Douglas Botting - Gerald Durrell

My next nerve-shattering encounter was with a small, fat doctor, who looked exactly like one of the less prepossessing garden gnomes. He peered in my mouth, peered in my ears and finally placed a stubby finger on the end of my nose.

‘Follow my finger,’ he said, as he drew it away, so I followed it. I remember wondering at the time what subtle medical trick this was to expose the mechanism of your body.

‘I don’t mean follow my finger,’ he snapped.

‘But you just told me to,’ I said, bewildered.

‘I don’t mean follow my finger, I mean follow my finger,’ he said irritably.

‘But that’s what I was doing,’ I said.

‘I don’t mean follow it with your whole body.’

I was beginning to doubt the mental stability of this man.

‘I can’t follow your finger without my body,’ I explained patiently.

‘I don’t want your whole body, I just want your eyes,’ he snapped.

I began to wonder which lunatic asylum he had escaped from and should I tell the other doctors about his condition. I decided to be patient and calming.

‘But you can’t have my eyes without my body,’ I explained, ‘they’re attached to it, so if you want my eyes you have to have the body too.’

His face went the colour of an old brick wall.

‘Are you an idiot?’ he enquired simmeringly.

‘I don’t think so, sir,’ I said placatingly. ‘I just don’t see how you can have my eyes without the body thrown in, as it were.’

‘I don’t want your Goddamed eyes,’ he shouted. ‘All I want you to do is follow my finger.’

‘But I did, sir, and then you got angry.’

‘Follow it with your eyes, you imbecile,’ he bellowed, ‘with your Goddam bloody eyes.’

‘Oh, I see, sir,’ I said, although to tell the truth I didn’t.

I wandered off to the next member of the medical profession, who was a dismal man with greasy hair, and looked somewhat like a failed Maitre d’Hôtel on the verge of suicide. He examined me minutely from stem to stern, humming to himself gently like an unhappy bear sucking its paw. He smelt of cinnamon and his eyes were violet coloured, very striking and beautiful.

‘And now,’ he said, ‘I want to look up your nose, so we’ll draw the curtains and be in the dark.’

Here, I thought to myself, we have another lunatic.

‘Wouldn’t you see it better in daylight, sir?’ I asked.

‘No, no, darkness, because I’ve got to stick something into your mouth,’ he explained.

‘What sort of thing?’ I asked, determined to guard my honour to the last redoubt.

‘A torch,’ he said. ‘It won’t hurt, I assure you.’

So the curtains were drawn and a slim pencil torch was inserted in my mouth and switched on.

‘Damn,’ he said, ‘the batteries have gone.’

He removed the torch, which shone as brightly as a bonfire.

‘That’s funny,’ he said and stuck the torch back into my mouth.

‘What,’ he said ominously, ‘have you stuffed up your nose?’

‘Nothing,’ I said truthfully.

‘Well, why can’t I see the light? I can’t see the light,’ he said querulously. ‘I should be able to see your sinuses, but there’s nothing there.’

‘They’ve been mucking about with my nose for years, sir,’ I explained, ‘and it never seems to do any good.’

‘My God!’ he explained. ‘You must go and see a specialist. I’m not taking responsibility for this. Why, your sinuses look like – look like – well, they look like the Black Hole of Calcutta!’

Gerald was sent to see Dr Magillicuddy, a sinus specialist, who stood no nonsense.

Sitting behind a huge desk he read my medical report carefully, darting fierce glances at me from opal-blue eyes.

‘Come over here,’ he said gruffly, his Scottish r’s rolling out of his mouth like bumble bees.

He stuck a torch in my mouth. There was silence for a moment and then he let out a long, marvelling sigh.

‘Hoots, mon,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen sinuses like yours. It’s like gazing at a bit of Edinburgh Castle. If anyone wanted to clean that up they’d have to excavate your skull with a pickaxe.’

He went back to his desk, sat down, laced his fingers and gazed across them at me.

‘Tell me truly, laddie,’ he said, ‘you don’t want to go into the army, navy or air force, do you?’

This was the moment when I realised truth was the only answer.

‘No, sir,’ I said.

‘Are you a coward?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir,’ I answered.

‘So am I,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think they’ll want a coward with sinuses like the Cheddar Gorge. Off you go, young man.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, and as I got to the door he barked –

‘Dinna underestimate yourself – it takes courage for a man to admit he’s a coward. Good luck to you.’

Eventually Gerald received a letter informing him that he was unfit for military service, but would have to do something to aid the war effort. He had two choices. He could work in a munitions factory or on the land. Unsurprisingly, he plumped for the latter. ‘Does it matter what sort of farm?’ he asked the clerk at the Labour Office, for he preferred the idea of a farm with sheep and cows to one growing cabbages and corn. ‘Personally,’ sniffed the clerk, ‘I don’t care which sort of farm. They’re all shit and smell to me.’

So Gerald set off on his bicycle in search of the ideal farm. His luck was in. He found Brown’s, a riding school at Longham, to the north of Bournemouth, that kept a few cows. Mr Brown was a short, round, ruddy-faced man with a treble voice who lived with his mother and never wore anything but hacking jacket, jodhpurs and flat cap. With this jolly fellow – ‘like a gigantic choir boy’ – Gerald struck a bargain. In return for his mucking out and grooming the twenty-two horses in the stables and leading people around on half a dozen rides a day, Mr Brown would assure the authorities he was helping to run a farm. And this Gerald did till the end of the war, congenially occupied in giving riding lessons to horsy local ladies and American GIs with cowboy delusions stationed in the vicinity.

Looking back on that aimless but idyllic limbo time, Gerald recalled with exquisite nostalgia (and perhaps a degree of romantic mythomania) his amorous entanglements with some of the more beautiful women who came to him for lessons. This had less to do with his own attractiveness or powers of seduction, he reckoned, than with the headily romantic context in which they found themselves, the seclusion and magic of the woods they rode through, alone in a world of their own. They were like shipboard affairs, these erotic rides – amorous adventures that were permissible because they were so far from the routines and obligations of port and home (or so, for a few hours, it seemed). Longer-lasting were the girls who were his friends, like Jean Martin, a nice country type who also worked at Brown’s stables, and of whom he was very fond, though he never even bestowed a kiss upon her, let alone any promises of eternal love.

Before long Gerald had a horse of his own, called Rumba, and on his days off he would ride out alone down the silent glades of the pine woods. He formed a very close relationship with his horse, and would spend hours in the saddle, letting his mind wander, making up poetry, breathing deeply of the very breath of nature. Often the horse, a creature of habit, bore him, dreaming, to his favourite pub in the forest, and refused to budge until he had finished off a pint of ale ‘for the road’.

So the months passed in this agreeable fashion. Gerald did not believe he was ducking his wartime duty, or letting the side down. What side? He did not feel that England was his country, even by adoption, and so was moved by no great stirrings of patriotic fervour. His grasp of the nature of the war was too tenuous for him to realise that England was not fighting for England alone.