Gerald Durrell - The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium

“Darling, you were brave to rescue me . . . I do hope you didn’t get too wet,” she said.

“Scarcely damp,” I said, getting her into the gondola.

By the time we got to the hotel she was shivering, and so I made her take a hot bath. By the time she had done this she was running a temperature. In spite of her protests that there was nothing wrong with her I made her go to bed in my ballroom-sized bedroom. By midnight her fever was such that I was seriously worried and called a doctor, a sleepy and irritated Italian who did not appear to have ever come within spitting distance of the Hippocratic oath. He gave her some tablets and said she would be all right. The next day I procured a doctor of my own choice and discovered that Ursula had pneumonia.

I nursed her devotedly for two weeks until the medical profession agreed that she was well enough to travel. Then I took her down to the airport to see her off. As the flight was called she turned to me, her huge blue eyes brimming with tears.

“Darling, I did so enjoy our affair,” she said. “I hope you did too.”

“I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” I agreed, kissing her warm mouth.

Even Passadouble, I felt, could not have been more tactful than that.

Coming from a family which treated books as an essential ingredient of life, like air, food and water, I am always appalled at how little the average person seems to read or to have read. That the dictators of the world have always looked upon books with mistrust had appeared to me peculiar, for books, I considered, provided a myriad of friends and teachers. That books could influence people, I knew — The Origin of Species, Das Kapital, the Bible — but to what extent a book could wreak havoc was never really brought home to me until I introduced Haveloek Ellis to the Royal Palace Highclifle Hotel.

On arrival in Bournemouth, I had made my way as rapidly as possible to my favourite bookshop, H. G. Cummin in Christ-church Road . Here, in a tall, narrow house, is housed a vast and fascinating collection of new and second-hand books. On the ground floor and in the basement all the new books glare at you somewhat balefully in their multicoloured dust-jackets, but climb the creaking, uneven staircase to the four floors above, and you are transported into a Dickensian landscape. Here, from floor to ceiling in every room are amassed arrays of old books. They line the walls of the narrow staircases, they surround you, envelop you, a wonderful, warm, scented womb.

Pluck the books out; and each smells different. One smells not only of dust but of mushrooms; another, autumn woods or broom flowers in the hot sun, or roasting chestnuts; and some have the acrid, damp smell of coal burning; and others smell of honey. And then, as if smells alone were not enough, there is the feel of them in the heavy leather bindings, sleek as a seal, with the golden glitter of the type buried like a vein in the glossy spine.

Books the dimensions of a tree trunk, books as slender as a wand, books printed on paper as thick and as soft as a foxglove leaf, paper as white and as crisp as ice, or as delicate and brittle as the frost layer on a spider’s web. Then the colours of the bindings: sunsets and sunrises, autumn woods aflame, winter hills of heather; the multicoloured, marbled end-papers like some Martian cloud formation. And all this sensuous pleasure to drug and delight you before you have even examined the titles: ( The Great Red Island — Madagascar; Peking to Lhasa; Through the Brazilian Wilderness; Sierra Leone — it’s People, Products and Secret Societies ), and come to the splendid moment when you open the book as you would a magic door.

Immediately the shop around you disappears and you stand, smelling the rich smell of the Amazon with Wallace, you bargain for ivory with Mary Kingsley, you face a charging gorilla with du Challu, you make love to a thousand beautiful women in a thousand novels, you march to the guillotine with Sidney Carton, you laugh with Edwardian gentlemen in a boat, you travel to China with Marco Polo; all this you do standing on the uneven, uncarpeted floor, with a magic passport in your hands, without the expenditure of a penny. Or perhaps I should say one can do this without the expenditure of a penny, but I seem incapable of entering a bookshop empty-handed or of leaving it in the same condition. Always, my cheque book is slimmer, and I generally have to order a taxi to transport my purchases.

On this particular occasion, I had already spent much more than I had intended (but who if he has any resolve in his makeup, strength in his character, can refuse to buy a book on Elephants or the Anatomy of The Gorilla?), when I suddenly saw, squatting peacefully on a shelf level with my eyes (so I could not possibly miss it) a series of volumes I had long wanted to acquire. This set was bound in a dark maroon coloured cloth and, apart from the difference in the thickness of each volume, they were identical. The title, in block, was so obscure as to be almost unreadable, and indeed I might easily have missed this Pandora’s box of books if a stray shaft of winter’s sunlight had not wandered through the dusty window at that precise moment and illuminated the volumes and their tides: The Psychology of Sex , by Havelock Ellis.

Now, anyone who studies, keeps or, most important, breeds, rare animals knows how important sex is, and the study of sexual impulses in an animal which can talk and write of its experiences and feelings — the human animal, man — is of enormous help in the study of the less articulate members of the animal kingdom. Though I possessed a fairly extensive library on the subject of human sex, it was lacking one master work for which I had been searching for some time — the classic Havelock Ellis, to a large extent now superseded by modern research but still an important early study on that subject, and certainly a wealth of information.

The young lady who helped me carry the books downstairs obviously thought that a man of my age should not be buying nine volumes on the subject of sex. John Ruston, the owner of the shop who had known me for a good many years, was more sympathetic.

“Yes,” he said, swaying to and fro like a dancing bear. “Yes, Ellis. We don’t get him in often.”

“I’ve been trying to find him for ages,” I replied. “I’m delighted.”

“It’s a nice, clean copy,” said John, with unconscious humour, picking up the volume dealing with homosexuality and examining it.

So my Havelock Ellis was packed up, together with a few last-minute purchases (who, with red blood in his veins, could resist The Speech of Monkey ; or A Slave Trader’s Journal or The Patagonians ?), and John Ruston had me driven round to the hotel where, for the next week, I devoted myself almost exclusively to Havelock, carrying him around, a volume at a time, and marking with a pencil those parts which I thought applicable to animal breeding generally. What I didn’t realize was that, at mid-winter in a nearly deserted hotel, my movements were studied by the staff about as carefully as I studied my own animals. What they saw was me deeply absorbed in a book (since all the volumes looked much the same), in which I kept marking passages as I drifted from cocktail bar to restaurant, from restaurant to deserted lounge. When they brought up my breakfast at seven-thirty, I was lying in bed reading Havelock and the night porters would find me still engrossed in him at two o’clock in the morning. Obviously there must be something about the book that kept me riveted and silent for such long periods.

I was totally unaware of the interest that my absorption with Havelock was arousing, until Luigi, the Italian barman, said to me: