Kitabı oku: «Gerald Durrell», sayfa 9
In idle moments in later years he found it fun to beachcomb through his memory for the flotsam of books he remembered reading in his youth. These ranged from children’s classics to Victorian adventure books for boys and on to more ambitious literary works like Shakespeare, Rabelais, the Bible, Lamb’s Essays of Elia and the novels of Rudyard Kipling and D.H. Lawrence, as well as the books of comic writers such as Edward Lear, Jerome K. Jerome, P.G. Wodehouse, James Thurber and Patrick Campbell. He even set about gnawing his way through those two daunting paper megaliths, Larousse and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His reading in works of natural history was even more voracious and wide-ranging, with a broad base of classics – Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace, Henry Bates, Henri Fabre, Gilbert White, Richard Jefferies, W.H. Hudson – and a broad trawl of more contemporary works, from the popular nature books of ‘Romany’ (who preached the gospel of ‘the balance of nature’) to Julian Huxley and H.G. Wells’ comprehensive biological overview The Science of Life.
In many ways it is probable that his lack of a formal education was the making of Gerald Durrell. It left his innate, highly original intelligence unfettered and unchannelled, free to roam at will, to explore far and wide, to make connections outside the orthodoxy of the teaching of the time, develop new trajectories of thought and pioneer new lines of progression that could not have emerged, except with difficulty, from an institutionalised mind indoctrinated within the conventions of a traditional education. Gerald believed this himself: ‘I think the set routine of an average school kills the imagination in a child. Whereas the way I was brought up, the imagination was allowed to grow, to blossom. It taught me a lot of things which you’re not normally taught in school and this proved very valuable to me in dealing with animals and as a writer. My eccentric upbringing has been of great value to me.’
By way of example, it was his lack of a conventionally programmed education that enabled him, very early on, to stumble on the matter of declining animal populations (he was particularly struck by the parlous state of the black-footed ferret of the Great Plains of North America). He was barely out of his teens when he began to compile his own ‘rather shaky and amateurish’ version of a Red Data Book of endangered species* – one of the earliest compilations of its sort in the United Kingdom. If he had gone to university to read zoology, he would have come away with a thorough grasp of comparative anatomy and the Linnaean order of species, but it is doubtful if the world at large would ever have had reason to know his name
So Gerald’s adolescence passed. Towards the end of 1942, when the tide of war had just begun to turn in the Allies’ favour – though years of bloody slaughter still remained – he received his call-up papers. Now nearly eighteen, he reported for his army medical in Southampton. First he and his fellows were marshalled – ‘rather like cattle in a slaughter house’ – and told to strip. Then they were each given a beaker and told to pee in it. Gerald had drunk several pints of beer beforehand to make sure he had a full bladder, but unfortunately he had overdone it. The beaker filled up and slopped over. ‘’Ere!’ cried the orderly. ‘Slopped all over the place. I ’opes you ain’t got no infectious bleeding diseases.’ In an unpublished account, Gerald recalled:
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.
At last, in May 1945, the guns in Europe fell silent. Gerald’s obligation to contribute to the war effort came to an end, and within a few weeks he had taken his first step towards his true life goal. By his own account he had long ago – as far back as Corfu, even – worked out what he wanted to do in life. First he would travel the world collecting animals for zoos, then he would establish a zoo of his own. Both objectives were highly unusual and extraordinarily difficult, and both required an expertise he did not possess in 1945. ‘I realised,’ he was to record later, ‘that if I wanted to achieve my ambitions, it was necessary for me to have experience with creatures larger than scorpions and sea horses.’ There seemed to be only one thing he could do – get a job in a zoo.
Having decided this, I sat down and wrote what seemed to me an extremely humble letter to the Zoological Society of London, which, in spite of the war, still maintained the largest collection of living creatures on one spot. Blissfully unaware of the enormity of my ambition, I outlined my plans for the future, hinted that I was just the sort of person they had always been longing to employ, and more or less asked them on what day I should take up my duties.
Normally, such a letter as this would have ended up where it deserved – in the waste-paper basket. But my luck was in, for it arrived on the desk of a most kindly and civilised man, one Geoffrey Vevers, the Superintendent of the London Zoo. I suppose something about the sheer audacity of my letter must have intrigued him for, to my delight, he wrote and asked me to attend an interview in London. At the interview, spurred on by Geoffrey Vevers’ gentle charm, I prattled on interminably about animals, animal collecting and my own zoo. A lesser man would have crushed my enthusiasm by pointing out the wild impracticability of my schemes but Vevers listened with great patience and tact, commended my line of approach to the problem, and said he would give the matter of my future some thought. I left him even more enthusiastic than before.
A few weeks later Gerald received a courteous letter informing him that unfortunately there were no vacancies for junior staff at London Zoo, but if he wished he could have a position as relief keeper at Whipsnade, the Zoological Society’s country zoo.
As a relief keeper, Gerald would be the lowest of the low. But since he was clearly a special case, and not at all typical of the usual recruit to the ranks of zoo keepers, Geoffrey Vevers thought up the grandiose title of ‘student keeper’ for him. ‘If he had written offering me a breeding pair of snow leopards,’ Gerald recalled, ‘I could not have been more delighted.’
A few days later – ‘wildly excited’ – Gerald set off for Whipsnade. He had two suitcases with him, one full of old clothes, the other containing natural history books and many fat notebooks in which he intended to jot down everything he observed of his animal charges and everything he learnt from his fellow keepers. On 30 July 1945 he began his lifelong involvement with zoos. If his adolescent reading had provided his secondary education, Whipsnade was to be his university.
* Red Data Books, regularly compiled by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), list all known endangered or extinct species worldwide.
SIX Odd-Beast Boy Whipsnade 1945–1946
Gerald’s first port of call at Whipsnade was the office of the zoo’s superintendent, Captain William Beal, a former army veterinary officer from the Gold Coast (now Ghana). Gerald found him sitting behind a large desk in his shirtsleeves, sporting handsome striped braces:
As the captain stood up, I saw that he was a man of immense height and girth. He came lumbering round the desk and stared at me, breathing heavily through his nose.
‘Durrell?’ he boomed interrogatively. ‘Durrell?’
He had a deep voice and he spoke in a sort of muted roar.
‘Think you’ll like it here?’ asked Captain Beal so suddenly and so loudly that I jumped.
‘Er … yes, sir, I’m sure I shall,’ I said.
‘You’ve never done any of this sort of work before?’
‘No, sir,’ I replied, ‘but I’ve kept a lot of animals at one time or another.’
‘Ha!’ he said, almost sneeringly. ‘Guinea pigs, rabbits, goldfish – that sort of thing. Well, you’ll find it a bit different here.’
Shortly afterwards, Gerald was told he was to start work straight away next morning – on the lions.
Whipsnade village, Gerald discovered, was a tiny place with one pub and a handful of cottages scattered among valleys full of hazel copses. His digs turned out to be an oak-beamed room in one of the cottages, the bee-loud, flower-bowered home of Charlie Bailey, who worked with the elephants up at the zoo, and his wife. Gerald was a rather surprising lodger for this modest couple, for with his upper-class accent and sophisticated ways he was more like a toff than a lowly trainee keeper.
‘What made you come to Whipsnade, Gerry?’ asked Charlie, not unreasonably, over a huge supper of country fare.
‘Well,’ Gerald replied, ‘I’ve always been interested in animals, and I want to become an animal collector – you know, go out to Africa and places like that and bring back animals for zoos. I want to get experience with some of the bigger things. You know, you can’t keep big things down in Bournemouth. I mean, you can’t have a herd of deer in a suburban garden, can you?’
‘Ah,’ Charlie agreed. ‘No, I see that.’
Eventually, stuffed with food, Gerald made his way up to his room. ‘I climbed into bed,’ he recalled, ‘and heaved a great sigh of triumph. I had arrived. I was here at Whipsnade. Gloating over this thought I fell asleep.’
He could not have been more fortunate in his place of work experience, for Whipsnade was a very special kind of zoo. Occupying five hundred acres of a former farm estate perched high on the Dunstable Downs in Bedfordshire, thirty-five miles north-west of London, Whipsnade had been opened in 1931. From the outset it had been conceived as a country zoo park – the first public one in Britain – where all the animals could, as far as possible, live in natural surroundings instead of in the barren and insanitary cages that were their lot in most of the zoos around the globe. The idea was not new: the great German animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck had created the first modern zoological garden in Hamburg back in the middle of the nineteenth century. But Whipsnade went far beyond the confines of the zoological garden. As an open-plan zoo park, lions and tigers could roam through Whipsnade’s dells, zebra and antelope could graze freely in the great rolling paddocks, and wolves could wander in a pack through the woods. Gerald noted that it was ‘the nearest approach to going on safari that one could attempt at that time’.
But the purpose of Whipsnade was not simply to display animals to the public in ideal surroundings. It was also intended as a place for preserving some of the world’s dwindling natural resource of wild animals, and it soon became internationally renowned for its success in the captive breeding of endangered species, from the nearly extinct white Chartley cattle and Przewalski’s Mongolian wild horse to the American bison, the musk ox and Père David’s deer. With unerring good fortune, Gerald Durrell had pitched up at a more than passable combination zoo and propagation centre, not perhaps up to the standards of the San Diego Wild Animal Park or New York’s World of Birds, but doing its best to cope in wartime. Its influence on his future life and career was to prove immeasurable.
