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.
4
A Question of Promotion
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.
It was ten o’clock in the morning and already the heat was so intense that I had to keep wiping my hands on a towel so that I did not drench the baby squirrels with my sweat and thus give them a chill. I was not in the best of tempers but while I was trying to get some sustenance into my protégés (who were not collaborating), my steward, Pious, suddenly materialised at my side in the silent, unnerving way that Africans have.
“Please, sah,” he said.
“Yes, whatee?” I inquired irritably, trying to push some milk-drenched cotton wool into a squirrel’s mouth.
“D.O. come, sah,” he said.
“The District Officer?” I asked in astonishment. “What the hell does he want?”
“No say, sah,” said Pious impassively. “I go open beer?”
“Well, I suppose you’d better,” I said, and as Martin Bugler, the District Officer, arrived at the crest of the hill I pushed the squirrels back into their nestbox full of dried banana leaves and went out of the marquee to greet him.
Martin was a tall, gangling young man with round, almost-black eyes and floppy black hair, a snub nose and a wide and very ingratiating grin. owing to the length of his arms and legs and his habit of making wild gestures to illustrate when he talked, he was accident prone. But he was, however, a remarkably good D.O. for he loved his job intensely and, what is even more important, he loved the Africans equally intensely and they responded to this.
Now it has become fashionable to run down colonialism, District Officers and their assistants are made out to be monsters of iniquity. Of course there were bad ones but the majority of them were a wonderful set of men who did an exceedingly difficult job under the most trying conditions. Imagine, at the age of twenty-eight being put in charge of an area, say, the size of Wales, populated by an enormous number of Africans and with one assistant to help you. You had to look after their every need, you had to be mother and father to them, and you had to dispense the law. And in many cases the law, being English law, was of such complexity that it defeated even the devious brain of the indigenous population.
On many occasions, on my forays into the forest, I had passed the big mud-brick courtroom with its tin roof and seen Martin — the sweat pouring down him in torrents — trying some case or other, the whole thing being made even more complicated by the fact that villages, sometimes separated only by a few miles, spoke different dialects. Therefore, should there be dissension between two villages, it meant that you had to have two interpreters from the two villages and an interpreter who knew both dialects who could then interpret Martin. As in courts of law anywhere in the world, you knew perfectly well that everybody was lying the hind leg off a donkey, I had the greatest admiration for Martin’s patience and solemnity on these occasions. The cases could range from suspected cannibalism, via wife stealing, to simple things like whose cocoa-yam patch was invading whose, inch by subtle inch.
On the many occasions that I had visited West Africa, I had only met one D.O. who was unpleasant.