his gloom.
‘Zozo,’ he called.
‘Yes, Mr Gerry?’ said Zozo, peering at him from under the brim of his large solar topee which, Gerald noted, ‘made him look ridiculously like a green mushroom’.
‘It seems as if the helicopter is not coming to rescue us.’
‘Yes, Mr Gerry,’ he agreed soulfully.
‘Well,’ said Gerald, in a kindly, reassuring way, ‘I wanted you to know that, by an overwhelming vote, we have decided to eat you first when the food runs out.’
But all was well, the helicopter eventually arrived, Zozo was spared, and Gerald and John and Margaret returned to Mauritius with their precious Round Island geckos and skinks as a first step in saving them too. ‘As we rose higher and higher, and the island dwindled against the turquoise sea,’ Gerald declared later, ‘I became determined that we must do everything we could to save it.’ It was the beginning of a great endeavour.
With Gerald about to go to America on another fund-raising tour – during which he would make a rendezvous with destiny in the form of Lee – John Hartley became the de facto co-ordinator of the Trust’s operations in Mauritius. His first action was to return almost immediately to catch pink pigeons for a captive breeding programme in Jersey, returning after a month with eight birds, three of which were left in Mauritius with the ones they already had there, and five brought back to Jersey. There was a steady escalation after that. On the recommendation of the Jersey Trust the Mauritius government had established the Black River Aviaries (now known as the Gerald Durrell Endemic Wildlife Sanctuary) to carry out their own bird rescue and breeding programme, and when the International Council for Bird Preservation appointed a young Welsh biologist by the name of Carl Jones to run the Black River centre in 1983 it was Jersey who funded his work, eventually taking over the whole programme. ‘This project was a defining moment for the Trust,’ John Hartley recalled. ‘It was the first project we developed overseas in a serious way over the years and basically we’ve learnt an awful lot of what we now apply elsewhere from the Mauritius model. It is also one of the most successful conservation projects in the world, without doubt.’
Carl Jones had no doubts that Gerald Durrell was the inspiration and driving force. ‘He saw things very simply,’ he was to recall. ‘He knew that captive breeding was just one way of saving animals, but he saw beyond this, and realised we had to develop the interface between captivity and the wild state. I spent a lot of time talking to him about this. He was a great visionary. Recently conservation has moved on into questions of animal consciousness and animal rights and whole ecosystems, and Gerry was interested in all these things. He knew that we had to move with the times. He was a great thinker and to my mind a very great man. He was also his own master. He was outside all the committees and in-fighting that ties up so much of the conservation movement. He wasn’t like some of the bigger conservation organisations who deal only in high-profile animals, put a load of money in and then pull out. He put local people in on the ground and stuck with the project hands-on in situ through thick and thin.’
For Gerald and Lee, much of the 1980s were to be taken up with a succession of international television series on natural history and conservation themes that would take them to almost every point of the globe. The driving force behind this televisual blitz was Canadian production chief W. Paterson Ferns, with whom Gerald had made the highly successful thirteen-part series The Stationary Ark in 1975, and who was now head of a Toronto-based production company, Primedia. By the time Gerald and Pat Ferns’ association came to an end they would have made five television series (four of them with Lee) and a television special together, a total of sixty-five programmes, plus six related books. The production costs reflected the rising scale of the programmes’ ambitions and the increasingly exotic location shooting. The thirteen-part series Ark on the Move was made in 1980 on a shoestring, for a budget equivalent to what Gerald was used to when shooting a single documentary for the BBC. By the time they made their fifth series, each episode was costing the equivalent of the entire first series.
During the early part of 1980 Pat Ferns had been back in contact with Gerald about the possibility of making another thirteen-part documentary television series, entitled Ark on the Move. The new British network Channel 4’s Chief Executive, Jeremy Isaacs, was attracted by the idea of having a major figure in natural history working on the new channel, and as well as commissioning Gerald’s new series, he purchased the previous one, The Stationary Ark. Ark on the Move was a logical sequel to The Stationary Ark, reflecting the shift in Gerald’s conservation thinking since the first series, and his plans to extend captive breeding operations from Jersey to sites overseas. The idea was to base part of the series on Gerald’s animal rescue missions to Mauritius, as described in his book Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons, and to shoot the rest in Madagascar, a species-rich island land-mass in dire ecological straits.
It was Pat Ferns’ view that Gerald and Lee would be perfect to front the new series together, since Gerald knew Mauritius and Lee knew Madagascar, and each would be showing the other familiar ground. Lee, Pat Ferns reckoned, was a quiet but intriguing presence on film. As for Gerald, Ferns knew that properly handled he was a natural. ‘I worked with some of the best television presenters in the world,’ he was to say later, ‘and Gerry was certainly in the first rank. He wasn’t an easy personality but I think he was a first-rate performer with a genuine vision. He was a true storyteller. He loved to regale an audience with a scotch in his hand over dinner or with a lemur on his shoulder in front of a camera. His writing relied on the brilliant simile or metaphor and he was able to translate this into a form of television presentation that captured the comic qualities of his books, while never detracting from the passion of his cause.’
Until Pat Ferns had come along, Gerald’s experience of television had not been particularly happy. The long, hard slog of documentary film-making, with the almost invariable crew acrimony and the front-of-camera pressures, had always put him under great strain, making him self-conscious and constrained, and stifling his natural humour and buoyant charm. But working with Pat Ferns had been different, and in The Stationary Ark he had finally blossomed in front of camera – ‘so full of life and cuddly-cute,’ as one reviewer remarked, ‘that you felt like reaching out and squeezing him.’ So he looked forward to the Ark on the Move shoot, and perhaps others to come, in happy expectation.
‘In this new series,’ Gerald was to write, ‘we were to show not only our breeding successes in Jersey but also our rescue operations in the wild. Also, we wanted to show our new scheme for working with governments all over the world to save their animals and to bring people from these countries to Jersey for training in the complex and difficult art of captive breeding.’ The plan was to visit Mauritius, Rodrigues and Round Island in the Mascarenes, where the Jersey Trust was already working with the government, and then to move on to Madagascar, to see what help they could give there.
In the late autumn of 1980 Gerald and Lee met Pat Ferns and the production team in Toronto as they passed through in the course of a fund-raising tour of North America, and at the end of January 1981 Pat Ferns (executive producer), Michael Maltby (director) and Paula Quigley (producer) arrived in Jersey for three days of pre-production meetings. A week or so later John Hartley and the production team flew to Mauritius to set up the production. Ark on the Move, the first of the new big series, was under way.
There were the usual hiccups and tensions that befall long film shoots involving talented but temperamental people in uncontrollable situations on unpredictable locations. The Australian film crew were delayed by an air strike, for example, and Gerald and the director began to fall out. But the shooting schedule was kept to, and all the key locations were tackled in turn – Pink Pigeon Wood, Black River Gorges, the Black River Aviaries, and ten days on Rodrigues.
In the last week of March the party moved on to the infinitely bigger island of Madagascar – a strange and intriguing land beset by its own infinitely bigger problems. Lying off the East African coast, a thousand miles long and two and a half times the size of Britain, Madagascar is an island of continental proportions – the fifth largest in the world and home of some of the world’s most remarkable flora and fauna, 90 per cent of it found nowhere else. All of Madagascar’s chameleons (representing two-thirds of the world’s species) and almost half of its birds are unique to the island. Of the four hundred or so known species of reptiles and amphibians, only twelve exist elsewhere. Four-fifths of the plants are found nowhere else, including a plethora of baobab tree (seven different kinds, where Africa only has one). The two dozen kinds of lemur that live there constitute an entirely separate branch of primate evolution, ranging in size from one as big as a five-year-old child to another small enough to fit into a coffee cup. There are woodlice the size of golf balls and moths the size of Regency fans. In short, the island is a natural treasure house – yet four-fifths of it now stood barren.
‘Today’s acute environmental problems are turning Madagascar, an irreplaceable storehouse of evolutionary knowledge, into a wasteland of barren soil,’ Gerald was to lament. ‘Eighty per cent of native forests has already disappeared. The conservation of this Eden’s rich tapestry of natural history is seen as one of the world’s foremost environmental priorities. Indeed, Madagascar has been described as the place with the greatest number of unique species in the greatest danger of extinction.’ It was an island of breathless and eerie beauty, he continued, a complex web of past and present, yet riven with wrenching conflicts between changing cultures and fragile environments.
Shortly after their arrival in Madagascar the party flew to the extraordinary reserve at Berenty, at the southernmost tip of the island. To a naturalist it could be said that Berenty has a significance that verges almost on the mystical. It consists of 450 acres of forest of gigantic old tamarind trees, and is famous above all for its lemurs – ring-tailed lemurs, mouse lemurs, nocturnal lepilemurs and sifakas – primitive primates which, having been displaced elsewhere by monkeys, evolved in Madagascar unbothered by simian competition. At first light on the day following their arrival, Gerald, Lee and the rest of the party went into the forest. At the end of the day Gerald dictated his recollections into his tape-recorder.
The first thing that ran across our path was a sifaka. They are the most beautiful and endearing of all the lemurs; not only are they so graceful, but they are so gentle and they have got such sweet, benign faces. They are the ballerinas of the lemurs. Not only are they graceful in the trees, leaping the most astonishing distances, but when they run on the ground they run on their hind legs, holding up their little black hands as though in horror at some remark that has been made to them, twisting the top half of their body slightly sideways as they run, which gives them a terrifically sort of pansy gallop, which is very amusing to watch. Their movement is so beautiful, as light as thistledown.
The ring-taileds, on the other hand, are more baboon-like. They gallop about like dogs or swagger about with their tails up, and when a troop of perhaps twenty or thirty of them walk down the forest paths here it looks like a sort of medieval pageant with banners up going along.
The animals here are so used to being studied and approached by human beings that they treat you exactly as though you are a part of the scenery. They ignore you and just walk past going about their business, sometimes within a foot of you. We have seen a lot of wonderful things. When I started dictating this, for example, about thirty ring-tailed lemurs just walked across the front of the house and any minute now I expect to get a visit from my little troop of sifakas that come and do their funny waddly walk for me and make me laugh.
From Berenty they drove three hours along a bumpy track in an ancient Land-Rover to visit a government nature reserve near a tiny village called Hazofotsy. The reserve protected a spiny forest unique to southern Madagascar, consisting of Didiereacae trees, which looked like giant cacti covered with formidable spikes. In this prickly and inhospitable terrain lived one of the most beautiful of the Madagascar lemurs, the Verrauxi’s sifaka. A lovely creamy-white in colour, with sooty backs, black faces and huge golden eyes, they leapt and pounced through their thorny world in the most amazing fashion, jumping twenty or thirty feet from one spike to another without ever impaling themselves. For Gerald and his party, though, it was rough going, as he explained into his tape-recorder: ‘As soon as I saw the Spiny Forest I thought to myself that our chances of filming anything at all were very remote. We drove over some roads that were like nothing I had experienced anywhere in the world. They were like ancient river beds which had been under mortar attack for about twenty years.’
That night they slept under the stars – ‘the Southern Cross like a gigantic chandelier in the sky’ – and woke drenched in dew. ‘I looked over to Lee,’ Gerald recorded, ‘and there she was lying, looking like a Pre-Raphaelite painting of the better sort, with all her hair covered with little tiny beads of dew, like a spider’s web.’
The sound-recording equipment and the camera on its tripod seemed to weigh a ton as they were carried through the Spiny Forest. But there were compensations. The spectacle of a Madagascar dawn was one – ‘a very odd shade of greeny-blue’. The seemingly limitless abundance of strange creatures was another – a five-foot-long, yellow-and-black-striped snake ‘like an animated school tie’; a spider the size of a saucer that spun webs the size of cartwheels seemingly thick enough to catch small birds in; a wood-louse (or pill-millipede) the size of a billiard ball; a ‘hissing’ cockroach as big as a lemon and the colour of mahogany that sang with a loud ringing-zinging noise when you picked it up.
After two weeks in Berenty Reserve and the Spiny Forest they travelled north to Ankarafantsika, one of the largest reserves in Madagascar. Sadly, owing to the slash and burn method of agriculture used by the local people, two-thirds of this marvellous reserve had been destroyed. A two-week shoot in the nearby forest reserve at Ampijoroa followed, then an excursion to the lush little tropical island of Nosy Komba, off the north-west coast of Madagascar, where the local lemurs – of a kind called black or Macaco lemur – were held by the local people as sacred, and therefore protected. They were incredibly tame – so tame that they would sometimes sit on top of the camera with their tail hanging down over the lens.
Their final port of call was Perinet, a forestry reserve set aside especially for the largest and most spectacular of the Malagasy lemurs, the indri. The size of a five-year-old child, they are marked panda-fashion in black and white, with huge white tufted ears and big staring golden eyes. ‘They are the aristocrats of the lemurs,’ Gerald was to record, ‘and behave in a way befitting their aristocracy. They rarely get up before ten o’clock and are generally in bed by four in the afternoon. While they are up, however, they delineate their territory by singing.’ Gerald, Lee and the crew went into the forest to find these creatures and to hear their song, as Gerald related into his tape-recorder:
Well, we went into the forest, and although we heard indri we didn’t see any. I’ve decided their marvellous yowling cry sounds exactly like those underwater recordings of the whale song. It really is a most plaintive and musical and beautiful cry. Finally we managed to catch up with some indri and get a recording of their voices, and this we played back. As soon as the recording died away, we waited and thought, ‘No go’, and then suddenly from the trees right next to us there rose up this enormous cry which almost vibrates the forest, it is so marvellously loud and rich – and there was this troop of indri sitting almost in our laps, and we hadn’t even noticed them. They are marvellous animals with great, fluffy ears that remind me very much of a koala bear’s, and these huge, rather maniacal-looking tangerine-coloured eyes stare down at you very fiercely. In fact, they are the most gentle, sweet creatures imaginable. And it’s extraordinary how a bulky animal like that can jump through the forest. They just jump from tree to tree like kangaroos, and yet with so little noise. A whole troop can pass you by and the most you may hear is a slight rustle – it’s quite extraordinary, the silence of movement.
Gerald was to reflect later: ‘It was a privilege to share the world with such an animal. But for how long could we do so? If the forests vanish – and they are vanishing – the indri goes with them. The morning before we left, Lee and I walked up the road towards the forest and stood listening to the indris, as the sky turned from green to blue. Their haunting, wonderful, mourning song came to us, plaintive, beautiful and sad. It could have been the very voice of the forest, the very voice of Madagascar lamenting.’
By the end of the first week in May the Madagascar filming was finished and the British Ambassador threw a farewell party for Gerald and the crew which was attended by a number of Malagasy politicians. During their time in Madagascar Gerald and Lee had had meetings with several Ministers, and had talked with their friend and guardian angel on the island, Professor Roland Albignac, a zoologist working for a French research organisation, about ways of brokering a deal with the Madagascar authorities to enable Western scientists to carry out research and assist in conservation programmes. It was during these discussions that the strategy for what eventually became the crucial Madagascar Conference and Accord, signed in Jersey in 1983, was developed.
In the second week of May Gerald, Lee and most of the film crew returned to Mauritius to film sequences that had been missed first-time round due to time lost at the beginning of the production. Their original director, Michael Maltby, was no longer with them. At Nosy Komba the tension between him and Gerald had become unbearable, and he had been replaced by Alastair Brown. But, after three and a half months on the move, under often arduous and stressful conditions, Gerald’s emotional insecurity finally erupted in a most dramatic and unexpected way.
In the first year or two of his marriage to Lee Gerald was always on tenterhooks, afraid some handsome young man would come along and take her away from him. His anxiety reached its most acute stage during the making of Ark on the Move, as the series’ producer Paula Quigley recalled: ‘The film crew consisted of mostly young, presentable, masculine kind of guys. If we went into the forest there would be two or three good-looking young men along with us.’ Gerald’s jealousy occasionally burst to the surface in full-blown apoplectic rages, and his problems with the original director, were largely due to his groundless suspicions that he had his eyes on Lee. Things reached an astonishing climax one night in Mauritius, as Paula Quigley was to relate:
We were shooting a special event – a sega dance – out at a special patch of ground. It was night and we’d brought in lights and food and drink, everything to help the thing along, and as the night wore on Gerry was sitting in the middle of it like a great Buddha with everyone around him paying court. Eventually John Hartley had a bright idea to move things along. In Madagascar he had learned a special native dance called a crocodile dance. Why didn’t he and Lee do a crocodile dance to keep everyone amused? The director thought this was a good idea, so John and Lee went into the middle, the music started up and they started doing a crocodile dance, jerking themselves across the grass in the press-up position in a series of little jerks – a crocodile mime. There was nothing suggestive about this, there wasn’t even any touching, but suddenly out of nowhere up storms Gerry, roaring with rage, standing there among all those people bellowing his head off, utterly enraged, a deep, seething, volcanic rage from the pits of his being – primordial jealousy incarnate. Well, the music stopped dead, and there was absolute silence, and John was running one way, into the dark of the forest, and Lee was running another way, and Gerry was being led into the shadows, away from the film lights, and the film crew just stood there, totally shell-shocked.
Next morning the crew turned up at the unit hotel at the appointed time, but Gerald didn’t show up. Paula went to his room, and found him terribly contrite that he had been so unprofessional as to miss his start time. He was very kind and sweet to the crew after that, but never said anything about the extraordinary events of the night before. But John Hartley wanted Paula to buy him an air ticket home, and eventually Paula told Gerry that he would have to apologise unreservedly to John, which he did, in a most profuse and heartfelt manner.
At the time of the filming of Ark on the Move, Paula wouldn’t have given good odds on Gerald and Lee’s marriage surviving. But after a year or so things began to get easier, and by the time of the next big series Gerald was feeling much more secure about Lee. Paula was also able to head off recurrences of Gerald’s outburst, making sure, for example, that he always came out to locations with Lee, and that Lee wasn’t left alone with young men.
Gerald and Lee went home to Jersey, where for three weeks they were busy shooting the zoo sequences which opened each episode of the series. Then they were free to spend the summer as they chose. In Jersey Gerald generally tried to steer clear of the island social round, and he had few intimates outside the world of the zoo. He was a naturally shy man, and though his outsize personality and worldwide fame tended to steer him into the company of the rich and the famous, the great and the good, he preferred to mix with them on informal terms, and could only really cope with formal functions with the help of a generous (though discreet) libation or two. There were times, however, when Gerald – a bon viveur at heart – entered into the spirit of the big bash or grand do with gusto. His wedding had been one example, and in the summer of 1981 it seemed he planned to continue in that vein.
It began with a visit to the opera at Glyndebourne, one of the finest small opera houses in the world, set in a beautiful mansion and a lovely old garden in the depths of the Sussex countryside. Gerald was determined that Lee should appear looking like a princess. During his travels in India before his marriage he had bought her a quantity of native saris, and in Jersey he found a dressmaker who was able to transform this material into something completely different. ‘With her hair up and in this ensemble,’ he wrote to Lee’s parents, ‘she looked like something straight out of Hollywood. I was the envy of every man at Glyndebourne, and there was not a woman there who could touch Lee for either looks or appearance.’
There was something else about Glyndebourne that excited Gerald particularly. Always a great man for seeing like in unlike, he perceived that this opera house was in its way an ideal model for his zoo. ‘I was enchanted with the whole thing,’ he explained, ‘because I have always said that what I want is for this place in Jersey to be small but perfect like Glyndebourne – I am glad that I was not disappointed in my choice of simile.’
The next engagement on the agenda was a garden party at Buckingham Palace – ‘one of those intimate little affairs with only about three thousand other guests’ – followed by a night out to see Noël Coward’s Present Laughter in the West End and to meet up backstage with the play’s leading lady, the stage and screen star Dinah Sheridan – an encounter all the more jolly for the fact that she and Durrell were each ardent fans of the other. A few days later Gerald and Lee set off for the Mazet on a leisurely, meandering, five-day drive. They aimed to spend three months in their Languedoc retreat, for both needed to unwind, and both had books to write.
Towards the end of 1981 Gerald’s new novel, The Mockery Bird, was published in Britain, and it came out in the United States a few months later. In some ways the book was a new departure for him – a story with a message for grown-ups, his ‘political book’ – but its publishing history had caused him considerable aggravation. At the time of his set-to with Collins the previous summer he had complained to his in-laws in Memphis:
Let me tell you of the thing that almost gave me fourteen coronaries in rapid succession. About ten days ago, I received the page proofs of my new novel (I had not seen galleys) and discovered to my horror that they had passed it over to some awful illiterate little editor who had the audacity to practically rewrite the thing. Snorting wrath I rushed round to my publishers while I was in London and told them they would have to hold up publication on the book. As a result of that, one of the senior members of the firm is flying over here this evening and has been instructed by me to be at the Zoo at 6 o’clock tomorrow morning; we are going to go through every page of the manuscript and put it back to what it originally was – a mammoth undertaking which I could well do without at the moment – however I can’t let such a travesty go out under my name.
Inevitably the book came out late, but at least in a form that conformed with Gerald’s sense of authorial integrity.
A cautionary and moralistic tale on a conservational theme, with a few satirical digs at conservationists of the conference-hopping variety thrown in – some of them allegedly thinly disguised real people – The Mockery Bird was an ingeniously spun story of events on the mythical island of Zenkali (a fictional version of Mauritius), home of the extinct but revered Mockery Bird and the no less extinct Ombu tree. The hero is a born-again conservationist by the name of Peter Foxglove, who discovers fifteen pairs of Mockery Birds and four hundred Ombu trees all alive and well in a valley scheduled to be flooded as part of a dastardly British plan to turn Zenkali into a military base, complete with a deep-water harbour and hydro-electric dam. Eventually it becomes clear that the economy of the entire island depends on the Mockery Bird, so in alliance with the island’s benevolent monarch, Kingy by name, and the genial eccentrics who comprise his court, Foxglove foils the plan and saves the island paradise.
The Mockery Bird was an ingenious and, by Gerald’s standards of fiction, relatively ambitious tale, but though it received some good reviews – the New Yorker praised it as ‘delightful’ – it found relatively little favour compared with many of his other books, a reflection perhaps of its troubled genesis.
Gerald meanwhile stumped round the halls on the mainland, drumming up publicity for the book. On 6 December, for example, he gave an after-dinner speech, billed as ‘Meet Best-Seller Gerald Durrell’, at the Europa Gallery in Sutton. On 9 December he was guest speaker at the London Evening Standard Literary Luncheon at the Barbican Centre. His name still pulled the crowds, and there was never an empty seat at these events, and rarely anything but a rapt and appreciative response.
In the New Year of 1982 Gerald sent his end-of-term report to the McGeorges in Memphis. He had been given another conservation award and made an Officer of the Golden Ark by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. The reviews of Ark on the Move suggested it had gone down very well – ‘principally due to the fact that we had a good sex image in Lee, who out-acted even the animals, and that takes some doing’ – and the book of the series was going to come out in the States the following year. It had been a busy year, and they couldn’t wait to get away ‘and relax with a couple of Bloody Marys – or six’.