Beasts, Birds and Beef

Gerald Durrell in Cameroon

Surprising a Leopard; Paulina, and Her Pets; The Overloaded Ark by Gerald Durrell

Gerald Durrell’s first is an entertaining book. It’s the story of a collecting trip to the Cameroons — French and British — and the adventures of trying to collect what the locals called ‘beef’ (specimens of animals and birds).

It’s a fun read.

Some might find that convenient. How much of this is as accurate as sworn testimony? That’s the question many a sceptical reader might want to ask. I must say that personally, I don’t really care. I don’t even care about the possibility Durrell might have gone overboard in anthropomorphising his animals —giving them names, personalities, quirks. The claims of the strict naturalists against the so-called ‘nature fakers’ of the beginning part of the last century have no hold on me. Not when the stories told here are so amusing.

Perhaps the most charming animals are the monkeys. That’s hardly surprising. They are like us not only in their looks but in their behaviours. We’re bound to feel fond of them. Durrell has particular approval for a baboon called George — who kept discipline in a monkey enclosure which included several very troublesome drills. George’s means of keeping the discipline was to note who was biting whom unjustly — and then to steam in and bite both participants of any fracas very hard. (On the boat back home, George is the great favourite of many of the crew — which he takes as only his due and the fair reward of his magnificence.)

Another monkey, just as interesting, is ‘Chumley’ a chimpanzee. Chumley liked cups of tea, an affectation he had picked up with a previous owner. He liked tea very sweet; and when he had finished his drink, he would see a sugary syrup at the bottom of the glass and would balance the cup upside down on his nose to get the sludgy last drops of it.

Chumley also liked to smoke, something Durrell finds out incidentally. He takes a cigarette when offered one — as it’s good, Durrell says, to be companionable with chimps. But when Durrell leaves a match-book before the ape, Chumley takes one and strikes it, lighting the cigarette with great ease. He puffs away very happily and occasionally inspects the burning end with some languid gesture — just in case there’s too much ash collecting, which he is more than prepared to flick away gently with a fingernail.

There is also Sue, a beautiful baby ape. She is everyone’s favourite: on the boat home she is placed in a sheltered spot in a converted baby’s playpen and is fawned over by every man jack of them.

But back to Africa for a moment. Durrell’s time here consists mostly of collecting trips, receiving the locals who come claiming to have captured beef for him — he inspects their catches and is often delighted, but even more often upset that the animal in question is a common one, or wounded, or dead.

In the camp, the animals often escape with comic or dangerous consequences. Some of them get out of their cages and are gone and home free before the alarm can be sounded. Others cause great ruckus but are recaptured well enough. My favourite is when the baby crocodiles have a prison break.

Some of the locals seem more often a hindrance than a help. They did not understand the desire to capture and catalogue animals, though they were happy to find and to sell them if the money was right. Although Durrell’s immediate staff seem extremely loyal; they put themselves at risk on these quixotic missions for nothing more than a foreigner’s money.

What they must have thought of Durrell and his companion and co-leader John Yealland (a quite laconic character more interested in his tropical birds than the rest of Durrell’s collecting) is not recorded.

At other times, Durrell goes off into the country himself, away from camp, in pursuit of catches. Early expeditions into the bush include crawling along waterfall ledges, net in hand; and later, approaching great shrew-like creatures — almost living fossils — which do great damage to some of the hunters’ fingers and thumbs with their razor teeth.

Durrell seems pretty fearless of the animals but his companions are less so. They tend to run when the going gets tough and that’s not unreasonable. When one of them is bitten on the groin, Durrell says that he kept up a long wailing monologue about his ‘heroic injury’ which I must say is the funniest description of something like that — though the man himself might not have enjoyed it quite as much as the reader does.

So much of this book is the relentless pursuit of beef up mountains, through brush and overland. Although Durrell himself acknowledges that the majority of his time was actually spent in camp — building cages for his samples; trying to feed and to console animals unhappy at captivity; and making increasingly desperate attempts to keep some of the finickier and more skittish breeds alive when they don’t want to feed, don’t want to drink, had seemingly given up on living. The descriptions here of Durrell’s trying to turn milk at many temperatures, eggs, pawpaw, insects, raw meat from other sources, fruit salads — anything — into appetising meals for ailing animals are quite interesting.

The hunts continue. Durrell has his people trek up a sacred mountain despite upsetting the solitary hunter who is supposedly alone in being allowed to traverse its upper heights. Durrell is then cursed, he is told, by bad ju-ju. When he later gets caught up in a wasp nest, has his face swell up, turns his ankle badly, and is almost swept away in a flash flood, Durrell concludes that the ju-ju has some force. At least, it does if you believe in its effects.

When he leaves on the boat to Liverpool — fighting malaria and the weather — he says the great cliche: that he must return to Africa or be haunted forever by its unresolved beauty and vast amoral heart, indifferent to all human affairs. It’s one of very few cliches in what is a very charming and original book. A fine first effort from someone soon to be a bestseller on a lavish scale and a very famous man.