Gerald Durrell - Fillets of Plaice

I was enchanted by the whole idea, but principally because it reminded me very much of a game that we had invented when we were in Greece. My brother Leslie, whose interest in guns and boats is insatiable, had collected a whole navy of toy battleships and cruisers and submarines. We used to range them out on the floor and play a game very similar to the Colonel’s, only we used to use marbles in order to score direct hits on the ships. Rolling a marble accurately over a bumpy floor in order to hit a destroyer an inch and a half long took a keen eye. It turned out, after we had thrown the first dice, that I was to be the aggressor.

“Hah!” said the Colonel. “Filthy Hun!”

I could see that he was working himself into a warlike mood.

“Is the object of the exercise to try and capture your fort?” I inquired.

“Well, you can do that,” he said. “Or you can knock it out, if you can.”

I soon discovered that the way to play the Colonel’s game was to distract his attention from one flank so that you could do some quick manoeuvring while he was not aware of it, so I kept up a constant barrage on his troops, the matches whistling down the room, and while doing this I moved a couple of battalions up close to his lines.

“Swine!” the Colonel would roar every time a matchstick fell and he had to measure the distance. “Dirty swine! Bloody Hun!” His face grew quite pink and his eyes watered copiously so that he had to keep removing his monocle and polishing it.

“You’re too bloody accurate,” he shouted.

“Well, it’s your fault,” I shouted back, “you’re keeping all your troops bunched together. They make an ideal target.”

“It’s part of me strategy. Don’t question me strategy. I’m older than you, and superior in rank.”

“How can you be superior in rank, when I’m in command of an army?”

“No lip out of you, you whippersnapper,” he roared.

So the game went on for about two hours, by which time I had successfully knocked out most of the Colonel’s troops and got a foothold at the bottom of his fort.

“Do you surrender?” I shouted.

“Never!” said the Colonel. “Never! Surrender to a bloody Hun? Never!”

“Well, in that case I’m going to bring my sappers in,” I said.

“What are you going to do with your sappers?”

“Blow up your fort,” I said.

“You can’t do that,” he said. “Against the articles of war.”

“Nonsense!” I said. “The Germans don’t care about articles of war, anyway.”

“That’s a filthy trick to play!” he roared, as I successfully detonated his fort.

“Now do you surrender?”

“No. I’ll fight you every inch of the way, you Hun!” he shouted, crawling rapidly across the floor on his hands and knees and moving his troops frantically. But all his efforts were of no avail; I had him pinned in a corner and I shot him to pieces.

“By George!” said the Colonel when it was all over, mopping his brow, “I’ve never seen anybody play that game like that. How did you manage to get so damned accurate when you haven’t played it before?”

“Well, I’ve played a similar game, only we used marbles for that,” I said. “But I think once you’ve got your eye in... it helps.”

“Gad!” said the Colonel, looking at the destruction of his army. “Still, it was a good game and a good fight. Shall we have another one?”

So we played on and on, the Colonel getting more and more excited, until at last I glanced at my watch and saw to my horror that it was one o’clock in the morning. We were in the middle of a game and so we left the troops where they were and on the following night I went back and finished it. After that I would spend two or three evenings a week with the Colonel, fighting battles up and down the long room, and it gave him tremendous pleasure — almost as much pleasure as it gave me.

Not long after that, my mother announced that she had finally found a house and that we could move out of London. I was bitterly disappointed. It meant that I would have to give up my job and lose contact with my friend Mr Bellow and Colonel Anstruther. Mr Romilly was heart-broken.

“I shall never find anybody to replace you,” he said. “Never.”

“Oh, there’ll be somebody along,” I said.

“Ah, but not with your ability to decorate cages and things,” said Mr Romilly. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without you.”

When the day finally came for me to leave, with tears in his eyes, he presented me with a leather wallet. On the inside it had embossed in gold “To Gerald Durrell from his fellow workers”. I was a bit puzzled since there had been only Mr Romilly and myself, but I suppose that he thought it looked better like that. I thanked him very much and then I made my way for the last time down Potts Lane to Mr Bellow’s establishment.

“Sorry to see you go, boy,” he said. “Very sorry indeed. Here... I’ve got this for you — a little parting present.”

He put a small square cage in my hands and sitting inside it was the bird that I most coveted in his collection, the Red Cardinal. I was overwhelmed.

“Are you sure you want me to have it?” I said.

“Course I am, boy. Course I am.”

“But, is it the right time of year for giving a present like this?” I inquired.

Mr Bellow guffawed.

“Yes, of course it is,” he said. “Of course it is.”

I took my leave of him and then I went round that evening to play a last game with the Colonel. When it was over — I had let him win — he led me downstairs.

“Shall miss you, you know, my boy. Shall miss you greatly. However, keep in touch, won’t you? Keep in touch. I’ve got a little, um..., a little souvenir here for you.”

He handed me a slim silver cigarette ease. On it had been written “With love from Margery”. I was a bit puzzled by this.

“Oh, take no notice of the inscription,” he said. “You can have it removed... Present from a woman... I knew once. Thought you’d like it. Memento, hmmm?”

“It’s very, very kind of you, sir,” I said.

“Not at all, not at all,” he said, and blew his nose and polished his monocle and held out his hand. “Well, good luck, my boy. And I hope I’ll see you again one day.”

I never did see him again. He died shortly afterwards.

MAMFE is not the most salubrious of places, perched as it is on a promontory above the curve of a great, brown river and surrounded by dense rain forest. It is as hot and moist as a Turkish bath for most of the year, only deviating from this monotony during the rainy season when it becomes hotter and moister.

At that time it had a resident population of five white men, one white woman, and some ten thousand vociferous Africans. I, in a moment of mental aberration, had made this my headquarters for an animal collection expedition and was occupying a large marquee full of assorted wild animals on the banks of the brown, hippo-reverberating river. In the course of my work I had, of course, come to know the white population fairly well and a vast quantity of the African population. The Africans acted as my hunters, guides and carriers, for when you went into that forest you were transported back into the days of Stanley and Livingstone and all your worldly possessions had to be carried on the heads of a line of stalwart carriers.

Collecting wild animals is a full-time occupation and one does not have much time for the social graces, but it was curiously enough in this unlikely spot that I had the opportunity of helping what was then known as the Colonial Office.

I was busy one morning with the task of giving milk to five un-weaned baby squirrels, none of whom, it appeared, had any brain or desire to live. At that time no feeding bottle with a small enough teat to fit the minute mouth of a baby squirrel had been invented, so the process was that you wrapped cotton wool round the end of a matchstick, dipped it into the milk mixture, and put it into their mouths for them to suck. This was a prolonged and extremely irritating job, for you had to be careful not to put too much milk on the cotton wool, otherwise they would choke, and you had to slip the cotton wool into their mouths sideways, otherwise it would catch on their teeth, whereupon they would promptly swallow it and die of an impacted bowel.