Jill Johnson, an eighteen-year-old girl who looked after the huskies and Shetland ponies at the zoo, remembered encountering Gerald on his first working morning at Whipsnade. ‘I was called down to meet a new boy,’ she recalled:
I went down to the office and there stood a fair-haired boy with a nice, open, friendly face, wearing an open-necked white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was taller than me, about five foot eight or so, and he had bright blue eyes, I remember. I said: ‘What’s your name?’ and he said: ‘You can call me Gerry or Durrell.’ So I said: ‘Gerry will do. Get a bike and follow me.’ As we rode along I asked him: ‘Why aren’t you in the forces?’ and he explained that he was a Greek citizen and that he wanted to be a big animal collector one day, which I treated with a pinch of salt. I took him to see the huskies and showed him around and after that we became good friends and got to know each other very well.
Though Gerald was officially described as a ‘student keeper’, his real role was that of ‘odd-beast boy’, at the very bottom of the heap in terms of status. But by dint of his personality he defied all conventional classification among his friends and colleagues at the zoo. The odd-beast boy was at everyone’s disposal, and could be assigned to any task with any creature, big or little, docile or lethal. In terms of learning the ropes at a premier zoo – the hands-on care of large and dangerous animals (including lions and tigers, bears and buffalo), daily routine and standard zoo practice – the job was exactly what Gerald wanted. But he wanted to learn more than that.
Gerald continued his voracious reading, but now he focused his interest much more on zoo business. Almost without exception, he realised, most of the world’s zoos since Victorian times had served merely as peep-shows, places of public entertainment, where people went to be amused in much the same spirit that their ancestors used to visit lunatic asylums. Scientific research at most zoos was virtually nil, and if an animal died it was simply replaced from what was taken to be Nature’s unending bounty. Before long, it dawned on Gerald that this bounty was in fact being rapidly exhausted:
As I pursued my reading, I began to learn with horror of man’s rapacious encroachment upon the world and the terrible devastation that he was producing among animal life. I read of the dodo, flightless and harmless, discovered and exterminated in almost the same breath. I read of the passenger pigeon in North America, whose vast numbers darkened the sky, who were so numerous that their nesting colonies measured several hundred square miles. They were good to eat; the last one died in Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. The quagga, that strange half horse, half zebra once so common in South Africa, was harried to extinction by the Boer farmers; the last one died in London Zoo in 1909. It seemed incredible, almost impossible, that people in charge of zoos should have been so ignorant that they did not realise that these animals were tottering on the border of extinction and that they did not do something about it. Surely this was one of the true functions of a zoological garden, to help animals that were being pushed towards extinction?
Jill Johnson remembered Gerald saying, ‘A lot of animals are going to become extinct. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if one could breed these animals and put them back where they came from?’ But then he would have doubts, and remark: ‘Perhaps they’re becoming extinct because they’re meant to, because the world is changing. Perhaps they’re becoming extinct like the sabre-toothed tiger became extinct, because it’s in the order of things, because they’re meant to be replaced by something else.’ But was it in the order of things for one species to commit biocide against all the others? For man to take it into his own hands to speed half the animal kingdom to extinction? Sixty million buffalo once trampled the Great Plains of America – the greatest animal congregation that ever existed on earth. Then the white man came and began to kill them off at the rate of a million a year, so that by the 1880s there were just twenty left in the whole USA. A man could ride a thousand miles across the plains and never be out of sight of a dead buffalo and never in sight of a living one. Was that in the order of things? Nothing in Gerald’s life so far gave him greater insight into the acuteness of this problem, and its potential solution, than his encounter with Père David’s deer.
Père David’s deer had provided the world with a classic case of near-extinction and captive breeding undertaken by default. A distant relative of the red deer, it was once widespread in China, but by the end of the nineteenth century it had been hunted almost to extinction, and during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 the few that remained were killed in the emperor’s garden in Peking. Or so it seemed. As it happened, before their total extinction in their natural homeland a few specimens had been sent to Woburn Park, not far from Whipsnade, by an English aristocrat, the Duke of Bedford. From this small group the numbers of the almost vanished species were increased by haphazard natural breeding in captivity to a point where Père David’s deer can now be found all over the world. Gerald was well aware of this extraordinary story, and he was fascinated when four newborn specimens of the famous deer – still rare at that time – were sent to Whipsnade to be hand-reared:
They were delightful little things with long gangling limbs over which they had no control, and strange slanted eyes that gave them a distinctly oriental appearance … They had to be fed once during the night, at midnight, and again at dawn … I must say I rather enjoyed the night duties. To pick one’s way through the moonlit park towards the stable where the baby deer were kept, you had to pass several of the cages and paddocks, and the occupants were always on the move. The bears, looking twice as big in the half light, would be snorting to each other as they shambled heavily through the riot of brambles in their cage. At one point the path led through the wolf wood, with the moonlight silvering the trunks and laying dark shadows along the ground through which the wolf pack danced on swift, silent feet, like a strange black tide, swirling and twisting among the trunks.
Then you’d reach the stable and light the lantern. The baby deer would start moving restlessly in their straw beds, bleating tremulously. As you opened the door they’d rush forward, wobbling on their unsteady legs, sucking frantically at your fingers or the edge of your coat, and butting you suddenly in the legs with their heads, so that you were almost knocked down. Then came the exquisite moment when the teat was pushed into their mouths and they sucked frantically at the warm milk, their eyes staring, bubbles gathering like a moustache at the corners of their mouths. In the flickering light of the lantern, while the deer sucked and slobbered over the bottles, I was very conscious of the fact that they were the last of their kind, animal refugees living a precarious existence on the edge of extermination, dependent for their existence on the charity of a handful of human beings.
Jill Johnson was Gerald’s partner in this operation. She recalled:
I used to milk the goats, and Gerry used to take the bottle of goat milk to feed the deer. But it was a bit of a nuisance doing it this way, because the deer kept swallowing the teats. So one day we decided to take the nanny goat in to the deer so that they could suck from her direct. This worked pretty well when the deer were small, but eventually they grew bigger than the nanny and would butt under her and lift her up in the air, legs sprawling, and feed from her like that …
After that venture we moved on to looking after sick and orphaned animals, and were even allowed to help with operations by the vet. But the Père David’s deer may well have given Gerry his first glimpse into the possibilities of captive breeding. We used to talk about them perhaps breeding in the Park and then being reintroduced into China. It was just a dream then, but later it did happen.
At Whipsnade Gerald continued to compile his own list of animals in danger of extinction. He was moved, he later confided to a friend, by a mixture of horror, despair, determination and love, quoting Cecil Rhodes’ alleged dying words, ‘So much to do, so little done.’
Jill Johnson thought Gerald must have been rather a lonely soul at Whipsnade, his class and intelligence distancing him from his fellow keepers. His family never visited him, as far as she could tell. Eventually he moved out of the Baileys’ house and into a room in a bleak and chilly place called the Bothy – he referred to it as the Brothel – a huddle of four or five keepers’ cottages opposite a pub called Chequers at the bottom of the zoo. Sometimes he was invited for a curry (West African style with lots of chilli peppers) at the home of Captain and Mrs Beal – ‘So hot,’ he told Jill, ‘it makes me sweat like a fever.’
Among Gerald’s friends at Whipsnade was Guinea Pig Gus. ‘As a romantic figure,’ he recalled, ‘Gus had little to commend him.’ His skull sloped back from his nose like a Neanderthal’s. His nose looked like some fungus squashed on his face. He suffered acutely from acne, had adenoids and bit his nails. ‘He was quite the most unattractive human being I had ever encountered,’ Gerald wrote in his autobiographical jottings years later, ‘yet he had the kindest of hearts.’ It was Gus who walked all the way to Dunstable and back to get patches and glue when Gerald punctured his bicycle tyres. It was Gus who brought him half a bottle of whisky – ‘God knows from where, for at that time a bottle of whisky was as valuable as the Koh-i-noor diamond’ – when he had pleurisy and thought he was going to die. It was Gus who took Gerald’s shoes to be soled and heeled so that he didn’t have to do it on his day off.
Gus’s heart belonged to the guinea pig, and all his spare cash went towards materials for the palace he was planning to build for these favoured creatures. When it became clear to Gerald that Gus would never have enough money to finish it, he decided it was time to repay him for all his past kindness, and to break his vow to live on his meagre salary by hook or by crook and never to write home for funds. ‘I wrote to my mother,’ he recorded, ‘explaining about Gus and his guinea pigs. By return came a letter containing ten crisp pound notes. In her letter, my mother said: “Don’t hurt his feelings, dear. Tell him an uncle who liked guinea pigs died and left it to you.”’
So the Guinea Pig Palace was completed, and the grand opening day arrived. ‘It was a splendid occasion,’ Gerald recalled, ‘attended by no lesser personages than Gus’s mother and father, his dog, his cat, me, his goldfish, his frog, and the girl from next door, as exciting as a dumpling. The Guinea Pigs took the move from their old home with great aplomb and dignity. Three jugs of beer from the pub and some elderberry wine and the party got so convivial that Gus’s mother fell into the goldfish pond and Gus at last succeeded in kissing the girl next door.’
