Douglas Botting - Gerald Durrell - The Authorised Biography

Eventually, matters reached a crisis. ‘Mother departed,’ Gerald remembered, ‘to have what in those days was called a “nervous breakdown” and Miss Burroughs entered my life.’ Miss Burroughs was Gerald’s first and last English governess. ‘She had a face,’ he recalled, ‘which disappointment had crumpled, and embedded in it were two eyes, grey and sharp as flints.’ Miss Burroughs had never had to deal with a small boy before. Terrified for some reason that Gerald might be kidnapped, she instituted a regime of locked doors, as though he were a dangerous prisoner. ‘I was locked in the kitchen, the drawing room and the dining room, but the worst thing was that she banished Simon from my bedroom, saying that dogs were full of germs, and locked me in at night, so that by morning my bladder was bursting, and as I didn’t dare wet the bed I had to lift a corner of the carpet to relieve myself.’

Miss Burroughs’ cooking left a lot – indeed, ‘virtually everything’ – to be desired. She was, Gerald recollected, the only person he had ever met who put sago in the gruel she called soup – ‘like drinking frog-spawn’. If the weather was bad, he was confined to the ballroom, where he and Simon invented their own games. Boy and dog built up an astonishing rapport, understanding completely how each other’s human and canine imaginations were working.

‘Sometimes, miraculously, Simon would become a pride of lions,’ Gerald was to record, ‘and I a lone Christian in an arena. As I prepared to strangle him, he would behave in the most un-lionlike way, slobbering over me with his moist, velvet-soft mouth and crooning endearments. At other times I would change into a dog and follow him round the ballroom on all fours, panting when he panted, scratching when he scratched and flinging myself down in abandoned attitudes as he did.’

Simon, Gerald noticed, was basically a coward, for whom ‘a lawnmower was a machine from hell’, and sadly it was his cowardice, which should have saved his life, that was to cause his death. Startled by a chimneysweep driving away from the house on a motorcycle and sidecar, he turned and fled down the drive, into the road and under the wheel of a car, which, Gerald was to lament, ‘neatly crushed Simon’s skull, killing him instantly’.

Gerald was left as alone as his mother, now returned from her cure and, for the moment, recovered from her addiction. It was high time, she decided, for him to begin some kind of formal education and to mix with other children. Down the hill from Berridge House was a kindergarten called The Birches, run by a large old lady called Auntie and a dapper, kindly, intelligent woman called Miss Squire, better known to the children as Squig. Gerald remembered The Birches with fondness. It was the only school he ever attended where he completed the course.

Gerald loved The Birches because both Auntie and Miss Squire knew exactly how to teach and treat young people. Every morning he would take a tribute of slugs, snails, earwigs and other creepy-crawlies down to Squig, sometimes in matchboxes and sometimes in his pocket, thus forming a zoo of a kind. ‘The boy’s mad!’ exclaimed brother Lawrence when he learnt of this. ‘Snails in his pockets …!’

‘Aren’t they lovely?’ Gerald would tell Squig.

‘Oh, yes dear, quite beautiful,’ Squig would reply, ‘but I think they would probably be happier in the garden.’

Noticing the interest that Gerald’s wrigglies aroused in his fellow pupils, Squig bought and installed an aquarium with some goldfish and pond snails in it, and they would all watch the antics of these creatures absolutely enthralled. It was about this time that Gerald, still only six, announced to his mother his wish to have a zoo of his own one day. He had kept a collection of small toy animals made of lead – camel, penguin, elephant, two tigers – in a wooden orange-box at the Queen’s Hotel, but one day as he walked along the Bournemouth promenade with his mother he described to her his blueprint for a collection of real creatures, listing the species, the kinds of cages they would be housed in, and the cottage in which he and his mother would live at his zoo.

In 1932 the family moved a short distance to a brand new house at 18 Wimborne Road, Bournemouth, which Mother named Dixie Lodge in honour of her family. Though still substantial, it was a rather smaller property than Berridge House, in less extensive grounds, and so easier and cheaper to run. In Gerald’s view it was a pleasanter place altogether, and the garden contained a number of climbable trees which were home to all sorts of strange insects. Here he settled down – ‘quite happily’, he said, ‘under the raucous but benign influence of Lottie, the Swiss maid’.

But then, when he was eight, disaster struck out of a clear blue sky:

Mother did something so terrible that I was bereft of words. She enrolled me in the local school. Not a pleasant kindergarten like The Birches, where you made things out of plasticine and drew pictures, but a real school. Wychwood School was a prep school where they expected you to learn things like algebra and history – and things that were even greater anathema to me, like sports. As both my scholastic achievements and interest in sports were nil, I was, not unnaturally, somewhat of a dullard.

Football and cricket were an utter bore for Gerald, gym and swimming lessons an absolute torture, bullying a constant menace. The only part of the curriculum that appealed to him was the one and a half hours per week devoted to natural history. ‘This was taken by the gym mistress, Miss Allard,’ he remembered, ‘a tall blonde lady with protuberant blue eyes. As soon as she realised my genuine interest in natural history, she went out of her way to take a lot of trouble with me and so she became my heroine.’

Gerald came to hate the school so vehemently that it was all Louisa could do to keep him there at all. ‘He used to be taken to school by his mother in the morning,’ recalled a visitor to Dixie Lodge; ‘at any rate she tried to take him – and he would cling onto the railings on the way, screaming, and then he’d have to be taken home, and then he’d get a temperature and the doctor would say, it’s no good, you’ll have to keep him away from school.’ Eventually the GP diagnosed Gerald’s recurring condition as a chronic form of what he called ‘school pain’ – a psychosomatic reaction which prevented the boy from ever completing his prep school education.

Soon after the Durrells moved into Dixie Lodge, Lawrence (who lived there off and on, as did Leslie and Margaret) had struck up a friendship with Alan Thomas, the assistant manager at Bournemouth’s famous Commin’s bookshop, a young man of about Lawrence’s age who shared many of his intellectual and literary interests. Enormously tall, thin, bearded and ‘spider-like’, Alan lived in nearby Boscombe, and soon got to know the family well, becoming a kind of extra brother to the boys and a lifelong friend. It was not long after Gerald had joined the unhappy ranks of Wychwood that Alan happened to spot the headmaster browsing in his shop.

‘I believe you have the brother of a friend of mine at your school,’ said Alan.

‘Oh?’ said the headmaster. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Durrell. Gerald Durrell,’ Alan replied.

‘The most ignorant boy in the school,’ snapped the headmaster, and stalked out of the shop.

Gerald stumbled with difficulty through his lessons, until one day, falsely accused of a misdemeanour by the school sneak and given six of the best on his bare bottom by the headmaster, his mother took the mortified boy away from the school for good, thus terminating his formal schooling for ever at the age of nine.

To help Gerald get over the trauma of his beating, Mother decided to buy him a present, and took him down on the tram to Bournemouth town centre to choose a dog at the pet shop. Gerald recalled: